Bonus: 'Dana'

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Hand in the Window" Bonus Episode: "Dana" (Dec 16, 2025, ABC News / 20/20)

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Overview

This special bonus episode delves into the case of an unidentified murder victim referred to as "Dana" by confessed serial killer Shawn Grate. While Grate confessed to multiple murders, "Dana" was a mysterious victim whose real identity remained unknown for years. The episode chronicles the determined efforts of detectives and forensic experts to uncover who "Dana" was, utilizing innovative technology and investigative persistence. Hosted by Brad Milke and John Quinones, the episode reveals the emotional toll of the case, the intricacies of forensic reconstruction, and the eventual resolution that brought closure to one family.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Shawn Grate’s Confession and Introduction to "Dana"

• Confession Details (00:29–02:11)
  • After being arrested for kidnapping, rape, and two murders, Grate tells Detective Kim Major of an additional, unidentified victim. He only remembers "her name's Dana...I totally forget her name" (John Quinones quoting Grate, 01:59).
  • The victim had been a traveling magazine salesperson who had encountered Grate at his and his grandparents' homes.
  • Grate describes luring her inside, assaulting, strangling, and ultimately killing and burning her body in 2006 in Marion County, Ohio.

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2. Investigative Obstacles and Early Forensic Work

• Cold Case Challenges (03:28–04:09)
  • The victim’s body is found in 2007, burned and without any personal effects. Detectives know only basic characteristics: white, 5'3"–5'9" tall, 15–22 years old, but she's unidentifiable.
  • Early facial reconstruction attempts are unsuccessful; Grate himself says the composite "doesn't look like the woman" he remembers (John Quinones, 04:20).

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3. Advanced Forensic Facial Reconstruction

• Samantha Molnar’s Role (04:55–07:09)
  • Forensic artist Samantha Molnar from the Ohio Bureau of Investigation is brought in for a more accurate clay reconstruction. She explains, "once we had the [skull]...I basically start doing the clay reconstruction from there..." (Samantha Molnar, 05:44).
  • Using CT scanning and 3D printing of the skull, she builds a new facial sculpture.
  • Molnar meets Grate to verify the reconstruction: "He tells her that yes, it looked much more like the woman that he remembered" (John Quinones, 07:00).
  • She describes the encounter with Grate as "extremely eerie...he didn't look like a monster" (Samantha Molnar, 07:09).

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4. The Breakthrough: Isotope Testing

• Expanding the Search (11:38–13:07)
  • Investigators turn to isotope testing, analyzing Dana’s tooth and rib: "You are what you eat...everything you eat, the source of the water you drink...shows up in your bones" (John Quinones, 11:38).
  • Results indicate Dana was likely from the southern U.S., between Texas and Florida, not Ohio (Samantha Molnar, 12:28).

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5. Genetic Genealogy and Final Identification

• DNA Technology’s Role (13:36–14:20)
  • Investigators use genetic genealogy databases to build a family tree.
  • "There is a break in the case...it leads to the name Dana Lowery" (John Quinones, 14:10).
  • Molnar explains the confirmation: "We were able to swab her daughter...and then successfully identify Dana as the victim" (Samantha Molnar, 14:20).
  • Dana Lowery was a mother who had left home to sell magazines, intending to return but never made it back.

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6. Aftermath and Emotional Impact

• Closure and Community Trauma (15:21–17:37)
  • Identification occurs in 2019—more than a decade after her murder, years after Grate’s confession and death penalty sentencing.
  • Quinones shares his perspective visiting crime scenes: "People still remember, you know, everyone still talks about it...I went to...areas where the women’s bodies were found" (John Quinones, 16:12).
  • Detective Kim Major, instrumental in Grate’s confessions, has written a book titled A Hunger to Kill—named after Grate’s chilling words.
  • The episode closes reflecting on the story’s tragedy and the tenacity of investigators: "A testament to the persistence of these investigators" (Brad Milke, 17:29; John Quinones, 17:35).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Grate’s casual confession:
  • "I'm thinking her name's Dana. I totally forget her name after a while. Dana." (John Quinones quoting Grate, 01:59)
• On forensic reconstruction:
  • "Once we had [the skull], we can actually 3D print an exact replica...and then...start doing the clay reconstruction from there." (Samantha Molnar, 05:44)
• Describing the encounter with Grate:
  • "He didn't look like a monster." (Samantha Molnar, 07:09)
• On isotope testing:
  • "Everything you eat, the source of the water you drink...shows up in your bones." (John Quinones, 11:38)
• Emotional impact of the case:
  • "I think...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...but that wasn't the case at all." (Samantha Molnar, 15:04)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:29–02:11 – Grate's confession about Dana
• 03:28–04:20 – Investigators’ knowledge & challenges identifying Dana
• 04:55–07:09 – Forensic artist Samantha Molnar’s involvement and reconstruction process
• 07:43–08:20 – National and international search for Dana’s identity
• 11:38–13:07 – Isotope testing reveals Dana’s Southern origin
• 13:36–14:20 – Application of genetic genealogy, identification as Dana Lowery
• 16:12–17:37 – Legacy of the case, community memory, and Detective Major’s book

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains an investigative, empathetic tone—balancing technical forensic details, emotional testimony from investigators, and respectful remembrance of the victims. Both Brad Milke and John Quinones guide listeners through complex investigative steps while highlighting the lasting human impact.

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For listeners, this episode provides a gripping, step-by-step account of solving a "Jane Doe" cold case, showcases innovations in forensic science, and offers a heartfelt reminder that every victim has a story that deserves to be told.

Transcript

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[Brad Milke]

Hey, I'm Brad Milke. I'm a reporter at ABC News. I host our daily news podcasts. Start here. 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. Great, great. 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.

[John Quinones]

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

[Brad Milke]

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 Sean Grate 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.

[John Quinones]

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

[Brad Milke]

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

[John Quinones]

You 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.

[Brad Milke]

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?

[John Quinones]

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.

[Brad Milke]

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

[John Quinones]

No, no. This became a cold case.

[Brad Milke]

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?

[John Quinones]

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. In the case of Dana.

[Samantha Molnar]

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.

[Brad Milke]

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, right?

[John Quinones]

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.

[Samantha Molnar]

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.

[Brad Milke]

So that's so wild that they almost build it from the inside out of, like, this is what the skull would stand, Right. 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?

[John Quinones]

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, you know, 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.

[Samantha Molnar]

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.

[Brad Milke]

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

[John Quinones]

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.

[Brad Milke]

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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[Brad Milke]

All right, and we are back with John Quinones, 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?

[John Quinones]

They just won't give up. Samantha Molner, the criminal intelligence analyst and forensic artist, comes up with another idea of how to find. 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.

[Brad Milke]

There are markers literally like that reside in your bones.

[John Quinones]

What you've been 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.

[Samantha Molnar]

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.

[John Quinones]

Wow.

[Brad Milke]

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.

[John Quinones]

They test the soil samples and things in particular, 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.

[Brad Milke]

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.

[John Quinones]

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.

[Samantha Molnar]

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.

[Brad Milke]

Dana Lowery was identified in 2019. That's more than a decade after she was murdered, three years after Shawn Great 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, because 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?

[John Quinones]

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.

[Brad Milke]

Like this is the house that has since been torn down.

[John Quinones]

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 one. 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 could have even happened to me.

[Brad Milke]

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

[John Quinones]

Oh, yeah, they're amazing. Yeah.

[Brad Milke]

So 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.

[John Quinones]

Thank you. Brad, Sam.