DID ARTHUR SHAWCROSS KILL KATHY AND GEORGE-ANN?

Article BY MICHAEL BENSON - Art by NICOLAS CASTELAUX

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I grew up in a rural area south of Rochester NY, close to the Genesee Junction, where the Pennsylvania Railroad crossed the New York Central. Just south of the junction was an ancient stone trestle that carried the north/south trains over Black Creek, about a mile upstream from where that creek contributed to the Genesee River.

When I was nine years old, among my neighbors were George-Ann Formicola, 14, and Kathy Bernhard, 16, who liked to swim in the creek next to that stone bridge. On the evening of June 25, 1966, graduation night at the high school, the girls walked along the railroad tracks to the trestle wearing nothing but their two-piece bathing suits and carrying towels and a transistor radio. They didn’t return. Their bodies were discovered almost a month later, on July 20, by a farmer investigating the smell, in thick bushes alongside a lover’s lane, about two miles to the west of where they were last seen. They had disappeared on one side of my backfield and been found on the other.

Autopsy revealed that George-Ann’s left breast had been cut off, and there were many stab wounds throughout her body and around her privates. Both of Kathy’s breasts were removed, along with her vagina and her uterus. Also, many stab wounds about Kathy’s body. A small white button of the type found on the sleeves of short-sleeved shirts was found under where Kathy’s left hand had been. They found Kathy’s rubber sandals but not George-Ann’s. Both bodies were found lying face up, 15 feet apart. Had the killer taken George-Ann’s flip-flops as souvenirs, or had she perhaps not worn any?

The crimes were never solved, and completely changed my life. Once a rural paradise, my community now lived under a dark cloud. Twenty years later, I read two books about the serial killer Arthur Shawcross. I had a particular interest in Shawcross because he was a Rochester serial killer, and I remembered the case well. Plus, as I was to learn, there were aspects of his story that made the little hairs at the back of my neck stand on end…

During the late 1980s, Rochester had several serial killers slaying streetwalkers. When I was visiting my parents in the Genesee Junction area, my wife and I had just had our first child, on the local TV news there were interviews with crack-damaged hookers on Lyell Avenue in the City of Rochester bragging of fearlessness: They only went with guys they knew. They were working in teams. Despite this, they continued to drop like flies.

Then, later, we were also visiting the folks for Christmas when the serial killer, Arthur J. Shawcross, was arrested, so I got to see the breaking news reports in real time.

Shawcross’s capture had been cleverly done. Sheriff’s Deputies found one of his victims’ blue jeans frozen in the snow off a rural road, but didn’t announce the discovery. Because sex killers got a charge out of their acts, sex killers were particularly prone to returning to the scene of a crime. Police knew this, and a few days after the discovery of the jeans a helicopter spotted a man near that scene standing over a corpse with his penis in his hand.

Shawcross’s murder trial was telecasted live on Rochester TV, to spectacular ratings. The trial featured talk of murder, rape, sodomy, pedophilia, mutilation, and cannibalism. The killer’s insanity defense, like almost all insanity defenses, was rejected angrily by the jury. He was convicted and sentenced to 250 years to life at the Sullivan County Correctional Facility in New York State.

But was Shawcross the Genesee Junction killer? There were many reasons to think he may have committed his first Rochester-area murders years before his official biography said he did.

As a youth, Shawcross established a pattern of traveling back roads by car, setting fires, and spending lengthy times alone in the woods. Shawcross turned 21 years old in June 1966. During that all-important month, he said he was floating around upstate New York “looking for a job.”

As was his lifelong habit when free, he parked his car and wandered along streams and rivers looking for secluded places to “fish”. (In 1972, around the time of his first two known murders, Shawcross’s then-wife Penny said he had gone on dozens of fishing trips during their time together but she’d never once known him to bring home any fish.)

He was sexually dysfunctional. He wanted a divorce from his first wife because she either wouldn’t give him oral sex, or wouldn’t allow him to give oral sex to her. He was already experiencing impotency problems that would plague him for the rest of his life.

Stress hit Shawcross hard. He ran away from it and became violent. And, so, with his marriage falling apart, he was feeling stress in June 1966 as he ran away from his marital difficulties, doing what he’d done since he was a boy, wandering alone in the woods and along waterways, every once in a while stopping to build a campfire and think sadistic thoughts.

