The Case of the Missing D.A.
39:09 Share

Get charged up for the all-electric Acura ZDX, featuring your choice of complimentary charging packages, an impressive range, and a bangin' Olsen premium sound system. With a three-month trial subscription of SiriusXM, transform your ride into the most extensive and personalized audio experience on the road. Visit your local Acura dealer for electrifying offers on a 2024 Acura ZDX. Acura. Precision. Crafted. Performance.

Hey guys, it's Hoda Kotb from the Today Show reminding you to check out my podcast, Making Space. In this week's episode, I sit down with Maria Shriver live at our very first Making Space Wellness Weekend. We talk about her journey of self-discovery, the lessons she's learned along the way, and why a bumpy path might mean you're headed in the right direction. You can listen to the full conversation now by searching Making Space wherever you get your podcasts. The clues are tantalizing. A sporty red car. A speck of cigarette ash.

A battered hard drive. It is a mystery. It absolutely is a mystery. But what do these clues say about the sudden disappearance of the district attorney who left them behind? It's baffling. It's confusing and perplexing. It's all of those things. His name is Ray Gricar. When he vanished in 2005, it was a big story. A prosecutor in Pennsylvania who vanished on Friday is still missing.

Now, Ray's story is linked to an even bigger one. Stunning allegations of sexual child abuse. One of the most storied names in college sports is enveloped in scandal. Because seven years before he went missing, Ray Gricar decided not to prosecute Jerry Sandusky for the first known allegation of child sex abuse against him. Now, some are asking whether that Sandusky case had anything to do with the DA's disappearance.

For anyone to think there is no relationship is the epitome of naivete. Others say, no way. Eliminating Ray doesn't eliminate the problem for anybody.

Ever since the Sandusky scandal broke, Dateline has been on the ground, analyzing the clues, digging into the case, and talking to those who knew the DA from Centre County. There are several scenarios for Gricar's disappearance. We'll look for answers. What really happened to Ray Gricar? Ray, I love you very much, and I miss you. He was the district attorney in Pennsylvania's Centre County, working in the postcard-pretty town of Belfont.

Penn State is just down the road. It's a powerful presence in this central Pennsylvania neighborhood. Back in April 2005, Ray Gricar had served the better part of five terms and racked up a stellar reputation. But it's the nature of the job that, you know, you do difficult things, you make difficult choices. He was the most serious prosecutor I've ever met.

Bob Buhner was Ray's friend. Buhner was the DA in neighboring Montour County. He met Ray Gricar in the 90s, and over the years, the two traded shop talk whenever they could. Did he go with his gut? Did he shoot from the hip, or was he like, punch all the right buttons and then get to the answer?

He was the guy that always had the next question. What about this? Did you consider that? He was the most serious guy, most ethical guy. Methodical, meticulous, fearless, too. He didn't care who the person was he prosecuted. He prosecuted some very high-profile cases that made national news in Little Center County in the middle of Pennsylvania. It didn't bother him who the person was. It was what they did that counted.

In the spring of 2005, everything seemed to be going Ray Gricar's way. He was in love. After two divorces, he had moved in with his longtime girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, and he seemed happy at last. I think for both of us, we finally found our soulmate. We found the person who was perfect. Investigators say he had no health problems, no money worries, and he was close to his only child, 27-year-old Laura.

She lived in Washington State at the time, but the two stayed in touch by phone. I spoke to my dad often. I would say three to four times a week. We were in pretty regular contact. In that spring of 2005, Ray was 59, just eight months away from retirement. And he was ready for it. He was already starting to cut back on his workload. We were going to drive across the country, take our time, visit the national parks, and end up...

on the west coast visiting his daughter. The trip never happened. On April 14th, Laura had a conversation with her father that she'll never forget. The conversation was, hey dad, just called to say hi and I love you. I said, I have this exam and he said, you know, I love you too. And he said, I'm sure you're going to do great on the exam. You always do. You're just like your mom. The next day, April 15th, Ray woke up and told Patty he was going to play hooky.

She wasn't surprised he'd done it before. I said, "It's time to get up." And he said, "I don't think I'm going to go to work today. I think I'm going to take today off." I said, "Fine, good for you." Patty went to work. She was a clerk in Ray's office. Ray called about 11:30 that morning. He told her he'd taken his fun little Mini for a spin on the country roads near their home. He often did that. He loved to go for long drives. So she thought nothing of it. And, um...

