Sullivan Correctional Facility, located just outside Fallsburg, New York State. It is a maximum-security prison, home to some of America’s most violent criminals. One of them is Arthur J. Shawcross.
Shawcross has murdered eleven women and is currently serving a 250-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 have come to meet him face-to-face to see if he would tell us what made him such a violent killer.
“People on the outside do not know what evil is. Do you know what evil is?”
“Sure.”
“Are you evil?”
“Somewhat.”
Rochester, New York State, thirty miles from the Canadian border. It is a provincial city of a million people, set amongst the gorges and falls of the Genesee River. It is a middle-class town, but it also has a dark side.
Lyell Avenue is a mile-long drag through one of the city’s rundown neighborhoods, home to its seedy red-light district. In March 1988, women began disappearing from the strip. Dorothy Blackburn was a 27-year-old prostitute and a mother of three. Her body was found in a nearby riverbed. She had been strangled to death.
In July, Anne-Marie Steffen, a 27-year-old cocaine addict, also went missing. Her decomposed body was found on the banks of the Genesee River.
“Anne-Marie Steffen, do you remember meeting her?”
“I met Anne-Marie Steffen, I think, in front of the Finger Hut on Lake Avenue.”
“Do you remember killing her?”
“Yeah, possibly. We’re not going into details here.”
“No, but how did you kill her?”
“Probably strangulation.”
“How do you know when they’re dead?”
“How? I don’t. Just do.”
“More or less?”
“After they just relax. The body relaxes, doesn’t fight no more. Now, it takes about four minutes, probably. Sometimes less than that.”
To the outside world, Shawcross 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 spent much of his free time fishing the banks of the Genesee River.
But he was living a double life. He had a mistress named Clara and was a regular visitor to Lyell Avenue.
“You’ve got a wife, you’ve got a mistress, and you’re also seeing prostitutes quite regularly, and other people, I guess.”
“I could say I was enjoying myself.”
For almost one year, Shawcross killed no one. Then, in July 1989, police found the body of an elderly homeless woman, Dorothy Keeler. Dorothy was found down on the Seth Green Island on the Genesee River, and she was just bones. So, the police really did not know at the time why he killed her.
“She used to live in my house, in my apartment for a while.”
“Was she a friend?”
“She was until she started stealing stuff out of the house. I asked her, ‘Why are you stealing?’ and just sending her money. And I said, ‘You have a bank account.’ I was paying her twenty-five cents an hour just to clean the apartment.”
“So she was thieving from you?”
“She was taking from me and my wife, Rose.”
“Does that warrant killing her?”
“Huh?”
“Does that warrant killing her?”
“Well, to me it did.”
But Shawcross did not just kill Dorothy Keeler; he would later return to her dead corpse. He came back and visited. He came back and visited, and he took her skull, her head, and threw it in the Genesee River.
“After you killed her, you went back later to see the body, is that right?”
“No, I went back to clean up.”
“She was found with her head removed. Did you? That’s right. How did that happen?”
“Just pick it up and move it.”
“Why?”
“You just pull the head off. Yeah, it was already off.”
Shawcross 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 banks of the Genesee River, and throughout the autumn of 1989, the killings continued. On the 27th of October, Patricia Ives was found strangled to death behind the town’s YMCA. And just four weeks later, the killings were to take an even more sinister turn.
“You know, the one that I remember the most and that has stuck with me all these years is a young woman by the name of June Stott. And June was not a prostitute, but she was a little slow. She 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 when they turned her over, he had come back and eviscerated her, cut her open right from the neck right down to the vagina.”
“That was a fit of anger, you know? We spent a day down at Turner Point Park, you know, feeding the ducks and walking around and making out. Then she just flipped, you know? Jumped up and says, ‘I’m going to scream, scream. I’m going to tell the cops.’ I snapped her. Snapped her neck. Stayed there all day until dark, then split her open, from neck to groin. I didn’t go all the way deep into the stomach here; he just split her open. I don’t know why.”
“That was really disturbing because at that time we didn’t know what we were looking for. Now you have a guy who is certainly, we believe, the same guy, but his activity is increasing. What he’s doing at the scenes is becoming more severe all the time.”