Throughout his killing career, Shawcross’s violence was triggered by arguments with his mother or one of his wives, and his first marriage was crumbling. The most casual slight from a woman could trigger in him murderous rage, if he was already in an angry mood because of problems with a key woman in his life.

Shawcross was an expert with a knife. He’d hunted deer and could dress game. Later, Shawcross would talk about wanting to kill a doe so that he could use his hunting knife to remove the animal’s vagina. He said he was going to give the deer’s genitals to his girlfriend’s youngest son.

He bragged of his bestial escapades, sheep, cows, killed a chicken. For the previous two years he’d had a long series of short-lived unskilled jobs, including one in Watertown, N.Y., at which, as an apprentice butcher, he eviscerated animals at the Adams Meat Market in Adams, N.Y. That was where, he later boasted, for $85/week he learned to “slaughter 19 cows and bulls a day.” He sickened his wife with tales of his workday and once told his cousin, “At the end of the day that crick runs red!”

That summer, due to his domestic woes, Shawcross thought of himself as a bachelor again and “rambled.” According to Shawcross’s own words he did “strange things” that summer, drove around in a hot-looking 1958 Pontiac.

“I was picking up girls and having sex with them,” he boasted. “I couldn’t stop myself.”

The Genesee Junction girls disappeared in June 1966, their bodies were found in July and in August 1966 Shawcross and his wife separated for good. That summer Shawcross lived in the town of Sandy Creek, N.Y., which was well south of Watertown and only about 90 miles northeast of Rochester.

On April 6, 1967, Shawcross was inducted into the army, went to Vietnam, and came back telling horrific stories in which he killed young females. But, since they were “Viet Cong chicks” they weren’t really murders at all. This was war and by taking out those enemy girls, he was doing his duty for America.

He claimed that he would go off on his own into the jungles of South Vietnam, and would stay for two, three days at a time. He said, “I’d look for the enemy by myself.”

In one story, he was wandering around the jungles of South Vietnam, a lone rogue warrior, when he happened upon the two teenaged girls bathing nude in a stream, waist deep in water. “They were both VC (Viet Cong). I mutilated them,” Shawcross later told a forensic psychologist. He claimed he had cut off one of the girl’s heads and placed it on a pole. He further described his Vietnam “experience”: “I took her and butchered her like a steer, neck down. I cut the body down the middle then cleaved the backbone to wash the blood out.”

It was the same thing he would have done, he explained, if he’d killed a deer. During one version of this story, he then cut a breast off the girl, roasted it over a fire before eating it. It was like eating “charco-broiled pork” he said.

After his Rochester arrest, Shawcross complained that mutilation murder of the two girls in Vietnam haunted him most. He would dream about it and wake up crying.

Talking to cops and shrinks after his Rochester arrest, he engaged freely in re-writing his biography to his advantage, and it would have been perfectly in keeping for him to transpose his earliest murders onto the rogue warrior actions of a self-proclaimed war hero.

And he didn’t always keep his stories straight, such as the time he started to talk about how he had killed a woman in Vietnam and then stopped and admitted that he was actually discussing “the ones here.”

After Shawcross’s killing career ended he increasingly leaned on his “Rambo” stories to boost his ego. He considered his Nam kills his “accomplishments,” his “achievements.” He used post-traumatic stress syndrome from the war as an excuse for his later murders.

Those war stories were horrific, sure—and they were also apparently untrue. According to his military records, he served two six-month tours as a supply and parts specialist and was honorably discharged in April 1969. Shawcross’s Vietnam stories were apparently made up out of whole cloth, as he never made a jungle patrol. Revealingly, none of Shawcross’s Vietnam tales involved him killing men. All of his claimed battle kills were of females. So Shawcross’s war stories were fiction.

In the summer of 1972, Shawcross committed his first two known murders in his hometown, Watertown N.Y., in the Adirondack Mountains, 200 miles from Rochester. The victims were kids, nine and twelve, a young boy, then a girl. The girl was from Rochester N.Y. and he killed her under a bridge over the Black River. (The Genesee Junction victims had gone swimming near a bridge over Black Creek.) The boy was sexually mutilated after death, perhaps for cannibalistic reasons. After his arrest for killing the girl, Shawcross told his interrogators that the stuff he did in Watertown was nothing compared to what he’d done in Vietnam.

