The Serial Killer's Apprentice

by James Renner

  “The question becomes, why would a person who’s just going for a leisurely drive take the time to go upstairs and remove the laptop from its case and take it with them? Why not take the case?”

  Zaccagni anticipates my response. This makes no sense.

  “It makes a lot of sense,” he replies with a smile, before returning to the chronology.

  “Friday night, people remember the car sitting in the parking lot. It’s a very distinct car. Two people in the antique mall are positive they saw him in there. One man is positive he saw Gricar talking to a female on several occasions. I asked him, Were they together? He said, ‘Well, in my mind they were together, but they weren’t holding hands; they weren’t lovey-dovey or anything.’

  “We have three or four good witnesses from down there who are definitely ID-ing him in the park. They saw him sitting in his car. They watched him driving his Mini Cooper back and forth on Friday.

  “We can definitely put him there on Saturday, too. There’s a museum right here, across from the park. I think it’s called Cottingwood House. The employees there watched Ray bring his car and park it two or three different times across the street. He came and left, came and left, came back. He got out of his car, sat on a bench. He was reading a newspaper or something. But by noon Saturday, he just seems to have fallen off the earth.”

  What does Zaccagni make of all this?

  “Depends on what theory you want to go after,” he says, pulling himself up to the table. “You have three prominent theories here.”

  Theory one: homicide. Twenty years spent convicting Centre County’s most hardened criminals earns you some enemies. Maybe some thug killed him and made off with the computer. Perhaps Gricar had uncovered high-level corruption, something so potentially damaging he could only store the evidence on his personal laptop. Maybe he offered the person a chance to come clean, setting up a meeting just outside of Centre County’s jurisdiction where he could lay out the gathered information in seclusion. Give them some time to think it over.

  Zaccagni points to the park. “He’s contemplating what this guy should do, and this guy shows up and this ends up becoming a homicide because Ray doesn’t understand how dangerous this man is.”

  But if it’s a clandestine meeting, why spend the day looking at antiques with some woman? Why spend the night there?

  Theory two: suicide. The family history supports this. Tony Gricar tracked down aerial photographs of both the site where his father’s car was found by a river in Dayton and from North Water Street where Ray’s car was parked by the Susquehanna. The similarities are striking. The placement of the bridges, the rivers, and the cars are mirror images of each other.

  Zaccagni thinks maybe Gricar kept a diary on his laptop. Maybe that’s why it’s gone. He was traveling to parks to think it through. “We know [that on Thursday, April 14] he was at another big body of water,” says Zaccagni. “He’s over in the Huntingdon area. Raystown Dam. We have some people who saw him there.” But no one has ever known Gricar to keep a journal. And he was making plans, looking forward to traveling after retirement. Outwardly, he showed no signs of the depression that drowned his brother.

  Co-workers certainly noticed no difference in his demeanor. “He did not have any change in his physical appearance or mental state,” says Mark Smith, Gricar’s first assistant. “The entire office is baffled by his disappearance.”

  And finally, suicide is a private act. Why invite someone to smoke inside your car before you jump off a bridge?

  Theory three: hoax. Gricar was seen with a woman at the antique mall, though witnesses can’t say for sure if they were romantic. She could have been a smoker, though Gricar abhorred the habit. Was Lewisburg their rendezvous before skipping town and starting a new life?

  Even the computer makes sense. He’d been communicating via e-mail, Zaccagni speculates, playing devil’s advocate. “It’s all on the laptop. Maybe some directions. Maybe he’s been doing some online banking, because he has a special account set up in a different name.” So he took it with him. And he took the laptop out of the bag to buy some extra time.

  The biggest problem with this theory is his daughter, Lara, whom Gricar cared for after a skiing accident in 2001. Lara, whom all his secretaries knew to patch through whenever she called, or face the most severe reprimand. But Lara has not been contacted by her father. She recently took a lie-detector test to prove it.

  Further evidence only adds to the confusion.

