World's Most Evil Killers - Season 5, Episode 18 - Arthur Shawcross - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NARRATOR: On the 27th of October 1989, the body of a woman was found covered in cardboard and hidden
under a bush behind the Maplewood YMCA in Rochester, New York. She was the fourth woman to be discovered in a tiny area
by the banks of the Genessee River. Women didn't want to go out alone at night at this point in time.
There was a real sense of fear. NARRATOR: The killer was 44-year-old Arthur Shawcross,
a tall, imposing outsider whose deadly deeds had started over 15 years before, 100 miles north in the small city of Watertown.
KATHERINE RAMSLAND: He would not have stopped himself for any reason, and he didn't
think of victims as people. It was business, business as usual. That was his attitude.
NARRATOR: Back in October 1972, Shawcross had confessed to killing two young children
and was convicted of manslaughter. LYNDE JOHNSTON: He offered no defense for him.
I mean totally unemotional, totally unconcerned with anything that was going on.
NARRATOR: Remorseless Arthur Shawcross once again started targeting innocent victims after he was released
from prison, beginning a killing spree that would see the deaths of 11 women, making him one of the world's most
evil killers. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] On the 3rd of January 1990, detectives made a breakthrough
in their hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the streets of Rochester. Senior investigator John MCCAFFREY
spotted the perpetrator from a helicopter he was using to locate the missing bodies.
Some people will say, well, you got lucky with the helicopter. Not really. We were doing good police work.
NARRATOR: John and Rochester Police Captain Lynde Johnston tirelessly worked the case together in order
to bring the killer to justice. When you don't work together, the bad guy wins, and that's
totally unacceptable. NARRATOR: After he was apprehended, Arthur Shawcross went on trial, accused of 11 homicides.
If convicted, the man later dubbed the Genessee River Killer would spend the rest of his life
behind bars. The case is exceptional simply because this is all in one place, all at once, all
in one short period of time. It's that relentlessness that makes it exceptional.
[TENSE MUSIC] NARRATOR: This killer's story begins in Kittery, Maine on the 6th of June, 1945.
Arthur Shawcross, also known as Art, was born to mother Betty and father Arthur, Sr.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: His father was a corporal. And quite shortly after he was born, he and his mother
moved to Watertown in New York State. His father wasn't around a lot, so he lacked
the classic father figure. KATHERINE RAMSLAND: Shawcross said that he had been sexually abused.
First, he said by his aunt, and then it was his mother, and then he added his sister, all of whom
said that didn't happen. And in fact, the aunt's name, he didn't even get right.
NARRATOR: The young Shawcross was labeled a loner at school. He was nicknamed as Oddy because he was regarded as so
strange and difficult. And in a way, I think he took pleasure from that. I think he enjoyed being separate.
He liked being the loner. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: There was also cruelty to animals in his childhood.
So here is somebody who enjoys the suffering of others. And the fact that this is present in his childhood
is very alarming, indeed. NARRATOR: Throughout his teens, Shawcross's violent and unruly behavior marked him out as different.
LYNDE JOHNSTON: He never graduated from school up there. He was arrested for arsons and burglaries.
And you know, he did some other time, and then he ended up getting married. [TENSE MUSIC]
NARRATOR: At the age of 19, Shawcross married his first wife, Sarah. When I look at Shawcross's relationships with women,
it's very clear to me that he's somebody who sees women as serving a purpose for him.
So he doesn't see women as people to have mutual, respectful relationships with.
They're there to serve a purpose. So Shawcross is a misogynist. That is his value system, and that informs so much
of his behavior. His child is born in '65, and he gets caught again-- no master criminal-- for a second-degree burglary
and gets six months probation. He's got all sorts of odd jobs. He's digging graves.
He's laboring. He's an apprentice butcher. He is the proverbial square peg in a round hole.
He doesn't fit in very much anywhere. NARRATOR: By August 1966, after just two years of marriage,
Shawcross and Sarah separated. His wife eventually asked for a divorce not necessarily because of his unfaithfulness,
though that was persistent, but more because he kept getting jobs and then losing them, and being laid off
and not having anything to go-- he was just literally an unstable personality. But we're talking about the middle '60s.
America is at war in Vietnam and everybody is being drafted NARRATOR: On the 7th of April 1967, at the age of 22,
Arthur Shawcross was drafted into the American military. [TENSE MUSIC] Just five months later, unstable Shawcross
married his second wife, Linda. He spent the first year of their marriage in Vietnam.