Before Shawcross’s actual military career was known, psychiatrists took his Vietnam stories at face value and commented that Shawcross had blurred borders of what was appropriate in Vietnam compared to what was appropriate in Watertown, N.Y.

Shawcross’s childhood history demonstrated that Shawcross never had a firm grip on what was and wasn’t appropriate.

Slowly, under psychiatric examination, Shawcross revealed himself to be an obvious sexual sadist from childhood. There were still people in the area that knew Shawcross when he was a boy and described him even then as evil.

“There was talk that he was Satan,” said one former schoolmate. Shawcross was a violent bully who spent long stretches alone in the woods with a loaded .22 at his side.

Shawcross got out of prison for the Watertown murders in 1987. Because of an incredible plea bargain after which he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the death of the girl and was never officially charged with the murder of the boy, he served only fifteen years.

He was relocated to Rochester against his wishes. There he murdered prostitutes and other vulnerable women of the street by strangulation, and dumped many of the bodies near or in the Genesee River. Several victims had had their vaginas removed.

One of the last prostitute murders was strangled, but Shawcross came back later to play with the body. He used a saw to remove the entire crotch. “I ate it,” he later boasted.

A comparison of Shawcross’s behavior and that of the Genesee Junction killer was compelling, so much so that in 1999 I sent a written summary of my findings to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, specifically Captain Maureen Chisholm of the Criminal Investigation Division.

On April 19, Detective Sergeant Gary Kaola called me at work and told me that in response to my letter, the MCSO had sent a team of interrogators to the Sullivan County Correctional Institute and that they had asked Shawcross if he knew anything about Black Creek or the Genesee Junction girls.

Shawcross put his chin on his chest, closed his eyes, balled his hands into fists and refused to discuss it. Tellingly, it was the same reaction his interrogators got when they asked him questions about his mother. It was his standard response to what he considered a tough question.

“So, that’s about all we can do,” Sgt. Koala said. “I can’t really talk to you about it because it’s an active investigation.” I thanked him and he hung up. I felt great. I had, by proxy anyway, gotten into Shawcross’s face and confronted his entire ego system. He’d had a chance to deny he was the Genesee Junction killer and refused.

Sue, the Genesee Junction murders had some things in common with the Shawcross methodology—quick kills. sexual mutilation, all victims killed in a car or outdoors, proximity to waterways, bridges, and railroad tracks—but there were also key differences.

All but one of Shawcross’s known kills were by manual strangulation (he killed one by hitting her with a log) whereas George-Ann and Kathy were killed with a knife. (Although the Genesee Junction murders would have preceded the others by five years, and when serial killers do change their method of killing, this evolution usually goes from the messy to the neat, as would be the case here. Also, it should be noted that Shawcross’s description of his first murders, which he said occurred in Vietnam, involved young girls bathing and killed with a knife.

Also, Shawcross’s other murders were all singles. If Shawcross was the killer, he never again took on two victims at once. Again, this could merely be a sign of learning, evolving as a killer. Two victims, especially scrappy ones, might have presented unanticipated problems.

The theory was not conclusive, of course. Not only was there no evidence that Shawcross was even in Monroe County on the night the girls disappeared, maybe the best argument against Shawcross as the Genesee Junction killer, was that serial killers as a rule start killing close to home and commit their crimes further away as they go along. In that sense, the Watertown murders resembled the start of a killing career.

But a look at the big picture reveals that none of his known killings involved encountering a victim more than two or three miles from home. In that sense, the Genesee Junction murders would have been very different, but he was much younger as well, 21 and driving a hot car, a souped-up 1958 Pontiac that had once belonged to the county sheriff’s department.

According to his own scenario for the time period he was trying to avoid his wife, with whom he was breaking up, and “searching” for girls to “pick up and have sex with,” and wanderlust may have taken him to the Genesee River and its attractively remote tributaries.

It is not a new concept to suppose Shawcross killed before his Watertown murders. His wife in the 1970s told police that she’d often wondered if Shawcross hadn’t been a killing machine for some time, not just the horrific stories he told about Vietnam, but when he was stationed in Oklahoma before going overseas as well.

