BELLEFONTE, Pa. -- For 20 years, Ray Gricar prosecuted hundreds of cases in the pale-cream courthouse on a hill overlooking this small Victorian county seat.

Then, three years ago today, he didn't return to his office, his cases, his family or his home.

The sudden disappearance of the 59-year-old Centre County district attorney stunned the Central Pennsylvania town of 6,400. But now, with no credible leads in the case, his name no longer spurs burning discussions.

Mr. Gricar's relatives and friends appear resigned to the fact that the initial urgency of the search following his disappearance has died down.

"Three years out now, I think it's kind of wearing on me," said Tony Gricar, who took on the role of family spokesman after his uncle vanished. "My anticipation is that, unless something comes up, we probably won't be hearing about this case much more, unless that proverbial needle in the haystack pops up."

Bellefonte Police Officer Darrel Zaccagni, the lead investigator on the case until January 2007, said his deepest regret is not delivering closure to the family.

He, like many others, rattles off the three obvious theories about what happened to Mr. Gricar: He was murdered. He committed suicide. He simply got up and walked away from everything.

"Depends on what information came in at what time, but we never had a solid lead, so it was a day-to-day changing thing on what could have happened here," Officer Zaccagni said.

Mr. Gricar's last reported conversation was with Patty Fornicola, his longtime girlfriend with whom he shared a home. He telephoned that he was driving along Route 192 toward Lewisburg, Pa., and wouldn't be home in time to take care of Honey, the family dog.

The scant evidence in the case has done little but raise more questions. Mr. Gricar's red-and-white Mini Cooper was found empty, save for some cigarette ashes, in the parking lot of a Lewisburg antiques mall. Ms. Fornicola told police that he didn't smoke and would not allow someone to do so in his car.

In July 2005, Mr. Gricar's laptop computer was found nearby, in the Susquehanna River, minus its hard drive. The hard drive was found along the riverbank three months later, about 100 yards from where the laptop was found. FBI computer specialists could not recover data from it.

"You have that whole great big river, but yet you find a computer that is 12 by 8 inches, and then you find the hard drive that is 2 inches by 3 inches, but we can't find a 6-foot body that weighs 180 pounds?" Officer Zaccagni said.

"It's like the evidence drops off the face of the earth," said Michael Madeira, the current Centre County district attorney.

He and Bellefonte Police Detective Matt Rickard, who took over the case from Officer Zaccagni, meet every month to discuss it.

"No one that has anything to do with this case has forgotten about it and simply moved on. We have done other things. We have to -- our jobs require us to. But no one has simply shrugged their shoulders and said, 'Oh, well, that one's done. Let's move on,' " Mr. Madeira said.

Barbara Gray, Mr. Gricar's ex-wife and mother of his daughter, Lara, wrote in an e-mail that she believes an "appropriate revisiting" of the case is worthwhile because of the possibility that someone might have a renewed willingness to come forward with information.

Ms. Gray wrote that their daughter was so "precious" to Mr. Gricar that she couldn't "imagine him consciously choosing to leave her."

Tony Gricar struggles when asked how he defines hope as it pertains to the case.

"You're just constantly bracing yourself for knowing that at any moment it could pop up -- something related to the case or a break ... That's something we're always going to have to live with in the back of our minds. There's also that point, for better or worse, where you have to start kind of separating yourself from it and just go along with your daily life," he said.

Ms. Fornicola, who met Mr. Gricar while she worked as an advocate for victims and witnesses, did not want to discuss him or his disappearance. She still works just yards away from his old desk in the district attorney's office, now as a clerk.

Detective Rickard has sifted through several boxes of case information and has made trips to the house Mr. Gricar and Ms. Fornicola shared to look through his belongings.

"I was hoping over the past year or so that everything I have looked through, which is literally thousands and thousands of pages of information, that something would kind of stand out," he said. "It kind of eats at you after a while."

Carla Baron, a psychic called in by the police department, said she still spends a lot of time reading about the case. She believes Mr. Gricar was killed.

"We've been following along, but on their end of it, it seems to have run cold," she said, referring to the police investigation. "We offered what we could."

Mr. Madeira said the investigation is no farther along than it was more than a year ago.

"If you had to take a snapshot of where this case is now ... it would be Detective Rickard looking at a piece of paper. That doesn't discount the way Patty feels, the way Lara feels, the way Tony feels. They're family; they're close to him in a personal way," Mr. Madeira said.

"But from the standpoint of where the case is, it would be Matt Rickard sitting at his desk, reviewing page 256 out of 1,000, or whatever it is."