Crime Junkie - CONSPIRACY: Ray Gricar

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Summary: In 2005, a day of playing hooky for Ray Gricar turned into an enduring mystery for his friends and family and left the world to wonder if there is a bigger conspiracy at play.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit  https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/conspiracy-ray-gricar/ 

Hi crime junkies, I'm Ashley Flowers and I'm Brett and strap in folks because I have got a case for you today that's going to make your head spin. This is one that I followed for a long time and to me it's like a real crime junkie case because nothing about it makes sense and the more I learned the more questions I have about what happened to Ray Grecar. In 2005 Ray Grecar was a DA working out of Pennsylvania and counting down the days till his retirement. Now in April he was a mere eight months away and it literally could not come fast enough. Not that he had any big plans in fact

having no big plans sounded really nice like that was his big plan. He just wanted to hit the road with his girlfriend Patty, drive across the country maybe visit his grown daughter like no real plans or agenda other than not having one which is to me goals. I'd say sounds amazing. Ray had met his girlfriend Patty at work and the two found a wonderful companionship in one another and they eventually moved in together so when the two woke up in bed together on the morning of April 15th it was supposed to be like any other day a work day. Yeah it's tax day. Yeah taxing literally like the most mundane of days.

Truly. But on this morning Ray told his girlfriend you know what I'm playing hooky today. Good for you Patty thing she like knows how hard he's been working he deserves a day off so she gets up starts getting ready for the day. Now according to the disappeared episode titled A Family's Curse Patty left a note before she walked out of the door that day. She said she had some errands to run over her lunch break so if he could take care of the dog that would be great but if he wasn't going to be around she needed him to let her know so that she could stop back by the house. So Patty goes to work another day another dollar

totally normal then at 1130 her phone rings and it's Ray. He was calling to tell Patty that he was out on the road just taking a drive along 192 and he wasn't going to be back home around lunch to take care of the dog so she was going to need to. Not a problem she says like I'll pop back in the house. They share a goodbye they say I love you before hanging up and the rest of the day is completely uneventful for Patty. Now she's a little surprised when she gets home around 510 and there's still no Ray but surprise does not worry like quickly her mind is already filling up like the blanks like maybe he's out maybe

he went somewhere zero worries. So Patty goes to the local gym she works out and then she gets home like two hours later and Ray is still gone and now she's running out of excuses to make like he should be back by now. She starts calling his phone once twice then more and more and more and every time there's no answers and her calls become more and more frequent. As 11 o'clock at night comes and goes Patty knows something is wrong and by the time 1130 hits it's been 12 hours since she's been in contact with Ray so she decides to call 911 and report him missing. Wallace McKelvie wrote about this case for Penn

Live which is Patriot News and he said that from the start this case was handled differently than standard missing person cases because the local law enforcement was all familiar with Ray. Because the local law enforcement was familiar with Ray they put out a B on the lookout for him right away for both him actually and his vehicle and they do this the same night that Patty calls in but the Bolo doesn't do much. All that night and into the morning no one spots Ray or his car which is like this little red mini Cooper. Oh yeah that definitely be hard to miss. Right so knowing he isn't just like driving around still

and his car hasn't been spotted at any local places a full search goes underway by the next morning on the 16th. Now based on Ray's last known communication with Patty they start their search along 192 which is great that they have a place to start but this is a huge stretch of road that doesn't really narrow down their search much so all day the search goes on. Helicopters, dogs, land, air like the whole kit and caboodle and hours pass with no sign of Ray or his car. Until about 6 30 at night when a state trooper is driving in the town of Lewisburg which is a town that's about like 50 miles or so away from where Ray

lived and there parked across from this antiques shopping mall is a bright red mini Cooper. The trooper runs the plates and sure enough it's Ray. Now he wasn't in the car but surely they'd find him because according to the trooper the keys weren't anywhere to be found like the car was locked and this particular area this particular mall Ray had been there a bunch of times before with Patty like he had to be nearby or at least they thought that at first. Once investigators were notified that the car had been found and they take a closer look at it and what was inside they become less confident that they were any

