Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 28

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 you get caught.

So what are you going to do about the cheatin’ wife? the woman wrote.

Don’t know yet, Stephen replied. He bragged that he’d had a friend install a spying device on their home computer so he could monitor Tara’s e-mails.

He rattled on, roguishly telling the nursing student—whose real name, Deena Hardy, was being withheld at the time—that he might need a sponge bath and that he was all alone with no one to play with.

I do want to see you naked, he wrote. Naked women are always good to see. Especially if you haven’t seen them in a while.

Hardy also provided a copy of the e-mails to Captain Wickersham. “We were suspicious of Stephen even before those e-mails, but when we saw them, it made us even more suspicious,” Wickersham said. “The e-mails made it obvious he thought his wife was cheating on him, which was very interesting to us. If there was foul play, now we had a possible motive.”

The salacious e-mails revved up public interest in the case. CNN ran a report on Tara’s disappearance. Good Morning America aired a taped interview with Hackel. The day the e-mail story ran in the Detroit News, chased by other local print and electronic reporters, Stephen Grant abruptly ended his cloister and granted numerous interviews.

“I hope Tara walks through that door,” Stephen told Channel 7, sobbing dramatically, his eyes widening with every word. “God, please—call. Please. Call anyone.”

Photos and video of Stephen—whose prominent, bulging eyes and breathless, melodramatic speech patterns undermined any attempt on his part for dignity and gravitas—were a dream come true for the investigative team. People who privately commented on the case agreed: Stephen simply looked guilty.

The term “bug-eyed” was fast becoming an adjective applied to Stephen Grant—not just as a physical descriptor but as shorthand for his increasingly flaky persona.

During interviews at Griem’s Detroit office, Stephen told reporters that his wife had been out of contact before, but he said this was the first time he was “scared.”

He raised the eyebrows of veteran reporters by blurting out that he’d prefer that she be off with another man than in harm’s way. “If she’s with somebody else, OK. I can understand that,” he said. “But I wish she would at least call home. Her kids are worried about her.”

And while he steadfastly denied any involvement with her disappearance, Stephen repeatedly said that police had told him he was their number one suspect.

“I understand why I’m a suspect—I get it,” Stephen said. “The police always look at the husband.”

Hackel denied investigators were looking at Stephen as a suspect. “We haven’t even established that a crime has taken place,” the sheriff said.

Hackel also told reporters that Stephen, while granting wide-ranging media interviews as a distraught husband, was responding to investigators only via faxes to and from his lawyer’s office. The sheriff also said his detectives had questioned Tara’s coworkers, after a source told investigators there were rumors she was possibly having affairs at work. The subjects of the rumors denied the allegations, Hackel said.

Tara’s family members were disgusted when Stephen’s lascivious e-mail exchange was made public. “It sickened me,” said Alicia, who by now had returned home to Ohio with her family. “I was flabbergasted.”

Alicia and her mother, speaking to reporters, continued to contradict Stephen’s assertion that Tara intended to head back early to Puerto Rico. Tara was tired from work and looking forward to an upcoming family getaway to Arizona, Mary said. And, she insisted, her daughter would never go two weeks without calling Lindsey and Ian.

“Her children are everything to her,” Alicia added.

With Tara missing and Verena gone, Kelly Utykanski, Stephen’s sister, was helping her brother care for Lindsey and Ian. Utykanski, thirty-nine, lived in nearby Sterling Heights with her husband, Chris. The squat, brassy redhead related to reporters how she had been helping distribute the missing persons posters and that Stephen was trying to shield the children from media reports. Ironically, a year later, it would be Kelly herself who contributed to some of the most sensational media coverage on the case.

For now, though, she was a concerned sister and aunt, looking out for the welfare of her brother’s children. “They obviously know Mom is lost, and that police are looking for her,” Utykanski said. “But we’re trying to shelter them from this as much as we can.”