Hold My Sweet Tea
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Hold My Sweet Tea
Ep. 40:When Murder Fades from Memory: The Forgotten Serial Killer Gary Gene Grant
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Link to book by Cloyd Steiger: Seattle’s Forgotten Serial Killer: Gary Gene Grant
https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467143622
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You've heard of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, but Seattle hides darker secrets in its rainy past. Meet Gary Gene Grant, a serial killer who terrorized the quiet suburb of Renton, Washington before the term "serial killer" even existed, yet somehow faded from public memory.
Growing up in a Seattle suburb during this decade, I was shocked to disc ver this forgotten chapter of Pacific Northwest crime history. Grant's reign of terror began in 1969 when 19-year-old culinary student Carol Erickson was stabbed while walking home along the Cedar River. Nearly a year later, 17-year-old Joanne Zuloff met the same fate. But Grant's most heinous act came in April 1971 when he lured two six-year-old boys, Scott Andrews and Bradley Lyons, into the woods, where they were brutally murdered.
What makes this case particularly fascinating is how thoroughly it disappeared from collective memory despite its horrific nature. While Vietnam War coverage and Manson Family trials dominated headlines, Grant's murders slipped into obscurity. Yet for the victims' families, the pain never faded. Through meticulous police work—following the trail of a hunting knife, matching tennis shoe prints, and carefully preserving evidence—investigators finally brought Grant to justice, resulting in four consecutive life sentences.
Today, the physical landscapes where these murders occurred have transformed completely—peaceful walking paths, coffee stands, and high-end condominiums mask the horrors that once took place. But through the dedicated work of retired homicide detective Cloyd Steiger, this forgotten case has been brought back to light, reminding us that some monsters hide not just in the shadows, but in the gaps of our collective memory.
Dive into this chilling hometown case with us, and remember that behind every forgotten killer are victims who deserve to be remembered.
Sources:
Cloud Steiger
Publication Date: 27th January 2020
https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467143622
https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/50-years-after-4-murders-rocked-a-community-and-a-courtroom-seattles-forgotten-serial-killer-explores-the-case-of-gary-gene-grant/
By Cloyd Steiger
August 16, 2020
Editor’s note: This is an edited, condensed excerpt from “Seattle’s Forgotten Serial Killer: Gary Gene Grant,” by Cloyd Steiger (History Press, 2020).
Books are available for purchase locally wherever books are sold, and at arcadiapublishing.com.
By HARRIET ALEXANDER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
03:05 18 Aug 2020, updated 03:55 18 Aug 2020
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8637453/How-Seattles-Forgotten-Serial-Killer-1960s-70s-slipped-net.html
Introduction to Gary Gene Grant case
Speaker 1Today we're diving into a chilling overlook case of a serial killer that rattled a quiet community in the Seattle Washington area over 50 years ago. This is Hold my Sweet Tea.
Speaker 2Hi everybody.
Speaker 1I'm Holly.
Speaker 2And I'm Pearl and we're going back to being borns, to our roots, not the gray roots.
Speaker 1Oh no.
Speaker 2Where we were born roots, oh no, where we were born roots. So we're doing a little hometown true crime. Yes, we decided we wanted a little break from the south and I was like, hey, let's do one from where we were born, that will be fun and and I'm like that is brilliant, let's do it.
Speaker 1So here we are doing it. So my hometown is Seattle, washington. That's where I was born, in King County, the little Washington Tacoma area. I grew up in Federal Way, washington, but my story today is in Renton, which is still a suburb of Seattle. It still rains there, yep, it does. It's a drizzly rain, though, but it doesn't get sticky, nasty hot like it does here, so I'll take the rain any day, yeah, the constant sprinkle is cool. Yes, you know, that's why the Cullens lived in forks.
Speaker 2Right, but were they blaming their glistening skin on the water?
Speaker 1No, the sunshine, no, I'm just saying, yeah, I know they were like oh my gosh, I'm so damp right now, right, I'm glistening.
Speaker 2I'm glistening in my dampness.
Speaker 1That's why they go camping on sunny days. Right, I'm glistening. I'm glistening in my dampness. That's why they go camping on sunny days.
Speaker 2Right, not come to school. Exactly Because they were only like hundreds of year old, exactly Pretending to be high school students, that would be like the most.
Speaker 1Oh my God, I could never. I would have to go into some kind of hiding somewhere else.
Speaker 2I there's no way, there's no freaking way. I want to keep going to high school over and over and over again that's what nightmares are made of.
Speaker 1You wake up and you're like oh my god, I was back in high school.
Speaker 2Like no what was the point in being an immortal if I I'm just going to replay high school over and over? That's your no thank you.
Speaker 1That's your karma for being an immortal To repeat high school over and over and over.
Speaker 2That is my personal hell right there. It's metaphase.