closer to Ray because inside the car they find his work cell phone which had been turned off and more interestingly they found cigarette ash near the passenger side of the car which is a big deal because according to all the sources I read for this case Ray didn't smoke and he didn't like the smell of it at all like everyone who knew him said that he definitely wouldn't have been smoking and he probably wouldn't even been okay with someone else in his car smoking. So at this point no one knew how the car got there or even if Ray was the one to put it there but they knew that it was a clue so the car was taken

away for processing and they did find a number of prints on the car but none that were usable. Well if someone was smoking did they find any like cigarette butts like they can pull DNA off of those right? So yeah potentially so in that a family curse episode they did say that cigarette butts were collected from the parking lot they didn't say anything about inside the car and they were able to pull DNA off at least one of them but it didn't match anyone in the database which we know doesn't necessarily mean it's not related to the case but it does mean that for now there's nothing we can do with it and it doesn't get us any

closer to finding Ray. People who knew Ray come together from far and wide to help look for him like Ray's daughter flew in even his nephews from Ohio came out and when they all talk there are a number of theories that arise from the totally innocuous to things that are a little bit darker. At first friends who knew Ray suggested maybe he just left town for a minute without telling anyone you know just like he did before. What do you mean before? Yeah so apparently one day years before without telling anyone Ray just bounced and he drove from his home all the way to Cleveland to watch a baseball game like he's from Ohio so he

knew that area was like big into like the Indians and he came home safe and sound and was back to work by Monday morning he just said he needed to get away and so they're thinking like maybe this was that all over again and you know maybe I can see why people would want to cling to that hope early on but that theory stopped making sense after they found his car and not him at the antiques mall like sure maybe he pieced out and went to a place he's been a ton like he did love the antique mall but where is he now like he couldn't get very far leaving his car behind and on top of that his girlfriend and daughter

had been doing press conferences telling Ray like everyone is looking for you like please come home I'm sure this is a misunderstanding but even after all of that Ray never surfaced and that's when a darker realization came into focus. The circumstances around Ray's disappearance almost mirrored his brothers who went missing 10 years before. It was Ray's nephews who first brought it up their dad Ray's brother had gone missing a decade before he said that he was just going out to buy some mulch and then never came home now eventually they found his car abandoned in a park

near a bridge over water now here they were again looking for Ray they found his abandoned car which just so happened to be near a bridge over water so it was feeling eerily similar now in his brother's case his body was recovered from the river a few days after finding his car and it was eventually ruled a suicide so everyone kept wondering if maybe that's what happened here in a dark time did Ray mirror his brother's death okay but like what dark time like was there something going on did he suffer from depression or well from what we know clinically no there are no medical records that the public has

ever been privy to that would suggest he suffered from depression but that doesn't mean that he didn't you know like many people who suffer often don't get treatment right and especially in like an older generation like it's more likely for that they just don't talk about things you know right so it is possible that he was depressed that day or had been for a while you know looking back people tend to read situations differently after someone goes missing and so some were saying that Ray was acting despondent in the days leading up to his disappearance others say they would have never seen it coming and it's hard

to imagine because most of his actions before this did seem so normal like they found footage of Ray from the night before he went missing walking into his office and then he was like working there for a couple hours and then you see footage of him like coming out a couple of hours later and people look at that footage and they say like oh look he's fine but research shows and probably those who suffer from depression will know that most of the time the decision to take one's life is made quickly not that the idea just springs up all at once according to a live science article on the statistics and warning signs of

suicide 75% of people who will attempt suicide actually talk about their thoughts and feelings before the act but according to Harvard's analysis of the Houston study 71% make the decision to take their own life in less than an hour so saying that Ray is fine on camera 15 hours before he went missing can't rule out the possibility that he did take his own life that morning but either way if Ray was sad if he did take his own life it would be just a matter of time before his body surfaced until then they had to keep treating this as a missing person's case which meant talking to shop owners at the antique mall to see if they saw

