He stood in front of the cameras on Valentine’s Day 2007.
He looked frightened.
He looked abandoned.
He looked like a man who had been left behind.
His name was Steven Grant.
His wife was gone.
He needed people [music] to believe his story.
The story was this.
Tara had come home from a business trip to Puerto [music] Rico on the evening of February 9th.
They had words.
She took a phone call in the other room.
[music] He overheard exactly what she said.
He heard her say into the phone, clear as anything.
I’ll meet you at the end of the driveway.
Then she picked up and walked out.
Got into [music] a dark car that was waiting at the curb and drove away into the Michigan winter without looking back.
He waited 5 days before calling anyone.
He told the sheriff’s department he thought she needed time.
Said this had happened before.
said she had a pattern of disappearing when things got heated between [music] them.
He had figured she was blowing off steam and would come back when she was ready.
And [music] when she didn’t, when the days passed and the phone stayed quiet and there was still no sign of her, he figured it [music] was time to make the report.
So, he made it.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2007, he called the Mcome County Sheriff’s Department [music] and reported his wife missing.
The investigators who took the call noted the 5-day gap immediately.
They noted it the way experienced people note the first detail that does not fit the frame.
They wrote it [music] down and they drove to Washington Township to hear what Steven Grant had to say.
What they would eventually find in the garage of the Grant family home in a plastic [music] storage bin that had not been there 2 weeks earlier would tell the actual story of what had happened on the night of February 9th.
And the actual story had nothing in common with the one Steven Grant was telling.
Tarin Distra was born on June 28th, 1972 [music] in rural Michigan.
She grew up there with her sister Alicia and the two of them moved through the public schools of their small [music] community with different destinations in mind.
Tara had the particular forward energy of ambitious kids who grow up in places that cannot hold them.
the focused [music] look, the plan already forming, the sense that education was not something that was happening to you, but something you were using.
She was sharp.
She was organized.
She had perfectionist tendencies [music] that her colleagues would later describe not as neurotic, but as productive, the kind of perfectionism that makes things happen rather than the kind that paralyzes.
She got to Michigan State University in the early 1990s and she graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in marketing.
She was not a drifter.
She walked out of MSU and walked directly into a career.
Washington Group International was a major engineering and construction firm headquartered in Boise, Idaho with a regional presence in the Detroit suburb of Troy.
Tara joined their downtown Detroit office and started building.
She was talented and she worked hard and she moved up the way people who are genuinely good at what they do move up by being reliably better than the alternatives.
[music] By the time this case became national news in 2007, she was an operations manager.
The title meant something.
[music] The role required her to travel frequently internationally, often for entire working weeks at a stretch, flying to Puerto Rico, [music] and to project sites across the country and to wherever the company’s work demanded her attention.
She was beautiful in the way that photographs carry forward.
Dark hair, a quality of engagement in her face that made her memorable.
Former colleagues and friends described a woman who set high standards for herself and held them.
Who made things happen through the combination of genuine competence and sheer follow-through.
Who did not accept the [music] gap between where things were and where they should be as a permanent condition.
She had opinions.
She had standards.
She was not easy in the way that people who demand nothing of themselves and others are easy.
But she was devoted in the ways that mattered.
She loved art, not in the casual way that educated people claim to love art at dinner parties, but in the deep way that people love things that give back to them what their professional lives cannot.
The Detroit Institute of Arts [music] was her place.
It sits on Woodward Avenue in Midtown Detroit, a building that contains one of the great permanent collections in the United States.
Diego Rivera murals, Dutch masters, [music] an Egyptian collection, French impressionists, American modernists, a repository of everything that human beings have managed to make of beauty, housed inside a city that has known as much suffering as any in America.
Tara Grant loved it.
She returned to it when she needed what it gave her.
At Michigan State University in the early years of the 1990s, she met Steven Grant.
He was enrolled there at the [music] same time.
They found each other in the way that college students find each other before either party has accumulated enough biographical data to know what the finding will mean.
Tara was driven and organized and beautiful and had a direction.
Steven [music] was pleasant and sociable and by most accounts of average everything.
Average ambition, average follow-through, average direction.
He never finished his degree where she was always in motion toward the next goal.
He had a different relationship with forward momentum.
He drifted not dramatically, not with any visible crisis, just the ordinary low-grade drift of a person who has not located what drives them.
He went to work at his father’s machine shop.
His father operated a tool and die business in Meum County, the kind of precision manufacturing operation that Meum County with its deep automotive industry roots had produced by the hundreds over the decades.
Steven helped at the shop.
He also ran a small operation of his own adjacent to his father’s.
He was a tool and die man, skilled at the machinery, experienced in the particular physical logic of metal fabrication, at home in the shop environment in a way he was never quite at home in any professional context that required the other kind of ambition.
They got serious.
They stayed together after college.
They dated through [music] their mid-ents.
And at some point, Steven Grant took Tara to the steps of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the building she loved, and he got down and proposed to her.
She said yes.
He had done something right.
He had found a gesture that fit exactly who she was, and used it at the right moment.
And she said yes.
And they built a life.
They married.
They moved to Washington Township in Meum County, roughly 30 mi north of Detroit, a large sprawling suburb of wide residential streets, [music] newer houses, twocar garages, backyard decks, the visual language of American middleclass aspiration.
They had two children, a daughter they named Lindsay, a son named Ian.
In February of 2007, Lindsay was six and Ian was four.
Washington Township is the kind of place where people assume they are safe [music] because the neighborhood is quiet and the schools are decent and everyone has a lawn.
The assumption is not always wrong.
It was wrong here.