He said, "You know, I'm driving down 192 and I won't be able to come home." I said, "Fine, no problem." He said, "I love you." And I said, "I love you too." And we terminated the phone call. It was their last conversation. When Patty got home from work that night, there was no sign of Ray. She went to the gym. When she got back, he still wasn't home. She called his cell phone. The calls went straight to voicemail.

For three hours, she dialed and redialed the number. Nothing but voicemail. Finally, frantic, she called 911. And to me, it was an emergency. This is not like him. It's unusual behavior. You know, they know who I am. They know who Ray is. So when I called to report, you know, Ray is not home, this is not like him. It's unusual behavior. They quickly responded.

Ray Guincar was gone. Gone without warning. The Bellefonte Police Department put out a description of him and his red Mini. The hunt for a missing DA was underway.

Patty Fornicola woke up on Saturday, April 16, 2005, and felt like she was trapped in a bad dream. Ray Gricar, her live-in boyfriend and the DA of Pennsylvania's Center County, hadn't come home the night before, and he was still missing. I knew it wasn't good that Ray still hadn't been located, so then we had to make a decision about calling his daughter.

As Patty told Dateline in 2006, she decided to make that call to Lara, then a college student in Washington state. You know, your gut tells you a lot of things. I just knew that something happened. My gut said it was bad. Ray's friend, Bob Buhner, was bewildered when he heard the news. I absolutely did not know what to make of it at all. It was very confusing. You know, DAs don't go missing.

Former investigator Darryl Zaghani still remembers that morning. We just handled it as a missing person, but a highly significant missing person. Darryl has now retired from the Belfont Police Force, but back then, he was the lead investigator on the case.

I assume alarm bells are ringing loudly when the DA goes missing. Yeah, when the DA is missing, you get a little concerned. We figured that there's a much better chance that there's foul play involved than the guy who just doesn't come home because he's been out at the bars all night. And that was just because you knew his character?

Well, we knew what Ray had done all his life. I mean, he prosecuted homicides and rape for years, and then he prosecuted here and then became RDA. Foul play was only one possibility. In those first hours after Ray went missing, the Belfont police say they considered several others. They ordered an aerial search of the nearby roads to look for the bright red Mini, thinking Ray may have had an accident.

They ordered other searches, too. They knew Ray may have gone solo somewhere. Turns out he'd done that before. He once took off to a Cleveland Indians game. He didn't go to this one because we called Cleveland and we had the stadium police looking for him. Did you potentially lose time in this investigation because of a...

a default position that he's going to turn up here soon, that there's a reasonable explanation. Now, we worked on it from the minute we decided we were going after this, this was a missing person. It was constant go, go, go. Investigators tracked Ray's movements before he vanished and found the last known pictures of him alive on his way to the office the evening before he disappeared.

It seemed routine enough, and it took them nowhere. One of America's most intriguing mysteries. On day two, investigators caught a huge break. Ray's Mini was discovered in a parking lot by an antiques mall called the Street of Shops in the nearby town of Lewisburg. Ray had visited the antique stores there in the past. Now, his car was sealed up tight and locked. His cell phone was inside.

But there was no sign of Ray. I was glad that it was found, not for the car, but thinking that maybe there would be a clue. There were clues, all right. Real puzzlers. When they opened up the vehicle, the first initial thing that struck them was a strong odor of tobacco in the car. Ray was not a smoker, and he definitely would never let anybody smoke in his car. There was more. Inside the car, a speck of ash on the passenger side.

How to explain that in the car of a passionate non-smoker? So it would indicate to us that somebody had either been in that car smoking or at least was leaning into the car, possibly talking to Ray, holding a cigarette. Investigators found cigarette butts on the ground and sent them off for DNA testing. Nothing there. There was no sign of a struggle or foul play and not a bloodstain in sight.

nothing to indicate that a crime had occurred in or near the car. What still baffles me in all of this is basically lack of a crime scene. Yolanda McCleary was a crime scene investigator and at the time an NBC News consultant. I mean, a crime scene at least helps tell a story. Something where you can prove or disprove witness statements, testimonies through your crime scene, through evidence,

There isn't a crime scene. But how many times have we seen crimes where someone willingly goes away with the person that ultimately kills them and there's no crime scene? Correct. If you willingly go, there is no crime scene. It's just the last place that you were seen. But if the car itself gave investigators little to go on, its location in Lewisburg, 60 miles from Greek car's home, did.

