STATE COLLEGE PA – (AP) – The mystery surrounding the prosecutor who decided to not pursue sex abuse charges against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky more than a decade ago came to a shocking end Saturday afternoon.
Ray Gricar served as the district attorney for Pennsylvania’s Centre County in 1998 when Sandusky was accused of sexually abusing several boys. After an extensive investigation, which included testimony by two law enforcement officers that they had overheard Sandusky admitting to showering with multiple young boys, Gricar decided no criminal charges would be filed, according to recent court documents. Sandusky retired the next year.
Then, in April 2005, Gricar disappeared.
His car was found abandoned in a Lewisburg, Pa., parking lot and his laptop’s harddrive was recovered from the nearby Susquehannna River, but there was no other trace of Gricar. No clues could be gleaned from the severely damaged harddrive and despite a six year investigation that involved the FBI and international help, police have as little an idea today about what happened to the former DA as they did then.
“We literally used every single resource, national and international,” Bellefonte, Pa., police chief Shawn Weaver told Crasstalk.com. “This is baffling. He literally just disappeared off the face of the earth.”
The Ray Gricar saga came to a bizarre end during halftime of the Penn State vs. Nebraska game. Once it all came to an end, Gricar told police what happened.
Gricar claims that he was shopping at the Beaver Valley’s new Walmart store on that fateful day when he returned to his car and was suddenly surrounded by a gang of furry eye browed senior citizens claiming to be Joe Pa’s private army of elderly Catholic ninja assassins.
The ring leader, who Gricar later determined to be Arnie from the VFW, 74, of Latrobe, Pa., snuck up behind the state’s attorney and threw a black hood over his head. He was thrown into the trunk of what Gricar believed to be a late 70s model Chrysler Cordoba, as he later told police, “I could swear I smelled the car’s fine Corinthian leather.”
An hour later the elderly Catholic ninja assassins pulled Gricar’s hood off and he realized for the first time that he was naked and chained to a boiler pipe deep in the bowels of Penn State University’s 106,572-seat Beaver Stadium. Happy Valley? More like Nightmare Football Stadium Dungeon Valley!
Every night the door to his football stadium prison cell would open and Gricar would be blinded by the light of Penn State’s hunchbacked Pope figure. All he could hear was the tapping of a metal cane. Tap, tap, tap. Joe Pa himself would come in and beat him daily with that cane. All 5’3″ of fury raining down on him. “I would see those giant caterpillar eye brows in my nightmares,” Gricar told detectives. “Oh the eye brows. They were so full of furry rage.”
Things finally changed three months ago when Gricar found a discarded box full of dusty old bobblehead dolls bearing the likeness of 1973 Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti. Years of hunting rats and drinking boiler pipe drippings had turned Gricar into a Bear Grylls-esque master of dungeon survival ingenuity. Gricar broke off the base of the bobblehead doll and spent weeks sharpening it into a shiv worthy of only the finest Saturday afternoon “Lockdown” re-runs.
Then on Saturday, Joe Pa came in to deliver his daily cane-beating and Gricar sprang into action like a Penn State linebacker closing down on a Wisconsin Badgers tailback. He grabbed the legendary coach and held the shiv to his neck. That’s when Paterno’s handlers came in and agreed to take off the chains in exchange for not killing their pontiff-like leader. Gricar held Joe Pa hostage as they slowly made their way upward toward his long-denied freedom. As they approached the exit, Gricar let go of Joe Pa and made a run for it.
Gricar could suddenly hear the rattle of the drum line and dulcet bursts of horn. The marching band was halfway through the second verse of traditional halftime performance of “The Nittany Lion” when the beleagured prosecutor stumbled onto the 50 yard line covered in dried blood, wearing only an adult diaper and a hat he had made out of foraged rat’s hide during an elaborate religious ceremony Gricar had concocted after years of Joe Pa’s violent, sadistic abuse.
State Police ran over to him believing he was just another drunken Penn State student who had jumped over a railing as part of a fraternity hazing stunt, but when they got Gricar back to the station the story began to unravel.
Crasstalk.com spoke with Gricar Sunday at his home in a suburb of State College. He’s glad the years of torture and deprivation are over but said he has no plans to stop rooting for Linebacker U on Saturdays. “I think we got a pretty good chance of winning the Big 10 this year.”
