00:00:04
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NARRATOR: On the 27th of October 1989, the body of a woman was found covered in cardboard and hidden
00:00:17
under a bush behind the Maplewood YMCA in Rochester, New York. She was the fourth woman to be discovered in a tiny area
00:00:27
by the banks of the Genessee River. Women didn't want to go out alone at night at this point in time.
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There was a real sense of fear. NARRATOR: The killer was 44-year-old Arthur Shawcross,
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a tall, imposing outsider whose deadly deeds had started over 15 years before, 100 miles north in the small city of Watertown.
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KATHERINE RAMSLAND: He would not have stopped himself for any reason, and he didn't
00:00:56
think of victims as people. It was business, business as usual. That was his attitude.
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NARRATOR: Back in October 1972, Shawcross had confessed to killing two young children
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and was convicted of manslaughter. LYNDE JOHNSTON: He offered no defense for him.
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I mean totally unemotional, totally unconcerned with anything that was going on.
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NARRATOR: Remorseless Arthur Shawcross once again started targeting innocent victims after he was released
00:01:27
from prison, beginning a killing spree that would see the deaths of 11 women, making him one of the world's most
00:01:35
evil killers. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] On the 3rd of January 1990, detectives made a breakthrough
00:02:05
in their hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the streets of Rochester. Senior investigator John MCCAFFREY
00:02:13
spotted the perpetrator from a helicopter he was using to locate the missing bodies.
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Some people will say, well, you got lucky with the helicopter. Not really. We were doing good police work.
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NARRATOR: John and Rochester Police Captain Lynde Johnston tirelessly worked the case together in order
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to bring the killer to justice. When you don't work together, the bad guy wins, and that's
00:02:41
totally unacceptable. NARRATOR: After he was apprehended, Arthur Shawcross went on trial, accused of 11 homicides.
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If convicted, the man later dubbed the Genessee River Killer would spend the rest of his life
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behind bars. The case is exceptional simply because this is all in one place, all at once, all
00:03:03
in one short period of time. It's that relentlessness that makes it exceptional.
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[TENSE MUSIC] NARRATOR: This killer's story begins in Kittery, Maine on the 6th of June, 1945.
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Arthur Shawcross, also known as Art, was born to mother Betty and father Arthur, Sr.
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GEOFFREY WANSELL: His father was a corporal. And quite shortly after he was born, he and his mother
00:03:34
moved to Watertown in New York State. His father wasn't around a lot, so he lacked
00:03:42
the classic father figure. KATHERINE RAMSLAND: Shawcross said that he had been sexually abused.
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First, he said by his aunt, and then it was his mother, and then he added his sister, all of whom
00:03:55
said that didn't happen. And in fact, the aunt's name, he didn't even get right.
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NARRATOR: The young Shawcross was labeled a loner at school. He was nicknamed as Oddy because he was regarded as so
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strange and difficult. And in a way, I think he took pleasure from that. I think he enjoyed being separate.
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He liked being the loner. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: There was also cruelty to animals in his childhood.
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So here is somebody who enjoys the suffering of others. And the fact that this is present in his childhood
00:04:33
is very alarming, indeed. NARRATOR: Throughout his teens, Shawcross's violent and unruly behavior marked him out as different.
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LYNDE JOHNSTON: He never graduated from school up there. He was arrested for arsons and burglaries.
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And you know, he did some other time, and then he ended up getting married. [TENSE MUSIC]
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NARRATOR: At the age of 19, Shawcross married his first wife, Sarah. When I look at Shawcross's relationships with women,
00:05:06
it's very clear to me that he's somebody who sees women as serving a purpose for him.
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So he doesn't see women as people to have mutual, respectful relationships with.
00:05:18
They're there to serve a purpose. So Shawcross is a misogynist. That is his value system, and that informs so much
00:05:26
of his behavior. His child is born in '65, and he gets caught again-- no master criminal-- for a second-degree burglary
00:05:36
and gets six months probation. He's got all sorts of odd jobs. He's digging graves.
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He's laboring. He's an apprentice butcher. He is the proverbial square peg in a round hole.
