A ‘Real-Life Clarice Starling’ and the Murder Case That Haunts Her

A HUNGER TO KILL: A Serial Killer, a Determined Detective and the Quest for a Confession That Changed a Small Town Forever, by Kim Mager with Lisa Pulitzer

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.”