The Genesee River Killer - Part One [03]

Arthur Shawcross was paroled after less than 15 years in prison. Had the authorities known what was next, they never would have let him out. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of I Heart Media, Stuff Media, or its employees.
Listener discretion is advised from my Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV.
Monster presents Insomniac. If you've never heard of Arthur shaw Cross,

(00:28):
I think you're going to find him to be one
of the most revolting characters you've heard about in a long,
long time. His crimes spanned decades, his punishments along the
way were far too late for the atrocities that he committed,
and maybe the worst detail of all, there were children involved.

(00:49):
For me, the stories that involved kids always seem to
be the hardest ones to understand, and they're definitely among
the hardest to ever forget. After listening to this show,
I think you'll find yourself wanting to forget Arthur shaw
Across too. I wish I could get him out of
my head, but so far that's been impossible. I'm Scott

(01:15):
Benjamin and everything I'm about to tell you is real.
This is Insomniac. The date was January three, and police
were searching Northampton Park, located sixteen miles east of Rochester,

(01:37):
New York, after a missing woman's clothing an I D
Card had been found in the area. Just minutes into
a helicopter surveillance flight, New York State troopers had already
spotted something. They saw a woman's body, partially clothed, face
down on the surface of the ice underneath the bridge

(01:57):
that crossed over Salmon Creek. They didn't know it yet,
but they had just stumbled across the frozen, mutilated body.
I've yet another missing woman, not even the one they
were initially searching for. It was a prostitute named June Cicero,
age thirty four, and she had been missing for more

(02:18):
than two weeks. Remarkably, at that very moment, a car
was parked in the same bridge and the driver had
his door open with his legs outside of the vehicle.
It was difficult for the troopers to determine exactly what
he was up to from high above, but he appeared
to either be urinating on the bridge or possibly masturbating.

(02:41):
As soon as he noticed the helicopter, the man threw
something out onto the ice and drove away, but the
state troopers followed his every move from the air and
called in ground units to tail him into town. Within minutes,
he was picked up, taken to the nearby Brockport Police Barracks,

(03:02):
questions photographed, and then released overnight. Authorities kept the suspects
home under surveillance. Well detectives dug up every bit of
information they could about the man they found just a
few feet away from the frozen body on the ice.
What they would discover that evening and in the days

(03:24):
and months to follow would horrify every officer on the
force and later infuriate the entire community of Rochester, New York.
We're going to take a closer look at the case
of the Rochester strangler, or as it's sometimes called, the

(03:47):
case of the Genesee River Killer. For this story to
have the full impact, you need to know that is
considered normal for a serial killer to experience a cooling
off period between their deadly attacks. In fact, that's one
of the key behaviors that set serial killers apart from
other types of killers. Spree and mass murderers claim all

(04:09):
of their victims at once, all in the same day,
and often all in the same location, with one violent outburst.
A serial killer follows a different pattern, one that includes
an active period when the homicide happens, followed by an
emotional cooling off period when the killer returns to his

(04:31):
or her normal life, followed by another active period, and
so on. If the result is a body count that
rises above three, you have a serial killer in your hands. Typically,
that cooling off period is a matter of days, weeks,
or sometimes months. But in the story I'm going to

(04:55):
share with you today, the killer deviates in these norms
and take an unusually long cooling off period between his
first and second series of victims sixteen years. In fact,
he also completely changes the target of his crimes between
his second and third victims. It's very rare for a

(05:15):
serial killer to change his method of operation, but he does,
and you'll find out why. We're going to start in
early nineteen in a small upstate New York city of Watertown,
where an unspeakable tragedy was about to strike the community.

(05:41):
It was the spring of nineteen and Arthur John shaw
Cross age was an employee with the Watertown Public Works Department.
He had just married his third wife, Penny, in late April.
Shaw Cross had only recently been released from a state
prison after serving time for burglary and arson. He had

(06:04):
set fire to a paper mill in April of nineteen
sixty and then to the cheese company that he worked
for in September of the same year. Well serving his
prison sentence, shaw Cross had spent just a few months
at the Attica Correctional Facility before being transferred to Auburn
prison in the summer of nineteen seventy. Later that same year,

(06:26):
on November four, an inmate riot broke out in Aubera.
Thirty guards were seized as hostages, and the inmates had
control of nearly the entire prison. The riot only lasted
one day, but it took a combined total of more
than six hundred state troopers, additional prison guards and sheriff's

(06:47):
deputies to regain control. In the situation had cooled down,
it was revealed that inmate Arthur shaw Cross had save
the life of a prison official during the riot. For
the he was granted early parole and was released after
serving just twenty two months of a five year sentence.