Speaker 1Anaphase. Yeah, he's not a super genius, he's just sparkly, rightly right, all right, now that we're off the collins, yeah, so that it's a great idea. We're going back, back, back, and some of us back further than exactly. And pearl's episode on thursday is going to be in wister, massachusetts, or, as your aunt and dad say, worcester, worcester, because you can't pronounce the R. No, not in Massachusetts, nope.
Speaker 2They're allergic to R's.
Speaker 1Right, there's no R's here.
Speaker 2You know, that's the funny thing of that is like they don't say the R there. And now I live in a place where they say Aura, aura, yep, so it's like they get serious about the R Yep, that's why I said roots.
Speaker 1They get real serious with that R. All right, well, are we ready to jump into this one today? Yeah, let's hit Seattle. So, as I was looking up, who do I want to do in Seattle, and maybe around the time that I was born there and lived there, and I start looking and of course, who pops up? Ted Bundy, always, always. You know the Green River Killer Also, always, always, always. You know the green river killer also always, always. So I'm like digging, digging, digging, and I come across the name gary gene grant. Who, who, exactly who?
Speaker 1I'm not an owl, so despite the horrific nature of his crimes. Like he largely faded from the public memory.
Speaker 2Which is probably a good thing yeah. In a sense because you want to remember the victim Exactly More than the killer.
Speaker 1And he was a serial killer before the actual term serial killer was coined. Oh, fun time, yeah. So I just want to preface this by saying our deep dive today is largely thanks to the meticulous work of Cloyd Steiger. He is a brilliant retired homicide detective from the Seattle Police Department who spent 36 years on the force. He later wrote the book Seattle's Forgotten Serial Killer, gary Jean Grant. So Steiger is now the chief criminal investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's Homicide Investigation Tracking System. That's a mouthful yeah.
Speaker 1Which is why they call it HITS For short. I was going to say I hope there's an acronym here- yes, it's a program vital to assisting local law enforcement in the Pacific Northwest by tracking and analyzing violent crime information so they're able to share this information. So once somebody is tagged on there, they're on there forever and they can look them up easily, all their stuff. So if they're moving around, you're from state to state. You're not state to state.
Speaker 1Yeah, you're still tagged and you're not like reliant on the local database that may not contain information from another state exactly, and that's why they're like they don't have to look around, it's right there. So, although Steiger knew many of the cases in the Pacific Northwest and thought he knew about every serial killer in the area because, I mean, he lived there, he grew up there why not? Gary Dean Grant was a name that he had never come across. So this case received a good amount of press when it happened, but it happened right around the time the Vietnam War was like dominating the headlines. Troops were coming home, there were protests on the rise in the Manson family, trials were taking place.
Speaker 2Of course nobody's going to know anything but the Manson family.
Speaker 1Like his stuff just kind of faded into the background and just went unnoticed for decades. It was easy with all that. So thank you, Floyd Steiger. I doubt you listen to this, but thank you for the story. I literally bought his. I'm going to put it in the show notes, the link to his book. I went and purchased it on Spotify so I could listen to the whole thing and get some info on this. So let's get into who Gary Jean Grant was. So Gary was born on June 29th, that's the day before your birthday.
Hometown connections to Seattle
Speaker 2It is 1951. A cancer serial killer. Who'd have guessed? Who'd have guessed it? Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1In 1951 in Renton Washington. His early life was marked by poverty and instability. Again red flag, you know happens a lot. Growing up in a trailer park on the outskirts of the city, his parents both engaged in low-skilled labor and struggled financially. His mother's alcoholism fueled constant fighting, creating a mentally overstrained and stressful environment for young Gary.
Speaker 2I had a stepmom like that yeah.
Speaker 1But you're not a serial killer that we know of.
Speaker 2Yet, yet but there's still time.
Speaker 1So he lost interest in education and he dropped out of school in the mid-60s Toward the end of the decade. Seeking an escape, he enlisted in the military and was assigned to the Navy. However, his service was short-lived. He was subjected to bullying by his peers. Is sad, I mean, you're in, you're in a navy, you're supposed to be in like a, I guess, brotherhood type situation, yeah. But he was come together right, right now they're gonna start singing again. But he was bullied by his peers and he begins showing signs of mental illness and was dismissed just after a few months, citing health reasons. They would call him a mama's boy, so they like, relentlessly picked on him while he was in there. That's terrible, yeah. So Renton is a city in King County, washington, an inner ring suburb of Seattle. It's situated about 11 miles southeast of downtown Seattle, and Renton straddles the southeast shore of Lake Washington. Lake Washington is pretty big too.
Speaker 1It's like really long at the mouth of the Cedar River, while the early 1960s were like booming years for Renton due to the success of the Boeing commercial jet production. Fun fact while we lived there my dad worked for Boeing. He was a machinist, so this happened all around the time that we lived there and I'm like that's scary.