He claimed he was subjected to Agent Orange, that he had killed almost three dozen
people, that he had been part of the massacre of a village. He had killed some prostitutes and cannibalized them
and all that. And then it turned out much of what he had described had come from novels about Vietnam and from a movie.
Well, the truth of the matter was he was a supply clerk in Vietnam. He saw no combat.
He was the one that stayed back in the supply room. He never saw combat. NARRATOR: In the spring of 1969, Shawcross
received an honorable discharge from the Army. The fantasies he created in Vietnam
now started to manifest as dangerous behaviors back home in the US. When he had come back to Watertown after the military,
he had been arrested for burglary. He was an arsonist. His wife left him. Over the next three years, volatile Shawcross
served time for burglary, divorced Linda, and married Penny, his third wife. Then, in 1972, Shawcross's dark desires suddenly
took a more sinister turn. On the 7th of May, a young boy called Jack Blake went missing.
He lived near the river in Watertown, and he was a typical 10-year-old. I think he went down near the Creek,
and probably throwing stones in, and maybe even fishing. And that's where he ran across art.
And art was fishing. And the assumption of the investigators was that the 10-year-old was annoying to him.
LYNDE JOHNSTON: He claims that the kid kept following him. He told him, go home.
Don't follow me. And he said he finally got angry with him and hit him once with his right hand right between the eyes.
And he said he just left him there. Jack was reported missing. So they did a search, couldn't find the body.
And Art was somewhat of a suspect because he was known to fish in the area. KATHERINE RAMSLAND: Shawcross was questioned.
He didn't know. But the police didn't much care for Shawcross because he was known to harass the kids and sometimes he'd
like to stuff leaves down their pants, which, you know, has sexual connotations.
So they kind of kept an eye on him as a potential pedophile. JOHN MCCAFFREY: He just denied it.
He just denied any involvement. And they didn't have enough to arrest him. NARRATOR: Then, four months later,
another child disappeared. In September 1972, an eight-year-old girl called Karen Ann Hill goes missing
when she's playing outside. Again, no one really knows what's happened. She's literally disappeared from the front yard.
NARRATOR: It would be less than 24 hours before her lifeless body was located. Tragically, the following day, the police find Karen's body.
She's been raped. She's been strangled, and mud and grass has been shoved into her mouth.
It's a horrifying killing. And you have to say whoever committed it has to be the most depraved of minds.
The fact that Karen Ann Hill is a girl is really significant here. And I think that tells us something
about the difference between the murder of Jack and the murder of Karen Ann. When you're putting dirt, and twigs, and debris in there,
you want to demean them and humiliate them. And I think that's what he's trying to achieve here.
NARRATOR: Once again, 26-year-old Arthur Shawcross was brought in for questioning.
The police immediately suspected Shawcross in the murder of Karen Ann Hill because he'd
been linked to the disappearance of Jack earlier. And a member of the public had seen
Karen close to a bicycle which matched the description of one that Shawcross owned.
Now, Shawcross's is innate cunning comes into play because he realizes he's got to be a prime suspect.
So he doesn't deal with the police. He says, OK, I'll admit to killing Karen hill,
but I'll also take you to the remains of Jack Blake, which are now, I'm afraid, skeletonized.
And he does that to lessen the charges. NARRATOR: With little physical evidence to connect him
to either crime, detectives couldn't guarantee a murder conviction when the case went to trial.
So on the 17th of October 1972, Shawcross pled guilty to manslaughter for the killing of Karen Ann Hill.
He was not indicted with Jack's killing. So this sends out a message to Shawcross
that actually, he's the one that's in control. He's the one that has power. And even though he's about to go down for a lengthy prison
sentence, he feels on top of the world because he feels that he's the one who's pulling the strings there.
[TENSE MUSIC] NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross was given an indeterminate sentence of up to a maximum of 25 years.
However, Shawcross once again demonstrated that he knew how to play the system when
on April the 30th, 1987, he was released after serving just 14 and 1/2 years. [TENSE MUSIC]
The reason he got out on parole is that he had met a woman by the name of Rose Walley
while he was in prison, and they became pen pals. And all the ways you get paroled is not only
being a model prisoner, but you have to have somebody in the community to find you
a job and some place to live. So she provided that to him. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: So he has this all
set up for when he gets out. She's going to provide him with a veneer of respectability.
