"Am I gonna be at the grocery store? Am I gonna be with my kids? Where am I gonna be when this is gonna hit like a brick?" asks retired detective Kim Mager, pondering the aftereffects of garnering the confessions of serial killer Shawn Grate.
In 2016, Grate was arrested at an abandoned home in Ohio for the kidnapping and rape of a local woman, who was rescued after placing a 911 call while tied up as Grate slept.
Mager, then one of only a few female cops with the Ashland City Police, spent 33 hours over eight days extracting Grate's confessions to five murders, kidnappings and multiple sexual assaults across the state.
The press dubbed the 40-year-old purportedly charming drifter "the Ladykiller."
"Yes, he's good looking, but the Devil's good looking, too," Grate's mother told a British tabloid.
Grate's violent crimes, which included strangling women to death and callously disposing of their bodies, shook Ashland, where Mager and her husband were raising their three kids. The detective sometimes passed crime scenes while driving her youngest son to football practice. The community was so small that one of the potential jurors for Grate's case had been asked out on a date by the killer.
Interviews with Grate—one luckily recorded on a backup device Mager had in her shirt when the equipment in the interrogation room failed—serve as the backbone of A Hunger to Kill: A Serial Killer, a Determined Detective and the Quest for a Confession that Changed a Small Town Forever, which she co-wrote with New York Times best-selling author Lisa Pulitzer. A&E Crime + Investigation spoke with Mager about having empathy for Grate, returning to normal life after dealing with brutality at work and the serial killer's upcoming execution.
You hadn't even been with Grate for two hours when you had him confessing to the kidnapping and rape of a victim who prefers to be known as Jane Doe. What told you that this was only the beginning of the interrogation?
It's hard to put into words, but I could see there was something unresolved. I knew there was more, I just didn't know that it was murder. I thought, I'm just gonna push as far as I can and try to not show judgment, because I could cause him to shut down. And in layers, it just kept coming.
He was actually somewhat congratulatory when I would catch something that didn't make sense to me and follow up on it.
When seeking information from Grate, you repeatedly told he was a 'standup guy.' Was that hard to say?
Odd as it sounds, his personality sometimes wants to do the right thing. So, I guess with any suspect that I'm interviewing, they're not always doing [wrong]. There's a piece of someone that sometimes wants to rescue somebody—to lead me to the truth.
You write that you had legitimate empathy for Grate—how?
I live with empathy. I know officers who have to project empathy while they might not feel it. For me, I often look at someone and think, 'He was four years old, at one point.'
Grate told me the story about him attacking one of his mom's boyfriends as a tiny child because the guy was in the bedroom with his mom. And when hearing that, it's almost like he's telling me [how he] became [a killer].
There are times when it's so difficult to not show shock or disapproval. There's never a time when you get to say, 'What you did is horrendous! This is what needs to happen to you!' You never get to have that closure, because you don't know if you're gonna get to interview [that suspect] again. And in Grate's case, it was never over. Every time I interviewed him, there was something else to catch.
Beyond Grate, throughout your 30-year interrogation career, how did you deal with returning to your normal life after a day of hearing about brutality? How did you process all of this?
Honestly, I can tell you, I have not processed it. I have never been debriefed in my entire career—meaning I've never had a case [after which] I got to sit down with someone to discuss what happened or how that was. That's not okay for anyone.
I lived years where I felt like someone was blowing a fan on my eyes, where you feel like you just can't breathe. Because it just keeps coming and hitting you and hitting you. And it's incremental, too.
