A successful executive goes off the grid and her distraught husband is at a loss.
“You see her, tell me, please.”
The family’s beautiful teen nanny was caught in the middle.
“The venom just began spewing out of her mouth.”
Then came the most gruesome discovery of all.
Tara Grant was a beautiful and smart small-town girl with big-city dreams.
“In the corporate world, she kept moving up the ladder. She was a perfectionist.”
But according to some, that perfectionist married her opposite — odd and awkward Steven Grant.
“He was the guy that you thought would grow up and rob a liquor store and leave his name tag on and you’d see him on the stupidest criminals.”
“Steve wasn’t the most popular kid in the world. He wasn’t the best looking. And so, I guess when I saw his wife, I was like, ‘Wow, good job, Steve. I never thought you would get someone like Tara.’”
Snagging Tara was a real coup for Steven.
“Tara’s success allowed them to have a very successful life. They lived in a really nice neighborhood. They drove new cars. Their children attended a private school.”
But with those successes came sacrifices.
“Tara was working in San Juan and working Monday through Friday. And then she would jump on a jet Friday afternoon and go back to Detroit and spend the weekend and then boom, back on the plane on Monday to her work life.”
While Tara was excelling at her job in sun-soaked San Juan, Puerto Rico, Steven, who had dreamed of working in politics, was holding down the fort at home as a soccer coach and self-proclaimed “Mr. Mom” to their two small children.
“Steven Grant loved taking care of his children. He was extremely present in their day-to-day lives.”
They seemed to be making it work. But were they really?
“Their public face as a couple seemed a lot more normal than what might have been simmering inside those doors.”
What was simmering was heading toward a rapid boil. And it was Steven’s growing resentment that was fanning the flames.
“I think that on some level her ascension and his flatline, being left there with the kids, I think in the back of his mind he certainly felt maybe a little bit emasculated by that.”
So they fought, and Steven sought the attention of another woman.
“Steve had a girlfriend before he met Tara and they had reconnected. He was looking for someone to make him feel wanted.”
Maybe several someones.
It seemed like he was also taking a fancy to the family’s beautiful 18-year-old nanny, Verina.
“The Grants had employed a German au pair who lived in their home to take care of their children. Steven began to talk to her because she was the only person in the home with him while Tara was working. And then their conversations turned sexual.”
“He told her bluntly that he would like to sleep with her.”
Was it just flirting, or did things become physical?
Reportedly, a very jealous Steven suspected Tara had someone on the side herself.
“He found some things on her computer about a previous relationship and it looked like that this relationship had been rekindled.”
And he believed an affair with her boss was making Tara’s weekly island getaways less work and more pleasure.
Regardless of their actual or perceived indiscretions, at least for the time being, they were staying together — until one night when it all went to hell.
It was a freezing Friday evening in February when Tara arrived home from Puerto Rico and informed Steven she was going back on Sunday, one day early.
“They immediately began to argue. He had told her, ‘This has to stop. You’re gone all the time.’”
Reportedly, an angry Tara packed her bags and walked out the front door.
“She went down the driveway and got into a car service, a black car service, and left.”
So Tara leaves.
Hours later, Steven tries calling her.
“Please leave me a message and I’ll be back with you as soon as I can.”
“I think it’s after two right now. It’s quarter after two. I just want to know what’s going on. I think you owe me and your kids at least a little bit of an explanation. Call me. Just call and let me know what the hell is going on. Bye.”
Over the next few days, Steven calls Tara several times, but gets no answer. He also calls her boss in Puerto Rico and her family, but they aren’t worried yet, saying:
“She’s probably just cooling her jets and she’s just staying away from you because she’s angry and you’ll hear from her soon enough.”
But after five days of desperately trying to find her, on Valentine’s Day Steven reports Tara missing.
“He came in, one of our deputies took a report from him and it was immediately turned over to our detective bureau because it just really wasn’t adding up.”
The intense search is on.
“It was a big deal because frankly attractive, well-educated executives didn’t go missing in the Detroit suburbs.”
High-powered globe-trotting executive and mother of two Tara Grant is gone.
“Where they lived, people did not just poof go away.”
Her husband Steven Grant says after they argued one night, she left their suburban Detroit home and flew back early to her job in Puerto Rico. And he’s been trying hard to find her for five days.
“I think you owe me and your kids at least a little bit of an explanation. Call me. Just call and let me know what the hell’s going on.”
Macomb County Sheriff’s Detective Sergeant Pam McLean and her partner, Detective Brian Koslowski, almost immediately believe something is amiss.
“When we first got to the house, Steven’s very nervous. He was very fidgety. He was trying to be overly cooperative. And the more questions we started asking him, the more nervous he became.”
