American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  A parole officer optimistically reported, “His relationship with Rose appears to be a strong one and both appear to support each other. Once her divorce is finalized, they indicate they will be married and both hope to remain in the Rochester community where they can assume a quiet life.”

  Rose found life with Arthur a strange existence. On one hand he had a short temper and was demanding. He could be scary when he lost his temper, Rose learned. But on the other hand he was hardworking, helpful, sweet and protective. He did a lot of the household chores and he enjoyed cooking. True, he had some sexual hang-ups, but who doesn’t? Rose would later comment. He had problems reaching a climax. He made lewd comments to Rose about women he saw on TV that were normally reserved for male conversation, like “Look at those tits!”

  What maybe troubled Rose most were his silent, brooding “withdrawals.” Ignoring her completely, he would sit blank faced, staring at the TV, moving his lips, or he would go off alone “fishing” or hang out at the Dunkin’ Donuts a few blocks down, chatting up cops. He occasionally borrowed her car, but mostly he still got around on his bicycle. Neighbors had mixed reviews of Shawcross: he could be friendly and very helpful one day but unsmiling and cold the next, ignoring their greetings. Others noted that Shawcross could be speaking coherently and then blurt out something “inappropriate.”

  At work, Shawcross was reliable and punctual and mostly kept to himself, but there were some issues. He told graphic stories of atrocities he’d perpetrated in Vietnam, and once when a young fellow employee angered him, he grabbed the youth by the neck and slammed him up against a wall.

  Then there was Loretta Neal, a young woman from West Virginia whom he pestered to the point that she complained. When Shawcross’s boss told him to leave her alone, he was startled by Shawcross’s aggressive response: “Everybody else in this joint is fucking her. I don’t know why I can’t.”

  Shawcross was warned that if he didn’t stop harassing Loretta he would be fired. He backed off. Instead, he cozied up with Loretta’s mother, Clara Neal, who was instantly smitten with him when she came by to pick up her daughter from work one day in late December 1987. In January, Shawcross began an affair with Clara.

  Since their arrival in Rochester, Rose had seen a gradual degradation in her relationship with Arthur. The subject of his abuse and rejection by his mother was a constant refrain. His mother had refused to visit him during his incarceration, and there was no question of his returning to the scene of his two child murders in Watertown. Thus it was now fifteen years since he’d seen his mother. Shawcross repeatedly invited her to come visit him in Rochester; she never came. He spent a considerable amount of time, energy and money purchasing an antique silver plate for her as a gift, but she didn’t like it, saying that he should buy only new things as gifts. Arthur grew even more sullen and withdrawn and began staying out longer and longer, returning with lame excuses about his absences. Claiming that Rose was hurting him while on top of him during sex, he forced her to go on a crash diet. When she didn’t do what he wanted, he slapped her and grabbed her leg so hard she was bruised for days. She complained about the abuse to Shawcross’s mother, who responded that Rose should tell his parole officer. Not wanting to lose Arthur because he “was still worth all the trouble,” Rose instead concealed the deteriorating relationship from the parole officer in a deluded hope that when her divorce came through and she married Arthur, all would be well.

  His mask of sanity peeling, Shawcross was openly seething at Rose, reserving his sweet and vulnerable mask for his new girlfriend, Clara Neal. As he raged and abused Rose, he purred and cuddled up to Clara. Clara told Jack Olsen:

  At first I think he appraised me more like a mother type than a lover or girlfriend. Even at forty-two, that’s what he needed most. He’d scoot down the end of my couch, lay his head on my lap and go to sleep, me holding him jes’ like you would a baby. He’d pull his shirt off and I’d take a hairbrush and rub his back gently. What a boy would want from Mama!24

  His visits to Clara were becoming regular, and he soon began borrowing her car, driving her to the nursing home where she worked and returning for her at the end of her shift. In between he would cruise the street hookers on Lyell Avenue.

