Limb from Limb. George Hunter
on Monday, Stephen told reporters that his private investigator, whom he again referred to as a former FBI agent, hadn’t yet turned up any clues.
“I have to keep my faith that she’s out there, and not ready to come home yet,” he said. “It’s really all I can hope for, that she’s OK, but just not in a place mentally to come home.
“And if that’s not the case…well, I’ll deal with that when I have to. I can’t imagine the other road. At the end of that road is two kids whose mother isn’t coming back. And I can’t get my brain around that.”
He said his kids’ lives had been turned inside out over the past two-and-a-half weeks. It was time, he said, that Lindsey and Ian returned to school—first grade for her and private preschool for the boy—after their winter break and a few days they were kept home due to illness.
Stephen admitted his earlier misgivings, that, because of extensive broadcast coverage, the kids’ classmates would question them insensitively about their mother’s fate.
“Kids hear things,” he said. “My concern is, a lot of parents may have the news on while dinner is cooking and they may talk about things. People don’t check what they’re saying.
“I’m afraid that one of the kids in the school is going to walk up to [Lindsey] and say, ‘Your daddy did something horrible to your mommy.’ I understand that people are jumping to conclusions about me. I’ve done the same thing. But being on the other side of it, I’ll think differently from now on.”
Despite his fears, Stephen later said the kids’ first day back in school—Tuesday, February 27—was normal. Meanwhile, he had come up with his own delicate way of relating the matter of their missing mother to the children: he likened it to when the family golden retriever wandered away for a few days about six months earlier.
“I told them, ‘Remember when Bentley was lost for a while? Well, Mommy is lost like that,’” Stephen recalled.
28
On Wednesday, February 28, a crucial event took place below the media radar screen. As far as the public knew, the case of the missing executive was status quo, perhaps even waning a bit in interest as the days wore on. Newspaper articles were shorter and had moved off the front pages of the local dailies. Some papers even buried their “Tara updates” inside local sections, next to stories about city council meetings and road repair projects.
But at about twelve-thirty that afternoon, a local dental hygienist and nature enthusiast decided to take advantage of the 40-degree “warm spell” and go for a walk along Mt. Vernon Road and into Stony Creek Metropark. She hiked in a different part of the park than investigators had searched just four days earlier—a little-traveled, heavily wooded spot near some power lines, not far from the Macomb/Oakland County border.
Sheila Werner, an attractive thirty-four-year-old, wasn’t accustomed to being a passive observer of her surroundings. She’d adopted a one-mile stretch of roadway near her Washington Township home—an undertaking usually reserved for civic groups and other large organizations—pledging to keep it litter free.
As she walked, her glance was attuned not only to the natural flora and fauna around her way, but to man-made debris and other items that didn’t belong amid the woods and streams of Stony Creek.
“I knew about the Tara Grant investigation, and I knew the police had searched the park,” she said. “And I remembered the police asking people to keep an eye out for anything that looked suspicious. So it was definitely in the back of my mind.”
Perhaps that’s why the Ziploc bag caught her eye. Tucked in a low cranny, where two gnarled tree branches met, just a few yards from the road, the bag’s blood-soaked cargo stood out against the snow “like a sore thumb,” she later said.
“I noticed blood pooling at the bottom of the bag,” she said. The large bag also contained other plastic bags, a pair of rubber gloves, and some metal shavings.
Gingerly picking up the bag with her mitten, she retraced the path to her home and dropped the Baggie atop the freezer in her garage. Then she stepped inside and dialed the sheriff’s office.
Deputy John Warn took the call. He immediately drove to Werner’s house, and she showed him what she’d stumbled onto. “I asked her to take me to the area where she’d found the bag, and she did,” Warn said. “Then I called the detective bureau and told them what was going on.”
Not wanting to get up their hopes, some investigators surmised the Ziploc and its bloody contents were the detritus from poachers gutting prey in the woods. “The guys kept telling me, ‘It’s probably a deer bag,’” Lieutenant Darga said. “I’m like, ‘What’s a deer bag?’ They said, ‘It’s a bag you use after you’re finished cleaning a deer.’”
It was a plausible explanation. However, Darga kept coming back to the metal shrapnel in the bag—the kind of cast-off shavings found in tool and die shops that served Metro Detroit’s auto-related manufacturing industries. That included USG Babbitt Inc.—the tiny family metal shop in Mount Clemens, where Stephen and his dad turned out ball bearings.
“There was also some animal hair in the bag that matched the color of [the Grants’] dog,” Darga asserted. “I said, ‘We need to get this to the lab right now.’”
Detectives sent the bag to the MSP Crime Laboratory in Sterling Heights. Serology expert Jennifer Smiatacz tested the blood in the bag. It was, indeed, human.
Turnaround time for forensic evidence in the state police crime lab can sometimes reach several months, but there was a priority put on the Ziploc bag, Darga said. “The lab got the results back to us the next day. They knew what kind of case we were working on, so they checked it out immediately.”
The lab report inventoried the exact contents of the large Ziploc. Aside from the blood, shavings, and hair, the bag contained four clear plastic garbage bags, one pair of latex gloves, one 7-Eleven shopping bag, and an additional smaller Ziploc. All items had human blood on them.
“If you take it all together—human blood, the metal shavings, the hair—we were sure it was enough to get a search warrant,” Detective Sergeant McLean said. “Before that, we’d been dying to ask the judge for a warrant, but we knew we didn’t have enough. You never want to go to a judge when you’re not one hundred percent sure your search will stand up in court.”
The prosecutor’s office concurred: the bloody plastic bag was enough to justify detectives’ access to the Grants’ house.
29
Friday, March 2, was a day that no one connected with the investigation ever would forget.
Finally, nearly three weeks since anyone last had spoken with Tara, authorities felt themselves gaining control of the investigation. And, over the next few days, the case would gyrate with one surreal twist after the other—more than making up for the previous weeks’ maddening lack of progress.
McLean and Kozlowski drew up the search warrants for the Grant home and his father’s tool and die shop. Judge Denis LeDuc, of 42–1 District Court, signed them.
At about noon on Friday, Stephen gave a shocking one-hundred-minute interview to the Detroit News in which he openly disparaged his wife and referred to her in the past tense.
“Everything is surreal, like I’m walking around in a dream,” he began. “Nothing feels normal. It’s just…weird.”
He was asked to talk about his wife.
“Well, Tara looked completely different when we met,” he drawled. “She was beautiful. It’s hard to explain. She just looked a lot…different. She had the big hair, and it was a different look.”
When he was asked to describe Tara as a mother, Stephen said, “She loves her kids. But, you know, most mothers don’t travel five days a week. I’ve heard comments from people—‘What