On April 15, 2005, Centre County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Ray Gricar took a half-day off work, called his girlfriend to say he was going for a drive, and was never seen again. Twenty years later, despite an FBI investigation, a laptop pulled from a river, a connection to the Jerry Sandusky scandal, and a theory tying his fate to another prosecutor’s unsolved murder, Ray Gricar has never been found — and no one has ever been charged in connection with his disappearance.
This is the story we cover across both parts of our latest episode, and it’s one of the most layered, contradictory, and genuinely unresolved cases we’ve ever tackled on the show.
Who Was Ray Gricar?
Ray Frank Gricar was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1945. He built his early legal career prosecuting for the City of Cleveland and as an assistant county prosecutor in Cuyahoga County before moving to Centre County, Pennsylvania, in 1980. He was elected District Attorney in 1985 — running on the simple pitch that he had more actual courtroom prosecution experience than his opponent, Amos Goodall, and the rest of the office’s staff combined.
He won, and kept winning, serving five terms over twenty years. Colleagues described him as quiet, low-key, and relentlessly fair — “no one got a bye with Ray,” as one former assistant DA put it. He built a reputation prosecuting domestic violence and sexual assault cases seriously at a time when that wasn’t always the norm, and he personally handled the prosecution of the 1996 Penn State HUB shooting.
By 2005, Gricar was 59 years old, eight months from a planned retirement, in a nearly four-year relationship with his girlfriend and colleague Patty Fornicola, and close with his adult daughter, Lara. By every account available, his life was stable, happy, and entirely unremarkable heading into that spring.
The Day He Vanished
On the morning of Friday, April 15, 2005, Gricar took the day off — not unusual for him, especially in his final months on the job. Around 11:30 a.m., he called Fornicola from his cell phone. In her own words, given in a later interview, the conversation went like this:
“I’m on 192. I’m not going to make it home to take care of the dog. Would you be able to go home?” And I said, “Sure.” He said, “Thanks. I love you.” I said, “I love you too.”
That was the last anyone ever heard from him.
He’d told her he was driving state Route 192 toward Lewisburg, a small town about 45 miles from their home in Bellefonte, known for an antiques mall he liked to visit. When Fornicola got home from work around 5 p.m. and he wasn’t there, she wasn’t immediately alarmed — she assumed he’d been delayed. By evening, her calls to his cell phone were going straight to voicemail. Not ringing and going unanswered — straight to voicemail, meaning the phone was already off. She left dozens of messages that night. At 11:30 p.m., exactly twelve hours after his last call, she reported him missing.
The Car, and Everything Wrong With It
Because Gricar was a sitting district attorney, Bellefonte police — a nine-officer department in a town unaccustomed to major cases — moved fast. By Saturday, a state police helicopter was in the air, a search was underway between Centre Hall and Rebersburg, and a bulletin describing Gricar (last seen in jeans, sneakers, and a blue fleece jacket) went out to six neighboring states.
That evening, his red-and-white 2004 Mini Cooper was found locked in a gravel lot in Lewisburg, directly across from the antiques mall — and directly beside the Susquehanna River, which would become central to the investigation for years to come.
The car itself raised more questions than it answered:
- No forced entry, no blood, no sign of a struggle
- His keys, wallet, and sunglasses were gone
- His county-issued laptop was also missing — despite his family insisting he didn’t normally bring it on these drives, and despite the laptop’s case and power cord being left behind
- His cell phone, however, was locked inside the car, powered off
- Cigarette ash was found on the passenger seat, despite Gricar reportedly disliking smoke and never allowing it in his car — a detail his ex-wife publicly disputed as inconsistent with his character
- A water bottle in the car was later DNA-confirmed as his — solid confirmation of ownership, though not much else
- Five sets of fingerprints were found inside; three were identified, two never were
The FBI, the Search, and an Eerie Family Parallel
The FBI joined the investigation within days, digging into Gricar’s financial records, phone records, and credit cards. They found nothing — no activity of any kind, on any account, from the day he disappeared onward. That total absence of a financial or digital trail has remained one of the most consistent, unexplained facts of the entire case for twenty years.
As the search expanded — helicopters, cadaver dogs, divers, and search-and-rescue teams combing the Susquehanna River near where his car was found — investigators revealed something that shifted the entire tone of the case: Gricar’s older brother, Roy J. Gricar, had disappeared under strikingly similar circumstances in 1996. Roy told his wife he was going to buy mulch, never returned, and his car was found abandoned near a river and a bridge in Dayton, Ohio. His body was recovered about a week later; his death was ruled a suicide by drowning.
