We would like to send out a special thanks to the fun and challenging June's Journey game. Who doesn't love a good mystery? In the hidden object murder mystery game June's Journey, you'll awaken your inner sleuth and step right into a thrilling adventure set in the heart of the Roaring Twenties. Find your inner detective. Download June's Journey free today on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Thank you and enjoy the show. April 15th, 2005. Belfont, Pennsylvania.
After taking the day off work and leaving on a road trip, 59-year-old Center County District Attorney Ray Grekar 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 antique small. Over the course of the next several months, Ray's county-issued work laptop and its hard drive are discovered on separate occasions in the nearby Susquehanna River, but the hard drive is too damaged to recover any data.
A number of theories are pushed forward, including that Rey completed suicide, disappeared voluntarily or was the victim of foul play, but there is no conclusive evidence to point to any of these theories and no trace of Rey is ever found. After that, the trail went cold. Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of The Trail Went Cold.
I'm your host Robin Warder, and while it took me a while to realize it, this marks a pretty special milestone for the podcast. It is our 268th full-length episode, and when you combine that with the 32 minisodes we released during the first two years as a podcast, I guess this would officially be our 300th episode. So to commemorate the occasion, I went to my massive list of case suggestions from listeners, and decided to do an episode about my most highly requested case that I have yet to cover,
and the lucky winner turned out to be the 2005 disappearance of Ray Gricar. This is one of the most heavily discussed missing persons cases of the modern era, and it's not hard to figure out why, because this is a rare example of a prominent law enforcement official becoming the center of their own unsolved mystery. For two decades...
Ray Grekar had been the district attorney of Center County, who devoted his life to putting murderers, rapists, and other vicious criminals behind bars, but less than eight months before he was scheduled to retire, Ray vanished without a trace. On the day he disappeared, Ray decided to play hooky from work and take a road trip, but he never returned home, and the following day, his abandoned Mini Cooper was discovered 60 miles away in a parking lot across the street from an antique small in the town of Lewisburg.
Now, since Ray had been to this particular Antiques Mall before, taking a trip to Lewisburg wouldn't have been all that unusual, but there were a number of odd clues surrounding his disappearance. Even though Ray detested smoking, cigarette ash was found inside his car, and there would be reported sightings of him in Lewisburg that day alongside a woman who has never been identified. Ray's work laptop and its hard drive would later be discovered in the nearby Susquehanna River,
leading to speculation that it contained information which Ray, or someone else, did not want to be uncovered, and there are conspiracy theories that his disappearance might be connected to the notorious Penn State child sex abuse scandal, which would become a major story six years later. But it's also possible that even though his body has never been found, Ray may have been feeling suicidal and decided to end his own life by jumping into the Susquehanna River.
as he lost his older brother under similar circumstances years earlier. Even though this is a very high-profile missing persons case with a number of different possible scenarios, there is no conclusive evidence which points to any of them, so we're going to have no shortage of theories to discuss on today's episode. However, before we get started, just a quick reminder that The Trail Went Cold is a weekly podcast, which is currently available for download on several platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
So if you like this podcast, be sure to subscribe to it, and please leave us a rating or review on any of those sites to help spread the word and garner us more exposure. The Trail Went Cold is on Patreon, so if you would like to learn how to support the show, please visit our page at patreon.com slash thetrailwentcold. For as little as $1 a month, you can garner access to exclusive rewards, which may include stickers and thank you cards, early access to episodes, and bonus content.
So with all that out of the way, let us now delve into the unsolved disappearance of Ray Gricar. Our story begins in Center County, Pennsylvania in 2005, and our central figure is 59-year-old Ray Gricar.
Originally born in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, Ray has spent the past four decades working in the legal field, as after earning a Juris Doctor degree at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, he launched his career by working as a prosecutor in Cuyahoga County. Ray married his first wife, Barbara Gray, in 1969, and they would adopt their only child, a baby girl named Laura, nine years later. Shortly thereafter,
Barbara was offered a new job at Pennsylvania State University, aka Penn State, so the family relocated to State College in 1980, and Ray decided to put his legal career on hold so he could become a stay-at-home dad and raise Laura. But Ray eventually caught the attention of the Center County District Attorney, who offered Ray a job as an assistant prosecutor and compelled him to return to work. By 1985, the position of Center County District Attorney became open,
so Ray decided to make his own run for it, and he wound up winning the election. Over the course of the next two decades, Ray would prosecute a number of cases and was re-elected district attorney four times. He was known for being a very private and enigmatic person who always kept a low profile, and unlike many others in his field, Ray did not have any higher political aspirations to become a judge or attorney general. However, he did have a reputation for being a very hard-working and dedicated prosecutor,
who truly cared for the victims in the cases he took on. During his run as district attorney, Ray's personal life would undergo a number of changes, as he got divorced from Barbara in 1991. Five years later, Ray got remarried to another woman named Emma Lang, but the relationship was described as a fairly tumultuous one, and their marriage would end in divorce in 2001. But the following year, Ray began a relationship with Patty Fornicola, who worked as a clerk and victim's rights advocate.
in the Center County District Attorney's office. Since Patty had also gone through a previous divorce, she and Ray were not in any hurry to get married again, but they thought they were the perfect match for each other. As a result, Ray decided to move in with Patty at her house in the town of Bellefont, located just over 10 miles northeast of State College. In January of 2004, Ray announced that he had decided not to seek a sixth term as Center County District Attorney.
and would not be running for re-election the following year. He would be stepping down at the end of 2005, shortly after he passed his 60th birthday, and he would retire from practicing law in order to spend more time traveling and visiting his daughter Laura, who was living in Seattle, Washington at this time. On April the 15th, Ray was in the midst of winding down his career and had just seven and a half months left in office. When he and Patty woke up that morning,
Ray told her that he was planning to take the day off work and went back to sleep. Patty's ordinary routine was to return home at lunchtime in order to take care of their dog, but since she had to run some errands that day, she wrote a note asking Ray if he could handle the dog before she left. Well, at around 11.30 a.m., Ray called Patty from his cell phone to inform her that he was now taking a scenic drive in his red and white Mini Cooper and driving northeast on Route 192 through the unincorporated community of Brush Valley.
