The Case of the Missing D.A.

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Speaker 5 The clues are tantalizing:

Speaker 7 A sporty red car.

Speaker 3 A speck of cigarette ash.

Speaker 8 A battered hard drive.

Speaker 9 It is a mystery. It absolutely is a mystery.

Speaker 3 But what do these clues say about the sudden disappearance of the district attorney who left them behind?

Speaker 13 It's baffling. It's confusing.
And perplexing. It's all of those things.

Speaker 15 His name is Ray Griecar.

Speaker 11 When he vanished in 2005, it was a big story.

Speaker 18 A prosecutor in Pennsylvania who who vanished on Friday is still missing.

Speaker 11 Now, Ray's story is linked to an even bigger one.

Speaker 21 Stunning allegations of sexual child abuse.

Speaker 23 One of the most storied names in college sports is enveloped in scandal.

Speaker 3 Because seven years before he went missing, Ray Guicar decided not to prosecute Jerry Sandusky for the first known allegation of child sex abuse against him.

Speaker 28 Now, some are asking whether that Sandusky case had anything to do with the DA's disappearance.

Speaker 23 For anyone to think there is no relationship is the epitome of naivete.

Speaker 5 Others say, no way.

Speaker 13 Eliminating Ray doesn't eliminate the problem for anybody.

Speaker 5 Ever since the Sandusky scandal broke, Dateline has been on the ground, analyzing the clues, digging into the case, and talking to those who knew the DA from Center County.

Speaker 11 There are several scenarios for Griekar's disappearance.

Speaker 27 We'll look for answers.

Speaker 19 What really happened to Ray Griecar?

Speaker 33 Ray, I love you very much, and I miss you.

Speaker 11 He was the district attorney in Pennsylvania's Center County, working in the postcard pretty town of Belfont.

Speaker 37 Penn State is just down the road.

Speaker 14 It's a powerful presence in this central Pennsylvania neighborhood.

Speaker 7 Back in April 2005, Ray Griecar had served the better part of five terms and racked up a stellar reputation.

Speaker 39 But it's the nature of the job that, you know, you do difficult things, you make difficult choices.

Speaker 13 He was the most serious prosecutor I've ever met.

Speaker 17 Bob Buener was Ray's friend.

Speaker 20 Buener was the DA in neighboring Montour County.

Speaker 17 He met Ray Griecar in the 90s, and over the years, the two traded shop talk whenever they could.

Speaker 10 Did he go with his gut?

Speaker 44 Did he shoot from the hip, or was he like, punch all the right buttons and then get to the answer?

Speaker 13 He was the guy that always had the next question. What about this? Did you consider that? He was the most serious guy, most ethical guy.

Speaker 47 Methodical, meticulous, fearless, too.

Speaker 13 He didn't care who the person was he prosecuted. He prosecuted some very high-profile cases that made national news in Little Center County in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 13 It didn't bother him who the person was. It was what they did that counted.

Speaker 49 In the spring of 2005, everything everything seemed to be going Ray Griecar's way.

Speaker 30 He was in love.

Speaker 35 After two divorces, he had moved in with his longtime girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, and he seemed happy at last.

Speaker 34 I think for both of us,

Speaker 34 we finally found our soulmate. We found the person who was perfect.

Speaker 51 Investigators say he had no health problems, no money worries.

Speaker 10 And he was close to his only child, 27-year-old Laura. She lived in Washington state at the time, but the two stayed in touch by phone.

Speaker 53 I spoke to my dad often.

Speaker 53 I would say three to four times a week.

Speaker 9 We were in pretty regular contact.

Speaker 5 In that spring of 2005, Ray was 59, just eight months away from retirement, and he was ready for it.

Speaker 3 He was already starting to cut back on his workload.

Speaker 34 We were going to drive across the country, take our time,

Speaker 34 visit the national parks, and end up on the the West Coast visiting his daughter.

Speaker 5 The trip never happened.

Speaker 38 On April 14th, Lara had a conversation with her father that she'll never forget.

Speaker 53 The conversation was, hey, dad, just called to say hi and I love you. I said, I have this exam.
And he said, you know, I love you too. And he said, I'm sure you're going to do great on the exam.

Speaker 53 You always do. You're just like your mom.

Speaker 11 The next day, April 15th, Ray woke up and told Patty he was going to play hookie.

Speaker 12 She wasn't surprised.

Speaker 5 He'd done it before.

Speaker 34 I said, it's time to get up. And he said, I don't think I'm going to go to work today.
I think I'm going to take today off.

Speaker 34 I said, fine, good for you.

