In July 2013, workers at a cable television company on Hayden Avenue in East Cleveland, Ohio, noticed a foul smell coming from a garage behind their building. They called the police. The garage was shared by several people, among them the man who lived in the second-floor apartment above the cable office. Jammed between his car and the wall, officers found a large garbage bag. Inside it, wrapped in a paisley bedsheet and several more layers of bags, was the body of an eighteen-year-old woman whose family had been searching for her for nine days.
By the next day, police had found two more women, wrapped the same way, within a few dozen yards of the garage. The man upstairs, Michael Madison, was a registered sex offender who had served four years in prison for attempted rape. In 2016 a Cuyahoga County jury convicted him of three counts of aggravated murder, and he was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Ohio upheld those sentences in 2020. As of October 2026 he remains on Ohio's death row, his execution stayed, in a state where executions have been on hold since 2019.
Most of what is on the record about Madison's early life comes from the penalty phase of his trial, where his lawyers presented it as mitigation, and from the Supreme Court of Ohio's summary of that evidence. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1977 and moved to Cleveland with his mother as an infant. His paternity was unclear and his father was never part of his life. His mother had a series of short-term relationships, and the court counted at least fourteen "transient parental figures" in the household while he was growing up, "few if any" of them good role models. The family moved often, and at times he was sent to live with relatives. In 1993 he and his half-brother stayed with an uncle in Pennsylvania who, according to the testimony, abused the half-brother and encouraged both boys to use drugs.
Madison told the defense experts that his mother choked him, beat him with a cord and punched him, and that her boyfriends beat him too; once he was taken to a hospital after one of them attacked him. A defense expert described neglect: not enough food, no help with schoolwork, no presents, no affection. An aunt reported that a babysitter had sexually abused him when he was six, though Madison himself told the state's psychiatrist he had never been sexually abused. An Associated Press report after the sentencing summarized the testimony as abuse by "his drug-addicted mother, a stepfather, some of his mother's boyfriends and other family members."
His adult record began early. Court records cited by the AP in 2013 showed drug-related convictions in 2000 and 2001. In 2002 he was sentenced to four years in prison for attempted rape and classified as a sex offender. The Ohio prison system's record also lists a separate Cuyahoga County conviction under the sex-offender address-notification law, and prosecutors referred at trial to his violations of his reporting obligations. By 2013 he was thirty-five, had two children, and lived alone in the apartment on Hayden Avenue. He had at least two girlfriends at the time, Brittney Darby and Shawnta Mahone, both of whom later testified against him.
Shetisha Sheeley was twenty-eight and lived in Cleveland. She had a twelve-year-old daughter, according to the Christian Post's summary of family interviews in July 2013. The lawyer who had represented her in a 2012 case, Michael Nelson, told the AP that she came from a troubled family background, was unemployed and lived alone in an apartment, and was "vulnerable as she struggled to make a life." She had spent three months in jail in 2012 because no one posted her $1,000 bond on a charge of firing a weapon from a vehicle; the charge was dismissed because no witness had seen her fire. "She lived on the edge," Nelson said. A minister who spoke for her family at a memorial service, Tanya Robinson Williams, remembered her as a strong, independent woman.
Her family last heard from her in September 2012. Her mother, Kim Sheeley, told the Plain Dealer after the body was identified that she did not know what her daughter had been doing in East Cleveland, because she did not live there. In his confession, Madison said he picked up a woman at a bar, brought her back to his apartment, and choked her to death in October 2012. He did not know her name. The Supreme Court later recorded that woman as Sheeley. Around the time she vanished, Darby noticed a fresh scab on Madison's nose. He told her he had broken up a fight between two girls.
Angela Deskins was thirty-eight and lived in Cleveland. Her younger sister, Catana, described her at the funeral home as the person who had looked after her when they were small. When Catana was three or four, Angela, then a student at a Catholic school, used to dress up as a nun and teach her numbers and letters. "She made learning fun," Catana said. "I looked forward to that every day." The family's statement called her "a wonderful daughter, sister and aunt who truly cared about her family and friends." East Cleveland's mayor, Gary Norton, said he knew her family and had gone to school with some of her relatives. Her family, he said, had made sure she always had a place to stay and money to live on, and she was "a very trusting person."
