Lucas’s uncanny ability to give details about some of the murders was the result of investigators sharing crime scene photos and reports to “help him” with his memory.
This resulted in Lucas being convicted by juries in eleven murders based on his confessions when he probably had murdered only two victims. (He had already been tried for the murder of his mother, had served the sentence and had been released.)
One of the eleven victims was the famous “Orange Socks”—an unidentified woman found in a Texas culvert in 1979, naked except for a pair of orange socks. Despite the fact that Lucas was at the time working in Florida, not Texas, the jury accepted his confession and sentenced him to death. (The sentence was later commuted by the governor.) In August 2019, based on a familial DNA match with her sister, “Orange Socks” was identified as twenty-three-year-old Debra Louise Jackson. Thanks to Lucas’s false confession, her murderer escaped justice.
This kind of false and exaggerated serial killer confession became known as the “Henry Lee Lucas syndrome.” Cold case departments have learned to be very wary of falling into this trap. One of the reasons that investigators in Bergen County, New Jersey, took so long to extract and process Richard Cottingham’s confessions in the 1968 and 1969 schoolgirl murders had to do with their scrupulous review of his claims. A less discriminating jurisdiction might happily accept a confession at face value in order to take a cold case off their unsolved list.
Often these cold cases are declared as “exceptionally cleared,” which means that they will not go to trial—either because the suspect is deceased, there is insufficient evidence other than the confession or an immunity deal was negotiated. The families of the victim are informed, but the press might not be advised of the “exceptional closure” or of the evidence behind the closure. The case just fades away, closed but perhaps not exactly “solved.”
Serial killers are motivated to make false confessions by numerous factors, including competitive ego boosting and boasting, exercising control over police and media as they are sent scurrying around alleged burial sites with cadaver dogs and ground radar—sometimes it can be as simple as a day out of prison for a walk in the fresh country air to point out an alleged body site and a meal on the road instead of gray prison food.
The 1980s: “Lucifer Dwells Within All of Us! . . . See You in Disneyland”
With almost seven hundred serial killers identified in the 1980s and the Henry Lee Lucas story coming to a dead end, the media began to shift its focus away from victim numbers to the serial killer’s novelty. It was no longer about numbers but style.
Right in the middle of the 1980s came Richard Ramirez, “the Night Stalker.” He killed a “moderate” thirteen victims, but he had media flare. The murders happened in California in 1984 and 1985 and fit the bill perfectly for media attention. Ramirez’s victims ranged from nine years old to seventy-nine years old, female and male. He committed some of his murders as part of home invasions and became known as the Walk-in Killer in addition to the Night Stalker. He gouged out one victim’s eyes with a spoon and took them away with him. One night, he killed three victims; on other nights, he left them raped and battered but alive. (As Richard Cottingham explained to me, “Killing somebody does not make you God; it’s knowing whether they will live or die that makes you that.”)
The Night Stalker left occult symbols at some of his crime scenes, such as an inverted pentagram drawn on a victim’s thigh in lipstick. Some crime scenes were signed “Jack the Knife.” One victim who survived reported that as she was being raped, he forced her to recite, “I love Satan.” When asked where they hid their valuables, victims were ordered to “swear on Satan” that they were telling the truth.
The victims seemed chosen completely at random, and the killer made unsuccessful attempts to disguise his fingerprints. His victims often saw his face, and he left them alive as often as he killed them. Outside the windows of the houses he entered, he left behind his shoe prints.
When the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was asked to profile the crime scenes, they responded that the crimes were unique and did not conform to anything they had seen before.
With Los Angeles on the alert as these killings became more frequent and frenzied in the summer of 1985, a neighborhood volunteer safety patrol encountered the Night Stalker and nearly beat him to death before the LAPD arrived and rescued him.
