I want you to picture a scene. It's January 1990.
It is freezing cold in upstate New York. We are
hovering in a helicopter looking down at a bridge
over Salmon Creek. Right. And standing there
just looking down into this icy water is a heavy
set middle aged man. He's not fishing. He's not
out for a hike. No. He's standing near the site
where a woman's body was recently dumped. And
he is. Well the reports say he's engaging in
a sexual act with himself. It is a. Just a grotesque
image. And it was, in a very real way, the end
of a nightmare. That man on the bridge was Arthur
Shawcross. Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today,
we are opening a file that frankly makes you
want to scream at the history books. This isn't
just a true crime story. No, not at all. It's
a story about a system that failed so catastrophically
that Dr. Michael H. Stone, and this is a guy
who literally wrote the book The Anatomy of Evil
at Columbia University, he called this case one
of the most egregious examples of the unwarranted
release of a prisoner. That quote has stuck with
me since we started researching this. Egregious,
unwarranted, because that's really the core of
what we're talking about today. We aren't just
looking at the Genesee River killer and his crimes,
although, you know, we have to go there. We do.
But we're really looking at this specific moment
in time where the legal system, the mental health
system and the prison system all looked at a
known child killer and said. Yeah, he's probably
fine to go back outside. It sounds impossible
when you say it like that. It sounds like a line
from a bad movie, but it happened. Arthur Shawcross
killed two children in 1972. He was released
in 1987. And then he killed at least 11 more
women. At least 11. So today's mission, our mission
for you, is to figure out how. How does a guy
with a rap sheet that terrifying at Christmas
talk his way out of prison? How does the, uh...
architecture of a liar, as you called it, work.
And where is that line? I mean, where do we draw
the line between a brain that is physically broken
and a mind that is just purely evil? That's the
big one. We've got a massive stack of sources
for this deep dive. We're pulling from trial
transcripts. the works of the legendary FBI profiler
Robert Ressler, some incredible investigations
by Jack Olson, and medical reports that get into
the literal gray matter of the brain. Yeah, the
neurology of it is fascinating and deeply unsettling.
So buckle up. This is a heavy one. But we need
to understand it because, honestly, the loopholes
he exploited, I'm not convinced they're all closed.
Let's start at the beginning, the origin story.
Or as I call it, the construction of the mask.
Right. Arthur John Shawcross, born in 1945 in
Kittery, Maine, but really grew up in Watertown,
New York. If we look at his childhood, are we
seeing the classic bad seed signs, the ones we
always hear about? We are seeing what forensic
psychologists used to call and, you know, still
debate pretty heavily the McDonald triad. OK,
pause there. I've heard this term thrown around
in TV shows all the time. The triad. What is
it actually? What does it mean? So back in 1963,
a psychiatrist named J .M. McDonald. proposed
this theory. He said that if you see three specific
behaviors in a child, it's a strong predictor
of future violent, maybe even homicidal tendencies.
And the three are? One, cruelty to animals. Two,
an obsession with fire setting. And three, enuresis,
which is the clinical term for chronic bedwetting
well past the age where a child should have stopped.
And Shawcross had these. He hid the jackpot on
the bedwetting. The sources indicate he was wetting
the bed well into his teenage years. No. We have
to be really careful here. Bedwetting on its
own doesn't make someone a serial killer. Of
course not. It can be biological. It can be stress
-related. But you have to think about the context
of the 1950s. Oh, the shame. Absolutely. His
mother would have been scrubbing sheets, maybe
shaming him directly. The other kids, if they
found out, would be relentless. Exactly. It creates
this intense internal cycle of humiliation and
rage. You feel powerless over your own body,
so you start looking for ways to exert power
over others. And Shawcross did that. He was a
bully. known for it at school. He had these violent,
sudden outbursts. He was a big kid, so he could
intimidate people. And eventually, he just dropped
out of high school in 1960. He couldn't function
in that kind of social structure. Now, speaking
of his childhood, and this is where it gets really
murky, we have to address the elephant in the
room, the abuse claims. Shawcross later told
psychiatrists some just horrific stories about
his mother, Bessie. Right. And they are truly
awful. He claimed that starting at age seven,
His mother forced him into oral sex. He also
claimed he had sexual relations with his sister
later on. Okay, the big question. Do we believe
him? This is, I think, the first major lesson
for you as a listener today. Yeah. The skepticism
of the self -reporter. When you are dealing with
a diagnosed psychopath, you have to realize that
they view their own history as a tool. It's a
weapon. It's a shield. So the past isn't something
that happened to him. It's something he uses.
