Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 34

On Wednesday, February 28, a crucial event took place below the media radar screen. As far as the public knew, the case of the missing executive was status quo, perhaps even waning a bit in interest as the days wore on. Newspaper articles were shorter and had moved off the front pages of the local dailies. Some papers even buried their “Tara updates” inside local sections, next to stories about city council meetings and road repair projects.

But at about twelve-thirty that afternoon, a local dental hygienist and nature enthusiast decided to take advantage of the 40-degree “warm spell” and go for a walk along Mt. Vernon Road and into Stony Creek Metropark. She hiked in a different part of the park than investigators had searched just four days earlier—a little-traveled, heavily wooded spot near some power lines, not far from the Macomb/Oakland County border.

Sheila Werner, an attractive thirty-four-year-old, wasn’t accustomed to being a passive observer of her surroundings. She’d adopted a one-mile stretch of roadway near her Washington Township home—an undertaking usually reserved for civic groups and other large organizations—pledging to keep it litter free.

As she walked, her glance was attuned not only to the natural flora and fauna around her way, but to man-made debris and other items that didn’t belong amid the woods and streams of Stony Creek.

“I knew about the Tara Grant investigation, and I knew the police had searched the park,” she said. “And I remembered the police asking people to keep an eye out for anything that looked suspicious. So it was definitely in the back of my mind.”

Perhaps that’s why the Ziploc bag caught her eye. Tucked in a low cranny, where two gnarled tree branches met, just a few yards from the road, the bag’s blood-soaked cargo stood out against the snow “like a sore thumb,” she later said.

“I noticed blood pooling at the bottom of the bag,” she said. The large bag also contained other plastic bags, a pair of rubber gloves, and some metal shavings.

Gingerly picking up the bag with her mitten, she retraced the path to her home and dropped the Baggie atop the freezer in her garage. Then she stepped inside and dialed the sheriff’s office.

Deputy John Warn took the call. He immediately drove to Werner’s house, and she showed him what she’d stumbled onto. “I asked her to take me to the area where she’d found the bag, and she did,” Warn said. “Then I called the detective bureau and told them what was going on.”

Not wanting to get up their hopes, some investigators surmised the Ziploc and its bloody contents were the detritus from poachers gutting prey in the woods. “The guys kept telling me, ‘It’s probably a deer bag,’” Lieutenant Darga said. “I’m like, ‘What’s a deer bag?’ They said, ‘It’s a bag you use after you’re finished cleaning a deer.’”

It was a plausible explanation. However, Darga kept coming back to the metal shrapnel in the bag—the kind of cast-off shavings found in tool and die shops that served Metro Detroit’s auto-related manufacturing industries. That included USG Babbitt Inc.—the tiny family metal shop in Mount Clemens, where Stephen and his dad turned out ball bearings.

“There was also some animal hair in the bag that matched the color of [the Grants’] dog,” Darga asserted. “I said, ‘We need to get this to the lab right now.’”

Detectives sent the bag to the MSP Crime Laboratory in Sterling Heights. Serology expert Jennifer Smiatacz tested the blood in the bag. It was, indeed, human.

Turnaround time for forensic evidence in the state police crime lab can sometimes reach several months, but there was a priority put on the Ziploc bag, Darga said. “The lab got the results back to us the next day. They knew what kind of case we were working on, so they checked it out immediately.”

The lab report inventoried the exact contents of the large Ziploc. Aside from the blood, shavings, and hair, the bag contained four clear plastic garbage bags, one pair of latex gloves, one 7-Eleven shopping bag, and an additional smaller Ziploc. All items had human blood on them.

“If you take it all together—human blood, the metal shavings, the hair—we were sure it was enough to get a search warrant,” Detective Sergeant McLean said. “Before that, we’d been dying to ask the judge for a warrant, but we knew we didn’t have enough. You never want to go to a judge when you’re not one hundred percent sure your search will stand up in court.”

The prosecutor’s office concurred: the bloody plastic bag was enough to justify detectives’ access to the Grants’ house.