As Tara’s career moved upward and Stevens remained static, the architecture of the marriage organized itself around the gap between them.
She was the primary earner, the salary that paid the mortgage, the car payments, [music] the children’s activities, the opair, the general overhead of a suburban household.
He was the primary caregiver, home with the kids, managing the school schedule, handling the domestic machinery.
He helped at the shop when he could.
But the center of gravity in the grand household was Tara’s income, and everyone in the marriage knew it.
Whether it was spoken plainly or carried in the silence beneath ordinary conversations, she was gone Monday through Friday most weeks.
The job demanded it.
She flew to Puerto Rico.
She went to project sites across the country.
She went to wherever Washington Group International needed their operations manager to be.
She did not understand these absences as abandonment of her children.
She understood them as the cost of maintaining the career that funded the life.
She was not wrong about that, but the cost was real, and it was distributed unevenly, and it fell most heavily on Steven Grant, who was home with two small children in a suburb 30 mi north of Detroit, [music] running a business that was not running very well, watching his wife move through a professional world that had no
equivalent in his own experience.
Before every trip, Tara left notes for Lindsay and Ian.
[music] physical notes, handwritten, left somewhere the children would find them.
Little messages telling them that their mother loved them, that she was thinking about them, that she would be back, she had made it a ritual over the years, a way of staying present across the distance.
The children grew up knowing that when their mother was gone, there was always a note.
There was always something in her handwriting that told them it was temporary.
It was a thoughtful [music] thing to do.
It was the gesture of a woman who took both dimensions of her life seriously and refused to pretend they did not sometimes pull against each [music] other.
She loved her children in the practical documented notes before every trip way that does not require anyone’s interpretation.
What was happening inside the marriage away from the notes and the cameras and the suburban exterior was something else entirely.
Tara’s family would say later after everything was known, that they had recognized warning signs, that they had seen things in the marriage that troubled them, that the picture of Tara’s domestic [music] life was not what the neighborhood saw from outside.
What many people did not know, Tara’s family said, was that she had been living a nightmare at home, subjected to verbal abuse and manipulation by Steven, [music] a pattern that had developed gradually, deepened over time and worsened as the distance between what he was and what she had become grew harder to ignore.
The mechanism of that control had gone digital.
[music] Steven Grant had installed monitoring software on the family desktop computer.
He was reading Tara’s communications, her emails, her messages, whatever the software could access.
He was building a private record.
He suspected she was having an affair.
And he was collecting evidence of it the way a man collects evidence when he does not trust the world he lives in and does not know how to address the distrust directly.
[music] He had also reconnected with an ex-girlfriend from before his marriage.
He was sending her emails about Tara.
These [music] were not brief incidental communications.
They were extended, detailed, emotionally loaded messages in which he laid out his suspicions, his grievances, his sense of being wronged.
He told her about the monitoring software.
He told her what he had found in Tara’s communications.
He positioned himself in these private letters to a woman who had nothing to do with the marriage, [music] as the betrayed party, the loyal husband whose wife had been unfaithful, whose home had been corroded from the inside by a woman who did not value what she had.
There was also living inside the Grant household, a 19-year-old German woman named Verina Derkus.
She was the family’s Opair brought in to help with the children, living in the house, part of the domestic arrangement [music] that made Terara’s travel schedule possible.
She had come to Washington Township in good faith, [music] doing a year abroad in the way that young people from Europe sometimes do, expecting to look after children in an American suburb and experience something of American life.
She had no way to anticipate [music] what she had walked into.
According to what investigators eventually pieced together, Steven Grant had developed a sexual relationship with Verina over the course of her time in the house.
He had groomed her.
She was 19 years old, living in his home, dependent on his family for her housing and her visa, with no independent support network in the country, [music] no close friends in Mumham County, no real structural alternative to the household she was embedded in.
He was her employer in the
practical sense.
He had the power that adults in established households have over young people placed in their care.
He used it to make her into something she should not have been, and he did it slowly enough and skillfully enough that she believed in him completely by the time it mattered.
Vina Dearus would later tell journalists that she had trusted every single word Steven Grant told her, that she had believed him absolutely, that she had had no reason to doubt.
The way that statement reads once you understand the full context is the way all such statements read in retrospect as the words of someone who was managed very deliberately into a position where doubt was not available to them.
On the morning of February 9th, 2007, Lindsey Grant, 6 years old, walked in on her father and the Opair.
Children do not process what they see in adult terms, but they register it.
Something happened in that household on the morning of February 9th that a six-year-old child was not supposed to see, and she saw it that evening.
Tara came home from Puerto Rico, the flight back from San Juan, the drive from the airport through southeastern Michigan in February, the return to the house in Washington Township.
These are the ordinary coordinates of a working woman coming back to her family after a week away.
She had done this dozens of times.
She knew the route.
She knew the house.
She had notes ready for the next trip.
She came home expecting to be there for the weekend with her children.
The argument started.
The argument was about travel.
It was about the marriage.
It was about the accumulated weight of everything that had been building between them.
Her absences, his [music] resentments, the gap between what they each were and what the other had perhaps expected, the secrets she did not know he was keeping, [music] and the secrets he believed she was keeping from him.
According to Steven Grant’s own confession given weeks later from a hospital bed in Northern Michigan, Tara slapped him during the confrontation.
She belittled him.
She told him she was going to leave and take the children with her.
[music] Whether all of that is exactly true or whether it is the version of events that Steven Grant constructed to manage his own culpability even in confession.
That question does not have a clean answer.
What is documented is what happened next.
He strangled her with his hands and with a belt according to the detail that emerged from the confession and from the physical evidence.
