Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  She asked, ‘How long will we be gone? I must be back by one o’clock.’ It was then about 10.30.

  I did have a place in mind but it was miles away. So I drove along and pulled in next to a lake. When I stopped I saw a house in the midst of some trees and a man walking our way from another direction. I turned around and drove away. During this, the girl did not make any attempt to open the car door or get out.

  Directly across the road from the lake a road led into a glen. It was about 500–622ft from the main road. When we got there, I went to the trunk and took out a blue blanket [subsequently recovered by the police] and threw it on to the ground, and I told her, ‘Get ready!’ I was not happy with her for some reason, but she was a very sexy woman, about 20 years old, and I wanted to have sex with her, especially since we already had after a manner of speaking. She took off my jeans and her panties and laid down on her back with her feet in my direction. The whole of her pudendum was pointing towards me – and it was beautiful, as was herself, a very pretty woman. Now, I do not know what other men look for or how they act, but I generally always look at the vulva, play with it. The prettier she looks in her genital area, the more I want sex.

  Now, I only stopped to help the girl get her car started. When she climbed in, I only had it in mind to get the tools to fix it. Sex was not on my mind, and I did not kidnap her. Everyone assumes these women and girls as innocents. They generally are not. Each and everyone of them wanted something from me, either money, to drive one of my cars, or something they would not divulge. I never kidnapped them, or forced them to come with me. She is no different from the others. I am not a rapist, and the word itself is so revolting it turns my stomach.

  Despite what anyone says, we had a delightful time in that clearing until she accused me of taking money from her purse, and then I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ I became much more angry than the moment called for and acted out within the content of that anger rather than against the accusation which called for no more than an explanation that I had not taken her money. The right rear tyre on my car had gone flat and I was changing it when she screamed out at me. She kept screaming the money was not hers and almost insanely demanding I return it. Then, in a wink, her tone changed and she told me how she wanted to trade her car for another. That I should give her $200 for the trade or she was going to say I had raped her. Until that instant, I had gone on with the business of replacing the lug bolts on the hub; but in that instant when she made that threat, I became what I see as being uncontrollably angry and I hit her with the lug wrench – and not with the hammer as she later testified, and what is generally believed. She was fully dressed and I can see it now as plain as it was happening even now. She fell to the ground as if she had been pole-axed and she slid slowly down a 12–14ft incline into a ditch, feet first, with her brown sweater rolling up until was under her armpits. I did not panic, but put the lug wrench in the trunk and the remaining lug bolt in my pocket, got into my car, and drove away. At about 15–20 minutes down the road, maybe 15–20 miles, I realised I could not leave the woman there to die if she was only wounded, and I had to know, so I turned around and went back. As I drove by, there were several cars and a tractor with a wagon behind it stopped beside the road, and all of the people were bending over someone that I knew was her, so I kept on driving.

  When Harvey had finished talking, I confronted him about the reality of the attack. I reminded this man that in fact he had left the young nurse for dead in that ditch but she regained consciousness several hours later lying in a pool of her own blood and suffering from almost lethal head injuries. It was practically nightfall and, in dreadful pain, she crawled over a mile through ploughed fields to a road where the farmer found her, and summoned help in the morning.

  Carignan later passed the ambulance as he was returning to the scene of the attack, not to save his victim’s life, but concerned that she might survive and be able to describe him and his vehicle. He returned intending to finish her off but, by then, she had crawled to safety. The only thing that kept the young woman alive was the news that her sister had given her the previous day, that she was expecting a child and she was determined to see the baby.

  Harvey claims he had been sexually abused by just about every female he came across, including his relations, babysitters, and his teacher at the reform school. And, while we are all too aware that, during the last three decades, child abuse has become exposed as a social blight, there is absolutely not a shred of solid evidence to confirm that Harvey was abused on the scale he continually asserts.

  What we can say with a degree of certainty is that he grew up with a grudge against women in general, perhaps directed toward his negligent mother and her family and friends. But, maybe this is all the evidence we need, for in a literal way, people don’t grow up to hate women, or men, for no reason, so perhaps Carignan is telling the truth after all.

