Arthur Shawcross was arrested in the Rochester area of upstate New York in January 1990, the day after a State Police helicopter crew found a missing woman's body near Northampton Park and watched his car leave the scene. He was 44 and worked nights cleaning and stocking shelves at a food service company. Within weeks he had been charged with murdering ten women in Monroe County and an eleventh in neighboring Wayne County, all killed between March 1988 and January 1990, according to the Associated Press. Most were sex workers, police said, and most had been strangled or suffocated.
He was on parole when the killings began. In 1972, in Watertown, in northern New York, he had pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of an eight-year-old girl, Karen Ann Hill, and he later admitted killing a ten-year-old boy, Jack Blake, as well. He served about 15 years. After his release in 1987, two small communities learned who he was and pushed him out, and state parole officials sent him to Rochester, a city large enough for him to go unnoticed.
A Monroe County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of ten murders in December 1990. He pleaded guilty to the eleventh three months later. He spent the rest of his life in prison and died in state custody in November 2008, at 63.
In 1972 Shawcross was 27 and worked for the city of Watertown at the landfill off Pearl Street, according to the Watertown Daily Times. He was then on parole for a burglary conviction, United Press International reported in 1990.
Jack O. Blake, 10, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Allen Blake of Watertown, disappeared on May 7, 1972. Searchers looked for him intensively for several days and then stopped when they found no trace. The boy's family protested, but Watertown police appear to have treated him as a runaway, the Watertown Daily Times reporter David C. Shampine later wrote.
Karen Ann Hill, 8, was killed in Watertown later that year, while she was visiting the city with her mother. Her father, Robert Hill, a machinist who in 1990 was retired and living in Bristol, New Hampshire, would speak about her death again when Shawcross was arrested in Rochester 18 years later.
Shawcross was arrested in the Hill case and was to be arraigned on a charge of murdering her in Watertown City Court on September 5, 1972. Security in the court was unusually tight; police said threats had been made against his life overnight.
His arrest reopened the search for Jack Blake. The day after the arraignment, sheriff's deputies and city police followed leads into a wooded area beside Routes 81, 37 and 12, near the city. On a Tuesday that week, police had received a telephone call asking them to search again in the area where the body was then found, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported on September 8, 1972. The boy's remains lay off Interstate 81, within a few yards of ground covered in the first search four months earlier.
Shawcross was not tried. He pleaded guilty to a single reduced charge, manslaughter in the first degree, in the death of Karen Ann Hill. On October 17, 1972, he was sentenced to a maximum of 25 years in prison.
The plea offer came from the Jefferson County district attorney, William J. McCluskey. The lawyer assigned to defend Shawcross, Paul J. Dierdorf, later explained the reasoning to the Watertown Daily Times. The manslaughter law then included a provision for killings committed under extreme emotional circumstances, he said, and in a couple of earlier trials juries had returned that kind of verdict.
He was never convicted in the death of Jack Blake. United Press International reported in 1990 that he had admitted both child killings. Some newspaper reports in 1972 loosely described him as the slayer of both children, but his one conviction from 1972 was for manslaughter, in the death of Karen Ann Hill.
He was first sent to Attica Correctional Facility, where he was kept in a segregated area with special security. In November 1972 the state correction commissioner, Russell Oswald, ordered him moved to Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Stormville. A department spokesman, David Eno, said officials had learned that a distant relative of one of the victims was an inmate at Attica, the Syracuse Post-Standard reported.
On April 30, 1987, Shawcross was paroled from Green Haven. He had served about 15 years of the 25-year maximum.
After his release Shawcross moved with Rose Mary Walley, a woman who had written to him in prison, to the village of Delhi in Delaware County, in the Catskills. They took an apartment above Oliver's Department Store on Main Street.
The village learned within a day who he was. "It got out who he was a day after his arrival, and people said they were fearful for their children," the Delhi police chief, Frank Harmer, said in 1990. Some residents asked him how they could get guns. Vivian Carpenter, a village trustee who was also his landlord, had him evicted. "We all agreed, we don't want him," she said. "I had children living in that building."