He had a few methods for finding victims. When his victims were prostitutes he picked them up on the street, usually in a car, then led them to a secluded place, often near water and a bridge, to kill them and dispose of their bodies.

His Watertown murders, however, involved camping out in a secluded place and waiting for victims to wander onto the scene, in one case in a woods and in another by a bridge at the bank of a river.

Certainly the Genesee Junction killer could have been lying in wait somewhere in the Genesee Junction area, when George-Ann and Kathy were wandering Genesee Junction. Killers who sought out their victims in this manner often referred to the process as they would if they’d climbed a tree awaiting a wandering buck.

Shawcross liked victims he could physically dominate. Check. And he liked brunettes. Check. Kathy may have earned bonus points. Her hair was black.

Criminal profilers divide murder into four components of killer behavior: 1) antecedent behavior and planning; 2) the act of murder; 3) body disposal, and 4) post crime behavior.

Regarding number-one, profilers have come to believe that a serial killer’s victims are rarely chosen at random, and even those that seem random may fall into a clear pattern if investigators only had the key to the killer’s criteria.

It appeared on the surface that, based on victim-choice, the Genesee Junction murders were drastically different from the Watertown murders, which in turn differed from the Rochester murders.

Shawcross shifted from a little boy to a little girl to hookers. But gender and age may have been secondary characteristics as far as he was concerned. The victims had something in common: they were all small in stature and easy to physically control.

There were large prostitutes in Rochester, and we know by his choices in wives and girlfriends that he was sexually attracted to large women, all of his victims were under five-six. None weighed more than 120 pounds. There were blonde and redheaded prostitutes in Rochester as well, but Shawcross only chose the ones with dark hair.

The antecedent behavior most likely to lead to murder was conflict with a female, parental conflict, and financial, employment, and marital problems. Shawcross’s wife wouldn’t allow him to give her oral sex. What more symbolic response that to kill a girl, and steal her vagina, which could be eaten—figuratively or literally—at his leisure?

Every detail of a killer’s crime reveals personality. Sociopathic killers have a warped view of dominion. Because the world has been unfair to them, they feel they deserve the right to do as they please, regardless of senselessness or damage. As children, killers as a rule do not recall ever fantasizing about happy things. When their imaginations were at work, they traveled to the darkest places. These children, when they do play with others, will tend to take charge of the play and “cast” playmates as extensions of their sick fantasies. Playmates don’t last long under those circumstances. FBI studies verify our intuitive conclusion that these future killers, when they run out of people to play with, turn to animals. Childhood cruelty to animals—along with abuse of other children, destructive play patterns, disregard for others, fire setting, stealing and destroying property—is considered a primary indicator that a person may one day become a murderer.

Killers were found more likely than non-killers to have fetishes, i.e. eroticizing objects like women’s shoes, underwear, and rope. In these cases, the fetish items tend to be included in their crime scenes.

Sex killers as a rule had problems with normal sexual relationships. It was not uncommon for a sex killer’s first rape to also be his first real sexual act.

Not all of the killers studied by the FBI mutilated their victims after the murders, but those who did considered the mutilation the “ultimate expression of their perversion.” In almost all cases, the mutilation occurred post-mortem.

Once the victim was dead the killer felt that he had “ultimate control.” The mutilation sometimes occurred just after the murder but in other cases, the killer returned to the scene of the crime to further play with the corpse.

As was true in the Genesee Junction murders, genital mutilation and breast amputation accounted for most of the mutilation. Psychologists believed that genital mutilation was an attempt by the killer to remove gender identification from the victims and render them non-female. Of course, Shawcross said that he mutilated the genitals of his only known male victim as well.

Profilers find insight into a killer’s personality by the means of body disposal. What state is the body in? What is the location of the dumpsite? We didn’t know all of the details regarding the Genesee Junction dumpsite, but we knew it resembled other Shawcross dumpsites.

The bodies were left face up, hidden in bushes. That was very Shawcross-like. He always sought to put time between the disposal of his victims and the discovery of their remains. Because the dumpsite was so far from home, it is more likely that all of the post-mortem mutilations occurred immediately following the murders.

