Original subtitles

[ominous music]

- One detective asked me,

"If you had to do it over again, what would you do?"

And I said, "I'd put 'em all in one hole

and you'd never find them."

[suspenseful music]

- [Woman] There's a man murdering prostitutes out there.

Should Rochester be worried?

- [Reporter] People in this city of 240,000

say they're scared.

[suspenseful music]

- He's using his bare hands to strangle them.

This shows his absolute rage.

- That gave him the name of the Genesee River Killer,

because that's where he dumped these bodies.

- It had the city in its grip.

[suspenseful music]

- These individuals were weaker than him.

- Easily approachable,

easily isolated,

easily killed.

[ominous music]

- There was something not right about him.

Nobody understood him.

- He was getting back at all those who had hurt him,

but doing so in an even far more dreadful fashion.

- After it was over, I was covered from sweat.

Everything was dead around me.

[dramatic music]

[ominous music]

- If you ask somebody to think

about where serial killers operate,

they're gonna tell you, New York City, Los Angeles,

maybe bigger communities.

The possibility that a serial killer

was operating in this community,

that can't happen in Rochester, New York.

[suspenseful music]

The Genesee River runs through the heart of Rochester.

On the west side of the city,

the river runs through a place called North Hampton Park.

[suspenseful music]

- Couple hunters that are out in the area

underneath this culvert,

they observed a body in the water.

[ominous music]

It was a female.

She was in her 20s.

There were no obvious marks of trauma, knife,

bullets,

anything along those lines.

[ominous music]

- At the autopsy, around the neck area,

they observed bruising, some damage around her throat area,

hemorrhaging of the veins in the eyes.

So the cause of death,

she was strangled to death.

[somber music]

So the victim was later identified as Dorothy Blackburn.

[tense music]

- So here you had a woman, she just had a baby,

a six month old, who'd she left with a neighbor.

She never came back to pick up her child.

So then that's when the family became especially concerned.

- Dorothy Blackburn was last seen here

along Lyle Avenue on March 15th.

Police say it's an area frequented by prostitutes.

[upbeat music]

- Every city has a place of ill repute

and Lyle Avenue was it.

A john could've killed Dorothy Blackburn.

A drug dealer could've killed her that she owed money to.

So initially it was anyone's guess

how she was murdered or who killed her.

[ominous music]

- Life was pretty disdained.

I can remember when I was little,

we were out traveling somewhere.

We drove by the city jail

and I looked and I just had a feeling inside

I'd land inside there.

[somber music]

- He told me it wasn't a very loving relationship

between him and his mother,

because she was very domineering and controlling.

Always criticized him.

And his mother would ridicule him in front of the family.

His own family would laugh at him.

He was like the odd man out.

[ominous music]

- And imagine as a child, the amount of shame that you feel

and what that could mean

is that you are trying to please someone

that cannot be pleased.

- There were really no caring parental figures in his life.

Without any of those positive qualities,

it creates an opposite picture

as to how a young boy is supposed to evolve.

[egg sizzling]

- I would say "how are you?" [laughs]

You know, we're always in fights.

I didn't have no playmates

other than my sister and brother and cousins.

- Nobody understood him.

All the kids in school called him Artie Oddball

because of his peculiar behavior.

He would talk baby talk.

He wasn't a normal kid.

[ominous music]

- Things happened in my house, our house, when I was four,

seven,

nine,

between my mother and my aunt

and being isolated way out in the country,

what was I to know, you know?

[somber music]

It's hard to talk about.

- He said it started with the aunt reaching into his pants.

Then the same thing happened with his mother.

- Being molested sexually by older family members,

mother and aunt,

he's gonna either feel incapable

of having a normal love relationship with a woman

or going in the opposite direction

and be very domineering.

[suspenseful music]

Some people have a question mark

over Arthur Shawcross having been sexually abused,

well my initial assessment after speaking with him,

was that I believe that they did happen

and that they contributed to his destabilization.

- Was he making up some things?

Maybe he elaborated and embellished

the story a little bit just to get that attention.

- Arthur's ability to lie,

this becomes a pattern, you know,

where there is fabrication.

It's a way to sort of distance himself

from the reality of a situation.

[ominous music]

- The police were called to the Driving Park Bridge.

There was one individual collecting bottles

and he came across originally what he thought was a deer.

You know, it was bones.

This was the first time I came across a skeleton,

so it was pretty unusual.

The medical examiner can't even tell you

a conclusive cause of death.

- The initial challenge is,

you can't show a photograph to potential individuals

who might know her.

