He claimed most
of his victims after being paroled early following a conviction for murdering a
child, which led to criticism of the justice system.
1. Early life
He was born in
Maine, but the family moved to Watertown in New York State when he was young.
Shawcross dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and when he was 19 he
enlisted in the army. He fought in the Vietnam War where he was to later
confess he had murdered and cannibalized two young Vietnamese girls, although
there is nothing to back up this claim.
Back in civilian
life, living in Watertown once more, Shawcross married four times, but his
wives invariably left him after a short time because of his violent and erratic
behavior. It was there, in May 1972, that he murdered 10-year-old Jake Blake.
He lured the boy to some woods where he assaulted and strangled him. Four
months later, he raped and killed an eight-year-old girl named Karen Ann Hill.
Arrested for
these crimes, Shawcross confessed to both murders but was later able to obtain
a plea bargain with the prosecutors. He would plead guilty to killing just
Karen Ann Hill on a charge of manslaughter, instead of first-degree murder, and
the charge of killing Jake Blake would be dropped. With little evidence to go
on, prosecutors went along with this, and the self-confessed double child
killer was given a 25-year sentence. Shawcross served 15 years before he was
released on parole in March 1987. He had difficulty settling down as he was
chased out of homes and fired from workplaces as soon as neighbors and
employers found out about his criminal record. Eventually he settled in
Rochester, New York, and lived with a woman named Clara.
2. His Second
Spree
Starting in
March 1988, Shawcross began murdering prostitutes in the area, claiming 11
victims before his capture less than two years later. The victims were:
Dorothy
Blackburn; Frances Brown; June Cicero;
Elizabeth Gibson; Patricia Ives; Dorothy Keller; Kimberly Logan; Anne Marie
Steffen; June Stotts; Darlene Trippi, and Marie Welch.
They were
usually strangled and battered to death, and were often mutilated as well. Most
of them were found near the Genesee River.
All the victims were murdered in Monroe County, except for Gibson, who
was killed in neighboring Wayne County. After the last victim's body was found
in January 1990, the police decided not to remove it and instead keep
surveillance on the area, based on a psychological profile that suggested the
killer would return to the scene. Sure
enough, Shawcross was spotted masturbating as he sat in his car on a bridge
over the creek in which the body of his final victim was floating. He was
arrested and eventually confessed in custody.
3. The Trial and
Conviction
In November
1990, Shawcross was tried for the 10 murders in Monroe County. The trial was
televised and drew high ratings. Shawcross pleaded not guilty by reason of
insanity, but the jury found him sane and guilty. The judge sentenced him to 250
years' imprisonment. A few months later, Shawcross was taken to Wayne County to
be tried for Gibson's murder. Rather than claim insanity this time, he just
pleaded guilty and was given a life sentence. In 1992, true crime author Joel
Norris wrote a book about the case. The paperback came with a tape that
contained "the live confessions of Arthur Shawcross and his hideous
crimes!" This drew some criticism that Norris was sensationalizing the
case.
4. His Imprisonment
Shawcross is
currently held at Sullivan Correctional Facility. In 2003 he was interviewed by a British
reporter, Katherine English, for a documentary on cannibalism. The convicted
serial killer bragged about slicing out and eating the vaginas of three victims,
and also to eating the genitals of the boy he killed in 1972. Some
criminologists have doubted these stories and suggested Shawcross embellished
his crimes to impress the reporter and viewers.
---
The Complete Arthur Shawcross Story
By his own
admission, Arthur Shawcross has been obsessed by sex for as long as he can
remember. Like many other pubescent boys
he conducted various sexual experiments, but for Arthur, it became more than
just idle curiosity. He claims that from
age seven, he frequently masturbated and had oral sex with both male and female
friends. Years later, he bragged to psychologists that he had also had sex with
a sheep, a cow and a horse and had even killed a chicken in the process of
trying to have sex with it. He would
also claim that his aunt Tina was responsible for his sexual habits because she
"forced" him to perform oral sex on her, which, he says accounts for
it being his preferred method of sexual contact. He also claims that when he was fourteen, he
had sex with his twelve-year-old sister Jeannie, an accusation she strenuously
denies. Another favourite story is that his mother sodomised him with a
broomstick when he was a child but that story is also suspect. Whatever the reasons, be they real or merely
the fantasies of a twisted mind, the pursuit of sexual gratification came to
play a major role in the life of Arthur Shawcross, and eventually led to him
becoming one of the most depraved and brutal serial killers in history.
