Further reading for Arthur Shawcross, the Genesee River Killer
The Misbegotten Son by Jack Olson
Arthur Shawcross is among the last of the mythical American serial killer legacy. As police and FBI investigation processes began to shift away from the high-flying media antics of times past, such as immortalizing the murderer with a headline grabbing name, Shawcross existed on a grisly frontier as forensic technology improved, thus rendering the prolific serial killer a nightmare of days gone by. But man alive, did Shawcross send that old nightmare paradigm off into the sunset on a nasty note.
It’s hard to nail down Shawcross’s genesis as such a vile killer as the product of such a typical upbringing. He seems to fall into the category of the “born bad” type. Similar to killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, whose childhoods had their share of traumas but not the types of traumas that produced sadist trash like Henry Lee Lucas. What makes him such a special case, like Dahmer, is the degree to which he went with his murders. Dahmer’s motivations for doing what he did were spawned by the dissonance of desperately trying to squeeze the square peg of normal human interactions, friendship, and love into the round hole of his deeply fucked up psychotic. mental state. Shawcross, though coming from the same Square one as Dahmer was more like a horror movie villain like Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers. Point A to point B, it didn’t matter, both of them cannibalized their victims and fucked the dead bodies.
And like most serial killings prior to the shift away from sensationalizing their crimes, Shawcross managed to get away with such vicious behavior due to policing so bad that it’s difficult to get your mind around. Cops who knew what he had gotten up to but couldn’t be bothered to follow up with because hey! It’s not like his victims, mostly prostitutes, are worth spending any time investigating. Because cops are pretty much worthless, Shawcross managed to murder, mutilate, viciously defile, cannibalize and fuck the corpses of 14 confirmed victims (some of whom were children) before he was finally apprehended and convicted. Shawcross died in prison in 2008 after living a life that lasted way too long.
Episodes: 423 & 424
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