Interview With A Serial Killer： Arthur Shawcross Tells All On 17-Year Killing Spree

Interview With A Serial Killer： Arthur Shawcross Tells All On 17-Year Killing Spree

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're going to book me. I'm not going to mug you.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Step gorgeous away, and.

Speaker 3 (00:05):
I believe I candoran to see from Americans download VLI now.

Speaker 4 (00:24):
Sullivan Correctional Facility just outside Fallsburg, New York State. It's
a maximum security prison home to some of America's most
violent criminals. One of them is Arthur J. Shawcross. Sharecross
has murdered eleven women and is serving a two hundred

(00:44):
and fifty year prison sentence. His case has raised serious
questions about what causes extreme violence and what we understand
about the nature of evil itself. We've come to meet
him faced face to see if he would tell us
what made him such a violent killer.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
People on the outside do not know what evil was.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Do you know where evil lived? True? Are you evil?

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Somewhat?

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Rochester, New York State, thirty miles from the Canadian border.
It's a provincial city of a million people, sat amongst
the gorges and falls of the Genesee River. It's a
middle class town, but it also has a dark side.
Lyle Avenue is a mile long drag through one of
the city's rundown neighborhoods, home to its seedy red light district.

(01:53):
In March nineteen eighty eight, women began disappearing from the strip.
Dorothy Blackburn was a twenty seven year old prostitute and
mother of three. Her body was found in a nearby riverbed.
She'd been strangled to death. In July, Anne Marie Stephan,

(02:14):
a twenty seven year old cocaine addict, also went missing.
Her decomposed body was found on the banks of the
Genesee River.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Anne Marie Stephan, do you remember meeting her?

Speaker 2 (02:29):
I met Anne Marie Stephan. I think in front of
the finger Hut lee Aawenhan.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Do you remember killing her?

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah? Possibly, I'm not going into details here.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
No, But how did you kill her?

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Probably strangling.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
How do you know when they're dead?

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Oh? Oh, just do more or less after they just relax, body, relax,
doesn't fight no more. One takes about four minutes problem,

(03:20):
sometimes less than that.

Speaker 4 (03:25):
To the outside world, Showcross was just a regular guy.
He lived here in this apartment on Alexander Street with
his fourth wife Rose. He worked nights at the local
cheese factory and spend much of his free time fishing
the banks of the Genesee River. But he was living
a double life. He had a mistress, Clara, and was

(03:49):
a regular visitor to Lyle Avenue.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
You've got a.

Speaker 4 (03:56):
Wife, you've got a mistress, and you're also seeing prostitutes
quite regularly.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
And other people. I guess I could say I was enjoying.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
My soul.

Speaker 4 (04:11):
For almost one year. Shore Cross killed no one. Then
in July nineteen eighty nine, police found the body of
an elderly homeless woman, Dorothy Keeler.

Speaker 5 (04:21):
Dorothy was found out on seth Green Island on the
Genesee River, and she was bones, so we really didn't
know at the time why he killed her.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
She used to live in my house, in my apartment
for a while.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Is she a friend? She was?

Speaker 2 (04:44):
She starts stealing stuff out of the house. I asked
her why you steal? And she's sending needed money and
I said, you have a bank account. I was paying
her four dollars and twenty five cents an hour just
to clean the apartment.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
So she was leaving from me.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
She was taken from me and my wife Rose.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
Does that warrant killing her?

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Huh?

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Does that warrant killing her?

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Well? To me, it did.

Speaker 4 (05:12):
But Shurecross didn't just kill Dorothy Keyler. He would later
return to her dad corpse.

Speaker 5 (05:20):
And he came back and visited. He came back and visited,
and he took her scull, her head and threw in
the Genessee River.

Speaker 4 (05:33):
After you killed her, you went back later to see
the body.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Is that right now?

Speaker 2 (05:38):
I went back to clean up.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
She was found with her head removed?

Speaker 2 (05:43):
Did is that's right?

