According to her husband Steve, Tara Grant stormed out the door of their suburban Detroit home after a fight and hadn't been seen since.

Stephen Grant: Everybody gets into an argument with their spouse. Tara would say things. I would say things. Was it bad? No. Not even close.

It wasn't until days later that Tara’s sister, Alicia, got the news at her home near Columbus, Ohio, from her mother.

Alicia Standerfer: She said, “I’ve gotten a phone call from Steve and Tara’s missing. He hasn't heard from her in five days."

Alicia Standerfer was almost two years younger than her sister. Like Tara she had two young kids and knew that it was ominously unlike her sister to walk out of her life even for a marriage timeout.

Alicia Standerfer: Tara would never leave her children and not let us know where she was. And she would never miss anything with her employer. In 10 years of working for the same company, she didn't miss a day.

When Alicia talked to her brother-in-law Steve, it was Feb. 13, the evening before he finally reported Tara as a missing person on Valentine's Day.

Alicia Standerfer: The conversation that we had started out, you know, with him telling the story and it very quickly changed tones. And he said to me, he said, “You know what? He said, she's probably shacked up in a hotel,” and those are his exact words.

Dennis Murphy: Shacked up?

Alicia Standerfer: “Shacked up in a hotel around the corner with some guy” and I remember at that instant, I said, “Stephen,” I said, “She could be in the slums of Detroit in serious trouble. She could be dead.” I didn't trust this man. Something was off. I didn't know what.

Alicia, in truth, had never been thrilled with her sister's husband. A smug underachiever, she thought. A guy who bellowed when he talked.

Alicia Standerfer: He always had to have the last word, no matter what.

Tara and Stephen met at Michigan State. A 4-H girl going for a business degree and a suburban Detroit boy with an eye on politics. When they married and kids came along...

Alicia Standerfer: Oh she was ecstatic. Lindsey was the sparkle of her eye.

Alicia and Tara had grown up together as farm kids on Michigan’s rural upper peninsula.

Alicia Standerfer: We had old MacDonald’s farm to a tee. We had everything: horses, you know, sheep cows pigs goats guinea hens rabbits chickens turkeys, geese, you name it we had it. Tara and I growing up, we had a list of things that we had to accomplish in the day. And if the list wasn't done when my dad got home, there were consequences to be paid.

And one activity on the list, more fun than chore, was making maple syrup, something Tara loved to do, even as an adult.

Alicia Standerfer: She was happy. She was a happy kid.

The snapshots didn't lie about the confident, chatty, take-charge girl everyone knew was going places.

Alicia Standerfer: She was my leaning post. When I had something very crucial to talk about, Tara was the first person I would call.

Her last call with her big sister came on Feb. 9. Forty minutes of girl-talk. Tara was in the Newark airport waiting for her connecting flight home.

Dennis Murphy: She seemed upbeat?

Alicia Standerfer: Yes.

Dennis Murphy: Did she ever say “I’ve got to turn around and go back to Puerto Rico on Sunday?”

Alicia Standerfer: No. In fact, she laid out all her plans to me which was to return to Puerto Rico on that Monday.

And now Tara was missing. Alicia and her husband drove five hours to Detroit to meet with the detective named Kozlowski and to paper the metro area with missing person posters.

Saturday night, the 17th, they made plans to go over to Stephen’s house for take-out pizza.

Alicia Standerfer: We drove up the driveway and Steve came out of the garage and proceeded to hug me in a very uncomfortable fashion. I tried to pull away and he would not allow me to pull away. He buried his head in my shoulder and he was crying.

Grant's tears became very familiar to TV news watchers but after a few days in the spotlight they dried up. He began bad-mouthing his missing wife in interviews like this one with Hank Winchester of Detroit’s NBC affiliate.

Grant: A couple of years ago, Tara and I did have a problem in our-- in our marriage with the-- with-- I don't want to call it an infidelity, but -- but pretty close to an infidelity.

Hank Winchester: What's pretty close to an infidelity? I don't understand what that means.

Grant: It was going there.

He started belittling Tara as an AWOL mom more concerned with her career and frequent flyer miles than her family.

(Stephen Grant)

I get that she has to travel for business but too much is too much and that was too much.

Watch the broadcast 'Valentine's Day Mystery' videos   Part 1: Wife goes missing   2: Detectives are thinking foul play   3: Police make gruesome discovery   4: The manhunt was on   5: Grant: 'And I choked her'   6: DA: 'It was about sex'

Alicia, meanwhile, felt compelled to speak-up for her sister in interviews, portraying Tara not as some one-dimensional, career woman but a loving mother who successfully balanced both work and family.

Alicia Standerfer: You know, I mean she's a family-driven, career-driven woman.

And the more Stephen Grant appeared on the news playing for sympathy, the more divided public opinion became about him.

Amber Hunt: He was a victim, or he was evil. And there really wasn't much in between.

Along the way, his "poor-me" image as the spouse possibly cheated on took a big hit. An old girlfriend of Grant’s leaked some recent e-mails that she'd received from Stephen two weeks before Tara went missing. They contained not-so-subtle come-ons, like:

"I am still in need of some excitement in my day ... Wink wink!"

"I just think of marriage vows like speed limits. Sometimes you have to break them ..."

Meanwhile, the agency that placed the young au pair in the Grant home became so uncomfortable with one of its girls being in the midst of a publicly messy domestic situation, it pulled Verena, the kids' nanny, out of the house against her will. She returned home to Germany on Feb. 21.

Reporter Amber Hunt knew why this juicy psychodrama about a suburban family had hit such a nerve.

Amber Hunt: They were the people next door.

Dennis Murphy: Nice house, good kids.

Amber Hunt: Yeah -- loving dad, successful mom, beautiful family.

But could reporters or anyone really find out what was going on under a family's roof? The husband, in particular, was proving difficult to get a fix on.

Amber Hunt: The people that we came across pretty much acknowledged that he was kind of a strange bird. He didn't bring home nearly the amount of money that she did. So, I don't know how that plays into somebody's psyche when you're pretty much left working for your dad and raising the kids.

Unobtrusively, the sheriff's office, meanwhile, had put surveillance teams on Grant, watching his house, studying his demeanor in security cam video from the mini-mart where every morning he bought the local papers full of news about the case.

The Macomb County detective team had no physical evidence and few leads, yet they had a gut feeling about the husband. His story, including her supposedly making a phone call and leaving in a black sedan, was full of holes.

Capt. Wickersham: The car service didn't work out. Nobody picked her up. The credit cards, nothing's going to be used. So it was pretty much, we're at a dead end.

With no fresh leads to run down, without the physical evidence they'd need to execute a search warrant of the house, the sheriff, Mark Hackel, announced to the public that they were going to search the sprawling park out by the Grant home over the weekend.

Sheriff Mark Hackel: We realized the public was in tune to this case. They really wanted to know what was going on, so we needed their help.

Someone out there listening to the sheriff was a dental hygienist, a person who'd adopted the narrow two-lane road that passed her house for litter clean-up chores. But her time in the case of the missing Tara Grant hadn't arrived. Not just yet.

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