The Hand in the Window: 'Dana'

Summary

Podcast Summary: 20/20 – The Hand in the Window: 'Dana'
Date: December 17, 2025
Host: John Quinones (with Brad Mielke, ABC News)

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Episode Overview

This bonus episode of The Hand in the Window deep-dives into the chilling, unresolved story of "Dana," one of serial killer Shawn Grate’s victims whose full identity eluded investigators for years. ABC News’ Brad Mielke and host John Quinones detail the relentless investigative work—spanning facial reconstruction, isotope testing, and genetic genealogy—that ultimately gave a name to this unknown woman, bringing closure to her family decades after her murder.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Shawn Grate’s Ominous Confession

• Shawn Grate, already incarcerated for multiple murders, casually mentions to Detective Kim Major that he killed another woman he thinks was named Dana.
  • Quote:

    “I'm thinking her name's Dana. I totally forget her name after a while. Dana.”
    — Shawn Grate as quoted by John Quinones [02:23]

• Victim was a door-to-door magazine saleswoman, killed in 2006 after an argument with Grate regarding magazines.

2. Initial Crime Scene and Discovery

• The victim’s body found burned, without clothing or identification in 2007, Marion County, Ohio, making the case exceptionally challenging.
  • Investigator estimates: young white female, age 15–22, height 5’3”–5’9” [03:58]
• Became a cold case due to a lack of identifying information.

3. The Role of Forensic Art and Facial Reconstruction

• Investigators attempt digital facial reconstruction, but Grate dismisses the resulting image as inaccurate.
• Enter Samantha Molnar, forensic artist at the Ohio Bureau of Investigation, who crafts a clay facial reconstruction from a 3D-printed replica of the victim’s skull.
  • Quote:

    “Start by building the muscle structure on the face, placing the average tissue depth markers, and then kind of finishing the sculpture from there.”
    — Samantha Molnar [06:07]

  • The reconstruction is shared with the public and presented to Grate, who confirms it better matches his memory.
  • Memorable Moment:

    “Meeting Shaun Great was extremely eerie... he seemed kind of unalarming. I could understand why maybe women were trusting of him... because he didn’t look like a monster.”
    — Samantha Molnar [07:33]

4. Innovative Forensic Techniques: Isotope Testing

• With the facial reconstruction not yielding leads, investigators turn to isotope testing (examining chemical signatures in bones and teeth) to geographically narrow the victim’s origins.
  • Quote:

    “Basically, you’re exposed in your environment. Everything you eat, the source of the water you drink... shows up in your bones.”
    — John Quinones [11:42]

• Testing indicates “Dana” was likely from the southern US (Texas to Florida), not Ohio as initially believed [12:32–13:03].

5. Genetic Genealogy Breakthrough

• Investigators send the victim’s DNA to a genealogical database, ultimately identifying her as Dana Lowery through a match with her daughter.
  • Quote:

    “We were able to swab her daughter, make that comparison, and then successfully identify Dana as the victim.”
    — Samantha Molnar [14:24]

  • Heartfelt insight: Dana was a mother of two whose children spent years not knowing why she disappeared.

6. Aftermath and Reflections

• Dana Lowery was identified in 2019, more than a decade after her death.
• Shawn Grate, already on death row for other murders, pleads guilty to Dana’s murder and receives another life sentence [15:25].
• John Quinones recounts his haunting visit to the crime scenes in Ashland—sites that, years later, still loom in the community’s collective memory.
  • Quote:

    “It was such a big case and such a tragic case that people still remember. I went to a gas station... wooded area... and those vacant lots where the women... were found.”
    — John Quinones [16:15]

• Detective Kim Major has since authored a book, A Hunger to Kill, underscoring that “this could happen anywhere and it could have happened to any one of us.” [17:04]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [02:23] “I'm thinking her name's Dana. I totally forget her name after a while. Dana.”
  — Shawn Grate (as quoted by John Quinones)
• [07:33] “Meeting Shaun Great was extremely eerie... I could understand why maybe women were trusting of him or went with him willingly because he didn’t look like a monster.”
  — Samantha Molnar
• [14:24] “We were able to swab her daughter, make that comparison, and then successfully identify Dana as the victim.”
  — Samantha Molnar
• [16:15] “It was such a big case and such a tragic case that people still remember. I went to a gas station... wooded area... and those vacant lots where the women... were found.”
  — John Quinones

