somebody didn t book with travelocity, with 24/7 customer support to help move them to the pool daddy promised! look at me, i m swimming! somebody, get her a pony! [ female announcer ] the travelocity guarantee. from the price to the room to the trip you ll never roam alone. ten days after she was reported missing, reserves and deputies from the sheriff s department swarmed the vast stony creek metro park, looking for any signs of tara grant, the 34-year-old wife and mother who had supposedly walked out on her family.
when they married and kids came along she was ecstatic. lindsey was the sparkle of her eye. alicia and tara had grown up together as farm kids on michigan s rural upper peninsula. tara and i growing up, we had a list. we had a list of things we had to accomplish in the day. if the list wasn t done when my dad got home, there were consequences to be paid. my husband. hi, steve! one activity on the list, more fun than chore, was making maple syrup, something tara loved to do. even as an adult. she was happy. she was a happy kid. the snapshots didn t lie about the confident, chatty, take-charge girl everyone knew was going places. she was my leaning post when i had something very, very crucial to talk about, that was life altering, tara was the first person i would call. her last call with her big sister came on february 9th. 40 minutes of girl talk. tara was in the newark airport waiting for her connecting flight home. she seemed upbeat. mm-hmm.
what she spotted that last day of february tucked under a tree looked like more than litter. a one gallon ziploc bag. because there was snow on the ground, it stood out like a sore thumb. there was bright red blood in the bag. sheila picked up the bag. she thought the sheriff s office might want to know about it, what with all the coverage on the news about that missing woman. the story of tara grant, the vanished wife and mother, had become as regular a fixture on the detroit news stations as sports and weather. if anybody knows, just say something. just tell us. call, call me, call the police, call somebody. the missing woman s husband, stephen grant, on the local news, made almost daily, teary, on the verge of angry appeals to his wife of more than ten years to come home. if not for him, then for their two young children, a girl 6 and a boy 4. please, call anybody. call the police.
plainclothes detective walking by. but that officer remembered stephen grant because of the fragment of conversation he overheard. and i heard him actually say, she s been gone for five days now. detective brian kozlowski was still wondering why the guy had waited five days to report his wife missing when his desk phone rang and sure enough, he d been assigned the case. his lieutenant sounding urgent. i want you to get on it immediately. by now detective kozlowski had the report from the desk officer who had taken down the husband s story. this story. after a week-long business trip grant said, his wife, tara, had come home the previous friday night, february 9th. no sooner had she unpacked her bag when she announced she d be going back to puerto rico early, sunday rather than monday. grant cried foul. she needed to be home more and traveling for her job less. the argument ensued. according to mr. grant. and he last heard her on a phone saying i ll be out in a minute.
morning, mere hours before the sheriff s search, grant went back to the park at dawn to recover his wife s torso. i had to dig it out of the ground. it was frozen in the ground. how did you carry it? threw it over my shoulder and carried it. it. no longer tara. a wife. a human. just it. merely a problem to be dealt with. i ve covered crime my entire career, and it s hard to shake some of these details. details like grant using his kids red sled. this red sled from an old home video, to transport his wife s body parts. just like a kid. grant returned to the car with tara s dismembered body. he shoved it into plastic garbage bags and drove once more to his father s machine shop. he then hid the torso behind boxes in the loft space between the ceiling. but he worried that the remains would thaw and start to smell. five days later he stashed the torso in a green plastic container, drove it back to the