Her father lost contact with her around May 2013. At the trial, a friend of hers testified that at about that time he dropped her off at an abandoned barbecue place in East Cleveland where Madison was waiting for her. Phone records showed she had called Madison around the time she disappeared, though nothing in the record showed what was said. That same month Darby noticed a strong smell in Madison's apartment. He told her two raccoons had died in the front closet. When she pressed him, he began to sweat heavily and told her, "You don't want to see that." Investigators later found a piece of bloodstained carpet in that closet with a DNA profile consistent with Deskins's. Madison told police he remembered nothing about her death or what he had done with her body.
Shirellda Helen Terry was eighteen and had grown up in East Cleveland. She had a summer job at a Cleveland elementary school, worked from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and walked home afterward. Her stepfather, Derrick Minor, testified about her straight-A average; her sister, Britney, about her love of praise dancing. Her grandmother, Rosetta Terry, told the AP she went to Bible study and called and texted her mother often. "She was a good girl; she was a hugger," her grandmother said. "We used to tease her that we were going to put her on a hug diet." Her mother, Belinda Minor, said years later that her daughter was an avid reader who wanted to become a social worker and believed no child should be without food, water, shelter or a good education.
She met Madison about a week before she disappeared, and they exchanged numbers. In their texts he told her he was twenty-five and had no children. He was thirty-five and had two. He lied about his job as well. He suggested she come to his place. She answered: "We can hang[] out but I'm not going to your house[;] I don't trust you like that yet." On the afternoon of July 10, 2013, she texted him to ask whether he wanted to hang out now. He asked whether she was heading to his street. She told him she was at East 152nd and St. Clair. That was her last message.
Her family reported her missing and spent the next nine days searching, putting up flyers across the neighborhood. A few days after July 10, Darby noticed a long, deep scratch on Madison's shoulder; he said someone's girlfriend had scratched him in a fight. Mahone saw deep scratches on his face and noticed a bad smell in the apartment, which he said might be a dead animal.
On July 19, 2013, an employee of the cable company, East Cleveland Cable, called police about the stench and the flies coming from the shared garage. Officers found the bag beside Madison's car and cut it open. The body inside was later identified, through dental records and DNA, as Shirellda Terry.
Police could not reach Madison at first and then found him at his mother's house in Cleveland, where he was arrested after a standoff of about two hours. Statements he made after his arrest led investigators back to the area around his building. On July 20 they found a second bag under a brush pile behind the garage, holding the body of Shetisha Sheeley, identified through fingerprints and tattoos. A third bag lay in the basement of an abandoned house fifteen to twenty yards from the brush pile. It held Angela Deskins, wrapped in a sheet and a sports-themed blanket. Each woman's body had been bent at the waist and the head bound to the legs. Searchers went back on Sunday, July 21, and found no one else.
The Cuyahoga County medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Gilson, found that Terry and Deskins had been strangled with a belt. Sheeley's body was too decomposed for a precise cause of death; the office listed it as homicidal violence by unspecified means. She had a deep bruise on her face that was inflicted while she was alive.
Detectives questioned Madison over several days. On July 21, 2013, he signed a four-page confession. He admitted choking a woman to death in October 2012, leaving her in the apartment while he went out drinking, then "fold[ing] her up," putting her in layers of trash bags and moving her to the garage, where he left her for months before moving her outside. About the others, he said he could not remember the killings. He admitted inviting Terry to his apartment and said he had been "really drunk and high" that night; he remembered waking up next to her body and later putting it in the garage. Of Deskins he said he recalled nothing.
The detectives did not believe the memory loss. In recorded interviews later played to the jury, Detective Nate Sowa pointed out that after three or four days in jail Madison was showing no signs of alcohol withdrawal, and Detective Raymond Diaz added that heavy drinkers are "a wreck" after a day or two without a drink. "I can't really explain that," Madison said. Officers asked him several times whether they would find more victims than the three. He said he did not know.
