At first, it seemed to work out. The grandparents bought Edmund a dog and a .22 rifle. Edmund proceeded to wipe out all the wildlife in the vicinity of the farm but otherwise was no trouble. (He did not kill livestock as alleged in some sources.) He was enrolled in the Sierra Joint Union High School in nearby Tollhouse, where he quietly earned average grades without attracting any attention to himself. But when the school year ended, he was sent back home to Clarnell for the summer. He suddenly returned two weeks later, completely transformed back to his disturbed self. He now became a problem for the grandparents, disobeying their demands that he stop shooting birds on the farm.
On August 27, 1964, his grandfather was in town purchasing groceries. As Maude sat at the kitchen table editing a recent manuscript for Boys’ Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts, Edmund shot her twice in the back of the head with his rifle and then stabbed her three times in the back because he did not want her “to suffer,” he said. He wrapped her head up in a dish towel and then carried her body into the bedroom. Then Edmund waited for his grandfather to return.
He didn’t want his grandfather to see what he had done. When his grandfather came driving up the road with the groceries, Kemper went out to greet him. “Granddad was smiling at me,” Kemper told police. “When he turned, I placed the rifle this far (indicating about 30 inches) from the back of his head and shot him.”45
Kemper then called his mother and told her what he had done. When police arrived, Kemper had little to say in explanation other than that he was “mad at the world” and “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.”
Kemper was immediately packed off to the Atascadero maximum-security state psychiatric facility, where the intelligent and disarmingly charming youth became the favorite of the psychiatric staff. He was assigned to work in the psychology laboratory, where he became a crew leader in administrating and helping to score the results of inmate psychology tests. Psychologist Frank J. Vanasek was impressed with Kemper’s performance, commenting, “He was a very good worker—and this is not typical of a sociopath. He really took pride in his work. Now, a sociopath would have been more likely to use his performance to achieve other ends.” Kemper understood himself much better than the degreed psychologist Vanasek. Kemper later said, “I broke my butt. . . . I was the dynamic young man, and they began to say maybe we can let him out sooner than we had thought.”46
Arthur Shawcross, “The Genesee River Killer,” Part 1, Jefferson County, New York, 1972–1989
On the other side of the country, in upper New York State near Watertown, Arthur John Shawcross, the son of the tenth-grade dropout Elizabeth “Betty” Yerakes and traumatized Guadalcanal veteran Roy Shawcross was growing up through the 1950s and 1960s.
Although Betty would claim that Arthur was normal, healthy, and never gave her any trouble until the age of five, other relatives remember little Art as being “odd” even as an infant. One cousin recalled that Arthur had beautiful, big eyes but a blank, expressionless stare and he almost never cried. But when he did, he creepily cried from only one eye. He still talked baby talk when he was six. He suffered from nightmares and frequently wet his bed. He was absent from kindergarten for a total of thirty-three days, and when in first grade, he began running away from home—unusual for a child of that age. He enjoyed making other children cry and invented fantasy friends with which he carried on extensive conversations.
He was called “Oddie” by other children and became a frequent target of their derision. He always seemed to be left out. Many former students remember Shawcross as a boy at the edge of the playground, wanting to join in but never being invited. Early school reports note that he wandered away from his classroom and was found sitting in empty classrooms and “he brings an iron bar on the school bus and hits at the children.”
In May 1953, at the age of eight, Shawcross was sent for a mental health evaluation. The report stated, “There seems to be a general feeling that one can’t tell what he will do. . . . Harbors a fair amount of hostility especially toward his mother because of fear of punishment and rejection, and seems unable to find many legitimate outlets for it. Defenseless objects (and possibly younger children) seem to take the brunt. . . . His conscience does not seem to be strongly developed as yet, but some guilt feelings appear.” In other words, little Arthur was on his way to becoming a psychopath.
