Ray Gricar Pt. Three

April 15, 2005. Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. After taking the day off work and leaving on a road trip, 59-year old Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar fails to return home and is reported missing. The following day, Ray’s abandoned car is discovered 60 miles away in the town of Lewisburg, parked across the street from an antiques mall. Over the course of the next several months, Ray’s county-issued work laptop and its hard drive are discovered in the nearby Susquehanna River, but the hard drive is too damaged to recover any data. A number of different theories are pushed forward, which include Ray disappeared voluntarily, completing suicide by jumping into the river, or becoming the victim of foul play, possibly in connection to the infamous Penn State child sex abuse scandal. However, there is no conclusive evidence pointing to any of these theories and Ray Gricar is never found.  If you have any information about this case, please contact the Pennsylvania State Police at [phone]. 

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 Additional Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Gricar https://charleyproject.org/case/ray-frank-gricar
 

http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/05109/490420-85.stm

 https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/04/the-hunt-for-ray-gricar-15-years-of-clues-theories-and-the-search-for-answers.html

“The Serial Killer’s Apprentice: And 12 Other Stories of Cleveland’s Most Intriguing Unsolved Crimes” by Ray Gricar

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/07/utah_detainee_isnt_gricar_but.html

https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/15/us/ray-gricar-missing-prosecutor/index.html

https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2015/04/ten_years_later_ray_gricars_di.html

https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/jerry-sandusky/article42806712.html

https://www.centredaily.com/news/article42828846.html

https://www.wearecentralpa.com/news/podcast-gives-new-insight-on-district-attorney-ray-gricars-disappearance-16-years-later/

https://www.northcentralpa.com/news/crime/no-answers-16-years-later-in-disappearance-of-centre-county-da-psp-says-case-still/article_8e33cc04-72d1-11eb-ab98-f30bcdaa197b.html

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part three
of our series on the unsolved disappearance of Ray Greecar. Robin,
do you want to catch everyone up when we talked
about in our previous two episodes.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Well, like I've said many times, this is one of
the most famous missing persons cases of the modern era
because Ray Greecar was a prosecuting attorney in CenTra County
who had a long and storied career and was planning
to retire at the end of two thousand and five.
But while he was fifty nine years old, in April
of that year, he decided to go on a road
trip to a town called Lewisbourg, located about sixty miles

(01:02):
away from where he lived, and he said he was
going to go antique shopping, but he never returned home.
His abandoned car was found park near an antique shop,
but there was no sign of Ray. But there were
a number of strange clues, like cigarette ash found near
his vehicle, and it appeared that the interior of his
car had been wiped clean of fingerprints. A couple months later,
they found his county issued work laptop in a nearby river,

(01:26):
and a couple months after that, they found a hard
drive which had been removed from the laptop, and Ray
had apparently made some Google searches about how to destroy
a laptop, how to destroy a hard drive, how to
get water damage on a laptop, and a hard drive,
which makes cause speculation that Ray may have tossed it
in there himself, or alternatively, someone else tossed it in
the water because there was something on there that they

(01:47):
didn't want anyone to find. Their speculation that Ray's death
may have been a suicide because yours earlier, his brother
had decided to end his own life by jumping off
a bridge into a body of water, so the respeculation
that Ray may have done the same thing and they
just never found his body. But there's also been a
number of theories involving foul play, and one of the
most prominent involves the infamous Penn State scandal, where assistant

(02:11):
football coach Jerry Sandusky was charged and convicted of sexually
abusing a number of young boys, and his actions were
covered up for decades, causing an immense amount of controversy,
and Ray, in nineteen ninety eight, seven years before he
went missing, have been asked to look into an incident
where Sandusky had allegedly groped a young boy in the shower,

(02:33):
but he felt that there was not enough evidence to
press charges, so the whole matter came to an end.
But there's been speculation that maybe Ray was digging deeper
into the Sandusky allegations and that he could have been
murdered in order to cover the whole thing up. And
we also talked to in our last episode about a
podcast that was released a few years ago called Final
Argument The Disappearance of Ray Greekar, in which the host

(02:56):
promised that she was going to have these earth shattering
revelations was pointed to being the victim of foul play
and was going to reveal them on her final episodes,
but they were never released, and she pretty much stopped
communicating with everyone and ghosting the listeners of the podcast,
so we really have no idea what she may have found.
So it's kind of an intriguing mystery within a mystery,
and all we know for certain is that twenty years

(03:17):
have now passed and we still don't know what happened
to Ray Grigar. So now we're going to spend the
rest of this series discussing whether Ray's death was a
suicide or if he was the victim of foul play.
Even though Ray's loved ones insisted that he had no
outward signs of depression or that he was feeling suicidal,
we can't deny the fact that the press people sometimes

(03:37):
don't give off any warning signs and keep all the
pain they're experiencing bottled up inside. Therefore, when their suicide
does take place, it takes everyone by complete surprise. Ray
was described as being a very private and reserved person
and does not strike me as someone who would be
open to discussing any mental health struggles he might have experienced.