A search of the apartment found personal items with a DNA profile consistent with Terry's and a pillowcase whose paisley pattern matched the sheet her body had been wrapped in.
By July 22 Madison had been charged with kidnapping and aggravated murder and was held on a $6 million bond, $1 million for each charge. On July 23 he was moved from the East Cleveland jail to the Cuyahoga County jail. Mayor Norton said Madison had made statements suggesting he might have been influenced by Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland man convicted in 2011 of killing eleven women whose remains were found in and around his home. Coming months after the rescue of three women held captive for a decade by Ariel Castro on Cleveland's west side, the case drew national attention.
A Cuyahoga County grand jury returned a fourteen-count indictment. For each woman there were two counts of aggravated murder, one alleging prior calculation and design and one alleging a killing during a kidnapping, and each carried a death-penalty specification that the murder was part of a course of conduct involving the killing of two or more people. There were also three kidnapping counts, a rape count involving Terry, three counts of gross abuse of a corpse, and a charge of having a weapon while under a legal disability, along with sexual-motivation, sexually-violent-predator and repeat-violent-offender specifications. The indictment alleged that Madison raped Terry between July 10 and July 19.
In August 2013 Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty told the court that his office's capital review committee would hold off on deciding whether to seek death until September 18, to give the defense time to present arguments against it. Madison's lawyer, David Grant, said the defense welcomed the chance. The prosecution went on to seek the death penalty.
The case took almost three years to reach a jury. One reason was a dispute over Madison's mind. His lawyers retained two forensic psychologists and told the court they did not intend to put his mental state at issue, but they acknowledged that their experts would testify that early childhood abuse causes changes in the brain. The state asked for its own examination. The trial judge, Nancy R. McDonnell of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, ordered Madison to be examined by a forensic psychiatrist of the state's choosing, Dr. Steven Pitt, and limited the examination to the question of brain damage, barring any questions about the crimes themselves. The defense appealed; the Eighth District Court of Appeals stayed the examination, then affirmed the order in 2015, and the Supreme Court of Ohio declined to take the case. Pitt then finished his interview, which was recorded.
In March 2016 Madison waived a jury on the weapons charge and on the sexually-violent-predator, repeat-violent-offender and prior-conviction specifications, leaving those to the judge.
Jury selection began on April 4, 2016, and was expected to take at least a week. Prosecutors said they planned to call about fifty witnesses. Before testimony began, the judge granted a defense motion barring prosecutors from comparing Madison to Sowell, though one witness's account of something Madison had said about Sowell was later admitted as evidence of intent.
The defense did not contest that Madison had killed the three women. David Grant argued instead that the killings were not planned but were "spontaneous eruptions of violence" by a man with drug and alcohol problems. That mattered: aggravated murder with prior calculation and design, and the kidnapping specifications, depended on proof that he had intended the killings beforehand.
The jury heard the recorded interrogations and the confession. Darby testified about the scab, the closet, the raccoon story and the scratches; Mahone about the smell and the scratches on his face. Deskins's friend described dropping her off to meet Madison. A friend of Madison's, Quiana Baker, testified that he had told her he was angry at women who acted as if they did not want sex with him and that they made him want to "Anthony Sowell" them. Another friend, Eugenia Thomas, testified that he had said he liked submissive women and had talked about hitting women and tying them up in a sexual context; all three victims had been found with bindings at the neck and legs. Thomas also said he had once told her he wanted to kill the mother of his children because she would not let him see them. Neighbors and friends, Darby among them, said he was a good father whose children loved him.
In closing, a prosecutor told jurors that Madison charmed the women to get close to them but harbored hatred for the women in his life, and called him a "professional" killer after the second murder. The defense repeated that he had not planned the deaths and was often confused and drinking.
The jury began deliberating on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, and returned its verdicts the next day, after about one day of deliberations and a three-week trial. It found Madison guilty of every count it considered, including all six aggravated murder counts, the kidnapping counts, the rape of Terry and the three counts of abuse of a corpse, together with all the death specifications. It found him not guilty of the firearm specifications. The judge found him guilty of the weapons charge and found him to be a sexually violent predator.