He told Patty that he was planning to do some antique shopping, which was one of his favorite hobbies, and he would not be back in time to take care of the dog, but after the call ended, Patty never heard from Ray again. Ray failed to return home that evening, and when repeated calls to his cell phone kept going to voicemail, Patty became concerned enough to contact the Belfont Police Department and officially reported him missing sometime after 11pm. Patty also reached out to Ray's daughter Laura,
who said that she hadn't heard from him either. Years earlier, when Ray was married to his second wife, Emma, he decided to leave their residence after they got into a huge fight and made an impromptu trip to his hometown of Cleveland. And since Ray was a huge fan of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, he decided to blow off some steam by attending a doubleheader, which is two back-to-back games, at Jacobs Field. While this was going on, Ray did not bother to contact Emma or anyone else to let them know where he was.
until he just suddenly reappeared at work again on Monday morning as if nothing had happened. Since the Indians had an afternoon game scheduled on April the 16th, the Belfont PD contacted the local authorities and asked them to check the Jacobsfield parking lot for Ray's Mini Cooper, but found nothing. However, at around 6.30pm that night, a state trooper would find the Mini Cooper in the small town of Lewisburg, located 60 miles east of Belfont in Union County.
The vehicle was in a gravel parking lot located across the street from an antiques mall called the Street of Shops. Like I mentioned earlier, one of Ray's favorite hobbies was collecting antiques, so he had traveled to Lewisburg to visit this mall on previous occasions. The Mini Cooper was locked, but when the police managed to open it and get inside, they found Ray's cell phone, which had been issued to him by the county for work purposes, and it was turned off. A half-filled water bottle was also found in the vehicle's beverage holder,
and testing would later find traces of Ray's DNA on it. But Ray's wallet and the keys to the Mini Cooper were nowhere to be found. The strangest clue was small traces of cigarette ash on the passenger's side floor mat, and there was also the scent of cigarette smoke, which seemed very unusual, since Ray disliked smoking, and everyone who knew him found it unlikely that he would ever let anyone else smoke inside his car. A pair of cigarette butts were also found on the ground near the passenger's side of the vehicle.
and while DNA was recovered from them and entered into law enforcement databases containing the DNA of offenders, it failed to produce a match. When a sniffer dog was brought in to track Ray's scent, it did not go any further than the parking lot, which seemed to indicate that Ray might have climbed into another vehicle and left the scene. There were multiple witnesses who recalled seeing Ray in Lewisburg on April the 15th, and it appeared that earlier in the day, before he parked the car in this particular lot,
He had parked across the street from another location, the Packwood House Museum. Employees from the museum said they saw Ray pacing around outside in a nearby park as if he appeared to be waiting for someone, but at some point, he moved his car to the lot near the street of shops. The most intriguing sighting was provided by witnesses, who said they saw a man matching Ray's description inside the street of shops, walking alongside a dark-haired woman.
and they appeared to be together since they were speaking to one another. During the early stages of the investigation, it was believed that the dark-haired woman might have been a close friend of Ray's named Barbara Petito, who had worked as a TV reporter in State College. Not only did Petito match the description, but she was known for being a smoker and a regular customer at the street of shops who had an interest in antiques.
however it turned out that petito was away on vacation in new york on the day ray went missing so she was ruled out as being the woman unfortunately the sighting of the woman was not made public until thirteen months after ray disappeared and investigators would face criticism for not pursuing this lead more aggressively when patty performed a search of her residence the only items of ray's which appeared to be missing were a pair of sunglasses
and his county-issued laptop computer that he used for work purposes. Paddy said it was uncharacteristic for Ray to bring his laptop on non-work-related trips. He also left behind his computer's case, power cord, and floppy drive, and the laptop's battery was believed to have about two or three hours worth of power. The Mini Cooper had been parked in close proximity to the Susquehanna River, which had two bridges crossing over it. One of them was a part of Pennsylvania Route 45 and used by local traffic.
while the other was a rusted and abandoned railway trestle. There was some concern that Ray might have decided to intentionally jump off one of the bridges into the river, as the whole scene bore us some striking similarities to another tragedy experienced by the Grigar family nine years earlier. In May of 1996, Ray's older brother Roy Grigar, who was 53 years old at the time, left his home in Westchester Township, Ohio, after telling his wife he was going out to buy some mulch.
but he never returned. Two days later, Roy's abandoned car was discovered 40 miles away in a park in Dayton, located near a bridge overlooking the Great Miami River. One week after he originally went missing, Roy's body was found in the river, downstream from the spot where his car had been parked. Since Roy had a history of struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, it seemed likely that he had jumped off the bridge and drowned, and his death was ruled to be a suicide.
The fact that Ray's abandoned car was also found a great distance from his home near a bridge overlooking a river caused speculation that he may have followed in his brother's footsteps and ended his own life. While Ray had no documented history of depression or suicidal behavior, and his loved ones believed that he was looking forward to his upcoming retirement. However, people had recently started to notice that Ray appeared to be withdrawn and giving off signs that he was fatigued, as he would often take naps after work and at lunchtime.
In fact, Ray seemed to spend so much time sleeping that in the weeks prior to his disappearance, Patty suggested that he go see a doctor, but he never did. On April the 14th, the day before Ray went missing, he took a half day off from work, and witnesses would recall seeing a Mini Cooper parked at a local lakeside marina during the morning hours with Ray sitting inside. Later that evening...
Surveillance cameras showed Ray arriving at his office at the Center County Courthouse, but he left after just under two hours, and no one could be certain what he was doing there. A search of Ray's office computer would show that he had done an internet search to look up the route from Belfont to Lewisburg, which struck some people as odd, since Ray had previously driven to the area on numerous occasions. Since there were no obvious signs of foul play in his abandoned vehicle, investigators seriously explored the possibility...
that Ray elected to take his own life and decided to perform a search of the Susquehanna River. Since the currents were strong, and Ray was not known for being a great swimmer, he likely would not have survived, even though the fall from both the bridges crossing over the river was only 25 feet. However, a search of the river failed to turn up Ray's body or any other evidence, but since the spring melt had recently taken place, the water level was higher than usual. By the time the summer arrived, the water level had considerably lowered,
and on July the 30th, some fishermen finally discovered Ray's laptop in the river, lodged against a bridge support on the abandoned railway trestle. A forensic examination of the computer indicated that it had been in the river for months, but the laptop's hard drive had been removed, and a new search of the area failed to turn it up. But two months later, on October the 1st, a mother and daughter skipping stones in the water wound up coming across a hard drive on the riverbed near the railway trestle.