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He doesn't fit in very much anywhere. NARRATOR: By August 1966, after just two years of marriage,
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Shawcross and Sarah separated. His wife eventually asked for a divorce not necessarily because of his unfaithfulness,
00:06:03
though that was persistent, but more because he kept getting jobs and then losing them, and being laid off
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and not having anything to go-- he was just literally an unstable personality. But we're talking about the middle '60s.
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America is at war in Vietnam and everybody is being drafted NARRATOR: On the 7th of April 1967, at the age of 22,
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Arthur Shawcross was drafted into the American military. [TENSE MUSIC] Just five months later, unstable Shawcross
00:06:39
married his second wife, Linda. He spent the first year of their marriage in Vietnam.
00:06:46
He claimed he was subjected to Agent Orange, that he had killed almost three dozen
00:06:52
people, that he had been part of the massacre of a village. He had killed some prostitutes and cannibalized them
00:06:59
and all that. And then it turned out much of what he had described had come from novels about Vietnam and from a movie.
00:07:07
Well, the truth of the matter was he was a supply clerk in Vietnam. He saw no combat.
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He was the one that stayed back in the supply room. He never saw combat. NARRATOR: In the spring of 1969, Shawcross
00:07:25
received an honorable discharge from the Army. The fantasies he created in Vietnam
00:07:32
now started to manifest as dangerous behaviors back home in the US. When he had come back to Watertown after the military,
00:07:44
he had been arrested for burglary. He was an arsonist. His wife left him. Over the next three years, volatile Shawcross
00:07:54
served time for burglary, divorced Linda, and married Penny, his third wife. Then, in 1972, Shawcross's dark desires suddenly
00:08:05
took a more sinister turn. On the 7th of May, a young boy called Jack Blake went missing.
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He lived near the river in Watertown, and he was a typical 10-year-old. I think he went down near the Creek,
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and probably throwing stones in, and maybe even fishing. And that's where he ran across art.
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And art was fishing. And the assumption of the investigators was that the 10-year-old was annoying to him.
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LYNDE JOHNSTON: He claims that the kid kept following him. He told him, go home.
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Don't follow me. And he said he finally got angry with him and hit him once with his right hand right between the eyes.
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And he said he just left him there. Jack was reported missing. So they did a search, couldn't find the body.
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And Art was somewhat of a suspect because he was known to fish in the area. KATHERINE RAMSLAND: Shawcross was questioned.
00:09:00
He didn't know. But the police didn't much care for Shawcross because he was known to harass the kids and sometimes he'd
00:09:07
like to stuff leaves down their pants, which, you know, has sexual connotations.
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So they kind of kept an eye on him as a potential pedophile. JOHN MCCAFFREY: He just denied it.
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He just denied any involvement. And they didn't have enough to arrest him. NARRATOR: Then, four months later,
00:09:26
another child disappeared. In September 1972, an eight-year-old girl called Karen Ann Hill goes missing
00:09:35
when she's playing outside. Again, no one really knows what's happened. She's literally disappeared from the front yard.
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NARRATOR: It would be less than 24 hours before her lifeless body was located. Tragically, the following day, the police find Karen's body.
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She's been raped. She's been strangled, and mud and grass has been shoved into her mouth.
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It's a horrifying killing. And you have to say whoever committed it has to be the most depraved of minds.
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The fact that Karen Ann Hill is a girl is really significant here. And I think that tells us something
00:10:21
about the difference between the murder of Jack and the murder of Karen Ann. When you're putting dirt, and twigs, and debris in there,
00:10:29
you want to demean them and humiliate them. And I think that's what he's trying to achieve here.
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NARRATOR: Once again, 26-year-old Arthur Shawcross was brought in for questioning.
00:10:44
The police immediately suspected Shawcross in the murder of Karen Ann Hill because he'd
00:10:49
been linked to the disappearance of Jack earlier. And a member of the public had seen
00:10:55
Karen close to a bicycle which matched the description of one that Shawcross owned.
00:11:01
Now, Shawcross's is innate cunning comes into play because he realizes he's got to be a prime suspect.
00:11:09
So he doesn't deal with the police. He says, OK, I'll admit to killing Karen hill,
00:11:17
but I'll also take you to the remains of Jack Blake, which are now, I'm afraid, skeletonized.
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And he does that to lessen the charges. NARRATOR: With little physical evidence to connect him
00:11:31
to either crime, detectives couldn't guarantee a murder conviction when the case went to trial.
