Friday, 01/02/09

[gstickley]

3 years, 8 months, 19 days, since the last CREDIBLE sighting of Ray Franklin Gricar, 04/14/05, 2100+ hrs. (reportedly a camera at the Centre Co. Courthouse.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the 11:19 a.m. phone call in light of the Years-In-The-Making and Meticulously Planned Walkaway Theory that's being discussed here and elsewhere recently. For the purposes of this discussion, let's assume RG is actually the "maker of the phone call," although that has not been definitely proven, and that he drove the Mini to Lewisburg, although again, that has not been definitively proven.

Imagine for a moment that you're Ray Gricar and you've spent several years planning a grand escape, squirreling away money no one can trace and planning to disappear for whatever reason. You've chosen Friday, April 15, 2005 to execute your plan.

When you awake that morning, you tell your girlfriend PF that you're going to take the morning off from work. She wants you to let her know if you plan on going anywhere so that she can come home to let Honey out at noon time if you're gone.

So now you immediately face two broad choices:

A) don't call to let her know you won't be home at noon OR

B) call and let her know she needs to let Honey out.

Choice A, not calling, could throw a monkey wrench in your plans pretty early on. If you don't call PF,

1) she might call you to double check on your plans, just to be sure that Honey is covered, and then you're going to have to do some fast thinking/talking if you've already left the house OR

2) at the very least, she'll become alarmed when she gets home from work around 5 and finds you gone, no note, no phone call.

Choice B, calling, is definitely a better plan. Now what are your options if you call?

1) call from your cell phone once you're on the road, revealing in the conversation where you are and allowing LE to confirm what you've said by triangulating the cell phone towers the call bounced from.

2) call from your cell phone once you're on the road, revealing nothing about where you are, and at least delaying discovery of travel a bit by forcing LE to triangulate the call.

3) call either from your cell phone or from the home land line giving some vague details about where you might go for a drive, perhaps combined with a hike, but make those details vague enough that they appear not to be solid plans AND make them appear to be a direction other than Lewisburg.

In my humble opinion, options 1 and 2 make little sense if you're a man who has spent years carefully planning a great escape. Why give either PF or LE any indication at all what your direction of travel might be? If you are RG, there are simply too many unknown variables you cannot control in either of these scenarios. Those of us looking at the disappearance with 20/20 hindsight know when PF called in the disappearance, know when LE sent out the BOLO, etc. But if you are RG at the time, you simply cannot know that at 5 p.m. on Friday PF will not be alarmed enough at your absence to jump in her car, grab her brother, and come looking for you down 192, perhaps thinking of the SOS as a potential destination since you've both been there before. If you are RG, you'd want PF and LE focused any place OTHER than where you've actually headed. If possible, you want LE out scouring five different state parks, various hiking trail areas, etc., and not concentrating all their efforts in the one place you might actually have gone.

And that is why a supposedly brilliant man who has meticulously planned a great escape for several years would almost certainly choose option #3. In my humble opinion, the phone call, assuming RG is the one who made it, suggests that RG did not leave Bellefonte on the morning of 4/15/05 on his way to some Great Escape. A "brilliant" man would not spend years planning a disappearance only to risk blowing it with a stupid choice at the last minute.

Thoughts?

[gstickley]

Personally, IMO, the "Years-In-The-Making and Meticulously Planned Walkaway Theory" is all pure horse manure! This 60-yr.-old man had no need for such a fairy tale. I guess the "YITMAMPWT" scenerio is now first & foremost in some minds; wonder why it took 3.5+ yrs. to come up with it? Ohhh, yeah, I remember . . . new information from sources that have been around the entire 3.5+ yrs.

Makes one wonder how the family/PF/co-workers feel "hearing" about the "YITMAMPWT"? All the family get-togethers, plans being for traveling upon retirement, tailgate parties, etc., I suppose were just a sham while RG plotted & counted down the days/mos./yrs. until he could tear their hearts out . . .

If you buy the "YITMAMPWT", I've got some cheap desert land here in the mountains I know you'll be interested in buying!!!!!