- There's an anthropologist down in the Syracuse area

who had recreated what he believed was the interpretation

of the person when she was alive.

- She had the very distinct look.

Once the picture did come out on the news,

it was her father who noticed that this is my daughter.

[somber music]

Anna Marie Steffen.

She became estranged with her father.

By turning to drugs for a lot of these women,

they abandoned their families

or their families abandoned them.

- They're out there all by themselves.

So when you go away, nobody knows you're gone.

- In these two cases,

there's no indicators that they were related.

They weren't found in the same location

and no physical evidence that would tie anyone

into their homicide.

[ominous music]

- Police were on the scene of yet another body,

just the remains and this one really concerned them.

- Another skeleton.

But the big thing was, there was absolutely no skull.

[percussive music]

- Police were really trying to piece together

what was going on.

They had no idea what they were dealing with.

This is coming more frequent

and this is becoming more frightening.

[tense music]

[tense music]

- The remains of a person are found

in the Genesee Gorge area.

- The head being missing was the key to show,

not only were they murdered, their ends were violent,

but the police had no idea who this was.

- They take the remains to the medical examiner's office

to shed any light on the identity of the individual.

[tense music]

- She was confirmed by some medical staples

that they found to be Dorothy Keeler.

She was just down on her luck,

would live in the homeless shelters,

just walked around the street

and just looking for somebody for companionship.

- It's this common theme.

Easily approachable.

Easily isolated.

Easily, unfortunately killed.

[gentle music]

- I was at summer camp.

We were playing kickball

and the ball had rolled into the back fence line

that's backed up to the Genesee River.

Being five, six, you don't know what you're looking at.

I just knew it looked like a body.

And about five minutes later, it was surrounded by police.

[tense music]

- I responded and parked the car

almost in the same spot that I parked the car

for Anna Steffen.

And we found the remains of a young woman covered

with some cardboard.

- The MEs determined that she was

the victim of strangulation.

- After her fingerprints were taken,

we identified her as Patricia "Patty" Ives.

25 years old.

She was a prostitute.

The night that she went out, she said she was gonna see

if she could pick up another john.

Where this body is found, you could draw a straight line,

go down the gorge and there's

where Anna Steffen was found.

And you look down the river,

maybe three quarters of mile

and Dorothy Keeler found there.

It was a very tight area.

And I remember thinking we had a problem.

We had a big problem.

- You had the connection with water,

cause of death, it was the same, strangulation.

- So you start adding 'em all up

and none of them are solved and we began to think,

we got somebody killing multiple people.

[water rushing]

[suspenseful music]

- Growing up as a kid alright, where I did something wrong,

I'd put it on a shelf and close the door,

forget about it.

[ominous music]

- Arthur was very, I don't know, he just wasn't right,

and he was a highly sexual person.

- If we're to believe Arthur Shawcross' stories

about being molested,

he is learning to be sexually gratified by his mother,

which is also a taboo.

As Arthur goes into adolescence,

what you can see is a slow ramping up

of inappropriate behavior.

[suspenseful music]

This may be one attempt at developing

or satisfying a sexual urge that he has

as a, you know, pubescent teenager.

- Well, I think if indeed it took place

where he violated animals sexually,

that could be very closely related, you know,

to the bad mother-son relationship.

The guy is deriving a sense of power

of the sort that he otherwise lacked.

- An animal wasn't gonna call you stupid

and make fun of you.

- Arthur is generally finding enjoyment

in inflicting pain on animals and what he might do next,

is cause harm on something other than an animal.

[tense music]

[suspenseful music]

- We've had calls at that station saying,

there's a man murdering prostitutes out there,

should Rochester be worried?

[suspenseful music]

- Police put the tactical unit out on the street

to interview prostitutes about suspicious individuals.

- We had people of interest.

I can't really call 'em suspects.

There's probably 150 of 'em and each one of these,

you'd have to go through and look at all their background,

look at their records.

It was incredible the amount of work that was going on.

- The possibility that a serial killer

was operating on the streets of Rochester

came to the forefront.

Papers started running bylines.

- These women were found along the Genesee River,

thus giving him the name of the Genesee River Killer.

- [Reporter] Police see no danger for the public at large,

but some people in this city of 240,000 say

they're still scared.

- I don't dare go out, I don't think now.

- When you did go out at night,

you made sure there was no one behind you.

- Women working in the Lyle area

were very conscious of the fact

that certain people who they had seen

were no longer on the streets.

- We tried the best of our ability to tell them

that there was a danger.

- June Cicero was a prostitute on Lyle Avenue.

