Ray Gricar: district attorney: Centre County PA

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I know this doesn't belong here but I'm putting it here. This is a national known disappearance.

Ray Gricar Podcast

New podcast dives into disappearance of former Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar
BY BRET PALLOTTO
APRIL 15, 2021 07:00 AM


Play VideoDuration 0:27
'Final Argument' podcast focuses on Gricar disappearance

"Final Argument: The Disappearance of District Attorney Ray Gricar" is a podcast that discusses the prosecutor's disappearance. BY COURTESY OF FINAL ARGUMENT

A new podcast about the vanishing of former Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar was released earlier this month, just weeks before the 16-year anniversary of his disappearance.

Rebecca Knight is part of a chorus of de facto investigators consumed by one of the most fabled missing person cases in Pennsylvania history.

“It’s inexcusable how they allowed this public servant to essentially fall through the cracks,” Knight said. “It didn’t make sense to me. And it still doesn’t make sense, nor a lot of other people.”

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Knight lived in Centre County from 1994 until 2004, one year before Gricar went missing. She retired from her magazine publishing job in 2009 and has been researching his disappearance ever since.

Central to the past decade-plus of Knight’s life has been interviews with hundreds of friends and peers of Gricar’s, along with some of the key investigators. Knight presented information in the first two episodes, but said interviews are forthcoming.


She purportedly has a copy of the entire state police case file into Gricar’s disappearance, which plays a key role in “Final Argument: The Disappearance of District Attorney Ray Gricar.”

The podcast is available on common apps — including Apple Podcasts and Spotify — as well as raygricar.com.

“Once I got inside of it, it didn’t take me long to see that it was something that I needed to really look into. It’s just one of those things,” Knight said. “The first and foremost thing was, how does someone of his stature vanish without a trace? How does this happen?”

Gricar departed Centre County in his red and white Mini Cooper 16 years ago Thursday. He ended up in Lewisburg, just eight months before he was set to retire.

Gricar, then 59, called his girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, about 11:30 a.m. the day of his disappearance to tell her he was driving down state Route 192 and wouldn’t be home in time to feed their dog.

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She called police about 12 hours later to report him missing. There are myriad theories as to what happened after their initial call.

Did he die by suicide? Was he killed by someone he’d prosecuted during the course of his decadeslong career? Did he flee his old life with the hope of vanishing and starting anew?

It depends who you ask. That’s part of the mystery.

“I believe a grand jury investigation has to be called into his disappearance,” Knight said. “... I’m going to keep beating this drum.”



This March 31, 2005, file photo shows Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar. A new podcast focuses on the county’s top prosecutor, who was last seen 16 years ago on April 15, 2005. CENTRE DAILY TIMES, FILE
Profile Image of Bret Pallotto
BRET PALLOTTO
814-231-4648
Bret Pallotto primarily reports on courts and crime for the Centre Daily Times. He was raised in Mifflin County and graduated from Lock Haven University.
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[Naj]

Local news interview last night FOX8 Johnstown, PA
Interview with investigator: Rebecca Knight

www.abc23.com/newspost/final-argument-the-disappearance-of-ray-gricar-podcast/


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[Naj]

gricar




Podcast explores 2005 disappearance of Centre County DA Ray Gricar
By Marcia Moore [e-mail] Apr 21, 2021


A Shikellamy High School graduate has created a podcast that she says will expose what happened to Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar who went missing 16 years ago.

Rebecca Knight said during the past decade she has obtained the entire police case file, about 6,000 pages of documents, as well as interviewed Gricar’s family, friends, colleagues, people Gricar prosecuted during his 20-year career and police who investigated his disappearance.

“The solution to this has been hidden in plain sight for so long,” said Knight, a Northumberland native who lived in State College for several years when Gricar served as district attorney. “I got really upset about why it hadn’t been solved.”

Gricar, who had been the district attorney since 1985 and was planning to retire in less than a year when he left his Bellefonte home on April 15, 2005, and drove his red Mini Cooper to Lewisburg where he told his girlfriend he planned to go antiquing.

The next day, his vehicle was found in the parking lot at the Street of Shops in Lewisburg but there was no trace of him.

His laptop and hard drive were found six months later in the nearby Susquehanna River. No evidence was found on the devices and the police investigation uncovered that before Gricar disappeared someone had searched on his home computer “how to wreck a hard drive” and “water damage to a notebook computer.”

While many believe that Gricar committed suicide by drowning in the same manner as his brother, Roy Gricar, nine years earlier, others, like Knight, believe he was the victim of foul play.

“A lot of very good policing was done, but they weren’t looking at a homicide,” she said, referring to the Bellefonte and state police investigation. The state police took over the case in 2014 and agency spokesman Ryan Tarkowski said this week that the investigation remains open.

Knight is laying out her case in an episodic podcast, “Final Argument. The Disappearance of Ray Gricar, District Attorney.” To date, two episodes are available and another eight are expected to be released.

Former Montour County District Attorney Rober Buehner also believes Gricar was targeted for death and hopes, like Knight, that the podcast will lead to a grand jury investigation.

“My hope is that we’ll find out what happened to my friend and colleague,” said Buehner, who in 2008 along with former Clinton County District Attorney Ted McKnight, publicly criticized the investigation and then-Attorney General Tom Corbett for not getting involved.

“A sitting district attorney goes missing and the attorney general refuses to take over the investigation?,” Buehner said. “If some person or persons can make a sitting DA disappear and the state attorney general does nothing about it, what chance does an average person have when one of their loved ones goes missing.”

He’s still critical of Union County District Attorney D. Peter Johnson for not calling on Corbett to intervene.

Johnson said it was not his decision to make since the disappearance was being investigated by the Bellefonte police with assistance from the state police.

“I was being told what they (investigators) were doing and I felt they were doing a good job,” he said.

“There is no evidence of a crime. We don’t know what happened, but we don’t believe it’s criminal,” said Johnson, who knew Gricar for 15 years and describes him as a deeply private man who “in a room full of people was alone.”

He adds that the circumstances surrounding Gricar’s brother’s suicide in an Ohio river in 1996 are very similar to the location on the Susquehanna River where Gricar went missing. Johnson said there are areas on the river where Gricar’s body could have gone and never surfaced.

After listening to the first two episodes of the podcast, Johnson raised issues with some of Knight’s findings, in particular that no fingerprints were found inside his vehicle or the failure to mention that a witness reported seeing Gricar in his vehicle with a blonde woman in the passenger seat that day.

Johnson said only two cases he’s prosecuted since 1995 have involved fingerprint evidence.

Despite the many unanswered questions in Gricar’s disappearance, Johnson said there would be little worth in a grand jury investigation other than for “public relations” reasons. “As a solution to his death? No.”

Johnson also questions Knight’s decision to charge a $19.99 fee to review some of the materials she has obtained, including police and forensic reports.

Knight defends the one-time fee, of which a portion will be donated to the National Center for Victims of Crime.

“It is not at all unusual for podcasts to charge a fee for access to certain areas in order to offset costs associated with production, not unlike being charged to buy a book or see a movie on crime,” she said.