HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - Ray Gricar told his girlfriend he was playing hooky, set out alone down scenic Route 192 in his red Mini Cooper and strolled through the kitschy storefronts of a Lewisburg antique mall.
There was nothing so unusual about an escape on an unseasonably warm Friday 13 years ago. The Centre County district attorney was eight months from retirement and he’d once gone to a Cleveland Indians game without telling a soul. The day before he showed up in Lewisburg, on April 14, an acquaintance saw him at Raystown Lake, more than an hour’s drive from Bellefonte in the opposite direction.
This time, though, he never returned.
Did Gricar, then 59, climb the steel guardrail of a nearby bridge and plunge into the Susquehanna, knowing the swift spring current would carry him away? Did he encounter someone he’d prosecuted over his 35-year career and end up in a shallow grave or abandoned mineshaft? Did he flee his old life, with its promise of a safe pension and a calendar full of languid day trips, for something new and exciting?
“It’s frustrating,” said Shawn Weaver, who oversaw the investigation from 2006, when he became Bellefonte’s police chief, through 2014, when the state police took over. “You can be set on one theory, really firmly believe it and then you can talk yourself right out of it.”
After nearly a decade chasing false leads - and absorbing the overtime pay each required - the 11-person department has returned to the usual grind of domestics and drug busts. The scant pieces of evidence Gricar left behind have been passed along. Tips are forwarded to the State Police’s Troop G major case team.
“Currently, the case is classified as a missing person,” said Trooper David McGarvey, in the formal tone of a public-facing spokesman. “Due to the nature of the investigation, specific details pertaining to the case will not be released.”
Reminders of Gricar are everywhere in Bellefonte, a picturesque county seat whose Victorian architecture rose out of the iron industry’s 19th-century heyday. The now-sleepy borough was once a political stronghold and home to five governors.
The last known image of the district attorney was taken from a surveillance camera on that Thursday night as he left the courthouse where he and his girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, worked together. She still works for the county. They were familiar faces in a borough of 6,000 residents, sharing a modest home on Collins Avenue, where he set out from the next day.
“Everybody knew him and everybody has a theory,” an employee at an ice cream parlor across from the courthouse said recently between scoops. He offers his own, that Gricar entered the witness-protection program and will reemerge at the end of a very-long-lived investigation into the mob. Which mob, exactly? “Who knows?”
Weaver, who interned under Fornicola in the 1980s when she was a parole officer, said he tries not to dwell on the case.
That’s easier said than done, though.
“Every time I drive by Lewisburg, I think about it,” he said. “At least weekly.”
THE EARLY DAYS
Gricar was a man focused steadfastly on his work. He had a deep-seated empathy for victims and could spend hours listening to their families. In the courtroom, he framed his arguments succinctly, in black-and-white terms. Defense attorneys girded their clients for his intense cross-examinations. At work, he was known to pass coworkers in the hall without acknowledgment, his eyes set on some unseen goalpost in the middle distance, unless they initiated conversation.
That focus manifested, for example, in a gullibility that former Montour County District Attorney Bob Buehner relished.
“Every time he’d want some help, I’d say, ‘OK, Ray, get me tickets for the big Penn State football game and I’ll see what I can do,’ ” he said.
There was a momentary hesitation that eased as Buehner pitched that line, and others, at his friend. Eventually, Gricar grew comfortable enough to reciprocate the joke.
Gricar’s attention to detail resulted in convictions in major cases, such as the 1993 slaying of Dawn Marie Birnbaum. The 17-year-old runaway was found in a snow bank off I-80. The district attorney used DNA, tire tracks and gas receipts to link the murder to a cross-country trucker, one of potentially hundreds who passed through the county on that particular day.
“It was a difficult case, with so much circumstantial evidence,” Buehner said. “That defendant made the mistake of dumping the body in the wrong county because Ray didn’t let up until it was solved.”
After law school and a brief stint as a city prosecutor, Gricar made his name through a series of high-profile murder cases in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County. He left Cleveland in 1979 when his first wife was hired as a professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Rather than take on civil cases or defense work, friend and fellow attorney Amos Goodall said Gricar spent more than a year as a stay-at-home dad to his adoptive daughter Lara, who declined to comment for this story.