Can we link Shawcross to the Genesee Junction murders based on their similarity to Shawcross’s Vietnam fantasies? It’s a theory with a shaky foundation. Experience tells us that all sex mutilation cases and fantasies have certain things in common. The prototypical mutilation killer, Jack the Ripper, left behind crime scenes with much in common to the one left by Kathy and George-Ann’s killer.

The cons may outweigh the pros, but there is one last coincidence on the pro side. Shawcross once told a psychologist following his Rochester arrest that he didn’t like Rochester because, among other reasons, he’d once been fishing near Rochester and was attacked by five men.

During my investigation into the Genesee Junction murders, a local man told me that, soon before the murders he and four friends had encountered a man fishing naked in Black Creek. It happened a long time ago and all, but he could’ve sworn the guy was a young Arthur Shawcross.

MICHAEL BENSON is the author of a dozen true crime books, including The Devil at Genesee Junction: The Murders of Kathy Bernhart and George-Ann Formicola, 6/66, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield, November 16, 2015.

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Details of Arthur Shawcross’s Known Crime Scenes
No. Victim Age Date Disappeared Date Found

1. Jack Blake 10 May 7, 1972 September 6, 1972

Only known male victim. Shawcross had previously taken the victim fishing. Murder took place in Watertown, N.Y. just upstream along Kelsey Creek from Black River, near a bridge, and railroad tracks. Shawcross was seen around the time of Blake’s disappearance exiting the woods behind a motel/gas station near North Watertown Cemetery. His boots were muddy and carried a broken fishing rod he said he’d found beside Kelsey Creek. Four months passed before the body was discovered and decomposition was nearly complete. Skeleton was naked. Some of the bones were out of order because of animal activity, and several of the boy’s teeth had been knocked out during the murder. Police found the victim’s clothes 45 feet away. The arms of the boy’s green jacket had been tied in a knot. Cinders found on the bottoms of the boy’s feet and scratches on his arms indicated that, at one point, he’d gotten away and had run through thorny brush as far as the railroad tracks, but the killer caught him and dragged him back into the woods. Dr. Richard S. Lee performed the autopsy and wrote that the boy had been stripped naked before he was killed. Cause of death: most likely asphyxiation and/or strangulation. Years later, following his Rochester arrest, Shawcross told a psychiatrist that he’d cut off the boy’s “penis and balls” and ate them.

2. Karen Ann Hill 8 September 2, 1972 September 2, 1972

Victim was from Rochester, and was visiting Watertown. A stranger to Shawcross. Was thought by her mother to be playing in the backyard of 503 Pearl Street in Watertown, N.Y., just around the corner from Jack Blake’s home on Water Street, and a block north of the Black River. Her body was found about ten hours after her disappearance beside the river, underneath the iron Pearl Street Bridge. Body was at the bottom of an embankment, covered with concrete paving slabs, face down, with a red circle around the neck. There were bruises on her face. She was naked from the waist down. Her red, white, and blue shorts were discovered beside the body, bloodstained. Also bloody and nearby were her blue panties. The Medical Examiner determined that, when found, the girl had been dead for eight to 12 hours. She had been punched in the face and stomach, raped and sodomized so viciously that her skin was torn. There was semen present both in vagina and rectum. Mud was stuffed into the mouth and throat. Shawcross was seen around the time of the murder on the south side of the River, on Factory Street, walking past an old plant and some railroad tracks. Shawcross, police came to believe, had been fishing in Black River near the bridge. Karen was crossing the bridge, having wandered off from the backyard on Pearl Street on her own, and was lured down to Shawcross’s location below. Shawcross later said he did it because of a “Vietnam flashback.” When later describing this murder Shawcross called the area “along the creek bed.”

3. Dorothy Blackburn 27 March 15, 1988 March 24, 1988

First known Rochester victim. Tiny prostitute with dark curly hair and full lips. Shawcross picked her up off the street in a car on Saratoga Street, just off Lake Avenue in Rochester and, after an attempted trick in a parking lot behind Nick Tahou’s Restaurant on West Main Street in Downtown Rochester, he manually strangled her in Northampton Park, off Route 104, west of Rochester. He tore out a portion of her vagina with his teeth, and dropped the body off of a bridge into Salmon Creek. Workers cleaning out the culvert discovered her nine days later. The body was face down, covered with a layer of silt and resting against a chunk of concrete that turned out to be the missing home plate from a nearby baseball field. She was clothed in jeans, a hoodie, and sneakers. Her blue shirt was pulled up so that her midriff was bare. Her left eye was closed. The autopsy report read: “Multiple lacerations vaginal area, right labia minora has 3 cm vertical and 1.5 cm horizontal laceration from clitoral area. Lateral to this, laceration labia majora left of clitoris.” Also: “Contusions to right supraclavicular area and hemorrhage into right neck strap muscles, consistent with manual strangulation.”