But being nervous doesn’t make someone guilty. And Tara is just missing.
So detectives also look at others, wondering if another lover is connected to her disappearance. Or what about the nanny? The couple had been getting close in the days leading up to Tara’s vanishing.
“Their relationship had begun approximately four to six weeks prior to Tara’s disappearance, and it was escalating quickly.”
The children were home sleeping the night their mother disappeared, but Verina was out.
As the investigation continues, detectives are watching Steven.
“We set up surveillance on him. We knew that something wasn’t right and we believed that he had something to do with it.”
In the meantime, Steven is busy playing the distraught husband.
“I hope Tara walks in that door right there.”
Becoming a regular on the evening news.
“If not, I hope my cell phone has 10 messages from her when I walk back into the room.”
“Please call anybody. Call the police. Call me. Call my in-laws. Call someone. If you see her, tell me, please.”
“It was an Oscar-worthy performance. This is a guy who is now the star of the Steven Grant Show. Poor me.”
Detectives are watching and closing in, chipping away at Steven’s implausible story.
“We found out that she wasn’t back in Puerto Rico. We had checked all the airlines. We knew her passport had not been used. We knew her credit card had not been used. And the cell phone records showed when her last call was made.”
Then investigators catch a break when a woman walking through a local park sees a baggie tucked into a tree filled with questionable items.
“Gloves, metal shavings, and blood that we later learned was in fact Tara’s blood.”
A bombshell.
Police arrange to have the rest of the park searched while still keeping surveillance on Steven.
“At this point in time, Steven had become somewhat uncooperative with us. All of our questions or anything had to go directly through an attorney. He had refused to take a polygraph for us. We later learned that he had taken a private polygraph and that it came back inconclusive.”
Three weeks after Tara went missing, detectives get a search warrant for the Grant house.
A knock at the door brings a team of investigators.
“He was there in the beginning of the search when we got there.”
Then Steven asks if he can take the dog for a walk.
“He was then free to leave. He was not being detained by us at that time.”
As Steven walks out of the house and into the cold winter night, the case takes a gruesome turn.
“We were all standing in the garage and my partner noticed this bin and it looked a little out of place. He opened it up and could see that there was a lot of plastic in there. He kind of poked at it and he could feel a little give and he’s like, ‘That does not feel right.’”
Detectives cut open the plastic.
What they find will sicken even the most seasoned investigators.
“Inside the bag were the clothed remains of Tara Grant — at least part of her. Her torso from the neck to the top of her thighs, face up. She had on her bra, panties, and part of the slacks that she had been wearing.”
Tara Grant was dead, and part of her was in her own garage.
“My first thought or feeling was, ‘We got him.’”
But did Steven act alone?
Steven Grant is on the run.
His wife, Tara Grant, had been missing for the last three weeks. But that all changed when a search of the family home yielded the most gruesome discovery imaginable — her torso.
“It was from her neck to her waist, found in a bin right next to a tub of her kids’ toys.”
“He knew we were going to find it and that’s when he went on the run.”
The manhunt for Steven Grant is on.
“The FBI is swarming the state, setting up a dragnet, a full-on search for him.”
A suicidal Steven borrows a car from a friend and heads north into the frigid Michigan night.
“He makes this meandering trip all over the state of Michigan and he remembers that he and Tara used to camp at Wilderness State Park.”
As he makes his way there, Steven arms himself with alcohol, pills, razor blades, and something else.
“He purchased a toy gun, thinking that if he had a gun in his hand and aimed it at police, they would shoot him.”
After driving for hours, a desperate Steven makes some final calls and writes goodbye letters to his two young children.
“He knew he wasn’t going to win.”
He was right.
“His vehicle was located up at the park and he was found underneath a tree. He had extreme hypothermia, semi-conscious. He was seeing people and talking to trees and he was in pretty bad shape. He was airlifted and taken to the local hospital.”
Once Macomb County Sheriff’s detectives McLean and Koslowski arrive, they place Steven Grant under arrest. But he wants to talk.
“7:45 p.m., Northern Michigan Hospital. Interview of Steven Grant.”
Little do detectives know the extent of the savage secrets Steven has been hiding.
“Okay, going to February 9th, Friday.”
Steven says it all started in their bedroom when Tara was unpacking from her work trip and he was naked getting ready for bed.
A fight about Tara’s busy work and travel schedule ensues.
The argument quickly escalates. Tara slaps him across the face. Then Steven hits her.
“She fell and then she banged the back of her head on the floor and then she said something like, ‘That’s it. I’m going to take the kids. You’re going to be homeless. You’re a piece of…’”
Enraged, Steven does the unthinkable.