The killing of June Stott 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 serial killer on their hands, and they called in the FBI.
“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 so it’s like walking into a pressure cooker in a way. It’s just intense.”
Police were chasing down hundreds of leads, and yet somehow the killer still seemed able to blend into the background.
“One of the big questions was, ‘Well, how is he getting these women?’ These prostitutes are scared to death, and they’re being killed, yet he seems to have no trouble getting them. 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, with no problem. So they’re not afraid to go with him. It’s just some nights it goes terribly wrong.”
“We’re trying to think how can these prostitutes make these mistakes, knowing that there is a perpetrator on this street that is snatching them right under police surveillance. I think 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.”
But despite a massive police clampdown, the killing continued. Undercover police officers now poured into Lyell Avenue, posing as pimps and punters, but Shawcross was not fazed by their presence. He continued to hang out on the street.
“I’m sitting on a stoop and I got shiny shoes on, like cop 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.”
“Why were you laughing at him?”
“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 he was actually talking to the killer.
“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 data. He was listening to that information and even told them that, you know, 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.”
All this time, Shawcross kept up his normal routine, working at the cheese factory and going home to his loyal wife, Rose. But the girls kept going missing. On the 17th of December, 1989, June Cicero, one of the street’s most notorious hookers, disappeared from Lyell Avenue.
“She was the madam of the streets. She was the meanest prostitute in the city of Rochester, and they all respected June Cicero.”
Shawcross had picked her up in the Chevrolet Celebrity that he borrowed from his mistress, Clara.
“How did June Cicero die? How did you kill her?”
“Strangled her.”
“Mostly?”
“My left hand. Let’s see, stronger than with just one hand. All right, right there. Pressure point.”
Shawcross drove the dead body of June Cicero out of town towards nearby Northampton Park.
“It was snowing real bad one night, and I went out Route 19, I think it was, and I crossed over on 31, headed back toward the city. And there was no cars coming, and I just opened the door and pushed her out. She went over the bridge, knocked some snow down, went down in the water.”
And he just closed the door and kept going.
The police were now to get a crucial break. While searching Northampton Park for the body of yet another missing woman, McCaffrey made a dramatic sighting.
“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.”
It was the body of June Cicero. And then McCaffrey spotted a suspicious-looking car on the bridge itself.
“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 Route 31.”
It was what the police had been waiting for. FBI profilers had highlighted the killer’s pattern of returning to the dead bodies, and McCaffrey decided to follow the Chevrolet.
“As I was driving to Spencerport, a helicopter was flying above me. It didn’t dawn on me what was going on, but the body of June Cicero was found very close to where you were on the bridge.”
“Yeah, that was just down the road a ways, you know. I didn’t register what was going on. I forgot she was there.”
“It is my belief that Shawcross returned to the bridge to make sure that the body was far enough under the bridge so we couldn’t observe it.”
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 Shawcross, and when they ran his name through their system, they found an astonishing personal history: a trail of murder stretching back almost twenty years.
Shawcross had grown up around Watertown, one hundred miles east of Rochester. In May 1972, an eight-year-old girl, Karen Hill, was reported missing. Fearing she had drowned, the police began searching the banks of the Black River.
“And we went over the bank, and I went on one side, Officer Passer went on the other side, and he says, ‘Here she is.’ I walked over under the bridge, and we saw this little body buried, with stones on her and her little feet sticking up. We knew she was dead because the whole upper torso was buried in rocks, and she was dead, you know? She was cold.”
“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.”
A sniffer dog led the detectives from the body of Karen Hill to Clover Street and the home of Arthur Shawcross. Shawcross was then twenty-seven years old and was living with his third wife, Penny. He had a troubled childhood and a history of petty criminality. He was arrested and brought in for questioning.
“Well, he was a lot different then. He was thin, he was just out of the army, he was in good shape. He 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, and I did not get in the cell with him like I ordinarily would. I would always stay outside the cell so we had the steel bars between us and talked to him there.”
Police now spent three days trying to get Shawcross to admit his guilt, and it appears that he made some sort of a confession.
“It wasn’t an airtight confession. He said something to the effect of either ‘I could have done it’ or ‘I might have done it.'”
“What did you do to young Karen Hill?”