[music] He kept going until she stopped.
The children were asleep upstairs.
Verina Derkus was somewhere in the house.
The medical examiner would later find bruising visible on Tara’s neck [music] and blunt force injuries on her head and face consistent with the struggle.
Marks on her body proving that she had been alive and fighting before she stopped being either.
In the Grant family home in Washington Township, Michigan, on the night of February 9th, 2007, Steven Grant killed his wife while his children slept above them.
Then he stood in the quiet of what he had done.
And he made a decision.
He made a decision that tells you everything about what kind of man he actually was.
A man in genuine shock.
A man undone by what he had done.
A man whose conscience had any kind of functional authority over him.
That man calls 911.
That man turns himself in.
That man at minimum collapses.
Steven Grant did none of those things.
He dragged Tara’s body to the garage.
He closed the door.
He went back inside and he began building the story.
He did not call the police on February 10th.
He did not call on the 11th or the 12th or the 13th.
He went about the business of daily life in a house that contained a dead woman in the garage.
Lindsay and Ian got up in the mornings and went to school.
The household ran.
Verina Dearkiss moved through the days.
Whatever she knew or suspected, she did not call the police.
Whether she was too frightened, too bound up in the affair and its implications, too entirely under Steven<unk>’s influence [music] to act independently, investigators would spend considerable time in conversation with her about exactly this.
What is documented is that the days passed and no one made a call.
2 days after the killing, Steven took Tara’s body to his father’s tool and die shop.
He used the shop’s equipment, the industrial tools of precision manufacturing work, the machinery his father’s trade had accumulated over decades of business, the same tools that had put metal shavings into every piece of clothing and every bag and every corner of every vehicle that had ever spent time in that shop.
He used those tools on his wife.
He cut her into 14 pieces.
He wrapped the pieces in clear plastic bags.
He drove to Stony Creek Metrop Park, a [music] large public preserve in neighboring Shelby Township, a few miles from Washington Township, and he moved through the frozen landscape, distributing what he had brought, placing pieces under fallen tree limbs, pushing them down into the hollows of the terrain, tucking them wherever the winter ground and the accumulated dead brush offered some concealment.
Then he drove home.
He cleaned up what could be cleaned up.
He rehearsed the details.
He settled [music] the timeline.
He decided what he had overheard her say on the phone, what the car looked like, when she had walked out, why he had not called sooner.
He assembled the story with the particular care of a man who knows the story will be examined by people whose job is to find its weak points.
And on February 14th, 2007, Valentine’s Day, he picked up the phone and called the Makeum County Sheriff’s Department.
He told them Tara was missing.
He told them the last time he had seen her was the evening of February 9th.
He explained the 5-day gap.
She had done this before.
She had a disagreement.
He had given her space.
He had waited.
When she still did not come back or call, he had decided he should make the report.
The investigators brought him in.
They sat with him for 2 hours.
He told them the full version of the story, the disagreement about her travel, the phone call she took in the next room, the words he overheard, “I’ll meet you at the end of the driveway, the dark car waiting at the curb, the woman walking away down the driveway and getting into the car and being driven off into the night.
” He had not seen her or heard from her since.
The investigators [music] listened to every word.
They wrote everything down.
They noted the gap, 5 days, and they noted the explanation for the gap.
And they noted the precision of the overheard phone call.
And they noted the particular quality of the grief he was presenting, which was controlled and articulate [music] and proportioned in a way that required, they thought, a certain amount of prior rehearsal.
They did not have enough to charge him.
They had a missing person’s report and a 5-day gap and the gut instinct of experienced investigators [music] who had heard a lot of stories.
So they opened the investigation and they started working it from the outside [music] and they started watching Steven Grant.
The Monum County Sheriff’s Department held [music] daily press conferences during the search for Tara.
Sheriff Mark Hackles department gave the public regular updates on what was and was not being [music] found.
The case attracted media attention quickly.
A missing woman, a suburban family, Valentine’s Day, a husband with a particular quality to him that made Detroit area journalists want to keep pointing cameras in his direction.
He was available.
He was quotable.
He was everywhere.
In the days after filing the report, Steven Grant gave interviews to local television stations.
He sat in his home and spoke to cameras.
He called reporters.
He was the kind of visible that is not the visibility of a grieving husband [music] who cannot stop himself from speaking.
It was managed visibility, deliberate visibility, the visibility of a man who understood the media as an asset and was deploying it.
He told the story again and again and it stayed consistent which is one of the things that made [music] it feel real to the people who were receiving it.
He talked about the marriage in ways that acknowledged its [music] tensions without quite opening the door.
He acknowledged there had been strain.
He said the travel was a source of friction.
He positioned himself as a husband who was imperfect but [music] committed, who had not given up on a marriage that was struggling, who was worried sick about a woman he loved, even if they had not been getting along.
[music] It was a carefully calibrated performance.
Not too much grief, not too little, not too defensive about the marriage, not too willing to air everything in public.
He found the register of a man who is being honest within limits and he lived in it on [music] camera.
He talked about Stony Creek Metrop Park constantly.
In interview after interview, the park came up.
He volunteered it.
He attached it to the story of the family’s life in Washington Township.
With the warmth of genuine local affection, the main reason we bought [music] the house is because that park was there.
I mountain bike out there.
I run out in Stony Creek [music] all the time.
We love that park.
He wo it into the fabric of his account of what the family had in Washington Township, into the story of the neighborhood and the things they valued.
Casual, [music] warm, specific.
The park.
The park the family loved.
Investigators noticed.
Experienced investigators notice what comes up too often.
They notice the names that occupy more space than they should.
the locations that keep getting volunteered in conversations where they were not asked for.