Speaker 7 Patty went to work.

Speaker 5 She was a clerk in Ray's office.

Speaker 43 Ray called about 11.30 that morning.

Speaker 20 He told her he'd taken his fun little mini for a spin on the country roads near their home.

Speaker 19 He often did that.

Speaker 8 He loved to go for long drives.

Speaker 54 So she thought nothing of it.

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 34 he said, you know, I'm driving down 192 and I won't be able to to come home. I said, fine, no problem.
He said, I love you.

Speaker 34 And I said, I love you too.

Speaker 34 And we terminated the phone call.

Speaker 38 It was their last conversation.

Speaker 55 When Patty got home from work that night, there was no sign of Ray.

Speaker 6 She went to the gym.

Speaker 7 When she got back, he still wasn't home.

Speaker 24 She called his cell phone. The calls went straight to voicemail.

Speaker 17 For three hours, she dialed and re-dialed the number.

Speaker 55 Nothing but voicemail.

Speaker 20 Finally, frantic, she called 911.

Speaker 34 And to me, it was an emergency. This is not like him, it's unusual behavior.
You know, they know who I am, they know who Ray is.

Speaker 34 So when I call to report, you know, Ray is not home, this is not like him, it's unusual behavior.

Speaker 34 They quickly responded.

Speaker 8 Ray Greedcar was gone.

Speaker 10 Gone without warning.

Speaker 35 The Belfont Police Department put out a description of him and his red mini.

Speaker 5 The hunt for a missing DA was underway.

Speaker 11 Hattie Fornicola woke up on Saturday, April 16, 2005 and felt like she was trapped in a bad dream.

Speaker 11 Ray Griecar, her live-in boyfriend and the DA of Pennsylvania Center County, hadn't come home the night before, and he was still missing.

Speaker 34 I knew it wasn't good that Ray still hadn't been located.

Speaker 34 So then we had to make a decision about calling his daughter.

Speaker 5 As Patty told Dateline in 2006, she decided to make that call to Lara, then a college student in Washington State.

Speaker 53 You know, your gut tells you a lot of things. I just knew that something happened.
My gut said is it was bad.

Speaker 12 Ray's friend, Bob Buner, was bewildered when he heard the news.

Speaker 13 I absolutely did not know what to make of it at all. It was very confusing.
You know, DAs don't go missing.

Speaker 12 Former investigator Darrell Zaghani still remembers that morning.

Speaker 48 We just handled it as a missing person, but a highly significant missing person.

Speaker 55 Darrell has now retired from the Belfont Police Force, but back then, he was the lead investigator on the case.

Speaker 45 I assume alarm bells are ringing loudly when the DA

Speaker 48 is missing. You get a little concerned.

Speaker 48 We figured that there's a much better chance that there's foul play involved than the guy who just doesn't come home because he's been out at the bars all night.

Speaker 25 And that was just because you knew his character?

Speaker 5 Well, we knew what Ray had done all his life.

Speaker 48 I mean, he had prosecuted homicides and rape for years, and then he prosecuted here and then became our DA.

Speaker 12 Foul play was only one possibility.

Speaker 44 In those first hours after Ray went missing, the Belfont police say they considered several others.

Speaker 43 They ordered an aerial search of the nearby roads to look for the bright red mini, thinking Ray may have had an accident.

Speaker 49 They ordered other searches, too.

Speaker 20 They knew Ray may have gone solo somewhere.

Speaker 55 Turns out he'd done that before.

Speaker 45 He once took off to a Cleveland Indians game.

Speaker 48 He didn't go to this one because we called Cleveland and we had the stadium police looking for him.

Speaker 45 Did you potentially lose time in this investigation because of a

Speaker 45 default position that he's going to turn up here soon, that there's a reasonable explanation?

Speaker 48 No, we worked on it from the minute we decided we were going after this. This was the missing person.
It was constant go, go, go.

Speaker 6 Investigators tracked Ray's movements before he vanished and found the last known pictures of him alive on his way to the office the evening before he disappeared.

Speaker 5 It seemed routine enough, and it took them nowhere.

Speaker 34 One of America's most intriguing mysteries.

Speaker 11 On day two, investigators caught a huge break.

Speaker 61 Ray's mini was discovered in a parking lot by an antiques mall called the Street of Shops in the nearby town of Lewisburg.

Speaker 10 Ray had visited the antique stores there in the past.

Speaker 5 Now, his car was sealed up tight and locked.

Speaker 10 His cell phone was inside.

Speaker 58 But there was no sign of Ray.

Speaker 34 I was glad that it was found, not for the car, but thinking that maybe there would be a clue.