The report concluded, “The mother appears to be rejecting (from Arthur’s point of view) and punishing even where it is uncalled for. This has resulted in a great deal of confusion about what he should be like. He feels as if he is a bad boy a lot of the time and is hostile enough in a confused sort of way to want to remain ‘bad.’ Is unable to develop moral standards. Instead, he appears to be indulging in a considerable amount of fantasy in which he perceives himself as a new person with respect and dignity.”
Shawcross would later claim that his mother beat him with a broomstick, inserted it into his anus and gave him forced enemas, that he had incestuous sex with his sister, his cousin or his aunt, and that he had sex with a male when he was fourteen, although none of these later claims could be confirmed. And Shawcross, as we will see, will tell a lot of tall tales.
When Arthur was nine, a letter arrived from Roy’s wife in Australia and his hidden past was exposed. From then on, family life was hellish. Betty became permanently embittered, referring to all other women, whether in life or on television, as “whores.” She berated her husband constantly, for the rest of their marriage. He now stayed away at work for long hours and became withdrawn and quiet. Arthur’s father became a “nonperson” in the family.
Later, Shawcross would write:
From that day forward my life turned upside down. Dad hung his head in shame. He couldn’t look you in the eye and say it was not so! Mom took over and she made life hell in that house. Dad can’t even watch TV without mom cursing or throwing something at him. Even where he worked he could of done better for himself, but now he started working in a gravel pit. I am ashamed of my father and now I am ashamed of myself. This same woman did it to both of us.47
Numerous episodes of cruelty to animals were later reported. A cousin remembers how Arthur liked to skin living fish to watch them suffer and see how long it took them to die. He snared rabbits and enjoyed snapping their necks, plucked feathers off baby birds, pinned frogs to his dartboard as targets and tied cats together. One friend remembers him throwing a kitten into a lake, over and over, until the animal drowned.
Shawcross also committed numerous acts of petty thievery, further filling in the typical serial killer’s childhood profile, along with the many instances of arson. Firefighters were constantly being called out to extinguish brush fires near his house.
It was all there, all the classic symptoms in the childhood history of a gestating serial killer: bed-wetting, bullying of fellow children, arson, cruelty to animals and flights of fantasy as a means of retreat, and a dominating mother taking center stage. The hysterical dominating mother and a weak, ineffectual or totally absent father figure is a motif that runs through many a serial killer’s childhood biography (Edmund Kemper, Jerry Brudos, Henry Lee Lucas, Kenneth Bianchi).
One of the common aspects of serial killer childhoods is rejection by peers, resulting in loneliness. It’s hard to say whether childhood peers reject the child because of his weirdness, resulting in frustrated and violent behavior further alienating the child from his peers, or it’s the violent behavior that leads childhood peers to reject their playmate, but regardless, the child feels rejected and in its loneliness begins to dwell on comforting fantasies of violent retribution in which they control and dominate everything around them, including the people who rejected them in the first place.
When Shawcross underwent a mental health assessment at the age of eight, the report stated, “Mother says he has no playmates. . . . Asked which of his brothers and sisters he liked best he said, ‘Not any of them
’ because they wouldn’t play with him.”
“Crazy Boy”
One of his strangest quirks was an obsession with walking in a straight line, no matter what the obstacle—swamp, hills or barbed wire. His clothes would get torn, he’d get mired in the Watertown swamps, but he would not change direction. He called it “walking cross-lots.”
As Shawcross became an adolescent, he grew stronger. Instead of ridiculing him, many began to fear him. When one girl called him “stupid,” he attacked her with a baseball bat. He did not know the meaning of the term “uncle” when fighting. Once he began, there was no stopping him until somebody would pull him off. A male cousin recalled that Artie did not know how to express his anger other than to shout out comic book captions as he hit: “Bang . . . zap . . . pow.” He hit a boy in the face with books, breaking his glasses; he broke his cousin’s nose with the butt of a toy rifle.
