Shawcross serial murder case pushed investigators to exhaustion, as body count rose

Gary Craig | Democrat and Chronicle

Show Caption Hide Caption The Hunt for a Serial Killer: The story of Arthur Shawcross Staff writer Gary Craig interviews retired Rochester Police Capt. Lynde Johnston, who worked on the grueling 15-month investigation to find a serial killer whose first victim was found in 1988. (June 2017)

A man rummaging for bottles along the river gorge near the Driving Park bridge stumbled upon the first body found in city limits.

The female corpse was covered by roofing shingles; a stone lay upon her outstretched hair, as if to hold her locks in place.

The body was badly decomposed, clearly there for weeks.

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"He came across what he believed was a body that had been decayed and was skeletal remains," said retired Rochester Police Capt. Lynde Johnston, who left the job weeks ago after a career spanning nearly 52 years.

This was September 1988 when the body was found. Just as upon his recent retirement, Johnston then headed the police unit that investigated homicides.

What Johnston and his colleagues did not know on that fall day was that they were about to embark upon a grueling 15-month investigation that would tax their spirits and occasionally exhaust their will. More murders were to come; more bodies would be found, many of them prostitutes who had disappeared off of Rochester's streets.

There would be many firsts with the investigation: The first time the city police called on the FBI's Behavioral Sciences "crime profilers" unit; the first time a local investigation provided so much knowledge about successful investigative strategies and missteps that police in other countries sought to learn from it; and the first time that local police confronted a serial killer whose body count over his life totaled more than a dozen victims.

"It's awful," said retired FBI crime profiler Gregg McCrary, who assisted Johnston and Rochester-area police with the investigation. "These are some of the most potentially draining and intense cases that any police officer will ever work because you feel the weight of this. You feel the responsibility for these lives out there. You get up and there's another body and it's, 'What did I miss?' "

Now, almost three decades after the murder spree, the case is still branded into Johnston's memory.

"You were so consumed by it," Johnston said. " ... There was a lot of internal pressure that all of us were feeling."

But that was all to come. No one could imagine that the woman found among the weeds near the Driving Park Bridge would be the first of many.

Instead, what police had was a body so decomposed that they called upon a facial "reconstruction" expert from Onondaga County. Using the features from the skull, he crafted a drawing of what he imagined the woman had looked like.

Only weeks after that image was broadcast by local media, a man called to say that the composite looked much like his daughter, Anna Marie Steffen, a prostitute who had vanished more than a month before.

"It was one that always stuck to me," Johnston said. "It took a while to identify her."

Body count mounts

As police would later learn, Steffen was the second local victim of a killer who targeted prostitutes and typically beat or choked the life out of them.

When Steffen was found, the Monroe County Sheriff's Office was investigating the murder of a prostitute, Dorothy Blackburn, whose body had been discovered floating facedown in a creek in the town of Sweden.

After Steffen, however, there was a hiatus in the violence. Police had no reason to suspect the work of a serial killer then. Instead, two prostitutes had been found slain miles apart — one in the city, one in the suburbs. The lives of the two women had put them in harm's way, police suspected.

Then, in October 1989, a woman's skeleton was found on Seth Green Island in the Genesee River. Police decided she'd been killed with a blow from some object, but were unsure just what. The immediate attempts to identify her failed.

A week later some boys playing softball near the Maplewood YMCA went hunting for a ball that had rolled into nearby hedges.

"When they went into the hedgerow they found the body of this woman who was left there," Johnston said. The woman was Patricia Ives, a prostitute missing for weeks.

Police learned of other missing prostitutes. "It was about at that point I had a really uneasy feeling about what was going on," Johnston said.

Frances Brown, a prostitute, was found dead on the river bank near Seth Green Drive on Nov. 11. The suspicions of a serial killer grew.

Johnston reached out to the FBI's crime-profiling unit. He created a "war room" with vast information on the victims, the crime scenes, and the homicides so the profilers would have any data they needed when they arrived. To compile the history of the victims, Johnston utilized police officers who typically conducted background checks on police prospects.

