Limb from Limb. George Hunter
No one wanted to jump the gun and later have possible evidence thrown out as tainted by an unlawful search.
“We have to have an indication that Mr. Grant caused harm to her before we could get a search warrant,” Hackel said. “But we don’t have any information he did anything like that.”
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They started just after dawn. On foot, on horseback, and on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), volunteer reserves and officers trudged through snowdrifts. They pulled up fallen tree limbs, scuffed up piles of dead leaves and literally beat the bushes. Overhead, observers in helicopters and airplanes patrolled the more desolate areas of Stony Creek Metropark’s nature preserve.
“We decided to search near the main trail that was out there, Orchard Trail,” Hackel said. “We searched near the areas where people would access the park. Usually, if someone takes a body and disposes of it, they do it near the main areas. They generally don’t want to take too much time. They just want to dump the body and get out of there as fast as they can.”
Hackel drew from a previous case he’d worked on before he was elected sheriff: the 1998 murder of Lisa Putnam, a Macomb Township state social worker who was beaten to death by twenty-eight-year-old Josephine Verellen and her twenty-two-year-old sister, Jacqueline, after Putnam removed Josephine’s two children from their filthy home and reported the health hazard to the state. Both women were later convicted.
“In that case, they took her body to Leonard (in Northern Michigan), and dumped her body in the woods, just twenty yards from the road,” Hackel said. “We were thinking the same thing [in the Grant case]. If he did kill her and dump the body in Stony Creek, it would probably be within twenty to thirty yards of the main trail.”
The mobile command RV was set up in the parking lot of nearby Powell Middle School, the spot also designated as the media staging area. The search area was off-limits to reporters, and Hackel instructed the rank and file not to discuss the details of the search with the press.
At home, local TV viewers followed the action on early-morning newscasts, then snapped off their sets and went about the business of the weekend—shopping, skating lessons, a day’s work. But at Stony Creek Metropark, stomachs knotted and the shivers weren’t all due to the February chill. Most of the 150 or so searchers dreaded what they might find, but even more, they feared another day, another weekend, another week, without answers.
Stephen’s sister, Kelly, walked around the park a bit and met with investigators at the sheriff’s mobile command center. Then she joined her brother and his children back in Washington Township, but she continued to take media calls on her cell phone. Stephen, she told the Detroit News, wasn’t bitter about the sheriff’s recent actions.
“He’s doing OK, trying to remain hopeful that she will be found OK,” Kelly said. “We know the sheriff is looking in to him. We just hope he is looking elsewhere as well.”
Alicia, Erik, and Mary spent the day with the sheriff, lending moral support to the search crew. “I was taking them to various places in and around the park,” Hackel said. “Wherever we went, Alicia was thanking the officers for helping. For the officers, I think it humanized the situation. When they saw her, I’m sure they thought, ‘What if that was my sister?’”
A few hours into the search, a volunteer member of the sheriff’s aviation unit radioed that he might have found something. While flying over a grassy area, he spotted what looked like a body.
“We thought for a minute, ‘OK, that’s it—we’ve found her,’” Hackel said. But the find turned out to be a false alarm.
“It was just a deer carcass,” Hackel said. “I wasn’t sure if I should feel happy or disappointed.”
When the theme music trumpeted at noon for local radio and TV news broadcasts on the case, the search still was under way. But about a half hour later, a discouraged Hackel called it off.
“We decided to terminate the search, since we went to all the areas we’d planned to go into in the perimeters we’d set,” Hackel said. The sheriff put out the call on his radio: “10–42”—police code for “out of service.”
Alicia was obviously distraught when the search revealed no clues. “I have a completely empty feeling inside,” she told reporters. “Now what?”
The postsearch mood was somber as the exhausted officers and reserves trudged to their cars in the school parking lot and drove away, Hackel said. “It was a lot of effort and work. I’m thinking, ‘Now I have to face the media and tell them we didn’t find anything, and face questions about whether it was really necessary.’”
But when Hackel met with reporters, he decided to keep Stephen guessing. “When the media asked if we were going to search other areas, I said we might,” he said. “I wanted to keep [Stephen] off-balance, keep him wondering what we might be up to next.”
During interviews he gave immediately after calling off the search, Hackel also made a plea to the public. “I asked people to keep their eyes open,” he said. “I said, ‘If you’re out walking in a park and you see something that looks even a little suspicious, take an extra look.’”
It was a lawman’s standard request for citizen assistance. Hackel had no idea how crucial it would turn out to be.
Around the time of the search, reporters began delving deeper into the backgrounds of Tara and Stephen Grant. So far, Tara had only been tersely described in most media accounts as an executive with the Washington Group, while Stephen was simply known as the husband, who was acting suspiciously, even if police weren’t coming right out and saying it.
But on Friday, the Detroit Free Press ran a story about the next day’s scheduled search of Stony Creek, which included a few paragraphs of biographical information about the Grants. The story explained that Tara had grown up on a farm in Perkins, a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP). She met Stephen in 1994 while working toward a business degree at Michigan State University (MSU), readers were told. When they met, the story said, Stephen worked in the office of state senator Jack Faxon.
After their marriage, Tara Grant’s career soared with the Washington Group while Grant said he readily played the role of Mr. Mom, the story said.
The next day, the Detroit News ran a front-page story under the headline WHO IS TARA GRANT? Interviews with Tara’s childhood friends revealed her as ambitious and tough-minded, a girl who grew up in rural Michigan shooting her own .22 rifle and dreaming about bigger things.
The characters of this true-crime drama were beginning to take shape more clearly: Tara, the farm girl who grew up to become a beautiful jet-setting executive, and Stephen, the jittery, bug-eyed stay-at-home husband, who many people thought was hiding something.
Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson summed up the situation succinctly in his February 23 column: The mystery surrounding 34-year-old Tara’s disappearance is as irresistible as any Lifetime Network original, he wrote. Stephen says he has no clue about what has become of his wife, but at water coolers across southeast Michigan, the lines already are being drawn between those who feel sorry for him and those who suspect him of being the next Scott Peterson.
Stephen told the Detroit News he was well-aware that people were comparing him to Scott Peterson, the California man now convicted for the sensational murder of his pregnant wife, Laci.
Accounts of the Peterson case frequently analyzed Scott’s demeanor during the time his wife was missing, and his lack of assistance during the frantic communitywide searches for her, or her body.
“I thought Scott Peterson was guilty, too,” Stephen said. “So I get why everyone is looking at me as a suspect.”
When Stephen was asked why he thought people suspected him, he said, “Because that’s just how it is. You always look at the husband. Whether it’s true or not, the husband always did it. But people who know me—even if they’ve only known me a short time—they