That shifted the investigation to Lewisburg at that point. We knew he was definitely there then. At least the car had been there. So we immediately went down and we started pounding doors and talking to people. And then we got confirmation from people in some of the businesses in that area who had actually seen Ray. And they saw him there for several hours throughout the day. They began building a timeline of Ray's movements in Lewisburg.

But it wasn't easy because there was another Mini Cooper owner in town that day. Sean Weaver was the chief of Belfont Police Department. He joined the force shortly after Ray disappeared, but he says he knows the investigation inside out. So there was a lot of sightings of another individual. We later found out who he was. He was in a restaurant eating with a woman, but it wasn't Ray. It was another guy that has a Mini Cooper.

It was a dead end. Tony Gricar is Ray's nephew. Tony lived in Dayton, Ohio. As soon as he heard his uncle was missing, he got in his car, collected his brother, and began driving to Pennsylvania. At the time, we thought, we need to get there as quick as we can to see what kind of assistance we can provide. But when Tony and his brother got to Lewisburg and saw the scene where Ray's car was found, they were stunned. Here we go again.

That was the exact first thought. The investigation into Ray Gricar's disappearance was about to take a whole new turn.

CarMax knows that finding the right car is all about exploring your options, like the option to shop your way on your schedule. At CarMax, you can browse, compare, and pre-qualify online, then finish up at the store. Or simply start on the lot. The choice is yours. Because at CarMax, you're in the driver's seat. Start the search for your next car today at CarMax. The way car buying should be.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with the one and only Mariska Hargitay to talk about 26 seasons as Captain Olivia Benson on the iconic series Law & Order Special Victims Unit, and the show's impact well beyond the television set. You can get our conversation now for free at

wherever you download your podcasts. Now they had the final answer. Or did they?

Nothing has more suspense than a Dateline mystery. And no one wants to wait to find out what happens next. That's why everyone needs Dateline Premium, where listening is always ad-free. You get the whole story and nothing but the story. Or do you? Yes, actually, you do. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or DatelinePremium.com.

When Tony Gricard drove into Lewisburg, Pennsylvania back in April 2005, he did a double take. Tony's uncle Ray had disappeared, and the cops had just located Ray's abandoned car in a Lewisburg parking lot near a bridge over a river. The scene took Tony straight back to a bad place in his past. To say that it was an eerie parallel would be the understatement of the century. It was the exact same thing.

Nine years earlier, Tony's father, Ray's brother, had abandoned his car by a park near a bridge over a river. His body was discovered in the river in Dayton, Ohio, a few days later. The coroner ruled it a suicide. Now this. Geographically, everything lays out the exact same, you know, with a car, a park, a bridge, a river.

Tony drew the logical conclusion about his Uncle Ray. Your thought was suicide? I think my first words probably the investigators were he's probably in the river. When your uncle went missing, of course, the connections with your father started to be made. Was your father depressed? Yeah, he fought depression for years.

by what I can gather, for 20-plus years. And depression can run in families. Patty remembered that Ray did seem preoccupied before he vanished. She put that down to work. She did recall that he'd been napping a lot. She'd even asked him about it. The weekend before he disappeared, I said, I want you to promise me something. He said, sure, what? And I said, if you continue to be tired, will you please promise

call your doctor." And he said, "You know, work frequently makes me tired." And I came back at him with, "In three years we lived together, I've never seen you nap so much at lunchtime and then after work." But when investigators went through Ray's medical records, they found nothing to indicate he'd been treated for depression. Nothing at all. In fact, Ray Gricar seemed fit and healthy.

But if the body was in the Susquehanna River, investigators were determined to find it. They brought in helicopters, rescue divers. There was even a cadaver-sniffing dog on a boat. Although the river could run shallow by that bridge, in the spring of 2005, Tony says the water level was high. There were spring rains as well as melt, so the water was several feet deep.

Belfont police chief at the time, Sean Weaver, said conditions were favorable for finding a body. At the time they could see right to the bottom of the river. It was like looking through clear water. It's pretty much the bottom of the river is a flat rock and you could see it very easily from the sky.

But nobody turned up. And this was the most confounding question of all. If he had jumped off the bridge like his brother, then where was it?

The biggest thing you have in a suicide is a body. The body helps tell you what really happened here, or is it even feasible this happened? I mean, we also know that sometimes things are staged to look like a suicide when in reality it's a homicide. So a body is something that will give you those clues and the means by which the suicide occurred. But in this case, where's the body? The river wasn't telling them.