Originally Posted by gstickley

Makes one wonder how the family/PF/co-workers feel "hearing" about the "YITMAMPWT"? All the family get-togethers, plans being for traveling upon retirement, tailgate parties, etc., I suppose were just a sham while RG plotted & counted down the days/mos./yrs. until he could tear their hearts out . . .

Remember the waitress who recalled RG and PF toasting and counting down the days till RG's retirement? Are we supposed to envision that RG was actually secretly counting down the days till April 15 and toasting his own YITMAMPW? Hard to envision the callousness required for that from a man of "the highest integrity" according to a woman who'd been married to him for 20+ years.

Another thing about the phone call: it also suggests RG wasn't on his way to a meeting with a lover IMO. Again, why tip his hand as to direction of travel if he was actually going to Lewisburg to meet up with a girlfriend? A suspicious/angry PF coming after him could have really put a crimp in that plan.

[Politigal]

short & sweet....

I don't believe he made the call

[gstickley]

Originally Posted by Politigal

short & sweet....

I don't believe he made the call

Has anybody CREDIBLE ever seen the phone records? Maybe they're like the "fingerprint" evidence that was there, then it wasn't.

[gstickley]

Try to picture this, guys. Ole RG sitting around for 8-10 yrs. plotting/planning the "YITMAMPWT". If he had the date 04/14/05 as "The Great Escape Day" in mind, he must have had great fun planning the spending of thousands of dollars to pay for a new car & mortgage for someone else prior to walking away.

[J. J. in Phila]

UTR, you missed one very important effect of the call. It got the police diligently searching for the Mini 20-40 miles from where we now know it was. If that was the plan, it worked brilliantly, because that is what the police did.

If RFG was planning to disappear, this would give him a head start on anyone looking for him. They would be led, not to Lewisburg, but to 30-40 mile stretch of highway, rural, underpopulated, without cell coverage for parts. That was the effect of the call; was that the intent? Maybe.

As to the lover, same answer, adding that PEF couldn't have had access to what cell tower carried the signal.

[J. J. in Phila]

LW, you suggested that there were no signs of an overnight trip. We know of none for the ballgame in Cleveland, yet RFG did make that trip. In terms of money, we don't know, but a few hundred would be easy to hide.

Originally Posted by gstickley

Try to picture this, guys. Ole RG sitting around for 8-10 yrs. plotting/planning the "YITMAMPWT". If he had the date 04/14/05 as "The Great Escape Day" in mind, he must have had great fun planning the spending of thousands of dollars to pay for a new car & mortgage for someone else prior to walking away.

Yep, GS. That makes virtually no sense to me, especially since with the 4/15/05 date being more than eight months prior to his retirement date. No nice little retirement nest egg to take along on his Great Escape, so every dollar would certainly count.

And I surely can't see a Brilliant Mind being satisfied with getting LE to search in essentially the same area the Brilliant Mind has gone to (and supposedly, where the Brilliant Mind has hung around for 24 hours). Someone as smart as RG would surely have set up that phone call so that PF and LE would be out searching Black Moshannon, Bald Eagle, Bear Meadows, and umpteen different wilderness areas within a 50-100 mile radius of Bellefonte. Get them looking not only for a car but also possibly a hiker lost or injured on a mountain somewhere. That would be Brilliant Thinking, IMHO.

Originally Posted by Politigal

short & sweet....

I don't believe he made the call

Pgal, for me, the jury's still out as to whether or not RG himself made the call. I can go either way depending upon what scenario I'm looking at.

But I wanted to take a look at the call assuming RG made it, in light of the YITMAMPWT that's being embraced lately.

Bottom line for me: If RG had a YITMAMPW plan, he would never have stupidly left bread crumbs. There were simply too many variables that could have stopped his plan dead in its tracks.

And for me, that's one more reason to believe the YITMAMPWT is a bust.

[J. J. in Phila]

UTR, the question is not on his retirement date. It is on what was the effect of that call. The effect was that LE would be intensely concentrating on a place where RFG obviously was not. Now, that wasn't to buy time to hide the Mini in Lewisburg, or let it get "cleaned up." So, either the call was really about the dog, or it was made to draw LE to that area.