Arthur John
Shawcross was born in the early hours of June 6, 1945 at the U.S. Naval
hospital in Kittery, Maine. He was two
months premature. At the time of his
birth, his mother, Bessie, was just eighteen and his father, Corporal Arthur
Roy Shawcross was twenty-one. Two weeks
after the birth, Bessie took baby Arthur and moved to Watertown, New York to
live with her sister-in-law until Arthur Snr. had completed his military
service. By 1958, the family had built a small house in a rural area six miles
northwest of Watertown near the town of Brownville. Three other related families soon settled in
the same area, which became known as "Shawcross Corners." This extended family, including thirteen
children, lived a normal, happy existence.
Young Arthur, on the other hand, was beginning to show the first signs
of abnormal behaviour, especially after his little brother Jimmy was born. He became a chronic bed wetter and was still
talking like a baby until he was six.
The following year, he started running away from home, which family
members dismissed as merely a ploy to gain attention.
By the time he
was eight, other behavioural problems began to surface. He seemed to hate children younger than
himself and teased them until they cried.
He became obsessed with his sister Jeannie and ignored his other sister
and younger brother. He invented
imaginary friends and spoke with them in strange voices. His classmates constantly teased him and
called him "Oddie," which would send him into a rage. By and large, Arthur was a loner whose
"weird" behaviour made it hard for him to mix and communicate with
others and he would often be seen sitting alone in an empty classroom while his
peers were outside playing. Curiously,
his grades were above average but a school nurse remembers him as being "a
troubled boy," who constantly ran away from home and often carried an iron
bar on the bus to threaten other children with. By the time he entered the
third grade, Arthur's behaviour deteriorated as did his grades and he was given
a series of psychological tests, which indicated that his behaviour was due in
large part to his feelings of inadequacy and rejection and a growing hostility
that he felt towards his parents, particularly his mother. Regardless of the results, he was later
promoted to the fourth grade where he stayed for two years. During this time, he ran away yet again and
was picked up at the Canadian border.
By the time
Arthur was nine, the atmosphere at home was no better than the one at school,
especially when Arthur's mother found out that Arthur Snr. had another wife and
son in Australia. Relatives believe that
from that time on, his mother became a different woman who flew into jealous
rages at the mere mention of another woman and raged constantly at Arthur Snr.,
who became quiet and withdrawn as a result.
Arthur Jr. did his best to stay out of her way by retreating to his
Grandmother's house at every opportunity. As the years passed, Arthur grew
increasingly violent and would often beat up the neighbourhood children and
became well known for his explosive temper.
He also began breaking into houses and stealing from local businesses
and lighting fires. On one occasion, after falling into a river at a family
picnic, he complained of sore legs and was given brain scans and a battery of
other tests to determine the cause. The
tests revealed nothing. His family later
agreed that it was just one more attempt to gain attention.
Becoming
increasingly withdrawn and antisocial, Arthur fell further and further behind
with his schoolwork until, in the eighth grade, he was a full three years older
than his classmates. Arthur didn't seem
to care; he had become a true outcast. By his mid teens, he was still wetting
the bed and had almost completely withdrawn into his own private little world. He spent hours walking in the woods talking
to himself and was often observed yelling at inanimate objects and beating the
undergrowth with a stick as if in torment from unseen demons. By the time he was fourteen, Arthur claims
that he was regularly having oral sex with his sister Jeannie and his cousin
Linda. He also claims that he had
another relationship with a young girl who lived nearby and was caught by her
brother while performing oral sex on the girl.
The brother supposedly threatened to tell their parents unless Arthur
performed oral sex on him as well. It
was at this time that Arthur's craving for sex became insatiable and he
continued to have oral sex whenever the opportunity presented itself. Curiously, Arthur never described any acts of
penetration during this period, which could indicate that he was unable to
sustain an erection from an early age.