At his trial, Ramirez flashed press photographers an inverted pentagram inked on his palm and chanted, “Evil, evil . . .” When he was convicted and sentenced to death, he growled at the court:
“I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society. . . . I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards; truly trematodes of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession. . . . You maggots make me sick; hypocrites one and all. . . . And no one knows that better than those who kill for policy, clandestinely or openly, as do the governments of the world, which kill in the name of god and country or for whatever reason they deem appropriate. . . . I don’t need to hear all of society’s rationalizations. I’ve heard them all before and the fact remains that what is, is. You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. . . . I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil, legions of the night—night breed—repeat not the errors of the Night Stalker and show no mercy. . . . I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of us! . . . See you in Disneyland.”
Entertainment Tonight had been on the air already for five years, airing right after the network news shows; while it used a newscast format, it focused exclusively on celebrity gossip. But as serial killers gained antihero celebrity status, their coverage in the hard newscast began to carry over into ET and similar shows like Inside Edition and Hard Copy that all followed the newscasts. With his inverted pentagram goat-head tattoo girls, who passionately pledged their deep, dark love for him, Richard Ramirez was a TV hit. He was hot. He was also in California, a state that permitted the televising of courtroom proceedings, like Florida, where Ted Bundy became the lead in his own televised trial (in which the judge sentencing him to death complimented him on his lawyerly skills).
Sometimes it was an extra twist in the headlines or moniker that brought them some measure of historical notoriety. The 1980s brought us serial killers like Douglas Clark, “the Sunset Strip Killer,” and his girlfriend-accomplice, Carol Bundy, who infamously shampooed and set the hair and makeup of a severed head Clark brought home to have sex with; David Alan Gore, a Florida auxiliary sheriff’s deputy and one of the Killing Cousins; Gary Michael Heidnik, a self-made millionaire who kept his enslaved victims chained in a basement pit in a squalid house in Philadelphia and would partly inspire the fictional Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (along with Ed Gein); Robert Hansen, “the Butcher Baker,” in Alaska, who would fly his female victims in his private plane to a remote cabin where he set them loose in the wild to hunt them down; Leonard Lake and Charles Ng in Calaveras County, in Northern California, who recorded video of themselves with their victims in a remote bunker they built; these were the few serial killers from that decade who came to some degree of prominence or fame while the rest of the seven hundred were barely mentioned in national news media and were not subjects of true-crime books.
Serial killers like Rodney Halbower and Harrison Graham—who has heard of them?
Halbower killed barely enough victims to make a Wikipedia list of serial killers, while Harrison Graham had a “respectable” number of victims, seven, but they were “less-dead”: inner-city black sex workers. Typically, his case was reported for a few days and then forgotten.
That’s how seven hundred serial killers tramped through the 1980s.
Arthur Shawcross, “The Genesee River Killer,” Part 3, Rochester, New York, 1988–1989
Arthur Shawcross, whose story I have been telling since his father
’s return from the Pacific in 1945 to his first two murders in 1972, committed his fourteenth and last murder on December 28, 1989, closing out not only the decade but a strange, somnambulistic cycle with war trauma, which the father Roy Shawcross had suffered fighting in World War II in the Pacific, while his serial killer son, Arthur, fantasized his in a supply depot in Vietnam; Shawcross is a tale of two wars and one serial killer.
Shawcross certainly had the kind of twist the media loved; there were hints of cannibalism, which always gets press, and his claims to having perpetrated atrocities in Vietnam gave the story extra legs. Yet at the same time, there was something mediocre and average in his murder of desperate sex workers trying to survive in a rough city like Rochester. In his actual murders, he was like so many other serial killers, lurching about in the night, strangling in a rage vulnerable, drug-addicted sex workers. Take away his previous two child murders and his Vietnam stories, and Shawcross could stand in for every third serial killer there ever was. That’s why of the nearly two thousand serial killers that made up the “golden age” between 1950 and 1999, his story is among those told here.
