The Genesee River Killer – Part Two [04]

It's been 15 years since Arthur Shawcross committed his last murder. Now that he’s out of prison, not only has his appearance changed, so have his victims. 

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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. I don't know for sure, but I'm

(00:26):
gonna wager a guest that most of you have never
seen a barn fire in person before. It's something that
I've witnessed several times in the past, and strangely enough,
I had a dream about a barn fire last night.
I don't know if I would call it a nightmare,
but it was definitely a vivid, realistic dream that made
me think of being a young boy again in northern Indiana.

(00:46):
I was standing there on my footy pajamas watching a
structure fire that had no hope of being put out
before the entire building was consumed. It took me right
back to when I was five or six years old.
I remember driving miles and miles behind fire trucks and
then standing out in the cold air of a Midwestern night.
Barnes burned incredibly fast and incredibly hot. Usually by the

(01:10):
time the fire trucks arrived, it was too late to
save the building. They were just there to knock down
the flames and prevented them spread into the farmhouse or
other nearby buildings. Sometimes the farmers were lucky enough to
get the animals out. Sometimes they weren't so fortunate. But
with a loft full of hay fueling the fire, there
was usually no hope, and that always made it even

(01:32):
more tragic. Sometimes there was a lot of confusion on
the ground. Other times everything seemed eerily calm as the
fireman went about their business. It all played out right
in front of us. It was exciting and terrifying, beautiful
yet terrible all at once. I'm Scott Benjamin, and everything

(01:56):
I'm about to tell you is real. This is insomniac.
It was April and Arthur shaw Cross, now age, was

(02:22):
out of prison and on parole once again, and this
time his appearance was dramatically different. He was no longer
the relatively fit and trim six ft tall ex military
man that went into prison in nineteen He now weighed
three hundred pounds and it wasn't muscle. His third wife, Penny,

(02:47):
had divorced him in ninet, just three years into his
prison term, but he already had another girlfriend waiting for him.
Her name was Rose, and she had been Arthur's prison penpal.
Life on the outside was different for Arthur this time.
For one, he and Rose couldn't find a place to live.

(03:11):
It wasn't that there were no houses for rent or
apartments available. The problem was that no community wanted a
convicted child rapist and murderer moving in. Arthur couldn't return
to Watertown for obvious reasons, and since his post prison
relocations were well publicized in the first three communities he tried,

(03:36):
there was a strong objection to his arrival. First they
tried Bingham, to New York, then Delhi, then Fleishman's but
in every case he and Rose were run out of town.
A senior parole board officer finally decided it was time
to try something different. They made the unfortunate decision to

(04:01):
seal Arthur shaw Crosses criminal records and then moved him
two d and fifty miles away into an apartment in
the city of Rochester, New York, without telling the members
of the community or the authorities. In other words, no
one knew who he was and his violent sex offender

(04:24):
past was now invisible. Arthur soon found a job to
pay the bills, work in the night shift, chopping and
packaging salads and boxes for a local food service company,
and he and Rose were married in the summer of

(04:44):
By Christmas of the same year, Arthur, now age forty two,
was already having an affair with an older woman named
Clara Neil. She was fifty six. By the spring of
shaw Crosses typical behavior was so erratic that neither of
the two women he was involved with noticed anything unusual

(05:07):
when he began staying out all night and using his
mistress's borrowed car, blue Dodge Omni two cruise for prostitutes
in the industrial area near the Genesee River. That's where
he found his first adult victim, a prostitute by the
name of Dorothy Blackburn. The agreement the two made was

(05:30):
for mutual oral sex for thirty dollars. Years later, shaw
Cross would claim that during the encounter, Dorothy bit his penis,
drawing blood and infuriating shaw Cross to the point of
violent retribution. In turn, he bit a chunk of flesh
out of her vagina and then choked her until she

(05:52):
was unconscious. He then drove her lifeless body out to
one of his favorite fishing spots, the bridge over the
Salmon River in Northampton Park, and dropped her into the
cold water below. Her remains would be found for nearly
a week. She was well preserved in the icy water,