The spot was about 100 yards upstream from where the laptop had been found, and it seemed impossible that the hard drive could have been dislodged accidentally after the computer was tossed into the river. The hard drive had to be manually unscrewed, so someone had clearly gone to the trouble of intentionally removing it. By this point, the hard drive was so badly damaged by the sand and grit from the riverbed that it was impossible to recover or extract any data from it,
even after the FBI's best forensic crew performed an analysis. Prior to his disappearance, Ray had purchased software to erase a computer's hard drive, which did not seem unusual, since he was probably planning to wipe his work laptop for his upcoming retirement at the end of the year. But it would eventually be revealed that a search of Ray's home computer showed that he had performed internet searches with such terms as, quote, how to wreck a hard drive, how to fry a hard drive, and water damage to a notebook computer.
So this only increased speculation about whether Ray removed the hard drive from the laptop and tossed both items into the river because there was something on there he did not want people to see. When Ray's co-workers returned to his office following his disappearance, they noticed a county codebook lying on the desk of an assistant district attorney, and curiously, it was open to the page which described what to do in the event that a sitting district attorney went missing or died.
Even though the authorities explored the possibility that Ray could have voluntarily staged his own disappearance, there would be no further activity on his bank accounts, credit cards, and cell phone records. No discrepancies were found in the district attorney's office financial accounts to suggest that Ray had done anything illegal to compel him to run away, such as embezzling money. There would be a number of reported sightings of Ray,
including two witnesses who were certain they had seen him watching a Cleveland Indians baseball game at a bar in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on April the 18th, three days after he went missing. One month later, a retired police officer thought he saw Ray and an older woman together at a restaurant in Southfield, Michigan, and another witness became convinced that she had seen Ray sitting in the studio audience for a taping of an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago, though a search of the episode's footage turned up empty.
One woman was so certain she had seen Ray eating at a restaurant in Texas that she snapped a photo of the man with her cell phone and turned it over to the authorities, but an FBI analysis of the photo concluded that the man was unlikely to be Ray. Even though Laura lived several states away in Seattle, she maintained a close relationship with her father as they frequently spoke on the phone and visited each other several weeks per year, but she said she never heard from Ray after he went missing.
Laura and Patty agreed to take polygraphs, in which they denied any knowledge of Ray's disappearance, and they both wound up passing. The authorities considered administering polygraph tests to both of Ray's ex-wives, as well as his two nephews, Tony and Chris Grekar, but ultimately decided against it, though they did not believe that any of these individuals knew what happened to Ray. Laura was the trustee of Ray's estate, and in 2011, she petitioned Center County to officially declare him dead,
before the standard seven-year waiting period expired. On July the 25th of that year, Ray was declared dead in absentia, and ironically enough, the judge who presided over this decision was David Grind, the former Center County District Attorney, who gave Ray a job as an assistant three decades earlier, which paved the way for Ray becoming District Attorney himself. In an odd coincidence, just one day after this decision was made,
an unidentified John Doe was arrested in Utah on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. Since the man refused to reveal his real name and bore a striking resemblance to Ray Gricar, there was speculation that he might have been Ray, but a fingerprint check ruled this out, and the man was soon identified as a 61-year-old New Mexico resident named Philip Beavers. By the end of 2011,
A major story would make national headlines, which just happened to have a link to Ray's career as a district attorney. In November of that year, a grand jury would indict Jerry Sandusky, a retired assistant coach from the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, with 52 counts of sexual abuse. Sandusky ran a non-profit charity called The Second Mile, which assisted underprivileged and at-risk children
but he had used his position of power to sexually abuse several boys over a period of at least 15 years. When Sandusky went on trial the following year, a jury found him guilty on 45 of the charges, and he would receive a 30 to 60 year prison sentence. Given that the Penn State football team were such a beloved institution, the story ballooned into a major scandal.
amidst allegations that high-ranking officials had known about Sandusky's abusive behavior for years, but swept all the allegations against him under the rug in order to preserve the school's reputation. Well, sure enough, it would emerge that in May of 1998, Sandusky was accused of inappropriately touching a pair of 11-year-old boys in a locked room shower, and the case wound up reaching the Center County District Attorney's Office, where it was personally reviewed by Ray Grekar.
Ray decided to set up a sting operation where the mother of one of the boys would confront Sandusky at her house while police were secretly recording their conversation in another room. When the confrontation took place, Sandusky did admit that he had showered alongside the boy and hugged him in an inappropriate fashion, though he stopped short of flat out admitting that he had intentionally molested him. He told the mother, quote, I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you.
A child psychologist who interviewed the boy concluded that Sandusky was likely a pedophile, but a second opinion was provided by a counselor who did not believe Sandusky was an habitual abuser. In the end, Ray decided not to press any charges against Sandusky and closed the case, though it does not sound like he shared the reasons for his decision with anyone. When Sandusky went on trial 14 years later,
The boy from the shower incident, known only as Victim 6, was one of the survivors who testified against him. Well, needless to say, since Ray had been a missing person for six years by the time the Penn State scandal broke, there was a lot of speculation that it was connected to his disappearance. When a search was performed of Ray's old files and handwritten notes, it failed to uncover a single mention of Jerry Sandusky or the 1998 investigation into the shower incident.