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So on the 17th of October 1972, Shawcross pled guilty to manslaughter for the killing of Karen Ann Hill.
00:11:47
He was not indicted with Jack's killing. So this sends out a message to Shawcross
00:11:53
that actually, he's the one that's in control. He's the one that has power. And even though he's about to go down for a lengthy prison
00:12:00
sentence, he feels on top of the world because he feels that he's the one who's pulling the strings there.
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[TENSE MUSIC] NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross was given an indeterminate sentence of up to a maximum of 25 years.
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However, Shawcross once again demonstrated that he knew how to play the system when
00:12:24
on April the 30th, 1987, he was released after serving just 14 and 1/2 years. [TENSE MUSIC]
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The reason he got out on parole is that he had met a woman by the name of Rose Walley
00:12:43
while he was in prison, and they became pen pals. And all the ways you get paroled is not only
00:12:49
being a model prisoner, but you have to have somebody in the community to find you
00:12:54
a job and some place to live. So she provided that to him. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: So he has this all
00:13:00
set up for when he gets out. She's going to provide him with a veneer of respectability.
00:13:05
But it doesn't quite work out that way initially because in the town that they move to,
00:13:10
people get to know about his past. NARRATOR: 41-year-old Shawcross initially settled in the city of Binghamton in Upstate New York.
00:13:25
JOHN MCCAFFREY: Basically, the people in the community, once they found out that a person who had killed two
00:13:29
children were in the area, and they chased him out of the area, really. And they relocated him to another town.
00:13:35
That town did that. This is a child killer. Even today, I have to pinch myself to think that you do
00:13:41
allow a child killer out after only 14 and 1/2 years to resume, quote, "a normal life."
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NARRATOR: After being run out of two different towns, Shawcross found anonymity in the bustling city of Rochester,
00:13:55
115 miles north. So it's a little larger city. So you're not as well known. I mean, some of the small towns, everybody knows everybody.
00:14:04
He was a little bigger. He would probably just blend in a little more. NARRATOR: Shawcross found a job preparing
00:14:15
food on the night shift at a company called G&G Cheese. And in his free time, he travels around,
00:14:23
looking for prostitutes. He also, at this point, has a mistress, a woman named Clara.
00:14:30
Clara Neal worked at a local nursing home, where Shawcross would often visit her.
00:14:37
She's 56 and has had 10 children. He's 42. But nevertheless, he strikes up a relationship with her.
00:14:46
It wasn't blissful. I mean, they argued and fought. And he would leave and come back,
00:14:51
and she would throw him out. But it was a kind of stable relationship. So he's figured out that if he wants to kill again,
00:15:00
he's going to have to change his approach. He wants easy victims. Kids who were easy, but they drew a lot of attention.
00:15:08
He'll shift his victim type. We call that situational rather than preferential. NARRATOR: Things remained quiet for over a year.
00:15:19
Then, on the 24th of March, 1988, the body of a woman was found. Detective Lynde was a captain with nearby Rochester Police
00:15:29
at the time. I met Dorothy Blackburn, was found in Salmon Creek out Northampton Park.
00:15:36
She was thrown into the water there by a little culvert or bridge. NARRATOR: Dorothy was last seen nine days earlier.
00:15:44
Her disappearance was out of character, and her worried sister had reported her missing.
00:15:50
The postmortem examination on the 27-year-old's body revealed that she'd been strangled
00:15:57
and her genitals had been bitten. Her murder would remain unsolved for over a year.
00:16:03
For a time, things go quiet. Shawcross has various problems. He has sexual problems, in particular.
00:16:12
But other things get in the way. His on-off relationship with Clara comes and goes.
00:16:17
For me, I believe he was profoundly unsettled and was simply a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
00:16:27
NARRATOR: On September the 11th, 1988, another body was discovered. LYNDE JOHNSON: When we first found in Anna Steffen,
00:16:35
we really didn't even know who she was. She was skeletal. It appeared that she'd been hidden.
00:16:41
Roofing shingles, brush put over her. Her tank top was around her wrist, and the pants she was wearing was down
00:16:48
around where the ankle was. NARRATOR: 27-year-old mother of two Anna Steffen had been arrested in July 1988 for prostitution.
00:17:01
She was pregnant at the time and had lost contact with her family. No one reported her missing.