(06:14):
but the river had also removed any evidence that her
killer might have left behind, aside from the deep bite
marks around her genitals. The community of Rochester, New York
didn't know it yet, but Dorothy Blackburn's murder was just
the first of what would be many, many more and
Arthur's second series of victims. It would be almost four

(06:37):
months before Arthur would strike again. It was early July,
and now that he was ready, he returned to his
favorite hunting ground, a stretch of road called Lyle Avenue
in downtown Rochester. It was there that he found another prostitute,
Anna Marie Stephen. A deal was made between the two

(07:02):
sex for cash, and they headed down to the banks
of the Genesee River and the dark privacy that location provided.
But when shaw Cross was unable to perform sexually, he
claims Anna Marie made fun of him, so he punched
her to the ground in the darkness. She crawled into
the river to escape, but he went in after her,

(07:25):
grabbed her by the throat, and held her underwater until
she drowned. This time, he simply let the body float
downstream instead of trying to hide it. She was discovered
two months later. Somehow, Arthur resisted the urge to kill

(07:46):
for a full year before taking his third victim in Rochester.
This time it was a homeless woman, Dorothy keeler Age.
Dorothy was working as a waitress in a diner shaw
Crossing asionally visited, and she and Arthur were having an affair.
It was July and the two had spent a lazy

(08:10):
afternoon together fishing and having sex on seth Green Island
in the middle of the Genesee River. At some point,
the conversation grew serious, and Dorothy threatened to reveal herself
to the other two women in shaw Across his life,
his wife Rose and his mistress Clara. Arthur and Dorothy argued.

(08:31):
He flew into a rage, picked up a heavy log,
and he beat Dorothy to death. He then concealed her
body under a fallen tree before heading home for the evening. Later,
shaw Cross told police that he returned to Keiller's corpse
months afterward, to remove her skull, He threw it into

(08:54):
the river and it was never found. What was left
of her body was discovered by fisherman on October, nearly
three months after she went missing. Just six days after
Dorothy Keeler was found on October, the discarded body of

(09:18):
yet another local sex worker, Patricia Ives, would be uncovered
at a construction site. She had also been strangled. A
little more than two weeks later, the bodies of two
Rochester prostitutes were found on the same day, November, Francis Brown,

(09:40):
aged and Kimberly Logan, aged thirty. They had been taken
just days apart in early November. Kimberly Logan was found
to have leaves stuffed down her throat to silence her
during her attack. Similar to shaw Cross's second victim, a
year old Karen Hill. Arthur also used this tactic to

(10:02):
silence the animals he killed when he was much younger.
Just days later, on Thanksgiving Day, the body of another
local woman was found underneath the blanket and a pile
of brush. It was the body of June stott Age, thirty.
She had been missing for exactly one month. She was

(10:25):
not a prostitute or a drug user. In fact, Stott
was a friend of Rose and Arthur shaw Cross, even
an occasional guest at their home. Similar to the other
recent victims, June Stott had been strangled to death. Unlike
the other adult victims to date, however, her body had

(10:46):
been mutilated. She was sodomized after she was killed. She
had been gutted from her genitals to her throat, and
her vagina had been cut out and removed. Arthur would
later claim that he had eaten that part of her
on with some internal organs. The killer's violence, as well
as the frequency with which he was taking his victims,

(11:08):
had now escalated considerably. It was impossible for the police
and the press to ignore the similarities among the recent slangs,
and while the detectives continued to comb through the criminal
records of the violent offenders that might be living in
the area, Arthur shaw Crosses sealed criminal records meant that

(11:29):
he didn't show up on any police searches. He remained invisible.
As a result of interviews with the local prostitutes. The
authorities were now canvassing the street corners and bars looking
for a suspicious man that several of the ladies had
come to know Ah's Mitch. He was a regular customer