Speaker 5 There were clues, all right.

Speaker 27 Real puzzlers.

Speaker 48 When they opened up the vehicle, the first initial thing that struck them was a strong odor of tobacco in the car. Ray was not a smoker, and he definitely would never let anybody smoke in his car.

Speaker 60 There was more.

Speaker 5 Inside the car, a speck of ash on the passenger side.

Speaker 20 How to explain that in the car of a passionate non-smoker?

Speaker 48 So it would indicate to us that somebody had either been in that car smoking or at least was leaning into the car, possibly talking to Ray, holding a cigarette.

Speaker 46 Investigators found cigarette butts on the ground and sent them off for DNA testing. Nothing there.
There was no sign of a struggle or foul play and not a bloodstain in sight.

Speaker 37 Nothing to indicate that a crime had occurred in or near the car.

Speaker 33 What still baffles me in all of this is basically lack of a crime scene.

Speaker 29 Yolanda McClary was a crime scene investigator and at the time, an NBC News consultant.

Speaker 33 I mean a crime scene at least helps tell a story. Something where you can prove or disprove witness statements, testimonies, through your crime scene, through evidence.

Speaker 33 There isn't a crime scene.

Speaker 45 But how many times have we seen crimes where someone willingly goes away with the person that ultimately kills them? And there's no crime scene.

Speaker 33 Correct. If you willingly go, there is no crime scene.
It's just the last place that you were seen.

Speaker 16 But if the car itself gave investigators little to go on, its location in Lewisburg, 60 miles from Greg Carr's home, did.

Speaker 45 That shifted the investigation to Lewisburg at that point.

Speaker 48 We knew he was definitely there then. At least the car had been there.
So we immediately went down and we started pounding doors and talking to people.

Speaker 48 And then we got confirmation from people in some of the businesses in that area who had actually seen Ray. And they saw him there for several hours throughout the day.

Speaker 40 They began building a timeline of Ray's movements in Louisburg.

Speaker 29 But it wasn't easy because there was another Minnie Cooper owner in town that day.

Speaker 17 Sean Weaver was the chief of Belfont Police Department.

Speaker 29 He joined the force shortly after Ray disappeared, but he says he knows the investigation inside out.

Speaker 63 So there was a lot of sightings of another individual. We later found out who he was.
He was in a restaurant eating with a woman, but it wasn't Ray, it was another.

Speaker 63 Guy that has a Mini Cooper.

Speaker 12 It was a dead end.

Speaker 15 Tony Griecar is Ray's nephew.

Speaker 20 Tony lived in Dayton, Ohio.

Speaker 5 As soon as he heard his uncle was missing, he got in his car, collected his brother, and began driving to Pennsylvania.

Speaker 62 At the time, we thought we need to get there as quick as we can to see

Speaker 45 what kind of assistance we can provide.

Speaker 10 But when Tony and his brother got to Lewisburg and saw the scene where Ray's car was found, they were stunned.

Speaker 3 Here we go again.

Speaker 62 That was the exact first thought.

Speaker 15 The investigation into Ray Griecar's disappearance was about to take a whole new turn.

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Speaker 44 When Tony Griecar drove into Lewisburg, Pennsylvania back in April 2005, he did a double take.

Speaker 5 Tony's uncle, Ray, had disappeared, and the cops had just located Ray's abandoned car in a Lewisburg parking lot near a bridge over a river.

Speaker 17 The scene took Tony straight back to a bad place in his past.

Speaker 62 To say that it was an eerie parallel would be the understatement of the century.

Speaker 62 It was the exact same thing.

Speaker 5 Nine years earlier, Tony's father, Ray's brother, had abandoned his car by a park near a bridge over a river.

Speaker 31 His body was discovered in the river in Dayton, Ohio, a few days later.

Speaker 5 The coroner ruled it a suicide. Now, this.

Speaker 62 Geographically, everything lays out the exact same,

Speaker 62 you know, with a car, a park, a bridge, a river.

Speaker 27 Tony drew the logical conclusion about his uncle Ray.

Speaker 45 Your thought was suicide?

Speaker 62 I think my first words, probably to the investigators, were he's probably in the river.

Speaker 45 When your uncle went missing, of course, the connections with your father started to be made.

Speaker 20 Was your father depressed?

Speaker 62 Yeah, he fought depression for,

Speaker 7 by what I could gather, for 20-plus years.

Speaker 12 And depression can run in families. Patty remembered that Ray did seem preoccupied before he vanished.

Speaker 44 She put that down to work.

