the other went went straight to the front door. all business? all business. that, said the prosecutor, is when they cleaned up and took tara s body in a bed sheet, loaded it into the truck, and waited for dark when one or both of them dumped her body in the woods. but to tell that story took two long trials, each peopled by witnesses the jury might not think were very credible. people who supposedly heard barr and mcmanis say things. we raped and killed the girl. they re not gonna find her. i m going to kill you like i killed the girl in florida. the girl i killed was 20. one witness testified about overhearing a conversation between barr and mcmannis. phillip barr was saying to david mcmannis, i didn t want to kill her. and she overheard david mcmannis respond, she had to die. not very believable, said the defense attorneys. just people making things up, said
you run out of ideas. tara s mother, sharon, again and again, demanded to know what, if anything, was going on. prosecutor feinberg had no choice, he said. he couldn t tell her. the frustration was clear. you could see it on her face. you could hear it in her voice. the family was devastated and they wanted answers. and i can understand that. you can t as a prosecutor and you can t as a detective give all those answers. you can t put that information out there. still, sharon continued to ferret out what she could. we just never gave up. there was no stopping. as did her attorney. she would hear a piece of information from a neighbor or a news source or a detective that wasn t supposed to tell her. and then she would confirm it, run with it, call me. she
detectives combed the site searching for any clue that could lead them to tara s killer. here again, here s keith morrison with a knock at the door. in the end, bones and a few teeth were all they found. there was every reason to think tara was murdered, and then dumped in the woods. but murdered how? by whom? sharon s attorney called her as soon as she heard the news. she was obviously distraught, devastated, hysterical, crying. now what? find out the killers and make them pay for the crime. prosecutor dan feinberg got the autopsy results. they were not helpful. only half of the bones in her body were recovered. and some of the more important bones like the hyoid bone which would show whether or not there might been a choking or
soaked gossip. there wasn t enough certainly to support charging peewee. but, thought the prosecutor, maybe he could find a way to go after barr and mcmannis. and he had an idea. bring some of the key witnesses before a grand jury just to see who passed the credibility test and who didn t. i ve prosecuted over 100 homicide cases and the complexity, and the amount of information that we had to review to determine if we could prosecute this case was the most i d ever seen. the idea worked. the grand jury indicted both phil barr and dave mcmannis for tara s murder. they were arrested in late 2012, 11 years after tara vanished from her home. dave mcmannis was arrested in maryland, where he grew up, while u. s. marshals mounted a manhunt for phil barr. kinda lost track of him. we were actually then able to to locate phil in the vermont
the trials began. dan feinberg was joined by a co-prosecutor named jennifer garczewski, 14 years almost to the day since tara s life ended. she s only a year younger than me. so when i think back to where i was in 2001, i was just finishing college and obviously that was a goal of hers. so i did feel a connection to her, thinking about her and where she would ve been at my age now. and the defendants now on trial? phil barr owned a septic tank repair business, dave mcmannis was his helper the day tara disappeared. the detectives had learned that barr used his business as a cover for stealing from the homes of unsuspecting customers. and here s what happened, said the state, that first of october, 2001: tara s landlord asked barr for a repair estimate. barr and his helper, mcmannis, began their work-day by smoking crack.