(03:58):
Many people acknowledged that in the week's prior to his disappearance,
Ray seemed fatigued and was napping a lot more than usual,
and excessive sleep can definitely be a sign of depression. Now,
a new detail I had learned during the Final Argument podcast,
which I did not know before, is that Ray had
scheduled a number of future appointments and engagements on his
office desk calendar which were weeks and even months into

(04:20):
the future, which do not seem like the actions of
someone who was planning to end their own life. But
the issue is that suicidal people are not always in
a rational state of mind, so you can't apply standard
logic to their actions. On April the fourteenth, the date
before he witnessing, Ray, took a half day off work
and was seen sitting inside his car next to a

(04:40):
lakeside marina. So could he have possibly spent this time
contemplating a suicide in which he drowned himself in a
body of water. The main reason the suicide theory gets
so much traction is because Ray's brother, Roy ended his
own life nine years earlier by parking his car near
a bridge located many miles away from his home before
jumping into the Great Miami River. And here we have

(05:03):
Ray driving sixty miles to Louisbourg and parking his car
near a bridge and an abandoned railway trestle which overlooked
the Susquehanna River. So maybe he decided to follow in
his brother's footsteps. Of course, the key differences between these
two scenarios is that Roy had a documented history of
bipolar disorder and depression, and his body was actually found now.

(05:25):
In a twenty eighteen article from the State College based
newspaper The Center Daily Times, Bob Yuner, a former Montour
County District attorney who is friends with Ray, made this
controversial statement quote, Here's the interesting thing. Ray never believed
his brother committed suicide. The most important reason was that
he thought his brother would never orphan his two sons,

(05:45):
rais nephews end quote. Buner also mentioned that whenever Ray
went to Ohio, he would check in with the police
to see if there were any new leads with Roy's case. Well,
this statement is heavily disputed by Roy's son, Tony Greekar,
who is the official family spokesman and has frequently shared
his thoughts in various Reddit threads and comments sections about

(06:06):
this case. Tony has always maintained that the family accepted
the suicide ruling and never believed there was any foul
play involved in Roy's death. If Ray felt otherwise, he
never said so in front of his family.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Which you would think he would. You would think that
if he was worried about his brother's death and that
he said, you know, he would never orphan these boys,
he would have never completed suicide. Well, then wouldn't that
be something that he and Roy's wife would have talked about,
that he would have talked to with the kids, like,
your daddy loved you so much, there's no way he
left you. Maybe one day I'll be able to vindicate

(06:40):
him and get you answers. You know, I'm a prosecutor.
I just feel like there would have been some kind
of conversation, not that he would have sat there silent,
and that the son would say, listen, we accept this information.
Do they accept it because they know their daddy had
been sick, that he was bipolar, that he was struggling.
I mean, the boys would have known that situation, probably

(07:01):
even more intimately than Ray would, wouldn't they.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Oh, definitely. And we see so many cases where someone's
death is ruled to be a suicide, the police rule
it that way, but their family are certain that they
are the victims of foul play. But this is the
complete opposite. Whether family is saying no, we accept the
suicide ruling, we have no reason to believe there was murder.
And of course Ray if he felt otherwise, he was
also a district attorney, so he would have had the

(07:25):
resources to spread awareness about his brother's case and possibly
open an investigation. So the fact that he never did
anything like that makes me think that Bobyuter's statement was
false and that Ray never believed his brother was murdered.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
So I couldn't think of the exact study to cite
that I'd read, and it was talking about time spent
that people prior to a suicide attempt would consider suicide,
and I think this is extremely relevant, So I'm going
to read what AI came back with, specifically perplexity on
the studies concerning this. So I asked studies on time

(08:01):
spent contemplating suicide before attempting in those who were unsuccessful
with completing suicide, and says key findings from studies, Nearly
half of people who attempt suicide report that the time
from the first current suicidal thought to the actual attempt
is very short ten minutes or less. In one study,
forty seven point six percent of suicide attempters said the

(08:23):
period between the first current thought and the attempt was
ten minutes or less, while those who took longer to
act tended to have higher suicidal intent. A separate study
of survivors of nearly lethal suicide attempts found twenty four
percent deliberated less than five minutes, twenty four percent deliberated
five to nineteen minutes, twenty three percent deliberated twenty minutes

(08:45):
to one hour, sixteen percent deliberated two to eight hours,
and thirteen percent deliberated one or more days. So these
findings indicate that for a significant proportion of attempters, the
window between decision and action is extremely brief, often measured
in minutes, not hours or days, and so the implications
are the short duration between contemplation an attempt highlights the

(09:08):
impulsive nature of many suicide attempts, suggesting that prevention efforts
must focus on rapid intervention and reducing access to lethal
means during a crisis. While some individuals can contemplate for
longer periods, most attempts occur soon after the onset of
acute suicidal thoughts, limiting the opportunity for intervention. So I

(09:29):
thought that was really interesting as it could pertain to Ray.
It could have just been something that, yeah, he had
all of these appointments and dates that he had marked
on a calendar, but perhaps that day he just thought,
this is the day I decided that I want to
end it, and then he took the actionable steps to
make that happen.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
That's really interesting. I didn't know that it was such
a high percentage who made an impulsive decision and went
through with the act only minutes afterwards. So theoretically, if
this applied to Ray, we know that as his last
phone call to his girlfriend was that I'm going to
drive and go do some antique shopping in this little
town he had visited before, So who knows, maybe that's
how he intended to start the day, just go to

(10:10):
Louisbourg do some shopping, and then once he arrived, he
suddenly decided I want to end my own life. I'm
feeling suicidal, and then just made an impulsive decision to
just walk over to the nearest bridge and jump into
the river.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Indeed, it sounds like what happened to Roy is pretty
cut and dried, but without a body, you definitely cannot
say the same thing about Ray. At the time Ray
went missing, the water level in the Susquehanna River was
higher than usual because of the spring melt, but it
eventually went down in subsequent months, which explains why the
laptop and hard drive were found in relatively close proximity