The same jury then had to decide whether to recommend death. Its options were life with parole eligibility after twenty-five years, life with parole eligibility after thirty years, life without parole, or death.
The defense case rested on two experts, Dr. Daniel L. Davis and Dr. Mark D. Cunningham, who testified that Madison's childhood had been full of "risk factors" (instability, physical and emotional abuse, neglect, head injuries, early substance abuse) that are associated with criminal and violent outcomes and that alter the developing brain itself. Cunningham said Madison "had choices" but lacked the foundation for making them that "less damaged people" have. "You get a choice," he told the jury, "you just don't get the same choice." A retired prison administrator, James E. Aiken, testified that Madison's age and record in custody suggested an "extremely low" risk to guards and other prisoners if he were sentenced to life.
The state answered with Pitt, who diagnosed antisocial personality disorder, saw a "victimization mindset," and found no mental disease or defect. He accepted that abuse can affect a child's development but said correlation is not causation and that the great majority of abused children do not go on to commit multiple murders. Madison, he said, was "entirely capable of making lawful choices." Darby's testimony that Madison had not been a heavy drinker during the period of the murders undercut what he had told police and the defense experts. Cunningham agreed that Pitt's diagnosis was "probably" accurate. The prosecution also questioned why the defense had not called Madison's mother, who lived in the area.
Prosecutors told jurors that Madison deserved to die because of the circumstances of the killings. The jury deliberated for less than a day. On May 20, 2016, all twelve jurors recommended death.
Judge McDonnell held the sentencing hearing on Thursday, June 2, 2016. She could have rejected the recommendation and imposed life without parole. She accepted it, finding that the nature of the crimes far outweighed the mitigating evidence, including his abusive and chaotic childhood, and sentenced him to death for each of the three murders. In her written analysis she gave no weight to his relationship with his children, "minimal weight" to his ability to adapt to prison, "some very slight weight" to his history of substance abuse, and more weight to his childhood than to the other factors, though not "great weight." She also imposed prison terms on the other counts, reported as fifty-one years by WKYC and as fifty years to life by the Supreme Court's public information office.
The families spoke. Linda Deskins, Angela's stepmother, described what her husband had been through. "Nothing anyone can say or do can make it better for him," she said. When Van Terry, Shirellda's father, came forward to give his statement, the AP reported, Madison smiled at him; Terry dived across the table toward him and was swarmed by sheriff's deputies, and Madison and his lawyers scrambled out of the way. Madison was not hurt. Terry was taken out of the courthouse, and the prosecutor's office said the incident would be reviewed. The judge declined to clear the courtroom, and the hearing resumed after a short recess.
Madison spoke only to answer the judge's questions. Grant told the court that Madison's history "certainly doesn't excuse what happened here but certainly provides a basis for understanding the type of person Michael Madison evolved into," and declined to comment afterward. McGinty called Madison the "worst of the worst." Assistant Prosecutor Christopher Schroeder said a death sentence would "send a message to the community that the strongest possible sentence will be imposed upon crimes of this nature." Madison entered the state prison system on June 13, 2016.
In Ohio, a death sentence goes directly to the state Supreme Court. Madison's lawyers, Timothy F. Sweeney and John B. Gibbons, raised twenty propositions of law. The court heard argument on September 11, 2019, and decided the case on July 21, 2020, in an opinion by Justice R. Patrick DeWine that all six other justices joined.
Nearly eighty pages of the defense brief concerned jury selection. Madison argued that the trial court had stopped his lawyers from asking prospective jurors how they would vote given the specific facts (three women kidnapped and killed, one raped, their bodies disposed of "like trash"), and that at least nine jurors who should have been removed as automatic death-penalty voters were kept, three of whom sat on the jury. He also challenged the removal of three people who opposed capital punishment, and argued that excluding jurors who oppose the death penalty on religious grounds violates the First Amendment. The court rejected each claim. The purpose of jury questioning, it said, "is not to establish how a juror will vote on the case to be tried; it is to discover whether any juror has a bias that would prevent him or her from individually weighing the facts of the case." Each disputed juror had, taken as a whole, committed to weighing mitigation.