(11:49):
on Lysle Avenue, and some of them knew, both of
experience and word of mouth, that Mitch was not only
capable of violence, but he was also with several of
the now missing women. What the cops didn't realize at
the time was that they were closer than ever to
the mysterious Mitch, and they were unintentionally giving him inside

(12:11):
information that allowed him to continue his deadly attacks virtually unchallenged.
M Arthur and Rose shaw Cross lived at two one

(12:31):
Alexander Street in Rochester, New York. There was a dunkin
Donuts located just down the block from their home, on
the corner of Alexander Street and Monroe Avenue, about a
four minute walk from door to door. Arthur was a
regular customer there. I know it sounds cliche, but that
donut shop is where the police would often gather, the

(12:54):
place where they felt like it was safe to let
their guard down a bit, And of course the shop
talk often turned to what was happening in the Genesee
River killer case. Arthur was routinely present for these discussions.
Between his deadly attacks, Arthur would learn exactly what the
police were discussing the leads they were chasing down and

(13:17):
in general how close they were to capturing, well him,
the killer. The whole thing was a sort of cat
and mouse game, where the mouse, Arthur, had the inside
line and exactly what the cat the Rochester police were
up to. Years after his arrest, Arthur was asked about

(13:39):
his donut shopped conversations with the police. He attributed to
his ability to get away with being so close to
his pursuers without suspicion, to being well groomed and well dressed,
including wearing shiny shoes a trade. Arthur claimed the police
liked about him at the donut counter. He the role

(14:00):
of a concerned citizen instead of the sort of individually
he might suspect would be out on the streets killing
prostitutes at night. And because Arthur had gained their trust,
he was occasionally given some friendly inside information about the stakeouts,
where the decoy prostitutes were located, and the investigation in general,

(14:22):
straight from the police work in the case, Well, this
is a fairly rare situation. It's not the first time
we've heard a similar story. Edmund Kemper is an example
of another serial killer who befriended the local police to
gain inside information on the investigation of the murders he
was carrying out. He hung out with police in a

(14:45):
bar called the Jury Room, across the street from the
Santa Cruz County Courthouse in Santa Cruz, California. Similar to
shaw Cross, the police came to know Kemper as a friend.
One of the officers even once gave him a set
of real police handcuffs as a gift. He occasionally used

(15:05):
them in his killings. If the code he abducted was
putting up a struggle, it was late. Arthur shaw Cross
was forty four years old, and his body count continued
to steadily grow. Seven missing women had already turned up dead,

(15:30):
and there would be numerous more before it was all over.
Just four days after the Thanksgiving Day discovery of June
Stott's body, another shaw Cross victim was found. This time
it was Elizabeth Gibson, aged nine. She was a prostitute,
strangled to death just like the others. However, her body

(15:53):
was dumped in nearby Wayne County, New York, instead of Rochester,
as Arthur felt the police were getting a little too
close for his comfort level. Next, it was the body
of twenty year old Felicias Stevens found on New Year's Eve,
murdered just three days after Christmas. She was Arthur's final kill,

(16:16):
but she wouldn't be the last victim recovered. There were
still missing women to be found. Just three days later,
on January three, the body of June Cicero was recovered
as a result of the New York State Trooper helicopter
surveillance flight. Those on the scene would note that her
body had been mutilated in a manner similar to two

(16:38):
earlier victims. At some point after her death, the killer
had returned to June Cicero's frozen body to remove her
vagina with a small hand saw. This was the same
surveillance flight that also exposed Arthur shaw Cross parked on
the bridge directly above June Cicero's frozen corpse. When the

(17:03):
authorities finally caught up to and questioned him on that
first day, Arthur reluctantly told them he was previously found
guilty of manslaughter in Watertown in but he denied any
knowledge of the recent Rochester murders, and since he wasn't
under arrest, he was questioned a while longer photographed and released.