But it doesn't quite work out that way initially because in the town that they move to,
people get to know about his past. NARRATOR: 41-year-old Shawcross initially settled in the city of Binghamton in Upstate New York.
JOHN MCCAFFREY: Basically, the people in the community, once they found out that a person who had killed two
children were in the area, and they chased him out of the area, really. And they relocated him to another town.
That town did that. This is a child killer. Even today, I have to pinch myself to think that you do
allow a child killer out after only 14 and 1/2 years to resume, quote, "a normal life."
NARRATOR: After being run out of two different towns, Shawcross found anonymity in the bustling city of Rochester,
115 miles north. So it's a little larger city. So you're not as well known. I mean, some of the small towns, everybody knows everybody.
He was a little bigger. He would probably just blend in a little more. NARRATOR: Shawcross found a job preparing
food on the night shift at a company called G&G Cheese. And in his free time, he travels around,
looking for prostitutes. He also, at this point, has a mistress, a woman named Clara.
Clara Neal worked at a local nursing home, where Shawcross would often visit her.
She's 56 and has had 10 children. He's 42. But nevertheless, he strikes up a relationship with her.
It wasn't blissful. I mean, they argued and fought. And he would leave and come back,
and she would throw him out. But it was a kind of stable relationship. So he's figured out that if he wants to kill again,
he's going to have to change his approach. He wants easy victims. Kids who were easy, but they drew a lot of attention.
He'll shift his victim type. We call that situational rather than preferential. NARRATOR: Things remained quiet for over a year.
Then, on the 24th of March, 1988, the body of a woman was found. Detective Lynde was a captain with nearby Rochester Police
at the time. I met Dorothy Blackburn, was found in Salmon Creek out Northampton Park.
She was thrown into the water there by a little culvert or bridge. NARRATOR: Dorothy was last seen nine days earlier.
Her disappearance was out of character, and her worried sister had reported her missing.
The postmortem examination on the 27-year-old's body revealed that she'd been strangled
and her genitals had been bitten. Her murder would remain unsolved for over a year.
For a time, things go quiet. Shawcross has various problems. He has sexual problems, in particular.
But other things get in the way. His on-off relationship with Clara comes and goes.
For me, I believe he was profoundly unsettled and was simply a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
NARRATOR: On September the 11th, 1988, another body was discovered. LYNDE JOHNSON: When we first found in Anna Steffen,
we really didn't even know who she was. She was skeletal. It appeared that she'd been hidden.
Roofing shingles, brush put over her. Her tank top was around her wrist, and the pants she was wearing was down
around where the ankle was. NARRATOR: 27-year-old mother of two Anna Steffen had been arrested in July 1988 for prostitution.
She was pregnant at the time and had lost contact with her family. No one reported her missing.
Anna has also been strangled and attacked and dumped in the Genessee River gorge, but her body isn't
discovered for several months. We took the skull to a forensic pathologist down in Syracuse, New York.
And he was able to do a reconstruction of a skull. We then photographed it and had it put in the paper.
And we got a call from her father who identified her. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: And I think it
was difficult in the beginning because he's targeting a population who are quite transient.
Sex workers move around a lot. Very often, they will go off the radar for weeks or months,
and that's not necessarily because they have been murdered. It's because they're in a different part of the country.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: The police had very, very little to go on. No fingerprints. No fingernail scrapings.
No semen. And it's impossible to know whether they were each individually raped before they were killed.
But certainly, there's no clear evidence. [TENSE MUSIC] You would look at all the types of activity that
happened at those crime scenes. Was he covering them up? Was he mutilating them?
And then you'd start trying to prioritize all your tips. And then they found another one or two bodies,
and some of the bodies had been mutilated. So by the time they got to the third and fourth body
over the next few months, there were a lot of common denominators and similarities.
NARRATOR: On the 27th of October 1989, Captain Lynde Johnston was called to the murder of another sex worker in Maplewood, Rochester
in search of 25-year-old Patricia Ives. LYNDE JOHNSTON: When you stood at the scene of Patricia Ives
and you look to your left and just down over the hill, where the body of Anna Steffan was found, then if you looked north
and you went down to Seth Green Island, there was another body they found. So there was a tight bunch of them right-- all
in the same area. Those were areas that fishermen frequented. There were brushy so that bodies could be hidden.
There would be building materials from the river that would have washed up to shore, so he could cover the bodies up
with those building materials. They weren't the places that the average person went to.