anything around the time that Ray's car would have made it there and it turns out that they did according to that pen live article written by Wallace McLevy there were a small number of sightings of Ray at least one person saw Ray sitting in his car quote rubbing his face and talking on his phone end quote which could be telling could mean nothing we don't have like Ray's cell phone records to compare times and calls so without that the sighting to me at least seems kind of meaningless but the other sighting of Ray is not at least one person possibly more it's a little bit hard to tell from my sources but at least

one person saw Ray in a store at that antique small where his car was parked across from now this isn't surprising because again he'd been there before what was surprising was that Ray was seen there with a woman oh right now at first you hear that and the implication is like oh there's another woman right but every time I have heard this described all the sources say that it seemed like maybe these two bumped into one another and had a friendly conversation maybe walked around together a little bit but that to everyone it didn't seem romantic I mean you hear that he's with a woman romantic or not

like we want to find her yeah here's the thing though and this makes me want to scream the police get a description of this woman dark hair maybe 30 40 about 5 9 and according to Sarah Gannum's reporting for Penn Live they never released this to the public until 13 months after Ray had been missing what yeah that is a huge span of time in this investigation and here's how it kind of played out in the first couple of days of the investigation the investigators thought they knew who this was apparently there was a woman who had known Ray for a very long time they were very good friends and she at least at one

time was a smoker and she fit the description so when they go to find her and tell her that Ray's missing see if she was the person that he was with she is MIA too so they think like ah we found him he is in fact like with this woman and kind of ran off but they quickly learned that this woman was just away visiting family and when they finally do make contact with her she says she hasn't seen Ray so now they're right back to where they started now it's been days now nobody has turned up in the river they don't know why Ray's car was parked across from the mall or who he met inside and to me this seems

like a perfectly good point to announce to the public that you have a missing guy and you're looking for the person that was last seen with him but again for completely unknown reasons the police hold back that information about the woman I mean maybe they did think that he went off with this woman but wanted to protect him like he obviously is a girlfriend his family they didn't want them to know maybe maybe but but again I go back to you know we know in hindsight they wait 13 months I get maybe not telling everyone day one we wait for him to show up but when you're like a couple of days out now and not anywhere close

to finding him but 13 month just seems like a really long time but I think you're on to something because I think this idea of him being with this woman or whatever starts to kind of shape this new theory that maybe Ray just walked away from his life and wanted to start over like there's another woman or maybe I feel like this is extreme though like he and Patty weren't married like if he didn't want to be with her just break up I guess it sounds simple but like by running away and disappearing on Patty literally I mean he still has a daughter like if he runs away from Patty he can never contact his daughter again no and

that's what I'm saying to me like a little bit walking away just to be with someone else doesn't make a whole lot of sense especially when you think about how close he was to retirement and the fact that after his disappearance his bank cards were never used and he left something like a hundred thousand dollars just sitting in the bank now for a month during the investigation nothing happens raise money stays untouched no one hears from him and still a body never surfaces making the idea of suicide harder and harder for some to believe now eventually a psychic is consulted by police and this

psychic says that she can see or sense or whatever psychics do she can see a construction worker lean into Ray's car and she says that as this construction worker is leaning in and talking to him he's also smoking a cigarette now this is interesting because at this point in the investigation the fact that police found ash in that front seat wasn't widely known by anyone but there is no construction worker that they can link to Ray and so that lead goes nowhere the longer he is gone with no contact with his family without touching his money it also becomes harder to believe that he just walked away that is until July of