4. Anna Marie Steffen 28 July 9, 1988 September 9, 1988

Diminutive (95 lbs.), pregnant, and homeless prostitute. Met Shawcross in a bar on Lake Avenue. According to Shawcross, the murder occurred after a trick went bad in the weeds near a construction site at the top of the gorge cliff, on the river’s west bank, near the Driving Park Bridge, an impressive structure that spans the gorge just below the Genesee River’s final waterfall. However, around the time of Steffen’s disappearance, she was seen by a friend, crying, upset as she crossed the Driving Park Bridge, complaining that “someone was after her.” According to Shawcross, someone came near their spot and he was afraid that discovery might result in a parole violation. When she threatened to scream he “grabbed her by the throat and just held her and squeezed her until she quit.” When she was dead, he just “rolled her off the edge of the cliff” until she came to a rest “behind a bush.” A man searching for discarded deposit bottles discovered the body two months later alongside the river gorge. He first saw a leg bone protruding, and then noticed that it was wearing clothes. The body was hidden in weeds and ferns, partially covered with sticks and slabs of concrete. The victims white tank top was found bunched around the left wrist bone and the jeans were inside out and around the skeleton’s ankles. Fifteen feet from the body were the victim’s flip-flops. Near the body was a large rock. When lifted, police found a hank of hair that had been ripped from the skull. Decomposition had occurred rapidly because of the summer heat. Because the remains were skeletal, a forensic anthropologist (like the titular character on the Bones TV show) was called in to identify them. A reconstruction of the victim’s face formulated from the skull was so accurate that Steffen’s father ID’d her.

5. Dorothy Keeler 59 July 29, 1989 October 21, 1989

The oldest of Shawcross’s victims, Keeler was a destitute woman whom Shawcross had once hired to clean his apartment. On her final day, Keeler came to Shawcross’s house appearing filthy, and explained that she’d been, his words, “sleeping over here by the river under the trestle.” He allowed her to take a shower. Afterwards he took her to Seth Green Island, which was in the Genesee River. He said that they “were having an affair.” While there, he claimed, he caught her trying to take money out of his wallet so he struck her on the side of the head with a log, broke her neck, and killed her. He then carried her body to tall grass where it couldn’t be seen. Shawcross stayed with the body for hours before leaving, and later visited the body repeatedly. “There was a smell but no one wanted to check it out,” he said. Three months later he used a stick to separate the skull from the rest of the remains and toss it into the river. Three fishermen from Pennsylvania seeking spawner salmon discovered the remains three months later. They said they were “bones in clothes,” partially covered with weeds and maple-tree branches. The skeleton was in a fetal position and wore jeans that had been pulled down to mid thigh. A pair of high-heeled shoes was found a few feet away.

6. Patricia Ives 25 September 29, 1989 October 27, 1989

Prostitute picked up by Shawcross in the Princess Diner on Lake Avenue. He murdered her behind the fence at the rear of the YMCA. The spot overlooked the river gorge just south of Driving Park Bridge, on the west bank of the Genesee River. Strangled her while having anal sex with her. It “took her a long time to die” and Shawcross had his “first orgasm in a long while.” Shawcross put her body up against the fence and covered her with a large board. He murdered Keeler and Ives exactly two months apart. The two women’s remains were found six days apart. A boy who climbed through the fence at the back of the Y to retrieve an errant baseball found Ives’ remains. He saw a foot protruding from underneath a large sheet of cardboard. The remains were found face up wearing pants and a sweater, no underwear.

