At about 6 a.m. on September 13, 2016, Ashland police took a 911 call from a woman who said she was being held inside a house against her will. For two nights she had been tied up and raped. Her captor had finally fallen asleep beside her. She worked her hands and legs loose, slid off the bed and reached a phone. Officers went to a vacant two-story house at 363 Covert Court and arrested the man inside, Shawn Michael Grate, 40. Searching the house, they noticed a smell they could not mistake. It led them to the bodies of two women.
Within hours Grate was leading detectives to a third body in neighboring Richland County, and over the following weeks he confessed to more. By 2019 courts in three Ohio counties had convicted him of murdering five women over roughly ten years, beginning with a young mother from Louisiana whose remains had lain unidentified for more than a decade.
Grate was born in 1976 and grew up in Marion, Ohio. Most of what is known of his childhood comes from the mitigation phase of his trial, as summarized by the Supreme Court of Ohio, and from his older half-sister, Barbara Charter, who testified for him.
His mother, Teresa McFarland, had married at 14. With her first husband she lived in Canada and in Ypsilanti, Michigan, before the marriage ended; Charter said her father had been violent toward her mother and that her mother drank. When Charter was three, she and her mother settled in Marion, where McFarland worked at a boat factory and as a dancer at a bar. There she met Terry Grate. They married in 1974 and had two sons, Jason in 1974 and Shawn in 1976, and divorced around 1980.
Charter described a house without warmth. Their mother, she said, often went out partying on weekends and was not seen again until Sunday night. By the age of 12 Charter was acting as "the mother of the house," looking after her two younger brothers until she was about 16. She married at 17 and moved out, and after that, she said, everything turned to chaos. When Shawn was 11 his mother moved to Kentucky with a man she later married, and he lived with his father for the next four years. Charter described the bond between Shawn and his mother as a struggle over who would control whom, visible from his earliest years.
School was hard for him. He was held back in kindergarten and again in first grade, and testing found dyslexia. He was a gifted baseball player until, at 14, he broke his arm and doctors found a large tumor in the bone. Part of his hip was used to rebuild the arm, and he never played again. His Facebook profile said he graduated from River Valley High School in 1995.
The year after high school, in 1996, Grate was convicted of burglary in Marion County and sentenced to four years in prison; a judge granted him early release in 1997 and put him on community control. In 1999 he pleaded guilty in Marion County to abduction and received five more years of community control, with a second abduction count and a child endangerment charge dropped. That year a son was born to him and a woman named Lisa Ball. Around the age of 20 he was treated at Marion General Hospital for depression and prescribed an antidepressant.
Christina Hildreth, who dated him for five years, said in 2016 that he had beaten, held and strangled her during what she called "a very volatile relationship." His moods, she said, could swing in a moment: "One minute he's happy, laughing, fine. The next minute he's looking at you evil." She said she finally got away after an argument in 2010 that ended with her in the hospital. In one attack, which she placed in June, he flipped her over a bed, punched her and broke her hand, then drove her to the hospital and stayed in the room, so that she was afraid to speak to the nurses until he stepped out. When police came, he ran. She later discovered he had been hiding inside her sofa for a week. He attacked her again and threatened her with a hammer before he was arrested, and he told officers he would come back for her. "I thought he was going to kill me," she said.
In December 2011 he married Amber Nicole Bowman in Richland County. They had a daughter and divorced about a year later; Bowman kept custody and did not allow visits. In March 2013 she reported threatening calls from him, which police linked to her refusal to give him money. Police in Mansfield recorded a run of small offenses over the next two years: helping a shoplifter at a Dollar General in 2012, theft and marijuana possession in 2013, scrawling the word "cheese" on a woman's window in 2014, four probation violations, and in February 2015 an accusation that he stole jewelry from a girlfriend. He worked for a time as a maintenance man at a Mansfield hotel. From 2012 until March 2016 his listed address was on Cliffbrook Drive in Mansfield. After that, the Richland County sheriff said, he was believed to have been homeless.
None of this marked him, in the eyes of the courts, as a killer. But by the time he moved to Ashland County in 2016, by his own later admission, he had already killed three women.
Dana Nicole Lowrey was 23, a mother of two daughters from Minden, Louisiana. In May 2006 she was in Marion County, Ohio, selling magazine subscriptions door to door. According to Marion County Sheriff Tim Bailey, she sold magazines to Grate's mother and the magazines never came. Prosecutors said this angered Grate, who lured Lowrey into his car and took her to his house, where he choked her until she lost consciousness and then killed her in the basement. He wrapped her body in sheets, left it off Victory Road north of Marion and later set it on fire.