2005 when something is found that completely changes the way everyone would view this investigation about three months after Ray went missing there were some fishermen out on the river near where Ray's car was found now the water at this time was crystal clear and they spot something at the bottom laying on the rocks it's a computer a laptop more specifically now they turn the computer over to police who discovered that it belonged to Ray Ray's work laptop was the only thing investigators couldn't find when Ray went missing now they figured that they

would come across it one day when they found Ray but here was the laptop and still no sign of Ray but this is the big break that they were waiting for and finding it the way they did disposed of in the river makes them feel like whatever is on that laptop could be the thing that leads them to Ray I mean yeah it's something that he owned it definitely makes me think that Ray or whoever took him definitely didn't want anybody to find that laptop right and police think so too but when they try and restore the laptop they realize something devastating there's no hard drive like it's ruined or like popped

out when it hit the riverbed floor no no no like it just wasn't there and they can tell because of this type of computer that the hard drive would have had to have been like ejected manually it wasn't just gonna get knocked out almost like disassembled right which means that whoever put it in there Ray or someone else didn't want anyone to find what was on that computer and now the question becomes who didn't want that information to be found was it Ray and would whatever was on there give him a reason to walk away from his life or did he or someone else have a reason to get rid of whatever is on the computer well

yeah and I think both are a possibility I think it could be Ray and I think it also could be someone else but whether Ray walked away or someone did something to him I do believe it was Ray who ejected his hard drive and threw the computer into the river and I think this because of something important found on Ray's home computer now the police didn't release this information to the public for almost four years but what they knew when the computer was found was that before Ray went missing he had used his home computer to search for ways to destroy a hard drive he had searched for things like water damage

to a hard drive how to fry a hard drive and people at his work said he had bought software to wipe his hard drive okay but this could be like super innocuous like you said he was about to retire maybe he just wanted to get stuff off his work computer because he would have to turn it back in okay but come on like listen I get wanting to do like a factory reset so they don't have your passwords or personal information yeah but how to fry a hard drive like that sounds like someone who doesn't want anything to ever be pulled off that computer when he leaves so what on earth could Ray be that concerned about or if someone was

threatening him what could that person have wanted to hide so to answer those questions police start looking into Ray's history with the DA's office I mean it's a position that can make you a lot of enemies maybe he pissed someone off and there were a lot of people to look at on this list so according to McClevy's reporting Ray was part of announcing the shutdown of this huge heroin operation just weeks before he went missing but police couldn't link anyone in that operation to Ray or to like the time and place of where he went missing now there was also a really big case that Ray prosecuted where a

man named James Cruz was convicted for murdering a 17-year-old teenage runaway now Ray actually potentially linked James Cruz to a number of other women making him a serial killer but in those cases other charges were never brought against him now James maintains his innocence and he's tried a number of time for different appeals and is always getting denied so maybe he's like out for vengeance on a wrongful conviction so I mean maybe but the only person who really thinks James is innocent is James listen I've looked at this case and I agree with the jury it's not like this guy has a huge backing of people following

him either like this isn't like a huge Scott Peterson case or an Adaine Syed case this case is almost unknown outside of Pennsylvania so because this guy doesn't have a following he's sitting in jail eventually this lead is ruled out as well now as people looked more and more into his life in the DA's office they make a strange connection a couple of years before Ray went missing this is now in 2003 another prosecutor was found in Pennsylvania under really bizarre circumstances it was a man named Jonathan Luna now Jonathan was a prosecutor in Baltimore but after working late one night like in the middle

of a big case he went missing now unlike Ray's case Jonathan was found the next day in a rural area of Pennsylvania he was like 95 miles away from where he was last seen laying face down in a creek and according to a Washington Post article by Cheryl Thompson he had 36 puncture wounds most of which were concentrated like on or around his neck now most of the wounds were pretty superficial and he had like little cut marks on his hands like signs of defensive marks on his nails and they even say his genitals had been wounded which there was no like real clarity as to what kind of wound that we were

talking about they didn't say that in the Washington Post article but I don't think it was any kind of like mutilation or anything sadistic like I think it likely could have been more in line with bruising or something you would get if you were struggling with someone okay wait a minute like it's sounding like there's not a lot of similarities between these two cases other than they're both in Pennsylvania and they had the same job yeah okay so there a lot of different circumstances around it but I'll tell you why it comes up so Jonathan Luna's case gets a little bit fishy because there has been a lot of