Speaker 2That's why your dad couldn't understand me, right? He couldn't hear. He couldn't hear, right, he worked at the.
Speaker 1Boeing jet production. But you know, as the Vietnam War drew to a close, this caused a severe recession and job losses. So many people left Renton to find work elsewhere. So at the time of his first crime, gary was just 18 years old. Time of his first crime, gary was just 18 years old. His first victim was Carol Erickson, a 19-year-old culinary arts student at Renton Vocational Technical Institute.
Speaker 1On the evening of December 5th 1969, carol was walking home from the Renton Library along a dirt road parallel to the Cedar River. She liked to walk down there and watch the ducks swim, and you know it's a really nice place. I was going to say a little relaxing stroll. And she lived in a little cabin down there because she had moved out of her parents' house. So she lived in a little cabin down there. So she was taking a little stroll along the river before she went home.
Grant's troubled upbringing
Speaker 1So she was taking a little stroll along the river before she went home. She had a little notebook with her that she liked to copy down recipes that she would find in books at the library and then she would write little notes to her friends and things like that in the little book. And she, gary, suddenly attacked her, stabbing her with a knife before dragging her body into the nearby bushes. There he sexually assaulted her corpse and further mutilated it, leaving lacerations on her neck. Her body was discovered the next morning, december 16th, by edward stewart, who was checking out fishing conditions on the Cedar River, and he thought it was a mannequin because we just discussed that the other day that it's never a mannequin.
Speaker 1It's not a mannequin. So Edward notified the police. In 1969, the Renton Police Department had a small operation. There were no homicide units, just a few detectives. Murders were very few and far between in that area. Until now, until now.
Speaker 1So police canvassed the area. They found drag marks leading from the trail to where the body lay. It didn't look like there was a struggle because the drag marks were like straight. It was just like straight drag. So there was nobody fighting or trying to kick and move or anything. So it looked like her killer had dragged her there after he killed her, so he where he stabbed her on the trail and then he dragged her into the bushes and did his and then stabbed her some more stabbed her some more and like, sexually assaulted her and mutilated her.
Speaker 1So Carol's body was nude from the waist down, except for a white pair of stockings. Her sweater was pulled up around her neck, exposing her bra. Her jeans and underwear and shoes were strewn about. She had marks around her neck and her shoelaces had been taken from her shoes that were lying nearby. Okay, so detectives fanned out and searched the area thoroughly. They did a really good job, with this case being that they were such a small police department, because you hear of other, larger, and we've reported on police departments that just botch everything.
Speaker 2They didn't want to think it was transmission fluid, right.
Speaker 1In a standard transmission no.
Speaker 2With no car they're like. Well, look at this. Somebody spilled transmission fluid.
Speaker 1If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and check it out. It's a melted slushie, so they found tire tracks near the river, a notebook, a picture book with Carol's name on it and a blue coat. It was determined by the medical examiner that carol's cause of death was a fatal stab wound to her heart. The ligature marks around her neck had not collapsed the airway but it was narrowed, so he killed her first and then he, I guess, strangled her while he was sexually assaulting her it's.
Speaker 2yeah, I guess that was his thing, yeah.
Speaker 1His. Yeah, and you know her parents were notified and that, and I just wanted to like throw this in there. So back in the 60s and all that, they literally went on like fingerprints and blood type. Yeah, when they were like trying to pinpoint things Like this knife has blood on it, it's the same blood type as this one. There was no DNA and all this other stuff, right? So when you had to identify a body, it wasn't a scientific thing where you're looking things up. You literally had to go down and look at it, look at it. So they really don't do that anymore, unless it's an extreme case.
Speaker 2Right, most of the time it's confirmation, but they're like we know. We're pretty sure this is who she is. But before DNA gets back, would you like to check?
Speaker 1But it's like way less common now than it was then, so you literally had to go down and see your child or your parent or whoever it was in this situation?
Speaker 2Yeah, your next of kin, best friend, something, whoever, whatever, it was sad.
Speaker 1Yeah, so nearly a year later. So he waited a whole year. In September of 1970, joanne Zuloff, a 17-year-old student from the same vocational school school so he stayed in the same area was attacked in the middle of the day. She was going on a bike ride later that afternoon with her friend and decided to go take a walk while she was waiting for her friend to come over, because you know, back in the 1970s, late 60s, you really didn't have a lot to do. So it's pretty up in the pacific northwest, so why?
Speaker 1not take a walk, sure so, as she was walking along, grant struck her in the head with a stone. He liked to, you know, attack from behind, because apparently he's a coward well element of surprise it makes him makes it easier right. So he hit her with the a stone in the back of the head. He dragged her into the woods where he sexually assaulted her and strangled her. Her new body was found on September 22nd.