(07:08):
So in October of Arthur shaw Cross was a freeman,
and he returned to his daily life in Watertown, New
York at the parole board, knowing what was about to
happen in that small, charming city over the next year,
they never would have let him out. Early shaw Cross

(07:40):
enjoyed fishing, and due to this hobby, he spent a
lot of his free time in and around the surrounding
creeks and rivers, mainly the Black River, the waterway that
runs right through the middle of town. As a result,
he often shared the river banks with the children of Watertown.
One young boy, Jack Owen Blake, age ten, became one

(08:05):
of Arthur's favorite fishing buddies. On May seven, just seven
months after shaw Cross was released from prison, Jack Blake
went missing. The Blake Boy's body wasn't initially found, but
suspicion immediately fell on Arthur shaw Cross. Arthur and Jack,

(08:28):
along with Jack's younger brother, had benefitshing together just days
before he disappeared. Shaw Cross repeatedly denied any knowledge of
the boy's disappearance, and since there was no evidence against him,
including nobody, he remained a free man. Four months later,
on September two, two and while the search for Jack

(08:52):
Blake was still on, it happened again. Another child went
missing in Watertown. Lots of us tell variety lies on
a daily basis. Most are small, but occasionally a few

(09:13):
whoppers too. We intentionally make false statements to others to
ease social interactions, protect someone's feelings with a small white lie,
or use a lie to simply avoid the unpleasant consequences
telling the truth. Pathological lying, on the other hand, is
when the behavior becomes compulsive or habitual. It's when a

(09:36):
person lies consistently for absolutely no personal gain other than
maybe to bolster their own character, regardless of how one
founded those claims. Maybe. Pathological liars typically try to present
themselves in a favorable light, whereas the hero not the
bad guy of the story. Pathologic a line was one

(10:00):
of many issues Arthur Delwyth throughout his life. Well in prison,
he self reported sexual abuse between himself at a young
age and his mother, his aunt, his sister, and a
couple of his cousins. Later, he would claim as an
adolescent he had sex with a variety of barnyard animals too.

(10:23):
Each of the accused family members has denied all of
Arthur's sexual abuse allegations, and not one instance was ever
proven to be true. What we do know of his
past is somewhat troubling. Arthur was a bedwetter until the
age of nine, and his mother repeatedly shamed him for that.

(10:45):
We also know that he was sexually excited by lighting fires,
and that he liked to torture and kill small animals,
including fish, cats, squirrels, and birds. That's all three points
of the McDonald try. It a set of three factors
that suggests future violent tendencies and serial offenses from an

(11:06):
individual if three or any combination of two are present
together bed wedding, fire setting, and cruelty to animals. Again,
Arthur exhibited all three traits. He also had at least
three known closed head brain injuries between the ages of

(11:27):
sixteen and twenty two. At the age of sixteen, he
was hit in the head with a discus and spent
several hours unconscious. At age eighteen, he was struck in
the head with a sledgehammer, again he was unconscious for
several hours, and at age two, while he was in

(11:49):
the army, he felt from a forty ft ladder striking
his head and rendering him unconscious once again for several hours.
Years later, an MRI scan of Arthur's brain would show
that he had developed a cyst in one temporal lobe
and residual scarring on both frontal lobes from the discus

(12:09):
and sledgehammer incidents. He dropped out of school after his
second failed attempt at ninth grade, and eventually was drafted
in the army at age nineteen. During the Vietnam War,
Arthur also bragged about his tour of duty and his
battlefield heroics in Vietnam, greatly exaggerating the role he played

(12:30):
and even admitting to several grotesque wartime atrocities. He bragged
about solo jungle missions where he killed women and young girls,
torturing them, raping them, cutting their heads off and nailing
them to trees or sticking them on posts, and then
cannibalizing parts of their bodies. There's no proof any of

(12:52):
this ever happened. He claimed to be an expert sniper
during the war, and then he could fashion a rifle
silence or out of a rubber nipple from a baby's bottle.
He also claimed battlefield kill count of thirty nine enemy soldiers.
Yet according to Arthur's commanding officers, the truth is Arthur

(13:14):
was a supply clerk and never saw combat. In the
years to follow. Back at home in Upstate New York,
Arthur would eventually mutilate several of his victims, and while
occasionally there were body parts missing, it was impossible to
prove that he ever consumed any of the missing parts,
including Jack Blake's heart and genitals, and much later, the

(13:38):
vaginas of three of his female victims. The date was
September two, just four months after the disappearance of Jack Blake,
and there was another child missing in Watertown. This time

(14:01):
it was Karen Ann Hill, age eight, who was visiting
with her mother for the Labor Day weekend. The Watertown
police were now searching for two missing children. They found
Karen Hill first. Her lifeless body was discovered under a bridge.

