DA Who failed to prosecute Penn State coach has been missing for 6+ years

The prosecutor who decided to not pursue sex abuse charges against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky more than a decade ago, despite an alleged confession, is at the center of a missing persons mystery that has enraptured middle Pennsylvania for years.

Ray Gricar served as the district attorney for Pennsylvania's Centre County in 1998 when Sandusky was accused of sexually abusing several boys. After an extensive investigation, which included testimony by two law enforcement officers that they had overheard Sandusky admitting to showering with multiple young boys, Gricar decided no criminal charges would be filed, according to recent court documents. Sandusky retired the next year.

Then, in April 2005, Gricar disappeared.

His car was found abandoned in a Lewisburg, Pa., parking lot and his laptop's harddrive was recovered from the nearby Susquehannna River, but there was no other trace of Gricar. No clues could be gleaned from the severely damaged harddrive and despite a six year investigation that involved the FBI and international help, police have as little an idea today about what happened to the former DA as they did then.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/sandusky-investigator-center-mystery/story?id=14905668

for failing to pursue justice.

I think we've all been there

Especially with the vote total in between.

and go spend the money someplace else, with a new identity.

Or maybe the two things are completely unrelated. Attorneys do scamper off sometimes - almost invariably because of money.

That explains why this was allowed to go on for so long (and the missing DA.) Probably every major team has been compromised in a similar way. The whole thing is rigged by Vegas.

there were many theories about what happened to him.

Who knows who he might've cut deals with or logrolled for?

Probably a mystery that will remain unsolved.

The 1998 allegations which was what was investigated consisted of an incident where Sandusky showered with a boy and the boy claimed that he hugged him. The boy's mother spoke to Sandusky on the phone where police were secretly listening in as part of the investigation, and Sandusky did acknowledge that he showered with the boy and admitted it was inappropriate. Showering with the boy was not a crime, and hugging him isn't either though it most certainly is inappropriate as well as a huge red flag concerning what his intentions were. DA's commonly don't take on cases that are definitely crimes just because of their belief that it would be too difficult to win. The DA not taking on this case when there wasn't even sufficient evidence that any crime had been committed at all would prompt damn near any DA to steer clear.

The boy himself also only claimed that the incident made him feel uncomfortable - not violated. There may very well have been the issue of whether or not the victim was willing to testify at all... his testimony would be vital to a successful case, and if he did testify but only testified that the incident merely made him feel uncomfortable, the case would very likely be lost. Keep in mind that these allegations were against a person the entire community regarded as nearly a hero as well, and the case would be tried in that community.

Given all of this, what DA anywhere would have taken on this case???

It's a shame that at that time more evidence of what Sandusky was up to couldn't be found, and the police certainly did try to find it.

NO showers or naked with kids.... EVER.

right?

and thanks for the info

as Mother Earth is shaken, and the Patriarchs quiver guiltily...

The more I think about this, the more I think his disappearance has nothing to do
with the scandal at PSU. If there was foul play involved, the question is why? Who would benefit from his death or disappearance?

1. He had declined to press charges against Sandusky, so there would be no reason for the mighty PSU football juggernaut to 'take him out', as it were.

2. The victims were powerless kids, so they wouldn't be involved. And even if they were, it's unlikely that they'd be sophisticated enough to engineer his disappearance into thin air. They'd have probably just killed him in the street or a home invasion or something.

3. If he had decided to kill himself because he was being threatened by PSU forces to remain silent, and he couldn't live with the guilt or whatever, I would think he'd have left all the incriminating evidence behind, so that someone would know why.

4. He declined to press charges in 1998, but didn't disappear until 2005. Why would someone wait 7 years to take action against him? It's even possible that the statute of limitations would have expired by that time (I'm not sure what the law is in PA regarding that).

To me, tying the PSU scandal into his disappearance doesn't really add up. But yes, I would love to know what was on that hard drive.


Here's an article I found. I think it's interesting.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/11/form...

I've been fascinated by the Gricar story for years. (The show "Disappeared" on ID covered it recently)

You've outlined nicely why it isn't likely that the Penn State administration had anything to do with his disappearance.

If you read up on the case (and clearly you have, Bunny), there's as much evidence that he walked away from his life (or committed suicide because of depression, as his brother did) as there is that he was murdered.

In the weeks before he disappeared, he asked around the office to see how he might go about wiping out his hard drive. Is this the act of someone about to be murdered, or someone that was planning to walk away from his life, and maybe didn't want the whole Penn State thing found on his computer and exposed?


Oh, and I admit to (just now) un-reccing this. There's plenty of TRUE stuff for Penn State administration to be ashamed of without adding in shadowy woo-woo stuff that's about the same quality as "Vince Foster was murdered".

what did he learn between 2002 and 2005 - and did he find his hands tied over it?

We will probably never know.

...but it's entirely plausible that Gricar as the DA was overpowered by very powerful
people in the Penn State community--who demanded that he not press charges. Maybe
it wasn't entirely his decision to not prosecute.

Possibly, his investigations did bother him and leave him privy to a very huge
scandal--and what would become a cover up--which it absolutely was. We can all see that.

Maybe Gricar became a problem for people in the Penn State community who wanted him gone. Sure,
the statute of limitations might have expired on specific crimes--but not on an ongoing
barrage of rapes against children--which is what Sandusky was doing.

Did you know that the attorney for Sandusky's charity was also an attorney on campus,
representing Penn State? There appears to be a very tangled web here.

Yes, murder is speculation and so is suicide. However, Gricar's body has never been
found--so how convenient that we will never know.

I've never heard of someone committing suicide and then making their body disappear.
That's got to be highly unusual.

Once you turn the other way when child rape is occurring, the sky is the limit. A pile of bodies or worse wouldn't surprise me at all.