Of course, given that Sandusky's abuse allegations were swept under the rug for many years, it's been theorized that Ray might have elected to participate in the cover-up as well, which is why he elected not to press any charges. However, Ray's nephew, Tony Grekar, who has functioned as the official family spokesperson, disputed this, stating, quote, One thing I can say is that Ray was beholden to no one, was not a politician. He developed a bitter taste in his mouth for the program and its coach, and that was not much of a secret.
so I wouldn't imagine he'd give favorable treatment to anyone associated with the team for any reason, end quote. Indeed, no conclusive evidence has ever been found to suggest that Ray's disappearance was linked to the Penn State scandal. Over the past decade, there have been at least two accounts of an informant coming forward and sharing a story about Ray being murdered. In September of 2013, the Altoona Mir newspaper reported,
that the authorities were investigating claims from an informant that a former member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club had killed Ray as revenge for prosecuting and convicting the guy on an aggravated assault conviction, which led to him receiving a multi-year prison sentence. The story goes that this biker damaged Ray's kneecaps and slit his throat before dumping his body into a mine shaft in rural Pennsylvania, which had since been capped and covered with several feet of dirt. The informant reportedly decided to come forward,
because he was under the impression that the biker was dead, but learned that he was actually still alive and living in another state. However, the informant was reluctant to lead authorities to the location of this mineshaft, since it supposedly contained four other bodies and some guns, and since this evidence could implicate him in other crimes, he wanted to arrange full immunity from prosecution. It's unclear how exactly this part of the investigation turned out, but it sounds like this man's story was never substantiated. In 2020,
Journalist Wallace McKelvey published a 15th anniversary article about Ray's disappearance for the Patriot News at PennLive.com, which detailed his interactions with a man he only referred to as the informant, though from my understanding, this is a completely different informant than the man who shared the previous story about the Hell's Angels. According to this informant, while he was incarcerated at the state correctional institution at Camp Hill, a former cellmate of his told him that he and another man
having contracted to kidnap and murder Ray Grekar because of a drug investigation. Both of these men paid a female acquaintance to lure Ray to the street of shops in Lewisburg with the promise of giving him information about a drug ring, but after the woman took Ray to a local motel, the cellmate surprised Ray by snapping his neck and putting his body into the trunk of a car. Afterward, the cellmate and his accomplice dumped Ray's body down an abandoned, flooded mineshaft. By the time the informant shared this story,
Both the cellmate and the woman were deceased, though the male accomplice was still alive. Just over two weeks before his disappearance, Ray did hold a press conference in which he announced that the largest drug bust in the history of Center County had taken place, as charges were filed against nine suspected dealers who were involved in a heroin and cocaine trafficking ring. However, the case was mostly handled by another attorney from Ray's office, and his personal involvement was mostly limited to giving statements to the media.
No evidence has ever been found to link the drug bust to Ray's disappearance, and once again, the informant's story has never been substantiated. In spite of all the different theories surrounding this case, there are still no conclusive answers about what actually happened to Ray Gricar. So I guess you could say, the trail went cold. But before we continue, we would like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, June's Journey, as we are very excited that they are supporting The Trail Went Cold.
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Even though their deaths are ruled to be murder-suicide, June and her niece Virginia have a hard time believing this and work together to crack the case. June is essentially a female version of Sherlock Holmes, so this game is a great way to sit back, relax, and let your own inner Sherlock escape within the glamorous Roaring Twenties. You'll search for hidden clues to solve mystery after mystery across thousands of vivid scenes, and with new chapters added every week, there's always a new case waiting to be cracked.
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So like I mentioned in the intro, one of the primary reasons that Ray Grekar's disappearance has become one of the most high-profile missing persons cases of the modern era is because he was an individual who devoted his career to closing cases and putting criminals behind bars, but found himself at the center of his own unsolved mystery right before he was scheduled to retire. Yes, people who work in law enforcement for such a long period of time are going to receive threats because of what they do, and sometimes they will even be murdered.
But very rarely will you find a situation like Ray Gricar's where the victim completely vanishes without a trace. And what further complicates this story is that there is no definitive evidence that Ray was murdered or that his disappearance had any connection to his career, as it's entirely possible that he was feeling suicidal and made the decision to take his own life. But to give you an idea of just how out of the ordinary this situation is,
Ray Grekar might be the only person who has ever been interviewed on an episode of a true crime show because he helped solve a case, but then became the subject of an episode of another true crime show over a decade later because he went missing. In October of 1999, the Discovery Channel true crime series, The FBI Files, released an episode titled A Stranger in Town, which chronicled the murder of a 17-year-old runaway named Dawn Marie Birnbaum.
whose body was found alongside Interstate 80 near Belfont, Pennsylvania. A truck driver named James Robert Cruz Jr. would be charged and convicted of the murder, and since Ray Grekar was the Center County District Attorney at that time and prosecuted Cruz at his trial, he was extensively interviewed during the FBI Files episode. You can find this episode on YouTube, and needless to say, it's quite eerie to watch this interview with Ray, knowing that he would go missing five and a half years later.
I know that I first became familiar with Ray's case when it was featured on an episode of the show Disappeared, which aired in February of 2011. It's very rare that you get to see interview footage with a missing person before they vanish, but during his appearance on the FBI files, Ray does come across like everyone described him, as he seems like a decent, straight-shooting guy who genuinely cared about getting justice for victims, but he's also pretty reserved and low-key. Not surprisingly,
This case has also been featured on a number of true crime podcasts, such as Generation Y, True Crime Garage, and Trace Evidence, but in April of 2021, a new, long-form, multi-episode podcast was released titled Final Argument, The Disappearance of Ray Gricar. It was created and hosted by a reporter named Rebecca Knight, who managed to get access to the original case file and has revealed some new pieces of information which were never made public before. Now, unfortunately,
Even though this podcast dropped nearly a year ago, it appears to be unfinished, as it has only released five episodes, and at the time of this recording, the last new episode came out on December the 13th of last year. It sounds like Knight has run into a number of obstacles while making this podcast, such as receiving a death threat, which would explain the sporadic release schedule, but I do want to share a couple of new pieces of information I've learned from listening to it.
Now, the three main theories which have always been pushed forward in this case are that Ray's disappearance was a homicide, suicide, or intentional walkway, though most people would say that the third theory is far less likely than the first two. One detail which has always been cited as evidence that Ray was murdered and had another person with him at the time he went missing is the presence of cigarette ash on the floor of his Mini Cooper, as Ray detested smoking and would not allow people to smoke inside his car.
Since there were two cigarette butts on the ground near the passenger side of the vehicle, it's possible the ash could have been caused by someone who was smoking while they were leaning in through the side window to speak with Ray. But even so, who could this person have been and why were they chatting with Ray in Lewisburg? Well, according to Rebecca Knight, there is no mention of the ash or the smell or anything cigarette related in the original police reports, even though many accounts state,
that the police detected the strong scent of cigarette smoke when they first entered the vehicle. I'm not seeing that the detail about the cigarette ash is false, as it's been repeated many times by many different sources, and was even specifically mentioned by one of the investigators during an interview on Disappeared, but perhaps the story about the cigarette smell has been greatly exaggerated.