Precisely. Did the abuse happen? It's possible.
I mean, dysfunctional homes absolutely breed
violence and trauma. But psychopathy experts
often point out that these offenders learned
very, very quickly that I was abused is a get
-out -of -jail -free card. It generates sympathy.
It provides a reason for their darkness. So he
might have been retrofitting his own history
to make himself look like a victim, not a predator.
It's a classic deflection. Don't look at what
I did. Look at what was done to me. And this
pattern of inventing a narrative to suit his
needs. I mean, it just exploded when he went
to Vietnam. Oh, the war stories. This part is
just wild. He gets drafted in 1967. He's 21 years
old. He goes to Vietnam. And if you listen to
Arthur Shawcross talk at a bar in the 1980s,
you'd think he was the inspiration for Rambo.
He was telling people he was this elite jungle
fighter. He claimed he was on long range reconnaissance
patrols. He claimed he beheaded Mama Sands, you
know, local Vietnamese women and nailed their
heads to trees as warnings to the. vietcong he
also claimed he engaged in cannibalism right
to survive in the jungle yes cannibalism mutilation
you name it he painted himself as this uh blood
-soaked warrior who had seen and done the absolute
unspeakable a broken man a victim of the war
but the reality was a little more Mundane. Mundane
is the perfect word. We have a service records.
Robert Ressler pulled them for the trial. He
was in the fourth supply and transport company.
So he was a clerk, a logistics guy. He was moving
boxes. He was a supply guy. He wasn't out in
the bush hunting the Viet Cong with a knife in
his teeth. He was likely moving crates, filling
out forms, working in a depot well behind the
front lines. So why the lies? I mean, that's
a huge, huge gap. Peeling potatoes versus beheading
people. What's the psychological function of
that? It's what some profilers call the persona
of dangerousness. Shawcross was a physically
imposing guy, sure. But deep down, he was that
insecure bedwetting kid. He felt inadequate.
By inventing these atrocities, he commanded fear
and respect. Nobody messes with the guy who claims
he ate people in Vietnam. And you have to remember
the era, too. Yes, absolutely. Late 60s, early
70s. The culture was just flooded with images
of the damaged vet. Taxi driver. The deer hunter.
All those stories coming back. Exactly. The public
was primed to believe that Vietnam turned good
men into monsters. Shawcross just stepped into
a role that society had already written for him.
He knew that if he said, I saw terrible things,
people would back off. They'd say, oh, it's the
war. Poor guy. It was the perfect camouflage
for the real monster that was growing inside
him. But while he was faking the combat trauma,
the real deviant behavior, the stuff from the
McDonald triad was actually starting to show
up in his official records. He gets stationed
at Fort Sill in Oklahoma after his tour, and
he starts setting fires. The second part of the
triad. Fire setting. And this wasn't just, you
know, a prank. An army psychiatrist actually
flagged this. He sat down with Showacross's second
wife, Linda, and told her that her husband, Arthur,
derives sexual arousal from setting fires. Wait,
sexual arousal? From arson? How does that work?
It's a paraphilia called pyrophilia. It's rare,
but it happens. For a man who feels inadequate
and powerless, fire is the ultimate power. It's
total destruction. You strike one tiny match
and you can watch something huge and powerful
burn to the ground. For some people, that rush
of dominance, of control, becomes sexualized.
So he gets discharged, the marriage falls apart,
he's back in New York in Clayton, and he starts
acting out for real, burglary, arson, and he
lands in prison for the first time. Sentenced
to five years at Attica. A serious sentence.
But... And here is the very first crack in the
system that we see. He only serves 22 months.
Less than two years on a five -year sentence.
