One of the problems with this line of reasoning is that weeks and months after the murders, Shawcross was able to relate the details to Boriello and Blythe in minute detail. In some cases, he actually brought them to body dump sites the police had been unable to find. He was probably able to do this because he had fantasized about each one so many times that they were fresh in his mind.
He took steps to destroy some of the evidence so the police wouldn’t find him. After his arrest, he also wrote a rather analytic letter to his girlfriend (he had a wife, too), saying that he hoped for the insanity defense because doing time in a mental hospital would be a lot easier than doing time in prison.
On that score, Shawcross clearly knew whereof he spoke. His troubles with the law began in 1969 when he was convicted of burglary and arson in Watertown, north of Syracuse. Less than a year later, he was arrested again and admitted strangling a young boy and girl. The girl had also been sexually molested. For those two crimes, Shawcross was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He was paroled after fifteen. That, if you recall from a previous chapter, was why age was the one aspect of the profile that Gregg McCrary had called wrong. Shawcross’s fifteen years in stir had merely been a holding pattern.
Now let’s take this step-by-step. First of all, if you ask me or just about any of the many thousands of cops, prosecutors, and federal agents I’ve worked with over the course of my career, you’ll get a resounding consensus that twenty-five years for ending the lives of two children is pretty obscene in and of itself. But second, to let this guy out early, it seems to me you have to presume one of two opposite premises.
Premise number one: despite this guy’s bad background, despite his dysfunctional family, the alleged abuse, the lack of good education, his violent past, and everything else, prison life was such a wonderful, spiritually uplifting, eye-opening, and rehabilitative experience that Shawcross saw the light, realized the error of his ways, and because of all the good influence in prison resolved to turn over a new leaf and be an upright, law-abiding citizen from that moment hence.
Okay, if you don’t accept that one, how about premise number two: prison life was so completely horrible, so unpleasant and traumatic every day, so thoroughly punishing in every way, that despite his bad background and continuing desire to rape and kill children, he never wanted to be back in prison and resolved to do anything he could to avoid going back.
I agree, that one’s just as unlikely. But if you don’t accept either of these two premises, how in the hell do you let someone like that out without considering the strong possibility that he’s going to kill again?
Quite clearly, some types of killers are much more likely to repeat their crimes than others. But for the violent, sexually based serial killers, I find myself agreeing with Dr. Park Dietz that "it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which they should be released to the public again." Ed Kemper, who’s a lot brighter and has a lot more in the way of personal insight than most of the other killers I’ve talked to, acknowledges candidly that he shouldn’t be let out.
There are just too many horror stories out there. Richard Marquette, whom I interviewed and who had a string of disorderly conduct, attempted rape, and assault and battery charges against him in Oregon by his early twenties, progressed to rape, murder, and mutilation after an unsuccessful sexual experience with a woman he’d picked up in a Portland bar. He fled the area, was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and was arrested in California. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Paroled after twelve years, he killed and dissected two more women before being captured again. What in God’s name led a parole board to think this guy was no longer dangerous?
I can’t speak for the FBI, the Justice Department, or anyone else. But I can say that for myself, I would much rather have on my conscience keeping a killer in jail who might or might not kill again if sprung, than the death of an innocent man, woman, or child as a result of the release of that killer.
It’s an American attribute to think that things are always getting better, that they can always be improved upon, that we can accomplish anything we set out to do. But the more I see, the more pessimistic I become about the concept of rehabilitation for certain types of offenders. What they went through as children is often horrible. That doesn’t necessarily mean the damage can be undone at a later date. And contrary to what judges, defense attorneys, and mental health professionals might want to believe, good behavior in prison isn’t necessarily predictive of acceptable behavior in the outside world.
In virtually every respect, Shawcross had been a model prisoner. He was quiet, kept to himself, did what he was told, and didn’t bother anyone. But what my colleagues and I have found and have tried desperately to get across to others in the business of correction and forensic psychology is that dangerousness is situational. If you can keep someone in a well-ordered environment where he doesn’t have choices to make, he may be fine. But put him back in the environment in which he did badly before, his behavior can quickly change.
Take the case of Jack Henry Abbot, the convicted murderer who wrote In the Belly of the Beast, a moving and penetrating memoir of life in prison. Realizing his exceptional talent as a writer and believing that anyone so sensitive and insightful must be rehabilitated, such literary lights as Norman Mailer campaigned to have Abbot paroled. He became the toast of New York. But within a few months of his release, he got into an argument with a waiter in Greenwich Village and killed him.
As Al Brantley, a former Behavioral Science instructor who is now a member of the Investigative Support Unit, put it in one of his National Academy lectures, "The best predictor of future behavior, or future violent acting out, is a past history of violence."
No one would accuse Arthur Shawcross of being anywhere near as bright or talented as Jack Henry Abbot. But he was also able to convince a parole board he could be released. After his parole, Shawcross first settled in Binghamton, where an angry community mounted a campaign against him and he left after two months. He was relocated to the larger and more anonymous metropolitan area of Rochester, where he took a job as a salad preparer with a food-distribution company. A year after his arrival, he began killing again—a different targeted victim this time, yet no less vulnerable.