(10:45):
to the spot where the Mini Cooper had been abandoned.
So if these much smaller items were eventually found. Why
wouldn't Ray's body turn up if it was in the river? Well,
I guess it would depend on where the currents could
have taken him. If Ray's body had floated downstream and
traveled southeast for about ten miles, it would have reached
the town of Sunbury, which contained the Adam T. Bauer

(11:08):
Memorial Dam, the world's largest inflatable dam. The dam is
installed every spring, and it's apparently confirmed that it was
already in place by mid April of two thousand and five,
So if Ray's body made it there, it's possible the
dam could have showed him up and made his remains
a lot more difficult to recover. That really does provide
the best explanation for how Ray's body could have wound

(11:31):
up in the Susquehanna River without being found, but of
course there's no concrete evidence to support this theory. If
Ray did jump into the river from the bridge or
railway trestle, there's also been some question about whether he
could have done this without being seen, as the bridge
was part of the Pennsylvania Route forty five and often
had a lot of traffic. But even though Ray arrived

(11:52):
in Louisbourg on April fifteenth. His car was not actually
found until the following day, So for all we know,
Ray could have hung around the area for a while
and not jumped into the river until the middle of
the night when there was less of a chance of
any witnesses seeing him.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Couldn't it also be, though, that someone did hurt him
and foul play was involved, And it's a potential that
one this is staged where his car's located. Was it
very public knowledge of how Roy had completed suicide?

Speaker 2 (12:22):
I'm not entirely sure. I mean, I don't think that's
something that got a lot of news coverage because he
was missing for a short period of time, and it
wasn't a foul play investigation, so and it took place
years earlier, so if you wanted to find out about it,
you would have to go through the newspaper archives. And
I'm sure it wasn't something that Ray talked about during
his public life when he was addressing the public about

(12:43):
the cases he was working on. But if it was
someone who had inside knowledge of his life and they
wanted to make it look like his death is a suicide,
then that would be the most logical solution. Just park
his car near a bridge and a body of water
and make people think that he decided to follow in
his brother's footsteps. Well, even if Ray's death was a suicide,
the big mystery, which has still never been explained, is

(13:05):
why he removed the hard drive from his laptop. Remember
that hard drive was screwed in pretty tight, so it
wouldn't have just broken off on its own and someone
had to make a concerted effort to remove it. I
know that Ray had been performing internet searches about how
to wipe a hard drive prior to his disappearance, which
isn't unusual on his own, since he would probably want
to remove everything from his work laptop before he retired

(13:27):
at the end of the year. However, it's been reported
that one of the search items he used was quote
water damage to a notebook computer, which is quite different
than the standard practice of using software to erase your
hard drive. But here's the thing that has always troubled me.
If Ray was feeling suicidal and there was something on
that hard drive that he didn't want people finding out about,

(13:48):
why toss it into the same body of water where
you're planning to kill yourself. Surely Ray knew that people
would search the river if he abandoned his car so
close to it. Well, the hard drive suffered too much
damage to recover any data from it. There's no way
Ray could have predicted this. Remember, he drove sixty miles
from Belfont to Louisbourg on a scenic route, which is

(14:09):
pretty much open country. If he had disposed of the
laptop hard drive before he arrived in Louisbourg, by say,
bearing the items in a remote wooded area, it's possible
that no one would have ever found them. Well, it's
easy to assume that Ray had something horrible on that
hard drive that he wanted to destroy. This was a
county issued work computer, and I'd like to think he

(14:29):
would have been smart enough not to save anything incriminating
on there in the first place. It really makes a
lot more sense to me that a third party would
want to destroy the hard drive because they believed it
contain evidence and their first instinct was to toss it
into the river.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Yeah, I absolutely think that. I don't know why he
would have searched water damage to a laptop, but when
you do have this idea of the hard drive was
taken out and destroyed and it's sunk into the river.
I don't know that he, like you said, would have
been foolish enough to say, hey, let's just put this
next to my car and hopefully no one will find me. Now,

(15:07):
if he's suicidal, and he's in a state of let's say,
a manic state or just a dissociated state, then it's
possible that he could do things without being very logical.
But it does seem more probable that someone who wanted
to make sure a case he was investigating didn't have
the information shared after his death would be wanting to

(15:30):
destroy that hard drive as well.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
I'm fifty to fifty I think it's entirely possible that
it could have been foul play and that a third
party destroyed it. To think back to Ray Rivera's case
in reference that, again, the actions that he took seemed
completely illogical to the outside person, and we seem to
have a little bit more insights because we saw his
post it notes. We don't know what was on Ray

(15:54):
Greecar's computer. We don't know what he was writing, and
we don't know the information and how he was perceiving it,
and what could have been his motivation if he was
in if he was experiencing psychosis or if he was
in a manic state something like that. The way that
he would be choosing to go about getting rid of

(16:15):
this laptop, it could be for reasons that would be
logical or completely illogical. It could be something that just
came to him at the moment. When we try to
apply logic to somebody in that moment, then it can
be really difficult and it can limit the scope of
what we think somebody is capable of doing. And so
I really can't go one way or the other. I

(16:35):
think both are equally possible.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, since you shared that study about how suicide is
sometimes an impulsive decision for a lot of people that
they make in minutes, that could explain Ray's actions where
he just suddenly decides in Louisbourg that I want to
end my own life, and he's just not thinking through
the most logical way to get rid of his laptop,
so he just makes an impulsive decision to throw it
into the river, and that would explain why he didn't