[gstickley]

Originally Posted by logicworks

(snip)

Tell me what you see. I already have a number of opinions all of which match what I see, but am thoroughly interested in what others see there.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en...4&source=embed

JMO

LW, I followed your instructions carefully. I can see the angelic cherub holding the phone receiver, & I see the larger white figure below it. Directly below the white figure appears to be a white "P". To the left of the white figure, I see a smaller white figure that looks like the letters "TOM".

Speaking of psychic phenomena, Ray Gricar would have to have been psychic to know on the morning of 4/15/05 how PF, LE, and others might react to his 11:19 a.m. phone call and his failure to return if he indeed was in the process of a YITMAMPW.

(That is the kind of cumbersome and unfortunate transition one must make when threads are arranged chronologically rather than by topic, I'm discovering. My apologies to all.)

I have no reason to believe Ray Gricar was psychic, or ever claimed to be.
So for Ray Gricar, the question would not have been, could not have been, "What did happen?" but instead would be "What might happen?" as he contemplated that phone call on the morning of 4/15.

If he was in the process of a YITMAMPW, he had nearly four hours between PF's request and the phone call itself, plenty of time to contemplate possible ramifications. So many "What ifs?" that could have led to spoiling the Great Escape.

As things did unfold, if we take Bennett's sighting at face value and if RG actually made it to Lewisburg, LE missed bumping into RG by a few slim hours.

What Brilliant Mind would risk that?

[J. J. in Phila]

Short answer is, yes, because it worked before. Sometime prior to his divorce from EG, he was "gone" a day and a half. He was married at the time not in a live in relationship. Nobody called LE. He could have assumed the same thing would happen.

As I've pointed out, the BPD's initial response was exceptionally rapid.

Now, there is another possibility. RFG was planning to be away for a few days, and return or at least make some contact with a family member (including PEF)/friend/employee. Something happened.

There are a two possibilities with the call:

1. RFG realized that he wouldn't be home to walk Honey, and called PEF. Nothing nothing nefarious, nothing sneaky, just a routine telephone call.

2. RFG make the call so that the Mini would eventually be found, and retrieved by PEF; it was legally her car. The Mini would stay "lost" forever, parked in a parking lot in Lewisburg. Why?

A. He was planning to be gone, and didn't want to be driving another car while he was gone. He was planning to come back or contact someone after a few days.

B. He was planning to be gone permanently and didn't want the loose end of driving a car belonging to someone else.

C. He was planning to kill himself, or at least considering the possibility, but wanted the car, at least, found and returned, fairly easily. Maybe he thought that it would eventually lead to his remains as well.

Now, if we could ever determine that RFG did not have some way out of Lewisburg, we could eliminate 2A. and 2B.

Knowing if there is evidence that RFG left Lewisburg, and, if so, the method he used, may tell us if this was murder or not.

[gstickley]

Originally Posted by logicworks

If RG had any plans of leaving, no reason whatsoever for the call. A seasoned DA like RG is going to know that a BOLO will go out and the car would be found relatively soon without his needing to point a direction to it.

LW, your above quote makes more sense than anything I've ever heard about RG's so-called "planning to leave" and the "YITMAMPW".

Originally Posted by gstickley

LW, your above quote makes more sense than anything I've ever heard about RG's so-called "planning to leave" and the "YITMAMPW".

I agree--with this exception. Making a call in response to PF's request (in a YITMAMPW) would buy time before the BOLO went out. No call, PF starts to panic much earlier.

What makes no sense, though, is a call revealing direction/location.

[gstickley]

Originally Posted by UndertheRadar

I agree--with this exception. Making a call in response to PF's request (in a YITMAMPW) would buy time before the BOLO went out. No call, PF starts to panic much earlier.

What makes no sense, though, is a call revealing direction/location.

You're right. IF RG did make the call, he could have gained much more time by saying he was on a route in the opposite direction of Lewisburg.
(You'd have thought he'd known that in the YITMAMPW.) The car would have evenually been found, LE MIGHT have been looking in another direction. Gave RG credit for having a more Brilliant Mind.