  Recently, Carignan has said, ‘I hate women with a passion … They always played mind games with my head.’ Nevertheless, his account of sexual abuse may offer something else of value to us, as we look into his past. Those few lines in his letters are full of contradictions and without any doubt, this may be fantasy-fuelled. It is an account tailored to suit him, being abused by a domineering ‘truly cruel woman’, while he, the poor young lad was helpless, yet at the same moment, apparently enjoying a situation in which he revelled.

  As with so many killers, when Harvey Carignan came into this world he was immediately burdened by childhood problems. He carried the social stigma of being a bastard; a weak, nervous child; a bed-wetter who suffered from Saint Vitus’s dance; and, like the British serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe, was bullied throughout his formative years.

  He claims that women sexually abused him as a child, although these allegations are unsupported by fact. There is little doubt, though, that his mother and other female relations, including his aunts and grandmother, treated him with contempt. The psychological damage this caused may explain in large measure the passionate hatred that Harvey holds for women. He believes they all ‘played mind-games’ with his head, which perhaps accounts for his use of blunt instruments to mutilate and destroy the heads of his victims. His fury was such that he didn’t just hit them once or twice. More often than not he smashed their skulls to an unrecognisable pulp using demoniacal and inhuman force.

  Revenge – more particularly, revenge against women – played an important part in his motivation, and his modus operandi was always the same. But there is another side to this killer’s motive, which is, on the face of it, bizarre. While he slaughtered older women, perhaps in the image maybe of his mother, aunts and grandmother (with a few exceptions) he often allowed his teenage victims to live, despite the horrific attacks committed upon them. In a few cases, he even drove them home or patched up their cuts and bruises. The reason for this contradictory behaviour might be explained by his clearly-stated sexual attraction to younger girls. In this respect, there can be no doubt that Carignan was, and still is, fantasy driven. Those fantasies of sex with young girls always give him immense pleasure, while thoughts of older women generated intense hatred for Carignan.

  Throughout my extensive period of correspondence with Harvey, he made much of what he calls his ‘string of pearls’. In effect, he implies that these ‘pearls of wisdom’ are priceless details which he releases only when he judges the time is appropriate for him.

  ‘The truth is in my pearls of wisdom,’ he bluntly stated. ‘I am not going to reveal the pearls of this part of the truth at least for years,’ he added before clamming up and refusing to answer any more questions about the nature of his crimes.

  Harvey ‘The Hammer’ Carignan devoted the remainder of the interview to claiming that he is a man with much feeling. A man of great knowledge and, as he studies philosophy, he is worthy of having his words and thoughts considered by others. But within ‘The Hammer’, there is still a fatal flaw.

  Despite having spent the better part of his worthless l
ife behind bars, this monster, in every sense of the word, is totally unable to come to terms with his guilt. This is a trait he shares with many other serial murderers. Even with the evidence being consistent and overwhelming in every case of sexual assault, rape or murder, Carignan is psychologically compelled to transfer most of the blame for his crimes on to his luckless victims.

  When he is exposed, and all of his excuses stare him straight back in the face as complete untruths, he has a fallback position. He retreats to the trench used by so many offenders, namely the refuge which blames the entire law-enforcement and justice system for fitting him up.

  If the gravity and number of offences were not so serious, one might be forgiven for thinking that his excuses are laughable. Some may even argue that his letters are the ramblings of a madman and, as such, should be dismissed or, at best, ignored. However, Harvey is not mad by any definition. What he refuses to say, or hides between the lines, or chooses to forget to say, can ultimately be of greater interest, for in his pathological self-denial sits the true nature of The Beast.

  At the present time, Carignan is eligible for parole, for no matter how many murders he has committed, no one in the State of Minnesota can serve more than 45 years in prison.

  Harvey has a current pen-friend. Thirty-year-old Gloria Pearson was convicted of murdering her young son after a period of child abuse. They write to each other frequently and, in this respect, they are well suited.

