Officials in Pennsylvania offered a $5,000 reward for information in the cold case of a missing prosecutor who vanished under mysterious circumstances more than 18 years ago.
Veteran prosecutor Ray Gricar, 59, was just months away from retiring as the Centre County district attorney when he disappeared on April 15, 2005, according to the Pennsylvania Crime Stoppers.
Gricar had told his girlfriend he planned to drive on Route 192 toward Lewisburg, Pa. His red Mini Cooper was found near the Susquehanna River the following day.
In an odd twist, Gricar’s brother, Roy J. Gricar, disappeared from Dayton, Ohio, in May 1996. Roy Gricar’s body was later pulled from the Great Miami River, and his death was eventually ruled a suicide.
Although investigators considered the possibility that Ray Gricar also took his own life, there is no evidence to suggest that he had mental health struggles, Crime Stoppers said.
The scene where Ray Gricar’s Mini Cooper was found did not suggest foul play, but family members were confused by the cigarette ashes inside.
Ray Gricar did not smoke, and his loved ones claimed he would not allow someone else to smoke in his vehicle.
Gricar’s county-issued laptop was discovered under the Route 45 bridge with its hard drive physically ejected in July 2005, PennLive.com reported.
The hard drive was found upstream two months later.
The discovery also led investigators to the information that Gricar had purchased software to clear the hard drive, and even made internet searches like “how to wreck a hard drive,” the outlet said.
Although the retrieved hard drive was irreparably damaged by water and silt, the news contributed to rumors that the high-powered attorney’s disappearance stemmed from one of his cases.
One early subject of speculation was Taji “Verbal” Lee, who was sent down by Centre County as part of massive heroin bust weeks before Gricar vanished, PennLive.com noted.
Gricar’s disappearance was also compared to the unsolved 2003 death of Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Luna, a drug investigator who was found dead in a Lancaster County creek.
Then, in 2011, the public learned that Gricar declined to prosecute disgraced former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky for child sexual abuse in 1998.
But while Gricar’s colleague, former Montour County District Attorney Bob Buehner, believes Gricar was killed, he does not think the Sandusky case is involved.
“Who in the Sandusky case would have the motive to do any harm to Ray Gricar?” he told PennLive.come in 2015.
“Gricar might have been the best witness [for Sandusky] had he been alive … and any victim probably wasn’t old enough, I don’t think, to be abducting the DA and making him disappear.”
Gricar’s daughter, Lara, and his longtime girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, both passed polygraph tests. Still, Buehner hinted that family history may play a role in the case.
“Ray never believed his brother committed suicide. The most important reason was that he thought his brother would never orphan his two sons, Ray’s nephews,” he explained to the outlet.
Ray Gricar has not used his email, cellphone, bank accounts or credit cards since he vanished, Crime Stoppers said.
He was declared legally dead in 2011.
