I risked my life to bring down the ‘womanizer’: In a gruesome 33-hour interrogation, a brave police officer forced Ohio’s heinous serial rapist to reveal his crimes

• WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT
• On September 13, 2016, a man was arrested in the small town of Ashland, Ohio, for a brutal kidnapping and rape.
• The new book, Hunger to killtells the story of the interrogation of Detective Kim Mager, during which it turned out that the suspect was the “womanizer”.

The sun had not yet risen when a desperate call came into the Ashland County emergency dispatch center in northeast Ohio.

After a long silence, a whisper rang out: “I was kidnapped.”

In a barely audible voice, a woman said she was lying in bed next to her kidnapper.

“He has a taser,” she breathed. “Please hurry!”

He had fallen asleep and she had stolen his cell phone from the nightstand.

The frightened victim knew she was being held in one of the two yellow houses across from a downtown laundromat.

“Who kidnapped you?” asked the emergency operator.

The dispatcher listened intently and recognized a name: Shawn Grate.

Three officers were dispatched. They quietly circled the buildings and peered through the windows. There was no sign anywhere.

As they were returning to their patrol cars, one of the police officers tried to open one of the back doors again.

As he reached for the door handle, his heart stopped.

A woman’s outstretched hand pressed flat against the window pane.

They had found her – the victim, whom investigators identified as Jane Doe.

The slim brunette in her mid to late thirties was completely naked. She had numerous bruises on her legs. A shackle was hanging on her arm.

Inside the house, her rapist was lying face down in the ground floor bedroom.

“Stand up! Put your hands behind your back!” shouted the policeman who arrested Grate.

At the time, no one could have imagined that the seemingly isolated incidents of kidnapping and rape would soon reveal the most gruesome serial murder Ashland had ever experienced.

The first time I saw Grate, he was handcuffed in an interrogation room.

Apart from being unshaven and unclean, his light brown hair was unnoticeable; it was a disheveled mess.

He was bare-chested, barefoot and muscular. His most striking feature was his piercing blue eyes.

As a detective, I had dealt with people like him before. My job was to get him to admit what he had done by convincing him that this was a chance to explain himself.

First I had to gain his trust.

“We’re going to take your handcuffs off,” I said.

He had the potential to be dangerous. I took a calculated risk. But I had rarely obtained a confession from a handcuffed suspect.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“It’s difficult,” Grate replied.

“Can we get you something to drink?”

“I would like a coffee, whenever.”

When Grate recited his order (cream and sugar), I thought I saw tears welling up in his eyes.

“It’s okay, buddy, it’s okay,” I said in a soft voice, eager to connect. “We’re going through a lot, okay? A lot.”

He started to talk.

Grate claimed his problems began when his mother abandoned him and his older brother when they were 11 and 13 years old.

“I come home from school and she’s gone,” he said. “But I don’t blame her, honestly. I used to do that, but…”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

As my interrogation entered its second hour, he revealed more about his broken childhood and how he had been abandoned by his mother and later his father.

Eventually he confessed to kidnapping and raping Jane Doe. But my work wasn’t done yet.

I suspected that Grate might have been involved in the disappearance of two other women – Elizabeth Griffith and Stacey Stanley Hicks.

Time was of the essence.

We can only speculate what her condition might be.

If we were lucky, we would find her alive.

“I want to talk a little about other things,” I said to Grate.

In this way, I set the stage for a change of subject as our conversation entered its second hour.

“Shawn, you want to be a decent guy. You’re trying to be one. So, now I want to talk about some other things that we’re going into right now.

“We can’t find Elizabeth,” I said.

The mention of her name elicited an immediate reaction and Grate refused to look at me.

“Hey, look at me,” I pleaded. “I need your help. I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to ask for your help.”

‘Can you help me?’

At that moment, his gaze looked into my eyes and I had him.

Within hours, Grate admitted to kidnapping Elizabeth Griffith. He told me she was in a closet in an upstairs bedroom of the house where Jane Doe had been rescued.

“(But) there is no closet in the upstairs bedroom,” said an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent involved in the investigation.

We would have to go back.

When police and BCI agents re-entered the house, the air inside was stale.

All windows were tightly closed and shaded with bed linen and individual pieces of fabric.

In the middle of the upstairs bedroom was an open sofa bed made of green fabric.

The mattress was bare – there were no sheets, blankets or pillows. Items of clothing were tied to the metal bed frame – possibly as makeshift restraints.

A foul smell permeated the room.

On one wall, officers noticed a strange-looking wooden post with condoms attached to the top. It was narrow and long, measuring several feet.

Several of these strange devices were later found in other rooms of the house. As our investigation progressed, others turned up in trailers and campsites in the area.

Grate later told me that he had used it on himself.

A strange collection of clothing hung from nails and stretched from floor to ceiling in one corner of the room. Beneath the strange mosaic was a pile of dozens of stuffed animals.

If there was a hidden closet, it was here.

BCI agents worked quickly and methodically, removing the pile of toys and hanging clothing.

They discovered a can of air freshener, fly pupae on the floorboards and a dark wooden door sealed with thick black tape. Even the keyhole was covered.

When the door was opened, an overwhelming foul smell emanated.

They had found Elizabeth.

Her head was pressed against the back wall of the closet, strands of her blonde hair were still visible.

Her legs were bent slightly upwards and her hands were behind her back as if they were tied.

My heart sank. I felt helpless.

There was nothing I could do to save her.

My goal now would be to bring justice to her – and to all of Grate’s victims.

In 33 hours of interrogation over eight days, Kim Mager obtained Grate’s confession to five murders, kidnappings and several sexual assaults on women across Ohio.

He was sentenced to death in 2019 and is scheduled to be executed on March 19, 2025.

Excerpted from A Hunger to Kill: A Serial Killer, a Determined Detective, and the Quest for a Confession That Changed a Small Town Forever by Kim Mager with Lisa Pulitzer. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.