Speaker 5 She did recall that he'd been napping a lot. She'd even asked him about it.

Speaker 34 The weekend before he disappeared, I said,

Speaker 34 I want you to promise me something.

Speaker 34 He said, sure, what?

Speaker 34 And I said, if you continue to be tired, will you please call your doctor?

Speaker 34 And he said,

Speaker 34 you know,

Speaker 34 work frequently makes me tired.

Speaker 34 And I came back at him with, in the three years we lived together, I've never seen you nap so much at lunchtime and then after work.

Speaker 11 But when investigators went through Ray's medical records, they found nothing to indicate he'd been treated for depression.

Speaker 54 Nothing at all.

Speaker 15 In fact, Ray Griecar seemed fit and healthy.

Speaker 7 But if the body was in the Susquehanna River, investigators were determined to find it.

Speaker 35 They brought in helicopters, rescue divers.

Speaker 11 There was even a cadaver-sniffing dog on a boat.

Speaker 50 Although the river could run shallow by that bridge, in the spring of 2005, Tony says the water level was high.

Speaker 62 There were spring rains as well as melt.

Speaker 62 So the water was several feet

Speaker 62 higher.

Speaker 10 Belfont police chief at the time, Sean Weaver, said conditions were favorable for finding a body.

Speaker 63 At the time, they could see right to the bottom of the river. It was like looking through clear water.

Speaker 63 It's pretty much a

Speaker 63 the bottom of the river is a flat rock, and you could see it very easily from the sky.

Speaker 38 But nobody turned up.

Speaker 20 And this was the most confounding question of all.

Speaker 10 If he had jumped off the bridge, like his brother, then where was it?

Speaker 33 The biggest thing you have in a suicide is a body. The body helps tell you what really happened here, or is it even feasible this happened?

Speaker 33 I mean, we also know that sometimes things are staged to look like a suicide when in reality it's a homicide.

Speaker 33 So a body is something that will give you those clues and the means by which the suicide occurred. But in this case, where's the body?

Speaker 5 The river wasn't telling them.

Speaker 43 But Darrell Zagani, then the lead investigator with the Belfont police, came up with one answer.

Speaker 45 So it is possible a body wouldn't be found

Speaker 5 in that river.

Speaker 48 It's possible. I mean, basically, what happens is when you get into the Susquehanna, it ultimately ends up in the Chesapeake.

Speaker 48 But if Ray would have gone into the water,

Speaker 48 the possibility that he got down to what they call the fiber dam

Speaker 48 down the river Loay. The water just hits the dam and it grinds around.
He could have got wedged down in there underneath and just been thrown to pieces, unfortunately.

Speaker 11 Even as the river search was underway, the police continued to canvas the street of shops and the area nearby.

Speaker 58 It was frustrating.

Speaker 12 Lewisburg is a college town, home to Bucknell University.

Speaker 35 And the weekend Ray vanished, there were Bucknell parents in town.

Speaker 5 To Tony, every other dad looked like his uncle Ray.

Speaker 62 Honestly, I couldn't walk through Bucknell that weekend without seeing 20 guys that looked like him.

Speaker 62 Upper middle class Caucasian male wearing a blue Eddie Bauer fleece.

Speaker 11 But investigator Zaghani wouldn't let it go.

Speaker 48 I mean, I probably put in

Speaker 48 16, 17 hour days at times. You know, just went home to sleep for a little while and then came back out and we're going at it again

Speaker 3 going at it and getting lucky with a promising new lead investigators came up with several credible sightings of ray in louisburg the day he disappeared one got their attention ray had been seen with a dark-haired woman in the street of shops We were hoping that maybe this was just a fling Ray was on or something.

Speaker 48 He connected up with another woman and decided to spend the weekend at a hotel or something.

Speaker 45 As a cop, you'd seen that before. That happens.

Speaker 48 Yeah, we know it happens. Never seen it it with Ray or anything, but, you know, that's what we started to think.
Okay,

Speaker 48 he may be hooked up with this lady and, you know, he just felt bad, didn't want to call Patty.

Speaker 36 A fling.

Speaker 5 Where would that hunch take them?

Speaker 5 Not long after Pennsylvania DA Ray Griecar went missing, investigators had a new lead.

Speaker 33 Investigators now said that they're looking for a woman.

Speaker 25 Ray had been seen with a dark-haired woman in a shop in Louisburg.

Speaker 11 At first, investigator Darrell Zagati wondered if maybe Ray had had a fling.

Speaker 45 Did you check hotel and motel records to find out if a couple had stayed in the Louisburg area around that time?

