America’s “golden age of serial killers,” from the 1970s into the 1990s, spawned a prolific cast of madmen with sobriquets like the Son of Sam, the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker and the Golden State Killer. Others are remembered by their given names: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy.
Yet by 2023, when Long Island authorities charged Rex Heuermann in the Gilgo Beach slayings, the attendant media frenzy reflected not only the scope and horror of the alleged crimes, but the acknowledgment that Heuermann, as The New York Times put it, “may have been among the last of the dying breed of American serial killers.”
Despite our insatiable cultural hunger for tales of murder and mayhem, serial killers operating in recent years have largely evaded household recognition. One of them is Shawn Grate, the subject of Kim Mager’s chilling memoir-cum-true-crime-thriller, “A Hunger to Kill.”
Grate is the convicted murderer of five Ohio women who disappeared between 2006 and 2016, when his killing spree came to a dramatic close. Mager is the retired homicide detective who helped put Grate behind bars, eliciting multiple confessions over the course of eight long, psychologically taxing days. Inevitably, she was called a “real-life Clarice Starling,” who, like the protagonist of “The Silence of the Lambs,” put herself in harm’s way during a series of jailhouse interviews — and remains haunted by the career-defining case.
“I had no intention of ever putting pen to paper,” writes Mager, who collaborated with the veteran ghostwriter (and former Times correspondent) Lisa Pulitzer, until “I began to realize that only by processing what occurred” can we “assist the public in identifying indicators of danger that are more nuanced than people realize.”
In Grate’s case, those indicators include a troubled childhood devoid of “nurturing,” an omnipresent rage toward the mother who abandoned him at 11, and a longtime fascination with bodily decomposition. Grate’s upbringing contrasts sharply with that of his inquisitor. But despite their wildly incongruous backgrounds — and Mager’s fury over Grate’s unspeakable crimes — Mager treats Grate with empathy, never reducing him to a tabloid monster.
There’s no whodunit here; no suspenseful hunt for an anonymous predator eluding the police. Rather, the story begins with Grate’s apprehension in rural Ashland, Ohio, where a terrified woman — kidnapped, bound and repeatedly assaulted — manages to call 911 from her sleeping captor’s cellphone. Cops frantically locate the abandoned house where the woman has been imprisoned. They arrest Grate and haul him down to the Ashland Police Division. There, Mager carries out her protracted interrogations — 33 hours in all — cultivating a rapport between detective and criminal that lies at the heart of the book.
Mager’s recorded conversations with Grate shape the dialogue-heavy narrative, which — lurid title aside — presents his crimes in detail but without sensation. (The most stomach-churning descriptions are reserved for the fly- and maggot-infested domicile where a victim’s corpse is found beneath a fetid mountain of trash.) Through “an arduous process to get him to a place of comfort and trust,” Mager persuades Grate to open up — first admitting to abducting and sexually assaulting the unnamed woman in the abandoned house; then to murdering a different woman, then another and then three more.
These confession scenes animate the plot. But Grate’s admissions don’t come easily; Mager knows she is always “just one question away from shutting him down.” She assiduously plumbs Grate’s psyche, exploring his upbringing, his proclivities, his beliefs and his relationships — both to other people and to Christianity, which emerges as a recurring theme. In the end, Mager’s skillful inquiry leads to a trial, a conviction and a death sentence that is currently pending.
The early chapters of “A Hunger to Kill” braid the story of the case with character-driven chapters developing the portrait of Mager, as well as the history and culture of Ashland, a faith-based heartland community whose wholesome facade masks social ills like drug addiction. Occasionally, details overwhelm; the investigative minutiae and diligent play-by-play of the interrogation didn’t always hold my interest.
Still, the book is compelling where it counts: It takes readers inside the difficult, delicate, disorienting act of earning a killer’s trust so that his victims can have justice. In an era of facile amateur recaps, this has real value. And while there are few facets of law enforcement that haven’t been dramatized — film and TV comparisons jump to the 2024 mind with alarming ease — she manages to demonstrate the real emotional costs of competent, painstaking police work.
There’s an excruciating question that Mager may never be able to answer: Did Grate take any lives other than those of the five women to whose murders he confessed? “The fear of finding more victims, whether they were alive or dead, is what haunted me throughout the case,” Mager writes. “And, if I’m being honest, that fear continues.”
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