The Genesee River Killer - Part One [03]

long time. His crimes spanned decades, his punishments along the way were far too late for the atrocities that he committed, and maybe the worst detail of all, there were children involved. For me, the stories that involved kids always seem to be the hardest ones to understand, and they're definitely among the hardest to ever forget. After listening to this show, I think you'll find yourself wanting to forget Arthur shaw Across too. I wish I could get him out of

my head, but so far that's been impossible. I'm Scott Benjamin and everything I'm about to tell you is real. This is Insomniac. The date was January three, and police were searching Northampton Park, located sixteen miles east of Rochester, New York, after a missing woman's clothing an I D Card had been found in the area. Just minutes into a helicopter surveillance flight, New York State troopers had already

spotted something. They saw a woman's body, partially clothed, face down on the surface of the ice underneath the bridge that crossed over Salmon Creek. They didn't know it yet, but they had just stumbled across the frozen, mutilated body. I've yet another missing woman, not even the one they were initially searching for. It was a prostitute named June Cicero, age thirty four, and she had been missing for more

than two weeks. Remarkably, at that very moment, a car was parked in the same bridge and the driver had his door open with his legs outside of the vehicle. It was difficult for the troopers to determine exactly what he was up to from high above, but he appeared to either be urinating on the bridge or possibly masturbating. As soon as he noticed the helicopter, the man threw something out onto the ice and drove away, but the state troopers followed his every move from the air and

called in ground units to tail him into town. Within minutes, he was picked up, taken to the nearby Brockport Police Barracks, questions photographed, and then released overnight. Authorities kept the suspects home under surveillance. Well detectives dug up every bit of information they could about the man they found just a few feet away from the frozen body on the ice.

What they would discover that evening and in the days and months to follow would horrify every officer on the force and later infuriate the entire community of Rochester, New York. We're going to take a closer look at the case of the Rochester strangler, or as it's sometimes called, the case of the Genesee River Killer. For this story to have the full impact, you need to know that is considered normal for a serial killer to experience a cooling

off period between their deadly attacks. In fact, that's one of the key behaviors that set serial killers apart from other types of killers. Spree and mass murderers claim all of their victims at once, all in the same day, and often all in the same location, with one violent outburst.

A serial killer follows a different pattern, one that includes an active period when the homicide happens, followed by an emotional cooling off period when the killer returns to his or her normal life, followed by another active period, and so on. If the result is a body count that rises above three, you have a serial killer in your hands. Typically, that cooling off period is a matter of days, weeks,

or sometimes months. But in the story I'm going to share with you today, the killer deviates in these norms and take an unusually long cooling off period between his first and second series of victims sixteen years. In fact, he also completely changes the target of his crimes between his second and third victims. It's very rare for a serial killer to change his method of operation, but he does,

and you'll find out why. We're going to start in early nineteen in a small upstate New York city of Watertown, where an unspeakable tragedy was about to strike the community. It was the spring of nineteen and Arthur John shaw Cross age was an employee with the Watertown Public Works Department. He had just married his third wife, Penny, in late April. Shaw Cross had only recently been released from a state

prison after serving time for burglary and arson. He had set fire to a paper mill in April of nineteen sixty and then to the cheese company that he worked for in September of the same year. Well serving his prison sentence, shaw Cross had spent just a few months at the Attica Correctional Facility before being transferred to Auburn prison in the summer of nineteen seventy. Later that same year, on November four, an inmate riot broke out in Aubera.

Thirty guards were seized as hostages, and the inmates had control of nearly the entire prison. The riot only lasted one day, but it took a combined total of more than six hundred state troopers, additional prison guards and sheriff's deputies to regain control. In the situation had cooled down, it was revealed that inmate Arthur shaw Cross had save

the life of a prison official during the riot. For the he was granted early parole and was released after serving just twenty two months of a five year sentence. So in October of Arthur shaw Cross was a freeman, and he returned to his daily life in Watertown, New York at the parole board, knowing what was about to happen in that small, charming city over the next year,

they never would have let him out. Early shaw Cross enjoyed fishing, and due to this hobby, he spent a lot of his free time in and around the surrounding creeks and rivers, mainly the Black River, the waterway that runs right through the middle of town. As a result, he often shared the river banks with the children of Watertown. One young boy, Jack Owen Blake, age ten, became one