(16:59):
take more drastic steps, like say, burying the laptop in
like a wooded area or something like that, where he
knows it'll never be found. Because he may not have
known that he was planning suicide when he left his
house that day.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
But on the other hand, when Ray took the laptop
on his trip with him, he left behind the case
and charger at his house. If Ray was planning to
use the laptop for work purposes and was gathering information,
it seems odd that he wouldn't take the charger. What
if the battery ran down while he was in the
midst of something important. This is one detail which would
seem to suggest that Ray only took the laptop to

(17:33):
Louisbourg to destroy it. If Ray's death was a suicide,
one potential explanation to account for all these oddities is
that he didn't want anyone to know that he chose
to take his own life, so he left a trail
of false clues behind in order to give off the
false impression that he was the victim of foul play.
Perhaps he removed the hard drive from the laptop and

(17:54):
destroyed it even though there was nothing incriminating on there.
Or he decided to smoke cigarettes in his car and
white fingerprints from the interior to make everyone believe that
a third party was with him. Ray still could have
felt that there was a stigma surrounding suicide, which is
why he didn't want anyone to know that he'd gone
through with it. If he intentionally jumped off the ridge

(18:15):
into the river, there's no way he could have known
his body would never be found, So why not plant
some seeds to make others believe that someone murdered him?
Once again, this isn't exactly a logical course of action,
but suicidal people sometimes do not do the most logical things.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
Couldn't it also be that he was if he was
trying to cover his suicide, that he's waiting for this
idea of Okay, I have a life insurance policy that
my wife and daughter could get and if I complete suicide.
It's possible that his did not have a suicide clause
in it, and that the payout wouldn't happen if he
was if it was ruled a suicide.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
That is true. It's never actually been specified if he
did have a life insurance policy, though I do know
that he was officially declared dead six years after he
went missing, rather than the standard seven years, But it's
never been shared if his girlfriend or his daughter got
any life insurance pay out. But yeah, some people, Some
times people will do that is that they'll try to
stage their desks to look like a homicide just so

(19:15):
that their families will be taken care of.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
Don't. Most life insurance policies initially have like a suicide
identity clause, and then once it's like, you know, five
years old or something like that, then it will pay
out in the case of suicide.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
That's how most of them are.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
I believe.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
I think the years depend, you know, like get's two years,
five years, whatever. That way, someone can't say, oh, you know,
I think I'm gonna take my life in six months,
let me go ahead and protect my family financially. But yeah,
I mean, I'm just I'm wondering maybe the company they
use at the prosecutor's office or maybe the private company
that he had didn't allow for that.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
It'd be nice if we knew that information, because I
think it would be extremely relevant to maybe how we
would feel about what course of action you could have
potential taken.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
So now it would be a good time to revisit
this whole angle involving the Penn State scandal and determine
whether or not Ray's disappearance or the laptop has any
connection to it. It has been theorized that Ray could
have been doing his own independent investigation into the allegations
of sexual abuse before he was murdered, and the information
he had gathered was on that hard drive. Alternatively, perhaps

(20:24):
Ray played a role in covering up the allegations when
he elected not to charge Jerry Sandusky after he was
accused of molesting a boy in the shower back in
nineteen ninety eight. If Ray knew that Sandusky was continuing
to use his position of power to sexually abuse young boys,
he could have become overwhelmed with guilt and decided to
kill himself. That idea might make a bit more sense

(20:44):
if the Penn State scandal was on the verge of
coming to light and Ray felt he was going to
suffer a major backlash for his inaction. But this would
not become a national story until six years after Ray
went missing, and there's no indication that anything was about
to surface in two thousand and five. It's no big
secret that, in order to protect the reputation of Penn
State's football program, allegations about Sandusky's sexual abuse were swept

(21:08):
under the rug for years, But everyone who knew Ray
said that this would not have been within his character.
He was described as a prosecutor who never played favorites
and did not care if the person he was investigating
was some low level career criminal or a beloved assistant
football coach, and since Ray had no higher political aspirations,
he probably did not care how taking on a respected

(21:30):
figure like Sandusky might harm his career. While it sounds
like Ray never spoke about his reasons for not filing
charges against Sandusky, Rebecca Knight revealed a very interesting new
piece of information on the Final Argument podcast. A source
told her that during the fall of two thousand and four,
about six months before Ray went missing, he heard Race

(21:51):
refer to Sandusky as a quote unquote pedophile and vow
that he was going to put him away. If this
was true, then this would imply that the only reason
Ray did not file charges for the shower incident was
because he did not believe the case was strong enough
to prosecute at that time, but he was not going
to give up on investigating Sandusky well. It eventually came

(22:11):
out that Sandusky was a serial abuser who victimized many
boys over a period of several years. It's unclear if
Ray had that information in nineteen ninety eight, or was
aware of any other predatory behavior other than the one
incident in the shower. While the recording of Sandusky's conversation
with the boy's mother sounded pretty damning, he never flat

(22:31):
out admitted to molesting the boy, only that he showered
with them and hugged him, so Ray may have wanted
to gather more evidence. You have to remember that Sandusky
had been a Penn State assistant coach for thirty years
and was a highly respected figure because of his work
with the Second Mile organization. So if Ray was going
to press charges against someone like that and bring him
to trial, I'm sure he wanted the case to be

(22:53):
air tight. When beloved head coach Joe Paterno had his
contract terminated in twenty eleven over allegations that he covered
up Sandusky's abuse, Penn State started riding in the streets
and causing property damage. I'm sure Ray was well aware
that this was the type of backlash you could expect
if he tried to take on Sandusky and the Penn
State football program without having all of his ducks in

