Detroit Man Shelly Andre Brooks Is Charged With Murdering Seven Women on the City's East Side
Police said DNA linked Brooks to many of the killings and that he was a suspect in seven more. A woman who survived an attack in June helped lead them to him.
Published
For years, women had been found beaten to death in abandoned buildings and vacant lots on Detroit's east side. On August 15, 2006, Shelly Andre Brooks was charged with murdering seven of them.
Brooks, 37, of Detroit, was charged with seven counts of premeditated murder and seven counts of felony murder. He had been in custody since July 30 in connection with the rape and beating of a woman in June, and she gave police a description of her attacker. Police said the seven women, aged 30 to 53, were drug users who had been raped and beaten to death. They were Sandra Davis, 53; Pamela Greer, 33; Marion Woods-Daniels, 36; Rhonda Myles, 45; Thelma Johnson, 30; Melissa Toston, 38; and a woman whose body was too decomposed to identify.
Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings said DNA evidence connected Brooks to many of the cases and that he remained a suspect in seven other, "very similar" deaths. "We really do not believe that he would have stopped until he was caught," she said. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said Brooks's mother had been a drug addict and that he had been abused as a child. "He really was killing his mother all over again," she said.
In March 2007 a jury convicted Brooks of first-degree murder in the 2002 killing of Pamela Greer, whose body was found in the same abandoned apartment building as Sandra Davis's, and he faced an automatic sentence of life without parole.
Police said in 2006 that the killings they suspected Brooks of began in 1999, while the seven killings he was charged with spanned about the previous five years.
Sources
- Man charged in deaths of 7 Detroit prostitutes, NBC News / Associated Press
- Suspected Serial Killer Gets Life in Prison For Murdering Prostitute, Charged in 6 Other Killings, Fox News / Associated Press