The park appeared in interview after interview with an ease that could have been genuine local affection.
Or it could have been the involuntary magnetism of a man who cannot stop circling the thing he has done.
They noted it.
They did not act on it yet, but they noted it.
Meanwhile, the investigation was running its electronic checks.
Tara Grant’s cell phone records were subpoenaed.
The results were exactly what the investigators had begun to suspect.
No activity after the evening of February 9th.
No calls, no texts, nothing.
Ara Grant’s phone had gone dark on the night Steven Grant said she got into a car and drove away, and it had not come back on since.
Her credit cards showed the same thing.
No transactions after February 9th.
No hotel bookings, no airline tickets, no gas station stops, no withdrawals, no ATM use, [music] no purchases of any kind.
A woman who had walked out spontaneously on a Friday night with no plan, no pre-arranged destination, no prepared bag.
A woman who had taken off to be with a lover would have spent money.
She would have needed a hotel.
She would have needed food.
She would have needed to get somewhere.
Getting somewhere requires money, and Tara grants money had not moved since the evening of February 9th.
A woman who goes nowhere, spends nothing, calls no one, and leaves no electronic trace of any kind after the night her husband says she walked out is not a woman who walked out.
She is a woman who stopped.
And something stopped her.
[music] There was more.
Washington Group International cooperated fully with the investigation.
Company managers and security staff provided everything requested by the Mcome County Sheriff’s Department.
They confirmed Tara’s travel schedule.
They confirmed she had returned from a business trip to Puerto Rico on the evening of February 9th.
[music] They confirmed her employment record, her standing with the company, her project assignments.
There was nothing in Tara Grant’s professional life suggesting she was about to abandon it.
There was nothing suggesting a woman who was planning to disappear.
She had a position.
She had projects.
She had the organized forward-moving professional trajectory of a person who was not preparing to vanish.
The day after he filed a missing person’s report, Steven Grant was stopped by police while driving.
He was arrested for operating with a suspended license and brought in for additional questioning.
[music] When he came out, he was on camera immediately.
He accused the police of using a traffic stop as a pretext to harass him.
He said the arrest had nothing to do with his driving record and everything to do with the sheriff’s department wanting another opportunity to question him about Terara’s [music] disappearance.
He was angry.
He was visible in his anger.
He made sure the cameras caught it.
The Makeome County Sheriff’s Department denied the accusation.
Hackle was measured as he was throughout the case.
He did not name Grant as a suspect.
He did not escalate publicly.
He continued doing what investigators do while the subject of the investigation performed his innocence on the evening news.
[music] Steven Grant retained a lawyer.
His attorney, David Green, became the formal channel between Grant and the sheriff’s department.
After the initial 2-hour interview on Valentine’s Day, Steven Grant communicated with investigators exclusively by facts.
He did not come in.
He did not submit to a polygraph.
He declined to give investigators access to the desktop computer in the home, the one with the monitoring software installed on it.
He handed over two laptops that had been terrors, but the desktop, which contained the record of his private surveillance of his wife and his extensive communication with the ex-girlfriend, he kept.
So, the structure of his engagement was this.
[music] To the cameras and the reporters, he was present, available, forthcoming, emotional in the correct proportions, willing to discuss the marriage, willing to express frustration with the investigation’s direction, willing to appear in living rooms across Metro Detroit as the husband left
behind.
To the investigators, he was a fax machine.
The two faces of Steven Grant, performer and withholder, ran simultaneously for 3 weeks.
The ex-girlfriend eventually did what Steven Grant had not anticipated when he chose to confide in her.
She turned over the emails to the Mackham County Sheriff’s Department.
She gave them the full correspondence, everything Steven had sent her about Tara, about the marriage, about the monitoring software, about his suspicions.
Investigators read the emails of a man who had been conducting a systematic surveillance campaign against his [music] wife while presenting himself publicly as her worried, devoted husband.
They read the possessive language and the paranoid accounting of her movements and the record of a man building a private case against the woman he was living with.
The emails were not physical evidence of murder.
They did not prove Steven Grant had killed [music] Tara, but they built the picture in a specific direction.
a man who monitors his wife’s communications and builds a secret file on her suspected affairs [music] and shares that file with an ex-girlfriend while performing marital devotion for the cameras is a man whose interior life and his public presentation have become entirely disconnected.
That kind of disconnection has a particular relevance to a murder investigation in which the suspect has constructed a cover story.
It suggests practice.
It suggests a man for whom the maintenance of a false narrative was already a habit.
Investigators also wanted access to the desktop computer.
Steven Grant would not provide it.
[music] His attorney would not authorize it.
Without a search warrant specifying the computer, there was nothing [music] they could do.
They noted the refusal.
They put it in the file next to everything else.
On February 24th, 2007, 10 days after the missing person’s report, the Mum County Sheriff’s Department made a decision.
They mounted a search of Stony Creek Metro Park.
Sheriff Hackle said afterward it was simply a hunch.
They did not want to sit back and do nothing, and the park had come up enough times in Steven Grant’s interviews that it warranted attention.
More than 150 searchers moved through a threemile grid of the park over 6 hours.
Reserve deputies, full-time deputies, volunteers, [music] sniffer dogs working the terrain, a helicopter covering from above.
They found nothing.
The park was frozen and wide.
It was February in Monum County.
Gray sky, bare trees, the cold that settles into southeast Michigan in late winter like something that intends to stay.
The dogs moved through the brush.
The helicopter worked the grid from above.
The teams came back at the end of 6 hours without what they were looking for.
The search was called off.