00:17:09
Anna has also been strangled and attacked and dumped in the Genessee River gorge, but her body isn't
00:17:16
discovered for several months. We took the skull to a forensic pathologist down in Syracuse, New York.
00:17:22
And he was able to do a reconstruction of a skull. We then photographed it and had it put in the paper.
00:17:29
And we got a call from her father who identified her. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: And I think it
00:17:35
was difficult in the beginning because he's targeting a population who are quite transient.
00:17:39
Sex workers move around a lot. Very often, they will go off the radar for weeks or months,
00:17:45
and that's not necessarily because they have been murdered. It's because they're in a different part of the country.
00:17:50
GEOFFREY WANSELL: The police had very, very little to go on. No fingerprints. No fingernail scrapings.
00:17:55
No semen. And it's impossible to know whether they were each individually raped before they were killed.
00:18:01
But certainly, there's no clear evidence. [TENSE MUSIC] You would look at all the types of activity that
00:18:09
happened at those crime scenes. Was he covering them up? Was he mutilating them?
00:18:14
And then you'd start trying to prioritize all your tips. And then they found another one or two bodies,
00:18:20
and some of the bodies had been mutilated. So by the time they got to the third and fourth body
00:18:26
over the next few months, there were a lot of common denominators and similarities.
00:18:36
NARRATOR: On the 27th of October 1989, Captain Lynde Johnston was called to the murder of another sex worker in Maplewood, Rochester
00:18:49
in search of 25-year-old Patricia Ives. LYNDE JOHNSTON: When you stood at the scene of Patricia Ives
00:18:56
and you look to your left and just down over the hill, where the body of Anna Steffan was found, then if you looked north
00:19:04
and you went down to Seth Green Island, there was another body they found. So there was a tight bunch of them right-- all
00:19:11
in the same area. Those were areas that fishermen frequented. There were brushy so that bodies could be hidden.
00:19:19
There would be building materials from the river that would have washed up to shore, so he could cover the bodies up
00:19:25
with those building materials. They weren't the places that the average person went to.
00:19:32
And I got really nervous about that point that there was certainly something very unique
00:19:37
going on here. NARRATOR: In just over a year and a half, detectives had found four bodies concealed, mutilated,
00:19:46
and all within half a mile of each other. GEOFFREY WANSELL: The police, to their credit,
00:19:53
decide that they must alert the community of sex workers that they are in danger.
00:19:59
And so in the autumn of 1989, if you work as a sex worker in Rochester, it must have
00:20:05
been a very frightening time. And then we, for a lack of a better word, we made what we call a war room.
00:20:12
And what we did was we hung their photographs up because we want to remember who the victim is.
00:20:17
You know, a lot of people don't care because they're apprised to other people. And they have mothers, fathers, sisters brothers.
00:20:24
So we believed he was right down in that area of Lyell Avenue or West Main Street, all these areas
00:20:31
where the prostitution activity took place. And we just needed to find them. This is a time when police investigations are becoming
00:20:40
increasingly sophisticated. That drawing on a lot of different techniques. And I think that was the key thing in this case.
00:20:46
It was the range of different evidence that was used. LYNDE JOHNSTON: We had certainly our surveillance teams out.
00:20:52
People on roofs with the binoculars. Every traffic ticket was looked at, every parking ticket was looked at.
00:20:59
Foot beats were put down there, extra patrols, and a lot of other covert activities that we
00:21:05
did, which I won't discuss because we might use them again. NARRATOR: As part of the investigation,
00:21:12
field interviews were conducted with some of the sex workers on Lyell Avenue. Detectives were informed a guy called
00:21:20
Mitch, who worked at G&G Cheese, was often seen talking to women in the area. The unfortunate part there was when the police went there,
00:21:30
they talked to management that worked during the day. Shawcross worked that night, and they really
00:21:36
weren't connected to him. GEOFFREY WANSELL: We've now got multiple victims within a very small area of Upstate New York who
00:21:44
are being killed relentlessly. Now the full weight of the police are brought to bear.
00:21:51
It is a full-scale manhunt. And every day that we didn't find this person, somebody else might die.
00:21:58
So there was a lot of internal pressure on ourselves. We put it on ourselves. NARRATOR: As more bodies were found along the banks
00:22:09
of the Genessee River and women continued to disappear from the streets, Rochester detectives combined with forces
00:22:16
from the New York State Police and threw everything they had at catching the mysterious killer.
