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. She had been tied up and repeatedly raped for two nights. While her captor slept, she loosened the bindings and called for help. Officers went to a vacant house at 363 Covert Court and arrested the man inside, Shawn Michael Grate, 40. In the house they found the bodies of two women.
Grate had lived in Richland County. In June 2016 he moved to neighboring Ashland County, where, according to the Supreme Court of Ohio's summary of the trial record, he built a makeshift fort in the woods near Mifflin, broke into two campers at Charles Mill Lake Park and burglarized a flea market. Around July 22 he broke into the vacant house on Covert Court and began living there. He worked briefly at a grocery store. He ate regularly at the Salvation Army's Kroc Center in Ashland, and there he met the woman who would later call 911. She introduced him to her neighbor.
Elizabeth Griffith was 29 and lived alone in Ashland. She lived with mental illness, and a peer counselor talked with her several times a week. She was last seen on August 16, 2016, walking in Ashland, and was reported missing about two weeks later. Grate later told police that she had come to the Covert Court house at his invitation and that he strangled her in an upstairs bedroom, then sealed her body in a closet with duct tape.
Stacey Stanley was 43 and lived in Greenwich, in Huron County. Her family remembered a loving mother and devoted grandmother who loved cooking and having family over, spent hours on her hair and whose favorite color was purple. "She helped others and she made people happy and she was really nice to everybody," her granddaughter, Trinity Lazzara, said.
On the evening of September 8, 2016, she drove to Ashland to shop and got a flat tire at a BP station. An acquaintance and Grate changed it. At about 10 p.m. she bought Grate a cup of coffee and left the store with him. He took her to the Covert Court house, where he sexually assaulted her and strangled her. He hid her body in the basement under trash. Her car was found on September 11 with her phone and license inside.
Her family searched for her. Relatives later said they believed their search had kept Grate awake through a sleepless night, until he finally dozed off and the woman he was holding was able to call 911.
On September 11, Grate had lured the woman who had introduced him to Griffith to the house, saying he had clothes for her. He took her Bible and told her she was not leaving, punched and choked her, tied her up, gave her pills and raped her repeatedly, recording the assaults on his phone. She is not named here.
After his arrest Grate led detectives to a third body, in Richland County: Candice Cunningham, whose remains were found behind a burned-out house on Park Avenue East in Madison Township the same day. Over the following five weeks he gave investigators a series of recorded confessions, demonstrating on video how he had strangled the two women in the house. 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."
Grate was indicted on 23 counts, including two counts of aggravated murder carrying death-penalty specifications, kidnapping, rape, robbery, burglary and gross abuse of a corpse. His lawyers entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity in December 2016, but two experts found he did not qualify, and the plea was withdrawn in April 2017.
His trial in Ashland County began in late April 2018. On the eighth day, May 2, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts, including the kidnapping and rapes, saying he wanted to spare the woman who survived from having the videos shown in public. He left the two murders and some related counts for the jury. On May 7, 2018, the jury convicted him of the aggravated murders of Elizabeth Griffith and Stacey Stanley.
At the penalty phase the defense presented two witnesses. A psychologist, John Fabian, testified that Grate suffered from complex trauma and personality disorders rooted in a dysfunctional childhood and possibly a mild neurocognitive disorder from early concussions. His half-sister described a chaotic home without love or care. The jury recommended death, and in June 2018 Judge Forsthoefel sentenced Grate to death on both aggravated-murder counts and to 90 years to life on the others.
Stacey Stanley's son, Kurtis Stanley, did not find the sentence enough. "The death penalty, I feel, is the too easy way out," he said. "I don't think he deserves human contact."
In his confessions Grate had also admitted killing women in neighboring counties.
Rebekah Leicy's body was found in March 2015 on an Ashland County road, about a month after she went missing from Richland County. Her death was first ruled a drug overdose. The case was reopened after Grate's confession. On March 1, 2019, in Richland County Common Pleas Court, he pleaded guilty to murdering Leicy and Candice Cunningham and was sentenced to life without parole on the aggravated murder count, with further consecutive terms.
Dana Nicole Lowrey was 23, from Louisiana, and was selling magazines door to door in Ohio when Grate lured her to a house and killed her. Her remains were found in 2007 on Victory Road in Marion. For years she was unidentified, and the Marion County Sheriff's Office released a composite sketch in search of her name. On September 11, 2019, Grate pleaded guilty to her murder, apologized in court and was sentenced to life without parole plus 16 years, consecutive to his other sentences. Officials believe she was his first victim.
The Supreme Court of Ohio unanimously affirmed Grate's convictions and death sentence on December 10, 2020. It found that his trial lawyers had erred in failing to object to some evidence about unrelated thefts but that, given his confessions, the survivor's testimony, the video of Stanley's assault and his arrest at the scene, the errors made no difference. Justice Michael Donnelly, concurring in the judgment, questioned whether the defense's mitigation work had been adequate.
Judge Forsthoefel denied Grate's petition for post-conviction relief in July 2022, and Ohio's Fifth District Court of Appeals affirmed that decision on June 26, 2023. In 2025 court-appointed lawyers filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, before Judge Bridget Brennan, raising 18 grounds, among them pretrial publicity, ineffective counsel and a claim that the trial judge slept during parts of the trial. Prosecutor Chris Tunnell called the claims unfounded and denied that the judge slept.
As of July 2025 Grate, then 48, was one of 116 people on Ohio's death row and was held at Ross Correctional Institution. He had no execution date, and none had been set as of October 2026.