Speaker 2So this time he decided to forego the stabbing.
Speaker 1Yes, so he like smacked her with a stone, and then he like just went ahead and did the deed and strangled her. Yeah. So I guess he was like oh, I don't have my knife on me, but I had the stone. I don't know if he had his knife or not?
Speaker 2Yeah, I was going to say he probably was just like oh, look at this opportunity. Yes, let me grab this big rock right here.
First victim: Carol Erickson
Speaker 1Joanne's parents. You know she hasn't, she hadn't come home and they were like called her friend that she was supposed to go on a bike ride which was named Robin Williams.
Speaker 2It was a girl.
Speaker 1I was like, oh, robin Williams. So they called Robin and they were like, hey, is Joanne over there? Did she go on a bike ride with you? And she's like, no, I haven't seen her. We were supposed to go, but no Joanne. So they went out to look for her after she didn't come home that evening, as they were driving a man that they didn't recognize had come out of the woods. So they reported that when they called the King County Sheriff's Office, but the King County Sheriff's Office didn't dispatch an officer, they said if she didn't show up by morning, to call back just one of those quirky little teenagers that run off somewhere, just call back, just one of those quirky little teenagers that run off somewhere, just call back in the morning. This wasn't the Renton Police, this was the King County Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 1So you see, as we get bigger, less stuff, right, they're like, eh. So the next morning there was still no sign of Joanne. They called the sheriff's office again. Search and rescue were dispatched with dogs. They found Joanne. They called the sheriff's office again. Search and rescue were dispatched with dogs. They found Joanne's body just after midnight in a ravine, her nude. Yeah, that took all day. Yeah, like they had to search, really search. So the nude body was covered in brush. So he covered this one up. Her bra and her underwear lay about six feet from her body.
Speaker 1So he undressed her all the way the detective told everyone not to move because it was late at night. So he took his flashlight and he approached the body.
Speaker 1He kind of like went in a circle with the flashlight just to kind of look around because it was dark in the woods he wanted to verify that it was joanne from a photo, and then he carefully checked for a pulse and she was cold and dead, so he backed away. He posted a sheriff's deputy to guard the scene until daylight because he didn't want to disrupt any, any evidence or anything. So this girl's body had to lay out there all night.
Speaker 2I mean she's dead, but still. Yeah, I'm sure her parents didn't still suck yeah.
Speaker 1I would have been like I'm gonna go stand out there too. So the next morning they found two footprints in the mud near her body, so they made a plaster cast of them. So again they're. They're doing a good job at evidence and everything. Her parents had given them a description of what she was wearing, you know, before this happened, and this included a watch and earrings, like her sweater, her jeans, everything. They found her clothing, but the jewelry was missing. She had petechial hemorrhaging from her chin to her hairline and around her eyes. So that's like when you throw up really hard and you get those little red marks around your eyes and stuff because you're straining so bad, that's petechial hemorrhaging. Or when you're strangled to death, yeah, that happens. So it was determined by the medical examiner that her cause of death was strangulation, possibly by a belt, because I guess it was wide enough. So he just like put his belt around her neck and strangled her.
Speaker 2He didn't have her shoestrings to use this time.
Speaker 1No apparently she must have had like slip-on shoes or something, I don't know or boots maybe she had rain boots on because it's, you know, rainy up there.
Speaker 1So but this is this is the chilling detail about what I said, about what her parents said she had on Mm-hmm, just four days after the murder, grant gifted his girlfriend a watch that he had taken from Joanne's body. Ew, yeah, he's like I got you this watch and he had a girlfriend. So he apparently, like once they had interviewed him and you know, while he was in jail and stuff a lot of these things were triggered by his mother. The first one, he said, was triggered by his mother because they had gotten into an argument and his mother pulled a knife on him.
Speaker 2Oh.
Speaker 1The second one was triggered by his girlfriend because they had gotten in a fight, so he was out walking it off, apparently and killed Joanne and came upon her.
Speaker 1I see. But then we come to the boys, and this one is like very heart-wrenching. So if you want to skip ahead, you may do so, because it's horrible. The final and perhaps most, like I said, heart-wrenching murders occurred on April 20th 1971. And I'm not saying that the girls were not heart-wrenching, but while passing a house, grant saw two six-year-old little boys, scott Andrews and Bradley Lyons, playing outside. The boys were playing in a vacant lot near their house with five or six other kids. After a while Scott ran home, he got some cookies from his mom, he grabbed enough to share with his friends and he went back out to play. His mother said that she didn't tell him to stay in the yard and this guilt would haunt her for the rest of her life. And I get the guilt part. But it literally wasn't her fault and I'm sure it would have happened some way, somehow, some way somehow, maybe somebody else's kid, but still, it would still happen, I'm sure.
