Where is Centre County, Pa., District Attorney Ray Gricar? No one in the county is known to have seen the 59-year-old Gricar – a button-down, lifelong prosecutor looking to retire at year’s end – in the last 28 days, says the Philadelphia Daily News. The 20-year veteran D.A. left work on Friday, April 15, drove to the riverside antique-selling town of Lewisburg, parked his red-and-white Mini Cooper – and vanished.
No one knows if Gricar has intentionally gone missing, committed suicide, was kidnapped, or even murdered. Amateur sleuths can find circumstantial evidence for each possibility. Did Gricar intentionally throw himself in the river and commit suicide, as his own brother had done nine years earlier? Or were some members of the big-city drug ring that Gricar had helped bust just two weeks earlier hell-bent on revenge? What of the fresh flowers found in an orange-juice container near the river where his car was found -a detail so strange that it reminds some locals of the 1967 suicide-mystery “Ode to Billy Joe.” Other made-for-TV stories like Georgia’s “runaway bride” have come, supplanted it, and left. The Daily News explores the theories.