On March 10, 2007, her skeletal remains were found in Salt Rock Township, off Victory Road. Nobody knew who she was. For twelve years she was a Jane Doe, and the sheriff's office released a composite sketch in the hope that someone would recognize her.
After his arrest in 2016, Grate told investigators about a woman he had killed in Marion and said her name might have been Dana or Diana. That fragment, combined with work by Project LINK and the volunteer genetic genealogists of the DNA Doe Project, led investigators to her daughters, whose DNA confirmed her identity in May 2019. Sheriff Bailey announced her name in early June 2019. Officials believe she was Grate's first victim. Her remains were later returned to her family in Louisiana. "Dana is home to be near her family," Marion County Prosecutor Ray Grogan said.
Rebekah Leicy was an acquaintance of Grate's in Mansfield. She was reported missing in Richland County in early 2015, and in March 2015 her body was found on County Road 1908 in Ashland County. The coroner found no signs of injury and ruled that she had died of a drug overdose, and her death was closed.
After Grate's arrest, Mansfield police reopened it. Prosecutors later alleged that he killed her between January 1 and February 6, 2015, most likely at a house on North Walnut Street in Mansfield, and moved her body afterward. Richland County Prosecutor Gary Bishop said the evidence showed she had been strangled.
Candice Cunningham had been living with Grate for several months in 2016. Bishop said Grate killed her on or about June 6, 2016, and put her body in a creek behind a Mansfield residence. The charges against him in her death later included arson and aggravated arson. Her remains were recovered on September 13, 2016, the day of his arrest, behind a burned-out house on Park Avenue East in Madison Township, after he led police there. Her mother, Dianna Gardner, said of her: "She wasn't perfect, but she was perfect in my eyes." Some news outlets spell her first name Candace.
The same month Cunningham died, Grate moved from Richland County into neighboring Ashland County. According to the Supreme Court of Ohio's summary of the trial record, he built a makeshift fort in the woods near the village of Mifflin, broke into two campers at Charles Mill Lake Park, stole a television, a DVD player, a chain saw, blankets and food, and camped in one of them while the owners were away. In mid-July he broke into the Mifflin Flea Market. Around July 22 he broke into the vacant house on Covert Court in Ashland. It had electricity but no water. He brought in a VCR and DVD player and, as he later told police, "kind of made [it] a home." He worked briefly at a Save-A-Lot grocery.
Through July and August he ate regularly at the Salvation Army's Kroc Center in Ashland. There he met a woman identified in court records as L.S. They took long walks around town a couple of times a week, talking about the Bible and life. He wanted a romance; she told him she wanted only friendship. L.S. introduced him to her neighbor.
Elizabeth Griffith was 29. She lived alone in an apartment in Ashland and had no job. She lived with a serious mental illness, and a peer counselor, Cindy Lynn Swanger, talked with her several times a week. In the days before August 16, 2016, Swanger noticed that Griffith seemed "pretty excited about something" and thought she might have met someone. On August 16 Griffith called Swanger, anxious to talk, but they did not manage to meet. That afternoon she was seen walking along Main Street after shopping. About two weeks later she was reported missing. "Elizabeth wouldn't hurt nobody," said Edna Boals, who knew both her and Grate.
In his confessions Grate said he had gone to L.S.'s apartment that day, found nobody home and met Griffith on his way out. She invited him in. They played Yahtzee, went to the Covert Court house to eat barbecued chicken, and she went home. Around 11 p.m. she called to ask whether he wanted to play again. They met at the YMCA and walked to the house. Upstairs, he strangled her. He bound her body, put it in an upstairs closet, piled stuffed animals and clothing against it and sealed the door frame with duct tape. About a week later he entered her apartment, destroyed the Yahtzee score sheet bearing his name and took some small items.
He told the story several ways. In one interview he said she had talked about killing herself and that he had wanted to test how much she meant it. In another he said that as he strangled her she prayed aloud, asking God to forgive him, and that he decided it was "way too late" to stop. In a third he spoke of her with contempt, saying she should have been put in an institution long before.
Stacey Stanley was 43 and lived in Greenwich, a village in Huron County. Her family remembered a loving mother and devoted grandmother who liked cooking and having everyone over, spent hours on her hair and loved the color purple. "She helped others and she made people happy and she was really nice to everybody," her granddaughter, Trinity Lazzara, said. Some reports give her name as Stacey Stanley Hicks.