Speaker 1 (05:47):
How did that happen?

Speaker 2 (05:48):
He just pick it up and move it.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
You just pulled the head off.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
It was already all sure.

Speaker 4 (06:00):
Ross had now murdered three women, but his blaze of
terror had only just begun. In Rochester, New York State,
the bodies of murdered women had begun appearing around the

(06:20):
banks of the Genesee River, and throughout the autumn of
nineteen eighty nine, the killings continued. On the twenty seventh October,
Patricia Ives was found strangled to death behind the town's YMCA,

(06:40):
and just four weeks later, the killings were to take
an even more sinister turn.

Speaker 5 (06:51):
You know the one that I remember the most and
that stuck with me all these years. As a young
woman being able to in staff and June Uh was
not was not a prostitute, but she was a little slow.

Speaker 6 (07:06):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (07:06):
She had Uh acted much younger than her age. I
think the thing that was most disturbing about it is
that when her body was turned over, she was on
her stomach and they turned her over, he had come
back and viscerated her, cut her open right from the
the neck right down to the vagina.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
That was a fit of anger. You know. We spent
a day down a turning point park, you know, feeding
the ducks and walking around and making out, and then
she just flipped, you know, jumped up, says I'm going
to scream, scream, I'm gonna tell the cops. I snapped her,

(07:52):
snapped her neck. Stayed there all day until dark. The
nuh splitter open her nectar and grind. They didn't go
all the way deep into their stomach carrier, just splitter open.

(08:13):
I don't know why.

Speaker 5 (08:16):
Yeah, that was really disturbing because if you're at that time,
we didn't know what we were looking for. Now you
got a guy who's certainly we believe it was the
same guy, but his activities increasing, his what he's doing
at the scenes is becoming more severe all the time.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
The killing of June's Starts was a turning point for
the police. A pattern was now emerging all of the
murdered women were from vulnerable backgrounds. Most of them had
been slowly strangled. Their bodies were being dumped around the
Genesee River, and the killer appeared to be revisiting and
mutilating them. The Rochester police now suspected they had a

(08:57):
serial killer on their hands, and they cooled in the FBI.

Speaker 7 (09:03):
The situation on the ground when I first arrived was
a lot of stress, a massive police involvement in this thing.
There's no doubt in their mind they had a serial
killer working up there, and it's like walking into a
pressure cooker anyway. It's just intense.

Speaker 4 (09:19):
Police were chasing down hundreds of leads, and yet somehow
the killers still seemed able to blend into the background.

Speaker 7 (09:28):
One of the big questions was, well, how's he getting
these women? Prostitutes are scared to death and they're being killed,
yet he seems to have no trouble getting him. The
answer is he's a regular client. They know him, they
go with him, they have successful sex, He drives them, back,
drops them off, and no problem. So they're not afraid
to go with him. It's just some nights it goes

(09:49):
terribly wrong.

Speaker 8 (09:50):
We're trying to think How can these prostitutes make these
mistakes knowing that there is a perpetrator on the street
that that's snatching them right under police surveillance.

Speaker 7 (10:04):
I think that the prostitutes, and maybe to a degree,
some of the investigators, are looking for like a real
weird guy or somebody really really out of sync with
what was going on, when in fact it was just
the opposite. You wanted to look for somebody who really
was very much attuned to that scene and very comfortable
in that environment.

Speaker 4 (10:22):
But despite a massive police clamped down, the killing continued.
Undercover police officers now poured into Lisle Avenue, posing his
pimps and punters, but Shorecross wasn't phased by their presence.
He continued to hang out on the street.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
And I'm sitting on a stoop and I got shiny
shoes on, like a cup shoes, nice dress, and this
guy sits down beside me. He starts talking about the case,
pointing out all the decoys. I'm laughing at him.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Why were you laughing at it?

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Well, I thought it was hilarious. You know, he didn't
know who I was, but he had to open his mouth.
He thought he was talking to somebody on the team and.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
He was actually talking to the killer mayor.