(23:16):
a row.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
That's exactly right. That's such a huge institution. You'd be
up against that we know wenton, tried to cover their
tracks and had you know what, billion dollar endowments and
stuff protecting them, and so that is an incredibly huge institution.
It's like taking on the Catholic Church. And so when
he says, Okay, look, I know this man is a pedophile.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
This is a.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Dad who's child was his life, and he said, this
guy's a pedophile, I'm going to make sure that I
stay on top of his case. I can't imagine a prosecutor,
especially when at the end of his career, who's not
worried about political backlash and isn't worried about getting reelected
or anything like that. I could easily see him saying,

(23:59):
I'm going to my teeth into this, but I would
never put this case in jeopardy or these victims in
jeopardy by going forward until I'm one thousand percent sure
we could win it. And I'm pretty sure that's what
happened here.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
And that would make sense. Because he knew he was
going to retire, he pretty much did not care if
something like this got a public backlash because he's thinking, well,
it's the end of my career anyway, so if this
ruins me then I really got nothing to lose, So
it could be one of those things where this bothered
him for years and he just wanted to spend like
the last months of his tenure making this right and
possibly bringing a pedophile to justice.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
So now let's discuss this theory from final argument where
Ray was meeting up with a number of different women
who were the mothers of Sandusky's victims in order to
build a case against him. Could there have been some
incriminating information on Ray's hard drive which led to it
being destroyed and Ray losing his life. Well, even though
a lot of covering up was done in the Penn

(24:55):
State scandal in order to protect Sandusky for years, I'm
not sure this was a t type of scandal which
would have crossed the line into murder. I mean it
was Sarah Gannon, a twenty three year old reporter with
the Patriot News, who first brought the whole thing to
light by publishing a story about it in March twenty eleven,
and while the paper initially faced criticism for smearing the

(25:16):
reputation of Sandusky and Penn State, they received vindication when
the grand jury indicted Sandusky in November of that year.
It just seems odd that the people in power could
make a veteran district attorney like Ray Gricard disappear without
leaving any evidence behind, but couldn't prevent this young reporter
from breaking the story wide open. The final argument podcasts

(25:37):
made it sound like they were building up to the
presentation of brand new evidence that would link Ray's case
to the Penn State scandal, But because it abruptly came
to an end and Rebecca Knight stopped talking about it,
we may never know what she uncovered.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
She was leaning more towards the Penn State scandal. Is
there any way that she also could have been maybe
going to throw Hell's Angels into it, Because to me,
as scary as Penn State is with its political and
financial wealth that would be coming after you, Hell's Angels
would be very scary, more sea being killed by them

(26:13):
versus kind of buried financially by the other group.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, definitely, I would be more fearful if I was
in her shoes that I would be murdered by a
biker gang rather than people affiliated with a football program.
But she never gave any indication that she was looking
into that angle, And I think the reason I always
speculated that she was looking into the Penn State link
is because she was the one who presented the theory
about what if Ray was meeting up with these with

(26:38):
the mothers of other victims to try to build a
case against Sandusky. But like we've talked about, this scandal
ended over a decade ago, Sandusky's in jail, So if
she did uncover anything, I don't know why she would
be so secretive about it because Penn State's reputation has
already been destroyed, so you're not going to lose too
much if you come up with new information that pain

(27:00):
them in a bad light. Well, even if Ray's disappearance
had nothing to do with the Penn State scandal, could
he have traveled to Louisbourg to gather information about an
entirely different case he was working on at a wound
up getting him killed. Well that would all depend on
the biggest unanswered question in this case, and that's the
identity of the woman that Ray was supposedly seeing with
at the Street of Shops. I know it's tempting to

(27:22):
believe that Ray was conducting a secret affair, as he
did have a reputation for liking women around the time
he divorced his second wife, Emma, and before he started
his relationship with Patty, Ray reportedly fell head over heels
in love with a nurse and quickly asked her to
marry him, but she turned him down. And it's also
been reported that Ray often liked to go to a

(27:42):
certain restaurant at Center County, and while there he would
always request a particular waitress and flirt with her when
she served him. But even if Ray had a flirtatious personality,
I've not come across any information that he ever flat
out cheated on any of his spouses, and there was
apparently nothing in Ray's financial to suggest that he was
conducting an affair at the time he went missing. If

(28:04):
Ray was meeting up with a woman in Louisbourg, then
I would not be surprised if it was in relation
to some sort of investigation, which might explain why he
decided to take his work laptop along with him. However,
one aspect of this case which has never made sense
to anyone is why the authorities did not publicly disclose
the siding of Ray and the woman until thirteen months

(28:24):
after he disappeared. Yes, I know they initially assumed that
the woman was a friend of his name, Barbara Patito,
but she was ruled out relatively quickly, And it sounds
like the rationale is they didn't want to harm Ray's
reputation by potentially giving off the false impression that he
was conducting an affair. Well, I'm sure his family was
much more concerned about finding out if he was dead

(28:45):
or alive rather than protecting his reputation, So why wait
over an entire year to release this information. The original
investigation was handled by the Bellefont Police Department, who have
received criticisms for mistakes they made, including their failure to
go public about the sighting of the woman. Given the
high profile nature raised his appearance, it's believed that the