  One day in mid-March 1988, he picked up twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Blackburn, who would become the first of his twelve victims in Rochester. He claimed that Dorothy bit him while they were engaged in “sixty-nine”—mutual oral sex—and that he bit her in retaliation. He confessed that he then stripped her, tied her arms, beat her and raped her and then when he was finished and told her to get dressed, she called him “little man,” which so enraged him that he strangled her. He said afterward he “spent half the night with her” before dumping her body into a creek.

  Around this time, both Rose and Clara noted a sudden change in his behavior. He became even more withdrawn and quiet. On March 24, the body of Dorothy Blackburn was found; the next day, as Shawcross was driving Clara and two of her grandkids in her car, a police car came up behind and signaled for them to pull over. Clara recalls he seemed panicked, and she had to persuade him to stop. It was a routine traffic stop, but his fear, he told Clara, was that his parole would be endangered because having Clara’s grandkids near him was a violation. This episode must have been a wake-up call for Shawcross, especially if he was aware of Blackburn’s body being found the day before.

  After that, Shawcross stopped visiting Clara. He was acutely aware of his homicidal impulses and his behavioral disorders, and he now tightened up his mask of sanity. He refrained from killing for nearly eighteen months and broke off his relationship with Clara Neal, promising Rose he would marry her as soon as her divorce came through.

  About a month after he had raped, mutilated and murdered Blackburn, he went in for a mental health assessment. The counselor happily chirped:

  For one thing he is engaged to be married to his fiancée and consort and he reports that their sexual relationship is greatly improved. She has lost a great deal of weight through dieting and feels more competent so they are no longer experiencing sexual difficulties. . . . Social adjust shows great improvement. . . . He has reestablished contact with his parents after eighteen years, has a pleasant apartment with his girlfriend and seems to have made friends. . . . There has been no recurrence according to his report of any impulses or inclination toward the sort of behavior which landed him in prison for a number of years. . . . I have left it with him that he can contact me on his own initiative should he feel the need for ongoing help with any personal problems. At this time I’ve scheduled no further visits and do not feel he should be compelled to come.

  “This Motherfucker’s Getting Weirder and Weirder”

  After his first murder in Rochester, and the false alarm of being pulled over by the police, Shawcross kept his homicidal impulses under control for about a year and a half. Serial killers are often triggered by “stressors”: a loss of employment, a breakup, or an impending marriage or birth of a child. In the spring of 1988, Shawcross’s employers at the fruit and vegetable producer discovered his record as a child killer and harassed him into leaving his job despite his overall good work performance. When Shawcross found work with another grocer, his former employers warned them about the “child killer” but were told he was a “hell of a worker.”

  The one-year anniversary of Shawcross’s arrival in Rochester was coming up on June 29, and the parole board requested another mental health assessment. After two meetings, the psychiatrist gave him a clean bill of health:

  I find that Art is a well controlled and fairly stable individual. Although he continues to exhibit some discomfort or flashes related to anger, he is able to manage these episodes very well.

  The one feature which continues to be present in his current functioning which was probably predominant in his past is his general inclination or personality style of dealing with guilt or bad feelings by be
coming angry rather than becoming or experiencing serious discomfort, depression or low self-esteem.

  Given his history of childhood and early adult difficulties, traumas and anti-social behavior, it is logical that Art has developed elaborate and somewhat dysfunctional defenses in managing his feelings. However, this functioning style does not appear to present any current emotional or behavioral difficulties and Art does not have any particular motivation to pursue treatment at this time. Consequently I see no need for pursuing counseling with Art at this time.

  But typical of psychopaths, all this time Shawcross was retreating into secret lives. He and Clara restarted their affair in the spring of 1989 despite his plans to marry Rose. Shawcross regularly borrowed her car to cruise Lyell Avenue for prostitutes while she was at work. In the meantime, Rose’s divorce came through, and in August 1989, she became his fourth wife.