The parallel fueled a suicide theory that has followed Ray Gricar’s case ever since — one his family has consistently pushed back against, citing his happiness, his retirement plans, and a medical records warrant that turned up no diagnosis of depression or any other condition.
Sightings Everywhere, Answers Nowhere
In the weeks and months that followed, reported sightings of Gricar piled up across the country, and none of them ever led anywhere:
- April 18, Wilkes-Barre, PA (about 120 miles away) — two separate pairs of witnesses reported seeing a man matching his description, wearing a suit and tie (despite Gricar leaving home in jeans and sneakers, with none of his suits missing from his closet), discussing the Cleveland Indians at length — Gricar, a Cleveland native, was a lifelong fan.
- Late May, Southfield, Michigan (a Detroit suburb) — a man and his daughter reported seeing him with an older woman at a restaurant; police called it one of their best leads in nearly two months. It went nowhere.
- August, Nacogdoches, Texas — a woman at a Chili’s secretly photographed a man she thought resembled Gricar; the FBI analyzed the photos and reached no confirmed conclusion.
Meanwhile, Bellefonte police were fielding calls from fifteen to twenty different psychics, including a self-described “clairaudient” named Carla Baron, who had previously worked with police on another unsolved Penn State-area case and was in near-daily, hour-long phone contact with an investigator on the Gricar case. She insisted Gricar had been murdered. A separate psychic consulted independently by Fornicola reportedly said the opposite — that he had died by suicide.
Investigators also enlisted INTERPOL to circulate flyers bearing Gricar’s photo throughout Slovenia, where he reportedly had relatives — one of several efforts to rule out a voluntary disappearance. Nothing ever came of it.
The Laptop in the River
On July 30, 2005 — three and a half months after Gricar vanished — two fishermen found his county-issued laptop lodged against a bridge support in the Susquehanna River, in a stretch that had already been extensively searched by boat, on foot, and with cadaver dogs earlier that year. The laptop’s hard drive was missing.
Three months later, on October 26, 2005, the hard drive itself was found separately — about a hundred yards downriver from where the laptop had surfaced. That distance mattered: it strongly suggested the drive had been deliberately removed before the laptop was discarded, rather than simply falling out on its own. When it was finally sent for FBI analysis, the drive was too water-damaged to recover a single usable file.
The Hard Drive Searches That Changed Everything
In April 2009, four years after Gricar disappeared, lead detective Matthew Rickard revealed something that reopened the entire case: Gricar’s home computer had been used, in the weeks before he vanished, to search terms including “how to fry a hard drive” and “water damage to a notebook computer.” Investigators also learned Gricar had purchased hard-drive-cleaning software back in 2004 — a full year before he disappeared.
Removing a hard drive, for context, requires almost nothing — a small screwdriver, or sometimes no tool at all, and about two minutes of know-how. It’s not a specialist’s job. That accessibility cuts both ways: it means almost anyone could have done it, whether that’s Gricar himself or someone else entirely.
The discovery split interpretation of the entire case in two. One read: Gricar was destroying something — evidence, personal material, or preparing to disappear entirely. The other, more mundane read, floated by a source identified only as “Jacobs” in reporting around the case’s five-year mark: Gricar’s laptop was county property, his retirement was months away, and wiping personal information like a credit card number before returning a work device is a fairly ordinary thing to do. The unsettling truth is that both explanations require the exact same searches and the exact same software — there’s no way to distinguish innocent housekeeping from a cover-up after the fact.
Detective Rickard himself was careful not to over-claim, saying the disclosure was partly meant to generate new leads rather than prove any one theory. Montour County DA Bob Buehner disagreed sharply, arguing publicly: “The fact that they were looking for information on how to eliminate information from the hard drive or wipe it clean simply tells me there was important information on the hard drive and he didn’t want other people to see it. That would give a motive to do him in.”
The Sandusky Connection
In November 2011, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested on 40 counts of child sex abuse — and it came out that in 1998, Ray Gricar had personally investigated a complaint against Sandusky and declined to press charges.
The 1998 case involved a mother reporting that her 11-year-old son had showered with Sandusky, with police monitoring phone calls in which Sandusky said, “I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.” Two psychologists reviewed the case and reached opposite conclusions — one wrote that Sandusky’s behavior fit the pattern of a “likely pedophile,” while the other found no evidence of a sexual disorder at all. Gricar ultimately decided there wasn’t enough evidence for a “successful prosecution” and closed the case without charges.
Colleagues and family have consistently pushed back on any suggestion Gricar protected Sandusky out of deference to Penn State — his nephew has said plainly that Gricar had “a bitter taste in his mouth” for the football program. But the detective who originally investigated the 1998 complaint, Ronald Schreffler, later testified under oath at Sandusky’s 2012 trial that he personally believed charges should have been filed at the time.