Hackle went to the cameras [music] and said they had not found anything today, but asked the public to keep their eyes open.
The investigation continued.
Steven Grant, if he was watching the press conference, and there is every reason to believe he was watching every press conference, had survived the first real attempt to find what he had left in the park.
The search had covered the ground and come up empty.
the dismemberment site and the distribution of the remains [music] had been thorough enough or the ground had been frozen enough or both to survive a six-hour professional search.
He had not been caught yet.
He kept giving interviews.
In the days after the failed park search, he was still available to cameras.
He was still telling the story.
He was still performing.
One reporter who covered the case observed that Steven Grant seemed almost energized by the camera attention that there was something in the visible engagement of the media cycle that he found sustaining.
He was managing multiple pressures simultaneously [music] and he was managing them well enough so far that the story held.
What he could not manage was the physical world.
Sometime in the period after the failed February 24th search, [music] investigators received a call.
A woman walking her dog near Stony Creek Metrop Park had found a plastic bag.
The bag had blood on the outside.
She reported it.
Officers responded and collected the bag.
Forensic examination produced several elements.
Human [music] blood confirmed by laboratory analysis.
Latex gloves, additional plastic [music] bags, and metal shavings.
The metal shavings were the piece that broke the case open.
They were not [music] generic.
They were the particular byproduct of tool and die precision work.
The small fragments that a machine shop produces and that accumulate in the immediate environment of anyone who works in one consistently.
These were not construction debris.
These were not automotive shavings from a garage.
These were specific to the kind of precision machining work that Steven Grant’s father’s shop had been producing for decades.
The kind of work Steven Grant had been doing his entire adult life.
Forensic analysts looked at something else in the bag.
dog hair.
They tested it.
The hair matched the Grant family dog.
Prosecutor Eric Smith reviewed the assembled evidence, the human blood, the latex gloves, the plastic [music] bags, the tool and die metal shavings traceable to the specific type of machining work done at a shop where Steven [music] Grant was one of a very small number of regular workers.
The dog hair matching the animal that lived in the Grant family home.
Each element of the bag in the woods pointed to the same [music] address on the same street in Washington Township, Michigan.
This was the probable cause.
Smith and the Mohamm County Sheriff’s Department moved to execute a search warrant for the Grant residents.
On the night before the warrant was to be executed the evening of March [music] 1st, 2007, Steven Grant drove to Stony Creek Metrop Park for the last time.
He had been monitoring the investigation closely enough to know that a focused second search of the park was coming.
Whether this knowledge came through his attorney, through the media, through some other channel is not entirely clear.
What is clear is that he understood the park was about to be searched more carefully than it had been on February 24th.
And he drove there at night to move what he had left.
He found the locations where he had placed the remains.
He retrieved the plastic bags containing the body parts.
He cut the bags open and he redistributed what was inside, scattering the pieces further, pushing them under fallen trees, pressing them into the hollows and depressions of the frozen terrain, trying to spread the evidence across more ground and make systematic
discovery harder.
He could not take everything.
He brought part of what he retrieved back with him, the torso.
he could not make another trip to the park that night or he calculated that the warrant was too close and he needed to move the vehicle or something in him had already started to understand that the project was ending and the calculations were no longer rational.
He brought the torso back to the family garage.
He placed it in a plastic storage bin.
He put the bin in the garage.
He went inside.
The children were in the house.
On the morning of March 2nd, 2007, the Mum County Sheriff’s Department arrived to execute the search warrant at the Grant residence in Washington Township.
In the hours before the warrant was executed, the same morning, Steven Grant made an urgent call to a local television reporter, a journalist from Click on Detroit who had been covering the case closely [music] and who had
cultivated access to Grant through weeks of interviews.
Steven was insistent he needed the reporter to come to the house immediately.
He wanted to do an [music] interview.
He wanted a camera there.
He was pushing hard.
The reporter was on his way to Washington Township [music] when he received word that investigators were about to execute a search warrant at the Grant property.
By the time he arrived, police were already present.
Steven Grant had been removed from the premises.
[music] The reporter stood on the outside of the scene and watched the investigation move into the house and garage.
Psychologists and forensic experts who analyze Steven Grard’s behavior would later describe the reporter call as consistent with a particular pattern.
An effort to create a mediating presence between himself and what was in the garage without actually revealing what was there.
[music] A camera, a journalist, a documentary presence, something that altered the situation without resolving it.
the logic of a man who had been performing for 3 weeks and had not yet decided how to stop, [music] who wanted one more audience in the space before the audience was gone.
The detective [music] who found the storage bin has described the moment simply.
He was moving through the garage, methodical and thorough.
He had been there before.
During earlier walkthroughs of the property in the weeks since the missing person’s report, he noticed a plastic storage container that he had not seen during prior visits.
It was new.
It had been placed there recently.
He noted this.
He opened it.
Inside was the torso of Tara Grant.
The call went out immediately.
An arrest warrant for open murder was issued for Steven Grant.
Sheriff Mark Hackle went to the cameras and said what had been found in the garage.
He said Steven Grant was the number one suspect and the only suspect in the murder of his wife.
He said Grant was to be considered dangerous and was last believed to be operating a yellow 2006 Dodge Dakota extended cab pickup truck license plate 9 FLR57.
Anyone who saw the vehicle or had information on Grant’s whereabouts should contact the Mcome County Sheriff’s Department immediately.
Steven Grant had been gone for hours.
The moment investigators arrived to execute the warrant and he was removed from the property, he got into that borrowed yellow truck and drove.
He drove north.
He drove on the highway out of Mochum County and through the flat agricultural middle of the state and into the taller country of the north where the trees thickened and the towns became less frequent and the road eventually ran out of suburb entirely.