Speaker 1so the two boys, they were best friends. They went off to play alone in a wooded area but they never returned. So the parents were searching for them all day, calling you know, hey, have you seen bradley um, have you have you seen Scott? They were just calling back and forth because they couldn't find their kids and they knew that they played a lot together and they would go out and play all day. So they waited till their husbands had gotten home later that evening to call the police, because they were like, hey, you know, the kids haven't come home. And so they determined like, let's go ahead and call the police, let's see what happens. So at that point everybody in the neighborhood was searching for them. The sheriff's office called in search and rescue, along with 40 members of the local fire department. They worked around the clock checking area ponds, woods, rivers, because it had been raining a lot. So they were like the ponds were swollen, they might have fallen in Fell in, yeah, yeah like something.
Speaker 1Two days later, one of the firefighters, daniel Auburn, was assisting in the search. So it had been two days, they were still searching for these boys.
Speaker 2Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 1And he found the boys near the Royal Hills apartment. Grant had threatened the boys with a knife, led them into the woods about, you know, not very far from the lions residence because they lived right there in those apartments. He brutally beat the children, he stabbed scott and he strangled bradley. So he stabbed scott first because he had lured the boys had split up and I guess they were out playing. So he got Scott first. He had told him to undress and Scott was like no and tried to run away. So he grabbed him and then Scott went ahead and undressed and he stabbed Scott. And then Bradley pops up and he was trying to hide it but then he ended up having to grab Bradley and strangle him. So after the unspeakable acts he covered their bodies in leaves and branches and all that stuff. So again they found footprints of a tennis shoe at the crime scene and they took plaster casts.
Speaker 1So before I get into the rest of like Gary Jean Grant's case, a man named John Chance walked into Valley General Hospital in Renton. He asked to be admitted to the psych ward. He didn't want to identify himself. At first he was agitated and said he was all mixed up like in the head. He's like I'm just all mixed up and he's like I just I wanted to come in and he told Dr Rorison that he was considering wanting to hurt children.
Speaker 1Considering yeah, he said he was too much of a coward to kill himself and he thought that the Manson family was controlling his mind, telling him to do things. So the doctor they gave him an injection of Thorazine. They put him in a secure room. The following Thursday Dr Rorison was at home and he had heard about two local boys and how they had not been found yet and a light bulb like went off in his head.
Second victim: Joanne Zuloff
Speaker 1Yeah, he was like, wait a minute, right, he's like. So on the same night this guy come in and he's wanting to be admitted to the psych ward and he said that I think about hurting children. So Dr Morrison didn't know if he was bound by like doctor patient privilege, since the boys hadn't been found yet, they were just missing at that point. So he had the nurses at the hospital contact hospital attorneys to get their opinion. So the hospital went ahead and because it was a case of children, they went ahead and called the police for him. The detective interviewed the doctor, went and talked to John Chance who was still on Thorazine, told him his rights and asked him if he understood. And he said, yes, he, you know. They questioned him on several things. They asked him about the boys. He rambled about not remembering things and how at one point he thought he was from Saturn and he had met Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2Sounds like he was on LSD and not yeah that's what I was thinking.
Speaker 1I was like he was on some mind-altering substances or had too many of them and went oh cuckoo. So after the interview he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital where he was admitted after much debate because they didn't want to admit him. They were like, you know, we've done a psyche val and there's really nothing wrong he's just cuckoo um but or acting acting cuckoo, yeah, acting like that.
Speaker 1So the doctors, they went ahead and admitted him that morning, but then they scheduled him to be released later that day. So the police went and picked him up at the and took him to the station where he would intentionally lie about things. They said that he was very intelligent but he would tell them what they wanted to hear. So they took him to the crime scene. After the boys were found he described how he had stabbed one of the boys, strangled the other with a cord, but he was thoroughly confused about the area and unable to retrace his step, so he didn't seem to be concerned that the boys were dead.
Speaker 1He was later like diagnosed with schizophrenia and said that to be like legally insane because he didn't know the difference between right and wrong. He was formally charged with two counts of first degree murder for the deaths of Bradley Lyons and Scott Andrews. Then he was arraigned for the murders on May 3rd 1971. Okay, so what happened was is he had read or watched something on the news, so he absorbed it into his mind and he's like, yeah, this is what happened, this is what I did, but I'm very sketchy about the area because I don't know how I did it, so he was just telling them what he wanted to hear. So like this, people do stuff like this false confess.
Speaker 1Yes, yeah I don't understand the false confession thing at all. So let's get back to the boys. So a breakthrough in the case came on april 28 1971. Several searches had taken place um over the area the next few days where the bodies were discovered. Search teams found a hunting knife with dried blood stains not not far from where the boys' bodies were found. So lab analysis confirmed the blood matched Scott Andrews' blood type.