That year also marked the period when Arthur claims to have first
associated violence with sex. It began
after he was walking home from school and was picked up by a man in a red
convertible who supposedly held him by the throat while performing oral sex on
him. When Arthur failed to reach orgasm,
the man anally raped him and dropped him near his house. From that time on, Shawcross claims that he
could never reach orgasm without inflicting pain on himself. The following year
he was arrested for breaking into a Sears department store but was given
probation because he hadn't removed anything from the store. For the next few years, Arthur wandered
aimlessly through life until, at the age of nineteen, he married for the first
time. The union lasted less than three
years and produced a son. In 1968 Arthur
was conscripted into the army and began a tour of duty in Vietnam. It was to be an important turning point in
his life; he was about to learn how to kill.
1. The Making of
a Monster
Just prior to
his posting, Arthur married his second wife Linda Neary after a brief
courtship. Arriving in Vietnam, he was
assigned to a unit in Pleiku as a supply clerk.
One of his duties was to arrange for the distribution of ammunition
which entailed travelling to the outlying units by helicopter. It was at that point, he later told
psychiatrists, that he started going out on "fire missions" with
various forward companies. Initially, he
claims, he was shocked by the violence but soon found that he craved the danger
of going into the jungle alone looking for the enemy and eventually became what
he referred to as a "predator." On one such mission, Shawcross claimed
he encountered two Vietnamese women hiding guns in a hollow tree and shot one
of them and tied the other to a tree.
The woman who was shot was still breathing when Shawcross cut her head
off and put it on a post for the Viet Cong to find. He then cut off a section of her thigh and
roasted it over a fire and ate part of it.
Afterwards he had oral sex with the other woman and raped her before
shooting her in the head and butchering her body. He became an expert sniper and claimed that
he fashioned a silencer out of a rubber nipple from a baby's bottle, which
allowed him to pick off the enemy without giving his position away. Even if such a device were effective, it
would only be good for one shot, which brings to mind the question of how he
was able to obtain a ready supply of rubber nipples in the jungles of Vietnam. By
his own admission, Shawcross became an "animal" in Vietnam and found
it difficult to control the violent urges that drove him to rape and kill. The enemy weren't the only victims of his
sexual rages as he also claims to have attacked several Asian prostitutes, some
as young as eleven.
When he returned
home to Watertown in 1969, he was a changed man, for the worse. He was continually agitated and found it hard
to relax. After visiting his mother he
went to see his wife only to find that she had spent all the money that he had
been sending home and was seeing another man.
Soon after, when he was transferred to Fort Sill Oklahoma to serve out the
remainder of his term in the Army, Linda went with him. It was at this time that Shawcross began to
experience violent flashbacks and nightmares and began to beat Linda, which led
him to consult with an Army psychiatrist.
The doctor suggested therapy and a period in a mental hospital to try
and stabilise him but Linda, being a Christian Scientist, was wary of doctors
and hospitals and refused to sign the commitment papers. Without therapy,
Arthur's mental state began to decline and he became increasingly irritated
with Linda and her family, usually over their adherence to their religion,
which he saw as nothing more than witchcraft.
In April 1969, Arthur vented his frustration by setting fire to a local
paper mill and later in the year, the cheese factory where he was employed at
the time. He was later arrested and
convicted on two counts of arson and sentenced to five years in prison. He served the first six months of his
sentence at Attica prison where three black inmates allegedly raped him. Shawcross claims he later extracted revenge by
beating and raping each of his attackers in separate incidents and was
transferred to Auburn prison to serve out his sentence. In 1971, he was given
early release when he saved the life of a prison guard who had been clubbed
during a prison riot sparked by racial tensions within the prison. He returned to Watertown to "start a new
life," having been divorced by Linda while he was in jail. His stay in prison did little for his already
fragile mental state and by the time of his release he was in a highly agitated
frame of mind and ready to do further damage to anyone or anything that took
his fancy.
2. Death of the
Innocents
In an attempt to
settle into a normal routine, Arthur took a job at the Watertown Public Works
Department as a handyman and married a third time. His new wife, Penny Nichol, was a school
friend of his sister Jeannie and had two children from a former
relationship. Shawcross claims that up
to this time, he was still having a sexual relationship with Jeannie and that
she had introduced him to Penny because she had fallen pregnant to her
boyfriend and couldn't continue their relationship. By his recollection, after
five months, the relationship with Penny seemed to be going well and at one
stage she fell pregnant but later miscarried.
Sometime later, he claims that the marriage came under threat when
Penny's father accused Arthur of sexually assaulting Penny's younger sister.
Shawcross said he denied the allegation but from that time on, Penny's parents
spent a great deal of time around the house watching him. What makes both the miscarriage and the
alleged assault interesting is the fact that, by his own admission, Shawcross
was incapable of maintaining an erection or ejaculating making the possibility
of him fathering a child very difficult.
Secondly, regarding the assault, during his interviews with Dr. Joel
Norris for the book "Arthur Shawcross: The Genesee Killer," he seems
confused wether Penny's sister is named Rose or Jill. One thing is known to be
fact; Arthur Shawcross spent a great deal of his spare time fishing in the
creeks and rivers around Watertown. As a
result, he came to know many of the town's children and often shared the same
spots with them. One of his regular
fishing companions was ten-year-old Jack Blake and on one occasion, Arthur had
gone to the boy's house to ask Jack's mother Mary if Jack could go fishing with
him. According to Mary, when she
refused, Arthur was polite and agreed that she had made the right decision.
Four months
later, on the morning of June 4 1972, Jack went out to play near the Cloverdale
apartment block where Shawcross lived and never came home. Later that night, while out looking for her
son, Mary Blake knocked on Arthur's door to ask where her son was. He told her that he hadn't seen him since
that morning. The truth of the matter
was that Shawcross had taken Jack into the woods and after stripping him naked
and forcing him to run through the woods, had caught him and sexually molested
him before finally strangling him and battering him about the head. Later Shawcross would admit to removing the
boy's heart and genitals and eating them.
Although Shawcross was a suspect in the boy's disappearance, no action
was taken due to lack of evidence. Three months later, while the police were still
searching for Jack Blake, eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill was found dead under a
bridge near Black River, she had been raped, mutilated and strangled. When a police investigation revealed that
Hill and Shawcross had been seen together earlier the same day, Shawcross again
became a suspect. After they received
another report that Shawcross was seen eating an ice cream at the bridge near
where the body was found, the police picked Arthur Shawcross up and took him in
for questioning. He was interrogated at police headquarters for a full day
before he surprised police by asking them in front of his defence attorney,
"What's going to happen to me if I tell you something?" After several
more hours of interviews and plea-bargaining, Arthur Shawcross pleaded guilty
to the manslaughter of Karen Ann Hill.
He was later convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in
prison. To this day, he has never been
charged with the murder of Jack Blake even though he later admitted to the rape
and murder and showed police where he had dumped the body. He later told prison psychiatrists that he
had returned to the gravesite on several occasions to have sex with the corpse.
3. A Model
Prisoner
Arthur Shawcross
began his second jail term in the New York Penitentiary in Green Haven. For the first eight years he spent much of
his time protecting himself from the other inmates who considered child-killers
the lowest form of life. His record
shows numerous reports of fighting, minor stealing offences, lighting fires and
refusing to leave his cell. Eventually
he began to settle into prison life and behave himself until finally he was
considered to be a "model prisoner." During his incarceration he
claims that he tried to tell the prison's psychiatrists that his problems were
a result of the Vietnam War but they refused to listen. One of the first psychiatrists to examine
him, Dr. Albert Dresser, did not consider Shawcross a "psychological
risk." His report shows that he did
not perceive any evidence of delusions, hallucinations or sensory deceptions in
his patient Arthur Shawcross. Some months later, in October 1973, another
prison psychologist, Dr. J. R, McWilliams, also examined Shawcross and carried
out a series of tests including the Bender Motor Gestalt test and the Wechsler
Adult Intelligence test but found no evidence of any neurological
impairment. What he did find was that
Arthur suffered from fits of deep depression and "relied heavily upon
fantasy as a source of satisfaction."
His final entry
in the case file was that he considered Shawcross, "seems to be a normal
individual who knows he has done wrong and would like to help himself get back
on the right track for his eventual return to society." Curiously, an unknown person crossed out the
reference to "normal person" in the McWilliams report and wrote the
words "a psychopathic killer" above it in pencil. In 1976, Dr.
Michael Boccia examined Arthur and found that he had not come to terms with the
severity of the crimes that he was being punished for and constantly blamed
others for his problems. In his opinion,
Shawcross had not requested the first examination to deal with his mental
problems; he had done it merely to impress the parole board. The following year, the "model
prisoner" had taken courses in lock smithing and horticulture and began
preparing for his General Equivalency Diploma.
With more than a touch of irony he also began working with mental
patients as a counsellor. In June 1977, yet another prison psychiatrist, Dr.
Haveliwala gave him another psychological examination and found that although
he had adapted readily to prison routine, he had a schizoid personality, was
antisocial and had a distinct personality disorder. In addition, Haveliwala wrote "This man
does not show a good degree of evidence of successfully resolving or working
out his psychosexual conflicts." Two more years passed and yet another
report was tendered which described Shawcross as, "a person of abnormal
character traits with psychosexual tendencies.
It must be noted that the above-mentioned complications tend to be
chronic in duration."
Basically, what
most of the doctors were trying to say was that under normal circumstances,
Arthur Shawcross was a passive individual but when subjected to stress he
became a slave to his inner sexual drives and was unable to prevent himself
from giving them full reign. Regardless
of these and other unfavourable psychological reports, Arthur continued to
"improve himself" in prison and by 1985 had completed his high school
education and enrolled in college courses at Penn State University. A parole report during the same period
further stated that Shawcross "exhibited a belligerent reaction
representing a foreboding potential for a possible re-enactment of his tragic
behaviour." The report went on to further criticise the prisoner for his
disdain for the prisons Sex Offender Program and displaying his
"fury" during the parole interview. Incredibly, despite the numerous
psychological reports to the contrary and the parole boards own misgivings,
Arthur Shawcross qualified for early release in March 1987 and was deemed to be
"fit to re-enter society."
After his release, Robert T. Kent, his parole officer in Binghamton
County wrote to his superiors, "At the risk of being melodramatic, the
writer considers this man to be possibly the most dangerous individual to be
released to this community for many years." They were to be prophetic words indeed.
---
4. He Is On the
Prowl
When Shawcross
was released he was placed in the Binghamton area as the officials and
residents of Watertown had made it plain that they didn't want him there. He had also been maintaining a
"pen-pal" relationship with a woman named Rose Walley and indicated
that he would go and live with her and probably marry her. His parole conditions, among other things,
required him to restrict his movements to Broome county, observe an 11pm to 7am
curfew, refrain from partaking of any alcoholic beverage and not to have
contact with anyone under the age of eighteen and stay away from schools or any
other place where children were present. Learning that he would be placed in
their area, the Binghamton parole officers asked the question that the parole
board should have considered before his release, if he had to have such strict
parole conditions, why release him in the first place? His stay in Binghamton only proved to be a
short one when the residents objected to his presence and he was given approval
to move to Delhi, New York where he moved into Rose Walley's apartment. Shortly after he moved in however, the
residents of his new community got wind of his presence and he was asked to
leave. He appealed to the parole board
and was sent to live in the basement of the Baptist church in Delhi until
suitable accommodation could be found.
He and Rose later moved to Fleischmanns, New York and moved into a large
house and Arthur obtained work with a local building contractor. Within a
matter of days, he was recognised in the local post office and later that night
an angry mob led by the town's mayor assembled outside his house and demanded
that he leave the area. In the following
weeks, Shawcross and Walley were bounced around from one area to the other
until finally they were given an apartment in Rochester, New York. Eventually, according to Shawcross, he tired
of the parole boards interference and he and Rose got their own apartment and
new jobs and settled into their new surroundings. The job that Arthur got was at a company
called "Bognia's" where he was employed to pack salads in boxes. His
life seemed stable enough until Christmas 1987 when he asked his family to come
to Rochester to meet Rose and they refused.
His mood darkened when his sister informed him that the family had visited
her in Virginia and told her how they had returned the Christmas present that
he had sent them. He became angry and
ranted about how his family didn't want him and went out on his bike and rode
for miles until he cooled down. Shortly
after the Christmas incident, he started a relationship with another woman
named Clara Neal and often borrowed her car.
For a year he maintained both relationships, explaining to Rose that he
was just being nice to Clara so she would lend him the car.
On one particular
evening in February 1988, he rode his bike to Clara's and took the car and
drove around until he reached Lake Avenue near the Genesee River. It was an industrial area well known for it's
cheap prostitutes and drug dealers. As
he drove slowly down the street, a woman called Dorothy "Dotsie"
Blackburn signalled him to stop. When he
pulled over she asked him if he wanted a "date." He agreed and she directed him to a car park
behind a warehouse. He told her that he
wanted to have mutual oral sex and paid her thirty dollars. She then undressed and complied with his
request. Shawcross later described that at that point, the woman bit him on the
penis, drawing blood. He said he became
incensed and bit her vagina in retribution and squeezed her throat until she
lost consciousness. He them attempted to
stem the flow of blood from his damaged organ and tied the woman up with
articles of her clothing before driving out of town along State Route 104 to an
area in Northampton Park called Salmon River, one of his favourite fishing
spots. He told her that he was going to rape her and she began taunting him and
calling him names. He threatened to kill
her but she continued the name calling until he took her neck in his hands and
crushed the breath out of her. He sat in
the car with her body until nearly midnight then calmly carried her through the
snow to the river bridge and dropped her body into the icy river below. Walking back to the car, he drove back into
Rochester and drove up and down Lake Avenue looking for any sign that indicated
that "Dotsie" had been missed.
Satisfied that he hadn't been observed he went to a nearby coffee shop
to relax. After an hour or so, he returned
to the car, collected the woman's clothes and other property and threw them
into a dumpster bin. The following morning, after cleaning up the car, he
returned it to Clara and rode his bike home.
Because of his normally erratic behaviour neither of the women in his
life realised anything different in his demeanour. In the following months, Arthur became a Lake
Avenue regular and was well known by the local prostitutes as
"Mitch." On March 24, police
found the body of "Dotsie" Blackburn floating in the river some
distance downstream from the area where she had been dumped. Her body was well preserved by the icy waters
but the water had also removed any evidence that might link her with her
killer. The one thing that they did
notice about the body was the chunk that had been torn from the woman's vagina.
Arthur Shawcross
had contained the urge to kill for several months but when his boss learned why
Arthur had been in prison and sacked him, it triggered off his next wave of
violence. The second victim was a
part-time prostitute named Anna Steffen who Shawcross had picked up and taken
to the river near Driving Park Bridge. Shawcross claimed she had offered him
sex for twenty dollars but when he was unable to get an erection she began to
make fun of him. He became angry and
punched her to the ground. Trying to get
away from him she crawled into the water but he went in after her and held her
under the water by the throat until she drowned. He later told police that he couldn't be
bothered trying to conceal her body and just let it float downstream. It later became caught up in debris
downstream where, because of the warmer conditions, it rapidly decomposed. From that time on he tried to resist the
temptation to kill and got another job working nights packing salads for a
company called G & G Food Services.
He didn't kill
again until June 1989. His third victim
was different to the first two in that she wasn't a prostitute. She was a fifty-eight-year-old homeless woman
named Dorothy Keller. Shawcross had met
Dorothy when she worked as a waitress in a diner that he frequented. The two struck up a friendship, which had
quickly turned into an affair. On a
fine afternoon, Arthur was on his way to the river to fish when he stopped to
talk to Keller. When she found out where
he was going she asked if he would take her with him, he agreed. According to
Shawcross, they spent the morning fishing and making love until around midday
when it started to rain. They huddled
under a crude shelter that he had built and shortly after got into an argument
about her stealing money and about his relationships with Clara and Rose. He claims that when she threatened to tell
the other women about their affair he became angry and picked up a small log
and beat her on the side of the head killing her instantly. After hiding her body under a fallen tree he
returned home. He later told police that
he returned to the spot several months later and removed the skull and dumped
it in the river. Fishermen eventually found Keller's remains but Shawcross was
never connected with the woman even though he had been seen with her regularly
and often went to the fishing spot where he had left her body.
The next to die
was another Lake Avenue prostitute named Patty Ives. He claims that she offered him sex for
twenty-five dollars when he approached the same diner where Dorothy Keller had
worked. He agreed and they went to a
construction site and lay down on a mound of earth. While they were having sex, Shawcross says
that he caught Ives trying to remove his wallet and pushed her hard against the
ground. When she began to cry he anally
raped her and began strangling her until she lay still. He hid her body under
some scraps of construction material and waited until dark and went home. Two
months later he killed another prostitute called Frances Brown in similar circumstances
except that in this instance he claims to have choked Brown with his penis
while having oral sex and continued to have sex with her body after she died. When
he dumped her body down a nearby embankment, so much debris was dragged down
with it that police thought the body had been covered intentionally.
Following
Brown's murder, the media began to pick up on the story of the murders of five
Rochester women within eighteen months calling the unknown perpetrator,
"The Rochester Nightstalker," "The Rochester Strangler" and
"The Genesee River Killer." Some even suggested that the crimes were
similar to the Green River killings in Seattle and speculated that the killer
had merely changed localities. For his
sixth victim, Shawcross again chose someone close to home. June Stotts was a friend of Arthur and Rose
and a regular visitor to their home. She
was also mildly retarded. Shawcross had
seen June sitting near the river on a warm November day and asked her to go for
a ride with him. She gratefully accepted
and they drove down to a local beach where they played on the sand and fed the
birds before they walked to a deserted area and lay down on the ground to make
love. At some point in their lovemaking
Shawcross claims that he made an innocent comment about her not being a virgin
and she started screaming. He then held
his hand over her mouth to silence her but soon realised that he had suffocated
her. He then cut her open with his knife
so that she would decompose quicker and covered her with a blanket and brush
and left her. He later claimed to have
removed her vagina and some of her organs and ate them.
Arthur was now
on a roll and in the same month picked up Maria Welch from Lake Avenue and took
her to a small beach near the banks of the Genesee River where they argued over
a suitable price before they began having sex.
Again he claims that she tried to take his wallet and he strangled
her. He later changed his story and told
investigators that he had become angry and killed her when he realised that she
was menstruating. He drove further down
the road next to the river and dumped her body in some bushes. On November 11,
police investigators from the sixty strong serial crimes unit identified the
body of Frances Brown. Incredibly, no
one in the newly formed task force uncovered the fact that a known sex offender
and child killer who was still on parole was living in their midst. Two weeks
later, on November 23, while police were examining the decomposing body of June
Stotts, Shawcross killed again. As
before, the pattern was set. He picked
Darlene Trippi up from the Lake Avenue area and drove to an isolated car
park. After the money was paid they
indulged in oral sex but Shawcross failed to get an erection. She became frustrated and called him names
and he choked her until she lay dead under him.
He dumped her body in open woodland. The following month, he killed
Elizabeth Gibson in a similar fashion when she got into his car to keep warm
while he was getting coffee from a diner.
They had oral sex in the car and again, he claimed that she tried to
take his wallet and he got angry and strangled her. Shawcross later told police that she had
struggled so hard that she had broken the gearshift in his car. He disposed of Gibson's body in a new area
near Wayne County, as he feared that the police were getting too close. Two
more weeks passed and even though the police were out in force in the Lake
Avenue area, Arthur Shawcross picked up an attractive girl named June Cicero
and took her to another isolated area and attempted sex with her before
strangling her. Virtually right under
the noses of the investigating police, "The Genesee River Killer" had
struck again. This time he dumped the
body off a bridge over the Salmon River.
Two days later
he returned to the dumpsite with a small hand saw and cut the vagina from her
frozen body and ate it. It is not hard
to see that, just as the prison psychiatrists had detected, Arthur Shawcross
lived in a fantasy world and made up these fanciful accounts of his numerous
"accidental" murders to hide the fact that he was a sadistic killer
who could only "get off" when he was subjecting his victims to pain
and anguish which eventually resulted in their deaths. The final victim was
another prostitute only this time Arthur chose a black woman named Felicia
Stephens. In later interviews he stated
that he could not recall any details of Felicia's murder only that she was
black and he had strangled her and dumped her body near those of Jean Cicero
and Dorothy Blackburn. It was this
desire to keep the bodies where he could find them again that led to his
capture.
5. Having Lunch
By the River
On Wednesday,
January 3 1990, he drove to Salmon Creek in Northampton Park to visit Jean
Cicero's body. He was aroused at the
thought of having sex with her corpse.
Arthur hadn't been following the progress of the serial task force that
had become prime news on TV and in the papers.
If he had, he would have known that police surveillance in and around
the Northampton Park area had increased dramatically. He was happy that there were no cars parked
where he wanted to stop on a bridge overlooking the creek so he could view
Jean's body while he ate his lunch, a salad that he had prepared at work. What
he did not know was that a police helicopter that had been checking the Salmon
River had not only seen his car parked on the bridge but also the outline of
the body under the ice. As the
helicopter approached, Shawcross left the area and drove along Highway 31 and
turned left at Route 259 heading toward the town of Spencerport with the
helicopter following his every move. The
helicopter crew then called in two patrol cars to follow the car and intercept
it. They followed it to an address in
Spencerport where the car was parked and Shawcross got out and entered the
Wedgewood Adult Home where his wife worked. The police entered the home and
asked the attendant about the man who had just entered and was told that he had
gone down into the basement. The police
followed and approached Shawcross in the basement and asked for
identification. He produced a photo I.D.
and asked what the police wanted. They
then asked him to step outside to answer some questions. Later he was interviewed in the car by Paul
DeCillis, one of the task force investigators and asked why he had been at
Salmon Creek. Shawcross answered that he
had been out driving and stopped to urinate but when he saw the helicopter he
decided to sit in the car and urinate in a bottle instead.
For several
hours, Detective DeCillis questioned Arthur Shawcross extensively about his
movements that morning but found that Shawcross had a pretty convincing
story. While they were talking,
Shawcross told him about his earlier conviction for the child murders. DeCillis continued to ask him questions about
his wives, his jobs, his sexual habits and even asked him details of the
attacks on Jack Blake and Karen Hill.
Throughout the questioning he was completely cooperative even though he
had not been arrested and was talking to the police voluntarily. Later that
night he was released and he went home, unaware that his house was under
constant surveillance. The following
morning the detectives picked him up again to "clarify some
inconsistencies in his story."
Again, Shawcross complied with their request and went with them. They drove him to an area near a golf course
where he had supposedly had a liaison with a prostitute who had testified that
he had often frequented the Lake Avenue area picking up prostitutes. When Arthur agreed with the assertion he was
asked to accompany the detectives to their office where an official
interrogation was conducted. Later the same evening, Arthur Shawcross
positively identified photographs of the eleven victims and confessed to their
murders. He then accompanied the police
to the various gravesites and late that night after twelve straight hours of
interrogation, Arthur Shawcross was officially charged with the Genesee River
killings.
6. The Epilogue
At his
arraignment, Arthur Shawcross followed his court appointed attorneys advice and
pleaded innocent on all charges and it was strongly rumoured that he would
raise an insanity defence. For the next
several months, Arthur was given a battery of tests by numerous psychiatrists
one of which, Dr. Kraus, compiled an extensive report which suggested that
Arthur Shawcross was "an emotionally unstable, learning disabled,
genetically impaired, biochemically disordered, neurologically damaged
individual, psychologically alienated from significant others during his entire
life, venting his frustration and rage, mixed with fear and defiance in a
lifetime of ever more violent and destructive aggression, which ultimately
turned to overpowering murderous fury."
7. The Trial
Which, although
extensively covered by print and television media, was a boring foregone
conclusion with the state rolling out a virtual plethora of psychiatric
specialists including Dr. Park Dietz who was well known for his consultive work
with the F.B.I. The only defense witness
was Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis who testified that Shawcross had been
"hideously traumatised" as a child, which had left him with a
multiple personality disorder. She also
cited post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his war experiences as a root
cause for his behaviour. Shawcross also
played his part and sat in court like a zombie day after day trying to give his
impression of advanced psychosis to the jury.
They were less than impressed and took just six-and-a-half hours to
return a unanimous guilty verdict and recommend a sentence of two hundred and
fifty years in jail.
8. Shawcross in
prison
The latest
mention of Arthur Shawcross came in September 1999 when he was found to be
selling his paintings and autographs on the Internet from within Fallsburg
prison in New York. The New York State Department of Correctional Services
temporarily suspended his art privileges after learning that his artwork and
autographs were listed for sale on eBay, the Internet auction service. He received disciplinary actions for the
breach, which included being locked in his cell for extended periods. As always the question is why? But while psychiatrists around the world
battle with the question of the motivation and emotional triggers that caused a
man like Arthur Shawcross to kill and keep killing, perhaps we would be better
served by pondering the other why. Why,
when the prison authorities were blatantly aware of his fragile mental state
after having served an extended period in jail for a brutal double murder, did
they release him back into society and then have the audacity to impose
incredible parole restrictions on him in the hope that the parole board and
local police departments could succeed where they had dismally failed?
We may never
know but one thing is certain, the deaths of eleven women stand as a testament
to their gross incompetence.
- Bird
