She was right there in the bedroom with him, and he was asleep. The morning light was barely coming through the dirty window. Her hands were shaking as she pressed the phone to her ear. The operator asked for her address.
She whispered that she’d been tied up but had freed herself. He was in the same room. She didn’t know if he would wake up. The 911 call on September 13, 2016, ended a reign of terror that had gone unpunished for over a decade.
The man sleeping beside her had gotten away with murder five times. Shawn Grate had killed five women over the previous eleven years, living in the same house as two of their bodies. Police in Ashland, Ohio, had no idea the quiet, friendly man walking around town was a serial killer. Shawn Grate was born on August 8, 1976, in Mansfield, Ohio.
He was the youngest of three children and grew up feeling neglected by his mother. He didn’t start speaking until he was four years old. Even then, it seemed like a way to withhold what his mother wanted from him. He admitted his family relationships were dysfunctional.
“I really love my mom. But there’s a lot of hate,” he said. “It’s like boyfriend-girlfriend hate, but it’s a mom-son hate. ”
His mother withheld affection and said brutally mean things to him.
He developed fantasies of killing her, and eventually, of killing other women. Outside the home, things weren’t much better. He was bullied and ostracized at school. He attended a school for children with learning difficulties and was diagnosed with ADHD.
From the age of eighteen, he was regularly reported to police for domestic violence. He needed to control the women in his life completely. Violence was his most effective tool. In 1999, he was accused of threatening to kill his girlfriend, who was pregnant with his child.
He admitted attacking her and was put on probation for five years. It didn’t stop his violence. In 2003, he was arrested again on two counts of domestic violence. One former girlfriend dated him for seven months.
It was a violent relationship. He wouldn’t let her leave the house without knowing where she was going and when she’d be back. They got into physical fights. He would hide under the cushions of the sofa to secretly watch her.
When she had a domestic violence incident and reported it, she left. She was lucky to have gotten away. She could have easily been one of his victims. In 2006, when Shawn met twenty-three-year-old Dana Lowry, a mother of two, things changed forever.
Shawn said she was selling magazines door-to-door while he lived with his mother. He believed his mother wasn’t receiving her subscriptions. When he confronted Dana, she offered to split the cost. He thought she was trying to scheme him.
He brought her inside the family home. “I took her out, turned her around. She came towards me. I knocked her hands around, knocked her whole body around, and just grabbed her like she was meant to be choked up.
”
He strangled her until she lost consciousness. Then he laid down beside her. “It felt right in my hands,” he said. Strangulation was his method of control.
He could let a woman look, bring her back, and make her do what she was told. It was more than just control. He loved the control. Dana woke up.
He panicked. He grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed her in the neck. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. The murder of Dana was just the beginning.
He had discovered the killer within. When asked why he stabbed her in the throat, he said, “I had to do it quick. We had company coming over. ”
In 2005, Shawn dumped Dana Lowry’s body on Victory Road in Marion County, Ohio.
When she was found two years later, police had no clues to her identity. She was an unnamed victim. For the next five years, Grate, now a father of two, was involved in petty crime and violence at home. In 2011, he married and started a business making wooden signs.
His wife got pregnant quickly. By the end of the year, she left him. She was lucky she got out. That would have been a dangerous point for her.
His life fell apart. He lost custody of his children. His business closed. He floated from county to county.
He had drug charges, divorce, child custody issues, and a domestic violence case. Everything was coming to a head. By 2015, he had befriended thirty-one-year-old Rebecca Lacy. She paid the ultimate price for his frustrations.
She was reported missing in 2015. According to Shawn, they were at a bar playing pool together. He told her he needed to use the restroom. He heard his wallet clip zip and noticed four dollars were missing.
He choked her out and killed her. Over four dollars. Rebecca was found in the woods. Authorities initially thought she had overdosed.
Shawn had gotten away with murder for the second time. The fact that police ruled it a non-murder death made him even more confident in his own abilities. He felt he could kill again and again. The following year, Shawn started a new relationship with twenty-nine-year-old Candace Cunningham.
It followed the same pattern. Things started off well, but became fraught with domestic violence. He had a problem with her suicidal thoughts. He called her a “pill popper.
”
“I fought with her for like three days,” he said. “Then I grabbed her and that’s when I choked her. She passed out. I was irritable.
I had enough. I just finished her. ”
He choked her out, set the house on fire, then realized he had to hide the body. He went back in, dragged her out, and left her in the woods.
These women were disposable to him. He had the ultimate power and control. Sixteen months after murdering Rebecca, Shawn skipped town and moved to Ashland County. Shortly after he arrived, a local woman known to police went missing.
Elizabeth Griffith was a regular. She wasn’t a regular in a bad way. She called police often for neighbor issues. Many officers knew her well.
Elizabeth was twenty-nine years old. She was trusting, almost childlike. That made her a prime victim for him. Shawn said they were joking about how she wished she would die.
“So I’ll help you,” he said. He would choke Elizabeth to the point where she said she wanted to live. But in this instance, she didn’t say it. He choked her to death.
“Even after she stopped breathing, I held on till she messed her pants pretty much,” he said. The most shocking thing about the confession video was how normal he looked. How casual the conversation was. You would think they were talking about the weather instead of a horrific murder.