Speaker 5 We sent troopers out.

Speaker 48 did a hotel-by-hotel search, talked to the desk clerks. Car registrations were checked, descriptions of the female that he was seen talking to were presented, Ray's pictures was presented.

Speaker 37 But they came up empty.

Speaker 43 And when they canvassed nearby train and bus stations to see if anyone matching the couple's description had left town, they came up empty again.

Speaker 5 So they began asking, how likely was it that Ray Griecar, a standout DA, a guy who seemed happy in love at last, would run off with another woman? Ray's nephew Tony didn't buy it.

Speaker 62 He wasn't married, so what would the point be of running off with a mystery woman?

Speaker 12 And perhaps not unexpectedly, Ray's live-in girlfriend didn't buy it either.

Speaker 34 I know that if Ray did not want to be in this relationship with me, he would tell me. I know that.

Speaker 12 As investigators developed the lead, they too came to believe that Ray was not romancing the mystery woman.

Speaker 43 It didn't jive with what they were hearing, and what they were hearing was plenty mysterious.

Speaker 30 Were there multiple witnesses to Griekar and this woman?

Speaker 48 There were people in the street of shops that saw Ray with this lady walking together, talking.

Speaker 48 They would separate, go into a different little shop, come back out, start to meet up, walk together, sometimes go into a shop together, come back out, and then ultimately he just didn't see them anymore.

Speaker 48 It's a very big place.

Speaker 35 Investigators had a slew of questions for starters the woman's identity what was it that she and ray were talking about and was she there to lure ray into a trap or was she helping him start a new life yolanda mcclary then a consultant for nbc news said the answers would be pure gold i think she could answer some questions here as to

Speaker 33 Was it a meet set up that went wrong for Ray being the foul play? Or

Speaker 33 was it someone who had information for him and maybe it still went wrong?

Speaker 45 Or just someone he met casually, very innocently, but who could at least give us some sense of his state of mind?

Speaker 33 Absolutely. I mean, they said it didn't seem like they were intimate, but at least knew each other the way they were kind of talking and strolling.

Speaker 33 I'm just thinking maybe she could shed a little bit of light as to what happened in those last few moments.

Speaker 20 Investigators worked hard to track the woman down.

Speaker 10 They weren't successful, and some began wondering how credible the sighting was.

Speaker 35 As weeks stretched into months, the case of the missing DA was stalled.

Speaker 51 Then, in the summer of 2005, the river surprised them all.

Speaker 5 It gave up a huge clue.

Speaker 18 A cold case may have just gotten a boost with a very, with a discovery by two fishermen.

Speaker 32 The fishermen saw something glinting in the shallow water.

Speaker 27 Turned out, it was a laptop.

Speaker 48 They'd go, well, what's that? And they started looking at it and thought, hey, it looks like a computer. And they pulled it out and they got it to us.

Speaker 10 It was Ray's work laptop issued by the county.

Speaker 11 Investigators' excitement quickly turned to frustration because the hard drive was missing from it.

Speaker 5 Instead of answering investigators' questions, the laptop just gave them more.

Speaker 44 Why did Ray have his work laptop with him if he was playing hookie?

Speaker 5 Where was the hard drive? And why was it missing?

Speaker 51 They were still mulling that over when the river surprised them again and gave it up.

Speaker 5 A mother and her child saw it lying in the riverbed.

Speaker 45 When that hard drive was found, was your first thought that this is going to explain our mystery?

Speaker 48 We thought this is going to do it. This is going to tell us what's going on.

Speaker 30 It wasn't to be.

Speaker 11 Forensic computer experts told them they couldn't retrieve any data.

Speaker 12 The hard drive was just too damaged.

Speaker 45 When you found out that nothing could be recovered, Tell me your reaction.

Speaker 48 Very upset. It was like this great big carrot hanging there, you know, and you reach for it and you just just about have it and it's gone.
There's nothing there.

Speaker 6 Later, the hard drive was analyzed at the same lab that recovered data from the hard drive in the space shuttle Columbia,

Speaker 11 which disintegrated in 2003.

Speaker 7 It was another dead end.

Speaker 5 Still, the fact that the hard drive had been removed from the laptop only added to the mystery.

Speaker 43 Tony recognized that early on.

Speaker 45 When you heard about the laptop and the hard drive found separately, did did that change your thinking?

Speaker 62 When I was called in by the investigators and said, hey, Tony, we found the laptop. And I said, great.
And they said, but there's no hard drive. That gave me pause.

Speaker 62 Anybody's going to look at that and say, wait a minute, that wasn't an accidental thing.