Speaker 8 (11:14):
We subsequently found out that he did hang out at
Dunkin Donuts and the police would be in there themselves
talking about the homicide investigation and what they were doing,
not giving up intimate details, but how they were focused
on looking at every vehicle that went down the road
and maybe writing down plate numbers and running datus. He

(11:37):
was listening to that information and even told them that,
you know that he had told his girlfriend to be
careful out there because there was a bad guy out
there that was picking up women and killing them.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
All this time, shore Cross kept up his normal routine
working at the cheese factory going home to loyal wife,
but the girls kept going missing. On the seventeenth of
December nineteen eighty nine, June Cicero, one of the street's
most notorious hookers, disappeared from Lyle Avenue.

Speaker 8 (12:15):
She was the madam of the street. She was the
meanest prostitute in the city of Rochester, and they all
respected June Cicero.

Speaker 4 (12:25):
Shore Cross had picked her up in the Chevrolet Celebrity
that it borrowed from his mistress, Clara.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
How did June Cicero die? How did you kill her?

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Strangler mostly my leftown, so.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
He strangled them with just one hand.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Pressure point.

Speaker 4 (12:52):
Shore Cross drove the dead body of June Cicero out
of town towards nearby Northampton Park.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Was snowing real bad one night and I went out
rouped nineteen I think it was, and I crossed over
on thirty one headed back towards the city and there
was no cars coming, and I just opened the door
and pushed her out. She went over the bridge over
to knocked some snow down, went down on the water,

(13:24):
and he just closed the door and kept going.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
The police went out to get It's a crucial break.
While searching Northampton Park for the body of yet another
missing woman, McCaffrey made a dramatic sighting.

Speaker 8 (13:45):
We were less than two minutes into the flight from
Northampton Park back to Rochester when we flew over Salmon
Creek and underneath the bridge I could see a body
frozen in the ice.

Speaker 4 (14:03):
It was the body of June Cicero. And then McCaffrey
spotted a suspicious looking car on the bridge itself.

Speaker 8 (14:11):
The passenger door was open and it appeared that he
had been urinating out of the car and that's what
we could see, and as the helicopter flew by, he
closed the passenger door and slid across into the driver's
seat and started to proceed easterly on Arout thirty one.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
It was what the police had been waiting for FBI
profile as it highlighted the killer's pattern of returning to
the dead bodies, and McCaffrey decided to follow the Chevrolet.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
As I was driving the spence Port, the helicopter was
flying above me. It didn't dawn on me what was
going on, but.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
The body of June Cicero was found very close to
where you were on the bridge.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
That was just down the road away. You know, I
didn't register what was going on. I forgot she was there.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
It is my belief that.

Speaker 8 (15:23):
Shawcross returned to the bridge to make sure that the
body was far enough under the bridge so we couldn't
observe it.

Speaker 4 (15:34):
As the body of June Cicero was recovered from under
the ice, the driver of the suspicious car was taken
into questioning by the police. Twenty one months into their investigation,
police had now finally pulled in Arthur shore Cross, and
when they ran his name through the system, they found
an astonishing personal history, a trail of murder stretching back

(15:56):
almost twenty years. Shore Cross has grown up around Watertown,
one hundred miles east of Rochester. In May nineteen seventy two,
an eight year old girl, Karen Hill, was reported missing,

(16:16):
fearing she drowned. The police began searching the banks of
the Black River.

Speaker 9 (16:26):
And we went over the bank and I went one
side off sur passer one on the other side, and
he says, here she is. I walked over under the
bridge and we saw this little body buried with the
stones on her and her little.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
Feet sticking up.

Speaker 9 (16:51):
We knew she was dead because the whole uppera torsol
was buried in rocks, and.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
She was dead.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
You know. She was cool.

Speaker 10 (17:04):
And those guys are tough policemen, you have to understand.
And they were walking up from the embankment just shaking
their heads. I heard one of them say he stuffed
her mouth with dirt and mud to keep her quiet.