She was tough and she was considered the queen bee.

- June Cicero was cautioned and her comment was,

"He's not gonna get me."

- It was just like having a wife

without having the paperwork.

She worked at night and the money was great,

but asked a number of times for her to stop,

but it didn't matter.

It is I don't care, I'm gonna get the money

and go on about my business.

- I am the only child by my mother.

She was human,

smart, beautiful, head-strong person.

Unfortunately, she wasn't strong enough

to fight those demons.

[somber music]

[suspenseful music]

- And then another Lyle Avenue sex worker

is reported missing.

Maria Welch.

Soon after that, another body is discovered, Frances Brown.

At this point, the trail has gone cold

of who this person is.

Obviously, maneuvering right under the very noses of police,

we didn't know who would be his next victim.

You have to find this guy and get him off the streets now

before he kills again.

[suspenseful music]

- We started a war room.

We start looking at these cases

and we start posting their pictures up and their names

and where they're last seen.

[suspenseful music]

I was thinking, "We need somebody to just take a look

at all the stuff that we had and help us out."

So I said, "Let me make a call."

[tense music]

- In the FBI profiling unit,

we analyze every decision that the offender makes.

The victims are all mostly white sex workers,

so the statistical probability would be a white offender.

He doesn't have any problem getting victims.

He's a regular client.

We felt that he probably

was having a problem performing sexually

and it was the women who paid.

These are not entry level crimes.

This is a mature offender.

Someone with a history of sexual violence.

[suspenseful music]

[helicopter roaring]

[tense music]

- I was drafted and did my basic training

in Fort Benning and shipped out to Vietnam.

- He was a very childlike person, you know?

He was unassuming, very non-threatening

when he went to Vietnam.

You know, you're a man, you're gonna go to war,

you're gonna kill for your country.

- It was a fire base in a valley

and I see this woman, I took my machete

and I hit her three times

and her head fall off.

And I took the left leg and had a little fire

and I was cooking that leg.

When I bit into it, the flavor of it was like a pot roast.

I mean, I got blood and stuff all over me

and I went to the colonel's tent

and he gets up and gives me a hug and he says,

"You one sick son of a bitch."

[ominous music]

- This is just another example

of Arthur embellishing the truth.

He doesn't get to have this sort of war hero experience,

but he's witnessing, you know, extreme brutality.

That could've really fed his need

for more extreme levels of excitement in his life.

- I have not the slightest doubt

that when he was being misused as a kid,

that he would have in his mind,

thoughts of killing whoever had hurt him.

Being over there would have normalized

the whole idea of killing someone

that he may have in his mind fantasied doing.

- The military taught you how to kill.

It didn't teach you how to stop.

[suspenseful music]

[tense music]

- The FBI developed a profile.

A white male.

Comfortable with victims.

Strong, obviously familiar with the area.

The police department

was on the street interviewing prostitutes.

One individual described someone by the name of Mitch,

because he creeped her out.

The only way he could reach orgasm is if she played dead.

[sirens wailing]

- We thought that's the kind of guy we're interested in

and he was a known client,

a regular with the sex workers on Lyle Avenue.

He worked at a food service, this G&G Cheese.

- This individual provided the composite.

Now, he had a prominent nose

and he did look like an older white male.

- Finally, they have a face.

Sex workers, the people most affected by this serial killer

that cops would consider arresting,

became the most critical people

to helping them get this serial killer off the streets.

So what a different relationship.

- The investigators showed the composite

to people who work at the G&G Cheese,

but no one recognized him.

[ominous music]

- The fact that there's no Mitch

was kind of a deflating moment.

This is just another dead end.

[tense music]

[percussive music]

- Thanksgiving day.

We gave everybody the day off,

except the lieutenant and myself.

[suspenseful music]

A guy was out there in Turning Point Park

walking his dog

and they ran over to this carpet,

which had some snow on it.

- They pulled the carpet off

and they find the body of a woman.

She has been eviscerated.

- This body was not only strangled,

she was basically gutted from the top of her chest

all the way down to the bottom of her pubic bone.

- It was different behavior.

It was a sadistic act and we're worried about the next one.

- This guy was becoming bolder

and he was becoming more violent

and he had to be found.

- Another body is found like Thanksgiving day.

You know, it's a day where you

should kinda be home celebrating.

June Stott was cut from the base of her breast bone

down to her pubic area.

- I'd say if there was a low point of the investigation,

it's probably that day.

- It was bitterly cold.

I have a picture which I will keep forever of myself,

Captain Johnson, another officer.