(29:06):
Bellefont PD may have been out of the league, as
the case was assigned to only one investigator, who had
to juggle it with several other cases he was working on,
so it was finally handed over to the Pennsylvania State
Police in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
I don't see him being like a philandering, you know.
I don't know the way some people make it sound
that he was just all over women. He almost sounds
like a serial monogamous where he's hunting down like, Ooh,
I like this woman, I'm going to date her. Ooh
I like this woman. I'm going to go hang out
with her. Oh I like this woman, I'm going to
marry her. And yes, does he like being in the
company of a woman, Yes, but it doesn't ever seem

(29:43):
like he's you know, with twenty women are sitting at
you know, strip clubs every every single night, you know,
after work. And even if he was, if he's single, okay,
you know, like I just I don't get any kind
of read on him other than he's a man who's
used to being with some and so every time he's
not in a monogamous relationship, he's kind of on the

(30:06):
hunt for another one. It seems like a normal all
American human being, doesn't it.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Well, let me just play Devil's advocate for a moment,
because we have a situation where we have somebody who's
been described as enigmatic, who keeps their emotions really close
to his. Just he's somebody who's difficult to read, and
typically people who are like that are slightly more introverted,
and they may have some secrets. So do I think

(30:33):
that it's likely that he had all of these women
that he was having affairs with. No, But do I
think that it's possible that even though they didn't find
it in his financials. I mean, at first they said
he was worth only one thousand dollars, it took them
time to find that he had this other account where
he had one hundred thousand. Who's to say that there
wasn't some other account. I just I can't completely eliminate
it as a possibility, But I can't in good faith

(30:56):
say that like this is something that I for sure believe.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, they did confirm that they didn't find any charges
on his credit cards, like him staying at any motels
or driving off to have expensive meals to suggest that
he was having an extra marital affair behind his girlfriend's back.
But like you said, he did have bank accounts, so
I suppose he could have paid everything with cash to
help cover it up. But once again, it's still just
all speculation. They've just never found any hard evidence that

(31:23):
he was doing anything behind Patty's back.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Now, we've had numerous accounts from informants who've come forward
with stories of Ray being murdered by criminals that were
connected to investigations he worked on and they supposedly disposed
of Ray's body in a mind shaft. And one of
these stories, which involved Ray being murdered by a former
prison inmate and an accomplice, specifically mentions a woman arranging
a meeting with Ray in Louisbourg in order to lure

(31:49):
him to his death. Some of the reported eyewitness sightings
of Ray described him as pacing around and appearing to
be waiting for someone, So I do think it's likely
he traveled there for the purposes of something else besides
antique shopping. If Ray was meeting with a third party,
then I personally think this lessons the possibility of his
disappearance being a suicide. But with all the publicity this

(32:11):
case is received, you have to wonder why this mysterious
woman is never come forward unless she has something to hide.
Another complication is that eyewitnesses reported seeing Ray park the
Mini Cooper across the street from the Packwood House Museum
during the early afternoon of April fifteenth, before he abandoned
the car in the lot near the street of shops.

(32:32):
According to one witness, Ray parked his car in a
spot across from the museum and inexplicably left for a
brief period of time before he drove back to this
location to park his car in a different spot. He
was then seen pacing around in a nearby park as
if he was waiting for someone, but it's unclear what
exactly he was doing there. But he also appeared to

(32:53):
be talking to himself, so if he had some sort
of bluetooth device in his ear, perhaps he was making
arrangements to meet the unidentified woman at the street of
shops later that day. Some of the earliest reporting in
this case also stated that there was a few sightings
of Ray and Louisbourg on the morning of April sixteenth,
which I guess is not impossible since the Mini Cooper
was not actually found by the state trooper until six

(33:15):
point thirty that evening. However, Ray was still alive that day.
There's no paper trail to show where he could have
spent the night, unless he slept inside his car, but
even so, it's surprising that he wouldn't have at least
foam Patty to let her know where he was. Overall,
I'm inclined to believe that the reported sightings of Ray
on the sixteenth are mistaken and that whatever happened to

(33:38):
him likely occurred on the fifteenth. I know that when
a tracker dog was brought in to pick up Ray's end,
it didn't go any further than the parking lot where
the Mini Cooper was abandoned, since the car was locked.
This does suggest that Ray might have climbed into another vehicle,
which is another point which goes against the suicide theory,
since he simply could have walked to the bridge if
he was planning to jump into the South Hannah River.

(34:01):
On the other hand, if Ray left in another person's vehicle,
it's odd that he would leave his cell phone inside
the Mini Cooper unless there's evidence to the theory that
he was carrying around a separate burner phone for separate communication.
I guess it's possible that Ray could have been forcibly
abducted from the parking lot, but there were no signs
of any struggle or any witness who could corroborate this.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
Do we know how common it would be for a
prosecutor to have a phone that's not linked. I don't
feel like that would be a common idea, because you
have somebody who's a prosecutor, and you would want to
make sure that everything was done on the up and up,
so that your prosecution would actually stick and that there
wouldn't be any kind of hidden devices and things like

(34:44):
that to call and to question your integrity. Now, I
guess to communicate with an informant, maybe you wouldn't want
your phone number given out. I don't know, do you
guys know how that would work.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
I mean, I would like to think in most investigations
you would want it to be really documented and you
would not be using things like burner phones. But I
guess it would depend on the nature of the investigation.
Because this was Ray's final year before his retirement, and
if he was working on something really delicate, it might
be one of those things where, well, if this investigation
doesn't lead anywhere, I don't want anyone to find out

(35:17):
about it, So therefore I don't want to leave a
paper trail. So that's why he would use something like
a burner phone. Now, there's been a lot of discussion
about the cigarette ash inside the Mini Cooper, but what
hasn't got as much attention are the two cigarette butts
found outside the vehicle. It has been confirmed that DNA
was extracted from them, but there were no matches when
it was entered into the National Database of Offenders. Of course,