He was drinking as he drove.
He was taking pills.
He was doing the things that a man does when he is driving away from everything and does [music] not intend to stop.
He drove 225 miles.
He ended up at Wilderness State Park near the tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula along the southern edge of the straits of Machinar where the lower and upper peninsulas almost touch and lake Michigan comes in cold from the west.
It is not a metaphor.
Wilderness State Park is actual wilderness.
Thousands of acres of forest and shoreline, remote trails, the particular silence of northern Michigan in early March when the tourist season is months away [music] and the ground is still frozen and the park belongs to whatever lives there and is indifferent to the rest.
He later said he drove up there to die.
He said he went into that park with the intention of going into the cold and not coming back.
He did not bring adequate clothing.
[music] He did not bring anything that would help him survive exposure to March temperatures in the northern lower peninsula.
Whether this was a genuine suicide attempt or a last performance with no audience, an extension of the habit he could not break, even when there was no one watching, is a question without a clean answer.
The behavior of the previous 3
weeks, suggests that performing for absent audiences was not unusual for him.
He took his clothes off in the park.
He was running through the snow in Wilderness State Park, barefoot or close to it without adequate covering in conditions that were working efficiently to kill him.
When officers arrived, the Mcome County Sheriff’s Department had been tracking his cell phone.
He had made a call to his sister from somewhere in the park.
The tower data put his phone in Wilderness State Park.
Officers were dispatched and they moved through the park until they found him.
He was frostbitten.
He was hypothermic.
He was not coherent in the functional sense.
He was airlifted to Northern Michigan Hospital in the Paskki area.
He was treated for exposure and from a hospital bed 225 mi north of Washington Township, Steven Grant began to talk.
He talked at length.
He told [music] investigators he wanted to clear his mind.
Sheriff Hackle used that phrase in public, citing what investigators had been told about Grant’s stated motivation for confessing.
After 3 weeks of managing the story [music] and 5 days before that of building it, he lay in a hospital room in northern Michigan and he told the actual version of events.
He described the evening of February 9th in detail.
He described the argument.
He said Tara had slapped him and belittled him.
He said she had threatened to leave and take the children.
He described the act of killing her.
[music] He described dragging her body to the garage.
He described the two days that followed.
[music] He described the machine shop and the tools.
He described the park and the distribution of the remains.
[music] He described going back to the park the night before the warrant was executed.
He described bringing the torso back to the garage.
He described the drive north.
He [music] gave, in Sheriff Hackle’s words, a very lengthy confession, laying out exactly what took place from the hospital.
Through a statement, Steven Grant said that he loved his children and looked forward to seeing them as soon as possible.
His attorney, David Green, announced that he was no longer representing Steven Grant.
Tara Grant’s sister, Alicia Standifer, had driven from Chilikothy, Ohio to stand beside Hackle at the press conference in Mount Clemens on March 5th.
She had been there from the beginning of the public story, following the case, speaking to the media, publicly supporting Steven Grant in the good faith that a sister extends to a brother-in-law when she does not yet know what he has done.
She had vouched for him.
She had been a family presence at press conferences, a co-suffer, a woman sharing in the public worry about where Tara was.
When the sheriff’s department informed her of what had been found in the garage, not just that remains had been discovered, but the specific circumstances of the storage [music] bin in the garage where her sister had been kept, Alicia Stander let out a scream.
She said she could [music] not believe what they were telling her.
She had been standing in front of cameras defending a man who had kept her sister in a plastic container behind a garage door.
She stood at the press conference and spoke on behalf of the family.
She said they took comfort in knowing Tara was in a better place.
[music] She was composed in the way that people become composed on the far side of devastation.
Not because the feeling is gone, but because the feeling is so large it has become structural, loadbearing, something you have to organize yourself around rather than around anything else.
The Mochm County Medical Examiner, Dr.
Daniel Spitz, performed the autopsy on the remains.
He confirmed the cause of death as strangulation.
He found bruising externally visible on Tara’s neck, the physical record of how she died.
He found blunt force injuries to her head and face.
[music] He described these injuries as consistent with a struggle.
That detail matters.
The injuries on Tara Grant’s head and [music] face are not the injuries of a woman who was surprised.
They are the injuries of a woman who was conscious and [music] fighting.
She fought.
The marks are the documentation of what she did in the [music] moments before he finished.
Search teams went back to Stony Creek Metrop Park on March 3rd, the day after the torso was found in the garage.
They went with the knowledge of what they were looking for and the understanding of where to look.
What they found in the areas around the park where the bloody Ziploc bag had been located was described by Sheriff Hackle as gruesome.
Moving through the fields in the snow-covered hollows of the frozen park, the search teams began finding blood, hair, and dismembered body parts under fallen tree limbs in the depressions of the terrain scattered under the brush where Steven Grant had pushed them on the night of March 1st.
He had cut Tara into 14 pieces.
Police found 11 of them, marked with red dots on the aerial photographs of the search grid that were subsequently released to the press.
They did not find everything.
animals had been in the park.
Stony Creek in late winter hosts wildlife that operates on its own schedule regardless of what human beings have left in the landscape.
Some of what Steven Grant had brought to that park was not recoverable.
Some of Terara Grant was never found.
Steven Grant was arraigned on March 6th, 2007, charged with open murder, Michigan’s charging mechanism that allows prosecution to pursue either first or second degree at trial, depending on what the evidence and argument produce, and with mutilation of a corpse.
He was 37 years old.