Speaker 20 The mystery of the missing DA was now tightly focused on that damaged hard drive.

Speaker 51 Had it been deliberately removed from the laptop and destroyed?

Speaker 30 Was Ray's disappearance linked to something on it?

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Speaker 11 One year after Ray Greycar vanished without a trace, the man who took his place as district attorney of Pennsylvania Center County held a news conference.

Speaker 68 While leads grow cold, the interest of law enforcement, my interest, just as the public interest, will not grow cold.

Speaker 41 Ray's live-in girlfriend, Patty, made it clear she wasn't giving up either.

Speaker 57 Always, I can't make any sense of

Speaker 57 any of it either. I mean,

Speaker 57 one day it might be one scenario, one day it might be the other, but I've never given up hope.

Speaker 57 It helps me go on.

Speaker 35 But hope and the hard facts didn't seem to go together.

Speaker 11 Investigators had no body and precious little evidence.

Speaker 28 And their trophy find, the battered hard drive, wasn't giving anything up.

Speaker 62 You know, it's like everything else. It's been a roller coaster.

Speaker 5 Tony Griecar, Ray's nephew, had questions about that hard drive.

Speaker 27 It was recovered separately from the laptop, about 100 yards away.

Speaker 10 Tony knew it would take some doing to remove it from the laptop.

Speaker 12 He believes it was no accident.

Speaker 62 I know computers, especially laptops, and there's no way that just by going in the river that that hard drive is coming out on its own.

Speaker 62 I had a set screw and then a slide switch of sorts to release it.

Speaker 41 But why would Ray yank it out?

Speaker 11 Investigators have learned that before he disappeared, Ray was asking around the office about how to erase a hard drive.

Speaker 35 And on internet searches at home, he was asking how to wreck a hard drive.

Speaker 17 But Ray's friend, Bob Buener, said there could be a simple explanation for that. Buener spoke to Dateline shortly before he retired as a DA.

Speaker 13 As I'm ending my career now,

Speaker 13 Frankly, I'm thinking about the same thing. I got lots of stuff on that hard drive.
Yeah, I'd probably like to get rid of it. I don't have any need for it.

Speaker 12 And after all, why would Ray drive 60 miles to dump a hard drive in the river when he could dispose of it closer to home?

Speaker 12 But if Ray didn't remove the hard drive, then someone else apparently did.

Speaker 11 Maybe investigators speculated there was something incriminating on it.

Speaker 45 You'd really like to know what's on that hard drive.

Speaker 63 We think that that hard drive had information on there that it would maybe lead us to one of the theories.

Speaker 63 A reason why

Speaker 63 somebody would want him dead, why he would jump in the river, or why he wanted to leave.

Speaker 36 Three theories.

Speaker 27 That's what investigators were left with to explain what happened to Ray Griecar.

Speaker 45 Does your department lean in any particular direction?

Speaker 9 No, actually, we don't.

Speaker 63 And it's hard because we all have our personal thoughts on the case. Everyone who's ever looked at the case has their own theory.

Speaker 63 personal theory, how crazy it might be.

Speaker 12 One theory is that Ray disappeared because because he wanted to.

Speaker 5 He simply walked away.

Speaker 17 If so, that would require serious planning.

Speaker 35 Yolanda McClary, then a consultant for NBC News.

Speaker 40 Money would have to move, arrangements would have to be made.

Speaker 45 You'd have to be a pretty sharp cookie to hide that kind of plotting, wouldn't you?

Speaker 33 Whatever happened here is well planned out.

Speaker 5 By somebody.

Speaker 33 By somebody, whether it's Ray or somebody else.

Speaker 50 But financial investigators from the FBI could find no evidence that Ray was planning to move money.

Speaker 6 There was nothing to indicate that Ray was planning to walk out of his very successful life.

Speaker 33 Here's even the biggest thing. What is the motive behind that? Why would you just walk away from your life? Anybody.
I mean, he was close to his daughter.

Speaker 33 He had a girlfriend that he had no issues with. What is this all based on?

Speaker 29 Here was a case.

Speaker 45 He was planning retirement, planning travel after retirement. So does that make that even less likely that someone would set all this into motion and then just disappear?

Speaker 33 I find it less likely, yes. It doesn't make sense in his life.

Speaker 12 Tony Griecar agrees.

Speaker 62 There's no path that the investigators have gone down where they can say, oh, yeah, this is why it walked away.

Speaker 43 If Ray Griecar didn't walk away and assume a new identity, did he die by suicide, like his brother?