“I choked her. I grabbed her neck.”
“She finally grabbed my hand at one point, but it was too late.”
“I couldn’t stop. I knew I was going to prison.”
As Steven continues to strangle Tara:
“She was looking into his eyes and she was fighting with him and he grabbed a piece of clothing and put it over her face so that he didn’t have to see her while he was killing her.”
After more than four minutes of callously choking the life out of his wife, Tara Grant is dead.
Then, with their small children sleeping just feet away:
“I wrapped something, a belt around her neck. I think it was my brown leather belt and I knew I couldn’t carry her, so I wrapped that around her neck and I used it to basically pull her down the stairs.”
Steven, still naked, drags Tara’s body into the freezing cold garage where he struggles getting her into the back of her own truck.
“And I dropped her. It was the most disgusting noise. It just sounded like dropping a watermelon on the cement. I knew then that I had killed her.”
Steven eventually gets her into the SUV.
“He put it in the back of her SUV and shut the door and went back into his house.”
Moments later, the family’s nanny Verina, with whom he had flirted, walks in the door.
Steven quickly dresses, then tells her the story he has concocted — that he and Tara fought and she walked out on him.
“He wanted the nanny to feel sorry for him. At this point, he was playing the ‘Oh, my wife has left me’ card.”
Then Steven begins a plan to cover his tracks.
“He began to do things like call his wife’s cell phone and leave messages, knowing of course that her body was in the family garage.”
The next day, Steven’s scheme takes a grisly turn.
After saying goodbye to his kids, he drives Tara’s car with her body in the back to his father’s machine shop.
“He lays out a bunch of tarps on the floor and he removes her body and places her on top of it and he begins to dismember her.”
“I cut her hands off and I cut to the next joint and the next joint and same with her legs. And at some point I threw up.”
A shockingly barbaric act.
“And then I just told myself, ‘Look, if you don’t do this, you’re going to prison for the rest of your life.’”
And he kept cutting her up.
“When Steven finishes, he wraps the body parts in plastic and fills a large plastic bin to the brim with Tara.”
“I put everything — I think I put some newspaper in there because at one point there was some blood but it was real thick, like syrup.”
“So you had Tara’s entire body in one Rubbermaid container?”
Early the next morning, Steven grabs his kid’s sled and heads out into snowy Stony Creek Park.
While standing on a hill, Steven puts the bin on top of the sled. But before he knows it:
“It was like Keystone Cops. The sled took off and now I’m chasing after this sled that has my wife’s cut up body in it down a hill. And I finally got it stopped when it fell over and it broke and all these pieces had now fallen all over.”
Steven eventually gathers Tara’s mutilated body parts and buries them around the park.
“Steven brought Tara’s body and her remains into this area here. He was hoping that wildlife within the park would eat the remains and therefore just leave bones, which would then make it a little easier to avoid detection.”
Not that it would be her final resting place.
“He moved her multiple times to multiple locations.”
“I’ve done a very, very bad job of hiding anything. It’s right there in the open.”
“The way he was giving us his confession, it was as if he was just telling a story. He would laugh. He would joke. He showed no remorse. It was just telling a story.”
Detectives also learn from Steven what led to their big break — finding Tara’s torso in the family garage.
Turns out when Steven heard there was going to be a large-scale search of the park, he panicked, afraid the poorly hidden torso would be found.
“He first removed it from the park, then took it to his father’s business, and he put it on top of the office area there. It remained there for approximately a day, at which time he moved it because he was afraid it was going to start smelling. And then that’s when he took it to his garage.”
But it was also when detectives showed up with that search warrant.
“Our timing was just right. Fortunately for us, he had just moved her torso back there the night before.”
Investigators would eventually locate most of Tara’s remains, but not all.
“I believe there were 14 parts, but they only recovered 11.”
And they’d also find some of the saw blades Steven used.
“We recovered some with some flesh still on them.”
Detectives now know Steven Grant committed this despicable act all by himself.
The nanny had nothing to do with it.
Nine months after Grant is arrested for the brutal slaying of his wife, the case goes to trial.
And after three weeks of testimony, Steven Grant is found guilty of second-degree murder and mutilation of a corpse. He is sentenced to 50 to 80 years in prison.
“She certainly didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Andrea Billups co-wrote a book about Tara’s murder called A Slaying in the Suburbs. And she says while justice has technically been served, no amount of punishment can replace what was lost.
“I think the great sadness of this case obviously was for these children who were four and six at the time this murder occurred. So now they’d lost their mother and their father was going to prison for what certainly will amount to the rest of his life. It’s just an enormous tragedy.”