The court's most significant legal holding concerned Pitt's examination. Madison argued that the Fifth Amendment barred the state from compelling him to talk to its psychiatrist when he had not claimed any mental disease. The court disagreed: when a capital defendant shows that he intends to present expert testimony based on a mental examination at the penalty phase, the trial court may order an examination by a state expert, and the state may use it in rebuttal. It also held that he had no right to have his lawyers in the room during the examination.
It rejected his complaints about the interrogation videos, the testimony of Baker and Thomas, and the prosecutors' language. On the label used at trial it wrote: "We see no reason why a prosecutor may not call a serial killer a serial killer." It found no ineffective assistance by trial counsel and no cumulative error.
The court did find one real problem. The evidence did not support kidnapping as to Sheeley or Deskins. Madison had told police he picked Sheeley up at a bar and brought her home, and there was no evidence he had already planned to kill her or held her against her will. As for Deskins, nothing showed how she came to be in the apartment, and the medical examiner could not say the bindings were placed on her while she was alive. The state had argued at oral argument that an electrical plug found between her lips was a gag; the court found that the photographs did not support that theory. It reversed both kidnapping convictions and dismissed the two death specifications based on them. For Terry, by contrast, it held that Madison's lies about his age, children and job, and the invitation to his apartment, supported kidnapping by deception.
Reweighing the case on its own, as Ohio law requires, the court gave the abusive childhood little weight, noting that Madison was thirty-six at the time of the murders, and gave "some slight weight" to his relationship with his children and to Aiken's testimony. It found that the course-of-conduct circumstance alone outweighed the mitigation for Sheeley and Deskins, and that for Terry the course of conduct, kidnapping and rape together did. It affirmed all three death sentences.
At some point after the affirmance, an execution date was set. Cleveland 19 reported in March 2024 that Madison had been scheduled to be executed in May; that report did not give the year, and no other report has named the date. On March 13, 2024, on Madison's motion, the Supreme Court of Ohio stayed the execution, ordering that the stay "shall remain in effect until exhaustion of all state postconviction proceedings, including any appeals." What claims Madison has raised in those proceedings has not been reported.
Even without that stay, his execution would have been unlikely. When he was sentenced in 2016, Ohio already lacked supplies of lethal-injection drugs, and the AP noted that it was unclear whether the state could resume executions at all. Gov. Mike DeWine took office in 2019, and executions have been on hold since then. DeWine has issued reprieves in batches, moving each scheduled execution years into the future. In October 2025, for example, his office moved two executions set for February and March 2026 to February and March 2029, citing "ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs" to the prison system "without endangering other Ohioans." In June 2026 DeWine asked lawmakers to abolish the death penalty. According to a Statehouse News Bureau report on October 14, 2026, neither a bill to abolish it nor a bill to allow other execution methods, such as the firing squad or gas, was expected to pass in the lame-duck session, and the question will fall to the governor and legislature who take office after DeWine's second term ends at the close of 2026. No governor's reprieve issued specifically for Madison has been reported; his execution is held by the court's stay.
As of October 14, 2026, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's offender search lists Michael Madison, inmate A683577, born October 15, 1977, as incarcerated at Ross Correctional Institution and designated a sexually violent predator. It lists three counts of aggravated murder with a sentence of death from Judge Nancy McDonnell's court, along with the rape, abuse of a corpse and weapons convictions. The record still lists three kidnapping counts, although the Supreme Court reversed two of them in 2020.
His convictions have been affirmed on direct appeal, and as of the March 2024 stay his state postconviction proceedings were still going on. No execution date is pending while the stay is in place. Whether he has filed or will file a federal habeas petition has not been reported.
In the days after the bodies were found, about a hundred people gathered at East 146th Street and St. Clair Avenue for Shirellda Terry, holding the flyers her family had posted. A Baptist minister, Pia Hoffman, said the family was managing through prayer and the support of friends and family. Three miles away, Angela Deskins's family gathered at a funeral home on Lakeshore Boulevard, where a screen showed pictures of her as a child in pigtails and later cradling babies. A fundraiser and memorial for all three women was held at the Empowerment Church. East Cleveland City Councilman Mansell Baker urged residents to keep in constant touch: "if it has to be a text message that says, 'Hey, I'm going from Point A to Point B, and if I don't call you by the time I get there, come looking for me.'"