(35:39):
we know that a number of coal cases have been
solved in recent years by entering DNA into genealogy databases
and getting a match which eventually led back to the offender.
But I'm wondering if the legalities of that might be
a bit more complicated here, since there was no concrete
evidence a crime was committed. If these cigarette butts were
found at the scene of a murder along SIEID a

(36:00):
dead body, that would be one thing. But all this
proves is that someone was smoking cigarettes in the same
parking lot where a missing person's vehicle was abandoned. It's
also never publicly been revealed if investigators were able to
determine if the DNA on the cigarette butts was male
or female. If it was female, then this would lend
a lot more weight to the siding of Ray with
the unidentified woman.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
Yeah, but I mean this is really interesting. If it
was male or female, like you said, it could also
be anybody that just happened to be in that parking lot.
I mean, if there's a parking lot, that means people
go to this location. And so unless you could do
a genealogical reverse look up, which would be exorbitant on
two cigarettes you're not even sure linked to this case.

(36:45):
It would be very difficult to be able to prove that,
even if you track those people down, that they were
somehow involved, unless they were specifically tied to one of
his cases. I don't know. It just seems like a
long shot. Those cigarette butts could be left by any body.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
It's true, and you can't really prove that they're connected
to raise disappearance. And it would be one thing if
they were able to match the DNA on the cigarettes
to an offender with a criminal record, because that would
look pretty damning. But if it's just some regular person.
For all we know, it was just someone who decided
to smoke on that particular day, and it's just a
coincidence that Ray happened to park his car next to

(37:21):
their butts.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
And we don't even know if those butts were there
from that particular day. There's no way of dating the
time and date that they ended up there.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah, So it's like I can understand why there's a
reluctance to try to get DNA on them when you
can't even know for certain if they're connected to a crime.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
But what could have compelled Ray to travel to Louisbourg
in the first place. Since he was less than eight
months from retirement, it sounds like Ray had been passing
a lot of his workload onto the attorneys in his office.
He also practically had one foot out the door, since
he seemed to be playing hooky and taking half days
and full days off from work. It doesn't fit the
profile of someone who's doing a lot of covert work

(38:01):
on an important investigation unless Ray was working on something
so secret that he couldn't tell anyone else what he
was doing and was making all these trips because he
really wanted to get the case resolved before he retired.
I know, it's practically a cliche day in fictional cop
stories for the grizzled veteran to be working on one
last important case before retirement and having their plans spoiled

(38:22):
when something bad happens. But that's very well what could
have happened here. One detail about this case which doesn't
get discussed all that much is how Ray went missing.
A County codebook was found on his desk at the
Center County District Attorney's office and was lying open to
the section which described what to do if a sitting
district attorney went missing or died. We have no idea

(38:44):
if Ray did this, but surveillance footage confirmed that he
did visit the office on the evening of April fourteenth,
which would turn out to be the last time that
he ever went there. He could have used that opportunity
to pull the book out and leave it open so
his co workers would know the press to follow if
he didn't come back. This could be interpreted as evidence
that Ray was planning a suicide, but could also mean

(39:07):
that he was about to do something which might potentially
put his life in danger, and he wanted to cover
all his bases in case something happened. I have to
imagine that the answers might be on the hard drive
of Ray's laptop, But even though nothing could be recovered
from it, I guess we could always hold out hope
that technology might improve enough to make it feasible to
extract data from the hard drive someday. If it turns

(39:30):
out that nothing is important on there after all, then
this would support the idea that raised disappearance was a suicide,
and he staged the whole situation to look more mysterious
than it really was. But it's also possible that the
hard drive's contents could shed a lot of light on
what happened to him.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
I think it absolutely could either way. I mean, if
he's contemplating suicide, could a hard drive have had rambling notes?
Could it have had little things he was trying to
your research and plan. We know he was looking at
racing the computer and what water would do to damage
the hard drive. But again, like we said, he was
planning on leaving and so his computer was gonna get

(40:09):
scrubbed anyway. But it's interesting because without that, we don't
know if there was some you know, incognito investigation that
he was doing, if he was if he was saying, listen,
there's something so important to me that, even though I'm
on my way out, I'm gonna see if I can
go behind, you know, the scenes and actually look at
at some issue. And I'm going to go meet with

(40:29):
people who are willing to talk to me. Maybe this
is my last hurrah as a district attorney, or at
least maybe I can set my colleagues up to finish
this case for me. But in order to do that,
I need to protect these witnesses and get information from
them before I no longer have that authority and power,
and so I could absolutely see that happening. I could
see somebody or some organization saying, oh, he cannot look

(40:52):
into this anymore. But like you said, I mean without
that information, without the hard drive, we can't look for
any kind of concerning things he might have left as
someone who was maybe secretly struggling with mental health, and
we can look for information about some kind of secret investigation.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
For the longest time, I used to be fifty to
fifty on the murder and suicide theory, but some of
the information I heard on the Final Argument podcast did
give me the impression that Ray might have been the
victim of foul play. If he was murdered and a
third party tossed the hard drive in the laptop into
the Susquehanna River, then I have a feeling they probably
disposed of Ray's body at another location. This is one

(41:31):
of those frustrating cases with a number of different theories
but no concrete evidence pointing towards any of them. So
unless something new surfaces, we can only speculate on what happened.
Everyone who knew Ray described him as a very dedicated
prosecutor who always tried to seek justice for victims. So
if he became a victim himself, let's hope the responsible
party or parties can be brought to justice. But if

