In the spring of 2002, a wave of fear was quietly building on the east side of Detroit as a predator moved through the city’s most vulnerable communities. For five years, a man hunted women in the margins, leaving a trail of victims in the vacant and forgotten buildings of the struggling city. One of the women he targeted was Rhonda Myles, a 45-year-old female whose life was brutally cut short.
Her death would eventually become a key part of a much larger and more terrifying story, that of one of Detroit's most prolific serial killers.
On April 22, 2002, Rhonda’s body was discovered inside a vacant building at 1382 Manistique Street. She had been bludgeoned to death. The weapon, a leg from a wooden chair, was left behind, a grim testament to the violence of her final moments. The discovery was horrifying, but at the time, investigators did not yet know that Rhonda was the fourth known victim of a man who was just getting started. Her death followed a pattern of violence that was becoming tragically familiar to Detroit homicide detectives: a woman, often struggling with addiction or homelessness, found discarded in an abandoned structure.
The investigation into Rhonda’s murder was one of several similar cases that perplexed police. The victims were all women, killed by savage blunt-force trauma and left in desolate locations across the city's east side. For years, the cases remained unsolved, leaving a community on edge and families without answers. The killer, Shelly Andre Brooks, moved like a ghost through the city, preying on women he believed no one would miss. He was a homeless man with a deep-seated rage, and his victims were often sex workers and drug users he lured to secluded spots.
The break in the string of murders finally came in June 2006, more than four years after Rhonda Myles was killed. A woman who had been sexually assaulted, beaten with a brick, and left for dead by Brooks managed to survive. Her ability to provide a description and a street name, "E," gave police their first solid lead. Shelly Andre Brooks was arrested on June 26, 2006, for the assault. Once he was in custody, the full scope of his horrific crimes began to unravel.
DNA evidence became the crucial link that tied the cases together. Brooks's DNA, found on the chair leg used to kill Rhonda Myles, definitively connected him to her murder. This forensic evidence, combined with DNA from other crime scenes, allowed investigators to link Brooks to at least seven murders between August 2001 and June 2006. Faced with the irrefutable scientific proof and his surviving victim's testimony, Brooks eventually confessed to the slayings. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy suggested that Brooks, who was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother as a child, may have been "killing his mother all over again" with each attack.
In 2007, Shelly Andre Brooks faced justice. He was tried and convicted for the murders of Rhonda Myles and Pamela Greer, another of his victims. The jury took only 30 minutes to find him guilty in Rhonda's case. He was ultimately convicted on multiple counts, including first-degree premeditated murder, felony murder, assault with intent to commit murder, and first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Brooks was sentenced to multiple terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, ensuring he would never again harm another person.
Today, Shelly Andre Brooks remains incarcerated at the Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan, closing the book on a reign of terror that lasted half a decade. While justice was served, it came too late for Rhonda Myles and the other women whose lives were stolen. Their deaths are a stark reminder of the dangers faced by the most marginalized members of a community and the chilling reality that a killer was able to operate in the shadows of a city for so long.
