Arthur John Shawcross was born in Kittery, Maine, on June 6, 1945, and grew up in Watertown, in upstate New York. He left school in the ninth grade, drifted through labouring jobs and arson and burglary convictions, and served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. He later told psychiatrists and reporters that he had killed and mutilated Vietnamese women there. His service record shows a supply clerk who saw no combat, and the claim is regarded as invention, which matters because it was used for years to explain him.
In May 1972 he killed ten-year-old Jack Blake, and in September eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill, both in Watertown. He was allowed to plead guilty to first degree manslaughter in the Hill case, and the Blake charge was dropped. He was sentenced to twenty-five years and paroled in April 1987, having served fourteen and a half.
Parole officials moved him three times because towns found out who he was, and settled him in Rochester without telling the public. Between March 1988 and December 1989 he killed eleven women there. Most were working the streets on Lyell Avenue, and most were left in the Genesee River gorge, in Northampton Park, or along Salmon Creek. He returned to the bodies.
The women killed around Rochester were Dorothy Blackburn, twenty-seven; Anna Marie Steffen, twenty-eight; Patricia Ives, twenty-five; Frances Brown, twenty-two; June Stotts, thirty; Marie Welch, twenty-two; Darlene Trippi, thirty-two; June Cicero, thirty-four; Kimberly Logan; and Elizabeth Gibson.
He was caught from the air. On January 3, 1990, a State Police helicopter crew searching the Salmon Creek area saw a man on a bridge above a body that had not yet been recovered, masturbating over it. They took his registration and traced the car. He confessed over eleven days of interviews.
He was tried in Rochester in the autumn of 1990. His defence was insanity, resting on the Vietnam claims and on a rare extra Y chromosome later shown not to be present, and the jury rejected it in six hours. He was convicted in December 1990 of ten counts of second degree murder and sentenced to 250 years, then pleaded guilty in Wayne County to an eleventh, Elizabeth Gibson. He gave prison interviews for years and enjoyed them. He died of cardiac arrest at Albany Medical Center on November 10, 2008, aged sixty-three.
The case is remembered in New York less for what he did than for how he was released. The parole board that let him out in 1987 had before it a psychiatric file describing a man who had killed two children and was likely to kill again.