Ray Frank Gricar

Status:

Open

Jurisdiction:

Pennsylvania State Police Pa (PA)

Missing From:

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania

Summary:

Ray Frank Gricar, a 59-year-old Centre County District Attorney, went missing on April 15, 2005, 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.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Disappearance:

At 11:30 a.m. (EDT) on April 15, 2005, Gricar called Fornicola to inform her that he was driving through the Brush Valley area northeast of Centre Hall. Gricar failed to return home, and late that evening, Fornicola reported him missing. He took a half-day off from work and left his place of employment, driving his 2004 Mini Cooper, which is red with a White top and a vanity license plate. Ray called his longtime girlfriend, Patty Fornicola, on his cellular phone at 11:30 a.m. and said he was driving east-northeast on Route 192 toward Lewisburg in Union County, Pennsylvania. The day after Ray vanished, his car was found in a dirt parking lot on the outskirts of Lewisburg in Union County, near the Susquehanna River, 45 miles east of his Bellefonte home. There was no sign of him at the scene and no signs of foul play, but cigarette ashes were found inside the vehicle, and Ray dislikes cigarette smoke and would be unlikely to allow someone to smoke in his car. Ray's cellular phone was locked inside the vehicle and a water bottle was also found; Ray's DNA was on the bottle, indicating he drank from it.

Additional Details:

On July 30, fishermen discovered Gricar's county-issued laptop in the Susquehanna River beneath a bridge between Lewisburg and Milton, but its hard drive was missing. Divers searched the area of the river near where it was found over the next several days, but found nothing else. Two months later, someone recovered a hard drive on the banks of the Susquehanna River about 100 yards (91 m) from the location of the laptop, and investigators hypothesized that it had come from his computer; 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". Authorities investigated the possibility that Ray suffered from depression and took his own life as his brother did, but there is no evidence to support this theory. Gricar's older brother Roy disappeared from his West Chester, Ohio, home in May 1996. His body was found a week later in the Great Miami River; authorities ruled his death a suicide. In 2014, Pennsylvania State Police took over the investigation into the unsolved disappearance of Centre County's top prosecutor, who was eight months from retirement when he was last seen 13 years ago on April 15, 2005. Pennsylvania State Police maintain an active file on Gricar and are offering a $5,000 reward for any information that brings closure to the case. During his tenure, in 1998, Gricar declined to press charges against longtime Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky following allegations of child sexual abuse; Sandusky was charged and convicted of multiple counts of sexual abuse thirteen years later. The Centre County prosecutor's officer has said there is no evidence to suggest the two cases are linked and those who knew Gricar don't believe there was any connection. "I see absolutely no connection between Ray Gricar's disappearance in 2005 and anything connected with Jerry Sandusky," Buehner said.

Case Last Updated:

Apr 26, 2026