  On July 30, 2005, two fishermen pulled the laptop from the Susquehanna, under a bridge directly behind the park where Gricar was last seen. The hard drive had been removed. And that could not have happened in the fall. In order to remove the hard drive from Gricar’s computer, you had to first unscrew it.

  On September 23 of that year, a woman walking the low banks of the river came across a piece of electronic equipment one inch by three inches—a hard drive. This was near a railroad bridge a half mile upstream from where the Mini Cooper was parked. The hard drive is the same make and model as Gricar’s laptop, but Centre County did not keep tabs on the serial numbers, so Zaccagni can only assume it’s the one he’s looking for. We’ll never know for sure—five months spent in the Susquehanna damaged the hard drive so badly that even the FBI’s best forensic crew could not extract the data it once contained.

  * * *

  State Route 192 (Gricar’s route) is not the easiest way to get to Lewisburg from Bellefonte—heading down Route 45 shaves about 10 minutes off the hour-long journey. But it is the more scenic road, winding between two mountains, through sparse villages where fields of seed corn outnumber houses 10 to 1. Only four FM radio stations can be picked up clearly, but sometimes lower-frequency stations sneak through the static, like pale faces glimpsed under water. Evangelical doomsayers, mostly.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  And suddenly, there’s Lewisburg, home to Bucknell University. The houses here are victorian or colonial and tower over the main thoroughfares. A movie theater with a tall marquee advertises an upcoming documentary festival. The sidewalks are illuminated by glass orbs hanging from wrought-iron stands.

  The bridge above the spot where the fishermen found the laptop is about a quarter-mile long. Zaccagni figures Gricar jumped from the south side of the bridge, where the pedestrian walkway is; if you’re going in, why cross the street and climb over a concrete wall to do so? But the river flows south, and the laptop was found north of the bridge.

  Nor does it seem that the fall could have killed him. It’s only about 25 feet to the water.

  So what became of Ray Gricar?

  Not long before he disappeared, Ray told a friend about Melvin Wiley, the police chief of Hinckley Township, in Medina, who vanished without a trace in 1985. No one knows why Ray brought the subject up. Was he worried the same thing was about to happen to him, or did it sound like a swell idea?

  In August 2005, a man in Texas who’d seen a TV report on Gricar’s disappearance used his camera phone to snap pictures of someone who looked strikingly similar to the missing man in a Chili’s restaurant. He was sitting alone. Patty Fornicola believed it was Gricar, but his nephew Tony said it was definitely not. The FBI analyzed the picture, according to Zaccagni, and concluded that if it was Gricar, he’d had minor plastic surgery.

  Zaccagni says Fornicola’s identification was clouded by optimism. “She’s hoping against hope that Ray is still out there,” he says. “She’ll deal with why he’s doing this to her later.”

  Since then, there have been other sightings, the most promising of which occurred in a Meijer’s grocery store in Columbus. When Tony first viewed the store’s surveillance footage, he thought it could be his uncle. But upon closer inspection, he noticed that the man on the tape had a distinct way of walking that was not recognizable. He is sure, now, that it was not Ray.

  * * *

  Crime chatroom fans of the homicide theory are quick to suggest a connection between Ray’s disappearance and the deat
h of a man named Billy Joe Leathers a few days later. Leathers was a career criminal whom Ray had once prosecuted. But he was out when Ray vanished. As the search for the missing district attorney intensified, Leathers shot himself in the head, committing suicide. But detectives reviewed Leathers’s whereabouts for the days surrounding Ray’s disappearance and concluded the two never crossed paths.

  Then there’s the strange connection between Ray’s last day and a science fiction book written by a local professor. Bellefonte police detectives have learned that sometime around 1987, Ray was approached by a professor from Penn State who wrote science fiction novels under the pen name Pamela West. She told Ray she was researching the 1969 unsolved murder of Betsy Ruth Aardsma, a beautiful young woman who was stabbed to death inside the campus library. She told Ray she thought she knew who did it, but didn’t think she could publish the man’s name without getting sued. According to detectives, Ray told her to keep investigating. Eventually, West used the circumstances of the crime in a sci-fi book titled 20/20 Vision, which was published in 1990. The main character of the story is an aloof detective named Max Crane, who is about to retire. He drives a distinctive car with personalized plates—as did Ray. In the book, the murder occurs on April 15 (the very day Ray disappeared). A vital clue to solving the case is a bit of ash. Police detectives consider it a promising lead.