Within about a month he moved for a few days to the village of Fleischmanns, also in Delaware County. Harmer was later told that Shawcross had gone to a "large city." That city was Rochester. State parole officials sent him there after he had been forced out of two communities once his record became known, UPI reported during his trial.
In Rochester he lived on Alexander Street. He took a part-time night job at G & G Food Service, cleaning and stocking shelves. The owner, Barry Goldman, described the work as unskilled and said Shawcross mostly worked alone. What struck him most, he said, was that Shawcross rode a bicycle to and from work. About four months before his arrest, Shawcross married Rose Mary Walley.
The killings attributed to Shawcross began in March 1988. Most of the women were sex workers in and around Rochester. The list of women missing or found dead grew through 1989, and before his arrest a woman later found dead was being reported missing almost every week, UPI reported. When he was charged, officials described the case as one of the largest in the state's history.
The reports name only some of the women, and they say little about their lives.
Dorothy Keeler was 59. Police testified at the trial that after his arrest Shawcross told them a body found the previous October, which no one had been able to identify, was hers, and that she had been his mistress. He told them he killed her in the spring of 1989 after she threatened to tell his wife about their relationship. Two teenagers who were fishing found her remains on Seth Green Island, in the Genesee River gorge, in October 1989.
Maria Welch was 22. UPI, which spelled her first name Maria, reported that she had been missing since November 6, 1989. She was found in the town of Greece, near Lake Ontario, after Shawcross gave police information following his arrest.
Elizabeth Gibson was 29. Her body was found on November 27, 1989, in woods in Wayne County, the county east of Monroe. Because she was found there, her case was prosecuted separately, in Wayne County.
Darlene Trippi was 32. She was reported missing on December 23, 1989, and her body was found in Brockport, west of Rochester, after his arrest.
June Cicero was 34. She had been missing since December 17, 1989. It was her body that the helicopter crew found on January 3, 1990.
Felicia Stephens was the last. Her Social Security card and some of her clothing were found near Northampton Park on the Sunday before his arrest, and a deer hunter found her body on the morning of January 4, 1990, while police were watching Shawcross.
The ten women named in the Monroe County verdict were eight sex workers and two other women, the Deseret News reported after the trial.
Before the arrest, investigators had compiled a list of missing women. In January 1990 UPI reported that police in Brighton, a Rochester suburb, wanted to question Shawcross about the August 1989 strangling of Gail DeRyke, 47, who had not been on the list of 16 missing women. Rochester investigators had also met in New Castle, Pennsylvania, with the Pennsylvania State Police and police from the Youngstown, Ohio, area, who were looking for links to the killings of five women in their own communities in the previous six months. Howard Bradley, the police chief in Hubbard, Ohio, said the pattern there looked the same: women in the sex trade picked up and killed.
A retired Rochester police investigator, Lynde Johnston, told WHEC News10NBC in 2024 that investigators had looked at every woman with a similar way of life and charted what the cases had in common. At one point, he said, 17 women were considered possible victims.
On Wednesday, January 3, 1990, a New York State Police surveillance helicopter crew spotted a woman's body in a culvert in the Northampton Park area, about ten miles west of Rochester. It was June Cicero. Minutes later, troopers saw a car leaving the area. The helicopter followed it to a nursing home and then to Shawcross's home.
"The big break came with the State Police helicopter," said Major Salvatore Valvo, commander of State Police Troop E in Canandaigua. The department, he said, "couldn't have asked for anything better."
On Thursday, January 4, Shawcross was questioned, and he gave police information about Felicia Stephens, UPI reported. Her body was found that morning by a deer hunter while police kept watch on him. Later that day he was taken into custody, and he led police to two more bodies, those of Maria Welch in Greece and Darlene Trippi in Brockport.
The Appellate Division later found that he had gone with the police voluntarily and was not in custody when he was questioned, and that the record showed no threats or promises that induced his statements.
