Recognising these patterns, and the obvious fact that a serial murderer was at large in the community, the Rochester police doubled the size of its Physical Crimes Unit. Round-the-clock surveillance by the entire Rochester PD Tactical Unit focused attention on the red-light district where many of the victims had last been seen alive. Hundreds of hookers were questioned by the police. Indeed, later in the investigation, June Cicero who had been warned to be extra careful, sadly ignored the advice and was killed by Shawcross within minutes of speaking with Vice Squad detectives. Investigators were reminded of the paramount importance of keeping crime scenes intact and of not jeopardising the search for trace evidence by over-zealousness. Thousands of dollars worth of new equipment was purchased for use by the police evidence technicians. NYSP/HALT, and FBI/VICAP forms were completed, and the services of both FBI and NYSP profilers were called upon to complete a psychological profile of the serial killer. But all this proved of little use, for the killings continued unabated.
* * *
Elizabeth Gibson, a one-time beauty queen, married the day she left school. A bright young woman, she turned to cocaine and she started passing bad cheques to feed her habit. She ended up a common prostitute who was last seen plying for trade on Lyell Avenue on Saturday, 25 November. Her body was found two days later by a deer hunter walking through woods ten miles to the east of Rochester. She had been suffocated. Police discovered tyre impressions in the muddy ground, and blue paint chips where a vehicle had scraped a tree. This paint was later matched to Clara’s blue Dodge Omni, the car Shawcross often borrowed.
Down by the Genesee River, a familiar encounter had taken place. Shawcross had accused Elizabeth of stealing money from his wallet. She put up a fight, grabbing at his eyes and digging her fingernails into his face. During the struggle, she kicked out and snapped the gearshift of the car. Shawcross said, ‘I tried to revive her. I wept a little.’ Then, after dumping her body in the woods, he drove back to the city, dropping her clothes off en route.
* * *
Darlene Trippi, aged 32, was a petite brunette who knew Shawcross well enough for them to exchange gifts at Christmas. In fact, just a few days before she went missing, Shawcross had visited her home carrying a joint of venison; indeed, over coffee, they even discussed the murders that were plaguing Rochester at the time.
Much loved by her family, who chose not to dwell on their daughter’s career as a prostitute, she was last seen alive by her married sister on Friday, 15 December, when she was touting for business on a street corner. Shawcross came on the scene and took the unwitting woman down to the Genesee River, where, he says she accused him of being hopeless after an aborted sex session. ‘I got mad, then I choked her,’ he said. After his arrest, Shawcross directed police to Darlene’s frozen body. It was lying in a culvert, five miles beyond Salmon Creek.
* * *
Shawcross’s penultimate victim was June Cicero, aged 34, a strong character with a drug habit. She had arrived in Rochester from Brooklyn, New York, in 1973, and she had been well known on the streets of Rochester for 16 years where she was regarded as something of a mother figure to many of the younger hookers who operated in the red-light district. Streetwise, and considered something of a wildcat by vice officers, June suddenly vanished without trace from the ‘City Mattress’, the local name for the red-light area, during the late evening of Sunday, 17 December 1989.
A police helicopter crew spotted her frozen corpse lying in the icy Salmon Creek on Wednesday, 3 January 1990. The body was naked except for a white sweater, white socks, and a single small earring with a distinctive pink stone.
Shawcross was seen standing on the nearby bridge parapet by the helicopter observer, and he was seen to drop something into the creek before driving off. It was this incident which led to his arrest. During a search of the scene, evidence technicians deployed a Luma-lite 2000A. This specially designed lamp casts a phosphorescent beam which illuminates trace evidence that would otherwise go undetected using normal procedures. Bathed in an eerie glow, small flecks in the snow proved to be human tissue. ‘It was like human sawdust,’ said a scenes-of crime-officer.
Shawcross explained that he had taken June down to the river, where she called him a ‘wimp’.
‘I smacked her in the mouth’, he said. ‘I strangled her because she was going to call the cops.’
