Slices of Betrayal

0:06 Welcome to Unspeakable, a true crime podcast. Or I tell stories of real crimes with real victims, whose cases are so shocking that many are left wondering how is this even real? I use my experiences in law enforcement corrections, and combined with my years as a criminal justice educator, dig deep into complex cases of evil acts, some so evil many feel they are unspeakable. Warning. Unspeakable as intended for mature audiences. If you are easily offended, then I'm not your girl. Listening discretion is advised. Hey, y'all's kJ here back for an other episode of Unspeakable. What are y'all doing today? I had a long day of back at school today, and I said, you know what, I got a record after school, so I'm putting in. I'm putting the work for y'all today. I've got a great episode two. I'm pretty excited. I've got some shout outs though before I get started, and I've got some people, My people in Louisiana are showing up and showing out.

1:22 I'm gonna start with you, Miss Michelle Dixon in Springfield, Louisiana. Hey, Michelle, what is up? I'm so glad to have you join my team, as well as Evan Jackson and Alexandria Louisiana. Hi, Evan, how are you doing? I don't have a lot of male presence in uh in my in my repertoire here, so I'm always excited when I see the men come come swooping in right. So, Hey Evan, I'm glad to have you. I've also got from Union City, Indiana, Miss Karen Shoemaker. Hey Karen, and I like the way you spell it. You spell it different, ka R I N that's different. Welcome, welcome. And then I've got here another let's see in Texas. Jennifer Phillips. Hi, Jennifer. I had a friend in high school named Jennifer Phillips. I don't know are you the same one? Did you move, Jennifer?

2:08 Is that you either way? Hey girl? Thank you so much. And then Ashley Rodriguez, girl, you right here in my backyard in Denim Springs. Hey, Ashley. When my local people, you know, when y'all support me, I don't know how else to say, but when my local people support me and believe in me, it just it means the world. It's it's it's awesome. And then to tickle to tickle my fancy. In the opposite direction is when someone all the way from Clovis, California, Miss Veronica. You didn't put your last name, but Veronica in Clovis, California. Holy shit, all the way in California. Hey, hey girl, how are you Veronica? How's the weather? I feel like everyone in California is like cooler than me. I don't know, y'all get to like have beach and and there's like everybody's in California. I don't know. So thank you so much.

2:55 And then last, but not least, is gonna be Candace. And Candace again, I don't you didn't put a last name here, but if you are Candace in Sandy Hook, Mississippi, girl, I'm talking to you, Hi, Candace. I've got so many people to thank for their continued support. I've got more shout outs that are gonna come next episode, so hang in there. I don't want to bombard you with forty five names, so I'm gonna do them a little bit at a time. But each one of you matters, and each one of you are very special to me. Please talk to me on Patreon. It's me, y'all. It's absolutely me talking to you. I just was speaking to a to a friend online here and I messaged her right back. I say, a friend a listener, and I messaged her right back and she said, oh my god, I'm fangirling, y'all.

3:35 It's me. It's just me. So if you need anything, if you have a question, if you have a suggestion for an episode, reach out, let a girl know, and you never know, I might jump right on it right then. This one, though, we're gonna be in Michigan. We're going all the way to Michigan this week, and so this one's gonna go out to Michigan with Miss Tara Lynn Grant. That is who we're talking about today. She was born on June twenty eighth, nineteen seventy two, to proud parents Mike and Kim. Now this is not going to be a nineteen seventy two case. This is a closer to our time case. But she was the youngest of the bunch, and while she had a happy childhood there were no complaints about childhood. Her parents' marriage did ultimately not last, and so her parents separated whenever she was a kid.

4:19 But this was a testament to her she did not let that hold her down, she continued to just be an absolute success. She strived for just greatness in everything that she did. She grew up in Rock and she attended Mid Peninsula High School where she was an active student and she participated in things like cheerleading and she was a liked kid. She did really well in school. And after she graduated high school, she enrolled in Michigan State University and her focus was to study in business administration. What was her focus in that business admin marketing? Now, let me tell you something about people in marketingccess tful people in marketing all seem to have these similar traits about them, and I think that this lends itself to who Tara was. When you look at people that are in marketing and do really well, you're looking at extroverted, energetic, creative, adventurous, but also assertive people. You know, you have to be able to live out loud and to have ideas and live outside of the box and draw people in. But you also have to have, you know, a practical essence to you that you you know, you're assertive and you have things that they need to go this way and this is the only way we can do it. To make it successful, and Tara fit the bill. She got her degree. She graduated in nineteen ninety four and eventually she went to work for Washington Group International, which is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Now, professionally speaking, she was a

5:52 rock star. Professionally, she knocked it out of the park. Physically, she was a thin little thing. She was. She had this tiny frame, curly ringlets. Her hair's kind of shoulder length. She has brown eyes, and she's got a small little button nose, a cute little nose. She dressed in the photos of her when I'm trying to figure her out, she dressed casually, comfortable in most of the pictures I saw, which were, you know, pretty colors, and it was giving, as the kids would say, it was giving Anne Klein vibes if you know fashion wise what I'm talking about. She liked thin sweaters with a scarf or a bright colored collared top with a nice over jacket. Well put together, organized and a perfectionist flare to her. Now relationship, she met Stephen Grant in college and they quickly became an item. They say this, and we all know it, Opposites attract, Okay, So he was a bit awkward and He was socially kind of off and odd. To be honest, you know, I'm just I'm shooting from the hip, y'all. Okay. He was a kind of a little strange bird. But he liked her and she liked him back. They just had these different qualities about them. Now looking at him, he was an average looking guy. One thing I did notice about him was he had big eyeballs. And I don't know why they stood out to me. Be kind of has those big eyeballs.

7:24 My niece has big eyeballs. If she's listening to this, she's probably getting mad at me right now for saying that. But just big eyes. And you know, he was kind of on the door kier side, and nothing that would really make you, I think, look twice or anything. But just an average looking dude. His dreams were one day to work in politics. He was very driven by the political world, but he would never finish his degree. That though it didn't bother Tera, she didn't care. She loved him. He didn't have to graduate to be on par with her necessarily in terms of education. She loved him for him, and he loved her for her. He was attentive to Tara through their relationship, and it progressed, it continued to blossom, and that led him to propose at the Detroit Institute of Arts. So I was kind of wondering, why did he pick there? You know, that's kind of odd, maybe not odd, but that's different. And the answer is actually really sweet. Tara loved art, she loved it, and so he thought that that was the perfect fit for the proposal to the woman of his dreams. So they got married and by two thousand and three they had two children, were settled in nicely to the daily rush of life right there in Michigan. But their setup was a little bit non traditional. Tara was the breadwinner, big time breadwinner, and that meant that her job had her traveling a lot.

