On November 27, a hunter found another body, so now there were twelve, with several other prostitutes missing.
McCRARY AND GRANT ARRIVED ON DECEMBER 13. They went out to look at the body dumpsites and then worked together in the war room with the files.
“The goal of the first day,” McCrary writes, “was to get a preliminary determination of a pattern we didn’t yet know. For any case like this, it’s a filtering process. We look at it in phases of refinement. We’d read a case and then keep going back to cases we’d already been through to compare details and do more analysis based on what we were learning.”
They established three categories, based on manner of death and known lifestyle when alive. Category one: they were definitely in a series attributable to a lone killer; Category 2, they might be in the series, and Category 3, they were not in the series. McCrary saw a clear pattern emerging for seven of the cases, with a few remaining ambiguous.
In their profile, they decided that the killer knew the Gorge area, so he probably hunted or fished there. These women had been comfortable enough to go off with him, despite the known danger to women in their profession. He was probably a regular customer who seemed harmless. McCrary figured he was a white male, probably lower middleclass, blue collar. He’d have a menial type of job, if he had a job at all. He probably had a record for sexual assault, as well as a wife or girlfriend.
They were sure the cops knew him in some capacity and that he might be hanging out in coffee shops or bars. Based on the killer’s behavior, the cops might put surveillance on the next body they found, since he’d started to return to look at and molest his victims.
Then one of the most streetwise hookers went missing. June Cicero was very careful. Yet no one had seen her or Darlene Trippi for days. A black prostitute named Felicia Stephens was also missing.
On December 31, a trooper on road patrol in a rural area outside Rochester spotted a pair of black jeans along the roadside. He went through the pockets and found an identification card for Felicia Stephens.
On January 2, 1990, the State Police went up in helicopters to search for bodies. After two days, this search seemed futile.
Then one team flew over Highway 31, where the jeans had been found. They hovered over Salmon Creek, watching for any movement. Near a bridge, they saw something on the ice. As they got closer, they could see a nearly nude body, facedown. Then they noticed a Chevy Celebrity on the bridge, so they radioed to patrol units. A large overweight man stood on the bridge, urinating. He saw them, got into his car and drove away.
Patrol units were hot on his trail. The car pulled into a municipal parking lot across from a nursing home. The officers checked on the license plate. This car belonged to Clara Neal. They followed the man and asked for his ID. His name was Arthur John Shawcross, 44.
Under questioning, Shawcross admitted that he’d been implicated in the deaths of two children in Watertown. He’d served his time and been released. He insisted it was just a coincidence that he was parked over the body on Salmon Creek. He hadn’t seen it.
Before they released him, they took his photo. They showed this to the prostitute who’d mentioned the man who’d wanted her to play dead. “That’s the guy!” he told them.
THE TASK FORCE MOVED INTO ACTION. They wanted to know how a sex offender who’d been imprisoned for manslaughter had been released into their area without anyone finding the records.
His first victim, in May 1972, had been ten-year-old Jack Blake. Shawcross had told interrogators that he’d hit the boy and had accidentally killed him. Four months later, eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill’s body was found under a bridge. She’d been raped. Shawcross confessed. He’d served his time but had been released early. Because it had been difficult to place him in a community, the state had sealed his records.
The victim on the ice had been June Cicero. A hunter had also found the body of Felicia Stephens. Shawcross continued to deny knowing anything. However, he caved when the detectives suggested that his girlfriend might be implicated. He confessed and asked for a map and the photographs of the victims. He helped them find other bodies. He called the murders he’d done just “business as usual.”
When Shawcross finally gave his complete formal confession to a court stenographer, it was seventy-nine pages long.
Assistant District Attorney Chuck Siragusa intended to ensure that Shawcross never get out of prison again. However, Shawcross pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
The trial was quite a battle of experts, with the defense offering a multiple personality diagnosis, but most of Shawcross’ stories were roundly undermined by facts.
The jury took half a day to find him both sane and guilty of murder in the second degree (not premeditated) on ten counts. Shawcross was sentenced to 25 years to life on each of the ten counts.
The Genesee River Strangler died in prison in 2008 at the age of 63.
LISK
SHANNAN GILBERT WAS JUST 24 WHEN she went missing in 2010. She was just one more woman living by means of prostitution via Craigslist, but her family put pressure on the police to run a thorough investigation. They learned that she’d made a frantic 911 call from a gated community in Oak Beach, Long Island, on May 1.
