The village of Bellefonte — which the residents pronounce Bell-font — is located alongside a river on the side of a mountain in central Pennsylvania. This time of year the town is saturated with hues of red, brown, and yellow from leaves hanging from the maples, oaks, and elms of the endless forest that surrounds it. It’s the prettiest autumn in decades, thanks to the summer’s drought, say a couple old-timers sitting inside Plaza Centre Antiques.
The tale of Ray Gricar’s disappearance is already legend here; Plaza Centre Antiques is in sight of the courthouse where Gricar worked. Two gray-hairs biding time at a card table near the entrance are happy to share their theories on the fate of everyone’s favorite prosecutor.
“Someone got rid of him,” says Karl Rudeen, the one in the blue cap. “Everyone he put in jail has a motive. Take a number, get in line. He was killed for what was on that computer.”
“Now hold on,” says Ron Denker, a skinny fellow in a red flannel button-down, his white hair slicked back against his skull. “The man took an early vacation. Started a new life somewhere. I’ve thought about doing it. Everyone has. And he knew how to do it, because that was his business.”
The two men bicker and change their minds. Finally, they give up, frustrated. Denker walks away to tend to his section of the store.
“We’ve had a couple guys disappear around here, never seen again,” says Rudeen in a low voice. “But that’s just from a couple of wags.” He shrugs. “Maybe he’ll show up downstream, in Yellowknife.”
Visitors to Bellefonte stay at Schnitzel’s Tavern, a historic brick hotel constructed in 1868, one of the first in the country to have electric lights. Today, it advertises “Authentic German Dining in an Old World Setting.” Across the street a tall monument honors the seven men from Bellefonte who went on to become governor. Orange koi swim under a bridge in the park and for a quarter you can feed them.
At the center of town, High Street splits in two at a memorial for soldiers killed in combat and loops around the county courthouse and jail. Until recently, the man in charge there was District Attorney Ray Gricar. Gricar was a Cleveland kid. Collinwood native, avid Indians fan.
Though isolated, Bellefonte is just a straight shot down I-80. It was that blacktop river that took Gricar to Bellefonte from Cleveland 20 years ago, spiriting him to a new life.

Heading north, off Lamb Street, a large brick building, mostly garage, serves as both the police station and firehouse. More than 30 bicycles lean against a wall beside two cruisers, just inside the garage. “You’d be surprised how many people lose a bike and never come to claim it,” says Officer Darrel Zaccagni (pronounced Zeg-anny) as he leads a visitor upstairs. You can tell this bit of information digs at him a little, a collection of stories without conclusion.
On the second floor, a conference room serves as both the city council chambers and a fine place to interview witnesses. The room has a sterile, cold feeling, drab walls contrasting with the tall-backed red leather chairs that surround a cheap wooden table. The officer sits and sighs. He was supposed to meet with Fox News today about the Gricar case, but they canceled again. They keep bumping him for updates on Michael Jackson, Natalee Holloway, hurricanes, the horror of the moment. His uniform is still crisp for the canceled interview.
He wrings his hands, considering where to start.
“His girlfriend called us 11, 11:30, that night to report Ray had not come home yet,” he begins.
“Wait,” the visitor asks. “Take it from the beginning. How did you know Ray? Can you tell me a little about him?”
“Ray was the district attorney — county prosecutor, same thing out here — for 20 years. I would go to his office sometimes and talk to him about a case. He was the type of guy where when we were done [talking], he would go over and open the door and wait for me to leave. You didn’t chitchat with Ray at work. He would walk right by you in the hallway. He would just be so focused. When you went into the office, if you didn’t know there was a relationship between them, you couldn’t tell.”
“Between Ray and Patty, his girlfriend?”
Zaccagni nods. Patty Fornicola worked in the prosecutor’s office as a victims’ rights advocate. They started dating after Gricar’s second marriage dissolved. Zaccagni has known her since she was in high school and he was a rookie.
Pity the smalltown officer who finds himself swallowed up by high-profile mystery. With this one, it’s tempting to rush past the beginning and jump ahead like this, to the laptop the fishermen found in the river, to the possible sighting in Texas, and work the clues backward. That seems the easiest way to go. Taken chronologically, it’s easy to get lost. Chronologically, there are too many tangents, too many tributaries to float down.