During her examinations of Shawcross, Dorothy Lewis put him under hypnosis several times and "regressed" him to earlier phases of his life where he acted out such episodes of abuse as his mother’s insertion of a broom handle far up his rectum. During these recorded sessions, he is seen to take on other personalities, including that of his mother, in a scene eerily reminiscent of Psycho. (Shawcross’s mother, however, denied ever abusing her son and denounced him as a liar.)
In her work at Bellevue, Lewis has documented some compelling cases of multiple personality in children who had been abused. They are so young that it would be difficult to conceive of them being able to fake this. But as Lewis has demonstrated, the rare cases of multiple personality disorder begin early in childhood, often during the preverbal phase. In adults, it seems the only time you really hear about multiple personality disorder is after someone is on trial for murder. Somehow, it never comes up until then. Kenneth Bianchi, one of two cousins who together committed the Hillside Strangler murders in Los Angeles in the 1970s, claimed after his arrest to be a multiple. John Wayne Gacy tried the same approach.
(I’ve often joked that if you have an offender with multiple personalities, I’ll let the innocent personalities go as long as I can lock up the guilty one.)
For the Shawcross trial, lead prosecutor Charles Siragusa, who did a masterful job, called on Park Dietz to present the other side. Dietz examined Shawcross just as extensively as Lewis had, and Shawcross came up with a lot of specific details about the murders. While Dietz didn’t make any absolute judgment about the veracity of the stories of abuse, he thought they sounded at least plausible. Nevertheless, he did not think Shawcross was delusional, found no evidence he had su
ffered from blackouts or loss of memory, found no correlation between his behavior and any organic neurological findings, and concluded that whatever mental or emotional problems he might have, Arthur Shawcross understood the difference between right and wrong and was able to make the choice as to whether he killed or not. And on at least ten occasions here, and probably more, he had chosen to do so.
When Len Boriello asked him why he had killed these women, he replied simply, "Taking care of business."
True psychotics—those who have lost touch with reality—don’t commit serious crimes very often. And when they do, they are usually so disorganized and make so little attempt to avoid detection that they are generally caught fairly quickly. Richard Trenton Chase, who killed women because he thought he needed their blood to stay alive, was a psychotic. If he couldn’t get human blood, he’d settle for what was at hand. When Chase was placed in a mental institution, he continued to catch rabbits, bleed them, and inject their blood into his arm. He would catch small birds, bite off their heads, and drink their blood. This one was for real. But for a killer to avoid detection and get away with ten murders, he has to be pretty good at it. Don’t make the mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic.
During the trial, Shawcross always maintained a stoic and immobile, almost catatonic, demeanor toward the jury. It was as if he were in a trancelike state, unable to comprehend what was going on around him. Yet the police officers and marshals who guarded and escorted him reported that as soon as he was outside the jury’s sight and hearing, he would loosen up, become talkative, sometimes joke around. He knew a lot was at stake in selling the insanity plea.
One of the cleverest, most resourceful—and, I have to say, most charming—criminals I’ve ever studied and interviewed was Gary Trapnell. He’d been in and out of prison most of his adult life and at one point actually convinced a young woman to secure a helicopter to land in the middle of the prison yard and rescue him. During one of his notable crimes—an airplane hijacking in the early 1970s—Trapnell is in the plane on the ground trying to negotiate terms for his getaway. In the midst of this, he raises his fist in the air for cameras to catch and demands, "Free Angela Davis!"
" ’Free Angela Davis’? What’s this ’free Angela Davis’?" This comes as something of a shock to most of the law enforcement people working on the case. There’s nothing in Trapnell’s background to suggest that he’s in any way emotionally committed to the young black California professor’s radical causes. There’s nothing to suggest he’s political in any way, and here, as one of his demands, he wants Angela Davis freed from prison. The guy must be loony. That’s the only logical explanation.
Later, after his surrender and conviction, when I interviewed him in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, I asked him about this demand.
He said something to the effect of, "When I saw I wasn’t going to work my way out of this one, I knew I’d be doing some hard time. And I figured if the big black brothers thought I was a political prisoner, I’d be less likely to get my ass raped in the shower."
Not only was Trapnell fully rational at the time, he was planning ahead, virtually the opposite of being crazy. In fact, he wrote his own memoirs, entitled The Fox Is Crazy, Too. This nugget of information also gave us tremendous insight into negotiations. If some totally off-the-wall demand suddenly comes up, it could mean that in his mind, the offender has already moved on to the next stage and the negotiator can react accordingly.
Trapnell told me something else I found very, very interesting. He said that if I gave him a copy of the current edition of DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and pointed to any condition described in it, by the next day he could convince any psychiatrist that he was genuinely suffering from the affliction. Again, Trapnell’s got a lot more on the ball than Shawcross. But just as it doesn’t take all that much imagination to know you’ve got a better shot at parole if you tell the shrink you’re feeling much better and no longer have any interest in molesting little boys, it stands to reason that your fugue-state explanation will play better if the jury can actually see you in something of a trance.