Speaker 1The knife had, like, black tape wrapped around its handle. So when they took it into evidence they had peeled it off and it was a name, tom Evison, engraved in the handle. So Evison was quickly located and interrogated. The police said he told them that he had sold the knife to a friend, jerry Triplett. The next day Triplett was questioned and revealed that he sold the knife to another friend, jim Monger. I'm sorry. Monger in turn informed officers that he lent the knife to Gary Grant. I was like this knife has been through some stuff apparently it's like the brotherhood of the traveling knife right and then it ended up in gary grant's hands where he traveled it into somebody.
Speaker 1So authorities wasted no time. On april 30th 1971, gary grant was detained in his trailer and brought in for questioning. As he was being put into the police car, the detectives noticed the bottom of his shoe. It looked just like the shoe print they took of the plaster cast at the scenes where they found the boys and Joanne's body. It had like a circle on the heel part, like the several circles. I don't remember what kind of shoes those are, but I remember seeing shoes with that circle on. So it was very like boom right there, yeah.
Speaker 1So initially he couldn't provide an alibi for the day the boys were murdered but he agreed to take a polygraph test. First he claimed amnesia, then he broke down sobbing and eventually confessed to the killings to the polygraph guy. So he came in. He's like, um, he just confessed to the killings to the polygraph guy. So he came in and he's like he just confessed to the murder and then they had him like write a written statement which later he says he doesn't remember any of that. He doesn't remember writing any of that.
Speaker 2Of course not. Yeah, Like whatever you can use to your advantage when you realize, oh whoops.
Speaker 1Right. So the next day, like Grant and his father and the lawyer were in one of the interrogation rooms and they were talking and Grant confessed to all four murders. He detailed how they occurred a very significant complication, because Renton Police Captain William G Frazee had illegally installed recording devices in the interrogation room. Uh-oh, so this illegal wiretapping led Grant's lawyers to file a motion on June 1971 to drop all charges, citing a violation of his constitutional rights. Fortunately, on June 30 30th, the appeal was rejected because grant's confession had already been legally recorded on the day of his arrest because of the the polygraph guy, and he wrote it down. So, despite this, frazy um face charges of unlawful electronic interception of a conversation, which is a misdemeanor, and subsequently he was suspended from the police force.
Speaker 2So my guess is that no one in the room knew they were being recorded, right Because?
Speaker 1as long as one person knows, it makes it not illegal anymore, just because they were all in there and, like, the lawyer didn't know, his father didn't know and Gary didn't know, so that was like the thing they were like illegally.
Speaker 2And I'm sitting here going. Was he part of the interrogation team or was like someone else interrogating him who also didn't know?
Speaker 1It must have been somebody else like that was in there with them. But that was the whole thing. They were like no, no, this, you illegally install this. Nobody knew that there was recording devices in there. Yeah, okay, so the Frazee. He received four months of probation, no jail time, and he retired soon after King County Superior Court Judge David Sukup, who sentenced Fraased. He called him an honorable police officer who made a mistake in the investigation of one of the most brutal sets of murders to ever occur in king county and for me I'm like I get, I get it because you're like we can't not get this right, we already had a cuckoo bananas guy in here, so let's like get this guy because he's confessing, literally.
Speaker 2And there's four people dead. So I understand that you feel like you got to do what you got to do but, you got to do it the right way.
Speaker 1Right, that's like when people are oh, just record them. No, that's illegal. You can't do that without their knowledge. That's why, when you get a phone call, it's like this call may be recorded Blah, blah, blah. So Grant's trial began on August 12th 1971. The prosecution's main evidence included an audio recording of his confession, the bloodstained knife and the plaster cast of his tennis shoe imprints which matched the size and treads on his shoes that he was wearing when he was arrested. Several acquaintances testified for the prosecution, placing Gary Grant near the crime scenes on the day of the murders and noting his dirty clothes. So they had seen him and they were like why is Gary so filthy? Well, he had just murdered somebody and dragged them into the woods and was rolling around in the mud with their dead bodies.
Speaker 1Yes, grant's lawyers, james Anderson and Nick Marshall, insisted on their client's insanity, arguing for leniency and hoping to spare him the death penalty which was a possibility in Washington state at the time and it was actually hanging. It still did hanging. Back then, his father and close friends testified that Grant had always been a passive, harmless individual.
The murder of two six-year-old boys
Speaker 2Obviously not. Obviously not.
Speaker 1Like he would have. You know these points where he couldn't take things anymore.
Speaker 2Yeah, because he was pushing everything else down.
Speaker 1He was passive in front of you and then took it out on strangers, innocent strangers, right, the forensic psychiatric exam was conducted and while it found Grant to be sane, the psychiatrist noticed he was impulsive, struggling with self-control and often acted out of emotionally in like high-stress situations, which is why I said like he had. They had later said that he had, you know, murdered one because of his mother and the other because of his girlfriend. I'm like, what did he do for the boys?
