call me. call emma. call someone. the family lived in a comfortable home northeast of detroit. tara was the breadwinner, thriving in a six-figure management position with an international construction and engineering firm. the most recent job site was in puerto rico. she d been commuting between detroit and san juan for five months. stephen grant worked in his father s smalltime two-man machine shop and looked after the kids while tara was on the road. he prided himself on being a mr. mom at home and a soccer dad on the field. according to newspaper reporter amber hunt. he took them to all their appointments and soccer games and appreciated getting the accolades for that. and from the time he walked into the macomb county sheriff s office on valentine s day, 2007, to report his wife missing, his story never changed. as he gave the spare details of her disappearance to the desk sergeant in the lobby, he may not have noticed the huge
she left the house. he looked out the window and a black sedan was leaving. the husband agreed to meet the detective and his partner at the grant home the night he reported her missing. five days after he said she d walked out in a huff. mr. grant answered the door. i could tell he was afraid that we were there. where as he s our complainant, we re here to serve him and help him, but he s afraid of us. one of the detective s first questions was why grant had waited so long to report his wife missing? the husband replied that they d had fights before when tara walked out for a day or so, but she would always come back. we re immediately trying to establish her reason for leaving. was it an argument, was something prearranged? detective kozlowski proceeded to ask grant about the health of his marital relationship, potential lovers and potential enemies. while the other detective, sergeant pam mclean was with the two children and their au pair, a 19-year-old german girl verena d
talking about, isn t there? yes. there s no remorse. there s not an ounce of remorse. in his closing argument, the prosecutor brought the jury back to the bedroom as the murder occurred. the medical examiner had testified that tara likely went unconscious after 15 seconds of strangulation. but then, it probably took another three minutes and 45 seconds of grant choking her before she actually died. prosecutor smith took out a stopwatch and set it ticking for four minutes. plenty of time, he said, to think about going through with the murder and just as significantly, plenty of time to make the conscious choice to stop. that, he told the jury, also constituted premeditation. when i said tara grant is now unconscious, those next three minutes and 45 seconds were an eternity. stephen grant had the opportunity to choose life or death. he chose death. the jury went out to deliberate and stayed out.
and i kept cutting her up. he then drove back to the house, his wife s dismembered body in the back of the suv and he joined verena and the kids for a nice sunday afternoon. i tried to make things normal as possible for everybody. and i continuously flirted with verene because i thought that was the only way i was going to get through this. that s sunday night he loaded the kids plastic red sled in the isuzu and at 3:00 a.m. drove off looking for a place to dispose of his wife s pieces. he ended up at stony creek park near some big overhead power lines. he popped the hatch and dumped the body parts on to the kids sled. he pulled the last of tara up through the snow to the open field. and as soon as i started going, it was like keystone cops, the sled took off, and now i m chasing after this sled that has a body on it, down a hill. finally got stopped when it fell
over and it broke. the pieces fell all over the place. okay. so tara s torso, i took and i buried in the snow. and then the pieces, i put on the sled then i buried that in the snow. but grant was unhappy with his predawn work. i d done a very, very bad job of hiding anything. it s right there in the open. tuesday at dusk he returned to the park, retrieved all the body parts wrapped in clear plastic bags, cut them open and scattered the remains here and there under fallen trees. hands, feet, tara s head, everything. a one-gallon ziploc bag stuffed with all the plastic wrap he left by a tree near the road, and he was done. until he heard more than a week later, the sheriff announced a search of stony creek park. i thought, they re going to find that torso i buried in the snow. so on that very saturday