With the dead body in the trunk of Clara’s car, he drove along Route 31 to Northampton Park. He then stopped and heaved the mutilated corpse into the frozen Salmon Creek which runs directly through a viaduct under the road. En route, he stopped at a Dunkin’ Donut stall where he had a cup of coffee while passing the time with local cops who were discussing the string of murders.
* * *
Felicia Stephens was described as a small woman, five-five, about 115 lbs, with black hair, brown skin, and brown eyes. She worked as a prostitute and had the misfortune to climb into Shawcross’s car, in Lyell Avenue, during the late evening of Thursday, 28 December 1989. Three days later, a guard in Northampton Park spotted a pair of ice-encrusted, black denim jeans in the snow. Identification found in the pockets identified the wearer as Felicia Stephens.
Later, during a more thorough search, police found her pleated grey boots and assumed she was buried close by. Indeed, a deer hunter telephoned 911 on Sunday, 31 December, after he had discovered the woman’s body in a derelict farmhouse about 300 yards from where her clothes had been found.
Shawcross later claimed that, apart from wearing a fur coat and boots, Felicia was wearing nothing else when she stuck her head through his open car window in Lyell Avenue. ‘She was running away from her pimp,’ he said. ‘I sorta got real scared and pushed the window button. I dragged her several blocks, then stopped, an’ she just got in the car and asked about sex. I took her down to the river, and strangled her, too.’
* * *
The successful capture and subsequent trial of Arthur Shawcross was due to a combination of good luck and dogged police work in equal measure. Ultimately, though, it was the ‘mind set’ of this psychopath that ultimately sealed his fate for, on Thursday 4 January 1990, Shawcross literally offered himself up and, in doing so, he brought about his own arrest.
During that afternoon, a New York State Police helicopter was flying over the east corner of Northampton Park, some two-and-a-half miles from where June Cicero’s clothing had been found just days beforehand. Senior Investigator, John P McCaffrey, was one of two observers in the aircraft. He spotted what he thought was a body frozen in the ice of Salmon Creek. At almost the same moment, the other observer’s attention was drawn to a portly white male, who appeared to be urinating, or masturbating, over the bridge parapet. The man stopped, looked skywards and threw a plastic bottle into the creek before driving off in a grey Chevrolet saloon. The vehicle was soon traced to a nursing home in Spencerport, and the trail led to Arthur Shawcross.
On learning of their suspect’s criminal past, the police questioned Shawcross at his home. He vehemently denied any involvement in the murders, and the decision was made to leave him alone overnight pending further enquiries. In the meantime, his house was kept under observation by a static police unit until morning. Early the next day, Detectives Lenny Boriello and Dennis Blythe took him in for a quiet chat in the police station. Within hours, Shawcross confessed and he is now serving two sentences of 250 years to run concurrently. The only way Arthur will leave prison is in a pine box.
* * *
From the time he was incarcerated, Arthur Shawcross consistently refused to be interviewed and it took several years of spasmodic correspondence before he changed his mind. When he did, the confirmation came in the form of a blunt, handwritten note, which said simply: ‘I will see you.’
As part of the preparation for the interview, I set about talking to everyone who had been involved with Arthur’s life and crimes, particularly Clara Neal, who, in her wisdom, feels that Art should be released.
‘I will keep him on tablets so he wo
n’t murder again,’ she promised. ‘Besides, we are getting married soon. I really love him. He is such a wonderfully gentle man.’
At 10.15am, Monday, 19 December 1994, the first interview started at the Sullivan Correctional Facility. Before being admitted into the serial killer’s presence, the guards explained to me that Shawcross was still considered a highly dangerous and formidable killing machine.
‘He can revert to type within a microsecond,’ they said. ‘Should his features whiten, then tighten up, or should he break into a sweat, then get out of his way as fast as you can. He is strong enough to rip your head right off.’
Weighing in at around 20 stone, Arthur Shawcross is 5ft 11in tall. With a potato-shaped head topped with thin, silvery hair, a bulbous nose and small, black, ever-watery, pig-like eyes set close together, he is quite an intimidating sight. Massive arms hang from immensely strong sloping shoulders, his chest merging into a pot-belly which hangs over his belt. From his waist down, the shape of Shawcross is reversed. From the rolls of fat that circumnavigate his middle, he has short, stumpy legs that terminate in very small feet. All in all, one gets the impression that he is top-heavy and could topple over at any moment.