Why? Was it overcrowding? Good behavior? It was
partially good behavior, but there was a specific,
very dramatic incident. A prison riot. And in
the middle of the chaos, Shawcross, the inmate,
actually helped rescue a correctional officer
who was being attacked. Okay, that sounds heroic.
I mean, on the surface, that looks like a man
who has a moral compass. It does, doesn't it?
And that's exactly what the parole board thought.
They looked at that file and said, look, he saved
a guard. He's one of the good ones. He's reformed.
But you're skeptical. Let's look at it through
the lens of a master manipulator. Shawcross knows
how to play the game. What's the one thing you
can do as an inmate that will get you the most
positive attention? Saving a CO. It buys you
incredible capital inside the walls and especially
with a parole board. Was it altruism? Or was
it a calculated psychopathic move to get out
early? Given his later history, it feels like
a calculation. It's hard to see it any other
way. So he's out. It's October 1971. He's back
in his hometown of Watertown. He gets a job at
the public works department. He gets married
again for a third time. On paper, it looks like
he's trying to go straight. But the mask is slipping.
And this brings us to section two of our deep
dive. The first wave of killings. This is where
it all goes dark. May 7th, 1972. A 10 -year -old
boy named Jack Owen Blake goes missing. He was
just a local kid. Shawcross apparently lured
him into the woods, promising to show him something
interesting. And he just vanished. The police
had nothing. No body, no weapon, no witnesses.
Just a missing boy and a town in panic. And while
the town is freaking out, searching the woods,
putting up flyers for Jack. September rolls around,
Labor Day weekend. A little girl, Karen Ann Hill,
just eight years old, is visiting Watertown with
her mom. And Shawcross intercepts her. He takes
her under a bridge, he rapes her, and he murders
her. He was caught almost immediately for that
one, right? The evidence was pretty clear. Yes,
he was arrested the very next day. And once he
was in custody for the murder of Karen Hill,
the dominoes fell. Information came to light
that led investigators to Jack Blake's body.
So now... The police have a guy who has confessed
to killing two children in the span of just four
months. This is the moment where I think every
single person listening is going to get angry.
Because in a sane world, this is where the story
of Arthur Shawcross, the killer, ends. It should
have been. You kill two kids. You go to prison.
You never, ever come out. Maybe you get the death
penalty, which New York had at the time. Maybe
you get life without parole. But that is absolutely
not what happened. No. Enter the district attorney,
a man named William McCluskey. Okay, let's try
to get inside his head. I'm the DA. I have a
confession for the Blake killing. I have rock
-solid evidence for the Hill killing. This should
be a slam dunk. Why on earth am I even thinking
about offering a plea bargain? Because you are
terrified of one specific legal defense. Extreme
emotional disturbance. Explain that like I'm
a jury member from 1972. What does that mean?
Okay, so in 1972 New York law, murder is the
intentional killing of another person. Simple
enough, but... The law had this loophole, this
affirmative defense. If the defense attorney
could prove that the killer acted under an extreme
emotional disturbance, basically a temporary
break from reality, a crime of passion, an uncontrollable
urge that a reasonable person might also feel
in that situation. A seeing red defense. That's
a good way to put it. If they could convince
the jury of that, the jury could be instructed
to downgrade the charge from murder to manslaughter.
And manslaughter carries a much, much lighter
sentence. Infinitely lighter. Yeah. So the DA,
McCluskey, he looked at Arthur Shawcross. He
looked at the Vietnam stories, which, remember,
everyone still believed were true at this point.
He looked at the abused childhood narrative that
Shawcross was already spinning. The whole damaged
vet persona. Exactly. And McCluskey thought,
if I put this guy in front of a jury of his peers
from Watertown, his lawyer is going to cry PTSD.
He's going to talk about the horrors of war.