8:53 And when I say a lot, I don't mean she was running down the road an hour away, or you know, hey, I have to go on a quick two day trip. No, she was like setting. She was going to London, she was going to Puerto Rico. She was flying all over for her job. But Stephen decided, look, I can be a stay at home dad. I don't have you know, he wasn't too proud for that. I'll be a stay at home dad. He said, I'll be the primary caretaker of the children so that Tara could go make that coin. And she was traveling, and honestly, she was good at what she did, and so it just worked well for their family. She was gone often, so Stephen, you know, was happy. He loved it. He loved taking care of his children. And when people would talk to him about what his life was like, he'd say, look with pride.

9:42 He'd say, I'm mister mom. You know, my wife travels for a living, and so she flies in and out, and so I'm the mister mom daily. And I want to say this though, Tara loved their children. She loved her babies, and she was by no means absent mother. I would say she was more of a busy mother who was willing to sacrifice for the sake of her family. This was not a woman who dumped her kids off and then went and had fun in other countries. No, ma'am. She loved her children. She was very active in their lives. She just traveled more than the average bear. But by two thousand and seven, their children were now no longer little toddlers, little babies. The children, and I'm gonna tell you this I will name the children in this episode, and there's a reason for that that well, I'll get to later. So they have been in the public eye more than people might realize. So I don't feel like I'm being uncovering their names in some sort of malicious way, because they actually speak and are on social platforms and things like that. So in two thousand and seven, there was seven year old Lindsay and there was five year old Ian, and Steven knew that he had a catch in his wife Tara. She was a freakin' When I say stone cold fox, I don't necessarily mean, like, you know, a supermodel, but I mean she was whole package. Smart, she had tenacity, she was driven and homegirl wasn't scared to travel. She'd be out there jumping on those planes,

11:13 getting from A to B and making that coin. So there was routine and there was absolute stability in their home. That's why it was rather odd when Tara stopped answering her phone in early February of two thousand and seven. She had just come in. She had just gotten off of a plane from Puerto Rico, where she had been working, and her recent schedule was she was flying into San Juan. She was working Monday through Friday, and then she would just jump back on a plane, fly home for the weekend, spend time with the family, and then she would fly back out again on Monday morning. So she was moving around a lot, so hectic, Yes, lucrative job, absolutely killing it professionally one hundred percent. Looking kind of into the family life. It wasn't that they had anything different from the rest of us. I mean, all couples have disagreements, and they had had just recently a rather larger one.

12:18 But to ignore Steven's calls was just not her. That was not something she would do. She would be aggravated, but she would still answer the phone. So Tara told Stephen that she was going to have to return early on that weekend that she flew in. She said, look, i'mna have to fly back out on Sunday rather than on Monday. And so they got into an argument about it. Understandable frustration because I mean, she's gone a lot, and Stephen was kind of like, okay, look, mad Is okay, we can fight. Mad Is Okay. It just means you care, But to ignore your family and not answer your phone is not cool. So he got aggravated, and eventually Stephen left a voicemail on her.

13:02 Phone, going on, I think you're on me and kids. The next flight and all. Was going on. But this voicemail he left remained unanswered. And y'all, you know we all do. As time goes on, you become increasingly alarmed, like okay, it's it's really not cool anymore. But she was angry with him. However, it just this wasn't normal. She's not gonna do this. And we y'all, we know our family, we know our friends. You know what someone's gonna do, you know what their limits are, and you know when it's just not right. So Stephen continued to call Tara for a few days and she still was not answering. So eventually he's like, all right, enough's enough. He picks up the phone and he makes a phone call to her boss in Puerto Rico. But he's like, look, I haven't seen her. She left to go home. She did not make it back. So he called her family, who you know. When he talked to them, they felt like, well, maybe she's needing some extra time.

14:09 She'll cool off. You know, sure it's been a minute, but maybe he just really pissed her off, something good, you know, this time, and he kind of went along with it. But after five days, five days, no, come on, five days, Steven had enough and he went to the police and is like, look, my wife Tara is missing now when he went to go report her missing. This took place on Valentine's Day, a day that should be you know, loving and filled with flowers and candy, and now it was looking pretty bleak for Stephen and their kids because mom was missing. But you know this, we all know this as true crime. You know, people, adults are allowed to go missing. You're a grown ass adult.

14:58 You are allowed to abscond and run away if you want to. The thing about this case that's kind of different, though, is that y'all. She is a super successful executive, big time making big money, and it just does not ring true that this person would not show back up to work. She may be pissed off as hell at Steven, but she's still going to go to work. She's not gonna just totally leave. So her absence was kind of this seems a little bit sketch. So that was turned over to detectives because a small fight shouldn't typically result in someone not being seen or heard from for five days.

15:40 I mean, I can be an ass, y'all, I'm telling you straight up. I mean I can go a day or two and ignore you. That's fine, But I mean it's not your immediate family, you know, where you have children involved. So remember she's a loving mother. She is a successful professional, and she knows her importance not only the home but as well in the workforce. And she's not just gonna jump up and lead these people. Something was not adding up. So detectives had some more questions for her husband, Steven, and they wanted to try to see Okay, well let's talk about the argument. That's you know, the red flag here. That's way, then let's talk about it. Steven was open and honest with it. He said, Look, she came home. I was upset. I didn't want her to leave out a day early. She had just gotten back, and the last time that I saw her was right after we argued. He wanted her to stay. She was leading early. It just blew up. He just was in a bad spot. She got mad, and he said the last thing he remembered was Tara picking up her bags and that she headed down their driveway to a car, which he said was like a He didn't say these words, but I'm gonna say it kind of like an uber lyft.

