Limb from Limb. George Hunter
Over the past few days, he’d been reflecting on the number of times Stephen had mentioned Stony Creek Metropark, the four-thousand-acre preserve near the Grant home.
In fact, Hackel said, to his surprise, Stephen had actually described to a reporter for the Macomb Daily that he’d bumped into Hackel once on Stony Creek’s bike trails—and noted that the sheriff hadn’t been wearing a protective helmet.
“I thought, ‘Great,’” Hackel recounted with a rueful smile. “‘They’re going to write a story about the sheriff not practicing good safety.’”
Also on Thursday, Hackel said that police were looking into “discrepancies” in Stephen’s account of the case, which the sheriff described as “concerning.” For one thing, he said, Stephen’s immediate statement to Kozlowski and McLean when they showed up at his home the night of February 14 was that Tara had never disappeared before. “But then he told the news media she had disappeared twice before without calling him.”
Stephen also had told detectives he heard Tara say, “I’ll be right out” just before exiting the house. But no one had called her cell phone or her home phone after she arrived home that night.
Hackel also lamented the lack of practical assistance from Tara’s husband. “We would like to get a look at her home computer, or get ahold of some of her clothes, so that dogs could try to track her,” Hackel said. “But we don’t have enough evidence for a search warrant, and Stephen Grant isn’t letting us have access to the home.”
Stephen was not cooperating with police, but he tried hard to be accommodating to the media. When reporters called for interviews, he rarely refused—and he often took the initiative to call the journalists to chat about the case. Investigators were tuned in to every word.
“We were living this case by watching the media,” Hackel recalled. “That isn’t a traditional way of doing an investigation, but since Stephen wasn’t talking to us, we had to be very in tune to what he was saying to the media. I’d be in bed at night thinking about things he’d said to the media that day. I’d call people in the middle of the night, and they’d do the same with me. We were all trying to solve a puzzle. It’s like watching a whodunit movie—you’re trying to get a feel for the characters, and listening closely to everything they say.
“But unlike in a movie theater, where you can’t play back what the characters say, with the Grant case, we were able to play it back. We taped every television interview, and we collected all the newspaper articles. Even if I was at a meeting, when the news came on TV, I’d have (sheriff’s office spokesman John) Cwikla play it to me over the phone, so I could listen to it. We’d keep going back and listening to what was said, trying to piece it all together.”
During Stephen’s conversations with reporters, he seemed obsessed with trying to gauge his public image. “What are people saying about the case?” was a question he often asked.
Hackel disclosed to reporters at Thursday’s press briefing the wooded area police planned to search: Stony Creek Metropark. The search would commence Saturday morning, he said. “This was just an absolute hunch,” Hackel recalled. “Stephen had mentioned Stony Creek a few times in the media, so we decided to search the park.”
The sheriff thought by announcing the search, and by inviting the media to cover it, Stephen might make some kind of move. “We really didn’t have anything else,” he said. “[Stephen] wasn’t talking to us, and we weren’t getting any real clues. Maybe if we searched the park, we might find something. And even if we didn’t find anything, maybe it might force his hand somehow.”
Hackel would later realize his instinct had been spot-on. But at the time, his decision to announce when and where his investigators would be searching was criticized—including by members of his own department.
“I knew some people were going to say we were pandering to the media, but I was also getting that criticism internally,” he said. “Some people were giving me a hard time because I told the media about the search. They thought I was doing this to get attention. I told them I did want attention—it was a missing person case, and I was seeking the public’s help.”
On Friday, February 23, the polite sparring between Hackel and Stephen’s surrogates escalated into blatant barbs. As anticipation of Saturday’s search grew among law enforcement personnel, media members and the increasingly fascinated public, the sheriff abruptly preempted any chance of Stephen rehabilitating his public image as a grieving husband doggedly searching for his missing wife.
Stephen had told the Detroit News that he’d be an asset to searchers because of his familiarity with Stony Creek Metropark. “I know the area well,” he boasted. “I mountain bike out there, and run out there all the time.”
But Stephen, the sheriff said at his daily press conference, wasn’t welcome at the search. “We don’t need him there, unless he knows where she is,” Hackel said. “Having him there might be a hindrance. His attorney told us in no uncertain terms that we can’t talk to Mr. Grant except via fax. So it would be very difficult to have him there, if we couldn’t talk to him.”
Griem took umbrage and fired up his fax machine. I’m bewitched, bothered and bewildered why the sheriff would say such a thing, the lawyer wrote via facsimile to the sheriff’s office. Mr. Grant wanted to do anything and everything he can to help find Tara. But now, Griem wrote, I will fire him as a client if he participates.
Hackel figuratively shrugged. His point had been made, loud and clear. “If he does show up or not, that’s completely up to him,” the sheriff said.
Goaded into action, Stephen dropped off two of Tara’s laptops at the sheriff’s office that afternoon. A Channel 7 television crew, which was at police headquarters on another story, spotted him entering the building. The station carried the story live on its noon newscast while Stephen was still inside. Within twenty minutes, the parking lot outside headquarters was crawling with reporters and cameramen waiting for Stephen to emerge.
When Stephen walked out a few minutes later, he seemed to welcome the attention. He told reporters he’d dropped off two computers: one was her current work computer, issued by Washington Group; the other was an old device that hadn’t been used in two years.
Stephen explained he had just retrieved it from CompUSA, where he’d taken it February 8 for repairs to the CD tray. “[Police] found out I picked it up…and they wanted it,” Stephen said. “It’s one of my wife’s former laptops she used for work. The other one I gave them…if there are any clues, that would have something in it,” he said. “I haven’t touched that one. The [computer] she has now is the one she has with her. Her newest one is only a month old.”
Kozlowski looked out his window and saw the group of reporters gathered around Stephen. The cop was disgusted. “He wouldn’t talk to us, but I look outside and see him holding a press conference in the parking lot,” he said.
The two laptops Stephen turned in were all well and good, investigators thought, but the computer they really wanted to inspect was the Grants’ desktop machine—and that remained firmly off-limits.
“Unfortunately, it’s been made clear we aren’t going to be allowed to look at that one,” Hackel said. Later he called Stephen’s appearance with the laptops “staged in front of the media.”
“I had absolutely no use for [the laptops] whatsoever,” the sheriff recalled. “We wanted the one in the house. But we didn’t get that.”
Such stonewalling by Stephen and his lawyer were among the behaviors that continued to raise questions among detectives and deputies working on the case. Wouldn’t a truly innocent, distraught husband be demanding a polygraph, throwing open his whole life to investigators so they could eliminate him and move on to other possibilities? Wouldn’t someone who wanted police to find his wife allow investigators a look at the home computer?
Still, if Stephen had committed foul play, he’d done a good job covering his