The jury is going to feel sorry for this war
hero. And they're going to give him manslaughter
anyway. So he was afraid of losing the murder
conviction at trial. So he preempted the jury
and offered manslaughter himself. He thought
he was taking the safe bet. He offered Shawcross
a deal. plead guilty to manslaughter for both
deaths, and we won't even try for murder. We'll
just put you away. And Shawcross obviously takes
the deal. What was the sentence for two counts
of first -degree manslaughter? An indeterminate
term with a maximum of 25 years. 25 years for
two children. That's 12 and a half years per
child. And that's the maximum. He's eligible
for parole long before that. It was a complete
judicial collapse. I mean, technically, legally,
you could argue the DA followed the rules. He
used the tools available to him and he secured
a conviction. But morally, for the community.
It was an absolute disaster. It essentially told
Shawcross that he could kill, he could manipulate
the narrative about his past, and he could get
his slept on the wrist. It validated his entire
worldview. The world is a game, and he knows
how to play it. So he goes away. He's in Attica,
then Greenhaven. He serves 14 years. It's now
1987. He's up for parole. And this is section
three, the release. This is where the bureaucracy
actually kills people. It's just one failure
after another. OK, so he's been inside for 14
years. There had to be doctors looking at him,
right? You don't just let a child killer out
without a full psychiatric evaluation. Oh, there
were evaluations, multiple ones. Yeah. And they
were terrifying. The psychiatrist who evaluated
Shawcross in the years leading up to his parole
hearing labeled him a schizoid psychopath. We
mentioned that term earlier. Can we break that
down a bit more? We know what a psychopath is.
No empathy, manipulative, callous. But what does
the schizoid part add to that? Schizoid in this
context refers to a personality type that is
cold, aloof. detached from social relationships,
and deeply solitary. They're loners. So you have
a person who doesn't just like empathy for others.
The psychopath part. Right. They also have absolutely
no desire for human connection. They are totally
detached from the emotional reality of other
human beings. It's a double whammy of dangerousness.
The doctors were essentially screaming in the
reports, this man is a loaded gun, do not let
him out. So if the doctors are screaming no,
who in their right mind is saying yes? The prison
administration. The parole board. The social
workers. Well, why? On what grounds? Because
inside the highly structured environment of a
maximum security prison, Arthur Shawcross was
a good inmate. He followed the rules. He didn't
start fights. He did his chores. He was polite
to the guards. The social workers and the parole
board, who weren't trained psychiatrists, looked
at his behavioral record inside the walls and
said, look, he's reformed. He's no longer dangerous
to society. That is just maddening. Being good
in a cage doesn't mean you won't bite when the
cage is opened. A tiger can be calm in a zoo.
It's still a tiger. That is the fundamental disconnect.
A smart psychopath is often a great prisoner.
They know the rules. They know how to manipulate
staff. They know what to say. The social workers
saw a compliant middle -aged man. The psychiatrist
saw a predator in hibernation. The system listened
to the social workers. So in April 1987, the
gates open. Arthur Shawcross is a free man. And
this leads to one of the most disturbing sequences
in the entire story, a dynamic that criminologists
now refer to as pass the trash. This sounds like
a bad game show, but it's actually a real world
policy. Effectively, yes. So Shawcross is released.
His parole officer tries to settle him in Binghamton,
New York. But guess what? This is 1987. There's
no Internet, but word still gets out. The local
paper runs a story. The child killer is moving
in next door. The neighbors must have gone nuclear.
I know I would. They did. Protests on his lawn,
threats. Local employers refused to hire him.
So the parole department says, OK, this isn't
working. And they move him. He moves to Delhi,
New York. Same thing happens. The community rises
up, completely hostile. He moves to Fleischman's.
Same exact thing. So he's just bouncing around
this radioactive person nobody wants. And instead
of the parole department saying, hey, this instability
is incredibly dangerous for a man like this.
Maybe we need to put him in a secure halfway
house or revoke his parole. They just kept shuffling
him. Pass the trash. Get him out of my jurisdiction
and make him someone else's problem. Exactly.
And in June 1987, the parole officer makes the
final fatal mistake. He moves Shawcross and his
new girlfriend. a woman named Rosemarie Wally,
to a transient hotel in Rochester, New York.