Speaker 4 (17:32):
A sniffer dog led the detectives from the body of
Karen Hill to Clover Street and the home of Arthur
shore Cross. Shorecross was then twenty seven years old and
was living with his third wife, Penny he'd had a
troubled childhood and a history of petty criminality. He was
arrested and brought in for questioning.

Speaker 11 (17:53):
Well, he was a lot different then. He was thin,
he just out of the army. He was in good shape,
looked like he had very strong arms, very strong hands.
And when he was agitated, really agitated, he was scary.
You wouldn't want to be in the room with him alone.
He looked a little strange, to be honest with you,

(18:15):
and I did not get in the cell with him
like I ordinarily would. I would always stay outside the
cell so that we had to steal bars between us
and talk to him there.

Speaker 4 (18:26):
Police now spent three days trying to get Shoecross to
admit his guilt, and.

Speaker 11 (18:31):
It appears that he made some sort of a confession.
It wasn't a air tight confession. He said something to
the effect either I could have done it or I
might have done it.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
What did you do to young Karen Hilp.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
I ain't saying I told you I wouldn't talk about that.
I wasn't talking about anything that happened in Watertown.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
Why not.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Because I make that I'm not can a bud anybody
in order town. You can need to take it or
leave it.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
But another child was missing too. Four months earlier, ten
year old Jack Blake had also disappeared. Shorecross had often
gone fishing with a young boy, and police suspected that
he was responsible, but they had no hard evidence and
with only a vague confession linking him to the death
of Karen Hill, police decided to offer shure Across a

(19:29):
deal tell them what he had done to Jack Blake
and face a lesser charge for the murder of Karen Hill.

Speaker 11 (19:37):
So we had a conference in which mister Shawcross explained
to them what happened and what he did and how
he killed the bleak boy. This was part of the
plea bergen arrangement that he would explain that case for them.

Speaker 4 (19:58):
Shorecross directed police to the b body of the young boy,
which they found by train tracks just out of town.
He was naked and it seemed he'd been raped before
being strangled to death. But as part of his plea bargain,
Shorecross was in charge with the killing of Jack Blake
and faced a reduced charge for the killing of Karen Hill.

Speaker 11 (20:23):
Mister Shartcross played guilty to the manslaughter. He was given
the maximum sentenced twenty five years. Oh, the public was outraged,
they were furious, and they were very upset about the
plea bargain. I'm sure the public oh winded a murder conviction.

Speaker 10 (20:43):
People wanted justice and no matter the law had to
be upheld and nothing could be done more than what
was done. But it was terribly frustrating for everybody that
not more could have been done.

Speaker 4 (21:00):
Shore Cross served less than fifteen years of his sentence
before being released on parole in April nineteen eighty seven.
Just fifteen months later, he had settled in Rochester and
his trial of murder had begun again.

Speaker 12 (21:14):
But he had shaw Cross been held responsible for murder
in the second degree and received what would have been
a well deserved maximum sentence of twenty five to wife
at the time. I know one thing, as sure as
I'm sitting here, he would not have committed these other homicides.

Speaker 4 (21:37):
Now, armed with the knowledge of the Watertown killings, the
police in Rochester were convinced they had their man, and
they began to put the screws on off A shore Cross.

Speaker 8 (21:47):
There were several of the prostitutes that were still missing,
and they played on that. The interviewers and they said, look,
there's girls out there that are missing that we know
you killed.

Speaker 5 (22:01):
They had a stack of photographs of the victims like
a bunch of playing cards, and.

Speaker 12 (22:07):
He took the stack and, like a deck of cards,
dealt out the ones that he was responsible for.

Speaker 5 (22:14):
And then they went back and talked to him about
each one, and he gave a confession to each and everyone.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Why did you confess to it?

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Why? I just got tired of it after fourteen sixteen
hours later, tired of all the what was coming at
I just couldn't handle it.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
You are you.

Speaker 10 (22:44):
High?