Speaker 2Yeah, what? What occurred?
Speaker 1before that. Well, they actually they said that that could have been the result of him being picked on when he was little and the military and all that. So it was like his peers. I'm like did and all that. So it was like his peers, I'm like did he think he was still a little kid? That's why they called him a mama's boy.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't know, that's weird.
Speaker 1Possibility. The psychiatrist also suggested the crimes were a form of escapism, a way to vent frustrations from unresolved personal issues. But you still don't go kill people, mm-mm.
Speaker 2Go rage out in the woods and stab a tree like shit. Yeah, I mean, he's obviously mentally unstable and ill, but he's not get away with murder insane. Yes so.
Speaker 1In a dramatic move, the defense, despite having moved for its dismissal due to its existing um unlawful recorded interview between Grant and his attorney, grant himself took the stand as the defense's final witness. According to Deputy Prosecutor Michael DiGiulio, who worked on the case, grant basically went into a trance. He didn't explicitly admit to the murders. He walked right up to them, them making cross-examination difficult. So he just, like boom, went into this trance up there.
Speaker 1In closing arguments, prosecutor edmund allen, a former assistant chief criminal deputy, brought in a special prosecutor prosecutor I can't speak today to handle the complicated case asked the jury to find Grant guilty of all four murders and impose the death penalty. Marshall countered, appealing to the jury's humanity and describing Grant's quote-unquote split personality and quote-unquote unconscious rage stemming from a childhood filled with misery, turmoil and hopelessness. After two full days of deliberation, on August 25th 1971, the jury returned a verdict guilty on all four counts of murder. However, the jury did not impose the death penalty. On September 29th 1971, just three months after his 20th birthday, gary appeared for sentencing. The defense requested a new trial, which suck up, which was the judge he denied. The prosecution asked for four consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole, citing a psychiatrist pre-sentencing examination that suggested that Gary at times doesn't know what he's doing and could commit more murders. The defense again argued for concurrent terms, emphasizing Grant's psychiatric problems and the psychiatrist's opinion that he would be a model prisoner.
Speaker 2Why wouldn't he flash out and kill somebody in there, Right I'm like.
Speaker 1You don't think he would do it there. I don't know, maybe he can't sneak up on him. I wouldn't he flash out and kill somebody. You don't think he would do it there. I don't know, maybe he can't sneak up on him.
Speaker 2That's still a high stress situation here.
Speaker 1It's not going to be fun.
Speaker 2It's going to be some more turmoil, exactly.
Speaker 1The judge sided with the prosecution, imposing four consecutive life terms, effectively ensuring Grant would spend the rest of his natural life in prison. Immediately after the sentencing, the initial attorneys withdrew and Grant's parents hired a new lawyer to like appeal the conviction. They were dissatisfied that Marshall and Anderson hadn't argued that Gary was entirely innocent of the murders. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2What he like. He's not entirely innocent.
False confession by John Chance
Speaker 1So the appeal went to the three-judge panel of Washington Court of Appeals on July 9, 1973. They found no errors justifying dismissal or a new trial. Requests for review by the Washington State Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court were also denied, solidifying Grant's conviction and sentencing.
Speaker 2Yeah, there's no reason to waste the time of the court for this junk and keep going back right.
Speaker 1So Gary Jean Grant, now 73 years old, remains imprisoned at the Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe. Remains imprisoned at the Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe, washington. So he's still alive being a model prisoner.
Speaker 1Apparently he largely remains an obscure figure, despite the horrific nature of his crimes. While he's claimed that he doesn't remember the murders, like I said, he doesn't remember the victims, the families, the, the police officers, like all that stuff. But everybody in that town literally went through the his reign of terror and they will never forget what he did. The physical landscape of these crimes has changed dramatically over the decades. The muddy trail where carol erickson's body was found is now a well-maintained path and it has like a cat sculpture. Nearby where she was killed, the cabin she was walking home to had been replaced with a little like coffee latte stand. The woods where joanne uh zuloff's body were discovered are now peaceful and beautiful, with houses sitting and there's like the little trails and stuff, and the largely wooded area overlooking the cedar river where scott andrews and bradley lions lost their lives remains quiet. It's serenity masking the unspeakable acts of what happened looks like yeah, nothing ever happened there.
Speaker 1Nothing ever happened this is where the bodies were found, but it doesn't even look like that peaceful, whatever, yeah and the trailer park where Gary Jean Grant lived with his troubled life and his parents has since been removed, replaced by high-end condominiums near the beautiful Jean Coulon Memorial Beach Park. These changes are a stark contrast to the permanent scars left on the victims' families, their lives forever altered by the forgotten serial killer. I'm like I don't. I know this happened and everything, but why hasn't the family spoke out and kept his name relevant?