7. June Stotts 30 October 23, 1989 November 23, 1989

Stotts was neither a hooker nor a drug addict, but rather a shy, slow, and perhaps slightly schizophrenic woman who had befriended Shawcross and his girlfriend. Shawcross picked her up in his car. She was sitting on a park bench on Bloss Street, in Edgerton Park. He took her to Turning Point Park, on the Genesee’s west bank, across and a mile downstream (north) from his previous murder. The river at that spot had been widened so barges could turn around. From there, they walked down a “cinder road” to a spot beside the river where a barge was tied up. The location was beneath a cement plant and the air reeked of standing water. The only way to get there was to follow a dirt path through the foliage off Boxart St. Stotts was strangled to death. He removed her clothes and hid her body in bushes. He threw her clothes in the water 30 feet from the body. He remained at the site for three hours, presumably molesting the remains. He revisited the body a week later and had sex with her corpse. He used Stotts’ own knife on the body and gutted it from throat to crotch, as a hunter might gut a deer. “I cut out her pussy and ate it,” he later confessed. When done with her he dragged her into nearby standing water and threw a discarded rug over her. A man walking his dog discovered her body on Thanksgiving Day. On the ground was a piece of carpet with a human foot sticking out from under it. Crime-scene investigators could tell right away that the face-up victim had been moved some time after death. Blood had settled at the top of the corpse, so it was face down at first and then later flipped over. One knee had been pushed up under the body so that the buttocks were raised up in the air. Police found a pocketknife nearby and a bloody towelette. No semen was found on or near the remains.

8. Maria Welch 22 November 5, 1989 January 5, 1990

Welch was a diminutive, blonde, bespectacled, heroin-addicted prostitute. Shawcross picked her up in a car in front of Mark’s Texas Hots hot-dog stand at 48 Lake Ave., just north of Lyell Avenue. She was five-two, 100 lbs., brown hair and eyes, with tattoos of a unicorn, a marijuana leaf, and the letters L-O-V-E on the knuckles of her left hand. Before she disappeared she’d been plagued by prank phone calls, by a man pretending to be a cop, taunting her about prostitution and threatening death. (Twenty-three years earlier, the Bernhards had to suffer similar prank phone calls in which Kathy was called a whore, and Betty was threatened with death.) According to Shawcross’s account, the murder took place in a parking lot behind a warehouse somewhere in the Lyell/Lake area. Welch’s body was found, after Shawcross’s arrest and with the killer’s assistance, in a woods near Lake Ontario, not far from June Stott’s dumpsite. The remains—still wearing jeans, underpants, sneakers and two necklaces—were in a sitting position, head pitched forward almost to the knees.

9. Frances Brown 22 November 11, 1989 November 15, 1989

Shawcross picked Brown up in a car at the corner of Lake and Ambrose Avenues. He killed her in the car, parked in a parking lot behind a Kodak factory along the east bank of the Genesee River on Seth Green Drive, about a half-mile downstream (north) of “the island”. Murder took place in a parking lot close to the edge of the gorge. He claimed that he asphyxiated Brown by pushing his penis too far into her throat. After she was dead, he said, he French kissed and used her body to stay warm for a while and then rolled it off the “cliff”. A fisherman who disregarded a “Do Not Enter” sign off Seth Green Drive discovered her body only a few days later. He saw the body first from about 40 feet above on the slope leading down to the river. At first he thought it was a mannequin. The body, naked except for a pair of white go-go boots, was partially covered with uprooted grass, branches and twigs. The body was face down, on its knees with buttocks raised, arms encircling a concrete block, leaning to one side against a tree. The words “KISS OFF” were tattooed onto one of her buttocks. Because Brown was discovered so soon after her murder, the medical examiner was able to recreate events more precisely. Pinpoint hemorrhages behind her eyes indicated asphyxiation. Scrapes and bruises on the body revealed that she’d been beaten before she was murdered. No semen.

10. Elizabeth Gibson 29 November 25, 1989 November 27, 1989

Shawcross picked her up in his car from outside Mark’s Texas Hots, Lake Avenue. By this time police knew that there was a serial killer at work, but Shawcross gave no indication of changing his methods to avoid detection. He asphyxiated her in a parking lot at the corner of Avenue D and St. Paul St., just south of the Driving Park Bridge on the east bank of the river gorge. Site was directly across the river from the YMCA where he killed Patricia Ives. Shawcross traveled with the body, then dumped it facedown in a creek near a dirt road in Wayne County. He’d parked his car about 60 feet off County Line Road, 12 miles east of the city, and carried the body the remaining “few hundred feet” to the dumpsite. A hunter discovered her only hours later.