“I ain’t saying. I told you I wouldn’t talk about that. I wasn’t talking about anything that happened in Watertown.”
“Why not?”
“Because I make that. I’m not talking about anybody in Watertown. You can either take it, believe it.”
But another child was missing too. Four months earlier, ten-year-old Jack Blake had also disappeared. Shawcross had often gone fishing with the young boy, and police suspected that he was responsible, but they had no hard evidence. With only a vague confession linking him to the death of Karen Hill, police decided to offer Shawcross a deal: tell them what he had done to Jack Blake and face a lesser charge for the murder of Karen Hill.
“So we had a conference in which Mr. Shawcross explained to them what happened and what he did and how he killed the Blake boy. This was part of the plea bargain arrangement, that he would explain that case for them.”
Shawcross directed police to the body of the young boy, which they found by train tracks just out of town. He was naked, and it seemed he had been raped before being strangled to death. But as part of his plea bargain, Shawcross was not charged with the killing of Jack Blake and faced a reduced charge for the killing of Karen Hill.
“Mr. Shawcross pled guilty to manslaughter. He was given the maximum sentence, 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 wanted a murder conviction. People wanted justice, and no matter what, the law had to be upheld, and nothing could be done more than what was done. But it was terribly frustrating for everybody that no more could have been done.”
Shawcross served less than fifteen years of his sentence before being released on parole in April 1987. Just fifteen months later, he had settled in Rochester, and his trail of murder had begun again.
“But had Shawcross been held responsible for murder in the second degree and received what would have been a well-deserved maximum sentence of twenty-five to life at the time, I know one thing as sure as I’m sitting here: he would not have committed these other homicides.”
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 Arthur Shawcross.
“There were several of the prostitutes that were still missing, and they played on that, the interviewers. And they said, ‘Look, Art, there’s girls out there that are missing that we know you killed.’ They had a stack of photographs of the victims like a bunch of playing cards. He took the stack and, like a deck of cards, dealt out the ones that he was responsible for, and then they went back and talked to him about each one, and he gave a confession to each and every one.”
“Why did you confess to it?”
“Why? I just got tired of it. After fourteen, sixteen hours later, tired.”
“Of what?”
“All the, what was coming at me. I just couldn’t handle it.”
Police now had their confession, and Shawcross was charged with the murder of eleven women. As he was sent for trial, there was no doubt that he had committed the murders, but why had he done it? As medical experts began to examine him, serious questions emerged as to whether or not Arthur Shawcross might actually be insane.
Arthur Shawcross 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 made Arthur Shawcross act so violently?
“Everybody knows there’s something wrong with Arthur Shawcross. He’s not a normal person, everybody knew that just from the beginning. So what is it?”
Could there be something neurologically wrong with him? Eminent neurologist Jonathan Pincus 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 scan of Arthur Shawcross fitted this pattern.
“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 neurologically abnormal, I think he probably would not have been a serial murderer.”
But brain damage alone is rarely decisive. Shawcross was also subjected to an in-depth examination by a senior Yale psychiatrist.
“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.”
Dr. Lewis led Shawcross through a series of interviews, some conducted under a form of hypnosis.
“What do you do now? What’s happening? What are you doing?”
“Nothing, all right? Why are you holding your penis?”
“Art, what’s happening? What’s happening? What does Mommy do?”
“Oh, she’s got me. Mom has got you now.”
“What is she doing?”
“Playing, okay.”
“And what’s happening?”
“He started kissing me.”
“And what happened? Why are you crying, Art?”
“Oh.”
“And what do you say to them? What do you think?”
“I know.”
“What are you? Oh, stop, no.”
“What did your mother do?”
“My mother gave me oral sex. She performed oral sex on me for several years. Then, when I was fourteen years old, my dad had intercourse, and I ran away. I put a sign, a note, on my pillow in my bedroom: ‘I’m going to Syracuse.’ And I turned around and went to Canada. I just didn’t want to go home.”
“Because you were being abused?”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“He was very young when 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 this history of abuse.”
Dr. Lewis argued that the brain damage had caused him to suffer a phenomenon known as a partial seizure.
“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 a bright, bright white light, and then the next thing he’d know, he 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.”