00:22:23
It wasn't long before he struck again. On the 11th of November, another body was
00:22:29
found matching the killer's MO. Captain John McCaffrey coordinated the joint operation.
00:22:37
We had done several investigations together. And it wasn't until the end of 1989
00:22:43
when the Rochester Police Department thought there was a strong possibility that the unknown killer
00:22:49
would start to deposit the bodies outside of their jurisdiction. So they invited the New York State Police
00:22:55
in in the wake of these brutal killings, detectives became concerned that the perpetrator's behavior
00:23:03
would continue to escalate. In October, late October 1989, a young woman called June Stott went missing, and her body was found
00:23:14
months later in November 1989. [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NARRATOR: 30-year-old June had mild learning difficulties.
00:23:27
She was found along the banks of the Genessee River at Turning Point Park. But this time, it was much worse.
00:23:35
He has eviscerated June's body, cut it from sternum to pubic bone, removed some of the body parts
00:23:43
in what's known locally as a deer hunter's cut. June was somebody Arthur Shawcross knew.
00:23:49
They were on friendly terms. So when he targeted her, this is quite an interesting turn of events.
00:23:56
He is targeting women who are available to him not just because they're sex workers,
00:24:00
but because they're in his social circle. June Stott is probably the-- they're all tragic, but it really
00:24:08
was a sad scene because she was a young girl, not a prostitute at all. I remember walking down the path with some
00:24:17
of the other investigators, and we're just thinking, what's he going to do next?
00:24:22
NARRATOR: As well as the mutilation and concealment of the bodies, another pattern had emerged
00:24:28
linking all the victims. So we came up with a list of all these different categories
00:24:34
that we wanted to start comparing. And then we were finding that most of them were found either in creeks or near water.
00:24:41
The exception to that was a lady by the name of Elizabeth Gibson whose body was found out in an apple orchard in Wayne County.
00:24:51
NARRATOR: With concern mounting for the safety of women across the city, an FBI profiler was brought on board.
00:24:59
So during the 1980s, the concept of behavioral profiling became very prominent, looking at what we could see
00:25:06
from a crime scene that would tell us about the personality of the killer. If we could have somebody else come in
00:25:13
and just look at the cases to make sure we didn't miss anything, maybe offer them some suggestions.
00:25:20
This is long before the full weight of the Behavioral Science Unit has grown into what we now recognize
00:25:26
on television programs. This is the early days of profiling. But nevertheless, the FBI do come
00:25:33
up with a preliminary profile. LYNDE JOHNSTON: A lone middle-aged man, 30s. They believed he was a medium-type worker, just a kind
00:25:43
of guy that would be on the assembly line or doing some menial job. He drives a lot, which turned out to be the truth.
00:25:50
He frequents the river area because he liked the fish. He was all around water. He was familiar with the river gorge,
00:25:56
certainly, because of the fishing. He was capable of a relationship with a female.
00:26:01
The relationships would be unstable. And certainly, it was. Possibly, it would be sexually dysfunctional, which he was.
00:26:08
And he had the potential to return to the scene. Shawcross was not educated. He was not a good-looking guy.
00:26:15
He was overweight. He was just a person out there that took advantage of the girls by befriending them,
00:26:22
providing them with some food, and using that to get close to them. NARRATOR: By late December, detectives
00:26:33
had linked seven bodies to the killer and a further three women were thought to be missing.
00:26:39
We're talking about a relentless spate of killings within a six month period, preying on vulnerable women.
00:26:46
There is no real explanation for it. You know, when it started escalating by the mutilation,
00:26:51
his frequency of abducting and killing them escalated, and that's what really concerned everybody.
00:26:59
NARRATOR: Then on New Year's Eve 1989, a uniformed trooper was handed a vital piece of evidence.
00:27:07
It was a winter day. I was working in the office, and I received the call from the trooper.
00:27:12
And he said that passing motorists had just located the pair of boots on the snow-covered highway
00:27:19
in Northampton Park, so he went there. And in the field, he found a pair of blue jeans.