Rochester. A big city. Anonymous. A big city
with a lot of people. And here is the kicker,
the single most unbelievable failure in his whole
chain. The parole officer did not notify the
Rochester Police Department. Wait. Stop. So the
Rochester PD has a paroled double child killer,
a diagnosed schizoid psychopath, dropped into
their city, living in a transient hotel right
downtown. And nobody sent them a memo. Not a
single phone call. Not one memo. As far as Rochester
law enforcement was concerned, Arthur Shawcross
didn't exist. He was invisible. He was effectively
unsupervised in a brand new, target -rich hunting
ground. By October, he had his own apartment
on Alexander Street. He was buying a car. He
was settling in. And the clock was ticking down
to zero. It didn't take long. March 1988, the
Genesee River murders begin. And this is Section
4. The profile of the victims changes here. He's
not grabbing kids off the street anymore. No.
He evolved. Or devolved, depending on how you
look at it. He started targeting sex workers.
Why the switch? Is it about risk? It's all about
vulnerability and access. Shawcross was a predator
of opportunity. In the transient areas of Rochester,
sex workers were accessible. They would get into
a car with a stranger willingly. And tragically,
he knew that society pays far less attention
when a sex worker goes missing compared to when
a school child vanishes. He was banking on the
less dead phenomenon, the idea that some victims
are seen as less valuable by society and the
police. He absolutely was. It was a cold, cruel
calculation. We need to acknowledge the scale
of this. This wasn't one or two isolated incidents.
This was a spree. It was a storm of violence.
Dorothy Blackland. Anna Marie Stephan, Dorothy
Keeler, Patricia Ives, June Stott, Marie Welsh,
Frances Brown, Kimberly Logan, Elizabeth Gibson,
who was killed over in Wayne County, Darlene
Trippi, and finally, June Cicero. That is 11
women, 11 leaves. 11 convictions. He's suspected
in at least one more. And most of them were found
in or near the Genesee River Gorge. So bodies
are turning up. The city must have been terrified.
Why didn't the police connect the dots faster?
I mean, if you find three bodies in the same
river, isn't that pretty much the definition
of a serial killer? You would think so. But this
brings us to a really fascinating and tragic
concept that Detective Robert Keppel, who consulted
on the Ted Bundy case, later critiqued heavily.
It's called the modus operandi trap, or linkage
blindness. How does that work? How can you be
blind to a pattern that seems so obvious from
the outside? Police are trained to look for patterns
for a signature. The killer always uses a .22
caliber. The killer always ties the hands with
a specific type of square knot. The killer always
leaves the body facing north. They look for consistency
because that's what links the crimes. But Shawcross,
he was messy. He was inconsistent. In what way?
Sometimes he strangled his victims. Sometimes
he beat them to death. Sometimes he left the
body right where he killed them. Other times
he'd transport it and hide it in the river. One
victim was a different age profile. Another was
found in a different county. Because the crime
scenes looked so different, the detectives running
the task force thought they were dealing with
different killers. So they were looking for a
group of bad guys or multiple separate murderers
because they couldn't believe one guy was doing
all of this in different ways. Exactly. They
were looking for a perfect, neat pattern in a
chaotic, ugly reality. And because of that, Shawcross
slipped through the cracks of their investigation
for almost two years, killing again and again.
And finally, it wasn't some high -tech DNA test
or a brilliant Sherlock Holmes -style deduction
that caught him. It was just a helicopter. Back
to our opening image, January 4th, 1990. The
police are doing routine aerial surveillance
of the remote areas where bodies have been found,
just seeing if anything looked out of place.
They fly over the Salmon Creek Bridge in the
town of Parma, and they see a Chevy Celebrity
parked there. Shaw crosses car. And they see
this heavyset man standing on the bridge. He's
looking down at the ice. And he appears to be
either urinating or masturbating over the edge.
It's such a bizarre, risky thing to do. Why go
back to the scene of the crime like that? It's
a classic part of the serial killer cycle. It's
called totem behavior. They return to the dump
sites to relive the fantasy, to feel that sense
of power and ownership over the victim again.