On Friday, January 5, 1990, Shawcross was charged with murdering eight women and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Rochester City Court. He was named the prime suspect in three more killings. The district attorney's office said separate investigations into five other deaths of women would continue. New York had no death penalty; second-degree murder carried 25 years to life on each count.
The Rochester police chief, Gordon Urlacher, said police had found no motive and that a person like this was hard to understand, but that they were confident they had the right man. Deputy Chief Terrence Rickard praised the homicide detectives who had worked through the holidays, away from their families, to make the case.
In New Hampshire, Robert Hill, Karen Ann's father, said the parole board should have made Shawcross serve his whole sentence. "I'd like him to be put away in the frying pan, double voltage, double amperage," he told reporters.
On January 12, 1990, the Monroe County district attorney, Howard Relin, said Shawcross would be indicted on January 19 for the murders of two more women, June Cicero and Maria Welch. On January 23 a 23-member Monroe County grand jury returned a single indictment charging him with second-degree murder in the deaths of ten women, nine of them sex workers, killed since March 1988.
On January 24 he pleaded not guilty before Monroe County Judge Donald Wisner. His lawyer, David Murante, did not seek bail, and the judge gave preliminary approval for a second defense lawyer. The prosecution would be handled by Assistant District Attorney Charles Siragusa. Relin said he did not expect more charges in Monroe County. A separate charge of murdering an eleventh woman, in Wayne County, was pending. "I know this is going to be a complicated and drawn-out affair," Wisner said.
Pretrial hearings were set to begin on March 26, 1990, and a long hearing was expected on whether the statements Shawcross made to police could be used at trial. The court admitted them.
The Monroe County trial lasted 13 weeks, according to the Associated Press, and was under way by the start of October 1990. Shawcross did not contest that he had killed the women. His defense was insanity.
Siragusa built the case through police officers and the people who had found the bodies. On October 2, 1990, police testified about what Shawcross had told them of Dorothy Keeler, and the two teenagers who had found her remains in the gorge took the stand.
The defense argued that brain damage, abuse in childhood and his service as a soldier in Vietnam had left him legally insane. Its main witness was the psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis. The jury saw videotapes of her interviews with Shawcross under hypnosis, in which he shifted into a high-pitched woman's voice and spoke of incest in his childhood, of atrocities in wartime and of cannibalism. He told Lewis that his mother's voice had told him to kill.
The prosecution's psychiatrist, Park Dietz, told the jury that Shawcross had denied to him hearing voices or having multiple personalities. Dietz said Shawcross was faking mental illness to stay out of prison.
During the trial Lewis complained that defense counsel had lied to her, in a dispute over whether the lawyers should have hired another expert. The trial judge understood her complaint and made no further inquiry, and the Appellate Division later held that this did not deny Shawcross due process. Under cross-examination she lost her composure. Shawcross did not testify.
On Thursday, December 13, 1990, after about six and a half hours of deliberation, the jury found Shawcross guilty of ten counts of second-degree murder. The jurors rejected the insanity defense. The foreman said the jurors had decided that Shawcross "wasn't insane," the Deseret News reported. Sentencing was set for February 1, 1991, and each count carried a possible 25 years to life.
The sentence kept him in prison for the rest of his life: the Associated Press described him in 2008 as serving life in prison for strangling eleven women.
About three months after the Monroe County verdict, in March 1991, Shawcross pleaded guilty in Wayne County to murdering Elizabeth Gibson, 29, whose body had been found in the county's woods on November 27, 1989. With that plea, his convictions covered eleven women.
Shawcross appealed both judgments. On April 14, 1993, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, Fourth Department, unanimously affirmed them in two decisions, Appeal No. 1 and Appeal No. 2. The panel in the Monroe County appeal (People v. Shawcross, 192 AD2d 1128) was Justices Pine, presiding, Balio, Lawton, Boomer and Davis.