The life of Ray Gricar never diverged much. It was as if a path had been set for him at birth, which he followed obediently for 59 years.
Ray was born in October 1945, in the first wave of the Baby Boom. His family lived in the proudly Polish section of Collinwood. Growing up, Ray became passionate about Cleveland sports, and would often attend Indians games with his older brother, Roy. Later, he attended Gilmour Academy, an expensive Catholic preparatory school in Gates Mills and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Dayton, where he met a young freshman named Barbara Gray.
Though he first had aspirations to study Russian history, he focused on law after landing an internship at the prosecutor’s office. After graduation, he and Barbara moved to Cleveland and married in 1969. He earned a law degree from Case Western Reserve University and took a job as an assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. He went after career criminals. Rape. Murder. The rougher cases.
In 1978, he and Barbara adopted a newborn girl, Lara. When Barbara was offered a position at Penn State in 1985, Ray took the opportunity to take some time off, opting to become a stay-at-home dad. They moved into a house near State College, Pennsylvania. This brief respite from the dark side of human nature was short-lived. Eventually, the darkness found him.
Word in Bellefonte was a young prosecutor had moved to Centre County, looking to get away from the big city. It just so happened that District Attorney David Grine needed a part-time assistant. It doesn’t appear that Gricar put up much of a fight when the town posse came knocking at his door. Maybe he thought this would be different. After all, Centre County sees only one or two homicides a year.
Gricar became first assistant prosecutor for Centre County in 1985. When the D.A. became a judge later that same year, Gricar ran for the open position, and won.
Even though the D.A. gig was considered part-time, he often put in over 40 hours a week. That year, he successfully prosecuted one of the first cases in the country to use postpartum depression as a defense after a woman tossed her one-month-old son from a bridge into a local stream. She got eight to 20 years. In 1992, he prosecuted James R. Cruz, an interstate trucker who had dumped the body of a young girl on the on-ramp to I-80 heading out of town. Cruz was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. When an ROTC student opened fire in the student union at Penn State in 1996 — killing one girl and wounding another — Gricar put the shooter away for 30-to-60 years. Homicides were his specialty.
He and his wife divorced in the early ’90s, but it appears the only other time Gricar’s life took an unexpected turn was in May 1996, when his brother, Roy, suddenly disappeared. Roy was living in Dayton at the time. He had just been fired from his job at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where he worked as a private contractor. He suffered from bipolar disorder and had been acting erratic. On the pretense of heading to the store to buy a bag of mulch, Roy left the house and didn’t come back.

For the next week, Tony Gricar, Roy’s son, searched for his father. Ray drove in to speak to the local police and media. Then, Roy’s body was found in the Great Miami River. Cause of death was determined to be suicide by drowning.
Tony says his uncle was noticeably affected by the tragedy. But the always-focused Ray tried his best to move forward. A month later he married his second wife, Emma. While Gricar was withdrawn, Emma was social and outgoing. She liked to dance. Maybe he liked her for the way she complemented his silent nature. But in the end, the differences were too great. They divorced in 2001.
In January of this year, after two decades as district attorney, Gricar announced that he would not seek reelection. He hoped to travel. He wanted to visit his daughter Lara in Seattle, where she attends college, maybe spend some time in New England — he especially liked Vermont.
On Friday, April 15, Gricar told his new girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, he wasn’t going to work. He said he thought he might play hooky and head into Lewisburg, an hour’s drive to the east, to do some antiquing. This was not unusual. Gricar would often take half days off to visit antique shops in nearby towns, questing for vintage toys. Small metal cars. Outdated appliances.
Fornicola asked him to call if he wouldn’t be back in time to walk the dog at noon. That was the last time she saw him.
Since then, Tony has found himself filling the role for his uncle that Ray took for Roy: family spokesman. For the last month, the 32-year-old entrepreneur from Dayton has been in seclusion at a family-owned cabin in Selina, Ohio, coming into town only for interviews with Larry King and to receive updates from Zaccagni. The last six months wear on him.
“There are enough clues to take you in any direction,” he says. “And enough left over to rein you back in.”