That December, a cadaver dog doing routine training discovered a body along Ocean Parkway wrapped in burlap. It wasn’t Shannan Gilbert, but it opened up an enormous case that showed just how easy it was to dump bodies in this area of Oak Beach and Gilgo Beach without discovery. Four burlap-wrapped bodies turned up here, all of which were the remains of former prostitutes. In January 2011, officials identified the victims as Megan Waterman of Maine, Maureen Brainard-Barnes of Connecticut, and Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Lynn Costello of New York. All had advertised on Craigslist. They’d gone missing between 2007 and 2010.
An unidentified male had used Melissa’s cell phone to call her adolescent sister several times. He said he’d killed Melissa and made lewd sexual comments. The calls were traced to midtown Manhattan, but no suspect was identified.
Police kept searching and turned up the heads and some body parts two miles away of three other women, along with the remains of a female toddler (associated with one of the adult female victims). In addition, skeletal remains dressed in female attire turned out to be those of an adult male. It was speculated that he’d been a sex worker as well, although his identity remains unknown. Other partial remains were found in related beach areas, which added up to ten murder victims along the South Shore.
Experts argued over whether these could all be linked to a single serial killer, soon dubbed the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK), or should be attributed to several unrelated killers who all favored the same area as a dumping ground.
In December 2011, a marshland search turned up Shannan Gilbert’s body, along with a convoluted story that was made into several TV documentaries. Investigators believed that her death was an accident. She’d apparently knocked on a door or two in this small community, screaming, “They’re trying to kill me!” She had a driver waiting to pick her up from a client’s house, but inexplicably, she ran from him.
One of the discovered heads, along with legs and hands, was linked to a torso found in Manorville back in 2000. This was 40 miles from where the head was dumped in some brush. It was also near where another prostitute’s mutilated torso had been found in 2003. Her skull and skeletonized hands had turned up off Ocean Parkway in 2011.
A 48-year-old resident of Manorville was arrested in the summer of 2014, because his DNA was associated with the murders of two prostitutes in 1993 and 1994. He’d dumped their strangled, beaten bodies in that general area. He is a suspect in another 1993 murder as well. The bodies had all been positioned in a specific way and the same item of clothing was missing from each, although news reports say the police have not gone into much detail.
The LISK case remains unsolved, but some investigators speculate that this killer might have been active for over 20 years, with as many as 17 victims.
This is the area where serial killer Joel Rifkin managed to kill and dump at least nine prostitutes (and possibly as many as seventeen) between 1989 and 1993 before being caught with a body in his truck. He lived in East Meadow, Long Island, a twenty-minute drive to Gilgo Beach. It’s possible that some of the bodies found in Gilgo Beach were Rifkin’s victims, since four to which he confessed were not found. He has denied that he’s responsible for any of the LISK-related murders.
Although some investigators believe that once his dumping ground was discovered, the LISK moved on to another place, others think he’s still a resident, just laying low. Police are investigating links between these bodies and other still-unsolved cold cases.
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THE
CORRIDOR
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Katherine Ramsland
Copyright 2015 by Katherine Ramsland and Gregg Olsen
All Rights Reserved
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Published by Notorious USA
From the Notorious USA Team
WELCOME TO THE LATEST INSTALLMENT in the New York Times bestselling series of stories about America’s most notorious criminals.
That’s right. No matter where you live, you’re in the middle of Notorious USA.
Here, you’ll find them all… this time we’re talking Delaware.
This volume features the first documented female serial killer in the United States. Political intrigue winds though an unsolved mystery in Wilmington, while a high-powered attorney ruins his life to punish his mistress. We have poisoners and bludgeoners, and some privileged teenagers killing their baby.
The corridor state between New Jersey and Maryland might be small, but it has harbored some very dark characters.
When you're done with this volume, be sure to pick up Bodies of Evidence, Darkest Waters, Overkill and other box sets available as an eBook on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.
Your crime scribe,
Gregg Olsen
Notorious
Delaware
Foreword
I OFTEN DRIVE THROUGH DELAWARE on Interstate-95 on my way to points south. I’ve been to the outlets along the shore in Rehoboth Beach and stayed with a friend in her historical home in southern countryside. Delaware has just three counties, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex, and it’s full of events linked to early American history. Despite being densely populated, only a few headline-grabbing murder cases have popped up in the “First State.” To its north, Philadelphia and New Jersey see more criminal action, as do the Baltimore and Washington, DC areas to its south. Still, I did find several serial killers in the Delaware crime annals, including a female who exploited weaknesses in 19th century law enforcement. She might even be the country’s first known female serial killer, depending on what you believe about her. This state does have its share of twisted tales and murder mysteries. Being so close to the country’s capital, it’s no surprise that quite a few incidents are connected to politics. “Our beloved Delaware,” as the state song goes, you have a dark side!