(17:26):
Kept under constant surveillance, of course, but released overnight. The
detectives did their homework right away. They found his sealed
criminal file and a link to some critical physical evidence
in the case. They investigated Arthur's place of employment, a

(17:47):
food service company called G and G Cheese, and found
that the company used a brand of handy wipes that
matched those founded two of the crime scenes, and they
were the same wipes found in shaw Crosses home too.
And from there the rest of the missing pieces started
coming together. One point that really grabbed the investigator's attention

(18:10):
was when Arthur started telling them about his favorite fishing spots.
All the places he preferred along the river coincided with
where the bodies of the missing prostitutes were found. Just
two days after their initial contact with shaw Cross, and
with around the clock investigation into his background and activities,
including several hours of conversation with him personally, the police

(18:33):
had enough evidence to arrest him and charge him with
the murders. The date was January five, Arthur knew was over.
He asked to be allowed to speak with his wife, Rose,
and said that if he could just speak to her first,
he'd tell them everything they wanted to know, and that's

(18:55):
what he did. Throughout his lengthy confession to the authorities,
Arthur showed no sign of emotion, no remorse at all.
When asked why he did it, he coldly stated that
he was just taking care of business. With the sign
confession in hand, the authorities allowed Arthur to lead them

(19:15):
to the bodies of two missing women they hadn't yet recovered,
Maria welch Ago, who had been missing since early November,
and Darlene Trippy, age two, who had been missing since December.
It wasn't a surprise that both women had been strangled

(19:36):
to death. When it was all over, the number of
women who lost their lives at the hands of Arthur
shaw Cross in Rochester alone was twelve, and when you
add the two children he killed in Watertown in nineteen
seventy two, Jack Blake and Karen Hill, the grim total
grows to fourteen. Since all of victims were killed in

(20:00):
Monroe County, New York, with the exception of Elizabeth Gibson,
who was killed in nearby Wayne County, the Monroe County
trial was held first. The poor proceedings lasted nearly three months,
with all of Rochester keeping watch. It wasn't until years

(20:34):
later that I realized this siren chasing was a common
behavior in my family. We always watched from a safe
distance away, maybe a few hundred yards or so. Usually
we were close enough to smell the smoke and even
feel the heat. Sometimes I would see the whole structure
collapse onto itself. That always produced what seemed like a

(20:55):
million glory numbers shooting upwards, along with the blinding red
orange flames and a tower of the thickest black smoke
you can imagine, billowing into the sky. I remember it
was a thrill to be so near the action, but
it was also scary. My dad was always a siren chaser.
He couldn't resist getting close to the scene of an accident,

(21:17):
the fire, and arrest in progress, anything. Really, it was
a behavior he learned from his mother, my grandmother, and
lately I began to wonder if it was a behavior
that she had learned from her father, my great grandfather.
They lived in a small town, so whenever the sirens began,

(21:38):
my grandmother would load up to kids and go see
what she could. My dad was the same way when
I was growing up, and today I find it difficult
to resist turning the car around and see what's happening
if I see emergency lights. I can't believe that it
took me so long to realize that I'm the product
of at least three, possibly four generals of siren chaser's.

(22:02):
That explains a lot. In the United States, broadcasting and
photography of the court proceedings is allowed in some court
rooms but not others. In ninety nine, the eyes and
ears of the public were focused on the nationally televised

(22:24):
trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. In it was Jeffrey Dahmer,
in the Menendez Brothers, in he was the O. J.
Simpson trial. It's clear that television viewers enjoy watching high
profile criminal court cases play out in front of them

(22:46):
on live television, and while the nineteen ninety trial of
Arthur shaw Cross might have had a somewhat limited audience
due to its local coverage rather than national coverage, the
citizens of Rochester were more than willing to watch. The
New York Times ran an article about the televised shaw
Cross trial on December two nine, and it's said, like

(23:12):
a moth drawn to a flame, Rochester, a city of
two hundred and forty one thousand people has been both
repulsed and riveted by the proceedings in the teak paneled
second floor Core Room of the Monroe County Public Safety Building.
For more than ten weeks, the residents of Rochester and

(23:34):
the surrounding areas tuned in to witness the Core room
drama and theatrics of the show cross Case. It was
television that was difficult to watch at times because it
was a lured tale that included details of child sexual abuse, beastiality,
wartime atrocities, murder, reincarnation, corpse mutilation, and claims of cannibalism.

