CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cuyahoga County jury recommended that convicted serial killer Michael Madison be put to death for killing three women and hiding their bodies near his East Cleveland apartment.

The 12-person jury announced its decision just before noon Friday, nearly three years after police first discovered the remains of Shirellda Terry, 18, Shetisha Sheeley, 28, and Angela Deskins, 38, in July 2013.

Members of the women's families hugged one another in the courtroom after the verdict.

"It's over," said Belinda Minor, mother of Shirellda Terry, who would have turned 21 years old this year.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty applauded the jury.

"Justice is that virtue which gives every man his due," McGinty told reporters after Friday's recommendation was read. "If anyone was ever due this sentence, it would be a cold-blooded serial killer like Michael Madison."

Judge Nancy R. McDonnell will review the jury's recommendation and sentence Madison at 11:30 a.m. Thursday. The law allows the judge to impose a life sentence without parole is she disagrees with the jury's recommendation.

The same jury deliberated for less than a day before it returned a guilty verdict May 5 on 13 counts of aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping and offenses against a human corpse, for the deaths.

Madison had a deep-seated hatred of women, and the murders were the end result of Madison's pursuit for sexual and personal pleasure, McGinty said Friday.

"This was a hobby for him," McGinty said.

Madison spotted Terry walking to work July 3, and approached her on the street. He introduced himself as Ivan. In a series of text messages leading up to her death, he portrayed himself as a 25-year-old carpenter and painter. Madison was actually 35, unemployed and selling marijuana from his apartment at the corner of Hayden and Shaw avenues, prosecutors said.

He took careful steps to cover up the three killings, and mutilated the genitals of one of his victims, Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Christopher Schroeder said.

Police found Terry's body in Madison's garage on July 19, 2013. One day later, the decomposing corpses of Sheeley and Deskins were found in a lot and vacant home nearby.

All three women's bodies were found folded in half and stuffed into duct-taped trash bags.

Madison admitted to East Cleveland detectives in a series of interrogations after his arrest that he killed Terry and Sheeley, but couldn't remember where he hid their bodies. He remembered meeting Deskins but denied killing her.

McGinty and his assistants called 50 witnesses to testify in the case and presented over a thousand exhibits to jurors during the trial.

Madison's attorneys, led by David Grant, never denied that Madison killed the women.

Grant argued that the slayings were the result of outbursts of violence laid the result of a childhood fraught with abuse and neglect that started almost immediately at birth.

When Madison was two years old, his mother stuffed food down his throat, causing him to vomit. She then put him in a tub of hot water, and beat him with an extension cord when he screamed. The abuse continued throughout his childhood and turned to crime as a teenager.

The abuse, though tragic, did not outweigh the heinous details of Madison's murders, McGinty said.

"The death and torture of these three women had the weight of three locomotives versus the weight of the abuse he suffered as a small child," McGinty said.

Madison told the court after his May 5 conviction that he plans to appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court.

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