Defense experts argued that, like many other serial killers, Shawcross suffered a toxic combination of physical and mental damage.
“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.”
The defense entered a plea of not guilty by means of insanity. In essence, they argued that Shawcross was not responsible for his actions. It was an argument that provoked derision from both prosecution and police alike.
“Few things are more tragic than the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts, and I think that’s the answer there. It’s a beautiful theory, but it was just laid low by the facts.”
“He claimed his mother put a broom handle, inserted it 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 these things? I never… Why are they claiming these things?'”
“Your mom has obviously denied that anything like that happened. Everyone would. Can you picture what would happen to a person if she admitted she did shit like that to me? I mean, they say they’ve said, you know, ask Arthur Shawcross, they say, ‘Well, there was no sexual abuse when you were younger.’ How do they know? I know because I knew I was there. I know what I had to go through.”
“Well, they say they checked all the medical records.”
“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? That’s bullshit.”
“If he was lying and he hadn’t been sexually abused, that would confound you.”
“It would, it would indeed. It’s almost inconceivable that he was not sexually abused.”
Crucial to the defense case was the argument that Shawcross’s mental seizures meant he had no knowledge of what he was doing.
“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 the Genesee Gorge where they’re less likely to be found? I think all those facts really speak to someone who knew exactly what he was doing.”
“The prosecutor thinks that his upbringing was completely normal. This is just a man who is bad, 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, that’s not normal.”
“Is somebody who kills a person mentally ill? Probably. Is somebody who kills eleven people here and has killed two kids before got issues? Absolutely. But that’s not the claim, not the argument, that they’re not in some way disturbed. The issue is you don’t qualify for an insanity defense. Shawcross knew what he was doing, and if you know it’s wrong, then you’re responsible for your acts. That’s the way it works.”
During the trial, the defense also argued that Shawcross had been brutalized by his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam.
“What happened in Vietnam?”
“A lot of things happened in Vietnam, yeah. I went to Vietnam as a weapons specialist, and I had my own bunker just outside of Kontum, Vietnam, Central Highlands.”
Shawcross claims he often ventured out into the jungle as a one-man unit, hunting down enemy Viet Cong.
“And I see a woman in her thirties coming down this hill, carrying two AKs on this side and two AKs on this side, barrel 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, I came up behind her and took her head right there. It took a couple of hits, but the head came off. The body dropped to the ground; you just bled out.”
He claims he then set about cooking the dead woman’s body to extract information from her friend.
“I split the body in half, opened up a pouch, and I had some C4 plastic explosives. Lit a cigarette, just touched it, and it just started, lit up like a miniature sun. And I just laid the flesh up on top of that, stuck it right, and I bit into the, into the flesh itself, you know, just staring at her eyes. And she urinated and defecated on herself, and she talked to me in broken English. So she told me everything I wanted to know. I go in, I reported in, saluted the lieutenant colonel, and he gets up and he says, ‘You’re one sick son of a bitch, but I love you.'”
“None of that that we can tell is true. These Vietnam experiences are greatly inflated and exaggerated. There’s no indication he ever went out and shot anyone, much less cannibalized or did any of the things that he claims to have done.”
But despite his vivid recollections of combat, Shawcross found few comrades in Vietnam.
“But I can’t remember nobody’s name in Vietnam, and that messes me up.”
“War often forms very close relationships. You didn’t form friendships with anyone out there?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember anyone’s name?”
“No.”
“How long were you there for?”
“Thirteen months.”
“What was your official position in Vietnam?”
“I was a specialist, weapons specialist.”
“We were able to actually track down, in preparation, his commanding officer, sergeant, I think I remember his name, Sergeant Weaver. He was a supply clerk. He didn’t go out on these secret missions, you know.”
“I’m not a bullshitter. Anything I tell you is facts of life. If you don’t believe it, that’s your prerogative. You can do what you want, you know? Everybody reads what they want, believes what they want, you know, and hears what they want.”
After hearing three weeks of evidence, the jury were unconvinced by the argument that Shawcross was insane. They found him guilty on all counts of murder. He was sentenced to 250 years in jail and has spent the last eighteen years in a maximum-security prison. He has confounded numerous attempts by psychologists to understand him, and like many other serial killers, his crimes have given him a macabre notoriety.