speculation from people that his death shouldn't have been ruled a homicide and maybe it was staged because you know that big case that he was working on well at some point in court a bunch of money went missing and people started accusing Jonathan Luna of taking it and he was supposed to undergo a polygraph about the incident but then he died and so got obviously out of the polygraph okay but that's like an elaborate way to set up your own death yes it is but if we're going to assume for a second that this rumor holds any kind of credibility people say that he stole the money because he was in a lot of credit card

debt and if he was in debt and wanted to take his own life as like a way out he would know that none of his death benefits would apply to his family after suicide so maybe he was looking out for them now his death is still classified as an unsolved homicide and eventually everyone would come to realize that there was no connection between him and Ray Greekar but it's something that like if you were to look up this case you see all the time because it is just a little bit eerie that you have these two people who work in the DA's office who go missing or found murdered under really bizarre circumstances it's hard not to

kind of like make a connection in in high-profile stuff like that right but as the summer turns into fall and just as investigators think they're hitting a wall guess what is found was it Ray no the hard drive it was found in the same river as the laptop just a little further upstream police use every forensic technique they can to pull absolutely anything off this hard drive and I mean it's been sitting in water for months at this point so it's not going to be easy they try and they try but their own guys can't get anything so they send it to this like specialty office within the government who is known for being able

to recover things like this but even they have no luck and that's when it becomes clear to everyone that whatever Ray wanted to keep secret probably will stay secret forever or at least until he's found but here's the thing about secrets ruin hard drives toss a computer there is just something about secrets they can't stay secrets for long and in 2011 the public finally learns about a deep dark secret being kept by many in Pennsylvania and they would wonder if this could be the key to finding Ray Greek are so bright do you remember what one of the biggest stories of 2011 was gonna be honest 2011 was a long time ago

fair so in 2011 a huge scandal erupted in Pennsylvania when the whole world found out that former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky had been molesting young boys yeah and while that's shocking on its own what becomes one of the biggest parts of the story is that apparently it had been going on for years decades right yeah and for years and decades people knew people tried to report it it kept getting covered up over and over again and for those of you who didn't follow the case closely CNN did a great article in 2019 titled Penn State scandal fast facts which I'll link to in the sources if you want to

dive deeper into some of the details on this but I'll give you like the story at 30,000 feet so Jerry Sandusky had this nonprofit organization that he founded back in the 70s and the mission was to quote you know help troubled boys but spoiler alert it was really to give him a pool of vulnerable young victims to prey on now did things go down in the 70s and 80s I don't know maybe probably but the first report of an accusation comes from a mother in 1998 when she contacts the authorities and says that Sandusky was showering with her 11 year old son now Sandusky is evaluated by a psychologist who says

yep he's a total predator and he admits to showering naked with this boy and says you know totally my bad I know it's wrong won't happen again and everyone says well that's nice of him and they basically wash their hands of it and close the case so fast forward in 99 Sandusky retires but he's still hanging around all the time like a big old perv and over the years he keeps getting caught with young boys in the shower boys usually from his program but excuses excuses it gets reported and somewhere up the chain of reporting someone will always say oh I never heard about that no one ever told me I swear

and so that it would never go anywhere until 2008 a boy comes forward who says that Sandusky befriended him sometime in 2005 or 2006 and then assaulted him until he broke things off with Sandusky in 2008 an investigation was launched and they found that he called this kid a hundred and eighteen times so he was not getting out of this one and when this investigation started more and more reports started to surface the investigation lasted years and then in 2011 is when they finally announced that they were formally charging him now how does all this relate back to Ray you ask well when everyone finds out about this

revelation someone realizes that Ray had a connection to the case Ray was actually the prosecutor who got put in charge of the very first allegations back in 1998 and he was the one who declined to prosecute investigators looked into this theory and here's where it gets some legs now they could not find a single note on his case from back in 1998 not even a mention of Sandusky so they could never go back and find out why he chose not to prosecute him or how weak or strong the case was because there was just nothing which is super unusual to not have a single note from an investigation like that especially when

you're talking like that that would have been a high-profile thing even though it got kind of covered up yeah now according to Sarah Gannum's reporting for PenLive one of Ray's closest friends and colleagues was a man named Steve Sloan and Steve had Ray's old dictaphone which he would like say all his notes into and then his secretary would write them up now the only thing related to the Sandusky case that could ever be recovered was this quote October 13th 1998 Shreffler Ralston Sloan Greek car investigation going to Penn State meeting Ray Fran Ganter Ron Shreffler is taking us to the football building and