Speaker 10 This is a man that loved his daughter,

Speaker 45 loved his girlfriend. Does it make sense that he would take his own life and not leave some sort of explanation, a message to them?

Speaker 33 I would say no. It makes no sense to me.

Speaker 55 And without without a body, there's no way to be sure.

Speaker 36 That leaves one last theory.

Speaker 5 Murder.

Speaker 11 Investigator Darrell Zagani says that as a prosecutor, Griekar had put some dangerous people behind bars.

Speaker 48 Who knows who got out of jail 20 years ago that's still holding a grudge against Ray?

Speaker 28 Someone who may have wanted to get the straight arrow DA out of the way.

Speaker 42 Someone who may have lured Ray into a trap.

Speaker 45 I mean, the first thing that most of us think of when you hear of a prosecutor going missing under strange circumstances, that this could be linked to something he was working on, somebody who wanted payback.

Speaker 5 Sure.

Speaker 60 To me, that would be the most plausible thing.

Speaker 29 Tony hadn't conclusively settled on the foul play theory, but D.A.

Speaker 5 Bob Buener had.

Speaker 13 I've always felt,

Speaker 13 maybe not initially, but I always felt Several months later when all the facts started coming out that the only conclusion left was foul play. And that's an awful thing to imagine.

Speaker 13 It was the one thing I didn't want to think of.

Speaker 12 But if it was foul play, there were no credible suspects.

Speaker 10 And so over time, the Ray Griecar case went cold.

Speaker 11 In the summer of 2011, Griecar's daughter, Laura, petitioned the courts to have her father declared legally dead.

Speaker 17 That's where things stood for about six months until the case of the missing DA came roaring back to life

Speaker 24 at Penn State University.

Speaker 41 An awful story.

Speaker 5 It broke big in November of 2011.

Speaker 21 Former Penn State football coach indicted on child sex abuse charges.

Speaker 17 The story of the initial 40 child abuse charges against Jerry Sandusky.

Speaker 56 NBC News exclusive former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky speaks out.

Speaker 3 A grand jury spent more than two years investigating the accusations of eight alleged victims.

Speaker 5 And there it was in the official summary of the grand jury's findings, the name Ray Griecar.

Speaker 35 It turns out Ray was the first prosecutor to investigate an allegation of child sex abuse against Jerry Sandusky way back in 1998.

Speaker 7 That was news to many, including Michael Madera, the man who became Center County's DA after Ray disappeared.

Speaker 9 I found out about Griecar's involvement, along with the rest of the world, when we read the grand jury presentment.

Speaker 41 The question popping up in the media, why didn't Ray Griecar prosecute Jerry Sandusky years earlier?

Speaker 10 To understand that, you have to go back to 1998.

Speaker 35 That's when a mother contacted the Penn State University police to say her 11-year-old son had told her he'd been bear-hugged by Sandusky naked in the shower.

Speaker 30 It was an explosive allegation.

Speaker 5 Ray Griecar, the local DA, became involved.

Speaker 42 We don't have his file.

Speaker 5 We don't know exactly what he did, but former DA Bob Buener was pretty sure he knew what Ray did first.

Speaker 13 And when you get a case of child abuse,

Speaker 13 you just put on the game face. That's the one.
That's the one that really gets to us.

Speaker 12 Ray would have almost certainly met the alleged victim to assess his credibility.

Speaker 9 If he met with that victim, and I believe he did, he was the one that would have made kind of a gut credibility decision.

Speaker 45 But when you have a prominent member of the community, well-known member of the community, and then you look at the credibility of your alleged victim, does that become tough then?

Speaker 5 Oh, absolutely. If it ever got to a courtroom, the case would likely come down to the testimony of one 11-year-old boy against a hometown hero.

Speaker 20 That's where the sting, or something close to it, came in.

Speaker 12 We don't know all the details, only this, that the mother confronted Sandusky on two occasions in May 1998 while detectives listened in.

Speaker 45 Had you ever known Ray to do that kind of a sting or run that kind of operation? I don't know that I've ever.

Speaker 13 I think that would be typical of what Ray would do. As I said, he was the kind of guy, when police would come to him, he'd always ask the next question, well, have you tried this? Have you tried that?

Speaker 26 The grand jury report says Sandusky told the mother, I was wrong.

Speaker 17 I wish I could get forgiveness.

Speaker 8 I wish I were dead.

Speaker 10 Days after the story broke, NBC's Bob Costas asked Sandusky about that confrontation.

Speaker 68 In 1998, a mother confronts you about taking a shower with her son and inappropriately touching him.

Speaker 68 Two detectives eavesdrop on her conversations with you, and you admit that maybe your private parts touched her son.

