20/20 - The Hand in the Window: 'Follow the Flies'

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

A detective gets Shawn Grate to admit to his brutal attacks on Jane Doe. But what about the other missing women? To catch new episodes early, follow "The Hand in the Window" for free on ⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Amazon Music⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Deborah Roberts. I'm here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, The Hand in the Window. Remember, you can get new episodes early if you follow The Hand in the Window for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app. Now, here's the episode. Ella McKay, coming to theaters December 12. Your father's here. Why? A heartwarming new comedy from James L. Brooks. I'm a different person. I have never in my life felt this way about any other woman.

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Detective Brian Evans has known Detective Kim Major a long time. I started actually the same day as Detective Major did. It was actually on my birthday, September 29th, 1997 is the day we started. They had been rookies together on the Ashland Police Force, partnered up on a lot of cases. Over time, they formed a close bond. the type where they could finish each other's sentences. They each had their specialties. Evans was a narcotics detective.

And Major? She's a very good interviewer. I think most of that comes from her drive to help. She can be very relatable to the suspects, and they find it very easy to talk with her. Like Major, Evans had grown up in the area. He went to high school in Ashland. So when Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith disappeared in quick succession,

it seemed strange. I'd say it's very unusual to have two adult females' mission for the city of Ashland. I would say that that doesn't happen. After Jane Doe escaped her kidnapper, Detective Evans was one of the first officers on the scene at that yellow house on covert court. His role was to secure the crime scene. That meant walk through the house, take pictures, don't disturb any evidence. And finally, handle the paperwork needed for police to do a more detailed search.

Captain Lay has me in charge of the search warrant. Being a narcotics guy, I write the most house search forrants for drug houses. So that became my focus. Evans was looking for anything related to Sean Great's kidnapping and assault on Jane Doe but with two other women missing he was on high alert as he moved through the house room by room

if there were more secrets to be found Brian Evans would be there to find them from 2020 and ABC Audio This is the hand in the window. Episode 4 Follow the Flies While the crime scene buzzed with activity

in the interview room at the police department it was quiet Sean Great sat shirtless at a small table leaning back in his chair Detective Kim Major sat to his right about a foot away, leaning forward.

Major had gotten Sean Gray to admit to his brutal attacks on Jane Doe. Now she pushed him carefully about the other missing women, Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith. She started with Elizabeth, the 29-year-old who had last been seen a month before. Hey. Do you know where Elizabeth is right now? I don't care what you told anybody else. I care what you tell me. Hey.

I feel you already know. I can't answer your question. You already know. Gray kept telling Major that he felt she already knew where Elizabeth was. Detective Major wasn't sure what that meant. She tried a new question. Did Elizabeth? Griffith asked Great to hurt her or kill her.

No, she hasn't asked me to do nothing. She's mentioned it about not wanting to be alive before that one time. Like within five minutes on notice. Oh, my goodness. According to Great, Elizabeth had expressed suicidal tendencies. He told Major Elizabeth said that, quote, within five minutes of knowing her. Well, when I tell you, I don't think she's alive, it's because that's what I think. I don't know what else to say.

I don't know where she is. I would like for you to take me there. If you're willing to do it, we'll go load up and go there. Will you take me there? Take you to a place in Mansfield. Take you to a place in Mansfield, Great said. A city twice the size of Ashland in a neighboring county about 20 minutes away. His demeanor was suddenly different.

He looked uncomfortable, and his voice had dropped to almost a whisper. Where she is? Where are you going to take me a man still? Where there's another girl? Where there is a girl? But not. Great seemed to be talking about a different woman, someone besides Elizabeth Griffith. Major wanted to know if this woman, whoever she was, was still alive.

What happened to her? Hey, are you okay? What happened? She's gone? She's been gone. She's been gone. Great's voice was breaking. He began to cry.

The circling questions about Elizabeth Griffith had broken through, but not in the way major. was expecting. He's not even telling me about what happened in my own county. He's not telling me about our missing ladies. So you don't know, is he just making this up?

Has anybody, I mean, has she been buried, or did you just leave her somewhere? Is she missing? I don't know. I know I loved her. I loved her, he said. Is she in a house?

