Crime Junkie - SERIAL KILLER: Shawn Grate

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Shawn Grate is currently awaiting trial in Ohio for two counts of murder but his admitted body count is much more. From 2005 - 2016 he terrorized vulnerable women of Ohio but police had no idea. Shawn Grate murdered woman police didn't even consider missing and it wasn't until one day in September when an unthinkable call to 911 changed everything. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/serial-killer-shawn-grate/    

Hi, everyone, and hi, Brittany. Hi. Welcome back to another episode of Crime Genki. Today's episode I'm really excited about because I have never heard a podcast done on this case. There's never been any kind of documentary. It took me forever to put all this together, piecing it from web sleuths and old news articles. Any little bit I could find, but I think it's a really interesting story here in the Midwest

that I think all of you are going to love. But as usual, before we jump in, I want to tell you about one of our favorite nonprofits. This episode of Crime Genki is brought to you by Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana. So you're saying that Crime Stoppers just takes the tips and helps make arrests? No, they don't actually do any of the arresting. All Crime Stoppers does is they're responsible for taking the tip, keeping the tipster anonymous, and then giving that information to police, and police do all the arresting. So you're saying Crime Stoppers wants just the tip?

I don't even know how to follow that up, but yes, Crime Stoppers is only responsible for taking the tips, and their number one goal is making sure that the tipsters remain anonymous. As of early 2018, Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana is responsible for clearing over 7,000 cases because of their tips. I encourage you to get involved with your local Crime Stoppers, and if you want more information on Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana, go to CrimeTips.org. All right, Brett, I am pretty excited about this one. I came about it a super weird way.

So a little bit of a spoiler for our listeners is I am working on a local case that may be a crime-junkie episode, but it's actually so big that I might turn it into its own podcast. Either way, that's a case of a missing girl, and as I was researching that and going through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and NamUs and the John Doe, or the Doe Network, I came across this girl in Ohio who's still been unidentified, whose bones were found in 2007, and her story actually took me to the story I'm about to tell you. So I came about it a super weird way. I had never heard this story before, even though it was just in the state next to us

in Ohio, and it actually all took place in 2016, so not even that long ago. That's really recent. Really recent. And honestly, when you told me that you were going to use this case today, I didn't know anything about it, and I didn't research because I knew you would tell me everything you need to know. I will tell you everything you need to know. So it all starts on August 16th of 2016.

A woman named Elizabeth Griffith, who's 29 years old, goes missing in Ashland, Ohio. When she's reported missing, police learn that she has slight mental disabilities, and they begin to search for her right away. They find some security footage of her in a parking lot that's shared between a Walmart and an Aldi, and they also find some footage of her actually shopping inside the Walmart store. Ashland police post photos of her on their Facebook page, and one or two news outlets actually pick up the story, but even the ones that pick it up don't run the story more

than once. So it just gets a little bit of local attention, no national attention, and Ohio just keeps moving on. I was digging trying to find more information on the circumstances of her disappearance, but it was so hard to find anything. Yeah, I mean naturally my first questions are like, do we know what she was doing at Walmart? Did she go to Aldi next?

How did she leave? Did she have a car? Did someone pick her up? There's a lot of open-ended stuff with that. Right, and I wish I had answers, but we don't. I know that she didn't own a car, but I have no idea what she bought there. I have no idea if the surveillance video they have actually shows her leaving with someone, talking to anyone, getting into a car.

I would hope that something that police would release to get more information, but I have no idea either way if they just didn't have it or they didn't release it. There was so little interest in this, I know that we have just nothing to work off of. So her case kind of goes stale in August, not a lot's done. She doesn't have a ton of family members who are advocating on her behalf. Then in early September, police get notified of another missing woman. This time, it's 43-year-old mother of two and grandmother, Stacey Stanley. She's reported missing by her sister, who she was extremely close with.

Stacey had actually just recently moved to the Greenwich area, which is just about 20-25 minutes away from the Ashland area that we were just talking about. She used to live in Sandusky, Ohio with her sister. They were super close. So when she moved, her and her sister would still talk on the phone every single day. And she said that she spoke to her sister on September 8th, and remember this is 2016. At 10 o'clock at night, her sister calls her from a BP gas station. And she says, and the BP that she's at is in Ashland.

And even though it's not the city she lives in, I mean, within 20-25 minutes, it was super normal for her to be there. I mean, it's just going from town to town. She was in Ashland a lot, wasn't concerning to her sister. But what was concerning is she's at this gas station because she has a flat tire. And when she called her sister, she was trying to arrange to either have her sister or one of her sons or some family member come pick her up, help her out, fix her car. While she's on the phone with her, though, actually someone offers to help her.