16:49 It was a car service, and that it was black. She got in the car, the car drove away. He said, I've been calling her ever since. She's not answering the phone. So for a little, a little perspective, here, a little insight to this. Here is why missing adults are not usually a rush to judgment situation. Other than the fact that you're a grown adult and you can do what you want. I wanted to give you a little more hard data on this. Between twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen, listen to this number, ninety five percent of adults that were reported as missing, it was solved within a month, ninety five percent were figured out and found, ninety eight percent were closed and figured out within a year. So, you know, put that into medical perspective. If the doctor's like, Nona, I'm ninety eight percent sure you'll be fine. You're kind of feeling good about it. You know that we'll figure this out. So, according to World Population dot Com, if y'all live in California or Texas, y'all better watch y'all's backs. Okay, because that's where a majority of people go missing, is in California or Texas. Now that's based on like you know, hard numbers. But Alaska has the highest rate of missing people per population. So this was Michigan too, so they don't have a high missing person rate by state. Statistically,

18:23 we find these adults, especially in the neighborhood that they lived in. Okay, So she lived in extremely low risk lifestyle. I know right now, you're like, well, it's risky getting on a plane. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about. She didn't do drugs. She wasn't now you know, prostituting on the street or anything. She had a low risk lifestyle. She lived in an expensive neighborhood. They both had brand new cars in the driveway, and her children were in private school. It just doesn't scream, I won't answer the phone. And the detectives agreed. That's why they were like, I don't know, man, we might need to dive into this one a little quicker. So Detective Sergeant Pam McLean and her partner, Detective Brian Kozlowski immediately felt like while Steven was talking with them, they just gut instinct felt like his responses were off. So not everyone is going to respond the same way. This was just a guttural feeling from the two of them that the vibe was he didn't pass the vibe check all right, So what made them feel this way? Well, when they went to the home to ask basic questions about what had happened, Steven was readily available to help, but they said he was super fidgety. And then they noted that he was overly cooperative.

19:40 Overly cooperative and that, my friends, is always interesting because this is also what someone who is lying or leaving information out. They tend to do that whenever they're being questioned because oftentimes these people are trying to establish an alibi, and in an f to do so, they give way too many details that the average person who is under stress of their spouse missing, you know, they wouldn't be giving all of this. But these people, if they're lying, will give a lot of detail because they believe in their mind it makes them more believable. So an example like, you know, where were you at this time? Oh, I don't know. I was in the house. I went to the fridge. I got maybe six or ten grapes. You know, I ate those. I put them back in the fridge. Like, who the hell is going to tell you how many grapes they ate? What a weird thing to say. So, you know, that just kind of caught the attention of the detectives that he was being so incredibly detailed about what he was doing, and he was just so nervous that it was just eye catching. But remember, when you're doing this type of investigation, you still have to be somewhat delicate, because the man did just presumptively lose his wife in some way, and this is just a gut instinct.

21:01 Nothing else pointed his direction. Obviously they were fighting, they weren't getting along, so curious to that extent, they wanted to know how many other immediate players in their family life. You know, how many more immediate players are there in this home that we might need to talk to? And so who all was in the house and who all are her close family and friends. So Stephen said, well, I mean, we live here, our kids live here, and we also have a nanny. But the nanny did not live there full time. She only lived there partially throughout the week. Basically, when Tara wasn't there, so this wasn't odd.

21:43 Gathering a little bit more about this nanny. She was young. She was eighteen years old and her name was Verana Dirks. So I heard some people say Verena, verena whatever, tomato, tomato. So she looks like the average eighteen year old girl. Something kind of interesting about her is that she was German and she was just living in the States temporarily, so she had dark hair, her bangs swept over kind of in front of her eyes in the photos of that time. I mean, obviously people change, but at that time she had kind of an edgier haircut, kind of like today's wolf cut. And the photos totally give off these this Avril Levine air to them. I remember Avril when she was kind of in her punk kind of stage.

22:26 So youthful is my point, young and free compared to the very successful and established Terra, she didn't seem at all an issue. There's a young girl that was helping to nanny the kids. But Lord have mercy if I am not jaded, because as soon as I hear the word nanny, all I can think of is, oh, hell, I don't know if you did too, but oh, Jesus. But I'm telling you there really wasn't much to her and her role in the life was minimal other than you know, picking up the kids, taking them here there, you know, fixing a sandwich. Like I said. She did live the home off and on, but that was just while Tara was gone. There was no secret to this. She was, you know, part of the family arrangement. She had her own room, her own bed Latida. So police questioned close family who they felt could give them more insight to what she was like, and they agreed that this was completely and utterly out of the blue. There was no history of problems in the marriage that they knew of. There was no domestic violence, there was no anything that they could say, yeah, you know, this is a problem. A matter of fact, Tara's mother spoke to her on February the fourth, and Tara was talking about how excited she was, she was looking forward to a vacation.

23:41 She was expressing how tired she was and just she needed a break from work. So Tara wanted to come back home. She wanted a break. So maybe after the fight, you know, Tara decided to just leave for the vacation. Is what someone might say, but that's not what you know. That's not now what Steven said. Stephen said, No, she was leaving and her goal was to go back to work. She was not going on a vacation. Plus, Tara loved being with her children, you know, they biked and they hiked and they played together whenever she was home. She didn't want to just leave her kids and go on a vacation by herself. And that's not something she would have done. Even if she was pissed off to the end of the earth at Stephen and just went crazy, she still would have taken her children on vacation with her.

24:32 So it literally seemed like Tara had left and just not returned. But there was just problems with this scenario. Number One, even if she did just run off, she would need money. She would have to have money. You can't survive in this world without money, and no money was being spent by her out of their account. She would have flown out. If she jumped in the car she was going to catch that plane, she would have flown out, right. So police checked her flight records to see if she had caught the flight, and guess what, she would have flown out, you know, she was supposed to go catch this plane. She was packing her bags for the trip back to work whenever they had their argument.

25:17 So I mean, she was going somewhere, and she had these children that she greatly loved. So police said, all right, let's go check into her flight records. Let's see if she in fact actually caught the flight back to San Juan. This was expected to be on February the twelfth, okay, but she never boarded the plane. The flight would have been scheduled for February the ninth for her to fly back out. So you know, she wasn't reported missing until Valentine's Day, So where has she been all of these days? If she never even got on the plane. Here's the other rut row we're gonna hit. All cell phone usage stopped after the day she left the house in the uber car, So you know, this whole situation isn't looking good.