(14:21):
She had been raped, mutilated, and strangled. Mud leaves and
other debris had been forced down her throat and inside
her clothing. Once again, Arthur's shaw Cross, now aged, was
an immediate suspect. A police investigation revealed that he and

(14:44):
Karen Hill had been seen together on the day of
her disappearance. The neighbors reported that Arthur was seen eating
ice cream on the bridge, right near where the body
was discovered. Arthur again denied any involved and the disappearance
of the child, but after a full day of police interrogation,

(15:06):
he finally cracked. With his defense attorney present, shaw Cross
decided that he had had enough and asked police, what
would happen to me if I told you something? In
the hours that followed, he admitted to killing Karen Hill,
but he also let them know that he had additional

(15:27):
information to share. He could lead them to the body
of the still missing Blake boy if they were willing
to make a deal. Shaw Cross told them exactly what
they wanted to know. Four months earlier, it was he
who had lured ten year old Jack Blake into the woods,

(15:48):
stripped him naked, sexually assaulted him, and then strangled him
to death as part of a police bargain in exchange
for showing the police where the body of Jack Blake
be found. The authorities less in the charge against shack
Cross and manslaughter for the rape and murder of Karen Hill,
and all of their charges were dropped entirely. He would

(16:11):
not be charged in the rape or murder of Jack Blake.
For his crimes, Arthur shaw Cross was sentenced to just
twenty five years in prison with the possibility of early parole,
and well, that already seems like a light sentence for
murdering two children, it gets even worse. Despite the warnings

(16:35):
of prison psychiatrists, after less than fifteen years behind bars,
social workers and prison staff members incorrectly determined that shaw
Cross was no longer dangerous and granted him early parole
in April. Why did the prison psychiatrists advise against his release, Well,

(17:00):
reason was that shaw Cross had revealed that he had
returned several times to the site where he dumped Jack
Blake's body to have sex with the corpse. He also
confessed to removing the boy's heart and genitals and eating them.
His early release in prison, or even the fact that

(17:20):
he was being released at all, it was a mistake
that would only be amplified over the next three years.
My nightmares, yeah, I'm still having them. I had another

(17:43):
pretty disturbing dream this weekend. The last one was just
a few days ago, around three am. Um, it's another really,
really violent dream. I'm being chased. I was laying face down,
yelling and violently kicking the mattress as hard and fast

(18:05):
as I could. My wife was startled, terrified, and rightfully so.
It's clearly someone who's serious about catching me. Seriously, there's
a reason they want me in our moonlit bedroom. It
looked like someone was attacking me on my side of
the bed. Someone was By the next morning, the only

(18:29):
lasting memory I had of that evening's nightmare but someone
endlessly chasing me. As we raised up a very steep
set of stairs, almost as steep as a ladder. He
reached out to grab my ankles, and that's when I
turned and began kicking him in the heads. That terrifying
moment when the pursuer catches me like this is it.

(18:53):
I've got a fight otherwise I'm dead. It's it's gonna
be a battle to death. This or anything about this
is like I boy, I didn't stop, over and over again,
as hard as I could, I didn't stop. I just
kept going and going and going until the person is

(19:15):
practically unrecognizable. Was it Arthur chasing me? I don't know.
I can't say for sure it was him, but I
can't tell you. There was no more sleep for me
that night. I guess you can kind of understand why
I didn't want to record that when my family around
me or near me. So I'm kind of confessing to this,

(19:40):
even though it's something that never really happened. And Uh,
I got a deal with that. Um. That's about it
for now. I hope he doesn't haunt your dreams the
way he has mine. A common trait among captured serial

(20:04):
killers is that even though they're locked behind bars, they
want to believe that there's still somehow in control of
what's happening outside of the prison walls. Arthur shaw Cross
was no different. We've established his tendency to lie about
nearly all aspects of his life, a pattern that he

(20:24):
continued in prison, but he did so in a somewhat
puzzling way. He attempted to manipulate all of his interviewers, detectives, doctors,
anybody that would listen to him by changing his story.
The way he answered questions would very greatly based on

(20:46):
who he was talking to. If it was a male interviewer,
Arthur would play up his heroic but completely fictional actions
on the battlefield in Vietnam. If it was a female interviewer,
are they are going to long detailed descriptions of his
mutilation killings and described to them how much he enjoyed

(21:07):
removing parts of his victims, and then how much he
enjoyed eating those parts, And if he detected a tiny
bit of sympathy from his interviewer, his narrative voice switched
over to his alleged but never proven claims of sexual
abuse at the hands of his mother and aunt. He
would add graphic details to his stories of abuse to

(21:29):
see if he could elicit an even greater sympathetic response
from across the table. Again, manipulative behavior isn't necessarily surprising
from a serial killer, and it was always fairly easy
for those Arthur spoke to see right through his made
up stories. They knew he was a liar and he
was never going to change. How Arthur shaw Cross dealt

(22:01):
with his early release from prison and how we chose
to fill his free time doesn't even begin to tell
the story. You would undergo an extraordinary physical transformation as
he struggled to find a new home and unfortunately and
all new group of victims Next time on Insomniac. Insomniac

(22:26):
is a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV,
written and hosted by Scott Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins,
Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Josh Thain. Music composed by
Makeup and Vanity, set and cover by Trevor Eisler. Follow
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(22:46):
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