Ray Gricar: The Disappearance of a Prosecutor Who Knew Too Much

A man who kept a low profile

For nearly twenty years, Ray Gricar served as the district attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania. First elected in 1985, he was not a prosecutor who sought attention. He did his job quietly, methodically, and largely outside the public spotlight.

By 2005, Gricar had already made a decision about his future. He announced he would not seek reelection and planned to retire later that year. There was no public crisis surrounding him. No sudden controversy. From the outside, his life appeared stable and predictable.

That is what makes what happened next so unsettling.

Illustration of Ray Gricar. Created for documentary and educational purposes.

An ordinary Friday

On Friday, April 15, 2005, Ray Gricar did something unremarkable.

He was off work that day.

He got into his red Mini Cooper.

And he started driving.

Late that morning, he called his longtime girlfriend, Patty Fornicola. He told her he was going for a drive toward Lewisburg, a small town about an hour away. The conversation was brief and routine.

There was no indication that anything was wrong.

It was the last confirmed contact anyone would have with him.

Illustration of Ray Gricar. Created for documentary and educational purposes.

When he didn’t come back

As the day passed and Gricar failed to return, concern slowly set in. By late that night, he was reported missing.

Investigators would later confirm something troubling in its simplicity. After that final phone call, Ray Gricar seemed to disappear completely.

No phone activity. No emails. No bank withdrawals. No credit card use.

It was as if his life had been paused mid-sentence.

The car near the river

The next day, his Mini Cooper was found in Lewisburg, parked near the Street of Shops antiques mall. The location stood out immediately. The area sat close to the Susquehanna River, a wide, powerful stretch of water that had long been part of the landscape.

Inside the car, investigators found his county-issued cell phone.

What they did not find raised more questions.

There was no laptop. No note. No clear sign of where he went next.

The car had not been wrecked. There was no visible struggle. It was simply there, as if he had stepped away and never returned.

A silence that held

Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months.

Ray Gricar did not surface.

There were no confirmed sightings. No financial activity. No trace of a new life forming elsewhere. For a man with deep professional and personal roots, the absence was complete.

Then, months later, something surfaced.

The laptop

In July 2005, a fisherman discovered a laptop in the Susquehanna River. It was Ray Gricar’s county-issued computer.

But it was incomplete.

The hard drive was missing.

Later that fall, in October, the hard drive itself was found along the riverbank. By then, it was too badly damaged to recover any usable information. Whatever data it once contained was gone for good.

The discovery answered one question and raised several more.

The searches

As investigators continued retracing Gricar’s final days, they uncovered another detail that shifted the tone of the case.

Searches had been conducted on his home computer prior to his disappearance. Among them were phrases such as:

“How to wreck a hard drive” “Water damage to a notebook computer”

Public reporting confirms those searches occurred. What remains unknown is who performed them, exactly when they were made, or why. Investigators never publicly tied them to a specific moment or person.

Still, the searches added a sense of intention to a case already marked by careful absence.

Illustration of Ray Gricar. Created for documentary and educational purposes.

The weight of what he knew

Years after Ray Gricar disappeared, his name resurfaced during renewed scrutiny of an earlier prosecutorial decision.

In 1998, Centre County authorities investigated an allegation involving Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach. Prosecutors reviewed the evidence available at the time and declined to file criminal charges. Ray Gricar, as district attorney, approved that decision.

More than a decade later, Sandusky was charged with and convicted of dozens of felony counts involving the sexual abuse of minors. In 2012, he was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison, where he remains incarcerated. The later case was based on multiple victims and evidence that did not exist in 1998.

There is no verified evidence that Gricar’s disappearance was connected to the Sandusky case. No proof that he vanished to conceal wrongdoing or expose information. Those claims remain speculative.

What is verifiable is narrower. Gricar was one of the few people who fully understood what evidence existed in 1998, what did not, and why prosecutors believed charges could not be sustained at that time. When he disappeared, that context was never fully preserved.

Foul play

Investigators also considered whether Ray Gricar’s disappearance involved foul play.

Early on, some speculation linked his case to the death of Jonathan Luna, an Assistant U.S. Attorney whose body was found in a Lancaster County creek in December 2003. While the proximity in time raised questions, law enforcement never established any professional or investigative connection between the two men, and the theory was not supported by evidence.

Because of Gricar’s role as a prosecutor, investigators also examined whether criminal retaliation was possible. His office had handled drug prosecutions and other serious cases, and authorities reviewed whether any individuals he had prosecuted could be connected to his disappearance. No such links were found.

As part of standard investigative procedure, people close to Gricar were questioned. His longtime girlfriend and his stepdaughter cooperated with investigators and passed polygraph examinations. No evidence has ever suggested their involvement.

Despite these lines of inquiry, investigators found no proof that Ray Gricar was the victim of a crime. Foul play has never been confirmed, but it has also never been definitively ruled out.

Declared dead: Ray Gricar

Years passed without resolution.

In July 2011, Ray Gricar was declared legally dead. No remains had been found. No final explanation had emerged.

The case remained open in the public mind, suspended between possibilities.