There is no evidence connecting Gricar’s disappearance to Sandusky. The link is one of proximity and timing, not proof — though it didn’t stop a 2013 tip, investigated by the FBI, claiming Gricar had been murdered and dumped in a mine shaft in connection with the Sandusky case. Nothing was ever substantiated.
The Heroin Bust and the Jonathan Luna Parallel
A less-covered but arguably more evidence-grounded theory involves a massive drug bust Gricar helped announce just sixteen days before he disappeared. On March 31, 2005, Gricar stood alongside Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett to announce what Corbett called “the largest heroin operation that we have ever seen in Centre County” — a ring investigators had been building a case against since 2003, allegedly tied to at least one fatal overdose.
This bust drew comparisons to the unsolved 2003 death of Jonathan Luna, a federal Assistant U.S. Attorney in Baltimore who was actively prosecuting a heroin trafficking case at the time of his death. On the night of December 3, 2003, Luna left his office late, drove nearly 90 miles into rural Pennsylvania, and was found the next morning face-down in a shallow creek, stabbed 36 times — yet his official cause of death was drowning; he was still alive when he entered the water. For over two decades, the manner of his death remained publicly disputed. In late 2025, a Pennsylvania judge finally unsealed Luna’s autopsy report, confirming for the first time, officially: this was a homicide. No suspect has ever been identified.
Two sitting Pennsylvania district attorneys — Ted McKnight and Bob Buehner — publicly asked the state Attorney General’s office to take over the Gricar investigation, citing concern about prosecutors dying or disappearing under suspicious circumstances. McKnight stated directly: “I’m a believer that foul play happened to Ray Gricar.” A state legislator formally requested a joint federal investigation into both cases; the Department of Justice declined, citing jurisdiction. Officially, no connection between the two cases has ever been established — but the parallel, and the willingness of sitting officials to raise it, has never fully gone away.
A Friend Who Never Let It Go
Bob Buehner deserves special mention in this story. He wasn’t simply a rival DA lodging political criticism — he was a personal friend of Gricar’s, who’d spoken with him shortly before his disappearance and recalled Gricar’s genuine excitement about retirement, visiting his daughter, and antiquing. “He never would have left them in the lurch,” Buehner said.
Buehner spent years pushing investigators to send Gricar’s hard drive to Kroll Ontrack, the data recovery firm that had successfully recovered information from a hard drive salvaged from the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was eventually tested a third time. Nothing came back.
In 2021, shortly before his death at age 69, Buehner made one final, striking claim: a state prison inmate had written to him alleging that his own cellmate — a man Gricar had personally prosecuted — was involved in Gricar’s disappearance, and that the individual in question was allegedly connected to witness protection. Buehner said investigators never fully followed up. He died still convinced his friend had been the victim of something far worse than an accident.
Where the Case Stands Today
Ray Gricar’s daughter Lara had him declared legally dead in July 2011 — represented, in a strange twist, by Amos Goodall, the same man Gricar had defeated in the 1985 election. Twenty-one years after his disappearance, Pennsylvania State Police confirm the case remains officially open. A $5,000 reward continues to be reissued periodically. No one has ever collected his final salary. No one has ever claimed his pension.
Former Bellefonte Police Chief Duane Dixon, reflecting on the case years into retirement, put it simply: “Just about anytime someone finds a body, it makes me think about Ray. I wonder if it’s him.”
Suicide. Homicide. Voluntary disappearance. Every theory in this case has just enough evidence behind it to stay alive, and just enough missing to keep it from ever being resolved. Twenty years later, Ray Gricar is still gone, and no one — not the FBI, not INTERPOL, not the dozens of investigators who’ve worked this case since 2005 — has ever found out what happened to him.