After murdering two children in 1972, Shawcross later said, “I was sent to prison for 0-25 years. The first 8 years were hard for me.” Child murderers are targeted in prison by other inmates, and Shawcross had to be confined for his own safety in a segregation unit. He misbehaved, threw tantrums, malingered and faked seizures and frequently refused to cooperate with psychiatrists or to participate in therapy.
Between his mounting claims of child abuse at the hands of his domineering mother, incest with his sisters and an aunt, to his fantasies of the horrors of combat in Vietnam, Shawcross collected a babble of meaningless psychiatric evaluations and parole assessments and comments that included “dangerous schizophrenic pedophile suffering from ‘intermittent explosive personality’; hears voices when he is depressed; engaged in fantasy as a source of satisfaction; oral-erotic fixation with a need for maternal protection; possible organic involvement; normal psychopathic individual; not much insight concerning maladaptive life dating back to early adolescence; less than complete sincerity in dealing with deep-seated intraphysic [sic] and interpersonal conflicts; anti-social personality disorder and schizoid personality disorder . . . psycho sexual conflicts; prone to be rather simplistic and childlike in his attitudes; remains to himself much of the time; appears unable to establish peer relations, but shows good deal of trust in authority figures; a release of this man to the community at this time, given his lack of change in behavior, might result in a murder of several more children; obviously he is quite dangerous and capable of horrible crimes; mother never let his father be the man in the house; for years his mother would swear at father, throw coffee at him; mother ran the house and the father just brought home the money; had a very unhappy childhood because his parents were constantly fighting. He was lonely. He felt unloved, unwanted by his parents; still denies memory of his actions toward the girl after he grabbed her; there are some uninformative psychiatric examinations in the inmate’s file; do not feel that the inmate had any conscious desire . . . when his blood is cold to be a bad person or to hurt others. However the inmate has proved himself to be an extremely unusual person and one whose actual inner workings are probably completely beyond comprehension of any of us.”
Shawcross’s third wife, Penny Sherbino, remained loyal to him, convinced of his innocence. But after four or five years in prison, Shawcross became “engaged” to a pen pal, Rose Marie Walley, and he divorced Sherbino.
“Possibly the Most Dangerous Individual to Have Been Released”
In his eighth year of a prison sentence that could last twenty-five years, Shawcross began to feel motivated to get out. He set to work improving his image by enrolling in various therapy programs he had previously refused to participate in. It worked like a charm. His psychiatric reports immediately improved.
Psychiatrists wrote that Shawcross was:
neat, clean, quiet, cooperative, attentive, and pleasant. No bizarre mannerisms. Normal facial appearance and posture. Self-esteem/self-image good. Tolerance for frustration within normal limits. Abstract thinking intact. No hallucination/delusions. Thought processes logical, rational. . . . Does not manifest any psychotic/neurotic symptoms. Positive attitude. Intelligence good, good reality contact, denies suicidal or homicidal ideation. Not depressed, not elated, mood neutral, affect appropriate, motor activity normal, no bizarre gestures or mannerisms. Emotionally stable. Not mentally ill at present. No delusions, no morbid preoccupations. [Can] utilize psychotherapy to maintain his ability to control his emotional conflicts once he is placed on parole.
After fourteen years and six months in prison, the parole board decided to release Arthur Shawcross back into society and into his fiancée Rose Marie Walley’s arms. Shawcross had gone into prison as a young, relatively good-looking, slim man of twenty-seven; he was coming out looking considerably older than his forty-one years. He was balding, his hair stringy and gray. His face was now puffy and bloated, and he had developed a potbelly. But along with all that aging tubby fat, Shawcross had powerful gorilla arms with hands that tightened with vise grip strength and a seething sexualized anger toward diminutive women. He hid it well behind an easygoing charm with an undertone of false vulnerability that he would turn on instinctually like a predator, in the way a chameleon takes on a color.