“I get letters from 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 of life.”
“Do you see yourself as something of a celebrity here?”
“Of course.”
“In what way?”
“Well, everybody knows what I’m here for.”
“Do you enjoy the attention?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it gets to be a hassle.”
And from his prison cell, Shawcross continues to invent ever more imaginative justifications for his killing of the women in Rochester.
“When I picked those women up, I thought I had AIDS because one of the women who stopped in the car told me one of the women I took out is HIV positive. I didn’t know which one of them were, so I went back and picked up all the ones I dated in two streets in Rochester, and I started killing them. And while I was doing that, I took the vagina out and ate it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, probably to speed up the idea of the AIDS disease.”
“So you thought it might kill you quicker?”
“Probably. It’s just not a lot of people that I’ve ever spoken to have eaten human flesh. It is like a raw steak, really, steaks you got the fat on the end of it somewhere.”
“I mean, when you were hauled in by the police, did you make any mention of the HIV?”
“No, sir, I did not.”
“I suppose it’s because some people might say, ‘Well, isn’t that just an excuse to justify killing?'”
“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.”
One thing, however, remains a taboo subject: the killing of the two children in Watertown.
“You’re prepared to talk about what happened in Vietnam and killing all these prostitutes. I’m just wondering why you’re prepared to talk about it and not Watertown.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. You ask one more question, I leave.”
“Certainly, he knows how we all feel about murdering children. It’s just obviously, you know, probably the most reprehensible thing anyone can do, and he understands that. 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, just not going to talk about it.”
But in 2001, someone was to enter Shawcross’s life who would force him to confront his darkest demons: the daughter he never knew he had.
In 2001, Arthur Shawcross received dramatic news. While on leave from the army in the early 1960s, 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.
“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 on.'”
“What did you feel when you met him for the first time when you went to prison?”
“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. He joked around a lot.”
“What about your daughter, Maggie?”
“She’s cool. I’ve seen her just before you showed up.”
“Does, does your daughter Maggie know what you did? Does she know the details?”
“Before, she has the information of everything. I told her things that you want to know but you’re not going to get.”
“Like what?”
“Ah, you know what you’re talking about. Things that happened in that other place, Watertown, right?”
“The children that he had killed are, the, their ages are about the same age as my children are now. What he did to them, like I said, was a pretty graphic thing, and that’s going to be between him and his maker. That’s going to be between him and his maker.”
Maggie has seven children of her own, and she has been keen to make sure that they too have a relationship with their imprisoned grandfather.
“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 that the younger ones don’t know.’ But sooner or later, they’re going to find out. They don’t really advertise the fact that their grandfather was a serial killer.”
Both Maggie and the grandchildren have become regular visitors to Shawcross in prison.
“Do you love Maggie very much? Would you love your grandchildren?”
“Right, I write to them all the time. They send, the grandchildren, the kids in, in school, they send me their school tests and different things what they’re doing in school. Send me pictures, and I draw their pictures. I do portraits.”
“This is a horrible thought, but I mean, if someone were to, you know, rape and kill your grandchildren, what should happen to them?”
“That’s up to the law.”
“But what do you think should happen to them?”
“That’s up to the law.”
“But what would you think of them as a father, as a grandfather?”
“I would be devastated, right.”
“Do you have any comprehension of the suffering that you’ve brought the families of the people that you’ve killed?”
“I don’t have any remorse, for some reason.”
“But I find it strange that you can have, you clearly feel affection for your, your daughter and your grandchildren, that’s strange, but you can’t feel any empathy for all those people, that, the families of all the people that you killed.”
“Yeah, it’s not there. Like I said, on one side, the other side, I know something inside me is weird.”
“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 that he’s my father. I can’t change it. And I don’t see Arthur Shawcross from Watertown with my children in 2008 in Sullivan Correctional. Totally different people, totally different.”
“There’s always a bad man in me, 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?”
“Yeah.”
“Just a final question, Arthur. I mean, what, what, why won’t you talk about the two young children? It’s over, is it not? Because, is it because you’re ashamed of it?”
“It’s disconnect, as this is over. Okay.”
“Well, thank you very much for your time.”