It's been confirmed that latent fingerprints were found on the exterior driver's side passenger window and door handle, which wound up matching Ray, his girlfriend Patty, and a receptionist who worked at the Center County Courthouse. And while Ray's DNA and a fingerprint was on the label of the water bottle inside his car, the print was too smudged to be of any use. However, on the Final Statement podcast, it's revealed that other than the water bottle, there were no fingerprints found inside the Mini Cooper at all,
not even Ray's. It's very unlikely that anyone who owns and drives a vehicle could avoid leaving their fingerprints behind, which suggests that someone intentionally wiped down the interior of the Mini Cooper. Of course, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for Ray to do that himself if he was planning suicide, which lends credence to the idea of an unknown third party being inside the vehicle who did not want their prints being found. As you know, Ray's cell phone was left behind in the Mini Cooper.
and final statement does answer a question I've always had about whether phone records were checked. The podcast confirms that the only call made that day from Ray's cell phone was when he called Patty at 11.30am to let her know he was going antique shopping, and the only calls the cell phone received was when Patty kept calling Ray's voicemail when he failed to return home later that night. But interestingly enough, there was also a reported sighting from a Lewisburg store owner,
who said she saw a man matching Ray's description come into her store on the afternoon of his disappearance. He appeared to be pacing around while holding his hand up to his ear, and he'd even looked out the window at one point. While the witness could not confirm that the man had a cell phone, this opens up the possibility that he may have had a wireless Bluetooth device in his ear, which was also a burner phone. When Ray was seen wandering around outside the Packwood House Museum that same afternoon, the witnesses thought he appeared to be talking to himself,
even though he did not have a cell phone in his hand, though they don't discount the possibility that he had a Bluetooth in his ear. Ray's cell phone was a county-issued cell phone used for work purposes, so if he was secretly communicating with someone and did not want his calls to be tracked, it makes sense that he would use some sort of wireless burner device. But here's the most surprising revelation from the Final Statement podcast. I'm sure you know that there was a reported sighting of Ray with an unidentified woman...
inside the street of shops in Lewisburg on the day he went missing. However, I was surprised to learn that there were other reported sightings of Ray with an unidentified woman in the weeks prior to his disappearance, and they took place at antique shops in other towns besides Lewisburg, some of which were located in entirely different counties, such as Blair County and Clearfield County. In most of these sightings, the man and woman were described as quietly talking with each other,
though they didn't do anything intimate to give off the impression they were a couple. Now, obviously, virtually every missing persons case is going to have false sightings from eyewitnesses who were mistaken, and it's possible that the witnesses here mistook another man for Ray. But the issue is that some of these witnesses specifically recalled Ray driving and climbing out of a Mini Cooper, which is a very distinct looking vehicle,
and there were only a handful of Mini Coopers registered in the state of Pennsylvania in 2005. This would add an extra aura of credibility to these eyewitness accounts, but we can't even be certain if he was meeting up with the same woman in each of these sightings. Now, since Rebecca Knight got access to the case file, she was able to review Ray's financials, but said she did not turn up any red flags to suggest that Ray was having an affair during this time period.
If you're traveling to other towns to have secret rendezvous with women, unexplained charges for things like motel stays or dinners are probably going to show up in your financial statements, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. And the podcast also confirmed that investigators did check the local hotels and motels around Lewisburg and found nothing to indicate that Ray ever stayed at or visited one on the day he disappeared. So Knight presents her own potential theory.
that perhaps Ray was secretly working on his own independent investigation into the allegations that Jerry Sandusky was sexually abusing young boys, but he did so under the radar without telling anyone. These women that Ray was seen with could have been the mothers of some of the victims Sandusky had abused, and Ray wanted to meet up and get their stories in towns outside Center County in order to avoid attracting attention.
Ray may have chosen various antique shops as his meeting spots since he had a known interest in antiques, so traveling to other towns to go shopping for them would not have seemed unusual. If Ray was collecting information for an investigation, this would explain why he took his county-issued laptop to Lewisburg, as it was apparently very unusual for him to bring his work computer on non-work-related trips. Now, this theory is all just pure speculation.
as no women have ever come forward to admit to having any secret meetings with Ray in 2005. I mean, I can understand them being too frightened to say anything after Ray turned out missing, but Jerry Sandusky was tried, convicted, and sent to prison 10 years ago, and the people who covered for him have since been held accountable, so there would be no reason to remain silent. As the years have gone on...
I get the impression that law enforcement has pretty much dismissed any connection between Ray's disappearance and the Penn State scandal, which is why this new theory took me by surprise. So hopefully, the Final Statement podcast will be able to start releasing new episodes in the future and shed more light on this situation. We'll talk more about the Penn State connection a little later, but right now, let's explore some different theories surrounding the disappearance.
and there are some pretty wild ones, some of which have no substance, yet are still worth mentioning. For starters, you might recall that back in July of 2018, I released a Trail Went Cold episode about the unexplained death of 38-year-old Jonathan Luna, another cold case which had some eerie similarities to this one. Luna was a prosecutor who worked as an assistant United States attorney in Baltimore, Maryland, but on the evening of December the 3rd, 2003,
he inexplicably decided to leave his office at the Federal District Court building and went on an all-night tri-state road trip in which he drove hundreds of miles through Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Early the following morning, Luna's car was discovered in a rural creek in Lancaster County, and his body was lying in the water next to it. Luna had been stabbed 36 times all over his body with his own penknife, but even though the FBI believed that the wounds were self-inflicted and his death was a suicide,
the local Lancaster County authorities disagreed and thought he was the victim of foul play. The whole thing is one hell of a baffling mystery, and if you want to hear more details, go back and listen to my Trail Went Cold episode, and I also recently covered it on my spin-off podcast, The Path Went Chilly. Even though Ray Grekar has never been found,
It's incredibly odd that we have two separate cold cases which took place only 16 months apart involving prosecutors who traveled to a rural section of Pennsylvania before their vehicles were discovered near a body of water. Investigators have never found anything to indicate that the two cases are linked, and they probably aren't, but it's still a pretty odd coincidence. Another cold case which has been mentioned in connection with this one is the unsolved disappearance of 47-year-old Mel Wiley,
who was the police chief in Hinkley Township, Ohio, before he vanished in July of 1985. Wiley's abandoned car would be discovered in a park near Lake Erie, and while it was initially assumed that he drowned, his body was never found, and there was evidence uncovered to suggest that he had staged his own disappearance and took off voluntarily. It's been reported that Ray Gregar had an interest in this case and had made mention of it, as Hinkley Township is in fairly close proximity to Cleveland,
And it's possible, though never confirmed, that Ray may have crossed paths with Wiley back when he was still working as a prosecutor in Ohio before his move to Pennsylvania. I'm sure you've seen the parallels between these two cases, since they both involved missing law enforcement officials whose abandoned car was found near a body of water, so if you believe that Ray staged his disappearance, it's possible that he used the Wiley case as inspiration. But otherwise, there's nothing to really link these stories...
