HE LAUGHED AT VICTIMS
Serial killer kept bodies in bin bags
MONSTERS OF DEATH ROW
Dead-eyed slaughterer Michael Madison is every cop’s worst nightmare. Known to police from a young age, he graduated from drug dealer to sex offender to rapist – and finally to trophy-keeping serial killer...
MONSTER Michael Madison was handed a death sentence in June 2015 for the murders of three innocent women.
Shortly afterwards, Van Terry, the father of 18-year-old Shirellda Terry – who was one of Madison’s victims – approached the stand to tell the courtroom about his loss.
He said: “Right now, I guess we’re supposed to forgive this clown who has touched our families, taken my child.”
The grieving father turned around to look at Madison – the man who abducted, raped and murdered his daughter.
And Madison looked back at him with a big, sneering smirk on his face.
Terry snapped. He bolted across the courtroom and lunged at Madison, while guards desperately tried to keep them apart.
It’s this utter contempt for the agony he’s caused that makes Madison, now 41, one of the most cold-hearted killers in Ohio’s history.
Terry later told reporters: “He looked at me and smiled. It was so disrespectful.
“I was thinking how he mutilated my child, cut my child, and he did it all while she was still alive.
Strangled
“I don’t know if I thought about leaping or what have you. I just know I wanted him.”
Put yourself in Van Terry’s shoes. Chances are you’d feel no different.
And there could be more grieving fathers out there who don’t yet know the fate of their loved ones.
Because, while the official death count for Madison is three, police suspect there could be many, many more.
Madison was 35 at the time of the killings. Each one of his victims – Shetisha Sheeley, 28, Angela Deskins, 38, and 18-year-old Shirellda – had been lured to his apartment between October 2012 and July 2013.
Once inside, they’d been strangled to death and their bodies put in black bin bags.
Like a twisted trophy hunter, Madison kept the corpses either on his property or so close to his house that he could see them out of his back window, slowly rotting in the plastic he had wrapped them in.
When other girlfriends complained about the nasty smell lurking in certain rooms, he blamed the stench on dead raccoons, telling one: “You don’t want to see that. It’s gruesome.”
Like so many serial killers, Madison was moulded – and warped – as a youngster, growing up in a deeply dysfunctional family.
Raised in East Cleveland, Ohio, when he was two years old social services reported that Madison’s mother, Diane, had stuffed food down his throat with such force that he’d vomited.
Diane – herself a victim of child rape and abuse – then put a sick-soaked Madison into a red-hot bath, scalding him with the boiling water.
Rather than comfort her child, she then beat him with an extension cord in an attempt to stifle his screams.
A year later, when Michael was three, social services returned to the house to find Madison so badly beaten he needed hospital treatment.
As defence lawyer David Grant explained:
“This individual had no foundation on which to make the proper choices.
“The evidence will show that his life was further influenced by a disturbed family tree, comprising generations of physical abusers and sex abusers.
“It was, quite literally, a family tree of abuse.”
Against the backdrop of such a history of neglect and pain, Madison became a nomad in his late teens, at one point moving in with an uncle in Pennsylvania.
The uncle, however, was the opposite of a positive influence and the pair instead revelled in trying to have sex with the same women.
Madison was in and out of prison for drugs offences until things took a much darker turn in 2002, when he was convicted of attempted rape.
After serving a jail term, Madison resumed his drug-dealing business, living a relatively ‘normal’ life.
He also became a father of two before eventually splitting from his wife, Tenia Plummer.
Before that, though, they would be very sociable, often partying with neighbours.
Little did friends or family realise that the bodies of the women Madison had killed were sitting just a few yards THE WORLD’S MOST EVIL MURDERERS AND THE HORRIFIC CRIMES THAT SAW THEM SENTENCED TO EXECUTION...
away from where they were raising their glasses.
The first sign of trouble came on July 19, 2013, when cable TV workers notified police of a ‘horrible stench’ coming from Madison’s garage, as well as the presence of ‘ hundreds of flies’.
Court files reveal: “Upon entering the garage, police located a ‘large plastic bag jammed between the vehicle and the wall of the garage’.
Fluid
“Officers pulled the bag out onto the driveway and began cutting into it.
“After cutting through six layers of garbage bags, a large amount of fluid began to seep out of the container and run down the driveway.
“At that point, realising the bag might contain something other than decaying garbage, the officers stopped what they were doing.
“It was promptly determined that the bag contained a body.
“The body was identified three days later as Shirellda Terry, 18, who had been reported missing by her parents nine days earlier, on July 10, when uncharacteristically she did not come home from her job.
“To fit into the garbage bags, her body had been folded in half, with her feet at the level of her ears.”
Shirellda had died from strangulation – but a coroner also revealed how she had suffered a deep wound to her vaginal area made by a serrated knife.
A police SWAT team nabbed Madison later that day while he took refuge at his mother’s house nearby.
During his first interrogation he joked with police, telling one officer: “We’re going to be famous.”
He added: “I’m not expecting to beat this. This is ugly, trust me.
“I’m numb right now, I’m truly numb.”
Realising they were potentially looking at further murder victims, detectives returned to Madison’s home.
The court documents add: “Some 15 minutes after beginning their search of the neighbouring fields and abandoned houses on July 20, the detectives found another body.
“The discovery was made in a field behind a garage that was located near Madison’s apartment building.
“It was another garbage bag, covered over with debris and vegetation.
“Once the debris was removed, the bag was clearly visible.
Hitting
“A few hours after discovering that first garbage bag, the detectives discovered another similarly shaped bag in the basement of a nearby abandoned house on East 139th Street, located below one of the broken basement windows.
“They theorised that the body had been dropped through the window.
“The abandoned house was less than a hundred yards from Madison’s apartment building.”
The bodies were later identified as Shetisha Sheeley and Angela Deskins.
Fearing this might just be the tip of the iceberg, cops began asking Madison if there were even more bodies.
While he scoffed at the notion of 10 victims, calling that number ‘extreme’, he added: “Only time will tell. If there’s three, I’m pretty sure there are more.”
During his trial, several women came forward to testify that Madison was a womanhater.
Neighbour Eugenia Thomas said: “He got upset with women.
“He talked about hitting them and tying them up. He liked submissive women.”
When Madison was eventually handed his death sentence, Cuyahoga County common pleas judge Nancy McDonnell told him: “You clearly have no respect for the law and no respect for human life.”
It might take years for the state of Ohio to jab a lethal injection into Madison’s arm.
And for family members whose loved ones have been taken away, that day can’t come soon enough.
Shetisha Sheeley’s sister, Samara, said: “If you get the injection, you take the easy way out.
“It’s a lose-lose situation here and it makes me think selfishly.
“Thinking that your family will get to see you behind bars makes me want to see you die.”