By Tod Bohannon
On the 11th day of September, 2004, I walked into the Sullivan Correctional Facility a little shaken. It would be the first time I sat with someone who was found guilty of murdering 10 women.
I walked into the visitation room along side several women who were there to see their loved ones. I followed their lead since they appeared to have done this before. We walked to a guard sitting at a table and handed him the slip with our name and the name of the offender we were there to visit. The guard told us which table we could sit at and we sat down. There were already offenders in the room who had started their visit so I had the chance to scroll through the room to get a feel for it. There were 50 tables with 2 chairs at each one. Against the wall there were 7 vending machines for food and drink items.
The door buzzer would go off and the offenders would then walk in the room. This happened several times with no sign of Shawcross. Finally after waiting 30 minutes the buzzer sounds and Arthur walks through. He scans the room and I raise my hand a little in case he doesn't notice me from the photo I had sent him, that was taken a year or so earlier. He walks over and tells me to wait and he walks over to the guard. I hear the guard tell him we can sit where ever we want and Shawcross says I'm fine were I'm at.
He sits down and asks how my flight was, and says he thought I had gotten lost when they hadn’t come and gotten him by 9:30. I explained to him after I landed the day before at the airport, and got my rental car, I had gone to the motel and read over some notes I made about him through our correspondence, afterwards driving to find the prison so I wouldn’t get lost on the day I was going to visit. Then he asks if I am nervous and I say a little. As we talked he constantly looked me in the eye to see if I was paying attention or not, or maybe to see if I was not dominant in any way. I looked him back in the eye as he talked as a sign or respect and to let him know I was paying attention to his every word.
After a while we talked about other people like Nico Claux, David Berkowitz, and Charles Ng. He also told me about other pen pals he writes, what they do, and where they live. We joke about me not being able to smoke and I ask him if he is thirsty or hungry. He tells me he would like some coffee and that he loves popcorn. So I got out the bundle of ones I got that morning at the gas station and he explained he could not touch the money. We walk to the vending machines together and I insert the dollar and receive the change and I proceed to get him some corn-on-the-cob flavored popcorn. We sat down after it finished popping, and we discovered on his coffee cup that he had gotten a straight flush! Then we talked about my diabetes for awhile, afterwards which he talks about his favorite fishing hole being Russell Station on Lake Ontario. He told me how he used to reach under the banks and catch fish with his hands.
Arthur spoke of a time when he was in Hawaii and he visited Diamond Head. Upon leaving he had got 2 bottles of wine and 2 cans of shaving cream. He put those in his luggage when boarding the airplane. In the air the cans of shaving cream had combusted and there was shaving cream everywhere in the luggage compartment, but he said the wine was nice and cool. We talked of the Vietnamese girls you could rent when he was in Vietnam, and the work he did there. He ran a small zamboni on the floors there and did some pressure washing on the walks outside. At 1:30 p.m. they start taking photos and he ask if I want to have a photo taken. I say sure and he asks if he could also have one taken by himself for duplication. I told him that was fine and we walk up and they fill out the paper and I pay them the $3.50. He takes the one photo by himself, and then I stand beside him and we have our photo taken. We sit down and I see the picture is not what I wanted, so I ask him if the next day we can try again. He says sure. Then I tell him I plan on leaving around 1:00 p.m. the next day just to make sure I get back in time. He seems disappointed, but agrees that it is a good idea. We wind down that day with him telling me about his father’s home place and his mother. The guards tell me it's time to wrap it up about 10 minutes until three.
I wake up about 8:00 a.m, jump in the shower, get dressed, and head to the market. Arthur wants me to pick him up fresh vegetables. I find a Safe Way and go in and get lettuce, tomatoes, onions, green peppers, cauliflower, green grapes, Hershey bars, cookies, jellybeans, and spice drops. I also grab a box they were throwing away and some tape. I go out to the new Ford Escape which I'm falling more in love with by the minute and put everything in the box, tape it up, and write his name and number on it. When I get back to Sullivan I walk in and set the box where the mail room window is. There is a female officer there who is extremely nice and chatty. She opens the box and looks my name up on her computer. Then she inspects, weighs, and inventories the items as each offender is only allowed 35 pounds of food per month. Then I go to the visiting room and wait for Arthur's arrival. We spent another day talking about killers, collectors, and artists. I learn that we know some of the same people. We talked about New York City and the surrounding areas there. At 2:00 p.m. I stand up. He shakes my hand, thanks me for visiting him, and wishes me a safe trip home.
Editor's note: this is a contributor's account of two days he spent visiting Arthur Shawcross at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in September 2004, published as he wrote it. It is a record of a prison visit rather than an interview, and almost nothing in it is about the murders, which is what makes it worth keeping. The opening line understates the case. Shawcross was convicted in December 1990 of ten counts of second degree murder and sentenced to 250 years, then pleaded guilty to an eleventh in Wayne County. Before any of that he killed two children in Watertown in 1972, ten-year-old Jack Blake and eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill; he was allowed to plead to first degree manslaughter in the Hill case, the Blake charge was dropped, and he was paroled in April 1987 after fourteen and a half years of a twenty-five year sentence. The women he killed around Rochester between 1988 and 1990 were mostly working the streets on Lyell Avenue. One exchange in the piece is worth reading against the record. Shawcross talks about Vietnam and says he ran a small zamboni on the floors and pressure washed the walkways. For years he told psychiatrists and reporters that he had killed and mutilated Vietnamese women there, and that account formed part of the insanity defence his jury rejected in six hours; his service record shows no such thing. The mundane version he gave a visitor over vending-machine coffee is the closer one to the truth. He was fifty-nine at the time of this visit and died at Albany Medical Center on November 10, 2008, four years later.