What is she in? Sean, what is she in? She's in the woods? She's in the woods? Okay. How long has she been there? How long? June.

June? Okay. What's her name? Candice. Candice? Cunningham. This comes out of the blue, right? This came out of the blue.

A new name, a new county, a new possible victim of Sean Great. Candice Cunningham. Great described how he met Candace in Mansfield, in a house where he'd rented a room the previous winter. Candice had not been reported missing, and Candice had dated Sean Great. Detective Major would later learn that Candice was 29 years old. She was just 4'9, with dark hair and high cheekbones. Candice's family later told a local newspaper that she had struggled. with addiction and was in and out of touch with her family.

Great said that he and Candice had been seeing each other for around seven months when they began squatting together in a white house on the road leading out of Mansfield. But Great claimed the relationship wasn't going well. Great said they argued a lot. He told Major that one morning, Candace had woken him up by asking him to roll her a cigarette. Three o'clock in the morning, I had hit in a face with the bag of tobacco. I understand.

Gray told Major that they started physically fighting and that he strangled her to death. If this story was true, it was a confession of cold-blooded murder. Not wanting to lose momentum, Major asked great if he'd show her the spot in the woods behind the house where he'd left Candace Cunningham's body. It will be easy to find, he said. Just follow the flies.

So we're going to go find Candace, right? And who else we're going to go find? I guess I'm ready to go ahead and get my lethal injection. But I'll tell you of everything first. Okay. He says how many before I am lethally injected. So he's talking about how many people, how many victims before I get the death penalty is what he's asking. And I'm saying, well, let's not worry about that right now.

Let's just let's get the facts. Let's just talk. Major sense that there might be more that grade was on the verge of sharing. I do feel if you do something and it's in there, it needs to come out. It's like a sore that is festered inside, that you have to rip a scab off to clean it. It's in there. And it wants to come out. So I'll be the conduit.

Who else? Where I came from? Yeah. There's somebody in there? Yeah. Great wasn't making eye contact. When he said there was someone in the house at Colvert Court, he started squirming in his chair.

Who is it? Is it Elizabeth? Where is she in there? In the closet? Which closet? Upstairs. When he said that, I didn't know if she was alive or not. I just knew she was in a closet.

Major wanted to confirm whether Elizabeth Griffith was hidden in the house alive or dead. She returned to Great's earlier allegations about Elizabeth being possibly suicidal. So with Elizabeth, you wanted to free her, how did you do that same way with Candace or another way? Wow.

Same way. The same way. Strangulation. Detective Major told Great, she'd bring him something to eat and drink, making excuses to step out of the interview room. She was actually going to alert her colleagues at that house on Colvert Court to tell them they should be looking for a body.

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Brian Evans was in the process of photographing every room in the house when, I began to receive communication via phone calls and text messages from the interview that's taking place with Detective Major and now that we know Mr. Great. The first call that Brian Evans got was about Candace Cunningham, that Great had admitted to killing her in a house in Richland County. Five minutes went by when Evan's phone rang again. And I get another communication that our missing female Elizabeth is deceased and she's upstairs in a closet. Detective Evans was surprised. He had just walked through every room in the covert house and he didn't remember seeing any closets in the upstairs rooms. He went to look again.

He climbed the stairs and entered a small bedroom on the second floor. floor. Inside was a green sofa bed with rags tied to the frame. They looked like restraints. Once you got upstairs, the rooms are in semi-disserie. I mean, there was a bedroom, and in that bedroom there was, you couldn't see the closet door at all. On one wall, clothing was everywhere, hanging from nails and stacked in piles on the floor. As Evans looked clothing, he realized there was a door hidden behind all the mess. It was sealed shut with duct tape. As we started pulling away the clothes in that upstairs closet area,

you could see the fly activity. A lot of the flies were dead at that point, meaning that they've been there a while. Then you could start to get the odor of a decaying body. Evans and his fellow investigators pulled the clothes away away from the closet doorway, a BCI agent peeled back the tape and opened the door. Inside, they found more mess, another pile of clothing and bedding. The agents removed each layer of the pile one by one until they made a chilling discovery,

a woman's dead body. She was down basically on her stomach chest area with her hands tied behind her back and her legs tied up and then hog tied to her hands. And her head and face was facing away from us to the back of the wall. Because of the tight space

and the decomposition of the body, Evans couldn't tell immediately, if it was Elizabeth. The body had clearly been in the closet for a while. It was there during the days that Jane Doe was trapped downstairs. All right, Sean, I've been on the hunt for snacks. You've got chips. Here's what I got so far.