  Ray Gricar’s vanishing is a fascinating mystery best considered on porches overlooking the Susquehanna or in cars driving through the void of Route 192. No one may ever come up with a better explanation than what the old man at the antique mall told me: Sometimes, out here, people just disappear.

  * * *

  Anyone with information related to this case should contact Detective Matt Rickard at the Bellefonte Police Department, 814-353-2320. You can also contact the family at www.raygricar.com.

  Ray Gricar was about to retire as District Attorney when he vanished. (Bellefonte Police Department)

  Detectives are still searching for Gricar. Have you seen him? (www.FBI.gov)

  Darrel Zaccagni, the police officer who investigated Gricar’s disappearance, believes the prosecutor may still be alive.

  Gricar was last seen here, in Lewisburg, Pa. The clues he left behind defy the laws of physics. (Ron Kretsch)

  Chapter 4

  Gemini’s Last Dance

  The Unsolved Murder of Andrea Flenoury

  When Detective Bertina King first saw the body in the canal, she thought it was a young girl. The thin, feminine frame was still submerged and mostly obscured. From the shore, King could see only a hand suspended below the muddy water like a beckoning ghost, attached to the faint outline of a tiny female.

  The detective figured as soon as the Akron Fire Department arrived and pulled the victim from the water, she could transfer the homicide to detectives who worked juvenile cases. She was wrong.

  It was August 7, 2005, a Sunday morning, and though it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, there were already looky-loos across the way, milling about behind the laundromat and saloon, leaning out the doors of the apartment complex downstream. This side of the canal, thankfully, was just a big parking lot, now the sole domain of Akron police.

  The parking lot serves a section of the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail on Manchester Road in sleepy Coventry Township, beside the intersection with Carnegie Road. The intersection has claimed many lives recently. A few months earlier, a man hit the bridge guardrail a little after 2 a.m. and flipped his car upside down, into the river. His neck snapped in the crash, and the car went unnoticed for hours. A year before that, two teenage sisters died in an accident just across the street from the parking lot’s entrance. A makeshift memorial signed by friends still stands there, surrounded by flowers. The lot is used mostly by towpath joggers or fishermen. And it was a fisherman who had seen the hand floating under the waves and alerted authorities. Now, the only thing trolling the canal were ducks, and lots of them. It was impossible to not step in the ducks’ feces.

  Eventually, the firemen pulled the body from the water. It had been wrapped in chains to keep it submerged. They covered the partially clothed body in a white bag so the onlookers could not see the extent of the trauma. Two things were immediately apparent to Detective King. One: this was not a child, but a young woman. Two: she had not been submerged for long; there was no sign of decomposition.

  The victim’s prints were fed into the Akron database. The woman’s name was Andrea Flenoury, age 21. Later, the detective would learn that she was better known to others as Gemini.

  Before Andrea Flenoury became one of Akron’s most popular strippers, she was a Lordstown High School cheerleader. Lordstown is a proud hamlet just outside Warren but far enough removed from the city to be mostly farmland. The town is not large enough for a zip code of its own so it gets lumped in with the city more often than its residents would like. The majority of the townfolk are white. Andrea was not.

  Thumbing through the Lordstown High 2002 yearbook, one finds row after row of students of eastern european stock, broken suddenly by Andrea’s portrait. She stands out as much for her gracefulness as for her milk-chocolate complexion. She seems self-assured as she leans back in a chair, giving the photographer the best view of her perfectly straight teeth. Her cheerleading pictures are there, too. At five foot three, she was one of the shortest girls on the squad.

  Although Andrea graduated from Lordstown, she spent a portion of her high school career in Akron, where her mother moved after a divorce. And it was to Akron that Andrea returned shortly after receiving her diploma. Then, she met Jason Conrad.