11. Darlene Trippi 32 December 15, 1989 January 5, 1990

Streetwalker picked up by Shawcross in a car on Daus Alley, just north of Lyell Avenue. Trippi was asphyxiated in a parking lot off Emerson Street near the back wall of a loading dock, between two tractor-trailers. Her body was dumped in a culvert, under a small bridge, off a desolate section of North Redman Road in Brockport, west of the city. Dumpsite was in the same general direction as Salmon Creek. Both sites would be accessed by leaving the city via Ridge Road West (Route 104). Her clothes were disposed of separately on Shawcross’s way home in a clothing box at the Salvation Army near the intersection of Manitou Road and Ridge Road West. Trippi’s remains were found after Shawcross was caught, and only with the killer’s assistance. The body, when discovered, was frozen in ice, spread-eagled and face up.

12. June Cicero 34 December 17, 1989 January 3, 1990

Originally from Brooklyn, Cicero was known as the oldest, toughest, and meanest prostitute working Rochester’s streets. She’d been a streetwalker for 15 years. A cocaine addict who worked longer hours than the other women to support her habit, she was no longer a beautiful woman, but had managed to keep her body in attractive shape. By the time she disappeared, the murders, fear, and cold, snowy weather had depleted the number of available street hookers in Rochester to just a few. As with all of Shawcross’s victims, she was small, five-two. He picked her up in a car in front of City Mattress on Lyell Avenue. He dumped the body in Salmon Creek near the Route 31 bridge, not far from Northampton Park and the dumpsite of Dorothy Blackburn. He kicked snow over the body to hide it. Disposed of some of her clothes in his favorite Salvation Army box at Ridge and Manitou. Returned to the scene “two or three days” later, pulled the body out of the ice, and used a “saber saw” to cut out her vagina. “Bone and all,” he explained. He drove around with the vagina in his car for a time. Then, after pulling out the hairs and wrapping it in a bar towel, “I ate it frozen,” he later bragged. It was the discovery of Cicero’s body—face frozen into the ice, buttocks raised—that coincided with Shawcross’s apprehension. She was wearing white knee socks, a white jacket, and one earring—the mate later found in a vehicle Shawcross had driven. Using black light at the crime scene, investigators discovered orange specks in the snow, which turned out to be human sawdust from the sawing of the victim’s crotch.

13. Felicia Stephens 20 December 28, 1989 December 31, 1989

Shawcross’s only known African-American victim. She was a slight woman, five-five, 115 lbs., with black hair, brown skin, and dark brown eyes. It should be noted that many (more than ten) black hookers were murdered in Rochester during this same time period, but, with the exception of Stephens, Shawcross denied involvement in any of those crimes—including that of Kimberly Logan, who is listed in some unofficial sources as a Shawcross victim. (Police believe that at least some of those murder were committed by a black man named John White who lived in the town of Gates, west of the city, and who had been seen behaving peculiarly near one of the dumpsites. When police showed White’s photo to hookers on the street, he was ID’d as a john who’d been seen with some of the murdered women. White was interrogated, but unlike Shawcross refused to talk; He was put under constant surveillance until his 1994 death by heart attack.)

Shawcross encountered Stephens while stopped at a red light at the corner of Plymouth and Main in Downtown Rochester. According to him, Stephens stuck her head in his open passenger side window, and he closed the window on her, catching her throat. She began screaming so he grabbed her head with both hands, pulled her into the car through the window and choked her to death. Then he took her to Northampton Park and dumped her. She was a found face down, buttocks slightly elevated, near the spot where June Cicero was dumped. Stephens’ jeans were discovered on New Year’s Eve by a Northampton Park guard who spotted a “dark patch” in a snow bank along the park’s border, and discovered the frozen pants after parking off of Sweden-Walker Road. Hours later a jogger discovered one of Stephens’ boots in the park. Police knew the body might be somewhere nearby but did not release this information. Four days later—on January 3, 1990 when visiting the nearby body of June Cicero—Shawcross was caught.