And I got really nervous about that point that there was certainly something very unique
going on here. NARRATOR: In just over a year and a half, detectives had found four bodies concealed, mutilated,
and all within half a mile of each other. GEOFFREY WANSELL: The police, to their credit,
decide that they must alert the community of sex workers that they are in danger.
And so in the autumn of 1989, if you work as a sex worker in Rochester, it must have
been a very frightening time. And then we, for a lack of a better word, we made what we call a war room.
And what we did was we hung their photographs up because we want to remember who the victim is.
You know, a lot of people don't care because they're apprised to other people. And they have mothers, fathers, sisters brothers.
So we believed he was right down in that area of Lyell Avenue or West Main Street, all these areas
where the prostitution activity took place. And we just needed to find them. This is a time when police investigations are becoming
increasingly sophisticated. That drawing on a lot of different techniques. And I think that was the key thing in this case.
It was the range of different evidence that was used. LYNDE JOHNSTON: We had certainly our surveillance teams out.
People on roofs with the binoculars. Every traffic ticket was looked at, every parking ticket was looked at.
Foot beats were put down there, extra patrols, and a lot of other covert activities that we
did, which I won't discuss because we might use them again. NARRATOR: As part of the investigation,
field interviews were conducted with some of the sex workers on Lyell Avenue. Detectives were informed a guy called
Mitch, who worked at G&G Cheese, was often seen talking to women in the area. The unfortunate part there was when the police went there,
they talked to management that worked during the day. Shawcross worked that night, and they really
weren't connected to him. GEOFFREY WANSELL: We've now got multiple victims within a very small area of Upstate New York who
are being killed relentlessly. Now the full weight of the police are brought to bear.
It is a full-scale manhunt. And every day that we didn't find this person, somebody else might die.
So there was a lot of internal pressure on ourselves. We put it on ourselves. NARRATOR: As more bodies were found along the banks
of the Genessee River and women continued to disappear from the streets, Rochester detectives combined with forces
from the New York State Police and threw everything they had at catching the mysterious killer.
It wasn't long before he struck again. On the 11th of November, another body was
found matching the killer's MO. Captain John McCaffrey coordinated the joint operation.
We had done several investigations together. And it wasn't until the end of 1989
when the Rochester Police Department thought there was a strong possibility that the unknown killer
would start to deposit the bodies outside of their jurisdiction. So they invited the New York State Police
in in the wake of these brutal killings, detectives became concerned that the perpetrator's behavior
would continue to escalate. In October, late October 1989, a young woman called June Stott went missing, and her body was found
months later in November 1989. [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NARRATOR: 30-year-old June had mild learning difficulties.
She was found along the banks of the Genessee River at Turning Point Park. But this time, it was much worse.
He has eviscerated June's body, cut it from sternum to pubic bone, removed some of the body parts
in what's known locally as a deer hunter's cut. June was somebody Arthur Shawcross knew.
They were on friendly terms. So when he targeted her, this is quite an interesting turn of events.
He is targeting women who are available to him not just because they're sex workers,
but because they're in his social circle. June Stott is probably the-- they're all tragic, but it really
was a sad scene because she was a young girl, not a prostitute at all. I remember walking down the path with some
of the other investigators, and we're just thinking, what's he going to do next?
NARRATOR: As well as the mutilation and concealment of the bodies, another pattern had emerged
linking all the victims. So we came up with a list of all these different categories
that we wanted to start comparing. And then we were finding that most of them were found either in creeks or near water.
The exception to that was a lady by the name of Elizabeth Gibson whose body was found out in an apple orchard in Wayne County.
NARRATOR: With concern mounting for the safety of women across the city, an FBI profiler was brought on board.
So during the 1980s, the concept of behavioral profiling became very prominent, looking at what we could see
from a crime scene that would tell us about the personality of the killer. If we could have somebody else come in
and just look at the cases to make sure we didn't miss anything, maybe offer them some suggestions.
This is long before the full weight of the Behavioral Science Unit has grown into what we now recognize
on television programs. This is the early days of profiling. But nevertheless, the FBI do come
up with a preliminary profile. LYNDE JOHNSTON: A lone middle-aged man, 30s. They believed he was a medium-type worker, just a kind
of guy that would be on the assembly line or doing some menial job. He drives a lot, which turned out to be the truth.
