Comedy Of Horrors

Washington Township is a suburb of about 28,000 people in Macomb County, south-eastern Michigan, roughly forty minutes from Detroit. It was originally a series of orchards, including Westview Orchards, and was organised in 1827, when residents voted to name it after George Washington. By the time of this story it was a family suburb of subdivisions, big-box stores and leafy yards, with a historic Octagon House still standing.

Tara Lynn De Stramp was born on June 28, 1972 and grew up in Perkins, in the south-western corner of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her father, Gerald 'Dusty' Stramp, was a wastewater treatment operator at Sawyer Air Force Base, and her mother, Mary, stayed home with Tara and her younger sister, Alicia. When Tara was about two the family bought a 28-acre hobby farm, where the girls raised sheep, cows, pigs, rabbits, chickens and horses, tapped maple trees and competed in 4-H. Tara was a champion shot and in 1990 won the Grand Champion market hog award. She was a cheerleader and played basketball and ran track at Mid Peninsula High School, played first clarinet and piano, and worked part-time in a shoe shop. She graduated in 1990, spent two years at Bay de Noc Community College, then transferred to Michigan State University in 1992 to study marketing and business.

details of the account remain covered until revealed He was handsome, confident and a notorious partygoer and womaniser. They dated a couple of times and drifted into friendship. In August 1994 Tara's grandmother died, and Grant drove from Lansing to the funeral, a gesture that impressed her even though her family, especially Alicia, disliked him. They began dating and she moved in with him. When Faxon was re-elected that autumn Grant was not offered a job, so he went to work at his father's machine shop in Mount Clemens, making ball bearings, and Tara went with him. They married in September 1996 in a little country church near her hometown; he had proposed on a bench in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He cultivated fine wines, cooking and a slight French accent, and they became generous hosts.

Tara took temp work through Kelly Services and was placed with the engineering firm Morrison Knudsen. When the firm was bought by Washington Group International she was taken on permanently and rose quickly, becoming an operations manager. Their daughter Lindsey was born in November 2000 and their son Ian in 2003, and the family settled in Washington Township. In 2006 Tara was offered a full-time posting in Puerto Rico at $168,000 a year and chose to commute, flying out on Monday and returning on Friday nights; she was also chosen for the company's LEAP programme, offered to just fifteen of its 20,000 employees. Grant earned $18,900 at the machine shop that year, less than her $28,000 bonus, and was the primary caregiver, coaching the children's soccer and collecting the credit for being a good father. A series of au pairs helped with the children, including Victoria Prahoda from February to May 2006 and Verina Dirks, a nineteen-year-old German, from August.

By early 2007 the marriage was strained. On February 5 Tara wrote Grant a letter apologising for making him feel wrong and suggesting they renew their vows; she never gave it to him. Grant had begun emailing an ex-girlfriend on January 25 while Tara was in London, claiming he could read Tara's emails with tracking software, and he had read messages between Tara and an old boyfriend named Pete; on February 1 he sent her an email headed 'Sorry' admitting he had snooped. On February 7 he told Verina he was falling in love with her and performed oral sex on her.

Tara flew home from Puerto Rico on Friday, February 9, 2007, spoke to Alicia for forty-two minutes during a layover at New York airport, landed at Detroit Metro and called the house. She and Grant argued about her plan to return to Puerto Rico on the Sunday instead of the Monday, and about her boss, Lou Trundle. She slapped him; he struck her in the side of the neck, she fell and hit her head on the floor in front of the bedroom television, and she threatened to call the police and take the children. Grant knelt beside her, covered her face with clothing and strangled her, holding on for around four minutes. He dragged her body by a belt towards the garage, but the belt snapped and her head struck the concrete. He put her in the back of her Suzuki Trooper, covered her with a mat, and when Verina came home at about 11.30 he told her that Tara had left after a fight, leaving a note on Verina's pillow that said 'you owe me a kiss'.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He shredded her papers, destroyed her laptop, packed the parts into bags and a green Rubbermaid bin, and at three o'clock on the Sunday morning hauled them on a child's red sled into Stony Creek Metropark, where he buried the torso and the bags in the snow. On the Tuesday at dusk he returned, cut the bags open and scattered the remains under fallen trees, leaving a one-gallon Ziploc bag of plastic wrap by the road.

On February 14 Grant reported his wife missing. Sergeant Brian Kozlawski overheard him say she had been gone five days, and sat in on an account that rambled from a handgun he owned to a theory that Tara had been exposed to nerve gas or kidnapped by terrorists, with a joke about the au pair thrown in. He cried, and detectives Pam McLean and Kozlawski left convinced he had done something. this part of the story is covered for now He gave interviews to the press and wept on television.

Verina was sent back to Germany on February 21. On February 24 more than 150 searchers spent four and a half hours in Stony Creek and found nothing. On February 27 Victoria Prahoda called from Ukraine to describe Grant as creepy and to say she had felt watched in her room, which shared a wall with the master bedroom. On February 28 a dental hygienist, Sheila Werner, found the bloodstained bag in the woods and took it home. On March 2 police searched the house and Kozlawski found Tara's torso in a green bin in the garage. Grant had already gone, borrowing a friend's bright yellow Dodge Dakota, buying razor blades and sleeping pills, writing a suicide note to the children and abandoning the truck at Wilderness State Park before running into a blizzard. He was found the next day, suffering from hypothermia, and a Coast Guard helicopter lifted him out.

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He was arraigned in a striped jumpsuit and fuzzy bunny slippers. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Lindsey and Ian were raised by Alicia and have campaigned against domestic violence.