"She specifically, without a doubt, recalls not only seeing Doug in the kitchen that morning [but] also talking to him," Ray testified.
"When I asked her how she could be sure it was that day that she was remembering, not some other day she is confusing, she began crying, explaining to me that [it was] the morning that her mother dies."
Brian Stauffer
Faylene and Doug Grant on the day of their remarriage, July 27, 2001.
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Nowhere on the videotape and separately recorded audiotape of Ray's interview with Jenna does she claim to possess such clarity.
At the end of January 2002, detectives Ray and Palmer paid a surprise visit to Doug Grant at home. Grant repeated his account of the events of several months earlier — showing them how he'd found Faylene in the tub. The cops left after a few hours.
A few days after that interview, the Medical Examiner's Office issued its official findings in the case, concluding that the cause of Faylene's death was Ambien intoxication and drowning, the manner of death "undetermined."
Dr. Arch Mosley, a pathologist who now works in Coconino County, could have called her death a homicide, suicide, accident, or because of natural causes, but he didn't.
He tells New Times that no one has brought anything to his attention since since then that indicates the manner should be ruled anything but "undetermined."
"If I had been presented with anything compelling to change it, I would have," Mosley says.
The testing of Faylene's blood turned up only the Ambien — about five times the recommended dosage — which was curious because police at the scene had noted that the bottle of the recently filled prescription for the muscle relaxant Soma also was missing four pills.
(Where the Soma pills went is a mystery. Also, the cops apparently lost all the pill bottles seized at the Grants' home and never collected any of Faylene's vomit for testing, among other investigative errors.)
Detective Ray first met with physician assistant Chad White in March 2002. According to an audiotape of the interview, White told him:
"When I was giving her CPR, [Doug] kept saying, 'I'm so sorry. I gave her a sleeping pill and then she went and got in the bathtub, and I woke up.' He was real frantic about it."
Ray's police report about his interview with White included this summary statement: "According to Chad, Douglas was adamant about [getting] the Ambien, which is a sleeping pill."
That was what Faylene's sister, Cherlene, had told the cop about what White supposedly had revealed to her.
But the audio of the White interview reveals that the physician assistant never did say Doug Grant was "adamant" about securing the Ambien scrip, only that Grant had reiterated the troubles they were having getting to sleep.
The pattern of Sy Ray's written police reports not matching (in important instances) what witnesses told him would not reveal itself for years.
In part, it would take a diligent defense attorney armed with a rare court order to uncover the extent of the detective's duplicity.
Ray told Chad White and others that the toxicology report was going to show that the combination of Ambien and Soma would have rendered the woman incapable of drawing her own bath and getting into the tub.
In other words, Doug Grant had to have stuck his wife in the tub where she would drown.
But Ray already knew the testing had failed to turn up the Soma in Faylene's blood and that he had (and still has) no proof that the woman ever did take the Soma.
Ray apparently never entertained the possibility that Faylene could have taken the Ambien herself and then gotten into the bath before the drug kicked in.
The detective also interviewed Sherry Lines, a longtime friend of Faylene's and a sister Mormon.
A tape of the March 2002 interview shows that Lines said Faylene had confided in her months before her death "that she wasn't going to be around that much longer."
"I've read some of her writings, and they sound very similar to that," Detective Ray replied to her.
Faylene had been dating Lines' brother Lance in early 2001, Lyons said, and she had expressed no intentions of reuniting with Doug Grant.
Lines told Ray that Faylene's obsession about her approaching death had kept her from getting closer to Lance.
"She had come to me concerned that, 'Maybe I shouldn't even be involved with him; I really don't want to break his heart,'" Lines told Sy Ray in the recorded interview. "Faylene said, 'I really don't think I'm gonna be around, and I'm just trying to get everything ready.'"
But Sy Ray later wrote nothing in his police report about the interview concerning Faylene's fears of turning her new love interest into a young widower, and not anything about her profound revelations of an early demise.
"Sherry had heard nothing from Faylene that would make her think that she was suicidal," is all the detective wrote, which though technically true, was misleading.
Ray also neglected to note that Lines told him that Faylene was "just really happy" after remarrying Doug. "She was really peaceful."
