Stephen Grant's Confession

http://centralmediaserver.com/wxyz/wxyzconfession.pdf

The above link is to a pdf file of Stephen Grant's confession. 66 pages of things that make you want to beat the man about the head with a band saw blade.

It is full of "Poor me, poor me."

Just a couple of things:

"M Were you looking at her face?

G No, I covered her face up.

M What did you cover her face up with?

G With a pair--with gray underwear or a gray t-shirt."

This piece of garbage covered his wife's face up with underwear out of a laundry pile on the bathroom floor so he wouldn't have to look at her while he strangled her!

Then, he put a leather belt around her neck and dragged her body down the stairs, because she was too heavy to carry.

He claims to have been stark naked when he did this! And, of course, it was all her fault:

"G I was undressed and I--I was ready to go to bed and it just kept getting worse and worse and when she smacked me, I--I lost it...."

~~~

"G Yeah, yeah, not just the travel, though the--everything--Tara had--as long as I can remember she belittled me and--and her one way--she knew--she knew if she hit me, I'd hit her back."

~~~

"G Um and I dropped her. She was too hard to pick up and the belt slipped or broke. And she fell, and it was the most disgusting--and, it sounded like dropping a watermelon [on] the cement."

He does return to that part of the crime several times in the sixty-six pages of confession. I think that may have been the point when it all became real for him. When he dropped her body, trying to put it in the back of her SUV, and her head hit the garage floor.

Imagine. He is standing there, stark naked, in the Michigan garage, trying to load his wife's body into an SUV, the au pair is due back home any minute, and he drops Tara. Her head hits the floor with a sickening thud. He had known she was dead, but now he knows in a visceral way. She is dead. He has killed her. At one point he says, "My life is over."

I just want to smack him and say, "What about Tara's life? You're still alive to moan about it, you scum!"

I can see a really sick, black-humoured movie being made about this story, eventually. According to the document, he left her body in the SUV from Friday night until Sunday morning, trying to figure out what to do with her. Sunday, he put her in the plastic tub and took her to his dad's metal shop, where he tried to cut her up with a hand saw. A HAND SAW! That didn't work, so he got a band saw blade, broke it up into pieces by crushing it in a vise, and wrapped one end of each piece so he could hold it while he cut his wife's body up. The torso was too big, so he just wrapped the pieces two or three to a bag, and put her torso in another bag...of course, he took clear plastic bags to put the pieces in. When he's done with that, he stuffed all the pieces back into the storage tub and took it all home. It took him till the middle of the night to come up with the idea of putting her out in the snow, and he did so, putting her torso in one spot, and the rest of the pieces and the sled in another. That was after the sled got away from him, down a hill, and the tub fell off, scattering its contents. This all occurred in the dead of night.

He then went home, watched some TV with the kids, and went back to the disposal area. Once there, he dispersed the body parts in and under trees. He had taken a gallon-size zipper baggie with him and stuffed the latex gloves and all the plastic garbage bags in which Tara's body parts had been wrapped, and hid that, too. (That must be what the woman found that gave the police probable cause to get a warrant to search the house.)

He was beginning to think he had got away with it when it got to be over a week later and nothing had happened. He had even been arrested on an unrelated charge and questioned about his wife's disappearance. However, nine days after he spread his wife's remains around the snowy, frozen park, the sheriff announced that his department was going to search it.

In a panic, Stephen again returned to the scene. On foot because his mom was at the house with the children, and he didn't want her to hear him drive off in the dark of a February morning. He found Tara's torso, and hid it closer to where he could get it in her truck. Then, he ran home, gave his mother some cock-and-bull story and took off in Tara's SUV to retrieve his wife's frozen, clear-plastic-wrapped torso from behind a tree in a public park. This time, he took some black garbage bags. He drove home, and later, to the metal shop, where he concealed the body in an upper room. The shop office was a small space with a ceiling, and the rest of the shop was two storeys. He put her on top of the office.

Several days passed. The search of the park revealed nothing, but the remains were thawing in the metal shop. Stephen got another plastic storage bin, and removed the body to the garage again, where it was found in the search of the home the following day.

That was when he attempted "suicide by frostbite," as Loretta characterized it (aptly, I thought), by stumbling through the North Michigan woods, stoned on painkillers and drunk on whisky. He wanted to be found dead. He didn't want his remains to suffer the same fate he decreed for his wife.

This was a horrific crime, and I certainly don't mean to make light of it, but someday, somebody like Tarentino is going to make a sick but darkly humourous movie out of it.