of Arthur's favorite fishing buddies. On May seven, just seven months after shaw Cross was released from prison, Jack Blake went missing. The Blake Boy's body wasn't initially found, but suspicion immediately fell on Arthur shaw Cross. Arthur and Jack, along with Jack's younger brother, had benefitshing together just days before he disappeared. Shaw Cross repeatedly denied any knowledge of the boy's disappearance, and since there was no evidence against him,

including nobody, he remained a free man. Four months later, on September two, two and while the search for Jack Blake was still on, it happened again. Another child went missing in Watertown. Lots of us tell variety lies on a daily basis. Most are small, but occasionally a few whoppers too. We intentionally make false statements to others to ease social interactions, protect someone's feelings with a small white lie, or use a lie to simply avoid the unpleasant consequences

telling the truth. Pathological lying, on the other hand, is when the behavior becomes compulsive or habitual. It's when a person lies consistently for absolutely no personal gain other than maybe to bolster their own character, regardless of how one founded those claims. Maybe. Pathological liars typically try to present themselves in a favorable light, whereas the hero not the bad guy of the story. Pathologic a line was one

of many issues Arthur Delwyth throughout his life. Well in prison, he self reported sexual abuse between himself at a young age and his mother, his aunt, his sister, and a couple of his cousins. Later, he would claim as an adolescent he had sex with a variety of barnyard animals too. Each of the accused family members has denied all of Arthur's sexual abuse allegations, and not one instance was ever proven to be true. What we do know of his

past is somewhat troubling. Arthur was a bedwetter until the age of nine, and his mother repeatedly shamed him for that. We also know that he was sexually excited by lighting fires, and that he liked to torture and kill small animals, including fish, cats, squirrels, and birds. That's all three points of the McDonald try. It a set of three factors that suggests future violent tendencies and serial offenses from an individual if three or any combination of two are present

together bed wedding, fire setting, and cruelty to animals. Again, Arthur exhibited all three traits. He also had at least three known closed head brain injuries between the ages of sixteen and twenty two. At the age of sixteen, he was hit in the head with a discus and spent

several hours unconscious. At age eighteen, he was struck in the head with a sledgehammer, again he was unconscious for several hours, and at age two, while he was in the army, he felt from a forty ft ladder striking his head and rendering him unconscious once again for several hours. Years later, an MRI scan of Arthur's brain would show that he had developed a cyst in one temporal lobe and residual scarring on both frontal lobes from the discus

and sledgehammer incidents. He dropped out of school after his second failed attempt at ninth grade, and eventually was drafted in the army at age nineteen. During the Vietnam War, Arthur also bragged about his tour of duty and his battlefield heroics in Vietnam, greatly exaggerating the role he played

and even admitting to several grotesque wartime atrocities. He bragged about solo jungle missions where he killed women and young girls, torturing them, raping them, cutting their heads off and nailing them to trees or sticking them on posts, and then cannibalizing parts of their bodies. There's no proof any of this ever happened. He claimed to be an expert sniper during the war, and then he could fashion a rifle silence or out of a rubber nipple from a baby's bottle.

He also claimed battlefield kill count of thirty nine enemy soldiers. Yet according to Arthur's commanding officers, the truth is Arthur was a supply clerk and never saw combat. In the years to follow. Back at home in Upstate New York, Arthur would eventually mutilate several of his victims, and while occasionally there were body parts missing, it was impossible to prove that he ever consumed any of the missing parts, including Jack Blake's heart and genitals, and much later, the

vaginas of three of his female victims. The date was September two, just four months after the disappearance of Jack Blake, and there was another child missing in Watertown. This time it was Karen Ann Hill, age eight, who was visiting with her mother for the Labor Day weekend. The Watertown police were now searching for two missing children. They found Karen Hill first. Her lifeless body was discovered under a bridge.