Speaker 4 (22:46):
Police now had that confession, and show Across was charged
with the murder of eleven women jun Stock as Darky
black Burner. As he was sent trial, there was no
doubt that he had committed the murders, but why had
he done it? As medical experts began to examine him,

(23:08):
serious questions emerged as to whether or not Arthur Shorecross
might actually be insane. Arthur Shorecross had now been arrested
and was awaiting trial for the murder of eleven women.
There was no doubt he had killed them, but his
defense team now set about exploring a fundamental question. What

(23:33):
made Arthur Shorecross act so violently.

Speaker 13 (23:36):
Everybody knows that something wrong with either shortclass. He's not
a normal person. Everybody you know that just from the beginning,
So what is it? Could there be something neurologically wrong
with him?

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Eminent neurologist Jonathan Pinkers has examined the brains of numerous
serial killers and believes that damage to certain areas of
the brain is a major factor in causing extreme violence.
The brain skin of off the shoe Cross fitted this pattern.

Speaker 13 (24:04):
If you have a lesion on the MRI, you've got
an abnormality in the EEG coming from exactly the same place,
and behavior that's rather bizarre that comes from this part
of the brain. I think it's likely that the abnormality
of the brain has something to do with his behavior,
so much that I think that had he not been

(24:24):
neurologically abnormal, I think he probably would not have been
a serial murderer.

Speaker 4 (24:30):
But brain damage alone is rarely decisive. Shoecross was also
subjected to an in depth examination by a senior Yale psychiatrist.

Speaker 14 (24:39):
What we discovered and then were able to verify, was
the fact that he was horribly mistreated sexually as a
child in the course of the interviews, he relived some
of that experience, which was out of his conscious awareness.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
Doctor Lewis Let's shore Across there are a series of interviews,
some conducted under a form of hypnosis.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
What are you doing now?

Speaker 3 (25:07):
What's happening?

Speaker 6 (25:08):
Well?

Speaker 2 (25:08):
What are you doing?

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Not are?

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Why are you? Only your parents.

Speaker 4 (25:17):
Are?

Speaker 6 (25:17):
What's happening?

Speaker 4 (25:19):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (25:20):
What's happening?

Speaker 3 (25:22):
What does mommy do?

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Mom has got me? Momma's got you now?

Speaker 14 (25:27):
What is she doing? Okay?

Speaker 2 (25:33):
And what's happening? Shortcus? And what happened? Why are you
crying or h.

Speaker 13 (25:44):
What hers start?

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Excuse me?

Speaker 3 (25:47):
And what do you say to mommy?

Speaker 2 (25:48):
What do you say to me? No? What do you
all stop?

Speaker 6 (25:53):
No?

Speaker 1 (25:58):
What did your mother do?

Speaker 2 (26:00):
My mother gave me oral sex. She performed oral sex
on me for several years. And I was fourteen years old.
I did intercourse and I ran away. I put a
sign a note on my pillow in my bedroom. I'm

(26:20):
going to Syracuse, and I turned around and went to Canada.
I just didn't want to go home.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
Because you were being abused.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yes, sure, I was.

Speaker 6 (26:34):
He very young.

Speaker 14 (26:35):
He ran away from home. He used to hide under
the teacher's desk. He was an extremely bizarre and troubled child,
very very early on, so that there's a consistency to.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
This history of abuse.

Speaker 4 (26:59):
Doctor Lewis argued that the brain damage had caused him
to suffer a phenomenon known as partial seizure.

Speaker 14 (27:10):
Just prior to the murder. There would be some event,
very often, some disagreement or some threat to him where
the woman may have said I'll tell your wife about
this or something, and then he would see bright, bright
white light, and then the next thing he'd know, he

(27:34):
would wake up. And he would wake up, often in
his car, and he would look beside him and there
would be a body. He did not have conscious knowledge
of what he was doing or conscious control over what
he was doing.