For the first of four interviews, we came face to face in a small locked cubicle. No one else was present while Shawcross was engrossed with eating his lunch. He greedily stuffed the food into his mouth, and his eyes were furtive, darting around as if someone was about to snatch his food away.
After he wiped the grease and food particles from his mouth, he was asked why he had eaten the body parts of many of his victims. Shawcross smiled, and said, ‘Yes, sir, I have. The human meat, well, ah, it tastes like pork. I eat meat, uncooked meat, and it’s like that. I eat hamburgers raw. I eat steak raw, an’ I eat pork raw. I don’t know why I ate parts of people, but I just did. Period.’
For a long moment, Shawcross fell silent. His podgy fingers fiddled nervously with a Styrofoam cup. His eyes scanned the ceiling as if he was searching for an invisible fly, then he added, ‘Yeah, an’ I ate another one with the bone. I just remembered that.’
God, I thought. How can someone ‘just remember that’?
Although the truth of the matter is that Shawcross never fired a gun in anger while serving in Vietnam, he nevertheless wanted to boast about his service career during this period. Talking about his favourite subject was a good way of gaining his confidence and, true to form, Shawcross came up with the goods. He explained that he had killed up to 50 people while out on what he called ‘search and destroy missions’. He claimed, that he was tasked to destroy any living human he came across.
Despite the improbability of Arthur’s gruesome acts, Arthur obviously enjoyed talking about them if only to cause shock waves. When pressed, this intellectual pygmy came up with a multitude of often-conflicting reasons in his efforts to mitigate his heinous behaviour. These ranged from various types of child abuse, especially incest, to his self-perceived Rambo-type activities carried out in Vietnam: ‘The Army taught me how to kill. but it didn’t teach me how not to kill. I have been a god unto myself. I’ve been the judge, the jury and the executioner. I have murdered, butchered and totally destroyed 53 human beings in my lifetime. I just wanna know why.’
Arthur’s excuse for murdering prostitutes was equally bizarre. At first, he stated that he was ordered by God to murder them because they all had AIDS. When questioned about the obvious fact that he had also raped and killed two young children, and two quite decent women, he clammed up and could not provide an answer. And, as the interviews progressed, he tripped himself up at every turn.
He admitted that he had murdered many of the women after having had sex with them. On another occasion, he strangled his victim because she bit his penis during fellatio, all of which somewhat flies in the face of him being ordered to kill them because they had AIDS. Another luckless soul he battered to a pulp after she had accidentally trapped her head in the window of his car. He went further to say that after dragging her two blocks, he stopped, and she calmly climbed into the car and asked him if he wanted sex. But, then, he changed his excuse once again: ‘I went out with 80 to 100 women, including hookers. I was trying to find out why I was impotent, something like that.’
One girl had been murdered because she allegedly accused Art of stealing her purse. Another was slaughtered because she had stolen money from his home, and then threatened to tell Mrs Shawcross that her husband was having an affair. Then Arthur argued that he was suffering from a rare genetic disorder, and this was why he turned to serial homicide, changing tack almost immediately to blame his four wives for denying him sex so that he had to go out and find hookers to kill. Finally, he said that bright lights give him terrible headaches, and this is the cause of his problems.
In an effort to tap into the black abyss of Shawcross’s mind, I questioned him about the emotions he experienced prior to, and during the acts of murder. True to form, he did not disappoint with his answer.
‘It was a combination of the quietness of the area, the starlight, an’ I got sweating an’ stuff. I can’t control that. I strangled most of them, an’ it ain’t like on TV where they just drop dead. In real life, they can hold their breath for three minutes, and up to seven minutes before they susscumm [sic]. One woman, well, just as I was strangling her, she said, “I know who you are.” Then she went limp an’ she didn’t feel nothing. She just went limp.’
