Free Extreme Evil - Taking Crime to the Next Level (True Crime) by Phil Clarke, Kate Briggs, Tom Briggs Page B

signs of serial killer behaviour.
    From bed-wetting to bestiality, he slipped into a private fantasy world, while also falling behind at school. By the eighth grade he was some three years older than his classmates. A total outcast, he dropped out of school the following year aged nineteen.
    Two years later, Arthur was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam with the 4th Supply and Transport Company of 4th Infantry Division. Here he later attested to a series of heinous acts including the decapitation of a Viet-Cong woman, suggesting he also consumed a portion of her thigh he had roasted over a fire.
    Whatever occurred in the Vietnamese jungle, Arthur returned home in September 1968 and was assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma where he lived with his second wife, Linda. She soon witnessed first-hand Arthur’s fiery temper, not only taking regular beatings herself but on one occasion watching him kill their six-month-old puppy in a fit of rage.
    Following his honourable discharge from the army, the ex-soldier turned to arson, becoming sexually aroused by the flames that gutted a local paper mill and, later, a cheese factory. Serving a total of twenty-two months for these two attacks, he was released in October 1971, returning to Watertown. In less than a year Arthur Shawcross would mature from arson to murder.
     
    T HE  E ARLY  K ILLS
    Early in the summer of 1972 ten-year-old Jack Owen Blake disappeared whilst playing in a suburban area of New York city. His mother raised the hue and cry but a search for her son turned up nothing. The neighbourhood had no idea he had become Arthur Shawcross’s first kill. Luring him into the woods, he had stripped the boy naked then, forcing him to run, hunted the child down before sexually assaulting and murdering him. He would later maintain he also removed and then devoured the heart and genitals.
    Four months later, his appetite for murder awoken, Shawcross snatched eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill from under her mother’s nose. Her decomposed body was found beneath a bridge crossing the Black River. An autopsy revealed she had been raped then asphyxiated and had the local mud and leaves rammed down her throat. Knowing Arthur often fished under this bridge, police brought him in as a suspect. He soon confessed to both murders.
    Serving less than fifteen of a twenty-five year term, he was released in April 1987, deemed fit to re-enter society. After three communities in New York State refused to take him, Shawcross finally relocated in the city of Rochester, in Monroe County. Now free to start life anew, he managed to curb his dangerous urges for the best part of a year, until the beast within would stay silent no longer.
     
    R ED  L IGHT  F OR  M URDER
    In March 1988, his burning desire to kill pre-empted the thaw of winter, Arthur began to familiarize himself with the streetwalkers of Lyell Avenue. Picking up Dotsie Blackburn and agreeing a price for mutual oral sex, he drove to a deserted car park where, he later maintained, she bit his penis. Blood everywhere, he grabbed her throat and choked her to death, though not before biting her back. Six days later, hunters in Salmon Creek discovered the body. It had been badly beaten and had suffered distinct vaginal trauma.
    As the case began to grow cold, Shawcross struck again, murdering twenty-eight-year-old Anna Steffen, another prostitute from Rochester’s red light district. Two months went by before her badly decomposed corpse surfaced, found snagged on the river’s detritus. The lack of physical evidence saw her death follow that of her predecessor, and as time ticked by police grew less confident of solving either case.
    The following summer, Shawcross took his third life since his release from prison, shifting his murderous gaze to Dorothy Keller, a sixty year-old homeless woman working at a diner he frequented. Inviting her to accompany him fishing, he ended up beating her to death with a small log. When three fishermen found