00:27:27
And lo and behold, in the blue jeans, in the rear pocket was a birth certificate of a young lady
00:27:35
by the name of Felicia Stevens. NARRATOR: 20-year-old Felicia Stevens was a sex worker in the Lyell Avenue area of Rochester.
00:27:46
Her jeans were found 13 and 1/2 miles west, in Northampton Park. So I immediately called the Crime
00:27:54
Analysis Unit with the RPD that was working this case. And I said to the investigator, is Felicia
00:28:01
Stevens a missing person? Is she a subject of your investigation? LYNDE JOHNSTON: And we got people
00:28:07
over to her mother's house. And she indicated she hadn't seen her since December the 26th.
00:28:13
And she hadn't lived with Mom because they had a big falling out because of drugs
00:28:17
and her being a prostitute. So at that point, we assume that it's connected to the case.
00:28:23
And the state police started our own missing persons investigation. So all the agencies all got together
00:28:30
and formed a massive search out in that area, bringing in the horses so you could see higher, canine dogs,
00:28:36
troopers and city police walking the lines together, trying to find her. NARRATOR: As the ground search got underway,
00:28:44
John and the New York State Police took to the skies. We have our own helicopter, and it was based in Rochester.
00:28:52
So we immediately put the helicopter in the air. And for three days, we flew that area, searching for the body.
00:29:01
And I told the pilot. I says, let's fly from Northampton Park back to where Felicia Stevens was last seen
00:29:08
or would have been working on Lyell Avenue. That is Route 31. And the distance from Northampton Park
00:29:15
back to the city is probably 12 or 15 miles. So as we left Northampton Park in the helicopter,
00:29:23
we were only, probably, two minutes into the flight. As we're flying over Salmon Creek,
00:29:28
underneath the bridge, frozen in the ice was a body. NARRATOR: John had a hunch this was
00:29:37
a victim of the Genessee River Killer, but that wasn't his only discovery. Now, on top of the bridge was this gray Celebrity,
00:29:47
and the passenger door was open. And this guy was actually urinating out of the passenger side.
00:29:54
And as we flew over with the helicopter, he slid over into the driver's seat and proceeded in an easterly direction
00:30:01
towards the village of Spencerport. LYNDE JOHNSTON: We had discussed with the profilers
00:30:05
before, these guys like to come back to the scene. Of course, we didn't know who the body was yet,
00:30:10
but we had a list of potentials. My immediate assumption was that because this was the first time that the state police had used
00:30:18
the helicopter in the investigation, that possibly this person came back to relocate the body,
00:30:25
so we couldn't find it because it was so easily seen. NARRATOR: John immediately scrambled troopers
00:30:32
from Rochester to Northampton as he continued to follow the gray Celebrity car from the air.
00:30:40
He pulled into the rear parking a nursing home, and we hovered. I had radioed for a uniformed trooper
00:30:46
to come to the location. And as the person got out of the car, they just walked into the nursing home, in the back door.
00:30:55
NARRATOR: With a potential suspect in sight, John waited for news from forces on the ground
00:31:01
as the state trooper entered the nursing home. The trooper radioed and told me that the person that he was interviewing
00:31:08
was Arthur Shawcross. And the first question any uniformed trooper usually ask is, can I see your license and registration?
00:31:17
And Art told him, well, I don't really have a driver's license. I'm on parole. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
00:31:26
NARRATOR: It didn't take long for investigators to learn that the man they had in front of them,
00:31:32
44-year-old Arthur Shawcross, had killed two children in Watertown in the 1970s.
00:31:39
This obvious red flag set alarm bells ringing for John and the team, who were hopeful this was the Genessee River
00:31:47
Killer in their grasp at last. As New York state troopers conducted an initial interview
00:31:54
with Shawcross, the forensics team got to work identifying the body under the bridge.
00:32:00
[DRAMATIC MUSIC] It was when we were on the ground there we discovered that the body underneath the bridge
00:32:10
was not that of Lisa Stevens, but of another missing prostitute by the name of June Cicero.
00:32:17
NARRATOR: 34-year-old June Cicero had been missing since the 17th of December. Now, the unique thing about Jun Cicero
00:32:26
was she was kind of known as the queen bee of the prostitutes. She kind of controlled the whole area.
00:32:33
Whatever corner she wanted to work on, the rest of the prostitutes would let her work there because she was mean and aggressive.