A cousin recalled, “He made weird noises as he walked. . . . I’d run into him and he’d be saying, ‘Die die dee die, die die dee die . . . ’” Another cousin stated, “It came from his throat. . . . At first it sounded like a chant but later on we realized he was just saying ‘die’ over and over.”
In school, he was having academic problems. He was left behind three times with the result that he was sixteen when he entered eighth grade. He excelled in sports but was uncontrollable. He was dismissed from the wrestling team when he used TV wrestling tactics like body slams and punches. In track and field, he assaulted his competitors. His nickname was “Crazy Boy.”
From the age of nine, Shawcross also started to display undiagnosed blackouts and strange episodes of paralysis. At the age of ten, while picnicking with his family, he suddenly appeared to lose consciousness and slipped into the water. After his father pulled him out, Arthur claimed he could not move his legs. He spent six days in a hospital undergoing a battery of tests without any clear diagnosis. He was sent home and shortly afterward miraculously regained the use of his legs.
At school, Shawcross sustained the first of a long string of head injuries, also a frequent feature in the childhood histories of serial killers. He was hit in the head by a discus, resulting in a four-day hospitalization with hairline skull fractures. In the next few years, he would be knocked unconscious by a surge of electricity, a blow from a sledgehammer, a fall onto his head from a forty-foot ladder and a hit from a truck.
By the age of seventeen, Shawcross had dropped out of school and was employed in various temporary jobs. He matured into an attractive and strong youth with captivating green eyes and dark and handsome features, but his odd behavior still put many people off. He continued to “walk cross-lots” but now added a new twist to the obsession—he would speed up and slow down every twenty paces or so. Although he had a car given to him by his grandfather, he quickly wrecked it and preferred to use his bicycle, claiming that driving made him nervous. Whenever rising from a chair, he had a strange habit of grabbing his buttocks and “lifting himself up.” At dances he displayed weird and spastic moves, twenty years ahead of Devo and Talking Heads. His few dates with girls ended with his inappropriate behavior; one girl remembers him suddenly violently grabbing at her crotch.
In December 1963, when Arthur was eighteen, he registered his first criminal conviction. Responding to a silent alarm late one night, police caught him inside a downtown department store. He had smashed through the front window. The judge sentenced him to eighteen months’ probation as a youthful offender.
Despite his violent and disturbed behavior, some women found him attractive. Over the winter of 1964, Shawcross began steadily dating a girl a year older than him, and in September they were married. A year later, in October 1965, they had a baby boy. The couple lived in a trailer on property owned by his bride’s parents. Shawcross worked a variety of jobs but often faked injuries to collect insurance and went through long periods of unemployment. He engaged in acts of petty thievery at work and was considered an unreliable worker. Shawcross was an unfaithful husband, explaining later that his wife refused to engage in oral sex. Shawcross discovered that he had an ability to attract women, despite his weirdness.
Little is known about this first marriage; his wife, Sarah Chatterton, and their son managed to successfully disappear into obscurity. Later, Sarah would say that she feared for their son’s life around Arthur. A cousin remembers once coming over to the couple’s trailer and Arthur telling him, “She’s resting. I just got her. If you want to go in the back and get her, you can.”
In the winter of 1965, Shawcross was driving a car when a boy threw a snowball at it. He slammed on the brakes and chased the boy to his house, broke down the door and, once inside, slapped him several times. Shawcross was charged, on a technicality, with second-degree burglary. He pleaded guilty to unlawful entry and was sentenced to six months’ probation and a psychiatric evaluation. His wife left him and filed for divorce. After the divorce, Shawcross never saw his child again.
In 1966, Shawcross met Linda Neary, a bartender at a local square dance hall. Neary recalls that he was very quiet, never swore and disliked crowds. He was passionate about fishing. He hated to drive. He constantly complained about his mother, telling Neary that he felt she did not love him and that no matter what he did, his mother always thought it was wrong. Neary recalls that he seemed to be obsessive about his clothes, always insisting that his work clothes were superclean and pressed. Likewise, he was very one-track-minded, never deviating from an evening’s plan, for example—not even to stop for a cup of coffee.