  At the same time Shawcross was marrying Rose, he was going at it hot and heavy with Clara. He’d told her that he had been paroled into Rose’s custody and that he would leave her when his parole expired in April 1990 and he and Clara would go live together somewhere warm. When her son warned her that Shawcross had been sent to prison for killing a little girl, Clara told him to shut up, she didn’t want to know. She loved Shawcross and never brought it up, and neither did he. It was all in the past now, and he served his time in prison for it. He had the right to live in peace.

  Clara’s daughter Linda also did not like him at all. Shawcross pestered her whenever he saw her. He once threw her on a bed and she had to fight him off. Another time he pinched her nipple. When she complained to Clara, she laughed it off as only “joking around.” Linda recalled that Shawcross was around little boys all the time, buying them presents and taking them places. It worried her that he took an interest in her young sons, watching cartoons with them and playing with them for hours. He liked to tussle with them roughly, once biting her fourteen-year-old on the nipple as he held him down on Clara’s kitchen floor. Linda didn’t like the bite marks she saw on her mother’s breasts, upper arms and inner thighs. These weren’t love bites, she observed; they were the bites of a vicious, angry animal.

  Clara, on the other hand, maintained her rosy view of their relationship. Shawcross gave her a wedding ring that he said had belonged to one of his ex-wives. The ring was from one of his murder victims, Patty Ives, who had stubbornly refused to pawn or sell it even in the worst of times. Now Clara said the ring was so beautiful that it would make her cry and she hated it when police seized it from her. “They can tell me a thousand times,” she said, “but I’ll never believe it belonged to no dead whore.”

  Shawcross’s neighbors got used to the middle-aged man riding a girl’s bicycle and his odd comments, like asking one woman if she knew that pinching female breasts could cause cancer. He put his head into the lap of another woman and complained he hadn’t had sex in months. The women he was acquainted with brushed him off as a harmless oddball but kept their distance from him.

  In July 1989, the prospect of his wedding to Rose “triggered” Shawcross into murdering again, and now he would go on a serial killing rampage that would not end until his arrest some six months later. One after the other, Shawcross murdered women, mostly sex workers he picked up on Lyell Avenue:

  July 9—Anna Marie Steffen, 28

  July 29—Dorothy Keeler, 59

  September 29—Patricia “Patty” Ives, 25

  October 23—June Stott, 26

  November 5—Marie Welch, 22

  November 11—Frances “Franny” Brown, 22

  November 15—Kimberly Logan, 30

  November 25—Elizabeth “Liz” Gibson, 29

  December 15—Darlene Trippi, 32

  December 17—June Cicero, 33

  December 28—Felicia Stephens, 20

  After his honeymoon with Rose, Shawcross’s behavior escalated to the point that he was killing three to four victims a month. He was literally in a bloodlust frenzy by the end of 1989. He engaged in necrophiliac sex with the corpses of the women he had killed and mutilated some of them, cutting away their genitals, which he told police he ate. Shawcross claimed that after sawing out June Cicero’s vagina from her frozen corpse, he sucked on it like a “meat Popsicle” while driving away from the scene. (In another version, Shawcross stated he warmed it with the car heater.)

  Shawcross frequently covered his victims under concrete or asphalt debris, or brush and branches, as he’d done with his child victims. It could have been a sign of his remorse, or it could have been done simply to conceal the corpse. Shawcross later admitted that it served a practical purpose: to advance the decomposition of his victims in the hope that evidence would be destroyed, as it had been with his first victim, Jack Blake.

