Arthur John Shawcross was one of the serial killers I researched in-depth when writing I Hunt Killers. He was…a pretty sick dude. The thing that sticks in my mind the most is that he used to tell his victims to take off their clothes and then told them to fold the clothes neatly and set them aside. It’s a twisted bit of psychological manipulation. Someone tells you to fold your clothes and put them aside, well, you assume that’s because you’ll be putting the clothes back on at some point, right?
Not.
It was all bull. But it made the victims more compliant because they figured they’d be surviving the experience as long as they obeyed. But they didn’t. Not a one of them. He killed fourteen, including two children.
He also used to stuff his victims’ orifices with grass and weeds. I mean…OK.
That little datum was too much for Bethany, the lovely young woman who was my editor’s assistant on I Hunt Killers. When Jazz thinks about Shawcross, he originally contemplated the stuffing business. Bethany asked me to please take it out — it was too much.
Out of deference to her sensitivities, I removed that bit. And then proceeded to use it in Game. 😈
(By that point, reading my stuff had thoroughly desensitized her to the point that she was OK with it by now. Sorry for traumatizing you, Bethany!)
Anyway, Shawcross was a real piece of work. Dude had two out of the three of the Macdonald triad (bed-wetting and starting fires), but c’mon — you and I both know he was torturing animals somewhere and just never got caught.
Shawcross was imprisoned at one point early on and many lives probably would have been saved, but there was a prison riot and he helped a guard…so he was let out early. And people died.
He was caught again, sentenced to something like 250 years. Never made it that long, obviously — he died of a heart attack in prison in 2008.
You can read more about him here.
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