Officer Darrel Zaccagni’s voice takes on the air of urgency as he gets to the meat of his story, the part where Ray Gricar stops being an aloof acquaintance and becomes the main focus of his job.
Zaccagni begins: “He called [Fornicola] about 11:30 that morning and said, ‘Well, I’m on 192. I’m not going to make it home in time to take care of the dog.’ He says, ‘See you later.’” Fornicola recalls nothing usual about his tone.
“When he wasn’t home at dinnertime — she kind of expected him home by then. And when he wasn’t there, she thought, ‘What’s keeping him? Oh, he stopped to get something to eat.’ But when it got to be 10, 11 o’clock at night, she’s like, ‘No, he should be home by now.’ So then she called us.
“We put out a local message to be on the lookout for him. In the morning, we started taking it a little more seriously. Obviously, this was now a missing person.”
That evening, a state trooper spotted the car in a parking lot across from an antique mall in Lewisburg. The interior and exterior of the car were examined, the surrounding area searched. There were no signs of a struggle, and no one had attempted to wipe away fingerprints.
“The biggest thing that was found in that car that didn’t jive with what we know about Ray was some cigarette ashes,” Zaccagni continues. “Now, we’re not talking a lot. But some minute cigarette ash on the passenger’s side. When they opened the car, they got a tobacco smell. A cigarette smell came out of the car. Ray didn’t smoke. And he never let anybody smoke inside his Mini Cooper. Ray was very fastidious about his car. The cell phone was in there, turned off. Nothing appeared to be missing.
“Later, we went to the house and his work and collected all the computers he used for processing. [To] see if there was something on his computers to tell us what had happened. When we went to collect the computer from the house, Patty asked us if we wanted his work laptop, too. They had been using his work laptop to do Internet searches and things, but had recently bought a separate one for the home. ‘So we don’t use it anymore,’ Patty said. So she goes up and brings down the empty case and says, ‘It’s not here.’ So, it’s missing, but all the peripheral stuff is there: the power cord, the floppy drive, everything extra you would need for the laptop. It’s all there. The only thing missing is the laptop with its self-powered battery that lasts for two or three hours.
“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 his visitor’s 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 IDing 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.
Or, 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? Several people claim to have seen him Saturday morning.
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 bridge, the water, the car are all in the same place in relation to 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. He showed no signs of the depression that drowned his brother.
Coworkers certainly noticed no difference. “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’s 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. 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.
New evidence only adds to the confusion.
On July 30, 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.
On September 23, 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 while he awaits confirmation from a lab in California. Says Zaccagni: “It looks like a duck, but we’re waiting to see if it quacks like a duck.” After the five months the equipment spent in the water, he’s not holding his breath.
Psychic Carla Baron, who has weighed in on cases for Court TV, called from L.A. to tell investigators she thought someone involved in government murdered Gricar. She said his body could be found near an old farmhouse, by a river or a lake.

State Route 192 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 one. 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?
In August, a man in Texas who’d seen a TV report on Gricar’s disappearance used his camera phone to snap pictures of a man who looked strikingly similar in a Chile’s restaurant. He was sitting alone. Patty Fornicola said it was her boyfriend, 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.”
And who was the woman in the antique store?
Why was the hard drive removed from the computer if it ended up in the river anyway?
Who was smoking inside the car?
It’s a mystery to be riddled out on porches overlooking the Susquehanna or in cars driving through the void of 192. And it could be that no one ever comes up with an explanation more solid than what the old man at the antique mall said: Sometimes, out here, people just disappear.