  Many of the sex workers on Lyell Avenue were familiar with Shawcross as an amiable “john” they knew as “Mitch.” He was seen as a goofy, harmless, easy date, at least for the girls he did not kill. Some even talked to him about the “strangler” stalking them, not realizing they were in his car. One veteran street worker, well into her forties, remembered getting picked up by “Mitch” and, as she later told police:

  Three minutes into the ride I caught the bad vibes. This guy was a nonstop talker. . . . His voice turns growly and he starts telling me about hoes that ripped him off. . . . I’m thinking, Something isn’t right about this guy. Something doesn’t hang together. . . . He said he could take my sons fishing. . . . I’m thinking, This motherfucker’s getting weirder and weirder. . . . I did my little hoe’s roll and got out and shuffled around to the backseat. . . . He joined me in the back. I asked him to use a rubber but he didn’t want to hear about it. . . . I did an acrobat spread, feet against the back window, head propped on the passenger bucket seat. Then I went into a Georgia Buck, which is you push your chin tight against your chest bone so the john can’t get at your neck—hard on the breathing but it may save your life.

  He says, “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with your head in between the seats?” Something told me, No, no, you gotta keep this sucker in sight. If I put my head between the seats, I wouldn’t be able to see him and my neck would be in a blind-side position. . . . I thought, Maybe this guy is not strangling women, he’s suffocating them. It would’ve been a cinch with my head between the seats. So I says, “No! I’m fine just like I am.”

  He wasn’t hard and he couldn’t get it in, but he seemed cool enough. He talked all the time he was trying to fuck. His three favorite subjects were his wife is a bitch, hunting and fishing in the country, and all the shitty things the other hoes did to him. I was being careful. I’m thinking, Could this goofy guy be the strangler?

  . . . His hands keep fluttering toward my neck, and I’m telling him, “Don’t do that! I have asthma.” . . . He stops pushing and says, “What the fuck are you?” He looks me dead in the face and his voice turns mean: “What the fuck are you, one of those bip bam thank you ma’am bitches?”

  He shoved at my chest. I went to myself, Fuck, this is the strangler and you’re next! You better start playing this motherfucker right and let him know you can handle him. . . .

  It went on like that for over an hour, a cat-and-mouse game as Shawcross kept attempting to get his hands around her throat. She had a knife with her ready to use if things went off the rails.

  His hand went back up above my tits. I said, “Hey, I told you. Don’t do that. I’m too ticklish.” That was about the fifth time I had to tell him. I’m thinking, it’s normal for a trick to reach up and grab my tits, but this guy was interested in my neck. See, my tits are so big they’re over to the side. I don’t wear a bra or underwear when I’m working. So his hands got no business up around my neck when my tits are over to the side, see what I’m saying?

  Every time Shawcross sounded edgy, she would talk him down. And she let h
im know she had a knife in one of her hands near his rib cage. It was like that balance between war and diplomacy. She was very firm in her limits with Shawcross but without insulting or denigrating him (“Don’t do that! I have asthma”; “Don’t do that! I’m too ticklish”); at the same time, she kept a knife on hand and made sure Shawcross was aware she would use it on him. Eventually, Shawcross got tired of the whole thing and drove her home.

  All the way home he’s doing the motor mouth again. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Why’re you so quiet? Are you shy?” Sounded kind of annoyed, like it was a social error if you didn’t comment on every word. You see that in johns.

  I had him drop me off, and when I went inside, I told my boyfriend, “I coulda’ swore I was out with the fucking strangler tonight.”

  He said, “How could that be? You’re still alive.”25

  That’s what it took to survive a date with Arthur Shawcross and many others like him. Most women working the streets did not have the experience or focus that this veteran street sex worker had. The other ones that survived did so because they were lucky that Shawcross was not moody that night.

  “Moments Thereafter His Hands Would Close Around the Necks of His Victims”

  In November, as the victims began to pile up, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit was asked to produce a profile. They were right in identifying most of Shawcross’s characteristics, but wrong on one major one; starting with the serial killer’s average age at the first murder and accounting for the arc of escalation, the profile estimated his age to be early thirties. What the FBI did not know was that while Shawcross was indeed twenty-seven when he killed his first two victims in Watertown, his killing “arc” was suspended by a fourteen-year prison term. It took Shawcross about ten months after his release from prison to pick up where he left off. He was killing like a thirty-year-old serial killer might.