“He couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” Goodall said.
When a post opened up under District Attorney David E. Grine, Gricar was the obvious choice. Despite the insularity of Centre County politics, he won Grine’s old job in 1985 in an election that pitted him against Goodall, a Democrat. By that point, they’d already become friends and the election didn’t jeopardize that.
“He certainly wasn’t given to theatrical or grand gestures, even in social situations,” Goodall said. “There was nothing unfriendly or discourteous or disloyal about him. He’s what you’d expect to have in a friend.”
Gricar rarely shared his feelings openly and never provided his friends with an easy explanation for why he chose to be a prosecutor. One of the few times Goodall saw his friend shaken was when Lara had been injured in a snowboarding accident out west.
“We were coming in from a trip and he was flying out” of University Park Airport in State College, he said. “I’ve never seen him as white-faced and worried as when we saw him in the airport that day.”
It’s that equanimity and dedication to work and family - Gricar had planned to visit Lara in Washington state after he retired - that makes Goodall doubt that his friend would “voluntarily absent himself.”
After he vanished, Goodall helped organize a reward to find his friend. In 2011, he represented Lara when she sought to declare her father legally deceased. Grine, who went on to become a judge, presided over the case.
“Can you imagine how you’d feel if your father or fiancé disappeared?” Goodall said. “You’re floored. You don’t know what to do. That’s the way his daughter and fiancée were and, well, I felt the same way.”
CONCERNS, FEARS GROW
Ray Gricar called Fornicola at 11:30 a.m. to tell her he was driving down Route 192, a fact later corroborated by cell phone records, and wouldn’t be back in time to feed and walk their dog, Honey. It was a perfect day to drive with the windows down; sunny with temperatures in the 60s.
The route would’ve taken the district attorney through rolling hillsides, farm fields and underneath the vaulted canopy of Bald Eagle State Forest before reaching downtown Lewisburg. Amish children pedal along the shoulder, using their feet to propel up steep inclines. Horses whinny as cars speed by and the odd Longhorn steer suns itself in a green pasture.
“I love you,” the pair said before going about their day.
Fornicola returned home from the courthouse, found no note and went to work out at the Bellefonte YMCA. Back home again, still with no word, she fretted over Gricar and made a frantic call to police at about 11:30 p.m.
“I don’t want folks to forget about Ray,” she said, 10 years on. “Ray was a wonderful person. I have very wonderful memories of him and I need to cherish those.”
She declined further comment.
That Friday night, the officers on duty in Bellefonte showed up at the door of Duane Dixon, Weaver’s predecessor as chief, almost immediately after Fornicola’s call.
“We’ve had other missing persons cases, but nothing on the scale where they come to your door to advise you (that) your DA is missing,” said Dixon, now retired and working in the police records room in Glendale, Ariz.
Forgoing standard missing persons procedure, the police under Dixon’s direction immediately sent notice to other departments to be on the lookout for Gricar’s Mini Cooper. The next morning, with still no word from Gricar, the State Police joined the search and a helicopter went up to scan the roadsides.
“At this point, you’re thinking it’s a normal missing persons case, that he went somewhere and got lost,” Dixon said. “The main concern is a car crash because the direction he traveled was a two-lane highway and accidents do happen going from Lewisburg to Bellefonte.”
Darrel Zaccagni became the lead investigator because he showed up to work first that Saturday morning. In a perfect world, he said, the police would have given Gricar 24 hours but “when you hold an office like that - I don’t care what anybody says - you get a little more favored treatment than Susie Homewife Who Doesn’t Come Home Tonight.”
His first thought was that Gricar had met a woman in Lewisburg and decided to stay the night. Outside of his workplace demeanor, Zaccagni said the district attorney had a reputation for the easy charm he had with women.
That theory evaporated as the morning wore on.
“We should’ve heard from him by now,” he remembered thinking. “Patty would be getting up wondering ‘Where’s Ray?’ and he’d have to lie to her and say the car broke down, I slept in the car and my cell phone battery was dead. He’d have to have some explanation for her.”
POLICE SCOUR THE RIVER
By 5 p.m. Saturday, the discovery of the Mini Cooper parked across from an antique mall called the “Street of Shops” upset all previous assumptions.