A Mean Woman, a Woman of Means
IN EARLY 2014, Twelve Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was based on the horrific story of a free black man who was kidnapped in the North and sold into slavery in the South. For over a decade, he was helpless to rectify the situation. He managed to find allies who helped to restore his former status, but others like him were not so fortunate. No one knows how many people were victims of this type of nefarious self-enrichment.
A woman named Lucretia “Patty” Cannon ran a gang along the border of Delaware and Maryland who committed such crimes. People who tried to stop them paid with their lives. What we know of Cannon derives largely from twice-told tales and a pamphlet published in 1841 that reputedly contains her final confessions. If the folklore is to be believed, she was suspected in many more murders than the law could pin on her.
Descended from the black sheep side of English nobility, Patty was also the daughter of a prostitute. Her parents went to Montreal and built a thriving business from smuggling, so as a child she witnessed this risky and duplicitous but rewarding lifestyle. Her family presented a façade of respectability, but their wealth came from theft and fraud. When an associate named Alexander Payne threatened to expose them, Patty’s father took an axe and split Payne’s head open. For this act, he was convicted and hanged.
To support the family, Patty’s mother returned to prostitution. She also taught her daughters how to steal and exploit. At the same time, she groomed them to be ladies so they could attract respectable suitors.
Patty was the youngest, although quite large for a female. When she was 16, she was betrothed to a wealthy farmer, Jesse Cannon. Soon, they were married. Jesse relocated his bride to a southwestern area of his home state of Delaware. They settled near the Maryland border, on the Nanticoke River in Sussex County. Despite an unpleasant marriage, they had two children. Yet by the time Patty was 19, her husband and one of her daughters were dead.
She sank to her own lowest common denominator and took up with low-life, thieving ruffians. Patty was reportedly “Amazonian” and could best a man in wrestling, so she could be quite intimidating. As her surviving daughter grew up, the girl married Joe Johnson. With this man, Patty built and ran a “Joe Johnson’s Tavern,” at Johnson’s Cross Roads, which straddled the border between Delaware and Maryland. Thus, they could elude authorities who might enter to arrest them by walking toward whichever part of the property was outside that agency’s jurisdiction.
When people think of wayside inns run by families of thieves and killers, they generally think of the “bloody Benders,” who operated later that century and further west, in southeastern Kansas. But Patty Cannon beat them to it. During the 1820s, her tavern allegedly became the end point for travelers who struck her as having something she wanted. She’d welcome them, size them up, and then shoot or stab them and dump their bodies in the yard. Or, dressed as a man, she’d lead her gang after them, to waylay them at some point along the road. Rumors had it that Patty’s personal graveyard had satellite spots in several places.
More lucrative, however, was the slave trade. Delaware was a slave state during Patty Cannon’s day, but nearly one in four African-Americans was free. A singular tension ran through the state regarding this racial divide, and no one put much effort into locating free African Americans who vanished.
Patty noticed this area of neglect and fully exploited it. She had one of her own slaves lure others of his race back to her place. Once she had them, they were goners, on their way by ship to plantations just salivating for a new batch of slaves. The Cannon gang took women and children as well. Kids who resisted or who were too ill to travel were summarily killed and dumped in a cave.
As one legend has it (and there are several conflicting tales about Patty Cannon), the gang was finally stopped when they killed a traveler who had concerned family and friends with the resources to investigate. It was one of Patty’s own men who betrayed her when he showed a neighbor where she buried her victims. The sheriff soon arrived with deputies to search. They went through the entire tavern and out buildings, and found not just evidence of theft and murder but also 21 people chained up in an attic, awaiting transport. These people were set loose, while Patty was arrested, along with any gang member who was present.
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sp; Their trials took place in Georgetown. As often happens, one person turned on the rest and showed officials whatever they were looking for. Patty and several others were convicted of murder or accessory to murder.
Or so the story goes.
Today’s historians say there was no evidence that Patty Cannon was ever brought to justice for multiple murders. Joe Johnson spent some time in prison in 1821 for kidnapping. Eight years later, Patty was indicted for the murder of three (or two) infants and a slave trader. That’s not very many compared to what the stories about her tell us. What happened to her remains unclear, but several sources indicate that she did go to prison in Georgetown, but she never got to trial.
In her cell on May 29, at the age of 70, she killed herself with a torturous, slow-acting poison (apparently the only thing she could get her hands on). Supposedly, she did not want to be hanged, as her father had been. Accounts describe her going mad from the pain, tearing off her clothes, weeping, and raging against God. Just before she died, she supposedly confessed her crimes to a priest. She said she’d murdered eleven people, and had assisted in the murder of as many more. She had also poisoned her husband and strangled a daughter during infancy. This confession, true or not, became the subject of the 1841 pamphlet about her.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 14