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to the case & Grate’s confession: [00:55–02:35]
• Crime scene details & cold case status: [03:52–04:34]
• Facial reconstruction and Molnar’s perspective: [04:44–08:07]
• Isotope testing explained: [11:42–13:03]
• Genetic genealogy and Dana’s identification: [13:40–15:25]
• Community reflections and detective’s insights: [16:15–17:40]

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Tone: True to 20/20’s investigative, respectful reporting style, this episode is somber, methodical, and empathetic—highlighting both the horrors perpetrated by Grate and the dedication of those determined to identify his victims and bring closure to their families.

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Conclusion

This episode illustrates the dogged persistence of detectives and forensic experts in identifying a forgotten victim. Through innovative science, cross-state investigation, and unwavering dedication, Dana Lowery’s name was restored, her family given answers, and justice served, however belatedly. The story stands as a testament to both the depths of human cruelty and the resolve of those who seek the truth.

Transcript

[A]

This is Debra Roberts. I'm here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, the Hand in the Window. Remember, you can get new episodes early if you follow the Hand in the Window for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app. Now, here's the episode.

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[D]

Hey, I'm Brad Milke. I'm a reporter at ABC News. I host our daily news podcast, Start Here. And. And today we got a special edition of the Hand in the Window for you. I'm sitting here with our host, John Quinones for a really interesting bonus episode. So by now you've heard the series, you know the chilling story of Sean Grate, a serial killer in rural Ohio. Over the course of more than 30 hours of police interviews, Grate confessed to the murders of five women. Now, you might remember Grate did not remember the full name of one of these women. He said it was something like Dana. He said he killed her in a county that neighbored Ashland. We did not have time to include this in our other episodes, but there was a whole investigation to discover who this woman was. Police were following tips from multiple counties. Forensic experts were involved. There was cutting edge technology. Well, today we're gonna dive into the tale of Dana. John Quinones. Thank you so much for being here. Good to see you.

[C]

Thank you, Brad. It's good to be here.

[D]

I mean, part of what made this whole series so chilling was the idea that someone can be like, oh, yeah, you know, I killed this person. I assaulted this person. Like, it's just another chapter in this story. So I would like you to take us back to the fall of 2016, when Shawn Great first mentions this unidentified victim. He's in jail after being arrested for kidnapping, rape, two murders. And Detective Kim Major asks Grate if there's anything else he wants to get off his chest, and he says, there is.

[C]

I'm thinking her name's Dana. I totally forget her name after a while. Dana.

[D]

I think her name is Dana. So chilling to hear, I guess, what else came out in this interview, you.

[C]

Know, Brad, it's a riveting series about a vicious serial killer in Ohio and a female detective, a woman detective, who got him to confess. Detective Kim Major, as you mentioned, spent hours with the killer, Sean Gray, trying to get to the details of who the heck this woman Dana was. It turns out she was a traveling salesperson, sold magazines door to door and had gone to his house and had promised to sell, he says, his mother, some magazines, but never delivered them. Right. So Sean Grate is very angry and upset. Later, he's at another house, his grandparents house, and here comes the saleswoman again, selling magazines. And he invites her into this house. He invites her in, There's a conversation about magazines, and then he strangles her. She falls and then she wakes up again. He panics and he stabs her. Now. Great. Winds up dumping her body and eventually setting it on flames. He set it on fire. This is back in 2006 in Marion county, which is a neighboring county next to this town, where other murders had happened. Ashland, Ohio.

[D]

What did investigators know about this victim? Because he's saying somebody named Dana, I guess. What did they know about her as this starts unfolding?

[C]

Well, her body was found in 2007 on the side of the road. No clothing, there was no jewelry on her, nothing to identify with. And her remains were partially burned because he had set the body on fire. So it was hard to find out anything about this woman. What they did know was that she was white, and she's somewhere between 53 and 5 9, about 15 to 22 years old. But they were never able to identify her.