Sex was not a problem, Neary says, because they did not have any. She did not want to unless they were married, and Shawcross did not object.
Arthur Shawcross Goes to War
In April 1967, Shawcross was drafted into the Army, and in September, after his training was completed, he and Linda Neary got married. Early in October 1967, Private Arthur John Shawcross, serial number 52967041, was shipped out to Vietnam with the Fourth Infantry Division, where he was assigned to the Fourth Supply and Transport Company at Pleiku, the center for the defense of the central highland region in Vietnam.
Like their World War II fathers, many Vietnam war vets returned from the war with psychological demons. Vietnam war trauma was different in many ways from World War II and Korean War “combat stress reaction.” Vietnam was a war like no other fought by American soldiers. At the age of twenty-two, Shawcross was older than the average soldier sent to Vietnam but still young compared to the average age of twenty-six in World War II. Once sent to Vietnam, the mostly teen soldiers were expected to survive a twelve-month tour of duty (thirteen for Marines). In World War II, soldiers did their tours as a unit, supporting one another as a “family” through the required combat period from arrival to departure; in Vietnam, soldiers were shipped out by birth date, arriving on his own personal, lonely one-year schedule known as DEROS (Date Eligible for Return from Overseas). Once “in-country,” a soldier checked off on a calendar every day he escaped death or horrific injury, day by day, until his scheduled date of return to “the world.” The wait for the DEROS, when life would return to what it was before, often built up unrealistic expectations in the young soldiers, and as he approached the final weeks of his tour and the possibility of escaping unharmed, the mental stress often became intolerable.48
And there was more to it. During World War II, American troops sometimes went months between combat campaigns; in Vietnam, troops were often ferried by helicopter into combat zones every day of their tour except for short, disorientating R & R (“Rest and Recreation”) breaks. In other wars, the enemy wore distinct uniforms; in Vietnam, nobody knew where and who the enemy was. During other wars, soldiers gradually adapted to a wartime environment that was remote and different from their home. In Vietnam, they were constantly catapulted back and forth between homey air-conditioned facilities with steak dinners and television and the obscenity of the battlefield, resulting in a hallucinatory existence betwee
n the illusion of being safe at home and the reality of death in the field. And in the middle of all that, there were vacation leaves in Hawaii (halfway to home), so soldiers could reunite with their wives in hotel suites before returning to the deadly jungles and the rice paddies.
Readily available marijuana, heroin, amphetamines and LSD, consumed both on the battlefield and off, further heightened the hallucinatory experience. It was a rock and roll war with all the drugs and sex that came with it.
Vietnam was unprecedented in its brutality for American troops, with children and women frequently becoming accidental, collateral or deliberate targets. As the civilian population occupied combat zones and there was no way to tell friendly Vietnamese from hostile, and because young women and children sometimes took part in combat operations against the Americans, horrific battlefield atrocities transpired.
In the past, soldiers going home from war slowly “depressurized” on long ship journeys; and, once home, they were treated as heroes and praised and rewarded for their service no matter how horrible they might have been. Even the most primitive societies held rituals for their warriors cleansing them of sins committed on the battlefield and welcoming them back to the community. In Vietnam, a soldier completed his tour of duty, crawled out of the muck of the battlefield, showered, had a cold beer and within thirty-six hours, after a flight on a plane full of strangers, was suddenly back home. Alone. There he was reviled for having fought in an “immoral” war by those who stayed at home. Instead of “talking out” the traumas of battle, the Vietnam veteran bottled them up inside of him. The good life, the hero’s welcome, a return to what was before, adulation from the people at home he supposedly was defending against the evil of communism, all the things he expected, never materialized.
American Serial Killers Page 20