Listen to the full two-part episode, “The DA Who Vanished,” on Crime Clueless — available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
More Unsolved Disappearances Worth Your Time
Lauren Spierer — Like Ray Gricar, Lauren vanished without a single piece of physical evidence ever surfacing to explain what happened — no body, no definitive crime scene, just a trail that goes cold within hours of her last known movements. If the maddening combination of “everyone has a theory, no one has proof” is what draws you to the Gricar case, Lauren’s story will hit the same nerve. Read more here, and then listen to our coverage on this case on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
John and Shelly Markley — Another case where a family vanished under circumstances that seemed almost too ordinary to be sinister, in a small town unaccustomed to this kind of scrutiny. If you found yourself fascinated by how a tiny police department like Bellefonte’s got completely overwhelmed by the Gricar case, the Markleys’ story shows a similar dynamic playing out with even less initial evidence to work from. Read more here, and don’t miss the two part story found on our Podcast! Start with part 1 on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Sherry Lynn Marler — Sherry’s case, like Gricar’s, involves a small Southern town where everyone had an opinion and no one had answers — and where the physical evidence that did exist only deepened the mystery rather than resolving it. It’s another entry in our catalog of cases where “everybody in town has a theory” doesn’t get you any closer to the truth. Read more here, and then listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Mary Shotwell Little — If the eerie parallel between Ray and his brother Roy got under your skin, Mary’s case will too — a disappearance with a genuinely inexplicable piece of evidence at its center (in her case, a car found in a location that never made logical sense) that’s fueled decades of competing theories with no resolution in sight. Read more here, and listen on Apple,Spotify,YouTube or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Jennifer Kesse — Jennifer’s disappearance shares Gricar’s frustrating rhythm of near-misses: a promising piece of surveillance footage, a car found abandoned, and years of leads that seemed credible in the moment and evaporated on follow-up. If you found the parade of Gricar “sightings” — Wilkes-Barre, Michigan, Texas — maddening rather than satisfying, Jennifer’s case will scratch that same itch. Read more here, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Have thoughts on this story or other cases you’d like to see highlighted? Share them with us in the comments or connect with us on social media. Together, we can ensure that stories like this one are never forgotten.
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Resources:
Newspaper Clippings (Newspapers.com)
Armas, G. C. (2005, April 17). Police searching for missing Centre County DA. The Morning Call, p. 24.
Armas, G. C. (2005, April 20). Intensive search finds no sign of prosecutor. The Morning Call, p. 16.
Armas, G. C. (2005, April 21). Missing prosecutor called dedicated DA who kept low profile. Press Enterprise, p. 7.
Armas, G. C. (2005, April 26). Missing prosecutor’s medical records yield no clues. The Patriot-News, p. 15.
Associated Press. (2009, April 16). Vanishing act: Missing DA studied how to erase computer, detective announces. The Daily Item, p. A1.
Bosak, P. (2008, July 4). Prosecutors speak out in support of Madeira. Centre Daily Times, p. A1.
Bunch, W. (2005, May 13). Murder, suicide or just a runaway? The strange case of prosecutor Ray Gricar. Philadelphia Daily News, pp. 3–4, 26.
Centre Daily Times. (1985, October 30). Ray Gricar [campaign profile]. p. 9.
Centre Daily Times. (2005, April 27). Board of Commissioners to discuss Gricar’s salary at upcoming meeting. p. 11.
Citizens’ Voice. (2005, April 30). Report says missing DA was in area. p. 4.
Faris, S. [as cited in]. (n.d.). [Blog account of Fornicola phone-call transcript]. Referenced in secondary research.
Ganim, S. (2010, April 1). Review board lends new eyes: Parks Miller says case has not gone cold. Centre Daily Times, pp. A1, A3.
Joseph, M. (2005, April 29). Gricar reward up to $15,000. Centre Daily Times, p. 5.
Laepple, G. W. (2005, April 18). DA’s trail ends in Lewisburg: Car found on N. Water St. The Daily Item, pp. 1, 5.
Lanciano, J. (2025, April 20). What happened to Ray Gricar? 3 theories in search of solution. The Patriot-News, p. A8.
McKelvey, W. (2020, April 19). The hunt for Ray Gricar: Sifting through 15 years of clues, theories and the search for answers. The Patriot-News, p. A10.
Milavsky, B. (2005, April 23). Police step up search / Divers, cadaver dog join effort. The Daily Item, pp. 1–2.
Moore, M., & Blackledge, K. (2009, April 16). Gricar wanted to erase computer. The Daily Item, p. A2.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, April 24). Gricar family clings to hope. Centre Daily Times, pp. 1, 7.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, May 1). Last chats acquire new value: Friends, family mull over last words with Gricar. Centre Daily Times, pp. 1, 3.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, May 3). Gricar’s absence increases workload: District attorney’s office struggling to meet demands. Centre Daily Times, pp. 1, 5.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, May 6). River search yields no signs of Gricar. Centre Daily Times, p. 4.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, May 7). Missing: Small-town calm. Centre Daily Times, pp. 1, 7.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, September 4). Gricar family seeking answers. Centre Daily Times, p. 5.
Nissley, E. L. (2005, October 27). FBI tests hard drive for clues. Centre Daily Times, p. 1.
Press Enterprise. (2005, April 19). Loved ones plead for leads on missing prosecutor. p. 5.