Speaker 66 What happened there?

Speaker 17 I can't exactly recall what was said there there

Speaker 52 in terms of

Speaker 52 what I did say was that

Speaker 52 if he felt

Speaker 52 that way, then I was wrong.

Speaker 40 It seems Sandusky was confessing to something wrong, but that's not how Bob Buener saw it.

Speaker 13 People have characterized Sandusky's statements as being a confession. We call it under the law an admission, but it has to be an admission to a crime.

Speaker 13 Hugging in and of itself, even a child under the age of 12, is not necessarily a crime unless you can show sexual gratification. That's the key.

Speaker 37 Was that statement at least grounds for further investigation?

Speaker 10 Have you tried to get into Ray Griecar's head and to understand what his thinking may have been when this allegation was presented to his office?

Speaker 9 It's easy for me with 2020 hindsight to say, well, if I had that information, I would have said this needs to be looked into further.

Speaker 66 But that must always follow with, I don't know what information he had.

Speaker 29 Ray Griecar decided not to prosecute.

Speaker 43 We don't know his reasons.

Speaker 29 It is easy now to second guess Griecar's decision, especially since Jerry Sandusky went on to commit repeated assaults after 1998.

Speaker 42 In 2012, Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse.

Speaker 10 For those who say that Ray Griecar missed the opportunity to put Sandusky away, you say what?

Speaker 13 I say they don't know the law, they don't know Ray Griecar.

Speaker 5 There were online posts and tweets speculating about a link between the two.

Speaker 3 But could there actually be a connection?

Speaker 23 For anybody, anybody, to suggest otherwise is, I think, incredibly naive.

Speaker 5 Dr.

Speaker 16 Cyril Wecht is a well-known forensic pathologist in Pittsburgh, about 100 miles west of Penn State.

Speaker 49 He has not worked on the Griecar case, but he has followed it for years.

Speaker 16 Weck made news with his comments after the Sandusky story broke.

Speaker 12 He believes there must have been rumors Sandusky was continuing to abuse young boys after 1998, and he says Griecar must have heard them.

Speaker 23 I guarantee you, after a district attorney has been in office for some years, there is not any kind of criminal activity that takes place in that county that he is not aware of.

Speaker 11 Wex speculates that Griekar blamed himself for those alleged abuses and either walked away or committed suicide.

Speaker 5 Or Weck says, maybe Griecar knew too much.

Speaker 23 And someone says, Mr. Griecar, we've kept it quiet all this time, and without you around, we'll keep it quiet longer.
And that's the end of Mr. Griekar.

Speaker 10 But Griekar's friends and colleagues rule out any connection between the missing DA DA and the Sandusky case.

Speaker 9 I am in no way aware of any reason why there would be a link.

Speaker 9 As I've said before, when we were talking about the person Ray Griecar is, I cannot imagine, based upon what I know about him, that he would allow something or someone to influence a decision that he thought was the right decision to make.

Speaker 5 Bob Buener agreed and added this.

Speaker 13 I see absolutely no connection between Ray Griecar's disappearance in 2005 and anything connected with Jerry Sandusky.

Speaker 10 But you can see how people might make that leap and their imaginations, because this is a true mystery.

Speaker 13 It is a true mystery, and it's an enigma. Why would anyone want to, connected with the Sandusky matter,

Speaker 13 take out, eliminate a district attorney who declined to prosecute a case and who was leaving office in eight months?

Speaker 20 Declined to prosecute years earlier.

Speaker 13 Yeah. It would seem to me, if you're going to take somebody out in a criminal case, you go after the witnesses.

Speaker 17 you go after the people that could really get on the witness stand and do you in whether or not what happened to ray grikar has anything to do with jerry sandesky his disappearance remains an open case to this day the pennsylvania state police still follow leads they occasionally get reports of ray griecar sightings he's supposedly been spotted in illinois ohio michigan maryland and texas we've had some pretty crazy sightings but we look into them.

Speaker 63 We've had sightings in New York City from a very credible person. And the individual did look like Mr.
Greekar, but it wasn't him.

Speaker 55 Maybe one day they'll be able to unlock the secrets of that damaged hard drive.

Speaker 45 Do you hold any hopes that at some point technology will allow you to recover?

Speaker 63 Exactly. I'm hoping maybe in a couple of years.

Speaker 15 For now, the mystery of Ray Greecar's disappearance endures.

Speaker 49 And so does the wait for answers.

Speaker 45 Do you still hold out hope that you're going to get a definitive answer always

Speaker 62 we're always going to have that question that's never going away

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