He stripped her clothes off. He hog-tied her and buried her at the bottom of a closet on the second floor of the home he was squatting in. He duct-taped the door frame to keep the smell from getting out. Elizabeth was last seen on August 16.
Police and her family were desperately searching for her. Twenty-three days later, another local woman, Stacy Stanley, was reported missing. It was a chance encounter that gave Shawn the opportunity to kill again. Stacy had pulled into a gas station for a flat tire.
Shawn happened to be walking in the area. He helped her change the tire. They drove off. She was choked out, murdered, and left in the basement of the home where he was squatting.
He didn’t know Stacy. There was no personal connection. She entered the house on Covert Court. She didn’t come out alive.
“She grabbed her mace and sprayed me the first time,” he said. “I turned her around, put her on the bed. She did this backhand and got me. She sprayed me again.
Good shot. But I just lost it. I turned her around and clenched on. I didn’t let go.
”
“How did you know to stop? ” he was asked. “I didn’t stop even after that for like two or three minutes. ”
The way he described killing Stacy was mechanical.
He kept holding her neck so she couldn’t breathe because he wanted to make sure she was dead. The remains of two missing women were now in the house Shawn was using. He had murdered five women. Once again, he continued with his life, charming acquaintances.
He made another new friend, a woman who was also a friend of Elizabeth Griffith. They had played badminton together. She found his wholesome, trustworthy appearance charming. He talked about marriage with her.
They had discussions about God. He never had a bad thing to say about her. He certainly didn’t intend to hurt her. On September 11, 2016, Shawn took his new friend back to his home and kept her there against her will.
She sensed something was wrong. Her gut told her something was off with this guy. She was right. By the time it became clear what was happening, the door was shut.
She knew there was no escape. Detective Curt Dorsky was dispatched to the scene. They got a call that a female had been abducted and was in a house near a laundromat. “I didn’t think it was real at first,” he said.
“We just don’t have that sort of call typically in Ashland. ”
Shawn Grate was asleep beside her. She was desperate not to wake him. Officers raced to find her, but they didn’t know her exact location.
“I came around the corner of the wrong house and looked towards the other house and I saw her hand outstretched in the glass,” said Dorsky. “A sight that I’ll never forget. ”
The bedroom door had no handle. It was locked.
She couldn’t get out. “We all just ran to the door,” Dorsky said. “I think I would have gone through a wall if I had to get to her. ”
The kidnapped victim was safe.
Then officers went in search of the man who had abducted her. They found Grate in a bedroom. The conditions were deplorable. Dirty and disgusting.
After he woke up and realized what was happening, he was super nice and cordial. There was no resistance. Officers took him to the patrol car, thinking they were dealing with an abduction. “He was nice.
It’s crazy. He was very cordial,” said one officer. “At one point, he was cuffed behind his back and when I came back, he had flipped his cuffs to the front by slipping his legs through his arms. He was very relaxed back there.
”
During his interview with police, Shawn revealed that if they searched the house, they would find two missing women. Detectives found a body upstairs in a closet. Then another in the basement. The Stanley family arrived at the police department and identified their mother’s remains by tattoo and jewelry.
The next day, they learned the identity of Elizabeth Griffith. Finding Elizabeth was difficult for the police. Many of them knew her well. It was hard to accept that she had been killed that way.
Once Grate started talking, he didn’t stop. He confessed to three other murders: Rebecca, Dana, and Candace. He was already going to prison for the first two. He also wanted to rub it in the police’s face that he had done this and they had no idea.
Local TV producer Cassandra Nist arrived at the Ashland County Jail to speak with the serial killer face to face. “You want to believe he’s going to be your type-A villain,” she said. “Scary looking, creepy. That was not the case whatsoever.
”
She looked up and Shawn was standing there, staring at her. He had his glasses on. He looked like he had just woken up. But he was smiling.
He was in a good mood. The women murdered by Shawn Grate had one thing in common. They were in vulnerable situations and didn’t suspect anything sinister about him. He would profile his victims first.
He would find out what their vulnerable spot was. With one victim, he knew she was incredibly religious. So he presented himself as religious too, and that got him in. They were trusting and loving.
That was exactly what he needed. He turned their trust against them and used it to kill them. Great reveled in the attention his crimes were receiving. He sat on his cell reading the Bible, but when the four, five, and six o’clock news came on, he stood up and stared at the television.
He was watching his reign of terror play out in the media. On April 23, 2018, Shawn Grate faced trial in Ashland County Courthouse for the murders of Stacy Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith. He was afraid of the death penalty. He said he wanted to do his time and spend the rest of his life thinking about what he had done.
He didn’t want anyone injecting him with anything. On June 1, 2018, he was sentenced to death for the murders of Stacy Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith. His time in court wasn’t over. He pleaded guilty to the murders of Candace Cunningham, Rebecca Lacy, and Dana Lowry.
He received life without parole on top of his death sentence. When asked about remorse, he said he was about 50/50 because some women he felt deserved it. Some women he felt he was helping. Even in custody, he insisted it was out of character behavior.
But the people who watched him wouldn’t call it that. They saw the charm, the control, the narcissism. He loved the attention. He got his true place in life, up on a pedestal with everyone wanting information from him, wanting to know why he did things, wanting to get inside his head.
The only question that remains is whether there are more victims out there.