Speaker 2Because they don't want his name to be relevant. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1And that's why I went in with the victims and I gave you some information about them, because it doesn't need to be just about him, because he is forgotten.
Speaker 2Yeah, and. I mean, as it should be, but they need to remember their family members and not the dude who did the terrible stuff to them but, like even with the devastating impact that this had, it's weird how these people can just become forgotten. Yeah.
Speaker 1But it was around the time of all this other big news going on. So Right, there it is. But again, I'm going to put Floyd Steiger's link to his book in the show notes. So if you want to go, purchase the book or you can download it on any device, I did Spotify, you can. It's an interesting read and he goes into great detail with this story awesome.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. And I just want to say that a lot of us have had terrible childhoods where we were picked on and lived in shoddy conditions, yeah, very shoddy conditions. I mean, I grew up in an apartment complex where, like the poorest of poor people lived, and most of them were 10 to 15 people in a two-bedroom apartment. So the land of cockroaches, yeah, and here I am not murdering people, right.
Speaker 1And you're a cancer and I'm a cancer.
The breakthrough: Tracing the murder weapon
Speaker 2I'm like totally got the odds stacked up against me Right but here. I am out out here not stabbing people. Yet the older I get right, the meaner I get the rage fills you the older you get. It's like crazy the meaner I get and the less I care about people thinking I'm a horrible person. I'm just like. You know what. I'm just gonna say it yeah, oh yeah like I. You know what I'm just going to say it.
Speaker 1Yeah, oh yeah, I don't hold back it just flies out of my mouth. Now I'm like whatever, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care about your feelings, bitch mode activated. Thanks, yeah, but it's just crazy that as I was going through this, I was like, oh my gosh, we literally lived up there because I was born in 1972. So I was born right after this, but I had older siblings. They were all like significantly older than me, so they lived in this area. My parents, my dad, worked right there.
Speaker 2They could have been red rummed.
Speaker 1They could have been, but they weren't. But they lived in this area while all this was happening. So crazy, crazy, crazy crazy cool again. I think this like was a great idea yes, absolutely, we'll have to do some more fun things like this yeah, so hit us up if you want your birthplace.
Speaker 1Yeah, that would be cool To be on the show, on the show, and I have lots and lots of pictures of the case, so I will post all of those. And again, I'm going to shout out Mr Steiger, because a lot of those are from the police files that he went into, so I will make sure to give him all the credits because he's an awesome guy.
Speaker 2Giving credit where credit is due. Absolutely Cool, cool. Speaking of credits where credits are due yes, our theme music is by Patti Salzetta. She gets all the credits and we're going to be, you know, sitting there with our phones in our hands just waiting for those messages.
Speaker 1Yes, TikTok, people TikTok. Oh, we're also on TikTok.
Speaker 2Yes, we are YouTube, Facebook, instagram, message us somewhere, email us Steeped at wholemysweetteacom and we also have merch.
Speaker 1We do have merch. Nobody's bought anything yet except for us.
Speaker 2But yeah, we bought stuff from ourselves.
Speaker 1No one else has bought anything but we will have that link on the show notes as well, as well as the buy me a coffee.
Speaker 2they're right, the buy me a coffee if you'd like to donate. We are trying to save up for some new equipment. Yes, because the stuff we got to start out with was like uber cheap.
Speaker 1We both looked at the little sound board we're like We've had some issues.
Speaker 2So we just want to make life a little easier for ourselves. So if you want to donate to our cause, definitely use the Buy Me A Coffee link. We have those on our Facebook page, we have them on Instagram, they're on TikTok, so everywhere you go.
Speaker 1Yeah, In the show notes we link them every time they're there.
Speaker 2So just go get it, Support us please. I think, I'm going to do like a screen recording of the whole thing yeah, of all the things and just like post that, so then you can actually see how to order it, just in case I know that we've got some older people who just may not be able to do it. My sister, the online shopping is a mystery, right? So I'm going to show you and then we'll post that.
Speaker 1A tutorial, if you will, yeah.
Speaker 2And also make sure you share links to your favorite episode, links to our socials, just like spread the word yep and they can reach us on oh yeah, I already said that.
Speaker 1Oh, you already said the steeped part.
Speaker 2I'm so used to it at the end steeped at hold my sweet tea there we go well see, pearl has covered everything you said it now we've said it like more than once.
Grant's arrest and illegal recording issue
Speaker 1And if anybody's still listening, hold, my Sweet Tea is a Drunken Bee production and please stay safe out there and keep yourself cool, because it's sticky hot everywhere and we feel for you because we live in it all the time. Yep, and just because we're dipping doesn't mean you can't keep sipping. Bye, don't take your rage out on somebody. Thank you, you.