Pursell, T. (2010, March 21). After 5 years, Ray Gricar trail goes cold. The Daily Item, p. B4.
Robinson, A. (2005, April 17). Missing district attorney has ties to Dayton. Dayton Daily News, p. 30.
Roddy, D. (2005, April 30). Ray Gricar’s day off. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, p. 2.
Standard-Speaker. (2006, April 16). DA’s disappearance, one year later: Police, family still unsure what happened to Centre County DA Ray Gricar. p. 3.
White, C. (2011, July 6). Family seeks closure: Judge asked to declare ex-DA “legally dead.” Centre Daily Times, pp. A1, A3.
Centre Daily Times. (2005, July 24). Family dropped everything to help in hunt / Gricar mystery fading from memories in Lewisburg. pp. 1, 9.
Lancaster New Era. (2005, June 9). Police probe Mich. sighting of missing Centre County DA. p. 54.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (2005, June 3). Web site set up for missing DA. p. 18.
Turner, F. (2005, June 12). GRICAR: Search remains intense 2 months later / Where is Ray Gricar? The Patriot-News, pp. A1, A7.
Web and Secondary Sources
Charley Project. (n.d.). Ray Frank Gricar. Retrieved 2026, from Ray Frank Gricar – The Charley Project
Crimewatchers. (n.d.). PA – Ray Frank Gricar: Missing from Bellefonte, PA – 15 April 2005 – Age 59. Retrieved 2026, from RAY FRANK GRICAR: Missing from Bellefonte, PA – 15 April 2005 – Age 59 | Crimewatchers
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Blackman, A. (n.d.). Tale of two prosecutors. LancasterOnline. Tale of two prosecutors | News | lancasteronline.com
Rhymestine, J. [as quoted in]. (2026, April 15). Case for missing Centre County DA still open 21 years later. northcentralpa.com. Case for missing Centre County DA still open 21 years later | Crime Reports | northcentralpa.com
The Daily Collegian (Penn State University). (2010, April 15). Five years later, search continues for DA. https://www.collegian.psu.edu/archives/five-years-later-search-continues-for-da/article_0217fd2e-833c-58b2-bc37-3492adc0cd07.html
The Daily Collegian (Penn State University). (2005, July 19). DA’s girlfriend passes polygraph. DA’s girlfriend passes polygraph | Archived News | Daily Collegian | psucollegian.com
Daily Item. (2008, April 15). DA missing, but not forgotten. DA missing, but not forgotten | | dailyitem.com
Fox News. (2005). Missing Pa. prosecutor not at work. https://www.foxnews.com/story/missing-pa-prosecutor-not-at-work
James, S., & Murphy, D. (2006, May). Missing district attorney [Dateline NBC transcript/article]. NBC News. Missing district attorney
NBC News. (n.d.). Mysterious death of Baltimore prosecutor. Mysterious death of Baltimore prosecutor
NBC News. (n.d.). Prosecutor’s mysterious death still unsolved. Prosecutor’s mysterious death still unsolved
CBS News. (2025). Autopsy report in Maryland prosecutor Jonathan Luna’s 2003 death may soon be released. https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/jonathan-luna-lancaster-baltimore-prosecutor-autopsy
Fox News. (2003). Prosecutors’ cases mined for any link to killing. Prosecutor’s Cases Mined for Any Link to Killing | Fox News
Fox News. (2004). Letter: Slain prosecutor clashed with boss. Letter: Slain Prosecutor Clashed With Boss | Fox News
Van Susteren, G. (2015, May 19). Cold case files [Blog]. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/story/cold-case-files.print
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ray Gricar. Wikipedia. Ray Gricar – Wikipedia
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Jonathan Luna. Wikipedia. Jonathan Luna – Wikipedia
CasablancaPA [Blog]. (2012, July 15). No “like” button for this. CasablancaPA: NO “LIKE” BUTTON FOR THIS
Disappeared [Blog]. (n.d.). Ray Frank Gricar case summary. https://disappeared2005.blogspot.com/
Investigation Discovery. (n.d.). Disappeared case update: Ray Frank Gricar [Video]. Facebook. Despite leads going cold, interest in the Disappeared case of Ray Frank Gricar is as strong as ever a decade later. | Investigation Discovery
Trace Evidence. (n.d.). The disappearance of Ray Gricar. The Disappearance of Ray Gricar — Trace Evidence
Websleuths. (n.d.). PA – District Attorney Ray Gricar mysteriously disappeared – Bellefonte, 15 April 2005 [Forum thread]. https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/pa-district-attorney-ray-gricar-mysteriously-disappeared-bellefonte-15-april-2005-18.658958/