On the evening of September 8, 2016, she drove to Ashland to shop. Around 8:30 p.m. a flat tire stopped her at a BP station. She called her son, who arranged for an acquaintance, Wayne Bright, to come and change it. Grate happened to be at the station. By about 10 p.m. the two men had finished the job and Bright left. Stanley told her son she was getting a coffee and heading home. A clerk saw her buy Grate a cup of coffee and leave with him. She was "just chipper, in a good mood," he said.
Grate took her to the Covert Court house. He forced her into a sex act and recorded it on his phone. She tried to spray him with the mace on her keychain, and he strangled her. He dragged her body to the basement and covered it with trash, took $43 from her purse and drove her car. Later he told detectives that watching her talk with Bright had angered him, and he called her a liar and "just another sneaky woman." Asked when her fate had been sealed, he answered: "when she lied to me."
When she did not come home, her family began searching. On September 11 they learned that her car had been found on a residential street in Ashland, with her phone on the floor, her driver's license between the seats and the driver's seat pushed all the way back, though she was short. A neighbor later identified Grate as the man she saw get out of the car and walk away.
On September 11, the same day Stanley's car was found, Grate told L.S. after a walk that he had a bag of clothes for her. She also wanted to show him some Bible passages. They went to the house on Covert Court. She sat on the bed with her Bible open; he pulled it out of her hands and told her, "you are not going anywhere." When she tried to push him away, he punched her in the head and face and choked her until she went limp.
For two nights he held her there. He tied her up at least three times, sometimes to the bed, put pills in her mouth that he said were muscle relaxers, raped her repeatedly and filmed the assaults on his phone. He also took her keys, went to her apartment and stole money. On the second night he tied her hands and legs together and slept beside her in the first-floor bedroom. Around 6 a.m. on September 13 she woke and found him asleep.
Stanley's uncle later said the family believed their search had kept Grate up through a sleepless night, until exhaustion finally gave L.S. her chance. Police arrived minutes after her call, entered the house and arrested him.
In the first-floor bedroom police found clothing tied to a mattress and a chair as bindings, and Stanley's debit card, food assistance card and car keys. Upstairs, Griffith's bound body lay in the taped closet. Stanley's body was in the basement under a pile of trash, a scarf wound around her neck. Dr. Todd Barr, the deputy medical examiner for Summit County, found that both women had died of compression of the neck. Griffith's body was badly decomposed.
Between September 13 and October 17, 2016, Grate gave detectives a series of recorded confessions. He admitted the murders, the kidnappings and the rapes, said he loved L.S. and wanted to marry her, and agreed to a videotaped demonstration in which he used Detective Brian Evans to show how he had seized both women from behind and strangled them. Prosecutor Chris Tunnell later told jurors they would see him grin as he did it. In the same weeks he led police to Cunningham and began confessing to killings in Richland and Marion counties. Scientists from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation matched his DNA to swabs taken from L.S.
At his bond hearing on September 16, Judge Ronald Forsthoefel set bond at $1 million. Asked whether he agreed to the conditions, Grate said, "Sounds fair."
The Ashland County indictment had 23 counts. Four were aggravated murder, two for each woman, all carrying death-penalty specifications for a course of conduct involving multiple murders, and specifications for killing during a kidnapping, and in Stanley's case during a rape or aggravated robbery. The rest covered kidnapping, rape, robbery, burglary, gross abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, unauthorized use of Stanley's car, the camper burglaries and the flea market break-in.
On December 27, 2016, his lawyers, Robert and Rolf Whitney, entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. A court-appointed psychologist, Dr. Brian O'Reilly, found in February 2017 that Grate had not been suffering from a severe mental disease when he committed the crimes and understood that what he did was wrong and illegal. The defense's own psychologist, Dr. John Fabian, reached the same conclusion about insanity. At a hearing on April 7, 2017, the lawyers withdrew the plea. Grate was not in court; a deputy said he had refused to leave his cell, saying it was just a competency hearing and his attorney could handle it.
The court summoned more than 400 prospective jurors and questioned them in two stages, first about pretrial publicity and then individually about the death penalty, until 48 qualified jurors had been found. Opening statements came on April 23, 2018. "This isn't a who done it case," Tunnell told the jury. "This is a he done it case." The defense waived its opening statement, and the 911 call was played in court.
The jury heard from the police officers and detectives, the medical examiner, the BCI scientist, the BP clerk, the neighbor who saw Grate leave Stanley's car, Griffith's counselor and L.S. herself. The defense cross-examined few of the prosecution's witnesses; his later federal petition put the number left unquestioned at 34 of 50.
On May 2, the eighth day of trial, Grate changed his plea to guilty on 15 counts, including the kidnapping and rapes of L.S. and the abuse of both women's bodies. He said he wanted to spare L.S. from having the videos shown in public. He left the murder counts and some related charges to the jury. On May 7, 2018, it convicted him of the aggravated murders of Elizabeth Griffith and Stacey Stanley.
