Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 32

The day after the abortive metropark search, investigators regrouped and considered their next steps. “It was really getting frustrating,” McLean said. “It’s like we were trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle, but there were still a bunch of missing pieces. We were checking every angle we could think of, and we were coming up with very little.”

By now, tips were pouring into the sheriff’s hotline by the hundred, and each one had to be investigated. The leads were logged and checked out by all twelve men and women in the detective bureau. “We had to track down every tip,” McLean said. “That, by itself, was a lot of work.”

The tips ranged from the plausible—Tara was seen in a restaurant, or in Florida—to the absurd. One telephone tipster told the sheriff’s office she’d just seen Tara on the syndicated game show Wheel of Fortune. Mediums and clairvoyants called in offering advice.

As far as the detectives were concerned, it didn’t take a psychic to figure out what became of Tara. Though they couldn’t say so publicly, most or all of the investigators on the case figured the circumstantial evidence pointed directly to Stephen.

“He’s not a suspect, but his actions are suspect” was as far as Hackel was willing to go with his comments to the media.

More forces were marshaled. The Michigan State Police and the National Center for Missing Adults were enlisted. Any Jane Doe cadaver in any morgue within the United States was scrutinized, lest it be Tara.

Forensic investigators were tapping into the executive’s laptops, but they still wanted to get a look at the family desktop computer, Hackel reiterated to reporters. “The two laptops we have are old ones that hadn’t been used in a while,” the sheriff said.

Griem provided an excuse: Stephen, he said, could not turn over the desktop computer because it held “information that would violate the attorney-client privilege.” Further, he said, Tara “hardly touched” the home computer. He reiterated that Stephen had launched a private investigation into Tara’s disappearance.

Stephen said his PI was working hard on the case. “He’s making a lot of phone calls. He’s looking into a lot of things. He calls me daily with new questions. The problem is the police won’t give him any of their information,” Stephen complained. “So he’s in the dark about a lot of stuff. I don’t understand why the police are doing that. It’s not like the person we hired is a nobody—he’s a former FBI agent.”

Hackel disputed the claim that his detectives did not cooperate with the investigator Stephen had hired. “We never heard from any private investigator,” the sheriff said.

The week wore on. Local editors and TV producers, desperate to keep the story at the top of broadcasts despite the lack of substantial new details, rehashed background material and replayed Stephen’s tearful pleas. ABC’s Nightline, Fox’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren and MSNBC had picked up on the case.

David Griem told the Detroit Free Press that national media were hounding him. “We had [CNN’s] Nancy Grace show call us three times today and they told us that Sheriff Hackel is appearing, that Tara’s sister is appearing, and, more or less, threatened us to appear,” Griem told the newspaper. “We’re not going to add to this media feeding frenzy.”

The widespread media attention given to Tara’s disappearance rankled some people who noted the relatively sparse press coverage given to another local missing persons case that was being investigated at the same time: the disappearance of Lizzie Mae Collier-Sweet.

Collier-Sweet, a forty-nine-year-old black woman from Brownstown Township, came up missing January 8, 2007—almost a month to the day before Tara’s disappearance—after an arson fire destroyed the home the woman shared with her husband, Roger Sweet, who was white. Police found the missing woman’s diary among the charred remains; it contained descriptions of the abuse inflicted by her husband over the years.

Collier-Sweet’s diary also detailed a five-year-long affair her sixty-year-old husband was having with a mentally disabled relative, which began when the girl was thirteen years old. Police later discovered child pornography on Roger Sweet’s computers, including images of sex acts with the teen.

After Roger Sweet was arrested, police took a closer look at the 1990 death of his first wife, Marlene Sweet. The death was initially ruled accidental when Sweet told police his wife slipped in the bathroom and hit her head on the concrete floor. But on January 19, police ruled Marlene Sweet’s death a homicide. Roger Sweet eventually confessed to the murder of his first wife, but as of this writing, Lizzie Mae Collier-Sweet remains missing.

In the first month of Lizzie Mae Collier-Sweet’s disappearance, the local newspapers published only a handful of stories about the case. Television coverage was equally sparse, compared to the seemingly nonstop attention given to Tara’s disappearance.

The discrepancy in coverage gave rise to charges of racism. E-mails to reporters and letters to the editors of local newspapers posed the question: why was Tara Grant’s disappearance given so much more weight by the media than Collier-Sweet’s case?

One reader wrote in an e-mail, If Tara Grant was poor and black, nobody would care about her, just like nobody in the media cares about Lizzie Mae Collier-Sweet.

The penchant for the media to highlight the disappearances of attractive, upper-class Caucasian women has been dubbed “missing white woman syndrome.” But critics did not take into consideration one irrefutable truth that drove the amount of coverage given to the respective missing Metro Detroit women in the winter of 2007: the Tara Grant case sold newspapers and drew incredible television ratings, while stories about the Collier-Sweet disappearance did not.