She had been raped, mutilated, and strangled. Mud leaves and other debris had been forced down her throat and inside her clothing. Once again, Arthur's shaw Cross, now aged, was an immediate suspect. A police investigation revealed that he and Karen Hill had been seen together on the day of her disappearance. The neighbors reported that Arthur was seen eating ice cream on the bridge, right near where the body

was discovered. Arthur again denied any involved and the disappearance of the child, but after a full day of police interrogation, he finally cracked. With his defense attorney present, shaw Cross decided that he had had enough and asked police, what would happen to me if I told you something? In the hours that followed, he admitted to killing Karen Hill, but he also let them know that he had additional

information to share. He could lead them to the body of the still missing Blake boy if they were willing to make a deal. Shaw Cross told them exactly what they wanted to know. Four months earlier, it was he who had lured ten year old Jack Blake into the woods, stripped him naked, sexually assaulted him, and then strangled him to death as part of a police bargain in exchange for showing the police where the body of Jack Blake

be found. The authorities less in the charge against shack Cross and manslaughter for the rape and murder of Karen Hill, and all of their charges were dropped entirely. He would not be charged in the rape or murder of Jack Blake. For his crimes, Arthur shaw Cross was sentenced to just twenty five years in prison with the possibility of early parole, and well, that already seems like a light sentence for

murdering two children, it gets even worse. Despite the warnings of prison psychiatrists, after less than fifteen years behind bars, social workers and prison staff members incorrectly determined that shaw Cross was no longer dangerous and granted him early parole in April. Why did the prison psychiatrists advise against his release, Well, reason was that shaw Cross had revealed that he had returned several times to the site where he dumped Jack

Blake's body to have sex with the corpse. He also confessed to removing the boy's heart and genitals and eating them. His early release in prison, or even the fact that he was being released at all, it was a mistake that would only be amplified over the next three years. My nightmares, yeah, I'm still having them. I had another pretty disturbing dream this weekend. The last one was just a few days ago, around three am. Um, it's another really,

really violent dream. I'm being chased. I was laying face down, yelling and violently kicking the mattress as hard and fast as I could. My wife was startled, terrified, and rightfully so. It's clearly someone who's serious about catching me. Seriously, there's a reason they want me in our moonlit bedroom. It looked like someone was attacking me on my side of the bed. Someone was By the next morning, the only lasting memory I had of that evening's nightmare but someone

endlessly chasing me. As we raised up a very steep set of stairs, almost as steep as a ladder. He reached out to grab my ankles, and that's when I turned and began kicking him in the heads. That terrifying moment when the pursuer catches me like this is it. I've got a fight otherwise I'm dead. It's it's gonna be a battle to death. This or anything about this is like I boy, I didn't stop, over and over again,

as hard as I could, I didn't stop. I just kept going and going and going until the person is practically unrecognizable. Was it Arthur chasing me? I don't know. I can't say for sure it was him, but I can't tell you. There was no more sleep for me that night. I guess you can kind of understand why I didn't want to record that when my family around me or near me. So I'm kind of confessing to this, even though it's something that never really happened. And Uh,

I got a deal with that. Um. That's about it for now. I hope he doesn't haunt your dreams the way he has mine. A common trait among captured serial killers is that even though they're locked behind bars, they want to believe that there's still somehow in control of what's happening outside of the prison walls. Arthur shaw Cross was no different. We've established his tendency to lie about nearly all aspects of his life, a pattern that he continued in prison, but he did so in a somewhat

puzzling way. He attempted to manipulate all of his interviewers, detectives, doctors, anybody that would listen to him by changing his story. The way he answered questions would very greatly based on who he was talking to. If it was a male interviewer, Arthur would play up his heroic but completely fictional actions

on the battlefield in Vietnam. If it was a female interviewer, are they are going to long detailed descriptions of his mutilation killings and described to them how much he enjoyed removing parts of his victims, and then how much he enjoyed eating those parts, And if he detected a tiny bit of sympathy from his interviewer, his narrative voice switched over to his alleged but never proven claims of sexual

abuse at the hands of his mother and aunt. He would add graphic details to his stories of abuse to see if he could elicit an even greater sympathetic response from across the table. Again, manipulative behavior isn't necessarily surprising from a serial killer, and it was always fairly easy for those Arthur spoke to see right through his made up stories. They knew he was a liar and he

was never going to change. How Arthur shaw Cross dealt with his early release from prison and how we chose to fill his free time doesn't even begin to tell the story. You would undergo an extraordinary physical transformation as he struggled to find a new home and unfortunately and all new group of victims Next time on Insomniac. Insomniac is a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, written and hosted by Scott Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins,

Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Josh Thain. Music composed by Makeup and Vanity, set and cover by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and Facebook at insomniac Pod, on Instagram at insomniac podcast, and at our website insomniac podcast dot com. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.