though the disappearance of Mel Wiley is a pretty intriguing mystery in its own right, and I'm actually going to be releasing an exclusive bonus episode about the case on our Patreon page in the near future. And before we move on, I want to briefly discuss one of the wilder theories surrounding this case, which has been used as evidence to suggest that Ray might have staged his own disappearance. In 1987, Ray was approached by a professor from Penn State who wrote under the pen name of Pamela West,
and told him she was working on a book about the 1969 murder of Betsy Arzma, a 22-year-old graduate student who was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant in the campus library. West was certain that she knew the killer's identity, but did think she could publish his name without being sued, so she wanted Ray's advice on how to handle the situation, and he told her to keep investigating before she went public with her belief. Well, West ultimately got around the situation by publishing a science fiction novel titled 2020 Vision,
a whodunit where the details of the crime are loosely based on the Betsy Arzma murder, and the plot involves a detective traveling back in time in order to solve the case. The reasons people attempt to tie this book to Ray Grekar's case is because the lead character is a veteran who is close to retirement, much like Ray was, and the book's murder takes place on April the 15th, the same date Ray went missing. In addition,
The detective character drives a car with a personalized vanity plate, and Ray's Mini Cooper had a vanity plate which read PFO, a reference to his girlfriend, Patty Fornicola. Some other very loose parallels have been made between the plot and Ray's disappearance, such as ashes from an urn being a vital clue to solve the case, and the presence of cigarette ash in the Mini Cooper. Long story short, it has been theorized that Ray may have used 20-20 vision as inspiration to stage his own disappearance,
though I personally think that's a major stretch. By Pamela West's own admission, even though she had consulted with Ray for advice about her book, she never sent him a copy and has no idea if he even read it. Indeed, they never found a copy of 2020 Vision and Ray's belongings following his disappearance, and West said she had not spoken to him for many years. The book came out in 1990, and I don't think it exactly made a big splash, as it looks like it's long out of print.
so I have my doubts that Ray would decide to use it as inspiration to stage a cryptic disappearance 15 years later. While the idea of a voluntary disappearance has not been completely ruled out, most people do not believe that's what happened in this case, as it's an extremely difficult thing to pull off in the 21st century, particularly if you're a prominent figure like Ray Grekar, whose face has been plastered everywhere. One theory which has been pushed forward is that Ray could have taken off to Slovenia,
as he was fluent in the language, had traveled to the country in the past, and had relatives living over there. Interpol has actually gone so far as to distribute missing persons flyers for Ray in Slovenia, but they've never turned up anything. In 2005, an American would not be able to leave the country and travel internationally without a passport, so unless Ray was somehow able to obtain a fake one, I don't see this as a viable option.
Now, there has been some conflicting info out there about Ray's finances, as in the aforementioned 15th anniversary article he wrote about the case, Wallace McKelvey stated that he found a state inheritance tax form for Ray's estate, which was filed in 2013 and listed his total assets as $1,057.86. However, the disappeared episode stated that Ray had a bank account containing around $100,000, which was never touched after he went missing.
Given that Ray was drawing a yearly salary of $129,000 at this point and was not known for living a frivolous lifestyle, having just over $1,000 worth of assets does seem unusual. This has led to speculation that perhaps Ray secretly moved or withdrew a lot of his money in order to plan his escape, but I do know that his finances seem to have been investigated very thoroughly as they never found any large, unexplained sums of money suddenly appearing or disappearing from his accounts.
or any improprieties with the Center County District Attorney's Office financial accounts. Everyone has said that Ray was looking forward to retirement and spending more time with his family, and even if he didn't have a great deal of money saved up, his job still entitled him to a pretty good pension which would keep him financially secure. Given the circumstances, there really is no logical reason for him to run away on his own accord.
Ray's loved ones also don't believe he would have caused great pain for them by intentionally disappearing and not letting them know what happened, particularly when it came to his daughter Laura, whom he was very close to. As someone who devoted his life to practicing criminal law, I'm sure Ray had a pretty good idea about how a missing persons investigation would be handled and the type of questioning his friends and family would face. Theoretically, if Ray wanted to disappear,
he could have secretly contacted the people he cared about, such as his daughter, to say, hey, just wanted to let you know that I'm alive and well, but I needed to get away, so please don't tell anyone you heard from me. But we know that Laura was extensively questioned and passed a polygraph, and I doubt that Ray would have wanted to put her in the position where she was forced to lie to law enforcement and perhaps even perjure herself in order to protect him. An additional theory which has been pushed forward is that Ray entered the witness protection program
But this has pretty much been completely debunked, and it seems unlikely that the case would keep receiving so much attention in the media if the authorities already knew where he was. When you look at the big picture, I do not believe that Ray lived much longer after he arrived in Lewisburg, but the big question is, was his death suicide or murder? Well, 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 depressed people...
sometimes don't give off any warning signs and keep all the pain they're experiencing bottled up inside before they surprise everyone by going through with a suicide. Ray was described as a very private and reserved person and does not strike me as someone who would be open to discussing mental health struggles. Many people acknowledge that in the weeks 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 learned during the final statement 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 the future, which do not seem like the actions of someone who is 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 apply standard logic to their actions. On April the 14th, the date before he went missing,
Ray took a half day off work and was seen sitting inside his car next to a 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 in this case 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 Ray driving 60 miles to Lewisburg 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 difference between these two scenarios is that Ray had a documented history of bipolar disorder and depression, and his body was actually found. Now, in a 2018 article from the state college-based newspaper, the Center Daily Times, Bob Youner...