I will finish this memo Sue and either Ray will help type something hand write something or he'll tell me to dictate this and I'll give you the tape when we get back thanks so it means nothing like all kind of nonsense when you read it together it's really hard yeah but the point is there are supposed to be some notes later there obviously was something before except whatever he was supposed to write up or dictate when he got back is lost forever which makes people wonder is that what was on his work computer that he was trying to get rid of like could his disappearance be a bigger cover-up of some kind okay

Ashley you know I am a huge conspiracy theorist but I guess I don't get the timing of this like Ray was in charge of the first Sandusky investigation back in 98 he went missing in 2005 and then there wasn't even another investigation into Sandusky until 2008 like if he was leaving because of that he left before it was even a thing well what if he got a heads up now this is all complete conjecture people but for those of you who believe that his disappearance is related to the Sandusky case what if some kind of deal was made like everyone keeps it quiet as long as Sandusky promises to keep it in his pants basically

they have people watching him and then he's not cooperating then around 2005 is when he starts grooming that other kid the one that ends up coming forward like maybe they saw that and everyone was told to like get clean before they started the investigation I mean I don't put it past anyone if they let Sandusky go once but you said he was abusing boys between 98 and 2008 and people were reporting it like if that's the reason he would have left sooner listen I agree it doesn't make perfect sense and most people will say that his disappearance is probably not connected to Sandusky at all but if not his lost notes on Sandusky

what was on that hard drive that needed to be destroyed so bad there was a guy named Luke O'Brien from Dead Spin and he kind of had the same question and he wanted to know what he could have been hiding or what he was connected to so this guy actually requested records from the FBI related to the Greek car case and he got some back but the FBI said that the CIA had to like review and redact and approve all of the information first the CIA like what in the world is going on I'm not sure like okay here's exactly what Luke wrote quote the CIA refused to allow certain information to be released because it's

classified in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and can't be disclosed in order to protect intelligence sources and methods as well as the names titles etc of CIA personnel end quote now to be totally fair the CIA might not have anything on Ray the FBI checking with them might be normal protocol but we haven't gotten the CIA in an episode before and it's like worth mentioning whatever we think it means yeah so what was Ray so ashamed of or scared of that he had to abandon his life or who hated him so much that they would take his life and those are really the only two options right now

because you said his body never surfaced so we can pretty much completely rule out suicide well here's the thing not exactly some still believe that Ray could have jumped into the river they say that the river was connected to a dam and that if his body made it to the dam he could have basically gotten like chopped up for lack of a better term and there may be nothing left of him all that is left behind are questions why did Ray really take off work that day why did he take his computer with him and what the heck was on it that he or someone was so dead set on destroying and who was that woman he was seen with

because still to this day she has never come forward you know Brett this is one of those cases that I could spiral on forever and ever so we're gonna have a little bonus episode in the fan club for those of you who are not in there sometimes we do this where big cases Britt and I will record a little extra on like theories and kind of like off-the-wall stuff or what we think happened it's just like five to ten minutes and we upload them as audio extras for the fan club we did this for the Brian Schaefer case we talked about an alternate theory and listen I've got a whole lot more on this case that really

didn't fit into the episode but like a true crime junkie will want to know all of the ins and outs so if you want to join us for a little post episode conversation you can head to our website crimejunkiepodcast.com click the fan club link to join you'll get the audio extra and you can join the fan discussion and tell us where you think Ray Grykar is and what was on that laptop if you want to see the pictures and sources from this case or to join the fan club for the little audio extra go to crimejunkiepodcast.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast we will be back next week

with a brand new episode crimejunkie is an audio Chuck production so what do you think Chuck do you approve