Even in the fading light of dusk, it became obvious that Gricar’s disappearance wouldn’t be easily resolved. His cell phone - turned off - was found locked inside the car, but the keys were missing. After being taken to a nearby State Police barracks for processing, technicians detected an obvious cigarette smell and found ash on the passenger’s side floor mat. Zaccagni said Gricar not only didn’t smoke but reportedly abhorred the habit.
“That indicated that someone was in that car smoking or leaned into the car holding a cigarette,” he said.
Despite the unnerving developments, however, there were no signs of foul play. No blood, no scuff marks, nothing out of order.
There was no activity on Gricar’s email, bank accounts or credit cards. But it soon became clear that Ray’s laptop, which he was seen with on Thursday, was missing.
Dixon and Zaccagni were struck by another revelation brought to their attention by Ray’s nephew, Tony Gricar, who did not respond to requests for comment. Tony immediately recognized something eerily familiar about the scene: the parked car, the broad, fast-moving river and the bridge.
His father and Ray’s older brother, Roy, killed himself in 1996 after a long struggle with depression. The authorities had found his car parked along the Great Miami River in Dayton, Ohio, and found his body a few days later.
That history prompted police to mount a massive search of the river, a search that involved various agencies, boat owners and even curiosity seekers.
“Here’s the interesting thing,” said Buehner, recalling a dinner he’d had with Gricar and a few other prosecutors. “Ray never believed his brother committed suicide. The most important reason was that he thought his brother would never orphan his two sons, Ray’s nephews.”
The issue came up, Buehner said, because the normally tight-lipped Gricar had mentioned a trip back home. Every time he returned, Gricar told his friends that he would check in with police to see if there were new leads.
Buehner said he has always discounted the suicide theory because, in his experience as a district attorney, most people who kill themselves want their body to be found. Their final act might be used to make a statement about their lives or, by ensuring their body is found, allow closure to loved ones.
“If Ray intentionally wanted to commit suicide, all he had to do was drive down Route 192, pull over to the side of the road, stick socks in the exhaust pipe, turn on the radio and let the carbon monoxide take its toll,” he said.
Many of the police officers involved in the Gricar case have favored the suicide theory, but they also note that nothing in his medical history points to - or necessarily rules out - a struggle with depression or a diagnosis, such as cancer, that would spur him to take his life. Police even periodically checked psychiatric wards across the state to see if any men matching Gricar’s description showed up.
Gricar, however, was reportedly a poor swimmer.
“At this point, we can’t prove anything,” Dixon said.
But if Gricar did enter the Susquehanna, either voluntarily or through foul play, it’s entirely possible that he might never be found. On the day he disappeared, the U.S. Geological Survey put the water level a short distance downstream from Lewisburg, in Sunbury, at 11.5 feet - very similar to its present levels due to melting ice.
Sunbury is also home to an inflatable fiber dam. While it generally isn’t installed until late April or mid-May, authorities say it was in place at the time Gricar disappeared.
“If he got into those currents and made it down to the dam, he probably would have been chewed up,” Zaccagni said. “And if he made it past that, there are still more dams further down before he’d get to the Chesapeake.”
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At a press conference held that Monday, Gricar’s family held fast to hope that he would return.
“I want you to come home,” Fornicola said. “Please call us. We will wait for as long as we need.”
In the years since Gricar’s disappearance, amateur sleuths and conspiracy theorists have pointed to such statements as proof that the district attorney is alive and hiding out - having either skipped town or entered witness protection.
Zaccagni said the sheer length of time that has elapsed makes the latter unlikely. The former remains a plausible, if remote, possibility: In the years since, Bellefonte police have investigated reported sightings from Wilkes Barre to Texas to the audience of The Oprah Winfrey Show, then filmed in Chicago.
Matt Rickard, who took over when Zaccagni retired in 2007, worked with Interpol to distribute fliers in Slovenia, the country of Gricar’s ancestors and a place he visited twice in the late 1970s and early ‘80s while it was part of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.
Within a few months of his disappearance, both Lara and Fornicola passed polygraph tests that included questions aimed squarely at the walk-away theory. It’s unclear whether they’ve been tested again in the intervening decade, but most police officials place a voluntary walk-away a distant third among the most common theories.