But Daryl Zaghani, then the lead investigator with the Belfont police, came up with one answer. So it is possible a body wouldn't be found in that river. It's possible. I mean, basically what happens is when you get into Susquehanna, it ultimately ends up in the Chesapeake. But if Ray would have went into the water, there's the possibility that he got down to what they call the fiber dam there.

Down the riverway, the water just hits the dam and it grinds around. He could have got wedged down in there underneath and just been thrown to pieces, unfortunately. Even as the river surge was underway, the police continued to canvas the street of shops and the area nearby.

It was frustrating. Lewisburg is a college town, home to Bucknell University. And the weekend Ray vanished, there were Bucknell parents in town. To Tony, every other dad looked like his Uncle Ray. Honestly, I couldn't walk through, you know, Bucknell that weekend without seeing 20 guys that looked like him, you know.

upper middle class Caucasian male wearing a blue Eddie Bauer fleece. But investigator Zaghani wouldn't let it go. I mean, I probably put in 16, 17 hour days at times, you know, just went home to sleep for a little while and then came back out and we're going at it again. Going at it and getting lucky with a promising new lead. Investigators came up with several credible sightings of Ray in Lewisburg the day he disappeared.

One got their attention. Ray had been seen with a dark-haired woman in the street of shops. We were hoping that maybe this was just a fling Ray was on or something. He connected up with another woman and decided to spend the weekend at a hotel or something. As a cop, you'd seen that before. That happens. Yeah, we know it happens. Never seen it with Ray or anything, but, you know, that's what we started to think. Okay, he may be hooked up with this lady and, you know, he just...

Felt bad, didn't want to call Patty. A fling. Where would that hunch take them? Not long after Pennsylvania D.A. Ray Gricar went missing, investigators had a new lead. Investigators now said that they're looking for a woman. Ray had been seen with a dark-haired woman in a shop in Lewisburg. At first, investigator Daryl Zagati wondered if maybe Ray had had a fling. Did...

Did you check hotel and motel records to find out if a couple had stayed in the Lewisburg area around that time? We sent troopers out, did a hotel-by-hotel search, talked to the desk clerks, car registrations were checked, descriptions of the female that he was seen talking to were presented, raised pictures was presented. ♪

But they came up empty. And when they canvassed nearby train and bus stations to see if anyone matching the couple's description had left town, they came up empty again. So they began asking, how likely was it that Ray Gricar, a standout DA, a guy who seemed happy in love at last, would run off with another woman?

Ray's nephew Tony didn't buy it. He wasn't married, so what would the point be of, you know, running off, you know, with a mystery woman? And perhaps not unexpectedly, Ray's live-in girlfriend didn't buy it either. I know that if Ray did not want to be in this relationship with me, he would tell me. I know that.

As investigators developed the lead, they too came to believe that Ray was not romancing the mystery woman. It didn't jive with what they were hearing, and what they were hearing was plenty mysterious. Were there multiple witnesses to Greekar and this woman? There were people in the street of shops that saw Ray with this lady walking together,

talking, they would separate, go into a different little shop, come back out, start to meet up, walk together, sometimes go into a shop together, come back out. And then ultimately he just, he didn't see them anymore. It's a very big place. Investigators had a slew of questions. For starters, the woman's identity. What was it that she and Ray were talking about? And was she there to lure Ray into a trap or was she helping him start a new life? You

Yolanda McCleary, then a consultant for NBC News, said the answers would be pure gold. I think she could answer some questions here as to, was it a meat setup that went wrong for Ray being the foul play or...

Was this someone who had information for him and maybe it still went wrong? Or just someone he met casually, very innocently, but who could at least give us some sense of his state of mind? Absolutely. I mean, they said it didn't seem like they were intimate, but at least knew each other the way they were kind of talking and strolling. I'm just thinking maybe she could shed a little bit of light as to what happened in those last few moments. Investigators worked hard to track the woman down.

They weren't successful and some began wondering how credible the sighting was. As weeks stretched into months, the case of the missing DA was stalled. Then, in the summer of 2005, the river surprised them all. It gave up a huge clue. A cold case may have just gotten a boost with a discovery by two fishermen. The fishermen saw something glinting in the shallow water. Turned out it was a laptop.

