On the morning of January 3, 1990, a New York State Police helicopter flying low over Salmon Creek, west of Rochester, spotted what the crew took for a body on the ice under the Route 31 bridge, and, on the bridge above it, a man standing beside a parked Chevrolet with his fly open, looking down. The body was June Cicero, thirty-four, missing for seventeen days. The man drove off toward a nursing home on Spencerport Road, where his girlfriend worked, and the crew radioed the plate. Two days later, Arthur Shawcross, a forty-four-year-old salad preparer at a produce wholesaler on Lyell Avenue, sat down with police and, over eleven days of interviews, admitted to strangling eleven women in twenty-one months. Rochester learned in the same week that he had done it before. Eighteen years earlier he had killed two children in Watertown, been allowed to plead to manslaughter, and been paroled in 1987 over the written objection of the psychiatrist who examined him. The state had then moved him from town to town until it found one that did not know who he was.
Jack Blake was ten years old and lived with his mother, Mary, and his brothers on Watertown's north side. On May 7, 1972 (some accounts say April 7), he went out to go fishing with a neighbor his family did not much like, a twenty-six-year-old veteran with a record for arson and burglary who lived down the street, and did not come home. His body was found in the woods on September 5, after a telephone tip, beaten, and Shawcross said years later that he had eaten part of it, which no one has ever been able to prove or disprove. Karen Ann Hill was eight, visiting Watertown with her mother over Labor Day weekend from Rochester, and on September 2, 1972, she was found under the Pearl Street bridge over the Black River, raped and strangled, with leaves and mud packed into her mouth and clothes. Shawcross had been seen with her. Shawcross, who had married his third wife, Penny Sherbino, on April 22, 1972, was arrested on October 3 and confessed to both killings. The Jefferson County district attorney, worried that little evidence tied him to Jack Blake beyond his own word and that early psychiatric evaluations might persuade a jury he was not responsible, let him plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the Hill case and dropped the Blake charge. Penny Sherbino divorced him soon afterward. He got twenty-five years, the maximum for the plea. Mary Blake spent the rest of her life saying that her son's death had been bargained away.
He was born in Kittery, Maine, on June 6, 1945, and raised in Watertown, the eldest of four children of a paper-mill worker, a bed-wetter and a bully who was held back twice and left school at fifteen. He was drafted in 1967 and served a year in Vietnam as a supply specialist with the 4th Infantry Division. His accounts of that year, told to psychiatrists, prison interviewers and a biographer, of hunting Vietnamese women in the jungle, roasting and eating them, were the centerpiece of his defense in 1990 and of a good deal of what has been written about him since; his service record shows no combat and no one who served with him has corroborated any of it. He came home to Watertown in 1969, to a second marriage that lasted months, to arson and burglary convictions and a short prison term, and to the children.
He served fourteen and a half years in Attica, Auburn and Green Haven. His prison file described him as a schizoid personality who should not be released, and a psychiatrist wrote in 1987 that he was likely to kill again; the parole board released him in April 1987 anyway, on his eighth application, into the care of a woman named Rose Walley, who had corresponded with him and whom he would later marry. Parole officers placed him in Binghamton, where the newspaper found out within weeks and the town ran him off; then in Delhi, in the Catskills, where the same thing happened; then in Fleischmanns. In June 1987 the Division of Parole put him in Rochester, a city big enough that nobody would notice, and told the police department only that a paroled child killer was living on Alexander Street. It did not tell the public. He took a job with a food distributor, kept a girlfriend named Clara Neal alongside his wife, and drove Clara's car, a blue Dodge Omni, out along Lyell Avenue at night.