[D]

There's not a ton to go on, huh?

[C]

No, no. This became a cold case.

[D]

So what do you do if you're the police? I guess. What happens after Shawn Grate says, yes, I'm confessing to this murder of somebody named Dana. What do you do as the cops?

[C]

Something called digital facial reconstruction. And they did this on the body after he confessed. Shawn Grade was shown the reconstruction, and they showed it to him. And they said, is this the woman? And he said, no, it doesn't look like the woman. I don't think it's very accurate at all. Enter this woman, Samantha Molnar. She's a criminal intelligence analyst and forensic artist at the Ohio Criminal Bureau of Investigation. She's brought in. And in this clip, she tells us about her role in the case of Dana.

[E]

I recall getting a call from Marion county, and they had explained to us kind of what was going on in Ashland. They asked me if I would Be interested in doing a facial reconstruction, a clay reconstruction on this set of remains as another attempt to see if maybe we could get another image that might be more of what Shawn remembered.

[D]

Wait, so let me just get this straight. So I'm used to thinking about, like, composite imagery, right? Where, like, you bring in a sketch artist or something like that. Sounds like this is a similar concept, but you're doing, like, a 3D model of a person's face.

[C]

Exactly. It's fascinating. Science investigators, then they realize that they do have Dana's skull, Right? So Samantha Molner takes that skull to a hospital where they do a CT scan on it.

[E]

And then once we have that CT scan, we can actually 3D print an exact replica of the skull, or. Which was very important in this case because she had been burned and her skull was pretty damaged. So then once we had the exact replica of her skull, I basically start doing the clay reconstruction from there. Start by building the muscle structure on the face, placing the average tissue depth markers, and then kind of finishing the sculpture from there.

[D]

So that's so wild that they almost build it from the inside out of, like, this is what the skull would be. Right. And so. And then they add all these things on top of it, I guess. Okay. So then they have what they think might be almost a replica of this woman's face. What do they do next?

[C]

They start sending the photos around of the new reconstruction to the sheriff's department, to the media, and they share the photos on social media also to get the word out to see if anyone recognizes this woman, Dana. And this analyst, Samantha Mollner, also meets with Shawn Grade himself. Right? She goes to where he's being held to show him the new reconstruction to see if it better matches what he remembered, if it better matches his memory of this woman. And he tells her that, yes, it looked much more like the woman that he remembered. And that whole experience of visiting Great was very unsettling.

[E]

Oh, my gosh. I don't know how to explain it. Meeting Shaun Great was extremely eerie. This was one of the worst cases I had worked so far in my career. And then to meet him, and he seemed kind of unalarming. I could understand why maybe women were trusting of him or went with him willingly because he didn't. He didn't look like a monster.

[C]

Wow.

[D]

So I guess, does anything come out of this then?

[C]

Well, now they have more to go on, right? So they follow up on leads, right, about missing people, people from across the United States, from Canada, even Mexico, even Israel. But the Victim still remains unidentified. Investigators had been told by Sean Gray that the victim was an Ohio resident. So they searched through Ohio records seeing if there was any missing woman in the state of Ohio who might match the details of this case. But they didn't have any luck. Wouldn't give up, though. They wouldn't give up. They decided to try something else.

[D]

Well, and we're gonna get to the next phase of this investigation of this sort of deep dive into what happened from the victim you didn't necessarily hear about in the rest of the series. So we'll be back right after this.

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All right, and we are back with John Kinone as the host of the Hand in the Window. So, John, I mean, investigators now have this reconstruction of Dana's face, but they're still not having any luck identifying her. So what do they do next?

[C]

They just won't give up. Samantha Molner, the criminal intelligence analyst and forensic artist, comes up with another idea of how to find out who this woman is. She thought of something called isotope testing. The way it was described to me was that you are what you eat. Basically, you're exposed in your environment. Right. Everything you eat, the source of the water you drink, all of that shows up in your bones. Right. And it can reveal where you were born, where you grew up, and where you've lived throughout your life.

[D]

Like, there are markers literally like that reside in your bones, what you've been.

