Limb from Limb. George Hunter
“but that was just his way of getting out of taking the test,” he said.
For a man supposedly hoping to get his lost spouse back at any cost, Stephen was keeping detectives at a distance. “Generally, we work in constant communication with family members,” Hackel said. “We try to embrace them, but he would never get under our arm.”
On Monday, Alicia and Erik were still putting up posters and providing investigators with more information about Tara. They’d spent the weekend taping the flyers—which featured a portrait of a beaming Tara in a softly draped scarf-neck sweater—from Detroit Metropolitan Airport to hotels and gas stations within a fifteen-mile radius from the missing woman’s home.
Despite the dozens of posters and increasing publicity, “we don’t have any leads,” Alicia said. “Everything is a complete dead end. There hasn’t been anything new.”
Stephen—not posting flyers, but holed up in his Carriage Hills subdivision Colonial—ignored the ringing of the telephone and knocks on the door from TV, radio, and print reporters.
That, however, would change soon.
21
Hackel, the most high-profile law enforcement leader in Macomb County’s 570 square miles, isn’t your stereotypical “no comment, just the facts, ma’am” sheriff. The young lawman eschews what he calls “normal cop-think.” Instead, he embraces modern tools and had been raising communication—with his constituents, his staff, the media—to something of an art form.
The son of his own predecessor, Mark Allen Hackel often pointed out that his teenage ambition was not to join the force but to own a 7-Eleven convenience store. After graduation from Sterling Heights High School in 1980, two and a half years working midnights as a sheriff’s office dispatcher, changed all that.
At about 2:30 A.M. on July 16, 1981, Hackel took a 911 call from a man who said, “My neighbor just said someone killed his family.”
“In the background, I can hear a guy crying—or pretending to cry,” Hackel said.
The man Hackel heard sobbing was Robert Deroo. When detectives later got to his posh Macomb Township home, they went into an upstairs bedroom and found seventeen-month-old Jessica Deroo lying facedown in her crib. She had been suffocated.
They moved into the next bedroom and found five-year-old Nathaniel wearing blue pajamas and lying motionless on his back. He also had been suffocated.
In the master bedroom was the body of Deborah Deroo. The twenty-five-year-old housewife was spread-eagled on her bed. Her nightgown was pushed up around her shoulders, and her neck was heavily bruised. A can of Mace lay next to her outstretched arm. Investigators thought the placement of the Mace looked staged.
Another child, three-year-old Nicholas, lay motionless next to his mother on the bed. But despite the choke marks on his neck, Nicholas had survived.
Robert Deroo, a handsome cabinetmaker, was the prime suspect from the beginning, but prosecutors determined there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges against him. Upon reviewing the evidence two and a half years later, they changed their minds.
The sordid trial captivated the region. More than eighty witnesses were called over four weeks of testimony. It was revealed that Deborah Deroo was having an affair with her next-door neighbor. Another neighbor testified that on the night of the murders he heard a child shout repeatedly, “Don’t, Daddy, don’t!”
It took the jury only four hours to find Robert Deroo not guilty. Then, after a court battle with Deborah Deroo’s parents, the acquitted suspect won custody of his son Nicholas.
Police—including Hackel—were furious. The case spurred Hackel to embark on his long career as a police officer.
“I recognized it was an important, exciting job,” he said. “I didn’t know I would fall in love with it.”
So instead of becoming a 7-Eleven franchisee, Hackel stayed on the force. He attended the Police Academy at Macomb Community College. Despite being one of the youngest recruits, he came out number one in his class. He also scored first in the physical-fitness component.
He began his career as all deputies do, working in the Macomb County Jail as a CO. But he kept up with his schoolwork, too, pursuing a criminal justice degree, first at Macomb Community College, then at Detroit’s Wayne State University. Juggling job and classes, Hackel took seven years to earn a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.
“I recognized how competitive it made me,” Hackel said. Not just in terms of knowledge and promotions, either. The young deputy realized that an articulate, media-savvy, accessible lawman could be more effective than the traditional tight-lipped cop with an arm’s-length, fortress mentality.
“You are a street corner politician,” he said. “We can’t put out literature…marketing our organization. We develop a reputation through the media.”
Even in tough times, including his own father’s legal woes, Hackel seldom wavered from his forthright, approachable demeanor. The strategy served him well; he swept his 2004 reelection run with 80 percent of the votes, and many have maintained he has a blockbuster future ahead as a politician outside of law enforcement.
“Sixties-era police were more brawn than brain,” he said. “Now we need more business and people skills. We do not make anything, like a widget. We protect and we serve. The service part is harder, but more interesting.”
More often clad in sport coat and tie—with a small gold sheriff’s star on his lapel—than in one of his many cop uniforms, Hackel has spoken in twenty-first-century jargon of “marketing” the department. He has philosophized that law enforcement workers are simply “paid members of society doing what society should do for one another.” His mantra for the sheriff’s office has been “responsibility, accountability, availability, accessibility.”
This sheriff has had his own Wikipedia entry, and his agency has operated snappy Internet pages. (Welcome to your Web site, reads the message from Hackel.) The site is complete with citizen-friendly features, such as a Kids Area, safety tips, a virtual tour of the county jail, and links to local newspaper sites. Residents heading out to vacation can fill out a house-watch request form and teens can learn about the department’s Explorer program.
Hackel hosted a local cable-TV show, organized a senior-citizen greeter program at the sheriff’s office, brought back the county’s disbanded K-9 unit, and purchased a $150,000 thirty-foot “command center”—a custom RV with a sexy black paint job that is used in crisis situations and doubles as a roving police station.
But despite his attempt to make the sheriff’s office a user-friendly organization, Hackel, fundamentally, has been a cop. And beneath the folksy, down-to-earth persona, that cop was becoming angry.
Hackel was fed up with Stephen Grant’s coy cat-and-mouse tactics. It was time, he thought, to turn up the heat on Stephen, and the best way to do that was to lure him back out into the public eye.
And on February 20—eleven days into Tara’s disappearance—a surprise source called the sheriff’s office and provided the bait.
22
SEX, LIES, SPYING, trumpeted the front-page headline of the February 21 edition of the Detroit News.
The flashy scoop propelled the Grant story for all time from pathos to top-notch domestic drama. Quoting e-mails now in the custody of police detectives, the story documented Stephen Grant’s flip, cavalier, and flirtatious correspondence with a former girlfriend. The e-mails also revealed that Stephen suspected Tara was cheating on him with her boss, Lou, who was referred to in the correspondence as “the Old Geezer.”
In eight messages exchanged over an hour and a half at midday on January 25, 2007—when Tara was in London on another corporate trip—Stephen wrote to his ex that he considered marriage vows like speed limits. Sometimes you have to break them and sometimes