  This chapter is based on exclusive audiotape interviews between Christopher Berry-Dee and Harvey Louis Carignan within the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Minnesota in, 1996, and many years correspondence.

  ARTHUR

  JOHN

  SHAWCROSS

  USA

  For a moment, his eyes zeroed in. Just a moment before, a rare smile had masked Shawcross’s simmering fury; now that mask of sanity had slipped for the first time, and the fire of homicidal insanity flared in his eyes as he struggled to overcome the murderous emotions boiling within. The interview room went quiet, deadly quiet.

  SHAWCROSS’S REACTION TO BEING QUESTIONED BY CHRISTOPHER BERRY-DEE ABOUT THE MURDER OF TEN-YEAR-OLD JACK BLAKE.

  Deep within the Sullivan Correctional Facility, Fallsburg, New York, breathes the state’s most notorious serial murderer, and his name is Arthur John Shawcross. Dubbed ‘The Monster of the Rivers’ by the media, I asked him how he had acquired the title.

  ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘that’s where I killed’ em. That’s where the monster inside of me came out, an’ he came out down by the river pretty often.’

  The name ‘Shawcross’ is derived from the Old English crede cruci; which loosely translates as ‘belief in the cross’. Early variations of the spelling were ‘Shawcruce’ and ‘Shawcrosse’. Currently, there are about 5,000 Shawcrosses in the United States, even more in the UK and, by all accounts, Sir Hartley Shawcross, the former Attorney General of Great Britain, and Chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, was a distant cousin of our serial killer in question.

  ‘Art’ was a small baby, weighing just 5lb. The infant was born at 4.14am on Wednesday, 6 June 1945, at the US Naval Hospital, Kittery, just across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, Maine.

  The birth certificate records the father’s name as Corporal Arthur Roy Shawcross, aged 21, and the baby’s mother as Bessie Yerakes Shawcross, aged 18. His parents lived at Apartment 5, 28 Chapel Street, Portsmouth, Maine.

  His father was no stranger to the police himself, being a bigamist who had served with the US Marine Corps during World War II. He landed on Guadalcanal with an artillery regiment of the 1st Marine Division, and in doing so earned a number of battle star commendations and medals. In February 1943, after mopping up the action, he and his fellow marines were sent for rest and recuperation to Australia, where he met Thelma June at a dance. They were married Monday, 14 June that year at Melby, Australia, and Thelma later gave birth to a son whom they named Hartley after their illustrious British namesake.

  Arthur Roy Shawcross was granted a furlough in July 1944 and returned to the USA where he bigamously married his now pregnant childhood sweetheart, Bessie Yerakes, on Thursday, 23 November. Bessie, popularly referred to as ‘Betty’, was the daughter of factory workers who lived in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Her father, James Yerakes, was born in Greece, and her mother, Violet Libby, is of unknown Mediterranean descent. A week after Bessie was discharged from hospital with baby Arthur; her husband sent them to Watertown, upstate New York, where they lived with his sister while he completed his tour of duty in the Marines. Shortly after he was demobbed, the couple found a small place of their own in the picture postcard town of Brownville; the home of 1,200, lower-middle-class citizens, just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border and Lake Ontario.

  Young Arthur became the oldest of four children. His siblings were Jean, Donna and James and it would be fair to say that Arthur turned out to be the only rotten apple in a basket of otherwise good fruit. His education started normally enough at the Brownville-Glen Park Central School but personality problems soon surfaced. He resented his brother and sisters, with the exception of Jean, with whom he imagined having sex.

  By the age of five, Art had created two imaginary friends. One was called ‘Paul’, apparently a lad of Arthur’s own age; the other ‘friend’ was slightly younger, a blond-haired girl with no name. During the months to follow, he carried on long conversations in baby talk with these imaginary friends, which gave fellow pupils and teachers the impression that he was talking to himself.

  ‘I had to have these friends,’ he told the author, ‘because I wanted someone to play with. No one else liked me.’