00:32:42
NARRATOR: June's body had been cut to the bone on both sides of her crotch, and the killer had
00:32:48
tried to remove her sex organs. And I think for sure, because she represented a bit of a challenge, actually, she is the kind of woman
00:32:55
that he really despises. So I think this one was quite seminal, really. The fact that he'd gone back to the site,
00:33:04
was that evidence of him taking pleasure in his trophies, thinking, what a clever boy I am?
00:33:10
It's difficult not to think there might have been an element of that in it. NARRATOR: Whilst talking to state troopers,
00:33:17
Arthur Shawcross claimed he knew nothing about the body under the bridge. LYNDE JOHNSTON: He said that he had to urinate.
00:33:25
And he had a bottle, and he was starting to pee in the bottle. And the copter came, so he put the cap back on,
00:33:31
swung around, and just drove down to where Clara Neal was working. He said, ah, I don't know why they're
00:33:37
following me because all I was doing was taking a pee on the bridge. NARRATOR: Shawcross remained cool,
00:33:43
shrugging off the initial suspicions of detectives. I think he thought he could kind of bluff his way.
00:33:50
You know, just cooperate and not talk of anything of any real substance. JOHN MCCAFFREY: And the more he talked,
00:33:56
the more viable of a suspect he became. We provided him with a lunch, actually took him
00:34:02
to a restaurant, and bought him dinner. And all this time he was talking to us, unbeknownst to him,
00:34:10
he was providing us a lot of significant information. NARRATOR: That evening, investigators
00:34:16
conducted a preliminary search of Shawcross's apartment. We found under the sink these handy wipe dusting-type
00:34:24
of material that was found at the scene of June Stott and also at the Dorothy Keeler scene.
00:34:30
And overnight, we contacted the company in Ohio that manufactured them. And they told us that the only place in Rochester
00:34:37
that has them was G & G Cheese, and that's the place he worked. NARRATOR: Detectives knew if they were to corner their man,
00:34:44
they needed to conclusively link Shawcross to his victims. Lynde and the team went back over their old field interviews
00:34:54
to see if anyone would be able to identify the killer. One woman. Another sex worker called Jo Ann Van
00:35:02
Nostrand provided just that. So Jo Ann Van Nostrand said she saw this person in this car that went across the bridge
00:35:12
with Elizabeth Gibson in the car. NARRATOR: 29-year-old Elizabeth Gibson, whose body had been found among some trees in neighboring Wayne
00:35:21
County five weeks earlier. LYNDE JOHNSTON: Elizabeth Gibson was taken out to a vacant field
00:35:27
with a small stream and strangled. When we finally knew who Arthur was and we got a hold of Van Nostrand again,
00:35:35
she was able to identify his picture. NARRATOR: Now they had a positive identification
00:35:41
of Shawcross, the investigation was really starting to come together. But the search team, meticulously going
00:35:49
through the car that Shawcross was found driving, had also made excellent progress.
00:35:54
LYNDE JOHNSTON: In the, car there was an earring. And that earring belonged to June Cicero.
00:36:00
And the other one was on her body. And forensically, I believe they found some fibers that match
00:36:05
from the Tyler, the bike that was in the back of the trunk of the car. There was just a variety of good physical evidence
00:36:13
that linked him to these crimes. NARRATOR: The following morning, on the 4th of January 1990,
00:36:21
44-year-old Shawcross was officially arrested. JOHN MCCAFFREY: So we took him to Rochester
00:36:27
Police Department headquarters, put him in an interview room. And we had two teams of investigators.
00:36:34
State police and RPD teamed up, and they started talking to art. What for me was the most striking moment
00:36:41
of the entire case was when he was arrested and the period after that. He was very calm.
00:36:47
He was emotionless about it. The turning point was they asked him, is your girlfriend, Clara Neal,
00:36:53
involved in killing the girls? And he emphatically says, no. Clara is not involved.
00:37:00
Well, you have to tell us, or we're going to think that Clara is involved. He said, no.
00:37:06
Clara has nothing to do with this. It was me. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] NARRATOR: After an investigation lasting nearly two years,
00:37:17
thousands of hours in manpower, and many sleepless nights, the Genessee River Killer had been caught at last.
00:37:26
But with women still missing, detectives needed Shawcross to start cooperating. They had all the photographs of the victims,
00:37:36
and they put the photographs on the table. And Art picked the photographs up. And it was like a deck of cards.