“If he’s alive, we would have heard something,” Zaccagni said. “He’d be seen at a bar. He’d reach out to his family. He’d slip up and we’d find out about it.”
As the 10th anniversary approached in 2015, Weaver said he recently had a full conversation with Fornicola for the first time in years. She told him she’d be happy if Gricar walked through the door tomorrow, but would kick him in the shins for the anguish he’d put her through.
“I told her I’d be right behind her,” said Weaver, a former Army infantryman.
Zaccagni said there was little outside hurt feelings to stop Gricar from breaking things off with Fornicola if that’s what he wanted. And Gricar left his bank account and a county pension worth hundreds of thousands of dollars untouched.
“Ray was an intelligent man,” Zaccagni said. “Even if he found a sugar mama, he would know she could dump him tomorrow and he’d need his own means of support.”
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HARD DRIVE OFFERS TEMPORARY HOPE
Over the course of nearly 35 years as a prosecutor, Gricar had a hand in hundreds - if not thousands - of cases. That fact presented one of the greatest challenges to investigators.
“People say you need to go back through all of his cases,” said Weaver, “but have you seen them all? No department has the resources to do that.”
Even so, Weaver said the department received many tips that people Gricar had prosecuted were involved. Most of them ended with prisoners requesting lighter sentences or help with parole boards in exchange for the information, he said.
One of the early reprisal inquiries centered around Taji “Verbal” Lee. That March, just a couple weeks before his disappearance, Gricar had joined Corbett in announcing the shutdown of what Corbett described as the “largest heroin operation we have ever seen in Centre County.”
Zaccagni said he tracked down numerous leads involving that case and, as it turned out, none of the timelines for Lee and his associates corresponded with Gricar’s vanishing. Furthermore, there were far more obvious targets for assassination - such as cooperating witnesses - than the district attorney, he said.
Lee was ultimately sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in prison. According to the Department of Corrections, Lee is currently being held at the medium-security Mahanoy State Correctional Institution in Frackville.
Many early media reports linked Gricar’s disappearance with former Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna, a drug investigator who was found dead in a Lancaster County creek in December 2003. His case remains unsolved.
But that avenue yielded virtually no connection at all with Gricar, Zaccagni said.
There was a victim of domestic violence whose ex had issued a few vague threats years prior, but police in Alaska confirmed that his alibi seemed to check out. His name didn’t appear on any commercial flight manifests.
In 2011, the news broke that Gricar declined to prosecute an alleged case of sexual assault of a minor against Jerry Sandusky. The 1998 decision put Gricar’s name back in the national spotlight as it came amid news of an indictment against the former Penn State assistant football coach. It also spurred a wave of speculation that Gricar’s disappearance was connected to the disgraced coach or the alleged cover-up.
Buehner believes Gricar was killed, but doubts it had any Sandusky connection.
“Who in the Sandusky case would have the motive to do any harm to Ray Gricar?” he said. “Gricar might have been the best witness (for Sandusky) had he been alive … and any victim probably wasn’t old enough, I don’t think, to be abducting the DA and making him disappear.”
For Buehner, who has criticized the handling of the Gricar investigation, the more compelling lead was a prison tip he received and passed along that Gricar was abducted, killed and disposed of in reprisal for a case he prosecuted against a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club.
A similar account published in 2013 by the Altoona Mirror outlined the story of a former Hells Angels member who reportedly stopped short of taking authorities to the location of Gricar’s body.
The State Police declined to comment on specifics about the Gricar investigation, so the status of that and other inquiries remains unclear.
Weaver said investigators used ground-penetrating radar to follow up on a tip involving an alleged grave site in Blair County. No remains were found. Another tip involving the Hells Angels that originated from the southern part of the state was investigated by the State Police and “didn’t pan out,” he said.
Gricar’s laptop was discovered under the Route 45 bridge in Lewisburg in July 2005, with its hard drive physically ejected. The hard drive was found about two months later in the shallows further upstream.
Investigators also learned that Gricar had purchased software to wipe the laptop; they would later find Internet searches from his home computer included phrases like “how to wreck a hard drive.”
For Weaver, the hard drive promised to be the biggest development in the case, as the FBI and Kroll Ontrack, the firm that successfully recovered data from the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, examined it.