And her sister says that, OK, she says, you know, I have this really nice man. He's going to help me out. Everything will be fine. Oh, yeah. And she tells her sister, you know, I have this nice man, everything should be fine. That's the last time anyone from Stacey's family heard from her. It's stated in an article that she did go into the BP gas station to buy a coffee for the man that was helping her.

But I don't know if that account is from video, if it's from eyewitnesses or some kind of receipt. Again, there's just really nothing. The family just cannot locate her. And they become extremely concerned literally the next day. I mean, they know something isn't right. However, when they notify police, there's a little bit of a catch. According to Stacey's family, the police are just unwilling to help.

They file an official missing persons report. But Stacey has a history with the law. She has substance abuse issues. She used to be an addict. Her family says that she has been in recovery for six months and hasn't used drugs. She was getting her life together. She had a job. But unfortunately, it didn't mean a whole lot to the police.

And the family said that when they urged police to get involved, the police said they weren't going to look for her because she probably just went somewhere to get high with someone. But the family pointed out the fact that her car was left behind with her phone and her wallet. And they said that no one, drug addict or not, would willingly leave all of their stuff behind and disappear. Yeah. I mean, if she's going to get high, she still needs money to do that.

So where was all that stuff found? Was it found at the BP in the car? What about the flat tire? Was it fixed? Right. So again, I only know a couple of things. So what I do know is that her car was found on 9th Street. And 9th Street is just a couple of blocks away from the BP gas station.

Beyond that, I don't have any answers. They didn't, they say that they found her phone and her wallet. I assume they found it in the car, but I have no idea. They don't make any more references to the tire. So I have no idea if the tire was fixed and then the car was moved there, or if the tire was maybe just filled with air enough to get it a couple of blocks and moved there. There's really nothing on this. This was like the Elizabeth Griffith case, but even worse.

There was not a single news article or even a blurb anywhere about her disappearance. When I was going back through trying to research this case, yes, I couldn't find a single article. Wow. That's incredible and also incredibly sad. Yeah. So since the family wasn't getting any help from the police or the media, they came together themselves to search for her. They made flyers and passed them out everywhere.

They made sure to pass them out in the town she lived, but they really focused heavily on that Ashland area since that's where her car was found and where she was last known to be seen. They started at the location of her car on 9th street and they went from building to building, knocking on doors, searching abandoned buildings. They were passing out flyers, putting up flyers. There are a couple abandoned houses across from a laundry mat in Ashland that the family says they paid really close attention to because they knew they were abandoned, but they thought

that there might be people living inside and I don't know why they thought that. If they heard something, if there was some kind of indication when they looked in windows, they didn't say what it was that drew their attention to those houses, but they were drawn to them and they said they had a fear of trespassing, so they didn't want to break into these homes and get worried about police coming after them. So they reported it to law enforcement and begged law enforcement to go break those doors down. Law enforcement again said, not happening, we don't think your mother, daughter, sister

is endangered, so sorry, no luck. Nothing more came from the family's searches and no matter how much they insisted police Stacy was in danger, police believed she was just relapsing until they got a haunting call to 911. And this call came in on September 13th of 2016. Now what I want to do is I want to play some of this call for you guys and we're kind of going to break it up. This 911 call is 20 minutes long.

What? Yeah, if you want to listen to the whole thing, I will have a link on our website, but I'm going to play some of the most important pieces for you guys here. 911, what is the address to your emergency? I just want street laundry mess. What is it? Or street laundry mess? So, I don't know how clear that is, it's really hard to hear her, but this girl's whispering

into the phone and she says, when she's asked what her location is, they say fourth street laundry man. And when the operator asks her what the problem is, she just whispers and says, I've been abducted. Oh, I have like full body chills right now. I know. Who abducted you? Sean Green.

Is it John Green? Sean Great. Where's he at now? Did you hear that? I can't quite make it out. What do you think it says? So she says that the man's name is Sean Great and the operator asks, where is he at now? And she says he's asleep.

He is sleeping next to her while she's on the phone with 911. So calm or robotic or something like it's eerie. It's incredibly eerie. Her tone and her inflection is just like really kind of creeping me out right now. And through most of the call, her tone actually stays that same way. And the first time I heard it, I like had to take a step back and be like, that's just not how I'd be reacting if I was being abducted. But you also, I mean bravo to her because I would be freaking out, but she has this

man next to her and she can't freak out. Like I don't even think she could get her heart beating fast or it's going to wake this guy up. Well, I'm like, honestly, she doesn't even like volunteer information, which is kind of like, which, you know, outside looking in seems odd. The operator has to prompt her for this information, which just seems like I would be like, I am at XYZ. This is where I am.