They said, "Well, what's that?" And they started looking at it and thought, "It looks like a computer." And they pulled it out and they got it to us. It was Ray's work laptop, issued by the county. Investigators' excitement quickly turned to frustration because the hard drive was missing from it. Instead of answering investigators' questions, the laptop just gave them more. Why did Ray have his work laptop with him if he was playing hooky? Where was the hard drive and why was it missing?

They were still mulling that over when the river surprised them again and gave it up. A mother and her child saw it lying in the riverbed. When that hard drive was found, was your first thought that this is going to explain our mystery? Oh, yes.

We thought, this is going to do it. This is going to tell us what's going on. It wasn't to be. Forensic computer experts told them they couldn't retrieve any data. The hard drive was just too damaged. When you found out that nothing could be recovered, tell me your reaction. Very upset. It was like this great big carrot hanging there, you know, and you reach for it and you just about have it and it's gone. There's nothing there.

Later, the hard drive was analyzed at the same lab that recovered data from the hard drive in the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated in 2003.

It was another dead end. Still, the fact that the hard drive had been removed from the laptop only added to the mystery. Tony recognized that early on. When you heard about the laptop and the hard drive found separately, did that change your thinking? When I was called by the investigators and said, "Hey, Tony, we found the laptop,"

And I said, great. And they said, but there's no hard drive. That gave me pause. Anybody's going to look at that and say, wait a minute. That wasn't an accidental thing. The mystery of the missing DA was now tightly focused on that damaged hard drive. Had it been deliberately removed from the laptop and destroyed? Was Ray's disappearance linked to something on it?

Buying a car is a big decision, a decision you should feel absolutely confident about. And when you shop with CarMax, you will. Because CarMax offers a 10-day money-back guarantee, so you can feel confident that you made the right choice for you. If you're not completely satisfied with your decision, simply bring it back within 10 days for a full refund. Always shop with confidence at CarMax, the way car buying should be. See CarMax.com for details.

Ready, actors. A new horror movie with a promising young star. Action. She was so good at playing a killer. But where did the performance end and reality begin? Cut. A story with surprises even Hollywood couldn't have imagined.

I'm Keith Morrison. Think you've heard every Dateline story? Think again. Listen to Killer Roll and a dozen other riveting series when you follow the Dateline Originals podcast. A true crime story never really ends.

Even when a case is closed, the journey for those left behind is just beginning. Since our Dateline story aired, Tracy has harnessed her outrage into a mission. I had no other option. I had to do something. Catch up with families, friends, and investigators on our bonus series, After the Verdict.

Ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with strength and courage. It does just change your life, but speaking up for these issues helps me keep going. To listen to After the Verdict, subscribe to Dateline Premium on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at datelinepremium.com.

One year after Ray Gricar vanished without a trace, the man who took his place as District Attorney of Pennsylvania's Center County held a news conference. While leads grow cold, the interest of law enforcement, my interest, just as the public interest, will not grow cold. Ray's live-in girlfriend, Patty, made it clear she wasn't giving up either. Always. I can't make any sense of...

any of it either. I mean, one day it might be one scenario, one day it might be the other, but I've never given up hope.

It helps me go on. But hope and the hard facts didn't seem to go together. Investigators had no body and precious little evidence. And their trophy find, the battered hard drive, wasn't giving anything up. You know, it's like everything else. It's been a roller coaster. Tony Gricar, Ray's nephew, had questions about that hard drive. It was recovered separately from the laptop, about 100 yards away.

Tony knew it would take some doing to remove it from the laptop. He believes it was no accident. I know computers, especially laptops, and there's no way that just by going in the river that that hard drive is coming out on its own.

It had a set screw and a slide switch of sorts to release it. But why would Ray yank it out? Investigators have learned that before he disappeared, Ray was asking around the office about how to erase a hard drive. And on internet searches at home, he was asking how to wreck a hard drive.

But Ray's friend Bob Buhner said there could be a simple explanation for that. Buhner spoke to Dateline shortly before he retired as a DA. As I'm ending my career now, frankly, I'm thinking about the same thing. I got lots of stuff on that hard drive. Yeah, I'd probably like to get rid of it. I don't have any need for it. And after all, why would Ray drive 60 miles to dump a hard drive in the river when he could dispose of it closer to home?

But if Ray didn't remove the hard drive, then someone else apparently did. Maybe investigators speculated there was something incriminating on it. You'd really like to know what's on that hard drive. We think that that hard drive had information on there that would maybe lead us to one of the theories. A reason why somebody would want him dead, why he would jump in the river, or why he wanted to leave.