Detective Kim Major had left the interview room to make sure her colleagues were briefed on Sean Great's confessions. She returned ready to ask Great for more details about Elizabeth's death. Major asked if Great had sexually assaulted Elizabeth Griffith before her murder. Great said no. Major asked how Elizabeth had ended up at Great's home. According to Great, Elizabeth Griffith and Jane Doe lived in the same apartment complex. Great said that it was Jane who had introduced Elizabeth to him earlier that summer. One day when Great had gone to Jane Doe's building to see her,

she wasn't there, but Elizabeth Griffith was. So Great Ann Elizabeth spent the day together at her apartment, playing card games. That night, Elizabeth had gone to Great's home. They hadn't been there long, Great said. When he attacked her, he strangled her, then tied her up in the closet. In the days that followed, he would periodically kill the flies that buzzed around the house. Major noticed that Great was very interested in flies, the life cycle from egg to maggot to adult. He also seemed drawn to specific parts of death and the decomposition of bias.

There are times during the interview, if he would talk about what a woman's face does when you're killing her, or what her body does, how a body decomposes the larva, or following the scent to find the body, or watching their bodies decompose. You know, there's lots of things where you could tell he's interested in this. Major continued to press him. Are there any other girls in the house right now? Yeah? One down in the basement. Down in the basement? Another body.

This time in the basement of the yellow house. What's her name? Stacey. Stacey. Great described her as a dark, cared woman in her 40s. A nice lady, he said. He'd driven her car and still had her keys. All the details matched the Stacey Stanley case, the 43-year-old mother and grandmother who had gone missing from a gas station the previous week. Her sons had been all over town, putting up

flyers with Stacy's picture on them, asking the public for any information about where she might be. Great told Major that he'd seen Stacy standing at the gas station in the rain, waiting with a flat tire. He helped her, and Great said, he asked if Stacy would like to hang out sometime. Great told Major that Stacy had agreed, and they'd gone back to his house. According to Great, they'd sat together, talking. But then he said, Things turned sour. Did you have sex with her? Yeah.

Great raped Stacey. Investigators would later find out that he filmed the attack on his phone. When Stacey fought back, Great strangled her. She wanted to play that innocent thing. So that I just kind of just snapped on her. Great shifted the blame onto Stacy.

She wanted to play the innocent thing, he said. So I just snapped. Okay. So what did you put her in in the basement? Just put her on the floor. Put on the floor?

Where on the floor in the basement? I don't need all that stuff. Garbage. Okay. Great said that Stacy's body was under the garbage in the basement. Soon, Brian Evans got another call from the station. I'd say about within a half hour after finding Elizabeth upstairs, I received more information that Stacy should be in the basement. should be in the basement under a bunch of trash bags.

Evans and a couple of other officers went down to take a look. Downstairs, there was a large pile of bags. It looked like Great had been using the basement to store all of his trash since he moved in. And before we removed any trash bags, there was, I believe, a checkbook. There were some items that had Stacey Stanley's name on it. The officers also found a pink mace container on a keychain. Slowly and methodically, they photographed and removed bag after bag. As they cleared one of the last areas, they saw something startling.

It was a hand sticking out from under a blanket. It had a small tattoo on it and rings on the fingers. The rest of the body was hidden under the bags. It's bad enough what he did, but for some reason, thinking that he put her under trash, makes it worse. In a town as small as Ashland, one murder would be shocking.

Now, police were dealing with three. In a place where everybody knows everybody, it hit hard. Have you ever seen anything like this in all your years of police work? No, I've been on other homicides and other tragic cases, but not to this magnitude, no. By the early afternoon, a crowd had gathered outside the house on Colvert Court. Detective Evans recognized members of Stacey Stanley's family. In the day that they were found, I think we spent a majority of the day sitting in the parking lot. Stacey Stanley's son, Curtis, waited, along with a growing number of journalists and Ashland residents.

