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Monday, November 14, 2011

My Spidey Sense Is Tingling

I'm not sure what to make of this story.

It's not so much of a story as a "thing that makes you go, hmm," kind of thing, but it's piqued my curiosity, to say the least.

In the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State, reports came out last week of former District Attorney Ray Gricar, who had investigated and considered prosecuting Sandusky in 1998.  He ultimately chose not to prosecute Sandusky for reasons unknown (which is also curious, but I'll talk more about that in a little bit), but Gricar's story as a whole is a peculiar twist to this entire scandal.

Before I talk about Gricar himself, there's a small backstory involving his brother Roy.  In 1996, Roy Gricar disappeared.  His car was found, and several days later his body was found by a river, roughly a mile away from where his car was found.  His cause of death was ultimately ruled suicide.

Two years later, Ray Gricar was working on the Jerry Sandusky case, and he helped the local police set up a sting operation where they had brought in a mother of one of Sandusky's alleged victims.  The mother had a phone conversation with Sandusky, with the police and Gricar listening in on the conversation, unbeknownst to Sandusky.  During the phone call, the mother essentially got Sandusky to confess to having molested her son, which would normally form a rock-solid foundation of a case against Sandusky.

Except Gricar didn't press charges.  He dropped the case instead for reasons known only to him.

In 2005, Ray Gricar's story came to a mysterious head.  He called his girlfriend one day in April, saying he was going out shopping for the day and that he'd be home later.

Ray Gricar never came home.

Police found his Mini Cooper near an antique store with cigarette ashes inside the car.  Gricar never smoked, so the source of the ashes remained a mystery to this day.  Gricar's laptop was also missing, and two months later it was discovered under a bridge in the river, but the hard drive was missing from the computer. Then in September the hard drive was also found in the river, roughly a half mile from where Gricar's Mini Cooper was parked.  Water damage had ruined the hard drive, so any information stored on there was long destroyed.

Later on, investigators had the chance to look at Gricar's home computer, and what was found on there was even more intriguing: Gricar had been Googling methods on how to destroy a computer's hard drive. 

Let's review what we've got here: We've got a district attorney who had previously investigated Jerry Sandusky, and nearly built a case against him whose body was never found after he had disappeared.  We've got a DA's brother with a long history of mental illness who turned up dead in a river in Ohio.  We've got a DA who disappeared in a similar method to his own brother, and his belongings were mysteriously found in a river as well (though not the same river as where his brother was found).  We've also got this DA researching ways to destroy whatever contents were on his laptop's hard drive, though there's nothing to suggest that the hard drive had contained anything related to Sandusky. 

I'm not one who normally subscribes to conspiracy theories, but I am fascinated by them nonetheless.  Connect the dots on Ray Gricar to Jerry Sandusky, and you've got a great start to a conspiracy theory for sure.  And the amazing thing is, Gricar isn't the only strange case surrounding Sandusky.  There's also a janitor who had been working the grounds on Penn State in 2000 - two years before Mike McQueary had spotted Sandusky in the shower with a boy - and had seen Sandusky with a young boy in a shower together.  The janitor immediately reported what he had seen to his manager, and other coworkers as well.

Why wasn't this case followed up by the police?  Because the witness went nuts and ultimately was diagnosed with dementia.  He's now in a mental institution and under medical care 24 hours a day.

Like I said at the beginning, I'm not sure what to make of all this.  But the peculiar occurrences surrounding witnesses and people investigating Jerry Sandusky sound like what happens to informants in movie thrillers.  None of these details pass the smell test, but this entire scandal has me thinking of a minor line in a movie I had seen, after he had counted up the number of suspects in a case: "Five people make a conspiracy, right?"

So far, we've got Sandusky, Graham Spanier, Tim Curley, Gary Schultz, and Mike McQueary.  That's five people right there, and I didn't even bother counting McQueary's father, Ray Gricar, the janitor who had spotted Sandusky in 2000, or Joe Paterno. 

I'll still bet money that there are more details to discover as this case eventually goes to trial.

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