Arthur Shawcross

luckylittlelady

Lewis went to Rochester two days early, only to discover that the money that had been reserved to pay for the neurological tests had been "squandered on the services of a writer-cum-criminologist, Joel Norris." (He actually had a Ph.D. in psychology.) He had conducted videotaped interviews with Shawcross, which his partner (Lewis claims) tried to sell to a local media station. She was incensed and believed the judge should have halted the proceedings, but the trial went forward. (Kraus, too, had learned about this, as Olsen describes it, and was annoyed at the lack of ethics involved.)

Then, the neurosurgeon that the defense had tried to hire ended up on the prosecution's side. Although Lewis had once respected him, now she felt that he'd done shoddy work. He had not even examined Shawcross. Against court protocol, she decided to call him and confront him. She discovered that the doctor had received the MRI scan from the defense attorney via Joel Norris and had recommended an EEG, but had never been retained by the defense. That had left him free to respond to the prosecution. He agreed with her, she writes, that further tests should be done, so she attempted to speak with the judge in private regarding this issue. When that did not happen, she used open court to claim, "I have been lied to."

She meant by her own side, of course. The attorney she was working for had told her the tests had been ordered when they had not been. She believed that this outburst would get the judge's attention, assuming that the legal system is a search for the truth. The judge ignored her.

"I should have turned around and gone home," she writes, long before she ever got into court. But she'd gone ahead, which was her "second big mistake."

Under cross-examination, she was asked whether the interviews that Joel Norris had conducted might have influenced what Shawcross had told her. She said no, based on her belief that she had conducted hers first. She discovered that she was wrong about that. The interviews had occurred simultaneously. In open court, she was humiliated and made to appear unprepared.

Her testimony ran for three weeks, and she admitted that compared to the prosecution's confident and polished expert, Dr. Park Dietz, she appeared disorganized and clumsy. She was angry and she let that get the best of her, making her ideas less credible and alienating the jury. Dietz, who identified Shawcross as a malingerer, a faker, dismissed the idea of dissociation.

Too late to do any good at trial, Lewis sent the brain scans to Pinkus for interpretation, and she says that he identified scars on the frontal lobes that could have influenced the defendant's ability to make proper decisions. While she was not allowed to bring this into evidence, her discussion about the cyst on the temporal lobe was admitted. Dr. Dietz dismissed it as insignificant in Shawcross's criminality. There was no evidence, he said, that Shawcross had a mental disease or defect the prohibited him from understanding that his actions were wrong. That fact that he'd covered many of his victims indicated that he clearly understood he'd be arrested for this if discovered. He had held a job, was married, and had functioned competently in daily life. He might be abnormal, might even have consumed parts of his victims, but these acts and delusions did not impair his awareness that what he was doing was wrong.

The issue came down to this: whatever impairment he had, it had to affect his ability to appreciate the criminality of his actions. One expert said yes, it did, the other said no, it did not. Olsen reports that Lewis was paid $48,000 and Dietz $97,000 for their respective testimonies.

Throughout the trial, Shawcross sat like a zombie, as if to appear that he did indeed have some kind of brain damage. Yet it did not do him any good.

After five weeks of dramatic testimony and courtroom demonstrations, the jury was not sufficiently impressed with the defense interpretation of Shawcross's behavior. They took half a day to find him both sane and guilty of murder in the second degree (not premeditated) on ten counts. Shawcross was sentenced to 25 years to life on each of the ten counts, meaning that he will have to serve 250 years in prison before he's eligible for a parole hearing.

The second trial for Elizabeth Gibson's murder in Wayne County had been scheduled, but there seemed little reason to go at it again, since Dr. Kraus could not provide a finding of mental impairment that would amount to insanity. Shawcross's attorney advised him to plead guilty on that charge, and he did

luckylittlelady

Despite the fact that Shawcross was convicted and much of his story taken by the jury with a rather large grain of salt, his reputation for certain claims he made lives on. In Cannibal: The Real Hannibal Lecters, a 2003 HBO documentary, British reporter Katherine English chose Shawcross as one of her three subjects. He agreed to an interview, although he was rather scornful of her attempts to get him to describe morbid acts (her perception is that he took great delight in it).

She starts her interview at Sullivan Correctional Facility with him by saying he claimed to have eaten the genitalia of three of his victims. (She does not say how these tales evolved under the influence of many therapists.) While one vagina had been cut out (she says, repeating the inaccurate reporting), there was no evidence of that in any other, nor of his having actually consumed it. He apparently also had claimed at one point that he'd eaten the genitals of the little boy, Jack Blake, although this is not raised in the documentary. Nor did anyone find it credible.

English hoped he would explain himself. He clearly toys with her. Like Lewis, English accepts the stories of abuse that he told, but he says he does not wish to talk about certain things with a woman. He does admit that he tracked two Vietcong women through the jungle. He grabbed them, tied one up, and cut the other up to cook over a fire and eat. "I took the right leg of that woman's body, from the knee to the hiptook the fat off" and ate it while he stared at the other girl. "When I bit into itshe just urinated right there."

English asks him what it tasted like, and he said, "When was the last time you had nice roast pork?" (This had become his favorite description of human flesh, and he'd told this story endlessly to others, who eventually doubted it.)

"Why did you eat it?" English asked.

"I have no idea," he tells her with a smirk.

"Were you hungry?"

"No."

She urges him to talk about cannibalizing his prostitute victims. He again says, "That's hard to talk about, lady." (It wasn't so hard with therapists, both male and female, who were providing an insanity defense.) He says he cut parts off, finally mentioning "the vagina" and that he "consumed that."

Were they symbolic? She wonders.

"I thought I was killing my mother. The things I was eating, I thought it was my mother."

English ends her encounter with him by saying that she was uncomfortable when he took delight in telling her what her flesh would taste like, but she does not actually show him saying this. A common reporter's trick is to fill in lines they had hoped their subject would say but did not. In other words, they have an agenda to fulfill, and if they must, will put the words in someone's mouth. One leaves this piece with the impression that English was disappointed and decided to add something to make it more substantive than it actually was.

All Shawcross gave up in this interview were tales already dismissed as probably false and an admission that any psychiatrist could have fed to him about his mother. He does not come across like the cannibal she interviews after him, Issai Sagawa, who really did explore the taste of human flesh. Even Dorothy Lewis, the psychiatrist who was ready to believe most of what he told her, did not believe these descriptions. With no corroborating evidence to back up his recollections, it's difficult to include him on the list of notorious "cannibal killers."

Nevertheless, he is a serial killer of some renown, and clearly an interesting study for those who want to understand the roots of violence and who can patiently plow through the shifting variety of stories the man has told over the years.

In a handwritten report in 1990, Shawcross says, "I should be castrated or have an electrode placed in my head to stop my stupidness or whatever. I just a lost soul looking for release of my madness."

James

Interesting case. I read about him in a book many years ago. The story didn't ring a bell until they found out he was a child killer before. I remember how there was a huge uproar that a child killer was let out of prison and given a second chance, then winds up being a serial killer.

DoubleTalkingJive

Very interesting indeed. I have never heard of this case before.

luckylittlelady

I saw a program a while back where they sent a female journalist in to interview him. He was chained to the table and there were guards present but he really gave off such a threatening air, even though he is really quite old now. Wouldn't have got me in a room with him for all the tea in China.

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