His prior criminal record consisted of a concealed weapons charge, and a reckless driving violation from 1989, offenses of a young man doing something stupid, not the prior of someone with a documented history of violence.
The killing of February 9th had not been building in the public record.
It had been building in private [music] in the monitor software on the family desktop and the emails to the ex-girlfriend and the long accumulation of a marriage that had gone somewhere its occupants could not navigate.
On April 13th, 2007, the full
text of Steven Grant’s written confession was released to the public.
He had written it out.
A detailed sequential account of what happened inside the Grant home and in the days and weeks that followed.
[music] It covered the argument.
It covered the act.
It covered the garage and the machine shop [music] and the park and the cover story and the media appearances and the flight north.
It was his [music] account, in his words, of the actual events behind the story he had told the cameras and the investigators and everyone who had believed him.
Tara’s family made a decision about the confession.
They [music] decided that Lindsay and Ian, the children who did not and could not know the full truth of what had happened to their mother, who was 6 and four years old and living with their aunt in Ohio, would be given access to the written confession when they became adults.
They wanted the documented truth
to exist for those children when they were ready for it.
The decision reflects a particular understanding of what children who have been kept from the truth of their parents’ lives deserve when they are old enough to bear it, not a managed, softened version, the actual documented record in the words of the man who killed their mother and wrote it out.
The trial opened in December 2007 [music] and ran for 3 weeks.
The prosecution sought first-degree murder, premeditated, deliberate, [music] planned.
Prosecutor Eric Smith’s team presented the full forensic record, the evidence from the garage and the park, the medical examiner’s findings on cause of [music] death and the evidence of struggle, the timeline from February 9th through March 2nd, the cell phone and credit card records [music] showing Terra’s complete digital absence after the evening of the killing, the emails to the ex-girlfriend, the metal
shavings, and the dog hair and the plastic bin in the garage.
Expert testimony detailed the dismemberment methods and the analysis of the recovered remains.
Investigators who had watched Steven Grant perform his grief on camera over three weeks.
[music] While knowing what the garage contained, testified about the investigation and the specific moments at which the evidence had broken the story open.
The defense, led by attorney Steven [music] Rabout, acknowledged the killing, but contested the degree.
Rabout argued that what happened on February 9th was not the execution of a plan, but the explosion of a moment.
A man who had reached a breaking point and crossed a line he had not intended to cross.
From the evidence that we have, it appears he just lost it at that given moment, Rabot said publicly.
The defense pushed the jury towards second degree, a killing without premeditation.
A terrible act, but not a calculated one.
The confession paradoxically helped the defense.
Rabout acknowledged this explicitly after the verdict.
The confession’s detail and the way it framed the argument as a spontaneous confrontation.
Terror slapping him.
Terror threatening to take the children gave the defense material to work with.
It allowed Rabout to build the narrative of a man who had been provoked past a breaking point rather than a man who had walked into the evening with a plan.
To be frank, the confession helped us significantly.
Rabout said it assisted us to get to the ultimate verdict.
The jury deliberated after 3 weeks of testimony.
[music] They spent time with the premeditation question, the threshold between first and second degree, the distinction the law draws between a killing that was planned and a killing that was not.
12 people sitting with the complete evidence could not unanimously conclude that Steven Grant had walked into the argument on February 9th, intending to kill the woman on the other side of it.
5 days before the report, the 21 days of performance, the machine shop and the park and the media campaign and the faxes to the investigators.
All of that came after the killing.
Whether it demonstrated a pre-existing capacity for cold calculation that was present before the killing as well, or whether it demonstrated a man who had improvised brilliantly after committing an act he had not planned, the jury could not unanimously decide.
On December 21st, 2007, the jury returned a verdict of seconddegree murder.
The judge presiding at sentencing looked at Steven Grant and found three words for what he had done.
Demonic, barbaric, dishonest.
[music] He used them in that sequence.
Demonic is the act of killing.
Barbaric is what he did to her body afterward.
The 14 pieces, the park in the dark, the plastic bins.
Dishonest is the three weeks between February 9th and March 2nd.
[music] The Valentine’s Day call, the television interviews, the accusations of police harassment, the faxed communications, [music] the reporter on his way to the house on the morning of the warrant.
The judge named dishonesty last, it was not least.
Steven Grant was sentenced to 50 [music] to 80 years for secondderee murder with an additional 6 to 10 years for mutilation of a corpse.
The sentences to run concurrently.
He was 38 years old at sentencing.
He will not be eligible for parole until he is 88 years old.
His earliest possible release date is March 3rd, 2015.
[music] He is currently incarcerated in Michigan, his facility having changed over the years from Bellamy Creek Correctional in Ionia to Oaks Correctional Facility [music] in Manaste Township.
All appeals have been denied.
The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction.
The Michigan State Supreme Court ruled against him on the premeditation of publicity issue and the confession admissibility issue.
A federal appeals court subsequently denied his claim [music] that his constitutional rights had been violated when investigators obtained incriminating statements from him after his capture.
The sentence stands.
The conviction stands.
The record is closed.
Steven Grant released a statement from his hospital bed on the day of his arraignment before the formal charges were filed.
He said he loved his children and looked forward to seeing them again as soon as possible.
The children were in Ohio.
Lindsay and Ian Grant were taken to Chilikothy, Ohio to live with their aunt Alicia, Alisia Stander, Tara’s sister, who had been there at the press conferences and had driven from Ohio to stand beside the sheriff when the news came in about what was in the garage.
She was the person left standing closest to those two children when everything else collapsed.
She took them home.
She raised them.
Neighbors and relatives described Alicia as someone who did what needed doing [music] without public announcement.