26:07 And obviously she has not been in contact with anyone. So moving down the list of possible motive or influence in this case, police found that Stephen had made a phone call to Tara's work, as he had already stated, but the pretenses were a little different than how he had presented it. He said he was calling to check and see if she had flown back to work. But after more questioning, it turns out Stephen thought that Tara might be having an affair at work, and so he had called the man at work that he suspected she was having an affair with, So, you know, is she with you? It wasn't just hey, do you know where my wife is? She hasn't shown up. But looking further into this, there was no evidence, zero goose eggs of an affair that had happened with this man. Those aren't Stevens' words, by the way, those are Those are mine, Like, there was nothing I ever found that suggested she was having a literal physical affair with someone. So, while initially overly helpful, remember as time progressed and the police kept questioning and going back, he became a little less helpful to the police. So that willingness to help reduction really you know, took off. Whenever he was stopped for a traffic stop on February the fifteenth, so the day after

27:40 Tara was marked as missing, he was found to be driving under a suspended license license whenever he was pulled over, And so this resulted in his arrest. Now, he felt like the arrest was ridiculous and that this was just a ploy for police to be able to get him into an interrogate room. Well, the reality was that he was actually driving with a suspended license, and so they had every right to arrest him. Now did they use it to their advantage? I'm assuming so your wife is missing, we'd like to talk to you more. But for him to act incredulous like this is ridiculous, you broke the law.

28:21 They worked well within the bounds of what they are allowed to do, but he became extremely irritable about this entire situation from that point forward. Regardless of his feelings, though, his wife was still missing and police were no closer to finding her. So five days later, on February the twentieth, police asked Stephen, look, man, are you willing to take a polygraph test? And Steven said, no, I'm not going to do it. He's still angry. Okay, he feels like he's being mistreated and that they're pointing the finger at him without you know reason too, he hasn't done anything, so he says no, But then he decides, look, I will take it, but I won't take it if you're the one. If the Macomb County Sheriff's Office is the one that's going to be giving it, I won't take it.

29:09 But if there's a third party or something like that that will give it, I will take it with them. I just don't want to take it with you, all right. Cool. Strategically speaking, most people would tell you that taking a polygraph test probably is not a good idea. But on the other hand, I'm thinking about me personally. I always try to put myself in these shoes, and my wish to find my spouse would be heavily outweighing any personal risk that I might have in that situation. Sure, they may start looking at me as a suspect. Maybe they don't like what I say. Maybe I fail the dawn polygraph even if I had nothing to do with it. Strategically, it's just not a good idea to take it. But I'm telling you now, my sweetheart goes missing, you can do whatever the hell you want to me. I don't care.

29:57 I'll go to jail even if it's just wrong. But if God, if you can just help me find him, I'll do anything. So under a lawyer's advice. You know, he says, you know, I'll take it if someone else is taking it. But the key here to it also is that they're not admissible in court. That's why strategically it doesn't make sense I guess to take one because they can't use it in court. So what are they using it for is what a lot of people will question. Well, it's to him me up, is what people would think. So it turns out that he did go take a private polygraph. He did take it shortly thereafter, but the results were just inconclusive. It didn't say, oh, he's flat outlying, and it didn't say, oh he's you know, an angel here on earth telling nothing but the truth. It just was inconclusive. It didn't really sway one way or the other.

30:44 So police decided on a different strategy the next day, because remember it's been days now that this woman is missing. The next day they decide to hold a news conference and update the media about the case. Because by this point this case had blown up. People in the area knew that this mother was missing. That plan said, look, we're gonna hold our conference for the media, but not only that, we're gonna hold a press conference daily until she is found now. I don't know what was going on behind closed doors in the police's mind here. I wasn't there, but I have a feeling that this was being done to apply pressure to whom I can't say, but pressure, right. People who do things wrong want stuff to go away. They want it to go under the rug.

31:35 They don't want people to talking about it. They want time and distance and people to be quiet. Well, when they say that they're gonna have a press conference every day, you can take it to the damn bank that they are hoping to smoke out somebody who might try to, Oh, I have a little bit of information here, you know, and come forward with something, even if it's to you know, maybe make people look in another direction than themselves. But y'all, that's not all they did, Okay, they dropped a freaking bombshell in this news conference. See what Stephen didn't know was he may not have wanted to speak with them, but they were still doing some investigating of their own, and this included that they switched gears and started focusing on Stephen's digital presence, which included his emails. He did not know this, and the bombshell that they dropped was that there was an email that really stood out to police.

32:37 It was sent about a month before Tara went missing. The exact date was January twenty fifth. Tara was on a business trip in London at the time. She was not home and Steven sent a message an email to a former girlfriend. Her name was Dina Hardy, and the contents of that message were of a romantic tone and honestly they were just sexually suggestive. So I don't have a copy of that email at the time that I'm recording this. It wasn't for lack of trying. But he did make one statement that I do have that was kind of hm to me. They're discussing back and forth in this email, and this is a direct quote. He says, I don't care about being married. He said, it's a no, no conscience thing. Wow, you know, marriage to me is all about my conscience and that I need to sleep good at night and presumptively next to the person I married.

33:37 So that's a strange thing to say that you don't have any conscience about, you know, your marriage. So there was nothing, by the way that indicated that this email had led to anything further with this woman, but it surely wasn't anything that Stephen had mentioned whenever there was all this questioning being done, and man, if that does not stink of possible motive. The bombshell wasn't just that the media was going to tell everybody that her husband's looking kind of suspicion here because he would have had a you know, romantic email with an ex. No, no, no, no no. They actually released the emails, okay, to the public.

