DETROIT – A federal appeals court has ruled against a Detroit-area man who was convicted of killing his wife and dismembering the body.
Stephen Grant of Macomb County claims his constitutional rights were violated when investigators got incriminating statements from him after he was captured in northern Michigan in 2007. But the appeals court noted that he had waived his right to remain silent and his attorney had quit.
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On Dec. 21, 2008, a Macomb County jury found Grant, guilty of second-degree murder after he confessed to strangling Tara Grant, cutting her body apart with saw blades and leaving some of her body parts in Stony Creek Metro Park.
Grant will be eligible for parole when he turns 88. Until then, he remains in Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility in Ionia, Mich.
Stephen Grant made the confession in question in 2007 from a hospital bed more than 200 miles from the Washington Township home he fled just weeks after reporting his wife missing.
March 2, 2007, the same time police searched the Grant home and found Tara Grant's torso in the garage, Grant got into a pickup truck and headed upstate.
After a statewide manhunt, he was found the next day frostbitten and bewildered in Wilderness State Park in northern Michigan. He was taken to the hospital and treated for hypothermia.
While in the hospital, Grant told police that he and his wife were arguing in their house in early February 2007 over what he said were her frequent work trips, according to documents.
She walked away, he said, and he grabbed her wrist. Tara Grant then slapped him in the face, causing a scratch to his nose.
Stephen Grant told police he then hit his wife hard in the head and she fell to the floor, and then he began to choke her.
He said he covered her face with a gray shirt or pair of underwear.
"She finally grabbed my hand at one point, but it was too late then and I couldn't stop," he said, according to the police report. "I knew I was going to prison. I panicked."
The jury heard the graphic, three-hour recorded confession during the murder trial. Police said Grant then took his wife's lifeless body to a family-owned tool and dye shop and mutilated her body. He scattered her remains in Stony Creek Metropark.
Medical examiners said some of Tara's remains are still missing, including part of her left leg, her right foot and a portion of her right arm.