Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 36

As a team of five evidence technicians—two from the sheriff’s office and three from the state police—searched the four-bedroom home, Kozlowski and McLean cooled their heels in the garage with a group of about eight other detectives.

“We were trying to stay out of the way of the evidence techs,” Kozlowski said. “So we hung around the garage, just talking about the case. As I was standing there, my eye went to this green container—something about it seemed out of place.” The container, which stood along the wall next to a bucket full of toys, was marked Boys Clothes.

“I walked over and tried to open the top, but it was hard to get open,” Kozlowski said. “When I finally got the top open, there was a black garbage bag inside. I touched it. It was soft. It gave to my pressure. I almost closed the bag and dismissed it as a bag of salt or something, but I decided to tear open the bag.”

When he ripped a hole in the plastic bag, he caught a glimpse of flesh and blood. His initial fleeting thought was It’s a deer carcass. Then his gaze settled on a swatch of black fabric—a bra.

Kozlowski’s coworkers were surprised to see the unflappable detective suddenly jump away from the container and yell, “What the fuck!”

The detectives gathered around the bin as Kozlowski peeled away the garbage bag to reveal a female torso—dismembered.

“It was weird, very surreal,” McLean said. “We were almost in shock—we couldn’t believe what we were looking at. By that time, we’d already come to the realization that Tara was gone, so that part of it wasn’t that much of a surprise. But finding the torso…it was a huge shock.”

Still, a surge of triumph tempered the horror inside the Rubbermaid tub. “There was also a sense of elation—we got him,” McLean said. “We’d been working day and night. We’d sacrificed our personal lives. This is the kind of case that just takes over your life. All along, we knew he did it, but we weren’t sure if we were ever going to be able to charge him. And when we found the torso, we’re thinking, ‘We got him! We got him!’”

The stunned detectives hollered for evidence techs to secure the garage. “Then we switched our focus to finding Stephen,” McLean said.

Meanwhile, Hackel was busy fielding phone calls from reporters who saw Channel 4’s live report on the search of the Grant home. The sheriff insisted that Stephen was not under arrest. “He’s not even a suspect at this point,” he told reporters.

It was a hectic evening, the sheriff recalled, but it was about to take a bizarre turn. “I’m in the office trying to do damage control with the media, thinking this night has become a nightmare already,” Hackel said.

His cell phone rang again. This time it wasn’t a reporter—it was the chief of staff, Captain Rick Kalm, calling from the Grant home.

“He said in a soft tone, ‘We got her,’” Hackel said.

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“He says, ‘We found her in the house.’

“I said, ‘Rick, you have got to be kidding me.’ Then he told me, ‘Actually, it’s a woman’s torso.’

“When he said that, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up,” Hackel recalled.

The sheriff hopped in his car and made the twenty-minute drive to the Westridge domicile.

“I looked inside the container and saw leaves and twigs, and I told Rick, ‘He picked this body up from a wooded area and brought it back here. I’ll bet it was Stony Creek.’” The sheriff ordered another search of the park. It would begin at daybreak.

Sergeant Mark Grammatico was asked to remove Tara’s torso from the Grant home while detectives rushed to find Stephen. Grammatico ferried the plastic bin to the parking lot of a nearby shopping center, turning it over to Bill Robinette, of the Macomb County Medical Examiner’s Office.

After peeling away four black plastic garbage bags and one clear bag, Robinette, a medical examiner (ME), inventoried the clothing left on the body: a black Gilligan & O’Malley bra, an extra-small gray or silver Ann Taylor shirt—torn, black Victoria’s Secret v-string underwear, and the remnants of Isaac Mizrahi dress slacks, size 6.

Hackel called a press conference for nine o’clock Friday night, March 2, but he decided to hold off informing the media about the grisly discovery in the Grant garage. He merely confirmed that police had obtained a warrant to search the home, and didn’t say much else.

“I didn’t want Tara’s family to hear about it on the news,” he later said. “That would have been pretty gruesome. How would you like it if you were that person sitting at home and someone called you to tell you they heard on the news that your sister’s torso had been found?”

With Stephen on the lam, Hackel was worried about the safety of Alicia and her family. He also was concerned about Deena Hardy, the ex-girlfriend who had provided the salacious e-mails. “We didn’t know if he was going to try to get revenge on Deena for releasing those e-mails,” Hackel said. “And there was also a possibility he might drive to Ohio and cause harm to Alicia or Mrs. Destrampe. We had no idea what his state of mind was at that point.

“I called and talked to Erik [Standerfer],” Hackel said. “I told him we had information to lead us to believe there was foul play, and that they needed to come up here as soon as possible. That’s all I said. I didn’t want to tell them what happened over the telephone. Erik pretty much knew at that point that Tara was dead, but he didn’t have any of the details. This was about eleven-thirty at night. They immediately packed up the kids and drove up.”

Hackel booked a room for the family at the Best Western ConCorde Inn in Clinton Township, three miles south of the sheriff’s headquarters.

Meanwhile, Captain Wickersham phoned Deena and told her that Tara had likely met with foul play, and that Stephen was on the run. The captain suggested she spend the night elsewhere for her own safety. Deena went to the home of her friend Tom Gromak, the Detroit News staffer who had been instrumental in bringing the e-mails to light.

Hackel, who hadn’t slept in two days, finally headed to his nearby home in Macomb Township to shower and change. But the night that seemingly never would end was about to get even crazier.

As the exhausted lawman pulled up to a deserted intersection, he saw a vehicle stopped in the middle of the road. It didn’t take Hackel long to figure out why. I can’t believe I have to arrest a drunk driver in the middle of all this, he thought, reaching to the dashboard of his unmarked car to flick on the red-and-blue flashers.

A high-speed chase ensued. “She wouldn’t pull over for me,” the sheriff recalled. “She was drunker than a skunk. Finally she ends up on somebody’s lawn.”

Hackel called for backup and turned his quarry over to deputies, then got home just in time to shower, change, and bolt back out for the Best Western to meet Tara’s family and deliver the heartbreaking news.

As Alicia and her family approached Macomb County at about five-thirty Saturday morning, she called Hackel, who gave her directions to the Best Western. He met Tara’s family in their hotel room and broke the horrifying news that detectives had found a dismembered torso inside the Grant garage.

“It was like your worst nightmare come to life,” Alicia said. “We held out a glimmer of hope that she may still be alive, but we knew there was always a chance [that] something terrible had happened. But this was just the worst possible scenario. It’s something you never would’ve imagined.”

Breaking the news that a family member has been murdered is never an easy job, Hackel said. “It’s one of the worst things we have to do as police officers. Especially in this case, where I’d spent so much time with the family, and this wasn’t just telling someone that their loved one was dead. We had to tell them that she’d been dismembered. It was not easy.”