This is who I'm with. He's asleep right now. What do I do next? Like, I don't, I don't, but I've never been abducted. So who knows? I would be frozen. I would be frozen in fear. And I, my only thing would, I would call 911.

I wouldn't say a word and I would pray to God they just came to my location. So I mean, I'm screwed, but that's just how it is. Is there any way you can get out of the building? I don't know without waking him and I'm scared. So she says, is there any way you can get out of the building? And she says, I have no idea. I'm scared. Yes.

I'm scared. And she explains later in the tape, again, it takes a long time to get there, but basically what he's done is he has set up this whole contraption in the room that he has her in to where she, if she tries to leave, there's stuff around the door that's going to make noise. Are you bleeding from anywhere? I don't know. Where were you bleeding from?

So she asked her if she needs an ambulance and if she's bleeding from anywhere. And she said, not anymore. And when the operator asked her, where were you bleeding from? There's just silence and the silence lasts for 20 seconds. And I'm not kidding you. It is the longest 20 seconds of my life. Oh my God. The next thing we hear is the operator coming back in.

Do you know where he lives? No. Oh, shit. Oh, shit, I woke him up. I just put the phone down. So she asked if she knows where the guy lives or where she's being held right now. And all we hear from this girl is, oh, shit. Oh, shit, I woke him up.

And the operator tells her, just put your phone down. And the rest of this tape, at least for a big chunk of it, from about minute marker eight until 1126 is just silence, just cold breathing silence. And at 1126, the operator comes back in and asks her if she's still there. And there's just nothing on the other end. And I'm not 100% sure, like I've tried listening closely and turning up the volume. I think when she says that she woke him up, I can hear some rustling and maybe a man's voice.

And there's a part that's bleeped out. And of this whole audio, they only bleep out her name. So I'm wondering if he said her name. But he must go back to sleep because again, at the minute marker 1233, he asked her, the operator asked her again, are you still there? And she just asked how much longer. And then the operator says, okay, where are you? Can you get out of the bed?

So she gets out of the bed and she gets to be standing by the door. But remember, she's already told the operator, like she can't get out of the door. It will make a lot of noise. And the operator starts getting kind of sassy with her. And she's okay, you're not in the bed. Just leave then. Like it doesn't work that way. I mean, if she could have just leave, she wouldn't have called you on one.

Yeah. And then the operator is like, can't you just open the door? No, we've already gone over this. No, I cannot. Then I'll play you a little part that maybe it's I'm just super sensitive to this lady, but I feel like she just gets a little nasty. If you think you can get out, you need to get out. So that's where the operator says, if you can get out, just get out.

And she's saying, no, he's right here. If he hears me, he can catch me and he's strong. So if you listen to the whole thing, like this 911 operator is, Lord help me if I'm ever abducted and get on the phone with this 911 operator. Because I know their job is to remain calm, but like, damn, this girl is taking it to another level, like have a little bit of sympathy for a girl who's just been held captive. So there is a time as she's on the phone with her, she's obviously trying to get the police to her.

And there is a time where this girl actually does hear the police outside. So now she, she feels confident that she can leave the room because even if he hears her leave the room, like the police are steps away. She gets out of the room and realizes that there's no doorknob on the outside door and the police can't get in. And the police are on the other side, like just a wall between them. My heart was pounding. My pulse was out of control when I was listening to this.

Then you hear the police, you can hear them through her phone. And then it gets really quiet. And she just says, where did they go? And I just wanted to die. Is there a window there? Yeah, I'm looking out and they're telling me to come back. So they finally see her and they're able to come back and they're able to get inside. Thank God.

And they get inside, you actually hear the whole like interaction of her actually going to the police and explaining to the police where in the house this guy is. They go up and they find him and it's exactly who she said it was, 40 year old Sean Great. And they immediately take him into custody and do a sweep of this house. In this abandoned house, they go first to the basement and in the basement of the home, under bags of trash, they find a woman laying face down, fully clothed, but deceased and decomposing. Oh my God.

I know, she has a purse near her and in the purse is the ID of Stacy Stanley, who police wouldn't even acknowledge when missing. And as the police work their way through the rest of the home onto the second floor, they go in the second floor bedroom closet, which has been duct taped shut so you know something's in there. Naturally. And they find another nude body of a woman that has been hogtied and is decomposing beyond recognition.

