Arthur Shawcross
Getty ImagesArthur Shawcross began killing in 1972 and wasn’t caught until 1990.
The story of Arthur Shawcross is about a miscarriage of justice — a miscarriage that cost 12 women their lives.
Shawcross was different from the beginning — and a difficult childhood and a stint in Vietnam didn’t help. He knew early on that he derived pleasure from starting fires, and he had poor impulse control. The combination landed him in jail for nearly two years.
On his release, his violent urges worsened. He moved to Watertown, New York, the scene of some of his worst childhood memories, and raped and murdered two children: ten-year-old Jack Owen Blake and eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill.
He was suspected almost immediately and arrested. In exchange for the location of Jack’s body, police reduced the charges to manslaughter. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
This relatively brief sentence was further shortened when an inexperienced prison team missed the warning signs that psychiatrists later characterized as the tell-tale symptoms of schizophrenia and psychopathy.
The result was that Shawcross was on the streets again 14 years after his arrest. The stigma of his crimes made it impossible for him to settle anywhere. Until he moved to Rochester, New York, and his parole team mysteriously forgot to notify the local authorities.
He began to kill within the year. Within 21 months, 12 women were dead.
Authorities finally caught up with him in 1990, when a surveillance camera recorded him pausing to urinate over the frozen creek where he had just dumped a victim’s body.
His attempt to plead insanity — substantiated by wildly changing stories about wartime atrocities and tales of cannibalism — failed when authorities verified that he hadn’t actually seen combat in Vietnam.
His claims about having cannibalized parts of his victims remain unconfirmed.