At the penalty phase the defense called two witnesses. Charter described the childhood she and her brothers shared. Fabian, the psychologist, called Grate's upbringing chaotic and dysfunctional, and said he suffered from complex trauma rooted in neglect and emotional detachment rather than physical or sexual abuse. He diagnosed a long-term mild depressive disorder, a language-based learning disorder, a cannabis-use disorder and a severe mixed personality disorder with antisocial traits, and noted earlier diagnoses of bipolar disorder and ADHD. He put Grate's IQ at 83 and said early concussions might have left a mild neurocognitive disorder, though under cross-examination he acknowledged he had found no medical record of a concussion. He testified that Grate had told him of childhood fantasies of killing his mother, whom he described as miserable, and he linked that "miserable theme" to the murders. He also acknowledged that Grate knew what he was doing was illegal and had told him he hoped to kill more people in prison.
Before sentencing Grate spoke briefly. "I cannot say that I am normal," he said. "But I know right from wrong." He asked the families to forgive him someday and said he could not change anything.
The jury recommended death on both murders. On June 1, 2018, Judge Forsthoefel sentenced Grate to death, plus a mandatory 90 years to life on the other counts, and symbolically set the execution for September 13, the anniversary of his arrest. The date was only a formality, since every death sentence in Ohio brings an automatic appeal to the state's highest court.
Stanley's son, Kurtis Stanley, was not satisfied. "The death penalty, I feel, is the too easy way out," he said. "I don't think he deserves human contact."
That June the city of Ashland, which owned the property, tore down the house on Covert Court. A cousin of Stanley's came to watch, looking for some sense of closure, and a local woman began lobbying for a memorial to the two women. "I just think those girls shouldn't be forgotten," she said.
Gary Bishop, the Richland County prosecutor, had waited for the Ashland case to finish so that the publicity around two trials at once would not force a costly change of venue. A 14-count indictment charged Grate with the murders of Leicy and Cunningham, and a trial was set for March 4, 2019. Days before it, he agreed to plead.
On March 1, 2019, before Judge Brent Robinson in Mansfield, Grate pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of Rebekah Leicy, the murder of Candice Cunningham and two counts of gross abuse of a corpse. The aggravated murder charge in Cunningham's death had been reduced, because, Bishop said, although Grate called himself a "premeditator," he had not said that he planned her killing that day. Robinson sentenced him to life without parole for Leicy, 15 years to life for Cunningham and a year on each corpse count, all consecutive.
Cunningham's family spoke. Her mother wore a heart-shaped necklace holding her daughter's ashes and called Grate heartless. "A real man could not have done what you did to Candace," she wrote. Her sister, Ashley Fowler, said she would never forgive him and would have to explain to her children why their aunt was gone. An aunt, Rose Forrester, said she did not want to make him famous. "All he did was take a life that wasn't his," she said. Cunningham's grandmother wrote that she forgave him, to free herself, and urged him to turn to God. Nobody spoke for Leicy. Grate stood and apologized. "I know it's going to be hard to forgive me," he said, "but I apologize for my actions. Can't change nothing, just have to move on."
Once Lowrey had been identified, Marion County charged Grate with her murder in July 2019. On September 11, 2019, he pleaded guilty in Marion County Common Pleas Court, apologized and was sentenced to life without parole plus 16 years, to run after all his other sentences.
His automatic appeal was submitted to the Supreme Court of Ohio in July 2020, and the court decided it unanimously on December 10, 2020, affirming the convictions and both death sentences. Grate's appellate lawyers had raised 12 propositions of law, most of them claims that his trial lawyers had failed him: they never sought a change of venue, withdrew the insanity plea in his absence, waived an opening statement, cross-examined few witnesses and let in evidence that should have been kept out. The court agreed that they had erred in failing to object to testimony about other wrongdoing unrelated to the charges, including his account of stealing a safe, drug paraphernalia found in the house and calls to a marijuana dealer. But given his confessions, the survivor's testimony, the video of Stanley's assault and his arrest at the scene, it held that the errors made no difference to the verdict.
Weighing the sentence itself, the court found nothing mitigating in the crimes. It gave some weight to his cooperation with police and his drug use, considerable weight to his mental-health problems and some weight to his chaotic upbringing, but concluded that the aggravating circumstances clearly outweighed them. It found nothing mitigating in the link Fabian had drawn between his feelings toward his mother and the murders, and noted that Grate himself had said he knew right from wrong.