(24:00):
Adding to the public's outrage was the now widely known
fact that shaw Cross's criminal record had been sealed and
that a convicted child rapist and killer had been moved
into Rochester without alerting members of the community or the authorities.
They also saw him plead not guilty by reason of insanity,

(24:20):
well as defense attorney showed the Core room videotapes of
a supposedly hypnotized shaw Cross as he claimed to be
taken on one of his many multiple personalities, Ara Mas,
a reincarnated thirteenth century cannibal from England who Arthur claimed
taught him to eat human flesh. While the tapes were shown,

(24:41):
and throughout the entire trial, shaw Cross sat perfectly still
in the courtroom, head down, shoulders slumped, showing no emotion
at all. In the end, the jury didn't believe Arthur
was possessed, and much to everyone's relief, he is found
guilty of ten counts of second degree murder, with the

(25:04):
sentence of twenty five years for each count. Arthur shaw Cross,
now age, would be behind bars for the next two
d and fifty years with no chance of her role.
The following year, when the Wayne County trial was held,
shaw Cross simply played guilty to the second degree murder

(25:24):
of Elizabeth Gibson and received yet another life sentence. Arthur
was incarcerated at the Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security
prison from male prisoners in Fallsburg, New York. In prison,

(25:45):
Arthur was an outsider, a pariah with very few exceptions.
He was avoided, ignored, and often threatened by nearly every
other inmate in Sullivan. They deemed him the lowest of
the low, a pedophile, a rapist, and a serial killer
of women and children. Soon after his conviction, Arthur was

(26:08):
divorced from his fourth wife, Rose. She served him with
papers on his forty nine birthday in June. Of Rose
shaw Cross would pass away less than three years later.
In the spring of Arthur was now legally free to
marry his former mistress Clara, and did so in a

(26:28):
ceremony held in the prison's visiting room on July. She
was his fifth wife, but his time in prison for
this his second series of murders, would be only slightly
longer than his sentence for the child killings back in
nineteen seventy two. On November tenth, eight just shy of

(26:49):
eighteen years after his trial and conviction, Arthur shaw Cross,
now age sixty three, died of a pulmonary embolism. He
had complained of leg pain earlier in the day, and
by the time he was transferred to the Albany Medical
Center later that evening, it was too late. Arthur shaw
Cross was dead, and the citizens of upstate New York

(27:14):
breathed a collective sigh of relief. Well, the best case
scenario would have been devoid even a single murder that
might not even have been entirely possible in this case.
Throughout his entire life, whenever he wasn't in prison. Arthur
shaw Cross was killing, whether as when he was a

(27:34):
kid torturing and killing small animals, as a young adult
torturing and killing children, whereas a middle aged man strangling
and killing sex workers. And if Arthur shaw Cross had
not been granted the plea bargain deal in nWo after
the Watertown child killings, he would have been locked up

(27:54):
for life. The body count would have stopped at just
two instead of reaching fourteen. Two dead children are bad enough,
but in this case, a series of poor decisions led
to the deaths of twelve additional women. In Rochester, New York.

(28:17):
In two thousand eleven, in a South Georgia college town,
a bad neighbor was lurking near campus. People found him creepy, antisocial,
but he turned out to be far worse than anyone
ever expected, a predator who selected the woman next door
as his prey. I'll prove that you never know who

(28:39):
might move into your neighborhood, and you certainly have no
idea what they're up to or capable of behind closed doors.
Next time on Insomniac. Insomniac is a production of I

(28:59):
Heart Rate 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 Said,
and cover art by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and
Facebook at Insomniac Pod, on Instagram at Insomniac podcast, and

(29:20):
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