Three theories. That's what investigators were left with to explain what happened to Ray Gricar. Does your department lean in any particular direction? No, actually we don't. And it's hard because we all have our personal thoughts on the case. Everyone who's ever looked at the case has their own theory.

personal theory how crazy it might be. One theory is that Ray disappeared because he wanted to. He simply walked away. If so, that would require serious planning.

Yolanda McCleary, then a consultant for NBC News. Money would have to move, arrangements would have to be made. You'd have to be a pretty sharp cookie to hide that kind of a plotting, wouldn't you? Whatever happened here is well planned out. By somebody. By somebody, whether it's Ray or somebody else. But financial investigators from the FBI could find no evidence that Ray was planning to move money.

there was nothing to indicate that Ray was planning to walk out of his very successful life.

Here's even the biggest thing. What is the motive behind that? Why would you just walk away from your life? Anybody, I mean he was close to his daughter. He had a girlfriend that he had no issues with. What is this all based on? Here was a case he was planning retirement, planning travel after retirement. So does that make that even less likely that someone would set all this into motion and then just disappear? I find it less likely, yes. It doesn't make sense in his life.

Tony Gricar agrees. There's no path that the investigators have gone down where they can say, oh, yeah, this is why it walked away. If Ray Gricar didn't walk away and assume a new identity, did he die by suicide like his brother? This is a man that loved his daughter, loved his girlfriend. Does it make sense that he would take his own life and not leave some sort of explanation, a message to them? I would say no. It makes no sense to me.

And without a body, there's no way to be sure. That leaves one last theory. Murder. Investigator Daryl Zaghani says that as a prosecutor, Gricard put some dangerous people behind bars. Who knows who got out of jail 20 years ago that's still holding a grudge against Ray? Someone who may have wanted to get the straight arrow DA out of the way. Someone who may have lured Ray into a trap.

I mean, the first thing that most of us think of when you hear of a prosecutor going missing under strange circumstances, that this could be linked to something he was working on, somebody who wanted payback. Sure. To me, that would be the most plausible thing. Tony hadn't conclusively settled on the foul play theory, but DA Bob Buhner had. I've always felt, maybe not initially, but I always felt

Several months later, when all the facts started coming out that the only conclusion left was foul play. And that's an awful thing to imagine. It's the one thing I didn't want to think of. But if it was foul play, there were no credible suspects. And so over time, the Ray Gricar case went cold. In the summer of 2011, Gricar's daughter, Laura, petitioned the courts to have her father declared legally dead.

That's where things stood for about six months until the case of the missing DA came roaring back to life.

At Penn State University, an awful story. It broke big in November of 2011. Former Penn State football coach indicted on child sex abuse charges. The story of the initial 40 child abuse charges against Jerry Sandusky. NBC News exclusive, former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky speaks out. A grand jury spent more than two years investigating the accusations of eight alleged victims.

And there it was, in the official summary of the grand jury's findings. The name, Ray Gricar. It turns out, Ray was the first prosecutor to investigate an allegation of child sex abuse against Jerry Sandusky, way back in 1998.

That was news to many, including Michael Madera, the man who became Center County's DA after Ray disappeared. I found out about Greekar's involvement, along with the rest of the world, when we read the grand jury presentment.

The question popping up in the media, why didn't Ray Gricar prosecute Jerry Sandusky years earlier? To understand that, you have to go back to 1998. That's when a mother contacted the Penn State University police to say her 11-year-old son had told her he'd been bear-hugged by Sandusky naked in the shower. It was an explosive allegation. Ray Gricar, the local DA, became involved.

We don't have his file. We don't know exactly what he did. But former DA Bob Buhner was pretty sure he knew what Ray did first. And when you get a case of child abuse, you just put on the game face. That's the one. That's the one that really gets to us. Ray would have almost certainly met the alleged victim to assess his credibility. If he met with that victim, and I believe he did...

he was the one that would have made kind of a gut credibility decision. But when you have a prominent member of the community, well-known member of the community, and then you look at the credibility of your alleged victim, does that become tough then? Oh, absolutely. If it ever got to a courtroom, the case would likely come down to the testimony of one 11-year-old boy against a hometown hero.

That's where the sting, or something close to it, came in. We don't know all the details, only this, that the mother confronted Sandusky on two occasions in May 1998 while detectives listened in.

