by G. Jack Urso
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.
Rorschach — The Watchmen, by Alan Moore
.bmp) |
| Arthur Shawcross |
In 1988, Arthur
Shawcross was my neighbor.
I landed in
Rochester the summer after I graduated college with an eye towards a career in
radio or TV. While I searched for a job, I took a very small one-room apartment
in a seedy former hotel called the Normandie
Brownstone, 253 Alexander Street, whose best days were likely before World War
II. Likewise, many of its denizens seemed to be a motley crew whose own best
days were either behind them or never within reach.
Welcome
to the Hotel California
.bmp) |
| The Normandie (center). Shawcross' apartment building is on the left, across the parking lot. |
I rented room
328 in the Normandie. While some reports
put Shawcross in room 316, according to Misbegotten
Son, by Jack Olsen, he actually lived in the building next door during the
time I lived there. Olsen’s reporting seems solid, so I am inclined to believe
his account, though at the time I assumed Shawcross lived in the Normandie
since I often saw him there. The parole department moved him around a couple
addresses in Rochester, so Shawcross likely stayed at the Normandie and then
moved next door at some point before I moved in.
I would sometimes
see Shawcross riding a little girl’s bicycle. It was a light blue Schwinn with
a white basket with little plastic flowers fastened to the high-rise
handlebars. I didn’t know him by name, but a large, overweight, middle-aged man
riding around on a child’s bike was an unforgettable, surreal vision. I can
still see him in my mind all these years later, as clear as if it were
yesterday, peddling past the Normandie
with a stare fixed straight ahead, as oblivious to the world around him as the
world was of him. “My God, man,” I recall thinking, “have you no self-respect?”
In two separate
incidents in 1972, Arthur Shawcross raped and murdered a ten year old boy and
an eight year old girl in in Watertown, N.Y. After his release in 1987, he was
shuttled between a couple upstate New York hill towns, Delhi and Fleischmanns.
In each place he was driven out once local authorities discovered the nature of
his crimes. Eventually, Shawcross was
transferred by his parole officer to Rochester where he would resume his grisly
ways. His body count totaled 11 confirmed kills, and at least one more for
which he was not convicted. Due to the usual location of the bodies, he was
dubbed by the media as “the Genesee River Killer.”
 |
| Shawcross' first victim. |
My third-floor
room at the Normandie was above a bar
and across from the city’s busiest hospital. The bathroom looked unchanged since
the 1940s. A single bed, small dresser, a desk, and a chair, constituted my
furnishings. The utilitarian beige wall-to-wall carpeting had a greasy feel to
it that was disturbing to walk on barefoot. I brought with me a small black and
white television with a 6-inch screen that picked up three or four stations; I
turned it mostly for the company of other human voices.
At night, the
creak of the ceiling fan, the glare of neon, TVs blaring loudly through
too-thin walls, the ambulance sirens every 10 minutes, and the fights outside
the bar combined into an aesthetic chaos. I can recall leaning up against the
window in my room, staring out over the parking lot at the apartment building
where Shawcross lived, wondering how my life ended up like the punch line in a
bad film noir movie.
 |
| My 1988 checkbook record with entries for the Normandie Brownstone. |
Close
Encounters of the Null Kind
I found a
part-time job at a t-shirt shop to pay the bills while I managed to wrangle an
interview from nearly every radio and TV station within city limits – and
gloriously failing every one. Escaping the claustrophobia of my small room, and
the increasingly bitter disappointment of my job search, I ritually roamed the
downtown city streets on a daily basis.
The area I lived
in had a gray, sterile quality to it, at least to me. Alexander Street was a
busy downtown thoroughfare. While some side streets still had a tree-lined,
residential quality to them, the encroaching grayness was like a coronary
disease spreading along the city’s circulatory system. Tracy Chapman’s song
“Fast Car,” which was played ubiquitously that year, told a tale of escaping
poverty and hopelessness that somehow seemed apropos of where I lived. Indeed,
it could have been the Normandie’s theme song.
Only partly
employed, I had a lot of time on my hands. Anchoring one end of my daily walks was
the Midtown Mall, where I spent many hours window shopping, looking at books, browsing
the racks at Camelot Music, or scoring a cheap meal before heading back to the Normandie.