Speaker 4 (27:52):
Defense experts argued that, like many other serial killers, show
Across suffered a toxic combination of physical and mental damage.

Speaker 13 (28:01):
I would say it's three things interacting. It's brain damage,
mental illness, and the experience of having been abused. Every
one of those things is a factor in it. They
interact so that if you didn't have one of them,
the likelihood of violence would be tremendously reduced.

Speaker 4 (28:18):
The defense entered a plea of not guilty by means
of insanity. In essence, they argued that Shuecross was not
responsible for his actions. It was an argument to provoke
derision from both prosecution and police alike.

Speaker 7 (28:31):
A few things are more tragic than the murder of
a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
And I think that's the answer there. It's a beautiful theory.

Speaker 1 (28:40):
But it was just laid low by the facts.

Speaker 12 (28:44):
Claimed his mother put a broom handle inserted into his
anus and shoved it up, was his description that clearly
would have resulted in major trauma. There was no evidence
of any such trauma. During the trial, I received a
call from his mother. She questioned, why is he saying

(29:06):
these things? I never Why are they claiming these things?

Speaker 1 (29:09):
Your mama's obviously denied that anything like that happened.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Everyone would Can you pitch what would happen to a person?
She admitted, she did shit like that to mean.

Speaker 4 (29:23):
I mean, they say, they've said, you know, ask out
the Shortcusse say, well, there was those sexual abuse when
you were younger.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
How they know? I know because I was there. I
know what I had to go through.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Well, they say they checked all the medical records.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
I didn't have medical records when my mother was abusing me.
You think my mother took me to a doctor because
she was giving me oral sex as bullshit?

Speaker 1 (29:54):
If he was lying and he hadn't been sexually abused,
that would confound you.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
That would I would.

Speaker 13 (29:59):
Indeed, it's almost inconceivable that he was not sexually abused.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
Crucial to the defense case was the argument that Chullcross's
mental seizures meant he had no knowledge of what he
was doing.

Speaker 12 (30:17):
If you didn't know what you were doing at all,
why do you make efforts to hide anything? Why do
you deposit the bodies in a Genesee gorgierry where they're
less likely to be found? I think all those facts
really speak to someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

Speaker 13 (30:36):
The prosecutor thinks that his upbringing was completely normal.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
This is just a man who was bad.

Speaker 13 (30:42):
He's evil, and he killed those women because he wanted
to do it and he enjoyed doing it. That's not normal,
no matter what the prosecutor feels is normal.

Speaker 12 (30:53):
That's not normal is somebody who kills a person Menalil
Probably is somebody who kills eleven people here and has
killed two kids before, got issues absolutely, but that's not
the claimant not the argument that they're not in some

(31:13):
way disturbed. The issue is that you don't qualify for
and insanity defense. Shawcross knew what he was doing, and
if you know it's wrong, then you're responsible for your acts.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
That's the way it works.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
During the trial, the defense also argued that Shorecross had
been brutalized by his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
What happened in Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
A lot of things happened in Vietnam. Yeah, I went
to Vietnam as a weapon specialist, and I had my
own bunker and just outside of Kantoo in Vietnam Central Highlands.

Speaker 4 (31:54):
Shore Cross claims he often ventured out into the jungle
as a one man unit hunting down enemy Va Kung.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
And I see a woman in their thirties coming down
this hill carrying two ak's on this side and two
ak's on this side, barreled down. So I reach over
my shoulder like this, right behind my neck, and I
pull out a brand new machete. When she backed out,
and I come up behind her and took her head
right there. I took a couple of hits, but the

(32:23):
head came off. She body dropped to the ground.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
You just blet out, he claims.

Speaker 4 (32:29):
He then set about cooking the dead woman's body to
extract information from her friend.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
I split the body in half, opened up a pouch,
and I had some C four, plashed the explosives, lit
a cigarette, just touched it and just started lit up
like a miniature sun. And I just laid the flesh
up on top of that stick, right, and I bit
into the flesh itself, you know, just staring at her eyes.

