Limb from Limb. George Hunter

      As Alicia and her family approached Macomb County at about five-thirty Saturday morning, she called Hackel, who gave her directions to the Best Western. He met Tara’s family in their hotel room and broke the horrifying news that detectives had found a dismembered torso inside the Grant garage.

      “It was like your worst nightmare come to life,” Alicia said. “We held out a glimmer of hope that she may still be alive, but we knew there was always a chance [that] something terrible had happened. But this was just the worst possible scenario. It’s something you never would’ve imagined.”

      Breaking the news that a family member has been murdered is never an easy job, Hackel said. “It’s one of the worst things we have to do as police officers. Especially in this case, where I’d spent so much time with the family, and this wasn’t just telling someone that their loved one was dead. We had to tell them that she’d been dismembered. It was not easy.”

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      At about 9:30 A.M., Saturday, a team of detectives, several dozen police reserves, and five K-9 units gathered at Stony Creek for a second search. In all, there were nearly one hundred people.

      Sergeant Larry King, the Macomb administrative sergeant for the Macomb detective bureau, had spent a lot of time hiking in Stony Creek park as a child, and he was intimately familiar with the terrain. The twenty-one-year veteran led the group that conducted the second search of the park. This time they decided to check a wooded area not accessible to cars.

      After about an hour and a half, Deputy Scott Lasky discovered a pink object lying on top of the snow near a tree. The closer I got, the more I realized it was a body part, Lasky later wrote in his report. The first piece of Tara to be located was one of her thighs.

      “It was clean cut, and the skin near the cut had been pulled back,” King said.

      Shortly after the thigh was found, reserve officers Conrad Maday and Stephen Bonnell made an even more gruesome discovery: Tara’s head, wedged beneath an upturned tree stump.

      “You could see the hair and part of the neck,” King said. “Once we found the thigh and the head, we backed the reserves out of there and secured the scene. Then we called in the medical examiner’s office.”

      When technicians from the ME’s office arrived, they photographed the two body parts, as they’d been found. “Then we removed the head from underneath the log,” King said. “There was no doubt it was Tara. The head was well-preserved. [The weather] had been really cold, so it was pristine. The features were all there.”

      As detectives searched the park for more body parts, King was charged with carrying the bag containing Tara’s head and other limbs. A right hand was found on top of the snow behind a bush. A large bone, thought to be a femur, was discovered nearby. “Animals had gotten to it and picked it clean,” King said. A short time later, investigators found a left hand. “All that was left of it was bone and tendons,” King said.

      A foot was located in the snow. A lower leg was discovered in a hollowed-out log. “I’m walking through the woods and picking up pieces and putting them into a bag, thinking, ‘This is screwed up,’” King said.

      Every time he opened the bag to put another body part inside, King said, he could see Tara’s head. Her eyes were still open. “It was like she was staring at me,” he said. “In a situation like that, you’ve got to stop thinking about yourself and how you’re feeling, and think about the family. If this had been my family member, I would want the police to recover her entire body. So we put ourselves in the mind-set that we were doing this to help Tara’s family.”

      After several hours, the decision was made to halt the search, since dusk was approaching, and the cadaver dogs were becoming fatigued. King asked all available K-9 units to return to the park at nine the following morning. King gave the body parts to assistant medical examiner Sherry Huntley. A deputy was posted in the park overnight to keep the area secure.