(41:55):
Ray's death was a suicide after all, at the very least,
it would be nice if his body could be bound
to provide answers for his family. So if you have
been to have any information about the unsolved disappearance of
Ray Gricar, please contact the Pennsylvania State Police at eight
one four three five five seven five four five. That's
eight one four three five five seven five four five,

(42:17):
Jules Ashley, any final thoughts in this case.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
What's incredibly hard here is that there's no good answer
for this family because I don't believe in any ounce
of my body that Rage is left voluntarily to start
a new life. I just don't buy that. He had
too many things that he was looking forward to. Remember,
one of the things that people said was his life
was his daughter, and that he was getting ready to

(42:42):
be able to retire and go spend more time with her.
You got to remember her. His daughter was probably at
the age where they were, you know, fantasizing about what
if she has a grand baby for us and we
can go, you know, have our little house and I
don't have to be at work, and just kind of
getting a chance to have a second lease on life
with your girlfriend and things like that, and your daughter
and her growing family. And so that's a no, that

(43:05):
didn't happen in my mind. So it is this fifty
to fifty idea of was it a murder or was
it a suicide? And both would be incredibly horrific as
his family because it's been all of these years, and
in your head you're playing, okay, if he completed suicide,
there's all the standard questions like why did he suffer
so quietly? What if I had called him more? What

(43:27):
if you know, why wasn't I enough? Even though that's
none of those things are you know, truthful things. As
someone who's actually planning suicide is thinking about the people
they love, but as a survivor, you have all these
complex questions that add to your grief and trauma. So
if that becomes a reality for them, that's a very
difficult outcome, as is if he was murdered and there's

(43:51):
nobody who's going to be brought to justice. Also equally
difficult in its own way where they're saying, who did this?
Is it someone we know? Oh, because how would they
know he was out of town? Is it somebody who
could put the rest of our family at risk?

Speaker 2 (44:06):
You know?

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Why did they hurt him? And they're they're not gonna
get caught and we're not going to get justice for him.
So both are horrific. And this case is really interesting because,
like you said, he's a high profile man who had
an incredible career. He seemed very stable and God only
knows what was happening behind the scenes. But it really
does seem like a total mystery of suicide. Doesn't seem

(44:29):
like a clear outcome, and neither does a homicide.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
Yeah, this case is really confounding, and I'm completely on
the fence though for some reason, although like the evidence
presented in my rational brain says they could go either way,
my gut is leaning towards suicide, and you said, ash
either way. It's incredibly tragic because we've got Laara and
Patty who are left behind with all of these questions.

(44:55):
I just keep hearkening back to the fact that his
brother Roy completed suicide years prior, and the manner in
which he did it and the scene in which raised
car was disposed of, and there's a lot of things
that you can kind of interpret either way. But I
do think there is a distinct possibility. We know he
was sleeping more he was skipping work, and maybe he

(45:18):
was working on something, but maybe he was just having
his mental health deteriorate and he didn't have an outlet
for that. So, although I think both things are possible,
I really wish that we would be able to find
Gray gree Car so that Laura and Patty would be
able to have his body and be able to maybe
get some answers in the process.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yeah, this is a really difficult one. I remember seeing
it on Disappeared all those years ago and not knowing
what to think. But it is clear cut that this
is probably one of those missing persons cases where there
are only two answers, either murder or suicide. And I
do think that the suicide option is a definite possibility,
and that there's enough evidence pointing in that direction. But

(46:00):
on the other hand, there are just so many oddities
with this case that I just can't rule out the
possibility that it was the victim of foul play. I
mean possible that Ray was the one who disposed to
the laptop. But on the other hand, we still don't
have an explanation for this mysterious woman who was seen
with Ray and Leuisbourg before he went missing. And who knows.
Maybe it could be an encounter where Ray met someone

(46:21):
that he had a romantic interest in but she didn't
reciprocate it and that made him distraught enough to decide
to jump off a bridge and take his own life.
The possibilities are endless, but I still, though, would love
to know what a journalist Rebecca Knight uncovered when she
produced the Final Argument podcast, because that seemed like it

(46:41):
was leaning towards a major foul play theory and was
going to release some sort of bombshell which blew the
case wide open, but then nothing but silence, So I
don't know. Maybe she found out she was looking in
the wrong direction and that there was no conspiracy or
foul play at all, but she seemed pretty certain that
he was the victim of foul and if he was,
I don't know what it was related to, if it

(47:03):
was related to the Penn State scandal for something else
he was working on. But if he was murdered, then
whoever did it essentially got away with the perfect crime.
Since Ray's body has never been found, and if this
laptop contained incriminating information, it was too damage for anyone
to see anything, and there is no real evidence pointing
towards foul play. I guess the only way we may

(47:23):
know for sure is if Ray's body is in the
river somewhere. If they are able to recover his remains,
then they will be able to determine with certainty whether
his death was a murder or a suicide. But if
it was disposed of in a mine shaft somewhere, then
that's going to make this case a lot harder to solve.
But Yeah, out of all the unsolved disappearances we've done
from the modern era, I definitely would rank this is

(47:45):
one of the ones that I would most like to
see solved because I really just don't have any idea
what happened.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Robin. Do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on

(48:18):
The Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon,
and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is
a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsolved Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in

(48:41):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join tiers.

Speaker 4 (49:00):
So I want to let you know a little bit
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Speaker 1 (49:18):
We'll link them in the show notes.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
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Speaker 1 (49:39):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy