Serial Killer of the Month: Arthur Shawcross

Arthur Shawcross was on parole in 1987. His life in Rochester New York provided him with the basic essentials for his pleasure and well being. He had a wife, Rosemary Wally, who had been his prison pen pal, and a mistress, Clara Neal. The cops and psychiatrists thought he was getting along pretty well; and after a state he was. Rochester provided Shawcross with prostitutes to kill, a landscape to hide bodies in and people who would be slow enough to really engage his rage for a while.

The crime Shawcross committed and did time for had been manslaughter. But manslaughter simply doesn’t do justice to what Shawcross had done: a ten year old boy had been murdered, and eight year old Karen Ann Hill had been raped and strangled. The manslaughter charge had been granted in exchange for a guilty plea in the case of the Hill girl. Shawcross had done 14 years before getting out for good behavior.

His initial release had been an object of fear for many communities. Indeed, Shawcross had either been banished from town after town – or occasionally, if allowed to stay, the police would watch him so closely that he felt it better if he moved on himself. In Rochester he could be anonymous, have a job and rub elbows with the local police. The police for their part must have thought Shawcross a sort of local idiot. One cop described him as having “a room temperature IQ.”

Shawcross, who had the demeanor of a mild-mannered idiot; bicycling everywhere on an old 60s Schwinn, and working the graveyard shift making salads for a food distributor, had very quickly found means enough to leave the savagely beaten and strangled body of young 27-year-old Dorothy Blackburn out in the scrub at the edge of Salmon Creek. He found the time and inclination to put a 59-year-old drifter named Dorothy Keeler on the Seth Green Island in the Genesee, and a week later the dead body of Patty Ives, 25, was found under a pile of trash and cardboard behind a local YMCA.

Shawcross had killed at least eight people when the police finally decided that they had a serial killer in the area. The FBI, who took over the case, soon had a profile made up. The murderer would be a white male in his mid-30’s with an attractive demeanor. After all, clearly a lot of women were going with this man. But Shawcross was an ugly, stupid, fat idiot. Not the target the FBI was searching for.

But one morning, a helicopter spotted a body, nude except for a white sweater, floating down a river and upstream a man pissing in a bottle. When Shawcross got done with the bottle he noticed the helicopter, and drove off in a flurry. The police stopped him in the parking lot outside his mistress’ office. They took him in for questioning and impounded his car.

Shawcross seemed a totally unlikely suspect, he was too stupid to have done the crimes so well, and he was not like the FBI’s target. But when they got a look at his criminal history they paid more attention.

Shawcross was let go, without his car and with a tail. That night they found an earring matching one found on one of the victims. The next day Shawcross was arrested while bicycling home from work.

He held up under questioning, but not for long. Having been tricked into protecting his wife — a strange impulse for a serial killer — he confessed to all the crimes.

After a ridiculous trial, during which Shawcross was totally silent — except under hypnosis he became 11­-year-old Arty once again crying and whimpering. And then he became an 18th century whore named Gladys. The jury didn’t buy it as an insanity plea. Shawcross got ten 25-to-life sentences. Without possibility of parole.

Read more Serial Killer of the Month from the SLUG archives:
Serial Killer of the Month: Edmund Kemper
Serial Killer of the Month: Herbert Mullin

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