(32:58):
And she urinated and defecating on herself. And she talked
to me and broke in English. So she told me
everything I wanted to know. I go in, I reported in,
saluted the colonel, and he gets up and he says,
you wont six, son of a bitch, But I love you.

Speaker 7 (33:17):
None of that that we can tell is true. This
Vietnam experiences are greatly inflated and exaggerated. There's no indication
you ever went out and shot anyone, much less cannibalized,
or did any of the things that he.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Claims to have done.

Speaker 4 (33:31):
But despite his vivid recollections of combat, Shorecross found few
comrades in Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
But I can't remember nobody's name in Vietnam, and that
messes me up.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
War often forms very close relationships. She didn't full friendships
with anyone out there. No, you don't remember anyone's name. No,
how long were you therefore?

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Thirteen months?

Speaker 1 (33:56):
What was your official position in Vietnam?

Speaker 2 (33:58):
I was a specialists, weapons specialist.

Speaker 12 (34:05):
We were able to actually track down in preparation. His
commanding officer, a sergeant. I think I even remember his name,
Sergeant Weaver. He was a supply clerk. He didn't go
out on these secret missions.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
And I'm not a bullshitter anything. I tell facts of life.
You don't believe that that's your prerogative. You could do
what you want. You know, everybody's reads what they want,
believes what they want. You know, and here's what they want.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
The jury, have you agreed?

Speaker 4 (34:37):
After hearing three weeks of evidence, the Jewelry were unconvinced
by the argument that Hulcross was insane. They found him
guilty on all accounts of murder. He was sentenced to
two hundred and fifty years in jail. Shorecross has spent

(35:02):
the last eighteen years in a maximum security prison. He's
confounded numerous attempts by psychologists to understand him, and, like
many other serial killers, his crimes have given him a
macab notoriety.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
I get letters all over the world. I get a
lot of college students, college professors, doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists. Yeah,
all kinds of people from all walks away.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
Do you see yourself as something of a celebrity here?

Speaker 2 (35:37):
Of course we way, Well, everybody knows what I'm here for.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
Do you enjoy the attention?

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Sometimes? Sometimes it gets to be a hassle.

Speaker 4 (35:55):
And from his prison cell, shore Across continues to invent
ever more imaginative justific lovcations for his killing of the
women in Rochester.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
When I picked those women up, I thought I had
age because one of the women who stopped in the
car told me one of the women I took out
as HIV positive. I didn't know which one of them were.
So I went back picked up all the ones I
dated in two streets in Rochester, and I started killing.

(36:27):
And while I was doing it, I took UH vagina
three and hate it. Why? I don't know, Probably to
speed up the the idea of UH the age disease,
so you thought it.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Might kill you quicker.

Speaker 4 (36:50):
Probably it's just not a lot of people that I've
ever spoken to have eaten human flesh.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Then reads a raw steak. Readia steaks, got the fatal
on the end of it. Ye. Similar.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
When you were hauled in by the police, did you
make any mention of the HIV?

Speaker 2 (37:11):
No, sir, didn't. I.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
I suppose it's.

Speaker 4 (37:14):
Because some people might say, well, isn't that just an
excuse to justify killing?

Speaker 2 (37:19):
You believe what you want to believe. I told you
how I killed, why I killed. You don't want to
believe it, that's up to you.

Speaker 4 (37:32):
One thing, however, remains a taboo subject, the killing of
the two children in Watertown. You're prepared to talk about
what happened to Vietnam and killing all these prostitutes.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
But I'm just wondering why you're prepared to talk about
it and not Watertown.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
I don't want to talk about it. You say one
word question, I leave.

Speaker 7 (37:55):
Certainly he knows how we all feel about murdering children is, obviously,
you know, probably the most reprehensible thing anyone can do.
And he understands it. But the problem is he can't
justify it. He can't come up with a selling point
or a way to mitigate that, so he's just not
going to.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Talk about it.

