YouTube/WKYC Channel 3 Convicted Serial Killer Shawn Grate was arrested after a kidnapping victim escaped her bindings and called 911.
Tonight marks the beginning of Investigation Discovery’s Serial Killer week, where they’ll dive into the cases surrounding serial killers each night. For the first night, the channel will air an episode of Evil Lives Here about convicted serial killer Shawn Grate.
According to the episode description, “As Christina Hildreth helped Shawn Grate clean up his first crime scene, she didn’t realize what she was doing. Once police were banging on her door while she was trapped with a madman, she understood the situation was direr than she realized.”
After being arrested, a grand jury indicted Grate on two counts of aggravated murder in the deaths of two women and the kidnapping and sexual assaults of an unidentified woman in 2016. Grate was sentenced to death as well as life in prison without parole.
How Was Serial Killer Shawn Grate Caught?
#BREAKING: Jury recommends death penalty for convicted killer Shawn Grate
Grate was captured by police after a woman managed to escape from him and call 911, according to People.
“I’ve been kidnapped,” the woman told the dispatcher on September 13, 2016. “Please hurry.”
She told the dispatcher that she’d been tied up, but she was calling from her kidnapper’s phone after managing to escape. Her captor was asleep while she called, she said.
When police arrived, they found the woman had been tied to a bed and sexually assaulted. There were also two corpses on the premises, which filled the house with an awful stench. The bodies were those of previously missing women Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith.
Grate confessed to the murder of another woman as well while in police custody, and he was later connected to more victims. In 2016, grate said he had killed five women: Candice Cunningham, Rebekah Leicy, and another woman as well as Stanley and Griffith. In 2019, he pleaded guilty to killing Dana Nicole Lowrey in Louisiana.
Shawn Grate Was Sentenced to Death
The case of suspected serial killer Shawn Grate went to a jury Monday after the prosecution gave its closing arguments and the defense waived their right to present one — as they did at the start of the trial. t.co/zQk1Afzz0J
Initially, Grate’s lawyer entered a plea of not guilty on all charges, pivoting to not guilty by reason of insanity after Grate confessed to the murders in a press interview.
In October 2016, Grate wrote letters to reporters as well, talking about how he murdered the women and what he had done to them.
“They were already dead,” he wrote to a reporter. “Just their bodies were flopping wherever it can flop but their minds were already dead! The state took their minds. Once they started receiving their monthly checks.”
He told reporters that he’d known the women he killed and was friends with some of them, and he claimed he was justifying the murders to himself “as compassion,” The Washington Post reported in 2016.
Stanley and Griffith were found in Ashland County, and Leicy and Cunningham were killed in Richland County. For the Ashland County murders, Grate was sentenced to death. He was sentenced to life in prison for the Richland County murders, and for the murder of Lowrey, he was sentenced to life in prison plus 16 years, which was to be served consecutively with his other sentences.
Shawn Grate is currently at the Chillicothe Correctional Institute. His legal team has appealed the death sentence in the Ohio Supreme Court, so a stay has been placed on his initial execution date, which was to be carried out in 2018.
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