For a long time, the law enforcement community tried to rely on DSM for guidance and definition about what constituted a serious mental disorder and what did not. But most of us found the reference book to be of little value in what we did. This was one of the motivations for developing the Crime Classification Manual, which was published in 1992. The basic structure of the book grew out of my doctoral dissertation. Ressler, Ann Burgess, and her husband, Allen, a professor of management in Boston, collaborated with me as coauthors. Other members of the Investigative Support and Behavioral Science Units, including Greg Cooper, Roy Hazelwood, Ken Lanning, Gregg McCrary, Jud Ray, Pete Smerick, and Jim Wright, worked with us as contributors.
With CCM we set about to organize and classify serious crimes by their behavioral characteristics and explain them in a way that a strictly psychological approach such as DSM has never been able to do. For example, you won’t find the type of murder scenario of which O. J. Simpson was accused in DSM. You will find it in CCM. What we were trying to do was separate the wheat from the chaff as far as behavioral evidence was concerned and help investigators and the legal community focus in on which considerations may be relevant and which are not.
Not surprisingly, defendants and their attorneys will bring up anything they possibly can to avoid assuming responsibility for their actions. Among the laundry list of factors Shawcross’s team suggested had contributed to his insanity was the post-traumatic stress disorder from Vietnam. Research indicated that Shawcross had seen no combat. But this wasn’t a new one. It had been used many times before. Duane Samples, who disemboweled two women in Silverton, Oregon, on the night of December 9, 1975, claimed PTSD as his defense. Only one of the women died, but I’ve seen the crime-scene photos. Both of them look like autopsies. Robert Ressler discovered that Samples hadn’t seen action, either, despite his claims. The day before the attack, however, Samples had written a letter describing his long-standing fantasy of disemboweling a beautiful naked woman.
In 1981, Ressler went out to Oregon to help prosecutors explain why the governor should not follow through with his intention to parole Samples. The argument worked, though he was finally paroled ten years later.
Is Samples insane? Was he temporarily insane when he cut up the two women? The natural tendency would be to say that anyone who could do such a horrible, perverse thing must truly be "sick." And I wouldn’t disagree with that. But did he know what he was doing was wrong? And did he choose to do it anyway? Those are the important questions as far as I’m concerned.
Arthur Shawcross’s trial in Rochester City Court lasted more than five weeks, during which prosecutor Siragusa displayed a deeper and more complete understanding of forensic psychiatry than I have seen from virtually any doctor. During the trial, every minute of which was televised, he became a local hero. When the jury was finally handed the case after closing arguments, they took less than a day to reach a verdict of guilty of murder in the second degree on all charges. This judge made sure Shawcross would not have the opportunity to repeat his actions. He sentenced him to two hundred fifty years to life in the state penitentiary.
And this brings up another aspect of the insanity defense, one that a good many people don’t realize: juries don’t like it and don’t often go for it.
They don’t go for it for two reasons, I believe. One is that it strains credibility that multiple killers are so compelled to commit their crimes that they have no choice. Keep in mind that no serial killer in my experience ever felt so compelled to kill that he did so in the presence of a uniformed police officer.
The second reason juries don’t go for the insanity defense is an even more basic one. After all the legal and psychiatric and academic arguments are stripped away, when it finally gets down to the deliberation of a defendant’s fate, jurors realize instinctively that these guys are danger
ous. Whatever the decent men and women of Milwaukee might intellectually have felt about Jeffrey Dahmer’s sanity or lack thereof, I don’t believe they were willing to entrust his future (and their community’s) to a mental institution about whose security and judgment in keeping him they couldn’t be sure. If they put him in prison, his dangerousness would more likely be held in check.
I don’t mean to imply that most psychiatrists or mental health professionals are hot to spring dangerous offenders from incarceration and put them back in situations where they can do more harm. What I am suggesting is that in most instances, from my experience, these people don’t see enough of what we do to be able to make informed judgments. Even if they have forensic experience, it’s often limited to a particular area, which is what they will then rely on.
One of my first cases as a profiler involved the murder of an elderly woman, Anna Berliner, in her home in Oregon. The local police had consulted a clinical psychologist about the type of UNSUB they were looking for. Among her injuries were four deep pencil stab wounds in the chest. The psychologist had conducted interviews with about fifty men charged with or convicted of homicide. Most of these examinations had been done in prison. Based on his experience, he predicted that the offender would be someone with a fair amount of prison time, probably a drug dealer, because only in prison is a sharpened pencil widely considered a deadly weapon. People on the outside, he reasoned, wouldn’t think to use an ordinary pencil to attack someone.
When the police contacted me, I gave them an opposite opinion. I thought the age and vulnerability of the victim, the overkill, the fact that it was a daytime crime and that nothing of great value was missing, suggested an inexperienced juvenile offender. I didn’t believe that he carefully analyzed the pencil’s use as a weapon. It was there and he used it. The killer turned out to be an inexperienced sixteen-year-old who had gone to her house trying to get a contribution to a walkathon in which he was not actually participating.
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