He frequents the river area because he liked the fish. He was all around water. He was familiar with the river gorge,
certainly, because of the fishing. He was capable of a relationship with a female.
The relationships would be unstable. And certainly, it was. Possibly, it would be sexually dysfunctional, which he was.
And he had the potential to return to the scene. Shawcross was not educated. He was not a good-looking guy.
He was overweight. He was just a person out there that took advantage of the girls by befriending them,
providing them with some food, and using that to get close to them. NARRATOR: By late December, detectives
had linked seven bodies to the killer and a further three women were thought to be missing.
We're talking about a relentless spate of killings within a six month period, preying on vulnerable women.
There is no real explanation for it. You know, when it started escalating by the mutilation,
his frequency of abducting and killing them escalated, and that's what really concerned everybody.
NARRATOR: Then on New Year's Eve 1989, a uniformed trooper was handed a vital piece of evidence.
It was a winter day. I was working in the office, and I received the call from the trooper.
And he said that passing motorists had just located the pair of boots on the snow-covered highway
in Northampton Park, so he went there. And in the field, he found a pair of blue jeans.
And lo and behold, in the blue jeans, in the rear pocket was a birth certificate of a young lady
by the name of Felicia Stevens. NARRATOR: 20-year-old Felicia Stevens was a sex worker in the Lyell Avenue area of Rochester.
Her jeans were found 13 and 1/2 miles west, in Northampton Park. So I immediately called the Crime
Analysis Unit with the RPD that was working this case. And I said to the investigator, is Felicia
Stevens a missing person? Is she a subject of your investigation? LYNDE JOHNSTON: And we got people
over to her mother's house. And she indicated she hadn't seen her since December the 26th.
And she hadn't lived with Mom because they had a big falling out because of drugs
and her being a prostitute. So at that point, we assume that it's connected to the case.
And the state police started our own missing persons investigation. So all the agencies all got together
and formed a massive search out in that area, bringing in the horses so you could see higher, canine dogs,
troopers and city police walking the lines together, trying to find her. NARRATOR: As the ground search got underway,
John and the New York State Police took to the skies. We have our own helicopter, and it was based in Rochester.
So we immediately put the helicopter in the air. And for three days, we flew that area, searching for the body.
And I told the pilot. I says, let's fly from Northampton Park back to where Felicia Stevens was last seen
or would have been working on Lyell Avenue. That is Route 31. And the distance from Northampton Park
back to the city is probably 12 or 15 miles. So as we left Northampton Park in the helicopter,
we were only, probably, two minutes into the flight. As we're flying over Salmon Creek,
underneath the bridge, frozen in the ice was a body. NARRATOR: John had a hunch this was
a victim of the Genessee River Killer, but that wasn't his only discovery. Now, on top of the bridge was this gray Celebrity,
and the passenger door was open. And this guy was actually urinating out of the passenger side.
And as we flew over with the helicopter, he slid over into the driver's seat and proceeded in an easterly direction
towards the village of Spencerport. LYNDE JOHNSTON: We had discussed with the profilers
before, these guys like to come back to the scene. Of course, we didn't know who the body was yet,
but we had a list of potentials. My immediate assumption was that because this was the first time that the state police had used
the helicopter in the investigation, that possibly this person came back to relocate the body,
so we couldn't find it because it was so easily seen. NARRATOR: John immediately scrambled troopers
from Rochester to Northampton as he continued to follow the gray Celebrity car from the air.
He pulled into the rear parking a nursing home, and we hovered. I had radioed for a uniformed trooper
to come to the location. And as the person got out of the car, they just walked into the nursing home, in the back door.
NARRATOR: With a potential suspect in sight, John waited for news from forces on the ground
as the state trooper entered the nursing home. The trooper radioed and told me that the person that he was interviewing
was Arthur Shawcross. And the first question any uniformed trooper usually ask is, can I see your license and registration?
And Art told him, well, I don't really have a driver's license. I'm on parole. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
NARRATOR: It didn't take long for investigators to learn that the man they had in front of them,
44-year-old Arthur Shawcross, had killed two children in Watertown in the 1970s.
This obvious red flag set alarm bells ringing for John and the team, who were hopeful this was the Genessee River
Killer in their grasp at last. As New York state troopers conducted an initial interview
with Shawcross, the forensics team got to work identifying the body under the bridge.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] It was when we were on the ground there we discovered that the body underneath the bridge
was not that of Lisa Stevens, but of another missing prostitute by the name of June Cicero.