34:19 Now again, I searched for those and I had a really hard time finding them. So but they during this press conference at some point released the emails. So that's what we would call, like I said, applying the pressure and Lucy, you got some explaining to do, as Ricky Ricardo would say. So while Steven had been telling the police that he suspected Tara was having an affair, it surely was now seeming like the pot was calling the kettle black based on these emails. And y'all now that pot was pissed because he felt like his private life had now been put on display. Maybe you're hello, are you listening? Sorry? Your wife is missing the emails? To be damned, where's your wife? But he got upset about it, and police kept their word too, y'all, because the very next day they held another conference, and that's when they told the public, you know what, we're going to start doing ground searches. We're looking for her now, we are actively looking. And I do remember her sister saying something I don't have it here in my notes, but something to the effect of that made the family feel really sick because they knew what that meant. You know, if you're doing ground searches for someone, everyone pretty much knows you're probably looking for a body at that point, but they didn't have one. Interestingly, at that point when they vocalized to the world, hey, we're going to be doing ground searches, Steven then said, well, look, the night that I overheard, you know, or that we had our fight,

35:52 I did overhear her on the phone with someone saying that she was going to meet them at the end of the driveway. So he was kind of making it seem like, well, maybe she was calling a lover, or maybe she was calling someone, you know that it should have been me she was talking to. So police were like, all right, well checkmate, and they checked the phone records. Well guess what, that was a flat out lie. That phone record did not exist, and before Steven could even say no, it wasn't her cell phone, it was the house phone. They checked the house phone records too. No call was made to the you know, notation of what he was saying happened. So, of course the release of the emails had people talking and the media is kind of sniffing around this, going, hey boy, you know, why don't you give us a little something something, you know, maybe you ought to explain yourself here. So there was a local TV station, they were called Local four. They reached out to Steven's attorney. Yes, he went and got an attorney at that point, and the attorney spoke for Stephen to them and said, Stephen is an absolute emotional wreck because his wife is missing and the mistreatment by the police department isn't helping him. He's basically having a nervous breakdown. So the next day police say, all right, man, we need to see your home computers. So they wanted to check them for any evidence that might be helpful.

37:17 And Steven did pack up the computers and he went to the police station and he turned those into the Macombe County Sheriff's office. So searches had been underway at that point, like the ground searches to look for any sign of Terra, and so they decided that they wanted to go to areas where that she was familiar with. So to start, they searched a three mile area that surrounded the home, the Tara Grant Home. They didn't find anything, and this was no low key search either. They had helicopters, they had search dogs out there. They had over one hundred and fifty people boots on the ground combing through the area and they found nothing. So I guess, if you're her family, that's kind of a good thing because that means she's not dead. But it's not, you know, it's also a bad things. We don't have her and we don't know where she is. So they then went and even searched. Her family had a family cabin back in that rock area where she grew up, and it was a forty four acre area that they used for hunting.

38:24 And I think I read somewhere too that the family made like maple syrup and stuff like it, a wholesome family type stuff. I love that too. I think that's really neat. But they had this this family cabin, and so they thought, well, hey, maybe she went there. Maybe she got so pissed off she just went off the grid to the cabin and she's trying to cool off there. So the cabin was eight hours away from the you know, the home that Tara shared with her family, which was in Washington Township, eight hours away. So although that was a stretch, they still police went and they did the searches there and they found nothing, absolutely nothing at the home.

39:06 Then they also went and searched another property that was south of that location, but the only thing they found that was of any interest at all was deer tracks. I mean, there was there was no you know, foot tracks of people or anything there. So finding her was seeming more like finding a needle in a haystack. If she was even in this area, she was just gone. So by February the twenty fifth, this case made national headlines. And the more people that knew about this case, the more that people started focusing on things that maybe in the moment didn't matter or mean much, but looking back on it, it kind of was making them go hmm.

39:47 So let me give you an example. This included the fact that when Steven had been arrested for his suspended license. They did like a search incidental to his arrest, and they found four thousand dollars in cash in envelopes in his car. So it did make you just kind of wonder what was he doing with four thousand dollars cash yet his wife isn't spending any money any other way outside of the home. That's a large quantity of cash for someone who's just found out that their wife was missing, and he didn't seem to have anywhere specific that he was going with the cash. So about three weeks after Tara went missing, a judge signed off on a search warrant for the Grant home as well as a family business of Steven Grant's, and this was like a machine shop of some type that his family owned. And this was not just one detective or two detectives showing up to the house on the search warrant. This was a whole investigative team that showed up up to search this house.

41:01 So they meant business when they showed up, so they kind of blindsided Steven. He got irritated at all of the people and he said, look, can I just go walk my dog. I'm just gonna go walk the dog, and the police are like, yeah, bro, you're not under arrest. You can go walk your dog. We're just gonna execute this search horn. So he's like fine, So he grabs his dog and he goes out for a walk. And this is where I am just so amazed by police gut instincts, because this is so by chance that this happened. But he leaves to go walk the dog, and there's two detectives that are standing in the garage of the Grant home. Now their garage, y'all, it's pretty neat for a regular use family garage. You know. They've got their items in there, like a lot of us, do you know, lined up, you know, tupperware buckets with kids toys in it, stuff like that. So I want you to imagine if you walked into a garage, the garage door goes up, you look to your left and there is a like a shelving unit that's right there on the wall. And on top of that shelving unit, it's got miscellaneous little like tools and items just kind of set on all of these shelving units. In front of that, on the floor is a blue tupperware bucket, like a like a big one like you store stuff in and on top of that is an empty fish tank like they had petfish and they just cleaned it out and set it

42:33 on top. And then right next to that tupperware bucket is a green tupperware bucket, again regular bucket, nice and neat stacked, and there's a nicely folded black tarp on top of it. It looks like it's never been used, like it's a freshly pressed tarp just laying on top of it. Then on the side of that bucket is a Little Tikes kid wagon which is full of young kids toys, you know, like like plastic baseball bats and you know, little boy toys and stuff like that. And then right next to that is a trash can, but that trash can is like a clean trash can, and it's just filled to the top with more kids toys. So, like I'm saying, there's nothing bizarre in this garage. So the two detectives are standing there talking to each other about, you know, I guess what procedure they want to take to go through the home. And one detective is standing in the garage and mentions to the other detective that he just didn't remember that green tupperware bucket being there the very last time that they were there talking to Steven and so, ye'all, it's nothing out of the ordinary.

43:45 It's just a green tupperwaar bucket like you would put in your attic with your decorations or something. But feeling, and there's nothing more here than a feeling feeling like it just wasn't right, Like why is this bucket now here inserted between all of this other stuff. The detective decided he wanted to walk over and open it, so he just popped the lid off of it, and inside of it was some thick plastic that something was wrapped in. So the detective just leans down and presses his hand into the plastic, and he says, immediately, as soon as his hand pushed in, immediately he knew something was not right about the contents of that one bucket. He said, it was it was dense, y'all, and it had some give to it. And you know exactly where this is going.

