ASHLAND — The prosecution barreled through witnesses Wednesday in the case against accused serial killer Shawn Grate. A total of 15 witnesses testified.
First up was Nathaniel Keck, the nighttime attendant at the BP gas station on East main Street, where Stacey Stanley was last seen Sept. 8, 2016.
Keck testified that he saw Stanley with Grate after he began his shift at 10 p.m.
“They were over by the coffee pots talking. I noticed that she was chipper. She was in a good mood,” Keck said.
Keck said Stanley came to the register and bought two cups of coffee, one for herself and one for the man with her, who she indicated had helped her with her car.
“I watched them leave together, but I never actually saw them get into the vehicle,” Keck said.
A couple days later, when Stanley’s family came to the gas station looking for any signs of her whereabouts, Keck recognized her photo as the woman he had seen.
The gas station has a surveillance camera, he said, but when staff went to pull the tape from that night, they found the camera was not recording.
Through surveillance footage and testimony from Walmart associate Josh Smith and Nails 2 owner Son Thah (Sonny) Phan, Ashland County prosecutor Chris Tunnell established that Stanley was at Walmart in the garden center until 6:56 p.m. and then at the nail salon until about 8:15 p.m.
Joanna Smith, a resident of the 100 block of 9th Street, testified she was looking out her bedroom window one night in the days immediately after Stanley’s disappearance and saw a tall man of medium build with brown hair park Stanley’s car, get out and walk away toward Union Street.
Smith said she though the man looked familiar but did not know who he was. It was not until she saw Shawn Grate’s face in media reports that she realized he was the man from the car and that she had seen him at Save-A-Lot in the past.
Though she only saw the man from the side, Smith testified she was certain it was Grate.
“I’m pretty good at faces,” she said.
Most of the remaining testimony Wednesday concerned break-ins at two campers at the Charles Mill Lake Park campground and at the Mifflin Flea Market in June and July 2016.
Pam Miley testified she went to her camper June 23 and found it had been ransacked. It appeared someone had broken in through a window and taken almost everything from the trailer. Some of her items later were found in a neighboring camper belonging to Tom Molyneaux and his wife, Mary Lou, who is now deceased.
Molyneaux said he went to the campground June 30 to set his camper up to take his wife down for the Fourth of July. She was quite ill, but she really wanted to go, he said.
But when Molyneaux arrived, he found the camper in a state of disarray. Some of his own items and some items that were not were mixed in with trash all over the camper. Inside the camper, the owner and park rangers found rolling tubes for cigarettes, apparent tobacco stains, a large knife with duct tape on the blade and human feces throughout the camper in the piles of trash.
Shortly thereafter, Molyneaux sold the camper. His wife never got to visit it again before she passed away in 2017.
Some items of clothing items found in the camper were sent to a state crime lab for testing, rangers testified. Rangers also found what officer Mark Boggs referred to as a homemade (sex toy) that appeared to be a toothbrush holder wrapped in foil and then wrapped in a garbage bag. Boggs said he took the object apart to determine what it was and did not photograph it or maintain it for testing.
Defense attorney Bob Whitney attempted to suggest in cross examination that the window where the suspect supposedly entered the camper was too small for the defendant to have accessed it.
Tunnell argued what mattered was not how the person got in but the fact they were not supposed to be there.
Mifflin Flea Market owner Curt Conner testified that an employee, who is now deceased, called him July 11 to report someone had broken into the flea market. Conner was uncertain what was taken, but he testified that several of the items found at 363 Covert Court — brass knuckles and tasers — looked similar to items he sold in the store.
A cooler Conner said was similar to ones he sells at the market was found outside a makeshift fort in the woods about a mile from the market, near the intersection of County Road 1908 and County Road 1095, according to testimony from Ashland County Sheriff’s Lt. Scott Smart.
Smart testified that the fort, made of logs, blankets and shower curtains, appeared to have been lived in at one time but did not look recently occupied when he investigated it Sept. 19, 2016.
Tunnell had referred to the fort in his opening arguments, saying Grate had taken Jane Doe there one time, before he kidnapped, raped and assaulted her in the Covert Court house.
At the end of Wednesday afternoon, Tunnell called on two officers from the Ashland County Jail, deputies Cody Mager and Robert Ross. They testified that on five occasions in September and October, 2016, that Grate asked them if he could speak with detective Kim Mager.
It was not yet clear at the end the Wednesday’s testimony why those five requests were brought up. Later in the trial, Kim Mager is expected to testify and the jury is expected to hear tapes of Kim Mager interviewing Grate.