According to
reports, one of Shawcross’ victims, June Stotts, a young woman with
developmental problems who sometimes lived off the streets, was a daily fixture
at the Midtown Mall’s food court. How
often, I wonder, did I while away a late afternoon day just feet from Stotts,
totally oblivious of her vulnerability?
Shawcross,
however, had a sixth sense for identifying such vulnerable people. He is known
to have killed two women in Rochester prior to my arrival, but, as I recall, there
was no idea in the summer and fall of 1988 that a serial killer was prowling
the streets. As I wandered the city streets, so too did Shawcross, and his
victims, and thousands of others; each of us engaged in some form of hunting
and gathering. As it was with our ancestors on the dusty, ancient African
plains, predators still walk amongst us, seeking out the weak, the infirmed,
the lost — stragglers the herd won’t miss and can survive without.
.bmp) |
| Shawcross in a mugshot from his first incarceration in the 1970s. |
I never spoke to
Shawcross, but I saw him from time to time. I knew absolutely no one, so any
familiar face stood out. I still remember the people I ran into on a daily
basis — the drunk in the apartment next door, the young couple on the other
side, the guy who played chess, the old woman at the laundromat mat, the
coke-head who ran the head shop, and the strange, fat man with graying hair who
rode a little girl’s bicycle.
I saw Rochester
as a dead-end, both professionally and personally, and by Thanksgiving of 1988
I moved to Albany. Within a month I landed that radio job I longed for and soon
Rochester was a distant memory.
Karma
is a Ditch
When Shawcross
was arrested in 1990 as the Genesee River Killer, I thought he looked familiar,
but wrote it off as an overactive imagination. I considered my time in
Rochester as my own little journey through purgatory. It wasn’t until many
years later that I discovered Shawcross’ connection to the Normandie and realized that he was the strange, fat man with
graying hair who rode a little girl’s bicycle.
A little over a
year before I went to Rochester, in the Spring of 1987, on a short break from
college, I visited my mother in Delhi, NY. Small and insular, the big gossip
when I arrived concerned an ex-con who had recently moved to town. They
nervously pointed out where he lived and warned everyone.
Not long after I
returned to school, my mother called to tell me they drove the ex-con out of
town. For my mother and myself, being city folk, the thought of torch-bearing
townies driving some guy who paid his debt to society out of town was small
town ignorance personified.
Years later, while
thumbing through Misbegotten Son, I
discovered that the ex-convict driven out of Delhi that Spring of 1987 was none
other than Arthur Shawcross himself.
Well, score one
for torch-bearing townies.
Reportedly, the Delhi police were aware Shawcross served
time for the murder of two children, which led to his being driven out of not
only Delhi, but nearby Fleischmanns as well (fleischmann,
ironically, is German for “butcher” or “meatcutter”). Learning their lesson, parole
sent Shawcross to Rochester, this time without notifying the local authorities.
Under the radar of the police, and largely forgotten by parole, Shawcross
quickly descended into a nightmare of rape, torture, murder, cannibalism, and
necrophilia.
 |
| Shawcross lived in this apartment building next door to the Normandie. |
Shawcross was
captured in 1990, tried and convicted, then sent to the Sullivan Correctional
Facility in Fallsburg, New York. On November 10, 2008, after reporting a pain
in his leg, Shawcross was transported to the Albany Medical Center, not far
from my home, where he died of a heart attack that evening. My birthday,
coincidently, is November 11.
I didn’t know
Shawcross, but in a tangential way somehow my life intersected with his twice. It
took me twenty years to piece this story together, and I wonder how many other
stories are we unaware of in our lives? How would our lives be different if we
knew the truth of all these connections?
The classic 1960
Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters
are Due on Maple Street,” where neighbors turn against each other out of
paranoia, is a cautionary tale warning us that the greatest threat to our
communities, and ourselves individually, lay within us — that we are our own
greatest enemy and the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Perhaps.
Sometimes,
however, there are things in the world to fear besides just fear itself. Sometimes,
the monsters on Maple Street really are monsters — and sometimes they’re on
Alexander Street.
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UPDATE Feb. 15, 2021: Peter Vronsky, best-selling author of serial killer history, included a passage from my essay, “Arthur John Shawcross — The Monster on Alexander Street” in his latest book, American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 (2021).
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