  Ten years older, Conrad already had kids of his own and opted not to work, claim those who know him, in order to avoid paying child support. He was white, with a dark, bushy mane that fell below his shoulders. He lived with his mother in an efficiency near Highland Square but spent most of his time at Andrea’s place on the other side of Akron.

  Andrea lived in a cramped first-floor apartment on Excelsior Street, sharing a bathroom with the other tenants. The house slumps about its sides, as if it gave up the will to stand straight decades ago. Plastic toy cars rest on the stoop. There’s a depressed, poverty-stricken feel to the place, betrayed only by two gray satellite dishes attached to the side wall. Not that Andrea seemed to mind the conditions or the locale. She formed friendships with the other housemates, and it was only a short walk to Dave’s Supermarket, where she bought jugs of iced tea on summer evenings.

  She tried a typical post-grad day job for a while, selling movie tickets at Regal Cinemas. In August 2003, though, she and a co-worker were arrested for using a customer’s ATM card to steal gift certificates. Those who remember her at Lordstown High blame this behavior on Akron itself. The girl they knew was not a problem child until she’d spent some time there with her mother.

  Not long after the bust at Regal Cinemas, Andrea began stripping. It didn’t hurt that Lisa’s Cabaret was a quarter-mile walk from the apartment. She had also become friends with Amanda Boggs, who lived in the house, too, and stripped at area haunts when she wasn’t pushing wings at BW3. Boggs apparently often covered for Andrea. In later police reports related to Andrea, the number she gave to police was the main phone line for BW3 on Exchange Street.

  Over the next two years, Andrea danced at practically every club in town, moving from one to another, following the migration of older men seeking flesh. Lisa’s Cabaret, Touch of Class, Rumors, Flashdance Cabaret, Exotica. Wherever the action was, so was she.

  As Andrea began making serious jack—sometimes $700 a night—her relationship with Conrad took a violent turn.

  In January 2004, they got into a fight at Conrad’s mother’s place. According to the incident report, Andrea claimed Conrad grabbed her by the neck, then threw her to the ground, beating her head against the floor several times. She told police she then grabbed a knife, which Conrad took from her and held to her face.

  Conrad said he was breaking up with her, and that she had pulled the knife on him
before he pushed her to the ground. They were both arrested and charged with domestic violence.

  It was this report Detective King returned to after Andrea’s body was pulled from the water, in August 2005. Andrea’s claim that Conrad had grabbed her by the neck was intriguing. Andrea had not drowned in the river—she’d been strangled to death first.

  She was also six weeks pregnant.

  There was no need to invent a reason to bring Jason Conrad in for questioning. He already had a warrant out for his arrest on two grand theft charges. Detective King and her partner, Detective Steven Null, found him at Andrea’s apartment. They brought Conrad into the station and began the interrogation.

  Conrad said the last time he’d seen Andrea was the night before, around midnight. She had told him she was going to dance at Lisa’s Cabaret. He hadn’t been worried when he didn’t find her home in the morning. She didn’t like walking back by herself late at night, so she would occasionally take a ride from a female co-worker, even if it meant crashing at her place.

  At first, he seemed concerned about the baby. When they told him that Andrea was dead, the detectives watched him “fall apart,” recalls Detective King. He began to cry. And as he came to realize he was the main suspect, he immediately agreed to a series of tests. “Take everything you want right now,” said Conrad, according to the detectives. “She was my life. My life is over now.”

  Conrad passed a polygraph, and his alibi checked out. A DNA test confirmed he was the father of Andrea’s baby.

  So Detective Null hit the strip clubs and started turning over rocks.

  One of the first things he discovered was that Andrea had lied to Conrad. She had not worked at Lisa’s Cabaret for at least two months.

  A bouncer who knew Andrea well reported he had seen her walking near Arlington and Exchange around 2:45 a.m. The intersection, not far from her apartment, is a hub for hookers and dealers. The bouncer said he pulled over and offered her a ride. She said she was “okay,” though, so he drove on. He, too, gave a DNA sample and has been cleared by detectives.