44:38 So he decided to cut open the bag, and to his shock, when he just opcuts the bag and he opens it, he's looking at the severed end of a human neck where a head used to be. He's looking at a cut off, there's a neck there, So he stumped. He calls out to everybody else to come here, and that's when they pull it open and they all realize that they are most likely looking at Tara Grant's neck and torso down to the tops of her thighs. So there's no head and there's no knee in below, and there's no arms. It's just her neck down to her upper thighs. It's in the face up position in this bucket.

45:29 She is still wearing her bral, she still has on her panties. So clearly police now need to go grab Stephen and the dog and we need to talk like, now we just found her torso, you know, in your garage, and so their whole belief system here in the background that you know, Stephen must have had something to do with this. This motive that he must have had somewhere is now looking really accurate. Okay, considering how he felt like he was harassed by police. So he was last seen walking the dog. He wasn't under arrest or anything. But now that they're going to look for him, guess what, he's nowhere in sight. So it was kind of looking like maybe he knew the jig was up, and he ran off with the dog to walk it like under this guise that that's what he was going to do, and really maybe he was trying to run away. So Stephen Grant was believed to have killed his wife was now on the run. But where had his wife's body been all those weeks? Because it had not been in that garage when they were there before, so where had it been? As luck would have it, there was a woman that was taking a walk in a local park and she was very intrigued by a baggie that she saw that was stashed into a tree. Caught her attention, and we ladies are curious creatures, and so it just seemed so suspicion to her that she said, I'm gonna go up there and actually go look at it. So

47:00 she grows and grabs the bag and inside there are some very unsettling items, which was mainly sticking out where these bloody gloves that were inside. So detectives did their thing, They gathered the items, they went and they had the blood tested on those gloves, and wouldn't you know that blood came back positive as Tara Grant's blood. So by March the third the police announced to the public that the body parts you know had been located in the Grant home or a body part I guess had been found in the Grant home and they pointed at Stephen Grant as suspect number one, and from there a massive man hunt ensued. Lucky for investigators, Steven may have been desperate to get away, but he was also unwilling to completely cut ties with his family, and so he made a call to his sister, which police were able to trace to the Wilderness State Park in northern Michigan. The hunt was on, so they go searching for him, and the very next day, and this was right before seven am, they located Stephen Grant and he was in really bad shape. Now, to be honest, he was in shape. He was one body part at least he was he was whole, but he was not looking good. So it turns out whenever the police had the search warrant, Steven knew he realized they were gonna find that piece of body. So instead

48:31 of walking the dog, he had actually gone and called a friend who was none the wise or did not know that this was happening, and he asked if he could borrow the car under the pretense that Hey, don't have a car at the moment, Can I borrow your car? The friend says sure, and then he went on the run to that Michigan park where he was found. Just you know, he was in the throes of a all out suicidal meltdown. He brought alcohol with him, he brought some pills, but he also brought a toy gun. So why a toy gun? Well, I think this is proof of cowardice myself. But he was hoping for a suicide by cop. So if you don't know what that is, real quick, I'll explain. But he had bought this toy gun because he didn't want to kill himself. But he figured if he pointed the gun at the police, or he came out with a gun pointed the fake one that looked real, then they would light him up and kill him for himself. But you know that didn't happen.

49:29 They found him and he was still alive. He had made the time while he was getting away to write two goodbye letters to his children, so you know, he was absolutely on the run. And when he was located, he was sitting underneath a tree and was just semi conscious. He had extreme hypothermia and he was actually talking to the tree. He was very like, absolutely delirious when they found him, but they didn't shoot him. There was no reason to shoot him. They got him because he was barely alive, and they got him airlifted to a hospital. Once he got to the hospital and everything was stabilized, he was placed under arrest and once able, he requested to talk to the police, but he had a stipulation, I will talk to you only if the conversation is recorded.

50:22 So I don't know what that's about. In my mind, it's so that he can just lock in a statement and then he's hoping that then he can refer to the statement. I don't know what he thought was going on there. So they agree and they record his statement. Steven's account of the night Tara died began with her unpacking from that recent trip, and he says that he was getting ready for bed, so apparently he slept naked, so he was getting ready for bed. He was naked, and that's whenever the argument ensued about the constant traveling, and he said that it just escalated. It got really ugly, and that's when he claims Tera slapped him across the face, and then, in his own words, he responded, and that's when I hit and I choked her. So, as he was choking her, he says that she began to fight back, and while she's fighting back, he's got his hands around her throat. He is choking the life out of his wife.

51:24 He says, their eyes locked, and she was looking into his eyes with just absolute fear and terror while he is choking her to death. So did he stop, Did he have a moment of remorse or oh my god, what am I doing? No, he continued to choke her. He reached over, grabbed a piece of clothing and he covered her face with it, and not out of some type of you know, I don't know, reverence or something for her. It's because he didn't want to have to look at her while he choked her for over four minutes. He didn't want to have to look at her face, so he covered it. As over four minutes, he continued to squeeze her throat until he choked the life out of the woman he vowed to love forever. The entire time, their two children were sleeping in the adjacent room. His discussion and his explanation of the entire thing is so callous and so cold. It almost seems like he's just talking about taking out the trash. It's unbelievable. This is the mother of his children, and so it's just actually it's so chilling. But I want you to listen to it in his own words, not the part I just told you, but the next part when he is describing

52:55 how he moved her body from point A to point B after she was dead. I wrapped something felt around her neck. I think it was my brown leather belt, and I know I couldn't carry her, so I wrapped that around her neck and I used it to pull her downstairs. Were you as As I was listening to that, I was so unimpressed by how he just says what he said about the woman he married and gave birth to his children, and then he doesn't even bother getting dressed after she's dead. He doesn't even get dressed. That's when he decides, like you know that, he drags her all the way to the garage and he's trying to stuff her in the back of her own suv, and so he goes on to kind of discuss how he was struggling under her literal dead weight, and he finally was able to get her in the car, but not before he dropped her a couple of times because of her weight, and it was awkward, and he his description of what I have to tell you this, he said, I was struggling underneath her weight. And he said that, you know, I dropped her, and he said, it was a disgusting sound when I just dropped her. It kind of sounded like if you dropped a watermelon on the concrete. What I just I was so just when you hear people

