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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 durkis, lived in and looked after them because of tara's hectic travel schedule.
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.
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
sheriff mark hackel announced to the public they were going to search the sprawling park out by the grant home over the weekend. >> we realized the public was in tune to this case. they really wanted to know what was going on. we needed their help. >> someone out there listening to the sheriff was a dental hygienist, a person who adopted the narrow two-lane road that passed her house for winter cleanup chores. but her time in the case of the missing tara grant hadn't arrived. not just yet. coming up, cameras are rolling as police make a horrifying discovery inside grant's house. while outside, an escape. how angry are you? >> i'm very. i'm going to get him. i'm going to go find him. >> when "the valentine's day mystery" continues. daddy, come in the water!
under fallen tree limbs, down in hollows. grant had cut his wife into 14 pieces. police found 11 parts marked by the red dots in this aerial photo, but they never did recover all of the remains. animals had gotten there first, they said. with his client in custody and the man's wife in pieces, stephen grant's lawyer announced he was no longer representing mr. mom. grant himself was in a northern michigan hospital under guard recovering from exposure when he asked if he could talk to detective kozlowski. the detective got on the line and after a few seconds, grant made a surprising proposal. >> come up, we'll talk. >> come on up, we'll talk? >> yep, me and you. >> five hours later kozlowski and detective mclean, the two who made the original house call on grant, were mirandizing the husband in his hospital bed, after pressing record on their tape machine. >> do you, in fact, understand that you are, in fact, under arrest right now? >> right.
>> 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 equipped to take care of herself on the road. maybe she was just cooling off somewhere after a heated confrontation.
helicopter was called to the scene to reel in grant and deliver him to a hospital. he may have been exhausted, but stephen grant still hadn't tired of talking about himself. he was about to tell everything. coming up, a strange confession caught on tape. >> and then i drank more whisky and then i just told myself, look, if you don't do this, you're going to prison for the rest of your life. >> when the "valentine's day mystery" continues. ins and a bus rider. the "i'll sleep when it's done" academic. for 80 years, we've been inspired by you. and we've been honored to walk with you to help you get where you want to be. ♪ because your moment is now. let nothing stand in your way. learn more at keller.edu.
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
that and the determination that it was human blood in the baggie were the findings they needed to get a search warrant. so that gave you probable cause to go to grant's house? >> yes. >> and do a proper search? >> yes. >> two days later at 5:00 p.m. on friday, march 2nd, detectives and crime scene techs from the sheriff's department arrived to process the grant's home but with modest expectations. after all, tara has been missing for three weeks already. but now events tumbled quickly and we can see it in almost documentary realtime, because reporting crews from the nbc station, wdiv-tv are also on the scene. >> he's getting out of the car. he's getting out of the car. >> a camera rolls as grant is taken from his vehicle and patted down. >> they're patting him down. wait, wait. >> significantly, he has not been placed under arrest. >> and at that point we didn't have probable cause to arrest mr. grant. >> the other crew, meanwhile, is getting ready to set up for an interview.