Justice Michael Donnelly joined the decision but wrote separately. The failings of the defense, he said, were "more than plentiful," some so obvious that the trial judge had stepped in to prompt the lawyers to make basic objections. He was most troubled that they had not made sure the brain-imaging results were analyzed in time or that Fabian finished his report, leaving the jury an incomplete picture of Grate's mental health. Because the record could not show whether that made a difference, he urged that any such evidence be brought forward in post-conviction proceedings. Tunnell called Grate "the poster child for the death penalty in Ohio."
The court denied reconsideration and later refused to reopen the appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Meanwhile Grate pursued post-conviction relief in Ashland County with a petition first filed in February 2020 and twice amended, raising 37 grounds, among them claims that his lawyers had failed him at the mitigation phase and that Ohio should not execute people with serious mental illness. Judge Forsthoefel denied it without a hearing on July 19, 2022. The Fifth District Court of Appeals affirmed on June 26, 2023, noting that Grate conceded he had never been diagnosed with a serious mental illness as Ohio law defines it, and that criticism of his trial expert by other experts did not show his lawyers had erred in choosing him.
In 2025 court-appointed lawyers filed a 1,021-page federal habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, before Judge Bridget Brennan, raising 18 grounds. They include pretrial publicity, ineffective counsel, the use of victim impact statements, prosecutorial misconduct, challenges to Ohio's death penalty and lethal injection, and a claim, based on a 2021 affidavit recounting a juror's interview, that Judge Forsthoefel slept through parts of the trial. Tunnell called the claims unfounded and said the defense was "grasping at straws." Of the sleeping judge, he said, "Definitely not."
As of July 2025 Grate, then 48, was one of 116 people on Ohio's death row and was held at Ross Correctional Institution. When his sentence was upheld in December 2020, Ohio had carried out no execution since July 2018, and Governor Mike DeWine had said that lethal injection was no longer an option. No execution date for Grate had been set as of October 2026, and his federal petition was the latest reported stage of his appeals.
Some parts of the record rest only on Grate's word. His accounts of Griffith's murder changed from interview to interview, and he denied having sex with her or using objects found in the house on any of the women while they were alive; the courts did not resolve those questions beyond the counts of conviction. L.S. testified that he told her he had "directions from God," which his appellate lawyers later cited as evidence of insanity; both psychologists who examined him found him legally sane.
Leicy's case was first closed as an overdose, and her father wrote to the court in 2019 that he did not believe Grate had killed her. Grate's own lawyer said he was quite certain Grate was involved, and Grate pleaded guilty. No court has attributed any death to him beyond the five murders he admitted. Whether the defense's thin mitigation case changed the outcome is a question the federal court has yet to answer.
1976: Shawn Michael Grate is born; he grows up in Marion, Ohio.
1996: He is convicted of burglary in Marion County.
1999: He pleads guilty to abduction in Marion County.
May 2006: He kills Dana Nicole Lowrey in Marion County.
March 10, 2007: Lowrey's remains are found off Victory Road; she remains unidentified for 12 years.
2010: His former girlfriend, Christina Hildreth, says she left him after an argument that put her in the hospital.
December 2011: He marries Amber Nicole Bowman; they divorce about a year later.
January to February 2015: He kills Rebekah Leicy; her body is found in March 2015 and her death ruled an overdose.
On or about June 6, 2016: He kills Candice Cunningham.
June to July 2016: He moves to Ashland County and, around July 22, into the vacant house on Covert Court.
August 16, 2016: He kills Elizabeth Griffith.
September 8, 2016: He kills Stacey Stanley.
September 11 to 13, 2016: He holds L.S. captive; she calls 911 and he is arrested on September 13. Cunningham's body is found the same day.
September 13 to October 17, 2016: He gives recorded confessions.
December 27, 2016: An insanity plea is entered; it is withdrawn April 7, 2017.
April 23, 2018: The Ashland County trial opens; on May 2 he pleads guilty to 15 counts.
May 7, 2018: The jury convicts him of the aggravated murders of Griffith and Stanley.
June 1, 2018: He is sentenced to death; the Covert Court house is demolished that month.
March 1, 2019: He pleads guilty to the murders of Leicy and Cunningham in Richland County.
May to June 2019: Lowrey is identified through genetic genealogy.
September 11, 2019: He pleads guilty to Lowrey's murder in Marion County.
December 10, 2020: The Supreme Court of Ohio affirms his death sentence.
July 19, 2022: His post-conviction petition is denied; the denial is affirmed June 26, 2023.
2025: He files a federal habeas corpus petition in the Northern District of Ohio.