a former Montour County District Attorney who was 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, Ray's nephews, end quote. Buhner also mentioned that whenever Ray went to Ohio, he would check with the police to see if there were any new leads with Roy's case. While this statement is heavily disputed by Roy's son, Tony Gricar,
who is the official family spokesperson, and has frequently shared his thoughts in various Reddit threads and comment sections about this case. Tony has always maintained that the family always 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. 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 is why the laptop and hard drive were found in relatively close proximity 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 he was in the river? 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 10 miles,
it would have reached the town of Sunbury, which contains the Adam T. Bower Memorial Dam, the world's largest inflatable dam. The dam is installed every spring, and it's apparently been confirmed that it was already in place by mid-April of 2005, so if Ray's body made it there, it's possible the dam could have chewed 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 up in the Susquehanna River and never been found, but of course, there's no concrete evidence to support this. If Ray did jump into the river from the bridge or the railway trestle, there's always been some question about whether he could have done this without being seen, as the bridge was part of Pennsylvania Route 45 and often had a lot of traffic. But even though Ray arrived in Lewisburg on April the 15th,
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 chance of any witnesses seeing him. Well, even if Ray's death was a suicide, the big mystery which has never been explained is why was the hard drive removed from the 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 its own, since he would probably want to remove everything from his work laptop before he retired at the end of the year. However, it's been reported that one of the search terms he used was, which is quite different than the standard practice of using software to erase your hard drive. But here's the thing that's 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, surely Ray knew that people would search the river for him if he abandoned his car so close to it. While the hard drive suffered too much damage to retrieve any data from it, there's no way Ray could have predicted this would be the case. Remember, he drove 60 miles from Balfont to Lewisburg on a scenic route, which was pretty much open country. If he had disposed of the laptop hard drive before he arrived in Lewisburg by, say,
burying the items in a remote wooded area, it's possible that no one would have ever found them. And while 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 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 contained evidence, and their first instinct was to toss it into the river.
But on the other hand, when Ray took the laptop on his trip with him, he left behind the case and charger at the house. If Ray was planning to use the laptop for work purposes and was gathering information for an investigation, it seems odd that he wouldn't take the charger, since 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 Lewisburg in order 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 impression that he was the victim of foul play. Perhaps he removed the hard drive from the laptop and destroyed it, even though there was nothing incriminating on there, or he decided to smoke some cigarettes inside his car and wipe the interior of fingerprints in order to give off the false impression that a third party was with him.
Ray still could have felt there was a stigma surrounding suicide, which is why he didn't want anyone to know that he had gone through with it. If he intentionally jumped off the bridge into the river, there's no way he could have known his body would never be found, so why not plant some seeds in order 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.
So now I think 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's 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 Ray played a role in covering up the allegations when he elected not to charge Jerry Sandusky back in 1998.
and if he knew that Sandusky was continuing to use his position of power to sexually abuse young boys, he became overwhelmed with guilt and decided to kill himself. That idea might make a bit more sense 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 2005.
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 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 about how taking on a respected 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 this very interesting new piece of information on the Final Statement podcast. A source told her that during the fall of 2004, about six months before Ray went missing,
He heard Ray refer to Sandusky as a quote-unquote pedophile and vowed 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 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. While it eventually came 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 1998 or was aware of any other predatory behavior other than that one incident in the shower. While the recording of Sandusky's conversation with the boy's mother sounded pretty damning, he never flat out admitted to molesting the boy, only that he showered with him 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 30 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 airtight. When beloved head coach Joe Paterno had his contract terminated in 2011 over allegations that he covered up Sandusky's abuse,
Penn State students started rioting in the streets and causing property damage. I'm sure Ray was well aware that this was the type of backlash he could expect if he tried to take on Sandusky and the Penn State football program without having all of his ducks in a row. So what about this theory that Ray was meeting up with a number of different women who were the mothers of Sandusky's victims in order to build up 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 State scandal in order to protect Sandusky for years, I'm not sure this was the type of scandal which would have crossed the line into murder. I mean, it was Sarah Ganim, a 23-year-old reporter with the Patriot News, who first brought the whole thing to light by publishing a story about it in March of 2011,
and while the paper initially faced criticism for spearing the reputations 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 Gregar disappear without leaving any evidence behind, but couldn't prevent this young reporter from breaking the story wide open. Well, even if Ray's disappearance had nothing to do with the Penn State scandal,
Could he have traveled to Lewisburg to gather information about an entirely different case he was working on, which 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 Ray was supposedly seen with at the street of shops. I know it's tempting to 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 certain restaurant in Center County, and while he was there, he would always request a particular waitress and flirt with her while she served him. But even if Ray had a flirtatious personality, I have not come across any information that he ever flat out cheated on any of his spouses, and like I mentioned earlier,
there was apparently nothing in Ray's financials to suggest he was conducting an affair at the time he went missing. If Ray was meeting up with a woman in Lewisburg, 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 with anyone is why the authorities did not publicly disclose the sighting of Ray and the woman until 13 months after he disappeared.
Yes, I know they initially assumed that the woman was a friend of his named Barbara Petito, but she was ruled out relatively quickly, and it sounds like their rationale is that 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 or alive rather than protecting his reputation, and why wait over an entire year to release this information?
The original investigation was handled by the Belfont Police Department, who have received criticism for mistakes they made, including their failure to go public about the sighting of the woman. Given the high-profile nature of Ray's disappearance, it's believed that the Belfont PD may have been out of their league, as this 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 2014.