- You can just tell by the posture of the people

who are walking down this path in this desolate area,

is like, what is going on?

[somber music]

- June Stott was developmentally disabled.

Again, these women were so vulnerable.

- Another photograph went up on the wall.

It's another one of these tragedies.

- The offender's behavior can evolve.

After she was dead, she was obviously turned over

and we could tell,

that wound was a post mortem wound after death.

Now, that tells us that the offender

is spending time with this body.

So this is the evolution of violence.

And our prediction was that we would see more of this.

[gentle music]

- June Cicero would work out on the streets.

When word got out that she was missing,

with her intuition about johns.

Now that was a shocker.

- June's photo was now on the wall.

[suspenseful music]

- The next victim was Elizabeth Gibson

and then Darlene Trippi.

[suspenseful music]

There's a sense of desperation.

It had the city in its grip.

Rather than sit back and wait,

let's use his behavior against him.

See if we can find this offender returning to the scene.

They put troopers out there.

Helicopters are flying along the streams and the waterways

using his behavior to shape the search.

This is a trap we can lay for him.

[ominous music]

- I came back from Vietnam.

I'm home three days, my mother says,

"Aren't you gonna go see your wife?"

I asked, "Mom, what wife?

What are you talking about?"

I'd forgot I was married.

[Arthur laughing]

[somber music]

- He was very loving and caring in the beginning.

There was a sensitive side to him,

but I think he kind of got married to be normal, to fit in.

I'll have the family life that I didn't have as a kid.

- He is unable to perform sexually for his wife

and things spiral down from there.

- She always had doubts about his sexual confidence.

It would tend to make him more angry and heightened,

you know, his animosity and hatred of the women.

[suspenseful music]

- My wife was a blonde, you know, when I got done with her,

she looked like a raccoon.

Two black eyes, you know,

like I was in a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" type thing.

- Arthur's increasing cruelty towards his wife

leads her to divorce him.

He has lost control of his family.

He's lost control of his sexual prowess

and within a short span of time, he burns down a paper mill.

He is actually caught and sentenced

to five years in prison.

Again, this has a profound effect on him.

Arthur's anger is increasing.

- I went to, I think it was Attica.

After you're there a while

and you get the feel of the place,

you can learn about every crime there is,

how to do anything you want.

Just didn't feel the same when I was home,

like I didn't belong.

[ominous music]

- We were asking people with information to call the police

and anything you can do to develop a little lead.

But park policeman found a pair of black jeans.

It's not that far from where Dorothy Blackburn was found.

Inside the jeans were some identification

with the name of Felicia Stephens.

[dramatic music]

We went to the mother's house

and she hadn't seen her for a period of time.

So they did an all out press, grid searching,

horses, dogs, helicopter.

And so it was December 31st,

January 1st, January 2nd, they're looking,

trying to find out where she was

and we believed it wasn't gonna be good.

[suspenseful music]

[helicopter roaring]

- The senior state trooper gets to the helicopter

and he's gonna take one more look for Felicia Stephens.

As they pass on a bridge,

they see frozen

in the creek, a body.

- But when they got down to the ice,

it wasn't Felicia Stephens,

This was June Cicero.

[somber music]

- She was supposed to come by for the holiday

and she never showed up.

- The last time I saw her, she was walking down Main Street

and I was in the car with my father

and as we rode past, he said, "There's your mother."

And we stopped.

And I got to sit with her for about 20 minutes.

Last time I saw her alive.

- He was five or six years old.

He didn't understand what was really going on.

He just knew she wasn't coming back.

[suspenseful music]

- About 12 to 15 feet above where the body is,

they see a gray Chevrolet Celebrity stopped,

and what do they see?

They see the person pull away.

[suspenseful music]

Whoa, you know, what are the chances

that somebody's gonna be just coincidentally stopped

in this bridge?

- So this thing now is exploding.

This was the behavior that we were looking for,

that the killer would be returning to the scene.

You can't let this guy slip away.

This is the break.

[water rushing]

- This was the break that you couldn't anticipate.

The helicopter happened to be passing over

at the exact time they see the body

and the person in the car drives away.

Police helicopter follows this individual

to a nursing home.

Troopers respond to the location.

They ask him about what's going on.

He says, "What's the big deal?

I was just taking a piss."

- You're hoping this is the guy, you can't really be sure.

Now, let's get this guy identified,

let's find out who he is.

[suspenseful music]

- And this is the first time in this 21 month nightmare

that the name of Arthur Shawcross surfaces.

