“I Must Have Done It”
Helene Hill, a divorced mother of four kids, lived in Rochester. She was dating a man from Watertown, and he invited her to visit his half sister and her husband with him in Watertown on the Labor Day long weekend. At the last minute, her daughter Karen, a blond eight-year-old girl, begged Helene to take her on the trip to Watertown.
Jack had been missing for four months when Helene and Karen arrived on Friday night in Watertown for the visit. Her boyfriend’s half sister lived at 503 Pearl Street, a few hundred feet from where Jack had lived on Water Street and from the Pearl Street Bridge, where Jack had first encountered Shawcross.
Saturday, September 2, was a beautiful warm day. Helene dressed Karen in a matching red, white and blue top and shorts in a Labor Day theme and prepared herself to meet her new boyfriend’s relatives later that day. That afternoon, Karen was anxious to play outside, and Helene let her out into the yard, warning her not to stray too far away. After checking on her daughter a few times to make sure she was staying close to the house, playing with a pet rabbit kept in the yard, Helene went to wash her hair. This was 1972 and Watertown was a peaceful little town and people in general were not very acutely afraid of child abduction or serial killers (the word did not even exist in popular usage). Although Helene was aware that her daughter Karen was sometimes disobedient and could boldly wander away, back home in Rochester she walked to school herself and was capable of finding her way home. Nor was Helene aware that a few hundred feet away from the house on Pearl Street was a bridge over a river.
A witness driving over the Pearl Street Bridge at around 2:00 p.m. recalled seeing a small blond girl climbing a low fence by the bridge and descending down to the stony embankment apparently in search of something. He recalled that a ten-speed bicycle was leaning against the bridge railing. Returning ten minutes later, the witness testified he no longer saw the girl but that the bike was still there.
Four teenage girls crossing the bridge a few minutes later would testify that they saw a man dressed in dark shorts, sandals and a white shirt climbing up from beneath the bridge onto the sidewalk. His bare legs were wet, and he attached two fishing rods to a white ten-speed bike with brown fenders.
A short time later, a sixteen-year-old boy having just crossed the Pearl Street Bridge carrying a shopping bag of clothes he had just bought spotted his weird neighbor from the Cloverdale Apartments pedaling his bike down the road. The boy rarely spoke with the man, but for some strange reason the man pulled his bike over to the youth and offered to buy him an ice-cream cone. Afterward, he offered to carry the shopping bag on the bike back to the apartment complex.
Even after Karen and the white rabbit had been missing for two hours, her mother still was not worried. Karen was a wanderer and the area seemed busy with people and the town seemed like a peaceful, friendly, quiet place. It wasn’t until four hours later that Helene became worried enough to call the police. This time, the report of a missing eight-year-old girl visiting from another town spurred the police into quick action. They immediately began a search.
Karen’s mother and search parties had walked back and forth across the Pearl Street Bridge several times, but it wasn’t until after dark around 9:00 p.m. that Karen Hill’s body was found under the bridge. The little girl was lying facedown near a cast-iron sewage pipe, her body covered by flat paving stones that had been tossed over the side of the bridge. She was naked from the waist down, and there were visible signs of bruising on her neck. Her Labor Day–themed red, white and blue shorts were tossed to the side and her blue underwear stuffed into a crevice. Both appeared to be crusted in blood. A preliminary examination that night would indicate that Karen had been punched in the face and stomach, strangled with her own shirt strings and viciously raped vaginally and anally. Her mouth and throat were plugged full with mud and sooty matter from the riverbank. The final cause of death was asphyxiation or suffocation. The white rabbit was never found.
Seeing mud and soot jammed into the little girl’s mouth, one of the cops at the scene immediately thought of the man connected to the disappearance of Jack four months earlier. Hadn’t he been recently fined for spanking and stuffing grass down a six-year-old boy’s pants?
When the police arrived to pick up Shawcross for questioning, they noticed he had clumsily attempted to disguise his bike by attaching a baby carrier to the back. It only made their suspicion worse when he claimed he could not remember when he had bought and attached the carrier to his bike but under repeated questioning admitted it was a few hours after Karen’s disappearance. With all the witnesses placing Shawcross on the bridge near the time of Karen’s disappearance, police eventually squeezed out a vague confession in the murder of the girl. He said, “I must have done it.” Then they began working on him for the disappearance of Jack.
Shawcross eventually had as much as confessed to killing Jack and was almost ready to take police to his body when a renewed and proper search by police located the little boy’s body in the woods near train tracks about a mile north of the Cloverdale Apartments. His naked, decomposing body was found hidden beneath large strips of peeled tree bark. Thirty-five feet away from the body, police located his T-shirt, a green jacket with its arms tied together in a knot, his socks and running shoes. A hundred and twenty-six feet away police found the boy’s jeans and underwear. Indications were that the boy was stripped of his clothing while still alive because the clothing had not been stained by decomposing body matter. Police found one of Jack’s teeth knocked out on the ground. Cinders from the railway bed adhering to the bottom of the boy’s feet indicated that he must have been stripped naked and chased through the bush and made it to the railway tracks before being sadistically dragged back into the woodland and murdered. It had been a violent, terrifying death for the child. The body was too decomposed to determine cause of death or whether he had been sexually assaulted. The medical examiner speculated that death was likely by strangulation or asphyxiation.