54:27 say this and describe something so horrendous and just compare it to oh, yeah, I was like dropping a watermelon the way on the concrete, unbelievable. Well, moments after he finally was able to get her body in the car, he walked back in the house and that's when their nanny showed up. Remember that nanny that came to watch the kids. So now you maybe like, well, Kelly, you gave away what happened kind of quickly in the story. Yeah, but I did that on purpose, because now what I want to do is kind of reverse engineer a few things for you that are going to really hammer home what type of person Steven Grant was I'm going to insert now some little some some unknown facts that he conveniently left out of his confession, but that was figured out later on, okay, And I want to tell it to you now so you can really figure out what was going on the whole time that this argument went down, So that eighteen year old nanny, who at first was not part of this in any way, would eventually come forward and she would come forward to police with the fact that you guessed it, she was having an affair with Steven Grant. Now, she didn't come forward though, until after Tara's body was found. And so my question is why why would she wait to come forward with the

55:58 affair when Sarah went missing? But y'all, it actually makes sense. I'm not saying that this is good or she should be proud of it, but it makes sense why. The answer is because she did not know Tara was dead. Remember, Steven knew nothing when this all went down. He was even having press conferences at first where he was the heartbroken husband. And matter of fact, I'll put a video of that on Patreon for you if you want to go, or you can google it yourself, but I'll put a google a video on Patreon, So you can see how he's crying, y'all, lip quivering and all. You know, the whole thing, call me if you know where she is, if you see her, And the whole time he knew where she was, Okay. But whenever he later accounts the fight that they had, he makes it out as she hit him and when she hit him. That's what threw him over the edge, was when Tara punched him and hit him. But now we know that he was the one having the affair, which, by the way, he was accusing her of, which was never shown to be true.

57:07 Well that Nanny Verena, however you would like to say it, Verena Verena. Her account of things was that she and Stephen, yes, we were having an affair, but the romantic shift in our relationship didn't start until just a couple of weeks before Tara went missing. And the reason she says I didn't come forward was at first she said, I wanted to protect him. You know, I thought we were in love and so I wanted to protect him. But that was all based on the story he told her when she came into the house unexpectedly after he had just shoved the body in the suv. Verena didn't know anything about that. She says, I came into the house and okay, me telling you the story. You know now that he had just killed Tara. She didn't know that. And when she came in the house, she says, before that day, he had confided in me that he and Tara were having marital problems, and their marital problems was because Tara was having an affair. He even brought out emails that were two years old and he showed them to her, trying to say, see, I think she's in an intimate relationship with an old friend, which was never proven to be true or even accurate. And so after he showed her those emails before Tara was dead, he started to then pursue the eighteen year old nanny. But he was

58:40 concocting a whole house of cards here where he made her believe that Tara was being a bad wife cheating on him. He was victimized, and so after seeing the emails, she assumed that their relationship was ending because he was hinting to that, and so she once he started to pursue her, at first was not accepting it, but once all of this came to light supposedly, and she believed it. She then caved to the advances. It wasn't until the day that she came home and step and Stephen you know, was naked standing there in the house that he told her, oh my god, Tarah left me. Tarah left me. Her account was that she wasn't enjoying and an evening out with her friends and she was just having drinks and whatever.

59:33 And she said, I got really annoyed with all of the texts from Stephen and he kept saying that like she owed him a kiss for example, for being out without him. So she was kind of getting annoyed with it. So she packed up her things and she went back to the house to go, I guess talk to him about whatever, because she was annoyed. When she came home, she said, I walked in the door and Steven this is a direct quote, was running down the stairs and he was yelling. He yelled, what the the fuck are you still doing here? So she was kind of surprised when he said that, and she said she just kind of stood there until Stephen said, oh, I thought you were Tara. We just had a huge argument. She slapped me in the face and she left. So he was saying, Oh, I'm surprised because I thought you were Tara coming in.

1:00:22 So Verena was still surprised at this point, and so she said. At that point, Stephen ran past her and he ran into the dining room, where he collapsed and he started crying and he plopped down in a chair and he was sobbing. Tara left me. He was very emotional, she said. He started pouring his heart out to her, and he said that he needed her, he needed Verena. But she was just going to have to be quiet about their relationship because there was going to be a divorce and he did not want to lose the kids in a divorce if people knew that he had been flirting with her. Now, the young girl believed that she and Stephen were in love, even though this was only a couple of weeks that they had been flirting with one another, and she said she felt so compassionate towards him, thinking Tara was doing him so wrong, and she felt bad.

1:01:14 She didn't want to be the reason that he would lose the kids in the divorce. And so together they sat down and they deleted all of their text messages between one another that were, you know, flirtatious, flirtatious. Can you not see the manipulation here? Like on so many levels? And look, I know it seems stupid that she thought it was this simple okay that oh my wife let me left me, so now you know, I'm flirting with you. But remember, y'all, she's eighteen, and I can see how she would be swept up in the attention of this older man who is this broken person and his marriage is going bad, and he's mistreated and his wife has hit him. You know, she's young, and I'm gonna chalk it up to that. A really that in my gut that she knew better than to have this relationship with him, because that's why she kind of pushed it off at first.

1:02:07 It wasn't until she believed that Tara left him and that he had been hit by Tara that she caved to you know, her wants with him. He basically just opined to her. Look, I do all the work with the children. She's never here. You know that. That's why you're hired here. I'm the mother, I'm also the father, and she's not interested in doing her motherly duties. It's all on me. And it was about this same time that Steven, just so you can see the manipulation here, called and made that voicemail that you heard, and left that voicemail on Tara's phone, claiming that she needed to call him back and stop ignoring him, when in reality, he was lying so that young girl would believe it.