They aren't able to ID this woman for almost a week, but once they're able to compare dental records, they find out that it's the body of Elizabeth Griffiths. And the woman who called 911 is still unknown to this day. It's been kept a secret because she was sexually assaulted. And after the autopsies were done on Stacy and Elizabeth, the coroner found that the two women were sexually assaulted, tortured, and then both strangled to death. And there's no doubt in my mind that that was his plan for this unknown girl as well. Definitely, obviously.

When police took Sean then into custody, he confessed to everything, like kind of in a ranting, madman, crazy way, but not only was he ranting and raving about the two dead woman and the woman he had captive, now the woman he had captive, he swears he had no intention to kill her. It was totally consensual. She was there on her own, did not sound to me like she was there on her own pretty well. I mean, whenever I'm with someone that I enjoy spending time with, I call 911 for 20 minutes. So along with these three girls that he is just openly talking about, he starts talking

about other murders that police had no clue about. He took them to a patch of woods behind a burned home near Ashland where they found the buried remains of a woman named Candace Cunningham. And Candace actually was his girlfriend back in the summer of 2016, sometime in June or July. And she was never even reported missing because that spring, she had told her mother that she was moving to North Carolina and no one expected to even hear from her. She too had a history of drug abuse, run-ins with the law, but I just can't even believe

that all that time goes by like a full season and not even a single person was looking for her or calling her cell phone at all. I mean, it's just devastating. And there was some speculation that maybe they were engaged or married because of stuff on Candace's Facebook. And I can post this on our website as well. It's a screenshot of a photo. Sean had posted a photo with a caption that Candace had then shared.

And the caption talks about someone asking you to marry them and you say yes. And at some point on Candace's Facebook, she actually changed her Facebook status to married. But we all know Facebook statuses aren't legally binding. So who knows? Either way, her death is, he confessed her death, but it's super suspicious. And there's so much mystery around it because he never really gave a reason of why or how or exactly when. And there's not a ton of news articles explaining that either.

Again, her family hasn't been super vocal in the news. And there's nothing obviously before because she wasn't even reported missing. So it was really hard to find a lot about her specific case. The next place Sean took them was to a field in Ohio where they found the scattered bones of a woman who's later identified as Rebecca Leasy. She was reported missing back in February of 2016. But again, she was one that had a history of drug abuse run-ins with the law. And her disappearance, same as Stacey's, was not taken seriously.

Police didn't really do anything to look for her. There were no news articles, and they thought she was just a drug addict who had relapsed. Sean said, now he actually gave a reason for her murder. And he said they were hanging out in a bar and playing pool. And when he was coming back from the bathroom, he heard his money clip close and realized that she had taken $4 from him. $4. I'm sorry.

$4. $4. Let me say it again. $4. One, two, three, $4. I don't like an entire meal at Taco Bell, but that's a little bit extreme. Yeah. So he murdered her over $4 and scattered her body.

Finally, and again, this is what brought me back to the whole case, is Sean confessed that his first kill ever was of a young woman whose name he didn't even remember. He said it was either Dina, Dana, or Diana, likely. And he had met her in 2005 when she was selling magazines door-to-door. And he was living with his mother at the time. And he said his mother purchased the magazines from her. And the magazines never showed up. So when he ran into her somewhere in town later on, he was so upset with her that he

pretended he wanted to buy more magazines from her. And he abducted her and stabbed her. And this is the girl, he says, whose bones were found in 2007. To this day, no one knows if that's true or who this girl actually is. They often call her now Dana. But the rendering they did of her is so sad. And I'm, again, going to put this on the website and put it on her Instagram because it is shocking to me that a young woman, they think she's probably in her late teens, early 20s,

that this young woman is missing. A daughter or a sister or a cousin, a friend, and no one knows this girl can't even have a name. And the guy who killed her couldn't even have the decency to remember her name. He wrote a reporter while he was waiting in jail a couple of times, just these rambling notes about how government assistance basically steals people's minds and all these women that he killed, their minds were already gone and they were just bodies flopping around and all he did was take their bodies.

And right now, he's actually only charged with the murders of Stacey and Elizabeth. And he's charged on a couple of counts of sexual assault and kidnapping, but he's not charged with the other three murders that he's confessed to. And I don't know why that would be. I can understand why they wouldn't necessarily lump all of them together in one trial in case something fell through. You want to have the opportunity to try him again, but I don't know if you have to maybe try someone.