“Extreme Emotional Disturbance”
The prosecution of Shawcross would be as bungled as the investigation was. The semen samples taken from Karen’s body were never tested for blood type (this was still in the pre-DNA era) and thus there was no evidence of a blood type match to Shawcross; potentially “reasonable doubt” in a jury’s mind. His confession had been vague. The body of Jack had been found before Shawcross could lead police to it, and the evidence linking him to his murder was even more tenuous. Once the body had been found, Shawcross clammed up. There was no longer any advantage for him to lead police to the body in exchange for lighter charges. Without a confession and with such tenuous evidence linking him to Jack that day, Shawcross was not even charged for Jack’s murder.
In his psychiatric examinations, after the child murders, and later after his arrest in the murder of twelve sex workers in Rochester, Shawcross claimed that he was suffering from Vietnam flashback experiences, garnering him potential sympathy as a suffering war veteran. Shawcross would tell his psychiatrists, “Vietnam turned [a] country boy into a crazy. . . . I tortured people over there, cut two heads off, took a lot of ears off. The Vietnamese ears, we’d always cut the left ear. We’d string ’em and dry ’em and cut their hair in a Mohawk. . . . And string bone, teeth, or ear on one of these little amulets. . . .”
His Vietnam war claims got crazier and crazier with time. In a written statement, Shawcross would claim:
There is something in Vietnam that is still bothering me. It’s got to be bad because as yet I am unable to bring it out. I was with some guys who took a whore and put a firehose inside her and turned the water on. She died almost instantly. Her neck jump [sic] about a foot from her body. Another time we took another prostitute and tied her to two small trees, legs to the trees, bent down. She had a razor blade inside her vagina. She was cut from her anus to her chin. Then the trees were let go. She split in half. Left her there hanging between the trees.
Appears to have difficulty in discriminating between those activities that he was involved in when deep in combat in Vietnam and the types of activities that are acceptable when living freely among society outside the military. . . . The subject is often prone to compare his past warfare acts with the two killings he committed, as he attempts to minimize his present criminal predicament by informing that he has done much more heinous crimes during his stint in Vietnam.
The disorder PTSD had not yet been named in 1972, but by the time Shawcross would stand trial again in 1990 for his twelve murders in Rochester, the term PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—was well on its way to becoming a household term. Shawcross would milk it for all its worth.
In her recent book Through the Eyes of Serial Killers: Interviews with Seven Murderers, Canadian journalist Nadia Fezzani interviewed Shawcross shortly before his death from a heart attack in prison in 2008. Shawcross told her his same loony-tune tales from Vietnam, which Fezzani found difficult to swallow.
But in the end even the experienced journalist Fezzani seemed to buy into Shawcross’s bullshit. She wrote, “Shawcross’s years in the army appeared to have had a tremendous influence on his life. This was when he may have had his first experience with cannibalism.” In her book, Fezzani quoted a story of cannibalism that Shawcross had told her:
The most tender part of the body is the upper thigh of someone fourteen to twenty-six years old. . . . I saw a young female placing a spring in one of our C-ration cans. She was making a personal bomb! . . . I tied her hands behind her with stovepipe wire and blindfolded her plus gagged her. Picked her up and carried her up the side of the hill into the trees and stood her up against a huge teak tree [near the first hut where the dead woman lay]. . . . When the girl saw me again and the body of the woman she did not flinch. But when I cut the body in half and cut off the right leg at the hip and knee she was shocked. She watched my every move too. I carried the body that was not wanted up next to a large anthill and I tapped the outer edge of the hill and the ants came out quickly and covered the body fast and started to tear it apart. I went back and dug a shallow hole in the dirt and placed a quarter size ball of C-4 plastic explosives there and lit it with a cigarette. It burns like a small sun, very hot and bright. I added sticks and larger pieces of wood. Then cut some bamboo and shoved two lengths into the ground at each side of the fire. I then fashioned a crossbar and was about ready. I stripped the skin from the leg (which was about four inches across), then removed the cords and larger veins. Poured water over it and powder rock salt. Placed it over the flames and it cooked down somewhat like a roast. I went up to the woman and asked her questions and she just looked at me. I knew she could understand me by the way she moved her eyes. When I went back and picked up the meat, I bit into and ripped off a chunk and started to chew. She urinated herself and passed out.41
When Shawcross first made his Vietnam War claims, inquiries were made into his military service, information that is on the public record. The response from the military was that for Private Arthur Shawcross, serial number 52967041 with the Fourth Infantry Division assigned to a Supply and Transport Company at Pleiku, there were no records indicating he ever saw any combat or was wounded as he claimed while in Vietnam. He worked in the air-conditioned comfort of a supply depot in the safety of a fortified Army base at Pleiku, and the closest Shawcross ever got to combat was perhaps ducking into a shelter when an occasional randomly aimed mortar round was lobbed into the base by the Vietcong. The only jungle Shawcross saw was in the pages of National Geographic magazine or in the John Wayne Vietnam war movie The Green Berets or in the lurid tales of his father’s war in the Pacific told and garishly illustrated in men’s adventure magazines on which he grew up.