Now, we've had numerous accounts from informants who have come forward with stories of Ray being murdered by criminals that were connected to investigations he worked on who subsequently disposed of Ray's body in a mineshaft. And one of them, which involved Ray being murdered by a former prison inmate and his accomplice, specifically mentions a woman arranging a meeting with Ray in Lewisburg in order to lure 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 that 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 lessens the possibility of his death being a suicide, but with all the publicity this case has received, you have to wonder why this mysterious woman has 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 15th before he abandoned the car in the lot near the street of shops. 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 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 states that there were a few sightings of Ray in Lewisburg on the morning of April the 16th,
which I guess is not impossible, since the Mini Cooper was not actually found by the state trooper until 6.30pm that evening. However, if 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 if he did stay there until the following day, it's surprising that he wouldn't have at least phoned Patty to let him know where he was. Overall, I am inclined to believe that the reported sightings of Ray on the 16th are mistaken,
and whatever happened to him likely occurred on the 15th. I know that when a tracker dog was brought in to pick up Ray's scent, 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 Susquehanna River. On the other hand, if Ray left in another person's vehicle,
It is odd that he would have left his cell phone inside the Mini Cooper, unless there's credence 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, though there were no signs of any struggle or any witnesses who could corroborate this. Now, there's been a lot of discussion about the cigarette ash inside the Mini Cooper, but what hasn't got as much attention is 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, we know that a number of cold cases have been solved in recent years by entering DNA into genealogy databases and getting a match which led back to the offender, but I'm wondering if the legalities of that might be a bit more complicated here since there is no concrete evidence a crime was committed.
If these cigarette butts were found at the scene of a murder alongside a dead body, that would be one thing, but all this proves is that Salmon was smoking cigarettes in the same parking lot where a missing person's vehicle was abandoned. It's also never been publicly revealed if investigators were able to determine if the DNA on the cigarette butts belonged to a male or female. If it was female, then this would lend a lot more weight to the sighting of Ray with the unidentified woman.
But what could have compelled Ray to travel to Lewisburg 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 other attorneys at his office and 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 was doing a lot of covert work 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 this case resolved before he retired. I know it's practically a cliche in fictional cop stories for the grizzled veteran to be working on one last important case before retirement, and having their plans spoiled 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 after Ray went missing,
A county codebook was found on a desk at the Center County District Attorney's office, and it was lying open to the section, which described what to do if a sitting district attorney went missing or died. We have no idea if Ray did this, but surveillance footage confirmed that he did visit the office on the evening of April the 14th, which would turn out to be the last time he ever went there. He could have used that opportunity to pull the book out and leave it laying out in the open,
so his co-workers would know the procedure to follow if he didn't come back. This could be interpreted as evidence that Ray was planning a suicide, but it could also mean 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 can always hold out hope that technology might improve enough so that extracting some data from the hard drive might be feasible someday. If it turns out there's nothing important on there after all, then this would support the idea that Ray's 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. For the longest time...
I used to be about 50-50 between the murder and suicide theory, but some of the information I've heard thus far on the Final Statement podcast does 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 and the laptop in the Susquehanna River, then I have a feeling they probably disposed of Ray's body at another location. This is one of those frustrating cases with a number of different theories, but no concrete evidence pointing to any of them.
so unless something new surfaces, we can only speculate about what happened. Ray Gricard's story is a bit reminiscent of the episode I released last month about the unexplained death of Jack Wheeler, as we have two men entering their golden years who had very productive and interesting lives, which wound up being overshadowed once they became the center of an unsolved mystery. Everyone who knew Ray described him as a very dedicated prosecutor who always wanted to get 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 Ray's death was a suicide after all, at the very least, it would be nice if his body could be found and provide answers for his family. So if you happen to have any information about the unsolved disappearance of Ray Grekar, please contact the Pennsylvania State Police at 814-355-7545. That's 814-355-7545.
But if you just have your own thoughts about what happened, feel free to leave me a comment or send me an email to robin.warder at iCloud.com. That's robin.warder at iCloud.com. Now the reminder that The Trail Went Cold is on Patreon, so please visit patreon.com slash thetrailwentcold to learn how you can support our podcast and become eligible for some pretty neat rewards. This past month...
I actually recorded a special bonus episode with Jules, the co-host of my spin-off podcast, The Path Went Chili, as well as the host of her own podcast, Riddle Me That True Crime, in which we discussed the 1983 death of Nancy Argentino. She was the girlfriend of famous professional wrestler Superfly Jimmy Snuka, who was suspected of possibly killing her, though the case never did reach a conclusive resolution.
And of course, like I mentioned earlier in this episode, I'm soon going to be dropping a new bonus episode about the unsolved 1985 disappearance of Police Chief Mel Wiley, which has a slight connection to this case. In addition, we've dropped an exclusive bonus episode from The Path Went Chili, in which myself, Jules, and our other co-host Ashley discuss the unsolved 1991 murder of Dick Hansen, aka the 49er Hugs murder.
And for our patrons in Tier 3, I've also recorded another new audio commentary track, which can be played over a classic episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I'd also like to give a shout-out to our most recent listeners who have signed up with us on Patreon this week, and they are Kelly G, Miles C, Catherine M, Amy R, Lisa D, Stacy, and Ronnie C. Thank you all so much for your support.
Also, provided that it's still safe enough to travel, The Trail Went Cold will be appearing on Podcast Row in just over one month at CrimeCon 2022, which is being held at Paris and Bally's in Las Vegas from April the 29th until May the 1st. If you would like to purchase tickets, we already have our own personal life promo code to receive a 10% discount off a standard badge. Please visit CrimeCon.com and enter the promo code TRAIL. Once again, go to CrimeCon.com and enter the promo code TRAIL.
Trail. In addition, I wanted to provide another reminder that I hold live streaming sessions on a platform called Get Vocal. Every Thursday night from 7 until 8 p.m. Eastern Time, I host what is essentially an after show for each week's podcast episode where I have an interactive discussion about the featured case from said episode and answer questions and address comments from listeners. I always include a link to these sessions in our show notes, so be sure to check there for more information or visit getvocal.com.
That's G-E-T-V-O-K-L dot com. I just wanted to give another shout out to my supporters at the Unsolved Mysteries message board at the Sitcoms Online Forum and the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit. I need to provide a big thanks to McGill Foote, who edits and assembles this podcast together for me, and Vince Nitro, who composes the eerie music here on every episode. If you haven't already, you can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
Anyway, another special thanks to everyone for their support and allowing us to reach our special milestone of 300 episodes, and we hope to keep producing many more episodes for years to come. So have yourselves a great week and join us next Wednesday for another brand new episode of The Trail Went Cold. Thank you.