Asked why some of his victims’ bodies bore multiple bruising, while some had been disembowelled and others had had vegetation debris forced into their body orifices, he started to become agitated. His fingers and hands constantly fidgeted, and his eyes darted around the room.
After a few moments, he regained his composure, replying, ‘Yes, sir. Some of the bodies, yeah, they had bruises on them. That’s where I knelt over them with my body weight, or I dragged ’em into the rushes down by the water’s edge. I cut ’em open so’s they’d rot a lot quicker that way. Kinda gutted ’em like fish an’ stuff. The other stuff. Well, I just don’t need to talk with you about this just yet.’
Then he had the gall to ask me to be the Best Man at his forthcoming marriage to Clara Neal!
* * *
Lynde M Johnston, Captain of Detectives of the Rochester Police Department, took considerable interest in the progress of my interviews with Shawcross, who is also suspected of murdering 30-year-old Kimberly Logan, a black girl whom he had befriended. Now behind bars, Arthur is smug enough to refuse to answer police questions and, with the case still open for investigation, the police needed all the help they could get.
The Rochester PD allowed me access to the Logan file as part of the research for this book. It was apparent from the scenes-of-crime photographs and the autopsy reports that there were disturbing similarities between the Logan murder and the confirmed kills committed by Arthur Shawcross.
Special interest focused on several witness’s references to a suspect who matched Shawcross’s description. This man had been wearing a red T-shirt around Megis Street at the time in question. At the time of his arrest, Shawcross denied ever knowing Kimberley Logan, and he rejected the assertion that he owned a red T-shirt. With the police unable to find such a garment when they searched Shawcross’s home, this item proved to be the missing link because no other evidence, forensic or otherwise, was found.
Kimberly was a trusting, yet slightly retarded, young mute, and the sort of person who could make friends with anyone, including Arthur. For his part, Shawcross had established the set pattern of a serial murderer by the time of Kimberley’s death; indeed, her demise was sandwiched between the murder of Frances Brown on 11 November 1989 and that of Elizabeth Gibson on 25 November 1989. Moreover, Kimberley’s murder was distinguished by several hallmarks of Shawcross’s modus operandi – battery, strangulation, no evidential signs of rape, heavy bruising, nose and mouth stuffed with vegetation debris, clothes found neatly folded near to the corpse, and an attempt to cover the body to prevent premature discovery
. Of course, these attempts to hide the bodies did not always pay off, but Arthur knew that the longer the victims were exposed to the elements and the ravages of animals, the faster forensic evidence would deteriorate. In other words, he was ‘forensically aware’.
With Shawcross in the ‘frame’, so to speak, it was perhaps more by luck than good detective work that brought to light a photograph of Shawcross wearing a red T-shirt. The bearer of such a piece of good fortune was none other than Arthur’s fiancée, Clara Neal, who in her genuine efforts to prove that Arthur was a ‘loving and caring man’, produced a photo album containing pictures of Arthur taken around the time of his homicidal spree. Flicking through the pages I saw a Polaroid photo of her man wearing a bright red T-shirt; a garment he has denied owning, and one that fitted the witness’s descriptions. When the photograph was shown to Shawcross, he responded by declaring: ‘That’s fuckin’ bullshit. I ain’t never had one of them, and now you’re getting’ on my fuckin’ nerves.’
With this point-blank denial recorded on audiotape and effectively in the bag, the Rochester police were able to close the Logan file.
As it turned out, this particular matter raised more questions than it solved. Why, when he had admitted to all of the other Rochester murders, did Shawcross deny murdering Kimberley Logan? The Rochester police had never released the gruesome details of the Logan murder to the media, so the chances of a copycat crime being committed with an identical MO at the same time in the same city, were millions-to-one against. It was a puzzle indeed.
The answer to this riddle rests with the fact that Shawcross is a racist. Time and again over the years, he has expressed hatred for the black population. He has said that to have sex with a black woman is repugnant to him, but, suddenly confronted with the red T-shirt, Shawcross back-tracked and, in one of his letters, he explained:
Talking with Serial Killers Page 6