MOUNT CLEMENS -- Jailhouse letters written by convicted murderer Stephen Grant to convicted child killer Jennifer Kukla and other female inmates shows a man full of swagger about his celebrity status and his ability to entice women.

In a series of more than 20 letters hidden on a food cart, Grant wrote about how much he missed his two children, bragging about how people "call me a celebrity," and flirting with Kukla.

"I still laugh when I remember your one note," Grant wrote to Kukla. "You asked 'are you scared of me?' (LOL). You are too nice to be scared of. I just wish we could arrange a rendezvous in the closet one of these days."

Grant is incarcerated in the Macomb County Jail awaiting sentencing on Feb. 21, after being convicted in December of murdering and dismembering his wife, Tara Grant.

Kukla was convicted of first-degree murder in September, after she stabbed her daughters Alexandra, 8, and Ashley, 5, inside her Macomb Township trailer. Kukla, who also killed three family dogs and a pet mouse during her Feb. 4, 2007 killing spree, is serving a life sentence in the Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, where she is receiving mental health treatment.

Grant's letters, which were written from June to October 2007 while Kukla was also incarcerated in the Macomb County Jail, were released today by the Macomb County Prosecutors Office in response to Freedom of Information requests.

Prosecutors also released letters Grant wrote to other women, including Crystal Conklin, a 27-year-old Warren woman who is charged with fatally beating her 2-year-old son.

Also released today were audio files of Grant leaving messages on Tara Grant's cell phone after he'd fatally strangled her on Feb. 9, 2007, in an apparent effort to cover up his crime.

Grant wrote in one letter to Kukla that he missed his wife. "You are the 1st person to ask if I miss Tara," Grant wrote. "She, for the last 13 years, has been the one I went to with my problems and now I don't have that person to ask for advice." He added a sad face at the end of the sentence.

Grant appeared to brag about his celebrity status in another letter: "Ask the other ladies if they know 'Steve Grant,'" he wrote. "They probably do."

"I get letters from lots of people," he later wrote to Conklin. "Some are total strangers, but I have also gotten letters from people I used to know."

Grant also wrote that he is keeping a journal for his children, "so when they are older, they can hear about where they really came from from two people who loved them and each other."

Authorities found out about the letters between Grant and Kukla when an assistant Macomb County Prosecutor called Macomb County Sheriffs detectives to inform them that a woman identifying herself as "J.C." was being interviewed on radio station 95.5 FM, claiming to have knowledge that Grant had been passing notes to Kukla.

Detectives heard the last few minutes of the interview, and then contacted the radio station's program manager, who provided them with the woman's telephone number.

The woman, had served a jail sentence the previous summer after being arrested for probation violation, worked passing out food in the mental health ward, where women and men are housed separately. She said she passed notes back and forth between Grant and Kukla by hiding them underneath a Kool-Aid container on the food cart.

"She said the notes from Stephen would say 'how he killed his wife and that he thinks he's cool that he is a celebrity now because he is on TV,' " according to an unsigned police report written on Nov. 28, 2007, which explains how detectives found out about the letters.

According to other police reports released by prosecutors today, Detectives Mark Grammatico and Jason Abro interviewed Kukla in prison. She told them she wrote to Grant at first pretending to be a girl named Sarah, because "everybody on our side wanted to find out what he would say about his crime," Kukla told police. She also told them she had given the letters to her father.

original source:detnews.com