[C]

Eating, what's your diet, and it can reveal all of this. So the investigators send Dana's remains to a lab in Florida to do this isotope testing.

[E]

They tested a tooth, and they tested a rib. So it's going to tell you maybe geographically where you were born, where you lived the first few years, and then your ribs regenerate every 10 years or so. And that would have told us maybe where this female had spent the last several years of her life. And then once we finally got those results back, we found out that she likely was not an Ohio resident, but maybe that she was from the southern United States, somewhere between Texas and Florida.

[C]

Wow.

[D]

So we think she's from between Texas and Florida. How do you figure that out, though? Like, how do the results actually prove, like, oh, this person is from the south and not a different part of the country.

[C]

They test the soil samples and things, in particular local environments, and they create this isotope map by region. Right. To see what matches with the victim. And the isotopes found in Dana's bones matched isotopes found in the southern United States.

[D]

It's a huge breakthrough then. Right. Because then once you realize this person's not necessarily from Ohio originally, you kind of have to widen your search as to where this person came from.

[C]

Yeah. That means they start pulling missing persons cases from states in the southern U.S. down in the South. Anyone, especially with the name Dana. Right. Or similar. And in that age group that they had, still no luck. They were unable to identify her. But investigators then finally turned to another idea, and that is genetic genealogy. They sent samples of her, Dana's DNA to the big system that's out there, which builds family trees and identifies who our relatives might be. I know. I've done it myself. And then finally, there is a break in the case, and it leads to the name Dana Lowery.

[E]

What we did next was go down and swab the daughter of Dana to be able to confirm her identity. So your mom is going to share 50% of the DNA as her children. So we were able to swab her daughter, make that comparison, and then successfully identify Dana as the victim. I learned that both of her parents had actually passed away before she had passed away. I also learned that, you know, she was in a relationship and they had a couple of kids, that she was a mother, and that she had decided to travel, selling magazines. And I believe her intent was to come home to her family. And she. She didn't get to. I think, for me, the thing that struck my heartstrings the most was those kids growing up not knowing, thinking maybe their mom just didn't want to call anymore or didn't want to come back and see them. But that wasn't the case at all.

[D]

Dana Lowery was identified in 2019. That's more than a decade after she was murdered, three years after Sean Grate confessed. By that point, he'd already been sentenced to the death penalty for the murders of Elizabeth Griffith and Stacey Stanley. In a separate case, he had received life in prison for the murders of Candace Cunningham and Rebecca Lacey. Sean Grate pleaded guilty to Dana Lowery's murder and was then sentenced to life in prison in that case, too. So ultimately, he confessed to these five murders, all in Ohio over the span of about a decade. And, John, last question for you. Cause you personally went to the scene of this, you know, this house that had been abandoned, where there had been, you know, some of these murders here in Ashland. Right. I'm just curious about what it was like when you went to this town all these years later. What is it like there? What sticks out to somebody like you?

[C]

It was such a big case and such a tragic case that people still remember. You know, everyone still talks about it. I went to a gas station where one of the victims was picked up because she had had a flat tire. I went to a wooded area where Shawn Gray would build tree houses and hide out there and then dump the body next to a tree. I went to an area 10 miles outside of Ashland where he had killed a woman and then dragged her body to a creek and didn't even bury her. He just covered her with some branches and left her there. And then, of course, I went to those vacant lots where the women. Two of the women's bodies were found, one of them in the closet and one under a pile of trash.

[D]

This is the house that has since been torn down.

[C]

Exactly. And where one of the victims, the LA Jane Doe, was held until she was able to call 911. Detective Kim Major has written a book about it all called A Hunger to Kill, which is when Sean Gray said to her that he just felt this hunger to kill. The book, she says, is to remind everyone that this could happen anywhere and it could have happened to any one of us. She said it be. Could. Could have even happened to me.

[D]

It's really, again, tragic story, but again, a testament to the persistence of these investigators.

[C]

They're amazing.

[D]

Yeah. So I just. We could talk about this for hours, but I'm really glad that we got to at least sort of dive deeper on one of these storylines that is just so interesting here. John Quinones, thank you so much for a great series and a great chat here.

[C]

Thank you, Brad. Sam.

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