“We thought that was the key,” he said. “I took that personally to Kroll Ontrack and hand-delivered it.”
At the time, Weaver said, it was determined that nothing could be salvaged from the hard drive. The abrasive action of sand and grit from the river bottom had effectively destroyed it.
The news was a major letdown.
“I wasn’t going into it thinking there was specific information on there, but thought it would at least point us in some direction,” he said. “Obviously, (Gricar) or someone took it out for a reason.”
While the case is now with the State Police, Weaver said he hasn’t heard of any advances in technology since that would make recovery more likely.
MEMORIES FADE
On an overcast afternoon, Beth Beswick walked her Springer Spaniel named Hollywood through Lewisburg’s Soldiers’ Memorial Park, one of the last places Gricar was seen in 2005. The wooded park sits between a closed railroad trestle police believe Gricar’s laptop was thrown from and the Route 45 bridge where Gricar himself might or might not have taken his plunge into the Susquehanna.
Nearly a decade ago, Beswick, an attorney, represented one of the witnesses who saw Gricar here. She and Hollywood joined in the search along the park’s muddy riverbank that spring.
“Anybody who lives down here thinks about it,” she said. “It’s weird because they could come up with no explanation.”
Beswick, like even casual observers, has her own theory: Gricar was silenced after he threatened to expose a conspiracy to cover up the Sandusky molestation case.
Weaver said his officers had chased more rumors and theories than he can count. At one time or another, most of his 11 officers have worked the case.
The more time elapses, he knows, the less reliable memories become and the less likely the case will be solved. It’s out of his hands now, but he still thinks about Ray Gricar.
The problem of time only compounds what was already a difficult case with no physical evidence and a virtually limitless number of interpretations. He wonders what clue might have been overlooked, what questions went unasked, what witness hasn’t come forward.
“I hope, I really do hope that it’s solved not for my sake but for the people who care greatly about Ray, his family and his close friends,” Weaver said. “Especially, if he was murdered. You want to see justice done for him because that’s what he’s done his whole life.”
Dixon, who retired from Bellefonte five months after Gricar vanished, had expected to solve the case before he left. Expectation turned to hope and, finally, disappointment.
One of his most vivid memories was being hammered with questions by Fox News’ Greta van Susteren at a packed press conference.
“As time went on, of course, we had fewer leads and less information to give,” he said. “After the first month and a half, we had nothing major to release and fewer and fewer people coming.”
Now a civilian checking evidence in and out of storage in sunny Arizona, Dixon misses the cold weather, the small town atmosphere and the job he left behind. Ten years on, he still mulls the biggest case of his career, torn between suicide and foul play.
“It takes a toll because you feel like you didn’t accomplish what you wanted to before you retired,” he said. “I felt bad leaving with the case not closed.”
“It takes a toll,” said Gricar investigator Duane Dixon, “because you feel like you didn’t accomplish what you wanted to before you retired.”
Like Weaver, Zaccagni tries not to remember the Gricar case. Unlike some detectives, he doesn’t keep a box of photocopied case files, although he’s sure his wife has the press clippings somewhere.
The reminders, however, are everywhere.
Reporters start calling every April, like clockwork. Then there’s the occasional author looking to pick through his memories. And every time he crosses the Susquehanna, he wonders if Gricar is out there. He stays in touch with some of the current police and he checks the paper.
“Just about anytime someone finds a body, it makes me think about Ray,” he said. “I wonder if it’s him.”
For Buehner, the whole case is fraught with tragedy - and not just for his friend. Since Gricar vanished, the Centre County District Attorney’s Office has been mired in legal and political troubles.
Having himself retired as a district attorney in 2011, he understands the conflicting emotions his friend must have felt leaving his career behind: the heartache and the relief and the optimism.
Gricar was already making plans when Buehner approached him after a meeting in February 2005, two months before his friend vanished.
“Frankly, I’m insulted to see you’re retiring,” Buehner had said. “I don’t know who I’m going to go to for Penn State tickets now.”
Gricar, like old times, didn’t take the bait.
“I want to enjoy life before I’m too old,” Gricar said. “Thirty-five years is long enough.”
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Information from: Pennlive.com, http://www.pennlive.com
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