Hundreds and hundreds of people sitting there and a bunch of news channels and everybody else. And you could see them bringing things out and they see them bring the bodies out. And they had all those tents. And that was it. They didn't tell us. Detective Evans couldn't reveal everything he knew just yet. The body in the basement was too decomposed to be recognizable, but the evidence that police had collected suggested that it was Stacey Stanley.

Evans was close to one of Stacey's family members. He reached out to her. I told the family member, I can't release any information, but I'd like to have you answer a few questions about some property of Stacey's, and she said that she would. Evans shared a picture of the pink mace keychain and a ring that had been found on the body. Stacey's relative confirmed that Stacey owned those items.

That was hard, yes. Evans couldn't confirm the reason why he was asking these questions, but he knew what it looked like. Now, the police were almost sure it was Stacey. The only thing left was for the family to officially confirm it. The Stanley family would have to wait for hours until late that night before they were called to a meeting at the police station. Then I remember that night we sat in that room.

It was probably about 15 or 20 of us. They pulled out a couple pictures, and one of them was her hand with a tattoo she had on her hand right there. And they're like, because you guys recognize that? So I went up there and I looked to see, yeah, that's my mom's picture. And that's what... They're telling us it was my mom. Yeah, that was my mom. By the afternoon of September 13th, Detective Kim Major was finishing up her interview with Great.

She had asked him, point blank, if there were any other missing women in the area that he had information about. Great said no. Major pushed him. Are you 100% on that? She asked. Yes, Great insisted. But Major wasn't finished with Great yet. In a few short hours, Great had confessed to killing three women and directed the police to two of his victim's bodies. But there was still one body left to find. Candice. Cunningham's. It had been a long day, but Major knew that Great's openness might not last forever. She wanted him to show her where he had placed Candace's remains in the woods. When I met with Major in Ashland, I asked her to show me. This is the route that we traveled to go to the home where he murdered Candace Cunningham. This is the route we took, so Lieutenant Scott Smart was driving. Major took me to an empty lot on the edge of Mansfield, next to a busy road.

The house where Great and Candace had stayed is gone now, cleared away years ago. But you can still walk straight into the woods just beyond where the house once sat. Major described what Sean Great said he did the day he turned. on Candace Cunningham. After murdering her, he wrapped her body in a blanket, took her clothes off of her, took her into a ravine. He took her back there

and left her out in the elements under a bush. Candace had been described as being so bubbly and laughing all the time. Full of life. full of life, and the smallest things make her so happy, and he took every bit of that away. Great showed Detective Major and the other officers

where Candace's body lay. It was next to a creek. Major knew that if Great had not shown them, they may never have found the body. What was it like to finally find this woman and give it some closure? I felt this sense of urgency, but there was really nothing to run to. Like I wanted to go down to the ravine and rescue her, but she's gone.

The feeling of looking down at Candace Cunningham's remains at the bottom of the creek has stayed with Detective Major. The lack of dignity in her death. in Great's descriptions of her, the lack of remorse that Great showed. Sometimes only after you have time to think about it, do you actually realize how absolutely senseless something can be, absolutely senseless. She wasn't killed because they were arguing and she wanted him to roll a cigarette.

She was killed because he has a craving, that he has a hunger, and all it takes is you're making a mistake, and you're gone. You're gone. Detective Major, Ashland County, raised and proud, realized that in the course of one day, Great's confessions had given her town a horrific claim to fame. It was now the home of a serial killer. Now she and the town would have to try to understand

where did that hunger to kill come from and did it end? He started out absolutely charming, wonderful. And then little by little, he just turned, we're equal. The Hand in the Window is a production of ABC Audio and 2020. Hosted by me, John Quignores, produced by Madeline Wood, Camille Peterson, Kiara Powell, edited by Gianna Palmer. Our supervising producer is Susie Lou. Music and mixing by Evan Viola.

Special thanks to Katie Dendos. Janice Johnston, Michelle Margulis, Caitlin Schiffer, Rachel Walker, Annalisa Linder, Joseph Diaz, Jonathan Balfazer, Gail Deutsch, Gary Wynn, Stephanie MacBee, Natalie Cardenas, and Samantha Wanderer. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Thank you.