  Now called ‘Oddie’ by his classmates, young Arthur became the subject of ridicule and bullying. He retreated into a twilight world of his own, often wandering from class to class in a dream. He was easy meat for the stronger children who tormented him at every opportunity, and when they did so, he screamed and shook his fists, or went home in a sulk to torment his younger brother and sisters by way of revenge.

  Realising that they had a problem child on their hands, the school welfare officers made enquiries, soon finding out that his parents spoilt Arthur. When he misbehaved, his mother would spank him lightly, or put him in his room. The school also reasoned that Arthur’s father was excessively lenient to his boy.

  Events took a more serious turn when Arthur ran away from home. Of course, he was quickly brought back, but then he took to travelling to school on a bus carrying a tyre iron with which to hit the other children if they bothered him. The young Shawcross had learned that what he couldn’t achieve with his fists, he could make up for using a weapon. Just before his eighth birthday, the school called for a mental health evaluation on Arthur. Psychologists from the Jefferson County Mental Health Clinic felt that Mrs Shawcross was giving her ‘attractive, well-dressed, neat child’, mixed emotional messages. It seemed that the mother–son relationship was very complex, for while she treated her son like a little doll on the one hand, she also punished him at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason, which left the lad feeling very confused indeed.

  Mrs Shawcross had taught her son to be neat and tidy, and she and her former marine husband imposed what might be called old-fashioned values with echoes of military discipline. Arthur had to keep his room spotless, his clothes had to be neatly folded at all times and, for the slightest infraction, he was spanked or sent to his room. In return, and in attempts to curry favour, Arthur showered his parents with gifts, never forgetting a birthday or anniversary, yet still appeared to be confused. He developed a fear of unusual noises but, slowly, confusion gave way to resentment. He stole money from his mother to pay off the bullies at school. He had no friends, was mean to his younger brother, and it was very difficult to get the truth out of him because he always seemed afraid. Added to this, the psychiatrists thought that Arthur perceived his father as favouring the other children, and that his mother was rejecting him.

  Arthur’s
interest in school now fell apart, his progress slipped and he began to regress, sliding to the bottom of his class. The teachers put this down to a bad attitude rather than lack of intelligence, but the larger boys still bullied and hounded him. About this time he developed a characteristic blink, which he still has today. He also started to make a noise like a bleating lamb, and often lapsed into baby talk. He began suffering from nightmares and wetting the bed, which he continued to do until his early teens. Then he ran away from home again, only to be dragged back, screaming and protesting. Although the date is uncertain, a pivotal event occurred in the Shawcross household which turned it upside-down with lasting consequences.

  Arthur was aged nine when his grandmother, on his mother’s side, received a letter from Thelma June in Australia. In it, Thelma claimed, quite correctly, that in fact Arthur Roy Shawcross was her husband, and that they had a son now aged ten. Understandably, when Bessie Shawcross saw the note she took a serious view of her husband’s secret, and from that day on, she hated every moment she spent in his company. Indeed, she decided to make his life a misery. Already an oversensitive and confused boy, Arthur now kept away from home as much as possible. He was ashamed of his father and he could not stand the constant feuding that had become part-and-parcel of his parents’ lives.

  He ran away again to spend hours on end with his grandmother whom he adored and, although basically a very thoughtful and kind lad, he had now developed a much darker side. In effect, his mind was splitting in two, and he was mirroring the behaviour of his mother who exhibited two sets of opposing attitudes and emotion.

  By 1960, real behavioural problems began to emerge when young Arthur was in the seventh grade at the General Brown High School. In his spare time he started to torture small animals, skinning fish alive and toying with their bodies. He watched them suffer and saw how long it took them to die. He snared rabbits, taking his time to break their necks. He caught bats, putting them inside parked cars and watching as the drivers panicked. He tied cats together, pounded squirrels and chipmunks flat, shot darts at frogs nailed to his dartboard, and scraped the feathers from live chicks. On one occasion, he carried a sack to a nearby lake, and tossed it in the water. ‘Who says cats can’t swim?’ he said to another schoolboy. When the terrified animal escaped and swam to shore, he picked it up and threw it even further. After four attempts to reach safety, the kitten drowned.