As suspicious as it may be

that someone is stopped 15 feet above a body,

that does not amount to probable cause to arrest him.

- You only have one chance at these investigations.

So a consensus was made that it would be the best thing

to let him go

so we could build a case.

- But he was tethered.

The surveillance was on him,

he wasn't going out killing anybody that night.

- We wanted probable cause to be able to arrest him.

So that was the plan.

We're gonna try to find the prostitute

who was able to pick him out as a john.

- They put a photo array together

and one of them picked out Shawcross.

[suspenseful music]

- The composite also closely resembled Arthur Shawcross.

That provided probable cause,

the charge was patronizing a prostitute.

It was a crime.

[tense music]

- They took him into the interview room.

There was no emotion whatsoever.

And they said, "Art, you're here now.

Get it over with, you know, clear it up."

[dramatic music]

- I'm not in the room, but I'm close by.

So I'm going, "Man, we'd better get this confession."

- We certainly didn't know how long that was gonna take

or which he was gonna admit to or not admit to.

[ominous music]

- We found out that he frequented the river,

that he was a fisherman.

But he was denying anything.

The point came where they confronted him.

[dramatic music]

He was confronted.

At that point, he confessed

to the Elizabeth Gibson homicide.

And then gave a written signed statement

as to the details of that homicide.

- It was a very good moment.

There wasn't gonna be any more victims by this guy.

- Then the background investigation continued

and then we find out all of the details

that he in fact is on parole.

- Every station, newspaper went wild

trying to find out the background of this guy

and boy, when we found out he had murdered in the past,

that was shocking.

[suspenseful music]

- So at 27, after serving a few years in prison for arson,

Arthur Shawcross, he moves to Watertown, New York,

the place where he grew up

and now he has to re-enter society.

He goes to a local area for fishing

and there he meets a 10 year old boy named Jack.

- I knew where all the good fishing places were all around.

- Arthur lures Jack into the woods.

He forces him to strip naked.

- Arthur seizes the opportunity to violate the boy.

He himself was violated when he was a boy,

not dissimilar, you know, to the victim.

Now he's making somebody else endure that misery.

- Jack becomes afraid and runs away.

[dramatic music]

And Arthur starts chasing him

and he tackles him.

- Once you kill somebody,

killing somebody else is a snap of a finger.

[dramatic music]

[somber music]

Once you kill, it is easier then on.

You know, you don't forget it.

[suspenseful music]

- Arthur lures Jack into the woods

where the boy is alone and is vulnerable.

[suspenseful music]

Arthur rapes him.

But Jack escapes

and Arthur chases him.

He grabs him.

Strangles him and murders him.

[dramatic music]

- After it was over, I was covered from sweat

from top of my head, to the center of my chest,

my hearing and my vision, like purse in hands

and I couldn't hear nothing.

Everything was dead around me,

you know, and I was in a fog.

[ominous music]

- I think for Arthur,

that was like getting back

at all those who had hurt him

when he was the age of that boy,

but doing so in an even far more dreadful fashion.

- When you're doing things like that,

you don't think about it, it's just instant.

Just do it, get rid of it and walk away.

- Arthur's first murder of 10 year old Jack

could be seen as a precursor

for his later murders of sex workers,

because these are individuals that were weaker than him,

that he could dominate.

[mysterious music]

He is released and moves to Rochester, New York

and this became his playground.

[suspenseful music]

[tense music]

- They continued to interrogate him,

showing him pictures of the deceased women

and he starts dealing them out.

- He went through each and every one of them

and gave his account of how he killed each one of them.

[ominous music]

- When you look at the murders, he kept the same MOs.

Arthur Shawcross was the type of killer

who went after easy prey.

- You meet a prostitute on the street,

yeah, I was like a kid in a candy store, right?

[Arthur laughing]

- He's using his bare hands to strangle them.

Not only is this intimate, but this shows his absolute rage.

He is seeing the life go out of their eyes.

[ominous music]

- After I admitted to the 11,

it was like a big weight fell off me

and then one detective asked me,

"If you had to do it over again, what would you do?"

And I said, "I'd put 'em all in one hole

and you'd never find 'em."

[tense music]

- You're gratified that there was a conviction,

but it's not gonna bring those women back.

It's gonna be a long road for recovery, if ever,

for the victims' families.

- [Charles] We should always keep in mind,

the victims and their families

who certainly didn't deserve to live with the aftermath.

- What happened to my mother is his fault.

What happened to those other ladies is his fault.

She was a beautiful lady.

The smile that she had.

That's what's important

to have that picture in my head.

[suspenseful music]