Van Terry said in July 2013 that he did not want Madison executed. "Release him inside the prison population and let him deal with it every day of his life," he said. "I think he should suffer like we suffered." Of his daughter, a praise dancer, he said: "Right now, baby, go ahead and do your prayer dance for the Lord himself."
In 2019 Shirellda's mother, Belinda Minor, founded the Shirellda Helen Terry Foundation, which provides sleeping bags, pillowcases, school clothes and other necessities to children in need in Northeast Ohio. On the day the court stayed Madison's execution she spoke about forgiveness. "I forgave him so that I didn't have to be handcuffed with him in prison," she said. "I refuse to allow my daughter's legacy to be even handcuffed with him as he continues with the appeals process." She said she wanted "to hear her name ring out there."
Proven: Madison was convicted of the aggravated murders of Shetisha Sheeley, Angela Deskins and Shirellda Terry, of raping and kidnapping Terry, and of abusing all three bodies. The Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed those convictions and the three death sentences.
Reversed: the convictions for kidnapping Sheeley and Deskins, and the two death specifications based on them. The court found no evidence that either woman was taken or held against her will before she was killed.
Confessed: one killing, of a woman he did not name, in October 2012, which the courts recorded as Sheeley's. He said he did not remember killing Terry or Deskins. Wire reports from the trial say he told police he strangled two of the women "during fits of rage"; the Supreme Court's account of the written confession describes one admitted killing. The difference may reflect statements in the recorded interviews beyond the four-page confession.
Early reports that were later corrected: in July 2013, Mayor Norton described a killer "capable of killing three women in less than two weeks," and early reports said the women were believed to have died within the previous six to ten days. The investigation and the trial established that the deaths spanned about nine months.
Unproven: whether there were other victims. Detectives asked repeatedly; Madison said he did not know, and searchers found no one else. No other killing has been charged. Madison's remark about wanting to "Anthony Sowell" women was admitted as evidence of intent, and the mayor said he appeared to have been influenced by Sowell, but no connection between the two men beyond that has been reported.
1977: Madison born in Pennsylvania (October 15, per the Ohio prison record); moves to Cleveland with his mother as an infant.
2000 and 2001: drug-related convictions.
2002: sentenced to four years in prison for attempted rape; classified as a sex offender.
September 2012: Shetisha Sheeley's family hears from her for the last time.
October 2012: Madison, by his own confession, chokes a woman to death in his apartment.
About May 2013: Angela Deskins's father loses contact with her; a friend drops her off to meet Madison.
July 10, 2013: Shirellda Terry, 18, sends her last text to Madison and is not seen again.
July 19, 2013: cable company employee reports the smell; Terry's body found in the garage; Madison arrested at his mother's home after a standoff.
July 20, 2013: bodies of Sheeley and Deskins found nearby.
July 21, 2013: Madison signs a four-page confession.
July 22-23, 2013: charged with aggravated murder and kidnapping; held on $6 million bond; moved to the county jail.
2013: fourteen-count indictment returned.
2015: Eighth District Court of Appeals upholds the order for a state psychiatric examination.
April 4, 2016: jury selection begins.
May 5, 2016: jury convicts on all counts it considered.
May 20, 2016: jury unanimously recommends death.
June 2, 2016: Judge Nancy R. McDonnell sentences Madison to death; Van Terry lunges at him in court.
June 13, 2016: admitted to the Ohio prison system.
September 11, 2019: Supreme Court of Ohio hears oral argument.
July 21, 2020: State v. Madison, 2020-Ohio-3735: death sentences affirmed; two kidnapping convictions reversed.
March 13, 2024: Supreme Court of Ohio stays his execution until state postconviction proceedings end.
June 2026: Gov. DeWine asks the legislature to abolish the death penalty.
October 14, 2026: Ohio prison record lists Madison as incarcerated at Ross Correctional Institution under sentence of death.