June Cicero's body was down there, frozen in
the ice. He was. in his twisted mind, visiting
her. So the helicopter crew saw this, thought
it was suspicious, and ran the plates. They ran
the plates. It came back to Arthur John Shawcross,
and suddenly someone in the Rochester Police
Department pulled his file and realized, oh my
God, we have a guy living here who killed two
kids in Watertown in 1972. The pieces finally,
catastrophically, clicked into place. He was
arrested on January 5th. But the story doesn't
end with the handcuffs. That's Section 5, the
trial. Because Shawcross didn't just confess
and say, you got me. He went for the ultimate
gambit, the insanity defense. And this trial
became a heavyweight championship fight of forensic
psychiatry. It was really wild. On one side,
the defense brought in the famous Dr. Dorothy
Lewis. She's a legend in this field, right? An
absolute pioneer. She's one of the first to seriously
study the link between childhood abuse, brain
damage, and violent offenders. She examined Shawcross
and she came into court with a laundry list of
diagnoses, brain damage, PTSD from his combat
in Vietnam, and most controversially, multiple
personality disorder, what we now call dissociative
identity disorder, or DEDE. And she introduced
the jury to Bessie. Bessie. Dr. Lewis testified
that Arthur Shawcross... didn't kill those 11
women. She claimed that when Arthur was under
extreme stress, he dissociated, and a female
alter ego named Bessie, pointedly named after
his abusive mother, took over his body. And Bessie
was the one who was full of rage, vengeful, and
violent. That is a hell of a story to tell a
jury. It wasn't me, it was the angry lady living
in my head. It was a very clear bid for institutionalization,
not prison. If the jury believed Bessie did it,
then Arthur wasn't legally responsible. he'd
go to a secure mental hospital, not a supermax
prison. But the prosecution was not having any
of it. Who did they bring in to counter that?
They brought in the two biggest guns they could
find, Robert Ressler from the FBI's Behavioral
Science Unit and the renowned forensic psychiatrist
Dr. Park Dietz. Ressler is the guy who basically
invented modern criminal profiling. He interviewed
Bundy, Gacy. All of them. Correct. And Ressler
went straight for the jugular. He went for the
Vietnam lies. He got Shawcross's service record
admitted into evidence. He got on the stand and
told the jury, point blank, this man is not suffering
from combat PTSD because he never saw combat.
He completely dismantled the foundation of the
trauma narrative. He showed the jury that Shawcross
was a pathological liar, plain and simple. And
what about Dr. Dietz? How did he handle the Bessie
theory? Dietz attacked it head on. He interviewed
Shawcross for hours. He diagnosed him with antisocial
personality disorder, or ASPD. Which means, in
layman's terms. It means he's not insane. He
isn't out of touch with reality. He knows right
from wrong. He just doesn't care. He chooses
wrong because it feels good and serves his needs.
Dietz argued that Bessie was just another con,
another performance. He suggested Shawcross was
mimicking symptoms he'd seen in movies like Civil
or heard about from other inmates. It was another
manipulation. But wait, there was actual physical
evidence of brain problems, right? This wasn't
just a battle of psychobabble. Yes, and this
is where you, the listener, need to really pay
attention because this complicates everything
and makes it so much more interesting. Dr. Lewis's
team conducted brain scans, and they found two
significant abnormalities. What were they? First,
they found a cyst, a small growth that was pressing
on his temporal lobe. And second, they found
evidence of scarring on his frontal lobes. We
hear about the frontal lobe all the time in these
cases. Why is that specific part of the brain
so important? Think of the frontal lobe as the
CEO of your brain. It's the part right behind
your forehead that's responsible for executive
function. Decision -making, long -term planning.
morality, and most importantly, inhibition and
impulse control. It's the part that says, don't
punch that guy or don't steal that car or don't
act on that violent urge. Like the famous Phineas
Gage case from the 1800s. The perfect analogy.
Phineas Gage was the railroad worker who had
a metal tamping rod shot straight through his
frontal lobe. He survived, but his personality
completely changed. He went from a nice, responsible,
well -liked guy to a rude, impulsive, profane
jerk. The defense argued that Arthur Shawcross
was a modern Phineas Gage, that the scarring
meant he literally could not stop his violent
impulses. That's a terrifying philosophical question.