1:02:53 He had already killed Tara, and now he was throwing Tara and her reputation under the bus, leaving that Tara had left and just absconded from her family. Verena then was happy to just freely love him, because remember they'd been flirting for weeks, and that's when if you're ready to get pissed off even more, that's when this guy who has murdered his wife and is lying to this young girl and is emailing if you remember an ex girlfriend, that's when he just jumps on the sex train with this young girl and they engage in oral sex together. That night, they expressed their love to one another, and then they spent the next few evenings kissing and cuddling in the marital bed of Stephen and Tara. She continued to see him for weeks, and she said admittedly it was in secret, but it was secret because he kept pleading with me, please don't say anything about our relationship, because innocent people go to jail, and he didn't want that to happen to him. He was really worried that people might think he might be involved in his wife's disappearance because he was messing around with this young girl, and that's exactly what people were going to think. She, on the other hand, had that conscience, remember the one that he just didn't have that he talked about in the emails. She started thinking, oh my god, Okay, your wife's really missing. Now it's making news. I don't want them to think I was involved somehow. So she did

1:04:25 remain quiet, but she started to worry, like, this is scary. I don't know where your wife went, and now the police don't know where she went. Once Terra's body was found, that's when she was like, whoa hold on? She was scared, and she said she called him secretly and they were talking about it, and she said that Steven almost gave off this feeling of like he was pleased with all of the media attention that he had been getting, and he was even gloating to her about having been on dateline and it just didn't sit right with her, even though she thought she loved him, this is still wrong, Like, why do you seem excited to have been on the news?

1:05:06 You know, on February first, days before the killing, he was up front saying to this young girl before he even killed Tara, hey, I want to start sleeping with you. I don't know how he worded it, but that's pretty much what he was saying, and it escalated on February seventh, whenever she says that he just dropped his pajama pants in front of her and said, I guess today, I don't know what he said, but he dropped his pants, and she said that they ended up sleeping together for the first time that day. This is before Tara was even dead. He then the very next day confessed that he loved her during oral sex. Well, I'm sure he did.

1:05:51 And that's when Tara and Stephen's six year old daughter busted in the room and caught them in the bed that next morning. So she said, I was hiding under a blanket so the little girl wouldn't see me under the bed because you know, her mom wasn't in town or wasn't there, and so I was afraid we got busted. She said that they also engaged in oral sex in the grant's bed, and you know, the entire time that this was happening, she's thinking Tara left Stephen, but Tara was dead and had been cut up into pieces. She also said, okay, well, now I'm thinking back on this, and she said, so, you know, I was only scheduled to work Monday through Friday for the family, and so it was kind of odd to her that he asked her to come over on a Saturday and a Sunday, this was February tenth and February eleventh, because he said he had to go run a bunch of errands and he needed I guess her to watch the kids. And based on an investigation and looking at the statements that Vanna made, that's when police are like, okay, this makes sense, Steven did I'd go run errands? He ran errands to his family's machine shop. Ten days later, she returned to Germany, but they were continuing to talk secretly by phone and by email. Once Terras Torso had been located, he called her about two o'clock in the morning that morning on

1:07:23 March the third, and he confessed, Okay, look she's not missing. I killed her. He said, I want to tell you goodbye. I'm going to go to prison for the rest of my life, but I just need you to know it was an accident. It was an accident. It was an accident. After Stephen confessed it, she immediately hung up and called the police. So I just I don't hate on this little girl, this young girl. I mean, she's eighteen. I don't hate on her. I think that she was manipulated. I do. Once she gave that timeline of the weekend and that she worked on days she didn't normally work, they were able to figure out this. Tara's body was in the back of the suv when she came to babysit the kids, and that's when Steven drove to his family's machine shop and cut up her body. That's how he had the time to do it. And I don't know if you've ever watched the Netflix series it's called You Like You.

1:08:23 It's really good, go check it out. But this is literally one of the episodes that happens in that series. The whole time. When I was watching that series back in the day, I was thinking, Oh my god, yeah, right, truth is stranger than fiction. He uses a machine shop to cut up a body, and then this happens in real life. They believe he laid out a bunch of tarps on the floor. He took the body out of the suv. Nobody's there, they don't know it. He places her on top of the tarp and that's when he started to dismember her. After he cut her up, he had placed the pieces of her body all around the Stony Creek metro Park. Okay, scattered her. But once the police then made that pressure police conference and he realized that they were starting to go do that search, he ran back and he picked up her torso. He went back and got the dorso. And I'm guessing and the police are kind of thinking maybe he thought he was going to go move it somewhere else because that was the main part of the body, but that warrant was executed before he had time to go get rid of that torso. And as if this is not barbaric enough on all fronts, and I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, you know this is rough. Okay, I'm gonna let you listen to his confession in his own words about how he cut her up. Take a listen to this back up tear's hands up that I cut to the next joint and the next joint and stand with her legs and.

1:09:56 Something I threw up, and I took again, and I just told myself, look, if you don't do this, you're going to prison for the rest of your life. And he kept cutting on. I put everything. I think I put some newspaper in there, because at one point there was some blood. It was real stick like like syrup. So you had terrors entire body in one in one rubbers container. So early the next day, if you're not just completely just grossed out by now, early the next day. The next morning, after disassembling his wife, he goes to Stony Creek Park with his kid's sled. It's snowy okay. He goes with his kid's sled and he places his wife's body parts that are in the buckets on top of the sled. Now they're at the top of a hill where he's at and like something out of a bad movie, y'all, the sled takes off down the hill with the body parts in it. If this it would almost be comical.

1:11:04 If this wasn't the most horrific thing that I'm expressing to you. There is a runaway sled with his wife's body parts in it, and he's having to chase after it to catch it. Listen in his own words, Listen to him as he describes it. It was like Keston tops the sledge to both and now I'm chasing after this sled that has my wife's kind of body in it down a hill and I finally got to stop when it fell over and curl. It's not all these pieces of now fall always like unbelievable. I wouldn't even believe this if it wasn't like, you know, proven that this happened. He ultimately, in his mind, was hoping that the animals in the park would scatter her body and eat it and it would all just kind of go away, and that nothing would be left. But you know, obviously he had to go back and he had to move her to keep her torso from being found.

1:12:03 So with the use of canine dogs and officers out there on foot, once this confession was made, the canine officers were able to locate a majority of Tara's remains back in the Stony Creek, Park in Shelby Township. They did not get all of her parts back, but they were able to get a majority of her back so that she could be laid to rest. Stephen was charged with murder, and after a three week trial, he was found guilty of second degree murder and mutilation of a corpse, and he was sentenced to fifty to eighty years in prison.

1:12:49 I hope Stephen enjoys his prison life. He earned it. I hope he enjoys it, and look, having done some time myself behind prison walls, I do want to give him a little unsolicited advice, and that would be to take care of your eyes, because, based on everything that I've learned about you, those are the only balls you've got.