I think you have to try someone within a certain amount of time of charging them and maybe that's why they're waiting. Right, though, right to a speedy trial. Right. So right now, he's only standing trial for Stacey and Elizabeth. And initially, his lawyer wanted to basically put in a plea of guilty by reason of insanity. And he had a competency hearing in January of 2017, but he was found that at the time of the crimes, he was sane enough to know what he was doing, so they had to throw out

his plea of guilty by insanity in April. And he was set to stand trial in November of 2017, but at the time, his lawyer asked for an extension because the defense needed more time for two expert witnesses to prepare their testimonies. I have no idea what experts they're going to be bringing up on his behalf, but the trial has been moved to April 9th of 2018, which is basically right around the corner. Yeah, that's really soon. So you're talking about Ashland, Ohio, which it looks is about maybe an hour and a half

away from Columbus, which is where I have family. So I'm looking at this and I also noticed that it's not that far away from Chilacoffee, which has a lot of women missing and presumed or found dead. Is there any talk of connecting the sky with anything from the Chilacoffee vanishing girls? And a lot of like the same circumstances. So all the Chilacoffee women have the same kind of MO where there are these women who were addicted to drugs, had some run-ins with the law, and all the Chilacoffee women kind of had the same problem that the women in Ashland did where they couldn't get media

attention. They really couldn't keep police's interest because police thought they were just relapsing. As I was like roaming through the internet and the web sleuth articles, there's a couple of press conferences that the police did where they wouldn't outright say that they have no connection. They basically said, listen, our police and the Chilacoffee police and all the task force all have access to the same information and can share information. And if there's something to be found or a way to connect these, they will.

There's a reason they haven't so far. And I think they're saying, like, that's that. That we've got this guy for this stuff and has nothing to do with that. But it is eerie how similar. And I don't know if it's eerie how similar because it's possible. This guy was so close and he did do this. Or if it's just, unfortunately, part of these high-risk lifestyles that these women are living, if you are just more likely to have something like this happen to you because

you are addicted to drugs and you do run in these crowds and you sometimes do go to prostitution, you know, I don't know what's what. Well, and especially because the Chilacoffee disappearance has started in 2014. And these Ashland situations started in 2016. So it's not like they're very far apart in location or in time. Like it would be if if there was a serial murderer, rapist or a lot of girls going missing in my area. And then a couple years later, the same thing happened where you live, which is about two

and a half hours away from me. It would it would raise some red flags for both of us in that, like, there's a lot of similarities in the cases or in the situations and not a lot of distance or time. So absolutely. It's very interesting to know that the police departments from these different areas have talked but haven't officially ruled that they're connected or not connected. Yeah. And I think to even more again, everything I'm reading is saying that no, probably not.

But I've said this before in other cases, I find it really hard to believe when someone starts killing that they just stop for a long time and then just like start in like a crazy batch again. So his first kill he says is in 2005. So the first killing he has is 2005. And then all this time goes by 11 years. And then he has this batch in 2016 where he kills almost one woman a month. Question about his about the 2005 killing.

Where was that located? Do you know? So it was located in Marion County. Her skeletal remains were found dumped along Victoria Road, which was in northeast Marion County, Ohio, which is close to this Ashland area. Do you have a map pulled up? How close is it to Chiligothi? I'm pulling up maps right now.

It's closer to Ashland. It is pretty much directly north of Columbus, whereas Chiligothi is directly south. So I do have a map that I'm going to post a link to on the website. Just to give you kind of a visual idea of where all this happened. It kind of maps out where the house was where they found these women, where these other women were buried, where he grew up, where some of the women were last seen. So it'll give you a good landscape if you want to take a look at that on our website, just a visual of all of this.

And we'll have some more pictures, as usual, of some of the victims. I'm definitely going to be posting this Jane Doe a lot. I know it sounds crazy, but share it. Post it around. She's from the Midwest, or at least was found in the Midwest. And again, I can't believe that there's this girl who absolutely no one is missing. It's really, really sad, and I cannot imagine as a daughter and a sister and having sisters and really close friends, just having no one notice that I'm gone or not noticing that

one of the girls that I feel closest to have just disappeared off the map. It is. It's really sad, but I'm hoping that as the trial progresses and we get done with this first trial, maybe they will charge him for the other cases. And as we learn more about those, we'll learn more about this Jane Doe and maybe get some answers there. But we will follow the trial as it happens. And again, this first one is set for April 9th of 2018.

So definitely, everyone, please go to our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com, take a look at these pictures. If you want more information on the show, you can find it there. You can also sign up for our newsletter. It's called The Fix, and we're going to release that quarterly, but in this coming newsletter, we're also going to be releasing information about our first meetup. And we're also going to be doing maybe some giveaways of Crimejunkie swag, so make sure to go there and sign up.

And if you want to connect with us on social media, Brit. You can follow us on Twitter at Crimejunkiepod and on Instagram at Crimejunkiepodcast. We will be back next week with another case that I promise you'll love.