Not all psychiatrists and parole board officials were fooled by Shawcross. One psychiatrist had warned prior to Shawcross’s release, “Though the psychiatric and psychological profession has apparently not as yet defined a diagnosis for this inmate’s aberrant behavior or, even more pertinently, a cure, the society at large deserves protection until such is the case which would probably not be until well past this inmate’s conditional release date.”
After Shawcross’s release was approved, a parole board official bluntly complained, “At the risk of being dramatic, the writer considers this man to be possibly the most dangerous individual to have been released to this community in many years.”
Shawcross was released on April 28, 1987, and ordered to live in Binghamton, New York, in a Volunteers of America shelter under strict supervision. Shawcross was required to meet weekly with his parole officer, abstain from drugs and alcohol, abide by an 11:00 p.m. curfew, regularly attend a mental health clinic and stay away from children, playgrounds and anywhere else children routinely congregate.
Shawcross immediately breached all the terms of his parole. He routinely hung out in playgrounds and parks while fishing; he stayed out beyond his curfew; he did not seek employment and spent a lot of time on his bunk brooding in deep thought. After a few visits to required therapy, the psychiatrist concluded that Shawcross had “orgasmic and ejaculatory problems. No unusual sexual fantasies . . . [no insight into the child murders other than] having problems with anger and experiences in Vietnam.”
The psychiatrist declared, “No mental disorder requiring any specific counseling or treatment at this time.”
Shawcross now dropped out of therapy.
In the fifth week of his release, Shawcross came up behind a female volunteer at his shelter, seized her by her crotch and body-slammed her down on a bed. According to the parole board document reporting this incident, Shawcross did not go further after “she told him to let her alone, that she was not that type of a woman.” The report further stated that Shawcross had stolen several hundred dollars’ worth of property from the woman’s residence. No action was taken.
While the parole board may have let the case fall between the cracks, Shawcross was hounded by police departments, citizens and the media. Reports of his crimes and his location were revealed to the public several times, and as a result, Shawcross and Rose Marie were shuffled around various communities in northern New York. Finally, after a huge public outcry, the parole board moved Shawcross to a new location and ensured that it was kept secret from the media and most
authorities.
On June 29, 1987, Arthur Shawcross and Rose Marie arrived in New York State’s third largest city, Rochester. Eight months later, in March 1988, Arthur Shawcross would begin killing anew and would not stop until he was caught two years later, munching away on a salad while admiring the frozen corpse of his twelfth female victim on January 3, 1990.
“What a Boy Would Want from Mama!”
In Rochester, Rose Marie was employed as a home care worker for elderly and disabled clients while Shawcross eventually landed a job chopping and preparing vegetables for a wholesale producer in Rochester’s public market. He and Rose Marie moved into a creepy Tudor-style apartment building on 241 Alexander Street, in a neighborhood that was shabbier in 1987 than it is today. G. Jack Urso, who lived in the Normandie Apartments next door to Shawcross, blogged his recollections: “I would sometimes see Shawcross riding a little girl’s bicycle. I didn’t know him by name, but a large, overweight, middle-aged man riding around on a child’s bike was an unforgettable, surreal vision. I can still see him in my mind all these years later, as clear as if it were yesterday, peddling past the Normandie with a stare fixed straight ahead, as oblivious to the world around him as the world was of him. ‘My God, man,’ I recall thinking to myself, ‘have you no self-respect?’”23
Shawcross continued to drag his feet and avoid therapy. His psychiatrist in Rochester reported that Shawcross couldn’t afford therapy: “As you know he has very limited income and the cost at this time, although on a sliding scale, still is quite difficult for him. When he does obtain fulltime work and possibly some health insurance, this may no longer present a difficulty for him. Shawcross reports extensive and what sounds like rather thorough counseling, both for his post-traumatic stress disorder while in Vietnam, as well as his sexual difficulties which led to his imprisonment. He does report extensive self-awareness and what sounds like very appropriate use of psychiatric and psychological resources while at Green Haven. . . .”
American Serial Killers Page 33