NARRATOR: 34-year-old June Cicero had been missing since the 17th of December. Now, the unique thing about Jun Cicero
was she was kind of known as the queen bee of the prostitutes. She kind of controlled the whole area.
Whatever corner she wanted to work on, the rest of the prostitutes would let her work there because she was mean and aggressive.
NARRATOR: June's body had been cut to the bone on both sides of her crotch, and the killer had
tried to remove her sex organs. And I think for sure, because she represented a bit of a challenge, actually, she is the kind of woman
that he really despises. So I think this one was quite seminal, really. The fact that he'd gone back to the site,
was that evidence of him taking pleasure in his trophies, thinking, what a clever boy I am?
It's difficult not to think there might have been an element of that in it. NARRATOR: Whilst talking to state troopers,
Arthur Shawcross claimed he knew nothing about the body under the bridge. LYNDE JOHNSTON: He said that he had to urinate.
And he had a bottle, and he was starting to pee in the bottle. And the copter came, so he put the cap back on,
swung around, and just drove down to where Clara Neal was working. He said, ah, I don't know why they're
following me because all I was doing was taking a pee on the bridge. NARRATOR: Shawcross remained cool,
shrugging off the initial suspicions of detectives. I think he thought he could kind of bluff his way.
You know, just cooperate and not talk of anything of any real substance. JOHN MCCAFFREY: And the more he talked,
the more viable of a suspect he became. We provided him with a lunch, actually took him
to a restaurant, and bought him dinner. And all this time he was talking to us, unbeknownst to him,
he was providing us a lot of significant information. NARRATOR: That evening, investigators
conducted a preliminary search of Shawcross's apartment. We found under the sink these handy wipe dusting-type
of material that was found at the scene of June Stott and also at the Dorothy Keeler scene.
And overnight, we contacted the company in Ohio that manufactured them. And they told us that the only place in Rochester
that has them was G & G Cheese, and that's the place he worked. NARRATOR: Detectives knew if they were to corner their man,
they needed to conclusively link Shawcross to his victims. Lynde and the team went back over their old field interviews
to see if anyone would be able to identify the killer. One woman. Another sex worker called Jo Ann Van
Nostrand provided just that. So Jo Ann Van Nostrand said she saw this person in this car that went across the bridge
with Elizabeth Gibson in the car. NARRATOR: 29-year-old Elizabeth Gibson, whose body had been found among some trees in neighboring Wayne
County five weeks earlier. LYNDE JOHNSTON: Elizabeth Gibson was taken out to a vacant field
with a small stream and strangled. When we finally knew who Arthur was and we got a hold of Van Nostrand again,
she was able to identify his picture. NARRATOR: Now they had a positive identification
of Shawcross, the investigation was really starting to come together. But the search team, meticulously going
through the car that Shawcross was found driving, had also made excellent progress.
LYNDE JOHNSTON: In the, car there was an earring. And that earring belonged to June Cicero.
And the other one was on her body. And forensically, I believe they found some fibers that match
from the Tyler, the bike that was in the back of the trunk of the car. There was just a variety of good physical evidence
that linked him to these crimes. NARRATOR: The following morning, on the 4th of January 1990,
44-year-old Shawcross was officially arrested. JOHN MCCAFFREY: So we took him to Rochester
Police Department headquarters, put him in an interview room. And we had two teams of investigators.
State police and RPD teamed up, and they started talking to art. What for me was the most striking moment
of the entire case was when he was arrested and the period after that. He was very calm.
He was emotionless about it. The turning point was they asked him, is your girlfriend, Clara Neal,
involved in killing the girls? And he emphatically says, no. Clara is not involved.
Well, you have to tell us, or we're going to think that Clara is involved. He said, no.
Clara has nothing to do with this. It was me. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] NARRATOR: After an investigation lasting nearly two years,
thousands of hours in manpower, and many sleepless nights, the Genessee River Killer had been caught at last.
But with women still missing, detectives needed Shawcross to start cooperating. They had all the photographs of the victims,
and they put the photographs on the table. And Art picked the photographs up. And it was like a deck of cards.
He says, I killed her. This is so-and-so. And he admits to 10 homicides. But every one of these, it was always their fault.