Dorothy Blackburn was twenty-seven, a mother of three known on Lyell Avenue as Dotsie, and disappeared on March 18, 1988; she was found in Salmon Creek six days later with her genitals bitten and torn, the first time in the series the killer's rage showed on a body. Anna Marie Steffen was twenty-eight and pregnant when she disappeared on July 9, 1988; she was found in the Genesee River gorge in September, and Shawcross said she had threatened to tell the police he had beaten her. Then he stopped for ten months. Dorothy Keeler was fifty-nine, homeless, sleeping in Genesee Valley Park and living on cans she collected; Shawcross said she had been his lover and had threatened to tell his wife, and he killed her on July 29, 1989, and cut off her head. Patricia Ives was twenty-five, known as Patty, and was strangled on September 29, 1989, behind the YMCA on Driving Park Avenue, a few blocks from where Keeler lay; the two were found within a week of each other in late October, and that was when Rochester understood it had one killer. June Stott was thirty, a shy woman with a learning disability who knew Shawcross and his wife as friends from the neighborhood and was not a sex worker; he took her to the river on October 23, 1989, strangled her, and cut her open from throat to pelvis. He came back to the body more than once. Marie Welch was twenty-two, with a daughter, and disappeared on November 5, 1989. Frances Brown was twenty-two and was found on November 11, 1989, in the gorge, on the bank below the Driving Park bridge. Elizabeth Gibson was twenty-nine and was killed on November 25, 1989, in Clara Neal's car, when, by his account, she kicked the gearshift and broke it; he left her in the woods across the county line in Wayne County, which is why she was tried separately. Darlene Trippi was thirty-two and was killed on December 15, 1989, and left in Northampton Park; Shawcross said she had laughed at him. June Cicero was thirty-four and had known Shawcross well enough to warn other women about him; he took her on December 17, 1989, and returned to saw through her frozen body with a hacksaw the day the helicopter saw him. Felicia Stephens was twenty, and was the last, on December 28, 1989. Kimberly Logan, thirty, was found on November 15, 1989, with leaves stuffed in her mouth as Karen Ann Hill had been; police believed she was his, but he was never charged with her death and it is not among his convictions.
The Rochester task force had been working since the fall, with an FBI profile that predicted the killer would return to his victims and that he was a white man in his thirties or forties who knew the streets and drove a car. Detectives had quietly asked the sex workers on Lyell Avenue who they were afraid of, and Shawcross's name came up: a heavy, gray-haired man on a bicycle who paid for company and did not always want sex. It was the helicopter that made the case, and the confession that closed it. He was questioned first by Rochester police and then by the State Police, with his wife and girlfriend telling investigators about the cars and the hours, and on January 5, 1990, having been arrested on the strength of the bridge sighting and the borrowed car, he began to talk. He took detectives to bodies not yet found, Marie Welch and Darlene Trippi among them, and described each killing without much visible feeling.
The trial opened in Monroe County Court on November 5, 1990, before Judge Donald Wisner, on ten counts of second-degree murder. The prosecutor, Charles Siragusa, had the confessions, the cars and the bodies. The defense, led by Thomas Cocuzzi, did not contest the killings and argued insanity, and its case became a national event when the psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis testified for days about childhood abuse, brain damage from an old head injury, a cyst on the temporal lobe, an extra Y chromosome, and multiple personality, and the jury watched videotape of Shawcross under hypnosis speaking in the high voice of his mother and in the voice of a thirteenth-century English cannibal named Ariemes. The state's psychiatrist, Park Dietz, told the jury that the man was a sadist and a liar who knew exactly what he was doing. The jury took six and a half hours on December 13, 1990, to convict on all ten counts, and Wisner gave him twenty-five years to life on each, consecutive, which the newspapers rounded to 250 years. In Wayne County three months later he pleaded guilty to Elizabeth Gibson and took another twenty-five to life. The extra Y chromosome was later shown not to exist.
He spent eighteen years at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, where he gave interviews to anyone who asked, sold artwork and signed cards through a dealer, and told a British documentary crew in 2006 about eating Vietnamese girls. He died at Albany Medical Center on November 10, 2008, aged sixty-three, of cardiac arrest after complaining of leg pain. His daughter, Margaret Deming, claimed the body.
The New York State Legislature held hearings on the Division of Parole in 1990, and the state's handling of his release, the secret placement in Rochester and the failure to warn the police department properly became the standard example, cited for a decade, whenever the state considered how released violent offenders should be tracked. Mary Blake died in 2016, having outlived him by eight years, still writing to newspapers about the plea deal that let her son's killer count for one child instead of two.