The bodies were found in the places Detroit had emptied: an abandoned apartment building, a vacant garage, an alley, a vacant field, a vacant house. Between 2001 and 2006 seven women, all of them Black, between thirty and fifty-three, all of them drug users who sometimes sold sex on the city's east side, were raped and beaten to death with rocks, bricks and pieces of wood and left naked where they died. Some were found only years later, and for a long time nobody connected them.
Sandra Davis, fifty-three, was killed in August 2001, and her body was found in an abandoned apartment building. Five months later Pamela Greer, thirty-three, was found beaten to death in the same building. Marion Woods-Daniels, thirty-six; Rhonda Myles, forty-five, who was beaten with a brick; Thelma Johnson, thirty; and Melissa Toston, thirty-eight, followed over the next several years, and the last, a woman found in a burned-out building in June 2006, went unidentified for nearly two decades until forensic genetic genealogy named her in 2025 as Darylnn Washington. Published accounts disagree on several of the dates.
The man police charged was Shelly Andre Brooks, thirty-seven, born in Detroit on January 22, 1969, who had grown up largely with his maternal grandmother, left high school in the eleventh grade and had an early arrest for carrying a concealed gun. Six feet four and nearly three hundred pounds, he was in custody from July 30, 2006, according to police, on a charge of sexually assaulting a woman; some accounts give June 26. A surviving victim helped identify him, DNA testing connected him to at least four of the dead women, and he gave detectives detailed statements. At the end of August 2006 he was charged with seven counts of premeditated murder and seven of felony murder, and police said he was a suspect in as many as fourteen deaths in the city since 1999.
He was tried first for Pamela Greer. At trial he denied killing anyone, and the Wayne County jury did not believe him; in 2007 it convicted him of first-degree murder, which in Michigan carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole. A week later a second jury convicted him of murdering Rhonda Myles. The Wayne County prosecutor's office did not pursue the other five cases once his life imprisonment was assured, a spokeswoman said later. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the convictions in 2008.
His Michigan prison record lists two counts of first-degree murder, assault with intent to commit murder and first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Investigators have said he may be responsible for other unsolved killings in Detroit.