The court rejected each of his arguments:
Lewis's complaint during trial that defense counsel had lied to her did not oblige the judge to inquire further. The dispute concerned whether the defense should have hired another expert, and since many tests had already been done and several neurologists and radiologists consulted, it did not show that his lawyers had been ineffective.
He had received competent psychiatric help at state expense, as the United States Supreme Court's decision in Ake v. Oklahoma requires. Lewis was well qualified, examined him and assisted the defense, and "her loss of composure under vigorous cross-examination did not rise to the level of incompetent psychiatric assistance," the court wrote.
There was no error in the judge's instructions, or supplemental instructions, on extreme emotional disturbance, or in refusing the wording the defense wanted.
He did not need to be present when lawyers argued legal questions on his pretrial motions, and he had knowingly waived his right to be there.
The state law on telling jurors what follows a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity was not unconstitutional; it widened what a judge may tell the jury, to a defendant's benefit.
His statements were properly admitted: he "voluntarily accompanied the police and was not in custody when he was questioned," and no threats or promises induced them. Whether a person is in custody depends on what a reasonable innocent person would think, so the defense could not question officers about their own intentions.
The judge did not have to ask him on the record whether he understood that he was giving up his right to testify.
On August 19, 1993, a judge of the New York Court of Appeals, Stewart F. Hancock Jr., denied leave to appeal further. The convictions became final.
Shawcross entered the state prison system on February 1, 1991, passing through the Wende and Elmira reception centers. On March 22, 1991, he was transferred to Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, in the Hudson Valley, where he remained for the rest of his life, according to the state Commission of Correction.
In prison he drew and painted. In 2001 ten of his sketches and paintings, one of them a portrait of Princess Diana, sold for as much as 540 dollars each, the Associated Press reported. Under the rules then in force, inmates kept half of what their art earned and the other half went to the state Crime Victims Board. Protests over a man convicted of eleven murders profiting from his art led the Department of Correctional Services in 2002 to end its annual inmate art show and to ban the sale of art made in prison.
On Friday evening, November 7, 2008, Shawcross told an officer at Sullivan that his leg hurt and that he could not walk to the medical unit for his medications. The nurse on duty refused to send a wheelchair, saying he had walked that morning and had no wheelchair permit, and she did not go to see him. On November 9 he still could not walk, and that afternoon he was admitted to the prison infirmary, where no medical provider evaluated him in time. On November 10 a wheelchair-accessible van had to be brought from another prison, a wait of nearly four hours, and he reached Albany Medical Center at 8:40 p.m. He went into cardiac arrest in the emergency room and was pronounced dead at 9:50 p.m. He was 63.
A spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services, Erik Kriss, said the next day that the cause of death was under investigation. The New York State Commission of Correction later found that he died of a pulmonary embolism caused by a large blood clot lodged in a deep (iliac) vein. In a final report dated December 15, 2009, the commission concluded that he had received "grossly negligent, incompetent and inadequate medical evaluation and treatment," which contributed to his death. It found that staff had broken the prison system's rules on emergency sick calls, medication, infirmary admissions and records, and that no one had been clear about how he was to be taken to the hospital. It recommended training for the nursing staff, written rules on when to call an ambulance, administrative action against one nurse and referral of two nurses to the State Education Department's professional discipline office.
Not every woman on the investigators' list was killed by Shawcross. In 2024 WHEC News10NBC, Rochester's NBC station, reported on three women killed between August and October 1989 who had once been counted among his possible victims: Gail DeRyke, killed in Brighton; Jacqueline Dicker, 27, whose body was left beside Route 204 in Gates on August 27, 1989, two days before her birthday; and Linda Lee Hymes, a mother of six, who died on Interstate 490 in Rochester in October 1989. Police believe other men killed all three, and the three cases remain open with the Brighton, Gates and Rochester police.