They did something that made them die. Broke the gearshift of his car, tried to take his wallet,
bit him. It was always somebody else's fault instead of his. Although he admitted them, I don't
think he ever took full responsibility for why, though. NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross agreed to assist the police
with their remaining inquiries. After his confession, he said he wanted to take the police
to recover the bodies of a couple that we haven't even found yet. And he took the police down to Island Cottage Road
to recover the body of Maria Welch. NARRATOR: Investigators now had 11 victims they believed
Shawcross had murdered. But despite his confessions, Arthur Shawcross wouldn't admit
to killing Felicia Stevens. The only homicide that he would not admit to was that of Felicia Stevens.
The unique thing about Felicia Stevens was that she was an Afro-American female.
And we assume that he did not want to admit that he had had sex with an Afro-American.
She had been strangled in the same manner that the other girls had. NARRATOR: Despite his denials, Shawcross was
charged with Felicia's murder. His trial began on the 17th of September 1990. The world according to Arthur isn't actually
probably all the truth. You got to be very careful about what Art says because we really believe
he's a pathological liar. And he serves himself to make it look like it was other people's fault.
JOHN MCCAFFREY: His defense was insanity, and that was easily disproved because he
took us to the bodies that he had disposed of. So you couldn't be insane and know where you left the bodies.
And at this point, he introduces the fact that his mother abused him as a child.
It's all fantasy. I very much doubt he suffered anything at the hands of his mother just as he never saw any action
in the jungle in Vietnam. It's just an excuse. NARRATOR: First assistant District Attorney Charles J.
Siragusa led the prosecution. He systematically laid out the case of how each body was discovered, how
each body had been killed, and tied to all the bodies together. The jury deliberated less than eight hours
after two or three weeks of testimony and found him guilty of all 10 homicides. Shawcross is sentenced in the Monroe County cases
to 25 years in prison for each of the 10 victims, a total of 250 years in prison.
He is later to be tried for the one victim in Wayne County. NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross received an additional life
sentence in Wayne County for the murder of Elizabeth Gibson, on top of the 250 years he'd already
been sentenced to in Monroe. This is all about the families of the girls. Just because a person becomes involved
in drugs and a prostitute, they're still somebody's daughter, somebody's sister.
So there was a great deal of satisfaction and relief that we had brought closure to these families.
An unfortunate closure, but closures. NARRATOR: Shawcross was sent to Sullivan Correctional Facility
in Fallsburg, New York. After complaining of leg pain, he died of a cardiac arrest
behind bars in 2008, at the age of 63. LYNDE JOHNSTON: I didn't know how emotionally tied up you could be on something like this.
I remember coming home after he was arrested, walking upstairs, and crying just because I was so tired.
I put so much effort-- all of us put so much effort into this case. It was the only time in my career
that I had those feelings. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: What really angers me about this case
is that there was a chance to stop him. He killed two children and yet he was still
released from prison it really saddens me to think that there are women who would still be walking around today
had Shawcross been dealt with properly the first time around. NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross was a dangerous loner
who targeted vulnerable women in order to satisfy his deadly urges. He brutally murdered and mutilated 11 women.
16 years before this depraved killing spree, Shawcross had also savagely taken the lives
of two young children. Belligerent and unremorseful, Arthur Shawcross maintained his actions were entirely
the fault of his victims, making him one of the world's most evil killers. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
[WHOOSHING] [JINGLING]

Arthur Shawcross, known as the ‘Genesee River Killer,’ was a serial killer who murdered eleven women from 1988 to 1990 in upstate New York.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Arthur Shawcross, a serial killer, murdered 11 women in Rochester after being released from prison for earlier child murders.

Key points

The Discovery of a Killer. On October 27, 1989, the body of a woman was found, marking the fourth victim in Rochester.
Arthur Shawcross's Dark Past. Shawcross, a remorseless killer, had a history of violence dating back 15 years.
The Police Manhunt. Detectives launched a full-scale manhunt for the serial killer terrorizing Rochester.
The Evisceration of June Stott. June Stott's body was found eviscerated, marking a disturbing escalation in Shawcross's crimes.
The Discovery of Felicia Stevens. A pair of jeans and a birth certificate lead to the investigation of Felicia Stevens.
The Arrest of Arthur Shawcross. Arthur Shawcross, a known killer, is apprehended after a lengthy investigation.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

When you don't work together, the bad guy wins, and that's totally unacceptable.

John McCaffrey on the importance of teamwork in police work.

2:35WatchAug 27, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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