The children were given a home and a family in the aftermath of an act that had taken everything they were supposed to [music] have.
They grew up in Chiller Coffee away from Washington Township, away from the house, away from the park.
[music] By the time journalists checked in on the family in the years that followed, Lindsay and Ian were described as thriving.
That word is used with care in this context.
What [music] it means practically is that they survived what they were handed and built lives beyond it.
And that is a genuine thing.
In 2008, [music] Steven Grant’s father, William Allen Grant, was found dead in Kapak, Michigan from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It was June 13th, 2008.
Reports indicated he had been attempting to establish some kind of visitation with the two grandchildren in Ohio.
He had not succeeded.
His son had killed the children’s mother and disposed of her remains in a public park in Shelby Township.
[music] Whatever case could be made for maintaining a grandparent relationship across that fact, [music] it had not been made successfully before William Grant died.
Verina Deer returned to [music] Germany.
She gave interviews from there.
She told the Oakland press that Steven Grant had betrayed her, that she had believed [music] every single word he had told her, that she had had no reason to doubt him, that everything was a lie.
She had been 19 years old in that house.
She had been living with a family in a country where she had no independent support network in a relationship with the man of the household that he had engineered and that [music] she had trusted.
She said the word betrayed.
The investigators had had lengthy conversations with her about what she knew and when.
She was described in the public record as having been manipulated by a man who was experienced in the practice of managing what other people believed about him.
The case [clears throat] attracted sustained national media attention in a way that domestic homicide cases do when the subject of the investigation is visible and available and performs well on camera.
It was covered on Larry King Live.
It was covered on Court TV.
It was subsequently featured in episodes of Investigation Discoveries Scorned Love Kills and Betrayed Beware the Opair and in an episode of the Biography Channels Kasanova Killers.
Two books were written about it.
Detroit news reporters George Hunter [music] and Melissa Prey wrote Limb from Limb, which drew on jailhouse access to Steven Grant.
A second book, A Slaying in the Suburbs: The Tara Grant Murder, drew on multiple in-person visits to Grant at the Correctional Facility.
He gave interviews, [music] he was still engaging with the outside world in the attenuated way available to him, still watching the local news from his cell.
According to people who have kept track of him, still present in whatever way a man [music] without power or control or anyone left to manipulate, can be present in a story the world has largely moved on from.
In Washington Township, the house was eventually sold.
The neighbors in a neighborhood that had tried for years to put the case behind it were doing what people in such neighborhoods eventually managed to do, continuing.
The park is still there.
Stony Creek Metrop Park still hosts its hikers and snowmoilers and dog walkers and cross-country skiers in the winter.
The park [music] that Steven Grant talked about so warmly, so naturally in every interview.
The park the family loved.
The park he ran in.
The park that was the main reason they bought the house [music] is a public preserve of several thousand acres in Shelby Township.
And it is still there and people still use it.
And most of them know what happened there in the winter of 2007 because this is Mcome County and this is a case that did not become small.
Every September in Mochum County there is an event called Tara’s walk.
It is a 5 km walk held in Tara Grant’s memory and in support of domestic abuse programs in the county.
People turn out in numbers.
Tara’s children have been involved in it.
It was established by people who knew her and by people who never met her but understood what her case represented.
And it has run every year since.
A woman who left notes for her kids before every business trip is remembered every autumn in the county where she was killed.
The Detroit Institute of Arts is still on Woodward Avenue in Midtown Detroit in the building that has held its collection through everything the city went through over the 20th century and into the 21st.
The steps where Steven Grant proposed [music] to Tara Grant are still there.
Whatever Tara felt on those steps in whatever year that was, the feeling was real and the moment was real and the yes, she said was hers.
The marriage, the children were hers.
The career and the art and the notes before the trips and the sister who took the children to Ohio, all of it was real.
The cover story was not.
The cover story was 5 days of construction and three weeks of performance and a yellow truck driving 225 mi north toward cold that was going to finish him before the investigators arrived.
The cover story was the dark car at the curb and the overheard phone call with its single quoted line refined over 5 days until it was exactly right.
The cover story was every television appearance, every accusation of police harassment from a man communicating with investigators by facts, every warm mention of the park the family loved, every managed measure of grief calibrated for the camera.
The cover story was the reporter on route to the house on the morning of the warrant.
Come now, come to the garage.
Come stand near what is in the garage.
because proximity to the crime scene through a journalist felt in the logic of a man who had been performing for 3 weeks like something that might help.
The cover story ended when a detective noticed a storage bin in a garage that had not been there 2 weeks earlier and opened it.
After that, there was only the park and the snow and the 11 pieces of a woman whose autopsy showed she had fought before she died, [music] and the truck driving north, and the man in the cold without his clothes, and the hospital bed, and the lengthy clearing confession, and the three words from the judge at sentencing, [music] demonic, barbaric, dishonest.
Three words that are each accurate, and each insufficient on their own, which is why all three are required.
50 to 80 years.
March 3rd, 2057.
At the earliest, Tara Lynn Grant was 34 years old.
She graduated from Michigan State University.
She built a career that took her to Puerto Rico [music] and to project sites across the country and to the offices of a major engineering firm in Troy, Michigan.
She loved art.
She left notes for her children before every business trip so they would know they were loved.
She came home on February 9th, 2007 from a trip to Puerto Rico and she did not leave again.
Her sister raised her children in Ohio.
Her name is on a walk in Meum County every September and the man who stood in front of the cameras on Valentine’s Day 2007, looking frightened, looking abandoned, looking like a husband the world had done wrong is in a cell in Western Michigan watching the local news.
He has no power.
He has no audience.
He has no store.
