Faylene made her major life decisions only after fasting and spending endless hours praying, usually at the sprawling LDS temple in Mesa.
One decision in the mid-1980s was to marry Curt Stradling, with whom she had two children, Austin and Jenna.
Brian Stauffer
Faylene and Doug Grant on the day of their remarriage, July 27, 2001.
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Faylene seemed as though she would be the last person to divorce a spouse. But she did in 1992, after asking God whether it was the right thing to do.
Doug went through his own divorce around that time, from first wife Temberly, with whom he had son Bowen.
In the early 1990s, Doug began consulting with then-Phoenix Suns chief Jerry Colangelo on nutritional issues. That led to a handshake deal with Colangelo for a gig as a salaried nutritionist for the professional basketball team. The arrangement lasted about a decade.
In early 1993, Doug (then separated from Temberly) saw an attractive woman in her late 20s walk into a fitness center he then owned in Mesa.
Faylene Eaves Stradling always had been athletic — she was a dedicated gymnast as a teenager — and she was there for a workout.
Doug recognized Faylene as the girl with the big smile from years earlier at Westwood High. He struck up a conversation with her, which led to a date.
Doug's divorce from Temberly became final in May 1993. He and Faylene were married in an LDS temple in Mesa on September 9.
Faylene later would give birth to two boys, Marley and Braven.
Doug split from one health-products firm in the late 1990s and started his own company, Optimal Health Systems.
His second marriage was far from idyllic. Despite the LDS proscription against infidelity — "Next to the sin of murder comes the sin of sexual impurity" — Doug later admitted to having cheated on Faylene from early in the union.
It's impossible to know the extent to which Doug's dalliances, which Faylene long suspected, affected her mental health. But she did express suicidal thoughts in her journals as early as 1995, two years after she and Doug got married.
"The reason I've felt suicidal," Faylene later wrote in July 2000, another time she mentioned harming herself, "is I've been taking on EVERYONE'S opinions, behavior, criticisms as MY problem."
Another of her journal entries around that time bears scrutiny:
"What if I were on a plane and an emergency situation came up? What if I hadn't listened to the pre-flight instructions and thus it took me too long to learn them now in this present time of need to save my life and what if I died?
"Some may say my death was punishment for not listening or . . . just a coincidental happening resulting from the fact that I didn't listen and therefore couldn't save my life in time. But I say simply, it was my purpose to die at that time or these circumstances would not have led to my death — some other circumstances would have led to the continuation of my life."
Perhaps, if Doug Grant isn't guilty, Faylene didn't intend to kill herself by taking the Ambien before she drowned. Instead, akin to her fantasy about dying on the plane, she simply swallowed the pills, stepped into the bathtub, and put the rest in God's hands.
Doug Grant and Sy Ray are kindred spirits in some ways. Both are bound by ambition, ego, and a gift of patter that has held them in good stead in their professions.
A week after Sy Ray joined the Grant case as an investigator at the start of 2002, another detective interviewed Faylene's daughter Jenna for the first time. Three months had passed since that dreadful September morning at the home on East Michelle Way.
Speaking rapidly, the bright sixth-grader said she had awakened at 7:15 a.m. for school on the fateful day.
Jenna said Doug already had been up and in the kitchen, "probably" getting some food for one of her little brothers when she went to take a shower.
About 7:45, Jenna said Doug told her, in an obvious state of panic, to grab the boys and take them over to a neighbor's.
"I didn't know what happened, though I knew it had something to do with Mom," she told the detective.
He asked Jenna about the relationship between her mother and Doug.
"My step-dad was really, really nice to my mom," she said. "Treated her like a queen . . . He was really glad that they got back together, and they never fought."
The interview was something of a bombshell for the Gilbert police. Doug Grant never had said a word to them about having been in the kitchen with his son.
Sy Ray soon had a second interview with Jenna. A recording of that interview shows that Jenna repeatedly said she didn't recall much about that morning precisely, or at all.
She couldn't remember, for example, whether Doug had been wet (from pulling Faylene out of the tub) when he'd sent them from the house, though she tended to think he hadn't been.
However, when Detective Ray appeared before a grand jury three years later, his recounting of his interview with Jenna made her sound far more definitive.