Had you ever known Ray to do that kind of a sting or run that kind of operation? I didn't know that ever. I think that would be typical of what Ray would do. As I said, he was the kind of guy when police would come to him, he'd always ask the next question. Well, have you tried this? Have you tried that? The grand jury report says Sandusky told the mother, I

I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I wish I were dead. Days after the story broke, NBC's Bob Costas asked Sandusky about that confrontation. In 1998, a mother confronts you about taking a shower with her son and inappropriately touching him. Two detectives eavesdrop on her conversations with you, and you admit that maybe your private parts touched her son. What happened there?

I can't exactly recall what was said there in terms of what I did say was that

If he felt that way, then I was wrong. It seems Sandusky was confessing to something wrong, but that's not how Bob Buhner saw it. People have characterized Sandusky's statements as being a confession. We call it under the law an admission, but it has to be an admission to a crime. Hugging in and of itself, even a child under the age of 12,

is not necessarily a crime unless you can show sexual gratification. That's the key. Was that statement at least grounds for further investigation? Have you tried to get into Ray Gricar's head and to understand what his thinking may have been when this allegation was presented to his office? It's easy for me with 20-20 hindsight to say, well, if I had that information, I would have said, this needs to be looked into further. But...

That must always follow with, I don't know what information he had. Ray Gricar decided not to prosecute. We don't know his reasons. It is easy now to second-guess Gricar's decision, especially since Jerry Sandusky went on to commit repeated assaults after 1998.

In 2012, Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse. For those who say that Ray Gricar missed the opportunity to put Sandusky away, you say what? I say they don't know the law. They don't know Ray Gricar.

There were online posts and tweets speculating about a link between the two. But could there actually be a connection? For anybody, anybody to suggest otherwise is, I think, incredibly naive. Dr. Cyril Wecht is a well-known forensic pathologist in Pittsburgh, about 100 miles west of Penn State. He has not worked on the Greek car case, but he has followed it for years.

Weck made news with his comments after the Sandusky story broke. He believes there must have been rumors Sandusky was continuing to abuse young boys after 1998, and he says Gricar must have heard them. I guarantee you, after a district attorney has been in office for some years, there is not any kind of criminal activity that takes place in that county that he is not aware of.

Wex speculates that Gricar blamed himself for those alleged abuses and either walked away or committed suicide.

Or, Weck says, maybe Gricar knew too much. Someone says, Mr. Gricar, we've kept it quiet all this time, and without you around, we'll keep it quiet longer. And that's the end of Mr. Gricar. But Gricar's friends and colleagues rule out any connection between the missing DA and the Sandusky case.

I am in no way aware of any reason why there would be a link. As I've said before, when we were talking about the person Ray Gricar is, I cannot imagine, based upon what I know about him, that he would allow something or someone to influence a decision that he thought was

was the right decision to make. Bob Buhner agreed and added this. I see absolutely no connection between Ray Gricar's disappearance in 2005 and anything connected with Jerry Sandusky. But you can see how people might make that leap in their imaginations because this is a true mystery. It is a true mystery, and it's an enigma. Why would anyone want to, connected with the Sandusky matter,

Take out, eliminate a district attorney who declined to prosecute a case and who was leaving office in eight months. Declined to prosecute years earlier. Yeah. It would seem to me, if you're going to take somebody out in a criminal case, you go after the witnesses. You go after the people that could really get on the witness stand and do you in. Whether or not what happened to Ray Gricar has anything to do with Jerry Sandusky, his disappearance remains an open case to this day.

The Pennsylvania State Police still follow leads. They occasionally get reports of Ray Gricar's sightings. He's supposedly been spotted in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and Texas. We've had some pretty crazy sightings, but we look into them. We've had sightings in New York City from a very credible person. And the individual did look like Mr. Gricar, but it wasn't him.

Maybe one day they'll be able to unlock the secrets of that damaged hard drive. Do you hold any hopes that at some point technology will allow you to recover? Exactly. I'm hoping maybe in a couple of years. For now, the mystery of Ray Gricar's disappearance endures. And so does the wait for answers. Do you still hold out hope that you're going to get a definitive answer? Always. We're always going to have that question. That's never going away.

They called it the happiest place on the high desert, home to a tight-knit group of 30-somethings who like to party. It starts as a Playboy Channel fantasy, but this is real life. Where passion leads to murder, and a killer seeks God's help with the cover-up. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and this is Deadly Mirage, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Listen to all episodes now, wherever you get your podcasts.