[ladyheartfixer]

Originally Posted by gstickley

You're right. IF RG did make the call, he could have gained much more time by saying he was on a route in the opposite direction of Lewisburg.
(You'd have thought he'd known that in the YITMAMPW.) The car would have evenually been found, LE MIGHT have been looking in another direction. Gave RG credit for having a more Brilliant Mind.

so he called (if he really did...) and PF was placated for a time...that bought time to get to Lewisburg and on to whatever else was going on. It didn't send LE and the dogs out for him until later...it led them to the car...which he had bought and given to her anyway...so she got her car back ...big deal...btw...does she still have tha car and does she ever drive it? just curious. I don't see any harm in his making the call and addressing his location (IF he really did)...he still had plenty of tiime to meet up with someone and disappear...if you choose to believe that theory.

[J. J. in Phila]

Originally Posted by gstickley

You're right. IF RG did make the call, he could have gained much more time by saying he was on a route in the opposite direction of Lewisburg.
(You'd have thought he'd known that in the YITMAMPW.) The car would have evenually been found, LE MIGHT have been looking in another direction. Gave RG credit for having a more Brilliant Mind.

You forget that just as soon as PEF says she got a call, the police could (and did by Saturday afternoon) trace it. It wasn't so much RFG's message, but what tower carried the cell call. He just doesn't lie to her about it. Deception on RFG's part would really point to him doing it deliberately to lead the police in another direction. He gives that detail and it gets verified, very easily.

The purpose, under this scenario is lead police to diligently search an area where RFG is not.

Originally Posted by ladyheartfixer

I don't see any harm in his making the call and addressing his location (IF he really did)...he still had plenty of tiime to meet up with someone and disappear...if you choose to believe that theory.

Hi LHF,

That's all in hindsight though, if the YITMAMPW is really what happened.

Gotta look at it from the perspective of the morning of 4/15/05, not from hindsight.

If RG reveals his location to PF and lets LE confirm it by triangulation, how does he know that morning what PF will do later in the day? Or what LE might do with the proper persuasion?

• Will she be sufficiently worried (or otherwise upset) when she gets home from work that she might skip the gym, hop in her car, and head out looking for him?
  
• Might she think of the SOS as one possible destination and check it out herself, or might she insist that LE check it out?
  
• Might she call LE when she gets home from the gym instead of her brother and report RG missing as early as 7:30 rather than delaying four more hours?
  
• Might she prevail upon a sympathetic ear at the BPD to do more than establish a BOLO Friday night?
  
• Might an LE officer in Lewisburg stumble upon RG in Lewisburg on Friday evening (perhaps in a motel or restaurant or parking lot) if a BOLO goes out earlier in the evening?
  
• Might an LE officer in Lewisburg run into RG in the SOS instead of Bennett if things move a little more quickly?

Etc.

In short, RG would have no way of knowing who would do what, or when they would do it.

If you had spent years meticulously planning a Great Escape, wouldn't you do as GS is suggesting, and find a way to send LE in the opposite direction? Surely you wouldn't spend years planning something like this, only to deliberately draw police to less than a marathon's distance from where you've gone (and where you're supposedly still hanging around 24 hours later)?

All just my opinion.

[J. J. in Phila]

UTR, I think there a hindsight problem. The first one is, how do PEF and LE suddenly jump from Route 192 to Lewisburg?

Second, and this is the big one, how does LE do a search at night? Assuming PEF called eight hours after last contact, she immediately panics, and the BPD jump on it, it would be less than hour to dusk. Even after the Mini was found, I have not even heard them searching the river at night.

Third, we know happened the last time RFG "disappeared," and so did RFG. Nothing. He might have assumed that he'd have 24 hours, at least, based on that. Even if someone was looking for him, they are looking around 192, not in Lewisburg.

It's really one of those K.I.S.S. situations as far as RG would be concerned.

In the YITMAMPW scenario, after those years of planning and faced with PF's request, he's got four hours to decide whether he

A) throws PF and LE off his trail by confounding them with confusing information OR

B) hands them breadcrumbs to follow his trail.

No one truly hoping to disappear would choose B.

[J. J. in Phila]

LW, it wasn't just that tower; I'm not sure which of the two towers carried the signal. It wasn't "just the right location." Any call from Brush Valley would have been carried by one of those towers.

And, it clearly had the misdirection effect.