Arthur John Shawcross was born in Kittery, Maine, the first of four children of Arthur Roy Shawcross and Elizabeth "Bessie" ("Betty") Yerakes Shawcross. His family moved to Watertown, New York, when he was young. While several later tests showed his intelligence to be sub-normal or even "borderline disabled," Shawcross received As and Bs in his first two years of grade school but was later tested to have an IQ of 86, signifying below-average intelligence.[citation needed]
Shawcross said throughout his childhood, he was a frequent bed-wetter (which is one part of the Macdonald triad). He later claimed his mother performed oral sex on him for several years starting when he was aged 7, and that during junior high school he had sexual relations with his sister. Shawcross had a reputation at school as a bully and would frequently act out violently. He dropped out of high school in 1960.
In April 1967, at age 21, Shawcross was drafted into United States Army. At this time he divorced his first wife and gave up his rights to their 18-month-old son, whom he never saw again. He served one tour of duty with the 4th Supply and Transport Company of the 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam. He later boasted of grotesque combat exploits, such as "beheading mama-sans and nailing their heads to trees as a warning to the Vietcong" and engaging in cannibalism; in reality he never served in a combat position.
After the war, Shawcross was stationed at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, as an armorer. His second wife Linda experienced several aspects of his disturbing behavior, especially his penchant for starting fires; an Army psychiatrist told her that Shawcross derived sexual arousal from setting fires.
•Murders•
Shawcross's first known murders took place in his hometown of Watertown, New York, where he killed a young boy and a girl. Under the terms of a plea bargain, he was allowed to plead guilty to one charge of manslaughter, for which he served 14 years of a 25-year sentence. Shawcross killed most of his victims in 1988 and 1989 after being granted an early parole, which later led to controversy. A food service worker, Shawcross trawled the streets of Rochester in his girlfriend's 1984 Dodge Omni (later using her 1987 Chevrolet Celebrity), looking for sex workers to kill.
Shawcross died on 10 November 2008, while serving a prison sentence of 250 years for his crimes, at the age of 63. Dr. Michael H. Stone, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and an authority on violent behavior, identified Shawcross as "one of the most egregious examples of the unwarranted release of a prisoner" In March 1988, Shawcross began murdering again, primarily targeting sex workers in the Rochester area, before his capture less than two years later. He was convicted of eleven murders, with a twelfth not officially ascribed to him. The victims were:
1. Dorothy "Dotsie" Blackburn 2. Anna Marie Steffen 3. Dorothy Keeler 4. Patricia "Patty" Ives 5. June Stott 6. Marie Welch 7. Frances "Franny" Brown 8. Kimberly Logan 9. Elizabeth "Liz" Gibson 10. Darlene Trippi 11. June Cicero 12. Felicia All the victims were murdered in Monroe County except for Gibson, who was killed in neighboring Wayne County. Retired detective Robert Keppel has argued that the detectives investigating the case over-relied on the concept of modus operandi, at times searching for multiple suspects due to small differences in the profiles of each victim.
On January 5, 1990, two days after June Cicero's body was discovered by aerial surveillance, police arrested Shawcross. He had been spotted by an eyewitness and a police surveillance team standing near his car, apparently urinating on a bridge over Salmon Creek near where Cicero's body had been dumped.
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