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
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
i talked briefly with her for a few minutes, asked her about the night that miss grant had supposedly left. verena, the au pair, said she d been out of the house the night the fight occurred and didn t see what happened. as the detectives put away their notebooks, they asked if grant would come down to the sheriff s office the following day for a lie detector test. he agreed. he asked me, do you think that i m going to be in trouble for any of this? and i said, trouble meaning what, steve? and he said, you know i didn t have anything to do with this. that s when he showed emotion. he put hands over his mouth and he started to cry. here at the sheriff s office, detectives were finding the tara grant trail five days after she reportedly fought with her husband and walked out was growing stone cold. she wasn t using her cell phone or laptop or personal credit cards. she hadn t talked to her family. still, investigators knew that she was a sophisticated international traveler, well
were you looking in her face? no, i covered her face up. what did you cover her face up with? gray underwear or a gray t-shirt. how did you know she had died? when she stopped moving. and i was worried. i was really worried. the two children, grant said, were in their rooms down the hall from their murdered mother. the au pair was out. authorities would say later grant text messaged her, you owe me a kiss, and left a note reading the same on her pillow. grant said he returned to his wife s body, tied a belt around the neck and dragged the corpse down the stairs and out to the garage. he was going to hide the body in back of tara s isuzu trooper. i dropped her. she was too hard to pick up. the belt broke and she fell. it was the most disgusting noise. it sounded like dropping a watermelon on the cement. he went back upstairs only to hear the front door opening. verena.
an old girlfriend of grant leaked recent e-mails she received from stephen two weeks before tara went missing. not so subtle come-ons like, i m still in need of some excitement in my day, wink, wink. i just think of marriage vows like speed limits. sometimes you have to break them. meanwhile, the agency that placed the young au pair in the grant home became so uncomfortable with one of its girls being in the midst of a publicly messy domestic situation, it pulled verena, the kids nanny, out of the house against her will. she returned home to germany on february 21st. reporter amber hunt knew why the juicy psycho drama about a suburban family had hit such a nerve. they were the people next door. nice house, good kids? yeah. loving dad, successful mom. beautiful family. but could reporters or anyone really find out what was going on under a family s roof? the husband, in particular, was proving difficult to get a fix on. the people that we came