Two young women driving home to Hilton that night, both 19, saw Linda Hymes run in front of their car and a man come after her out of the dark. They drove to a pay phone to call for help. Before police arrived, Hymes was struck and killed by a car. The man the two women saw did not match Shawcross, police said, and Shawcross never admitted killing her. "It just didn't match," Lynde Johnston said. Her son had grown up believing Shawcross killed his mother. Jacqueline Dicker lay in an unmarked grave at Riverside Cemetery for 35 years, until a Brighton police investigator, Steve Hunt, arranged for a headstone in late 2024.
Proven by final judgment: the manslaughter of Karen Ann Hill (plea, 1972); the murders of ten women in Monroe County (jury verdict, 1990); and the murder of Elizabeth Gibson in Wayne County (plea, 1991). These judgments were affirmed on appeal.
Admitted but never the subject of a conviction: the death of Jack Blake in Watertown in 1972.
His own accounts of Vietnam: the defense told the jury that his service as a soldier in Vietnam was one cause of his insanity, and under hypnosis he described atrocities in wartime. These are his own claims. No report confirmed any killing by him in Vietnam, and the jury rejected the insanity defense that relied on them. Claims of cannibalism, made by him on the hypnosis tapes, are likewise his own and are not part of any finding of fact by a court.
Women once counted as possible victims: the investigators' list reached 16 or 17 names. Of the women on it, those whose deaths have been reported as still open (Gail DeRyke, Jacqueline Dicker and Linda Lee Hymes) are believed by police to have been killed by others.
Details that vary between sources: UPI spelled the name of one victim as Maria Welch; she is often given elsewhere as Marie. A 1990 UPI report misspelled Jack Blake's surname as "Black." Different reports give the time he served for the 1972 killing as 14 years or 15 years.
May 7, 1972: Jack O. Blake, 10, disappears in Watertown.
1972: Karen Ann Hill, 8, is killed in Watertown; Shawcross, 27, is arrested.
September 5, 1972: due to be arraigned in Watertown City Court on a murder charge in her death.
September 1972: Jack Blake's remains are found in woods off Interstate 81.
October 17, 1972: pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the death of Karen Ann Hill; sentenced to a maximum of 25 years.
November 1972: moved from Attica to Green Haven Correctional Facility.
April 30, 1987: paroled from Green Haven; moves to Delhi, then Fleischmanns, then Rochester.
March 1988: the Rochester-area killings begin.
Spring 1989: Dorothy Keeler is killed, by his own account.
October 1989: her remains are found on Seth Green Island in the Genesee River gorge.
1989: marries Rose Mary Walley, about four months before his arrest.
November 27, 1989: Elizabeth Gibson's body is found in Wayne County.
December 17, 1989: June Cicero is reported missing.
Late December 1989: Felicia Stephens's belongings are found near Northampton Park.
January 3, 1990: a State Police helicopter crew finds June Cicero's body and follows Shawcross's car.
January 4, 1990: he is questioned, Felicia Stephens's body is found, and he is taken into custody and leads police to the bodies of Maria Welch and Darlene Trippi.
January 5, 1990: charged with eight murders; pleads not guilty in Rochester City Court.
January 23, 1990: Monroe County grand jury indicts him for ten murders.
January 24, 1990: pleads not guilty before Judge Donald Wisner.
October 1990: trial under way in Monroe County Court.
December 13, 1990: convicted of ten counts of second-degree murder; insanity defense rejected.
February 1, 1991: sentencing date set in Monroe County; he enters the state prison system that day.
March 1991: pleads guilty in Wayne County to the murder of Elizabeth Gibson.
March 22, 1991: moved to Sullivan Correctional Facility, Fallsburg.
April 14, 1993: Appellate Division affirms both judgments.
August 19, 1993: Court of Appeals denies leave to appeal.
2001 to 2002: sales of his artwork lead the state to ban the sale of prison-made art.
November 10, 2008: dies after being taken from Sullivan to Albany Medical Center.
December 15, 2009: the Commission of Correction finds his medical care grossly negligent.
2024: WHEC reports that three women once linked to him were killed by others; their cases remain open.