

For the Ashland County murders, Grate was sentenced to death. Stanley and Griffith were found in Ashland County, and Leicy and Cunningham were killed in Richland County. 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. Once they started receiving their monthly checks.” “Just their bodies were flopping wherever it can flop but their minds were already dead! The state took their minds. “They were already dead,” he wrote to a reporter. In October 2016, Grate wrote letters to reporters as well, talking about how he murdered the women and what he had done to them. 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. 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.

In 2019, he pleaded guilty to killing Dana Nicole Lowrey in Louisiana. In 2016, grate said he had killed five women: Candice Cunningham, Rebekah Leicy, and another woman as well as Stanley and Griffith. Grate confessed to the murder of another woman as well while in police custody, and he was later connected to more victims. The bodies were those of previously missing women Stacey Stanley and Elizabeth Griffith. There were also two corpses on the premises, which filled the house with an awful stench. When police arrived, they found the woman had been tied to a bed and sexually assaulted. Her captor was asleep while she called, she said.


She told the dispatcher that she’d been tied up, but she was calling from her kidnapper’s phone after managing to escape. “I’ve been kidnapped,” the woman told the dispatcher on September 13, 2016. Grate was captured by police after a woman managed to escape from him and call 911, according to People. #BREAKING: Jury recommends death penalty for convicted killer Shawn Grate
