Ray Gricar

Ray Frank Gricar (; born October 9, 1945, missing since April 15, 2005) was an American lawyer who served as the district attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania, from 1985 until 2005. On April 15, 2005, Gricar went missing under mysterious circumstances and has not been heard from since. After he had been missing for years with no trace of his whereabouts, Centre County authorities declared Gricar legally dead on July 25, 2011.

Born in Cleveland, Gricar received his Juris Doctor degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law and began his career as a prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. He moved to State College, Pennsylvania, around 1980 and, after a brief stint as an assistant district attorney, was elected district attorney of Centre County in 1985. He was re-elected four times before announcing that he would not run for re-election in the 2005 campaign.

Gricar was reported missing to authorities after failing to return home from a road trip. His car was found in Lewisburg with his cell phone inside, and at a later date his laptop computer and the laptop's hard drive were found in the adjacent Susquehanna River. The hard drive was found in a different location in the river than where the laptop was found, which indicated that the hard drive was removed before the laptop was tossed into the river. No further trace of Gricar has been found.

Early life and career Ray Gricar was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in the city's Collinwood neighborhood. He attended high school at the Gilmour Academy, a prestigious Catholic school in Gates Mills, and enrolled at the University of Dayton (UD), where he became interested in studying law after working as an intern for the prosecutor's office.

In 1980, Gricar moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where his wife had taken a job at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). He was re-elected in 1989, 1993, 1997, and 2001. Sandusky was charged and convicted of multiple counts of sexual abuse thirteen years later. In 2004, Gricar announced he would not run for re-election and would retire from practicing law altogether in December 2005, shortly after his 60th birthday. In 2002 or 2003, Gricar moved in with his girlfriend Patty Fornicola, an employee of the Centre County District Attorney's office. Gricar failed to return home, and late that evening, Fornicola reported him missing. The car contained his county-issued cell phone but not his laptop computer, keys, or wallet. Pennsylvania authorities asked the FBI to analyze Gricar's bank accounts, credit card records, and cell phone records, but found no clues as to where he may have been. Divers searched the area of the river near where it was found over the next several days, but found nothing else. however, it was badly damaged, and analysis by the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, and the data-recovery firm Kroll Ontrack failed to recover anything from it. In April 2009, Bellefonte police revealed that before Gricar's disappearance, someone had used the home computer at the residence he shared with Fornicola to perform internet searches on topics such as "how to wreck a hard drive", "how to fry a hard drive" and "water damage to a notebook computer".

In June 2011, Gricar's daughter Lara, who was trustee of his estate, petitioned Centre County to declare him dead. County President Judge David E. Grine declared him "dead in absentia" on July 25, 2011. The following day, police in Utah arrested a man resembling Gricar on a misdemeanor charge who refused to reveal his identity. Centre County authorities sent copies of Gricar's fingerprints to Utah, but they did not match. Authorities eventually identified the man. Police working on the case believed this theory to be most likely, although his family did not believe this. Although Gricar was a poor swimmer, he had no medical history of depression or of suicidal thoughts. He was also reportedly looking forward to his upcoming retirement.

The second theory is that Gricar wished to start a new life and therefore engineered his disappearance. He allegedly expressed interest in the case of a Cleveland police chief who had disappeared, in order to start a new life. The exact date of this is not known. Multiple sightings of Gricar were reported after his disappearance, most notably in a bar in Wilkes-Barre, where both the bartender and an off-duty police officer claimed to have seen him watching a baseball game. It has also been suggested that Gricar may have taken off to central Europe; he was semi-fluent in Russian and fluent in Slovenian. He had relatives in Slovenia and had made trips to this region of the world in the past.

The third theory is foul play. Early on it was suggested that Gricar's disappearance might be linked to the unsolved death of Jonathan Luna, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who was found dead in a Lancaster County creek in December 2003. Gricar had recently been involved in a police operation busting a heroin dealing ring, and the criminals concerned were investigated for any links to his disappearance, but none were found. Suggestions were also made that Gricar's decision to decline to prosecute Sandusky for alleged child sexual abuse might be linked to his disappearance. Gricar's own family came under suspicion: both his girlfriend and his stepdaughter were asked to take polygraphs by the police, which they both passed.

In popular culture Gricar's disappearance was the subject of television documentary programs, including episodes of Haunting Evidence on Court TV in June 2006, Disappeared on Investigation Discovery in February 2011, news magazine Dateline NBC in December 2011, and an episode of Crime Junkie podcast in January 2020. An episode of the drama Without a Trace on CBS referred to the case.