00:37:44
He says, I killed her. This is so-and-so. And he admits to 10 homicides. But every one of these, it was always their fault.
00:37:52
They did something that made them die. Broke the gearshift of his car, tried to take his wallet,
00:37:58
bit him. It was always somebody else's fault instead of his. Although he admitted them, I don't
00:38:03
think he ever took full responsibility for why, though. NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross agreed to assist the police
00:38:11
with their remaining inquiries. After his confession, he said he wanted to take the police
00:38:18
to recover the bodies of a couple that we haven't even found yet. And he took the police down to Island Cottage Road
00:38:25
to recover the body of Maria Welch. NARRATOR: Investigators now had 11 victims they believed
00:38:36
Shawcross had murdered. But despite his confessions, Arthur Shawcross wouldn't admit
00:38:42
to killing Felicia Stevens. The only homicide that he would not admit to was that of Felicia Stevens.
00:38:50
The unique thing about Felicia Stevens was that she was an Afro-American female.
00:38:56
And we assume that he did not want to admit that he had had sex with an Afro-American.
00:39:04
She had been strangled in the same manner that the other girls had. NARRATOR: Despite his denials, Shawcross was
00:39:12
charged with Felicia's murder. His trial began on the 17th of September 1990. The world according to Arthur isn't actually
00:39:25
probably all the truth. You got to be very careful about what Art says because we really believe
00:39:30
he's a pathological liar. And he serves himself to make it look like it was other people's fault.
00:39:37
JOHN MCCAFFREY: His defense was insanity, and that was easily disproved because he
00:39:42
took us to the bodies that he had disposed of. So you couldn't be insane and know where you left the bodies.
00:39:48
And at this point, he introduces the fact that his mother abused him as a child.
00:39:52
It's all fantasy. I very much doubt he suffered anything at the hands of his mother just as he never saw any action
00:40:01
in the jungle in Vietnam. It's just an excuse. NARRATOR: First assistant District Attorney Charles J.
00:40:09
Siragusa led the prosecution. He systematically laid out the case of how each body was discovered, how
00:40:19
each body had been killed, and tied to all the bodies together. The jury deliberated less than eight hours
00:40:27
after two or three weeks of testimony and found him guilty of all 10 homicides. Shawcross is sentenced in the Monroe County cases
00:40:41
to 25 years in prison for each of the 10 victims, a total of 250 years in prison.
00:40:49
He is later to be tried for the one victim in Wayne County. NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross received an additional life
00:40:58
sentence in Wayne County for the murder of Elizabeth Gibson, on top of the 250 years he'd already
00:41:06
been sentenced to in Monroe. This is all about the families of the girls. Just because a person becomes involved
00:41:13
in drugs and a prostitute, they're still somebody's daughter, somebody's sister.
00:41:20
So there was a great deal of satisfaction and relief that we had brought closure to these families.
00:41:28
An unfortunate closure, but closures. NARRATOR: Shawcross was sent to Sullivan Correctional Facility
00:41:35
in Fallsburg, New York. After complaining of leg pain, he died of a cardiac arrest
00:41:42
behind bars in 2008, at the age of 63. LYNDE JOHNSTON: I didn't know how emotionally tied up you could be on something like this.
00:41:52
I remember coming home after he was arrested, walking upstairs, and crying just because I was so tired.
00:42:01
I put so much effort-- all of us put so much effort into this case. It was the only time in my career
00:42:09
that I had those feelings. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: What really angers me about this case
00:42:13
is that there was a chance to stop him. He killed two children and yet he was still
00:42:18
released from prison it really saddens me to think that there are women who would still be walking around today
00:42:24
had Shawcross been dealt with properly the first time around. NARRATOR: Arthur Shawcross was a dangerous loner
00:42:32
who targeted vulnerable women in order to satisfy his deadly urges. He brutally murdered and mutilated 11 women.
00:42:42
16 years before this depraved killing spree, Shawcross had also savagely taken the lives
00:42:50
of two young children. Belligerent and unremorseful, Arthur Shawcross maintained his actions were entirely
00:42:58
the fault of his victims, making him one of the world's most evil killers. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
00:43:29
[WHOOSHING] [JINGLING]