Speaker 4 (38:15):
But in two thousand and one, someone was to enter
Shorecross's life who would force him to confront his dark
as demons, the daughter he never.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Knew he had.

Speaker 4 (38:33):
In two thousand and one, Arthur Shurecross received dramatic news.
Whilst on leave from the army in the early nineteen sixties,
he had a brief romance with a woman in Hawaii.
Forty years later, the child from that relationship, Maggie Deming,
discovered who her father was and decided to make contact.

Speaker 6 (38:53):
My husband at first was like, you know, don't go there.
You know, do you realize that he killed children? And
I said, well, I can't just shut the door on this,
you know, you know, this is a part of my
life that I just can't close the door.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
What did you feel when you met him for the
first time when you went to prison?

Speaker 6 (39:15):
Apprehensive, nervous. I didn't didn't know what to think, you know,
what to say, Hi dad. You know, he was very genteel,
he was very soft spoken, very grandfatherly to my daughter.

(39:40):
He joked around a lot.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
What about your daughter, Maggie.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
She's cool. I've seen her just before you showed up.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
Does does your daughter Maggie know what you did? Does
she know the details of what he has?

Speaker 2 (39:57):
The information of everything I told her, things that you
want to know, but you're not gonna get like what ah,
you know what you're talking about, things that happen. You
know that other place ors the town, right.

Speaker 6 (40:16):
The children that he had killed are the children that
their ages are about the same age as my children are. Now. Uh,
what he did to them, Like I said, it was
a pretty graphic thing. And that's gonna be between him
and his macro. That's gonna between him and his macro.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
Maggie has seven children of her own, and she's been
keen to make sure that they too have a relationship
with their imprisoned grandfather.

Speaker 6 (40:48):
My older children know what he'd done. My younger children don't.
And my father kind of like said to me, you know,
it's best at the younger ones don't know, but somewhere
later they're gonna find out. They don't really advertise the
fact that their grandfather is a serial killer.

Speaker 4 (41:10):
Both Maggie and the grandchildren have become regular visitors to
show Cross in prison.

Speaker 1 (41:15):
Do you love Maggie very much and you love your grandchildren?

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Right? I write to them all the time. They send
their grandchildren, the kids in school, They send me their
school tests and different things, what they're doing in school,
send me pictures, and I draw other pictures. I do portraits.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
This is a horrible thought, but I mean, if someone
would to, you know, ripe and kill your grandchildren, what
should happen to them?

Speaker 2 (41:51):
That's up to the law.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
But what do you think should happen to them?

Speaker 2 (41:55):
That's up to the law.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
But what would you think of them as a father,
as a grandfather?

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Are there? I would be devastated.

Speaker 4 (42:04):
Right, do you have any comprehension of the suffering that
you've brought the families of the people that you've killed.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
I don't have any remorse for some reason.

Speaker 4 (42:19):
But I find it strange that you can have You
clearly feel affection for your your daughter and your grandchildren.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
It's strange, but.

Speaker 4 (42:26):
You can't feel any empathy for all those people that
the families of all the people that you killed.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
Yeah, it's not there. Like I said, in one side,
you are saying, I know something inside me is weird.

Speaker 6 (42:53):
These events happened so far back in time, These these things,
you really can't forget these sort of things you can't
really forgive on the part of those parents, you know,
having to live through that. I don't regret the fact

(43:15):
that he's my father. I can't change it. And I
don't see Arthur's Shorecross from Watertown with my children in
two thousand and eight and Sullivan Correctional totally different people,
totally different.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
There's always a bad man. I mean, you never can
get rid of it. He's behind a door somewhere. I'm
trying to keep him there. I don't want to hurt
nobody else really really, I.

Speaker 4 (43:50):
Just a final question of that, I mean, what what
Why won't you talk about the the two young dap.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Over?

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Is it not because? Is it because you're ashamed of it?

Speaker 2 (44:03):
It's disconnect.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
If this is over, okay, thank you very much for
your time.

Speaker 14 (44:16):
M