If your brain is physically broken, are you evil
or are you just a broken machine? Are your actions
a choice or a symptom? It is the ultimate question
of neural law, and it's something courts are
still grappling with today. But the jury in 1991
had to make a practical decision. Did the cyst
and the scarring make him rape and murder 11
women? Or did Arthur Shaw cross the man who lied
about Vietnam, who manipulated the parole board,
who hid bodies make a choice? What was the verdict?
Guilty. They didn't buy the Bessie defense. They
didn't buy the brain damage excuse. They saw
him as a manipulator. They convicted him of 11
counts of second degree murder and other related
charges. And the sentence? 250 years to life.
Effectively, life without parole, he was never
getting out again. So he's locked up forever
this time. The story should be over. But he had
one last grotesque card play. We have to talk
about the 2003 interview. Yeah, this is the final
disturbing chapter. This was with Catherine English,
a British journalist who was doing a documentary
on cannibalism. Shawcross is an old man now.
He's in a wheelchair. He's frail. But he sees
a camera and the performer, the manipulator,
turns right back on. What did he say? He confessed
to something new. something he'd never mentioned
to the police or at trial. He claimed in graphic
detail that he had sliced out and eaten the vulvae
of three of his female victims. Oh, my God. It's
just revolting. But here is the fascinating psychological
twist. The interviewer then asked him about Jack
Blake, his very first victim, the little boy,
back in 72. Shawcross had at one point claimed
he ate Blake's genitals, too. But in his 2003
interview, he clammed up. He refused to talk
about it. Why? Why admit to eating the women
but suddenly go silent about the boy? Control.
It's all about control. He gives her a new shocking
nugget here, but he withholds this other nugget
there. He wanted to keep the reporter and the
world dancing to his tune, even locked in a cell,
rotting away. He needed to be the puppet master.
He needed to prove he was still in charge of
his own horrific narrative. So was the cannibalism
claim even true? Who knows? And in a way, it
doesn't matter. With Shawcross. Truth and lies
were blended into a poisonous smoothie. It might
have been true or it might have been just another
Vietnam story. A shocking lie designed to get
attention and cement his legacy as the ultimate
monster. He finally died in 2008. November 10th,
2008. He complained of leg pains, was taken to
Albany Medical Center and died of cardiac arrest.
He was 63 years old and the world became a slightly
safer place. So we've unpacked a lot here. The
bedwetting arsonists, the Vietnam lies, the catastrophic
plea bargain, the parole failure, the linkage
blindness, the battle of the experts, the brain
cyst. When you look at this entire horrifying
mess, what is the big takeaway? So what? For
me, it comes down to the danger of what I call
administrative arrogance. Say more about that.
What do you mean by that? We had experts. We
had trained psychiatrists who looked at this
man and used big, scary, accurate words. Schizoid
psychopath. They wrote reports to warn us. And
a system of bureaucrats and social workers maybe
worried about overcrowding or just ticking boxes
on a form, or maybe they genuinely believe in
giving a guy a second chance. They overruled
the science. They prioritized the process over
the person. Exactly. They prioritized their administrative
procedure over the clear, explicit warnings of
the medical professionals. And because of that
one administrative decision to sign that one
piece of paper. 11 women died who did not have
to. It's a chilling lesson in the importance
of listening to the red flags, even when it's
inconvenient. And it leaves us, as you said,
with that lingering, uncomfortable question about
biology. We can hate Arthur Shawcross, and we
should for his actions. But that cyst in his
brain was real. That scarring on his frontal
lobes was real. It's the uncomfortable final
thought for you to chew on. How many other people
are walking around with frontal lobe scarring
right now from a childhood injury or a fever?
And what stops them from becoming Arthur Shawcross?
Maybe it's a good family. Maybe it's a lack of
other risk factors. Maybe it's just luck. Or
maybe, and this is what you have to hope, some
people just choose to be good no matter what
their brain looks like on a scan. That is a thought
that's definitely going to keep me up tonight.
Me too. Thank you for listening to this deep
dive. It was a dark one, but hopefully it shed
some important light on how these cracks in the
system form and what can crawl out of them. Stay
safe out there. And trust your instincts. We'll
see you next time.