Fezzani turned for advice to one of the psychiatrists who had evaluated Shawcross during his trial later in Rochester for his second series of murders, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a Radcliffe College and Yale University School of Medicine graduate, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York Universities and the author of Guilty by Reason of Insanity. Lewis has made assessments and testified for the defense in several high-profile criminal cases, including Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, and serial killers Joel Rifkin, Joseph Paul Franklin, Ted Bundy, Washington Beltway Sniper John Allen Muhammad and Arthur Shawcross. When she visited Ted Bundy a few days before his execution, Lewis infamously returned his kiss on her cheek with a kiss and a hug of her own for the necrophile who confessed to murdering at least thirty women. Lewis would tell journalist Malcolm Gladwell that she did not believe serial killers were evil. “To my mind, evil bespeaks conscious control over something. Serial murderers are not in that category. They are driven by forces beyond their control.”42
Lewis insisted that Shawcross was truly suffering from PTSD from combat in Vietnam and much more. She claimed that there was something suspicious about the Army’s statement that there were no records indicating that Shawcross ever saw combat. She told Fezzani:
Curiously enough, many of Shawcross’s records could not be found/obtained but we know that horrendous acts were witnessed and committed during the Vietnam War. Do not be too quick to dismiss his stories. Those particular ones have not changed over the years. We also do not know the nature of the training he received, but after World War II the army was determined to make their soldiers less squeamish and thus less reluctant to kill.43
We of course know exactly “the nature of the training” that Shawcross received. After basic training that every soldier receives, he was trained as a supply and parts specialist at Fort Benning, Georgia, before being assigned to a safe-and-sound supply depot in Vietnam.44
In Lewis’s own book, couched in conspiratorial prose of innuendo that dangles questions but furnishes no answers, the “expert” defense psychiatrist claimed that “reports based on CIA documents indicate that during that period civilian and military prisoners, as well as ordinary citizens, were used in these mind-brain experiments.” That the CIA conducted mind-brain experiments is true enough, but then Lewis follows with a kooky chain of Alice in Wonderland leaps of logic to suggest perhaps Shawcross was a subject of those experiments and that the prosecutor might be related to somebody who ran a CIA mind-control drug-testing safe house in New York State. She writes in prose tinged with paranoia:
When I tried to get hold of Mr. Shawcross’s army records, I was told that most of them, which were from the Vietnam era, were missing, burned in a fire. Unfortunately Mr. Shawcross could remember almost nothing about his army experiences except for the name of Westmoreland. It was as though his memory had been erased. He had some wild recollections of slaughtering women in Vietnam and cooking and eating their parts. No one believed him. The prosecutor, who fought the insanity defense tooth and nail, dismissed these bizarre memories as the ravings of a sane man. Since then I have seen two other serial killers with similar memory impairment for their Vietnam years. One of them has only wild, grotesque recollections—half-dreams that no one believes. Their army records have also been destroyed. In my Shawcross workup, had I stumbled on something the Powers That Be were not too eager to reveal? Is that why I was made to look so incompetent, hung out to dry?<
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Funny thing. According to CIA records, a man of the same name as the prosecutor’s, an uncommon name, ran a safe house in New York State in the 1960s where the CIA conducted experiments on mind control. It could, of course, be a coincidence, but I can’t help wondering whether the prosecutor and the operator of the safe house are related to each other.45
The name of the New York Monroe County prosecutor leading the case against Shawcross to whom Lewis refers was Charles J. Siragusa, not an exceptionally rare Italian surname. He is a federal district judge today. Both his Italian immigrant grandfather and father worked their entire lives for the Prudential Insurance Company in Rochester.46
A Charles Siragusa of no known relation to the prosecutor was indeed accused in the 1970s of running a CIA safe house. That Charles Siragusa worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (a predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA]) from 1935 to 1963 and rose to the rank of deputy commissioner. In 1977, he appeared as a witness before a Senate Hearing Subcommittee on Human Drug Testing by the CIA where he was asked by Senator Ted Kennedy whether he had set up a safe house in Greenwich Village for the CIA to run mind-control drug experiments. Siragusa responded that the Narcotics Bureau office in New York and the CIA jointly operated a safe house on 13th Street off Sixth Avenue “to debrief informants, to work undercover operations,” but denied knowledge of any drug experiments taking place there.47
The issue here is not the veracity of Siragusa’s testimony, but the logic and quality of Dr. Lewis’s “expertise” to assess a perpetrator like Arthur Shawcross. Maybe that’s why, as she complains in her book, she “was made to look so incompetent, hung out to dry.” With “expertise” like that, it’s also the reason juries began rejecting insanity pleas from serial killers, even in cases like those of Frazier and Mullin despite the fact they were delusional to the point of legal insanity.
American Serial Killers Page 28