"Lynde, as far as the Rochester Police Department was concerned, was the focal point of the investigation," said U.S. District Judge Charles Siragusa, who then, as Monroe County's first assistant district attorney, was also deep into the investigation.

Johnston had no concerns about whether some police would be irked that he asked the FBI for assistance.

"His goal was to solve the case," Siragusa said. "Lynde was not the kind of guy to get into turf battles."

The hours mounted; the stresses grew. Prostitutes vanished. Tips arrived, but many were of little use.

"You're trying to separate the wheat from the chaff — 'My brother-in-law's a serial killer,'" Siragusa said.

On Thanksgiving Day 1989, Johnston told the homicide unit to go home, rest, enjoy the day, and not spend any time on the investigation.

"We were working at least 18-hour days," Johnston said. "Sometimes we had to put our heads on our desks because we didn't go home for a couple of days."

That Thanksgiving day, Johnston received a call at his home: A woman's body had been found at Turning Point Park, hidden among cattails. She appeared to have been suffocated, and deep cuts into her body pointed to an escalation in the violence.

The afternoon was "a very gloomy day, a cold day, and we had no idea who (the victim) was," Johnston said. "Here we were, in the middle of another one and we still had girls missing."

Siragusa also remembers the day

"It was the low point," he said. "At that point nobody knows who the guy is."

Finding the killer

In late November 1989 another prostitute, Elizabeth Gibson, was found slain in the woods of Wayne County. The Wayne County Sheriff's Office joined the investigation. Two days later police acknowledged that they were looking at as many as a dozen killings as the possible handiwork of a serial killer.

Because of their lifestyles, many of the victims had disappeared with little public concern about their whereabouts. Police would later learn that the woman found on Seth Green Island was Dorothy Keeler, a 59-year-old drifter who lived in a homeless shelter and whose friends believed she had simply gone back to her hometown of Syracuse.

With the growing body count, the media began to ask whether police were doing enough to solve the crimes. Johnston said he and his colleagues worked furiously; to them, the victims' pasts were irrelevant, except as clues to use for possible answers, Johnston said.

"The girls were prostitutes, but that's no reason to die," he said.

In 1990, a new year and a new decade arrived, with the investigation still pushing at full-bore.

Then, in early January 1990, investigators finally caught a break.

June Cicero, a prostitute, had been missing for weeks. State Police were using helicopter surveillance to both look for bodies and to keep an eye on past murder scenes in case the killer returned, as crime profilers had predicted he would.

On Jan. 3, police spotted Cicero's body on the ice of Salmon Creek. Not far away, they saw a man in a car, possibly urinating in a bottle. They followed the car to a nearby nursing home, and, there, approached the individual — Arthur Shawcross.

Shawcross was on parole for killing of two youths in Watertown. After his release from prison, parole officials had tried to place him in other less-urban areas, but outraged residents forced him to move. His name had been among the list of many parolees reviewed by police, but parole officials indicated he was employed, adjusted, and abiding by all restrictions.

Police questioned Shawcross the afternoon of Jan. 3, allowed him to go home, and kept him under watch. The next day they brought him in for a much more expansive interview.

During the night police had accumulated physical evidence against Shawcross. For instance, police saw that hand wipes similar to those at two murder scenes were also used at the food services shop where Shawcross worked at nights, preparing salads.

Police tracked the manufacturer of the wipes, learning that no other business in Rochester ordered them, Johnston said. They also found the wipes in Shawcross' home.

Confronted with this and other evidence, Shawcross confessed to 11 murders — 10 in Monroe County and the one in Wayne County. Johnston remembers how they gave him photos of slain women who'd been found and some women who were still missing. Shawcross nonchalantly went through the stack, admitting to some murders and tossing other photos aside as if they were baseball cards he did not want.

The woman found on Thanksgiving Day was June Stotts, who was a friend of Shawcross who had earlier accompanied him fishing at Turning Point Park. As with many of the killings, Shawcross claimed he grew enraged with her during sex.

This day in Rochester history: First in a string of horrifying murders March 18, 1988: Dorothy Blackburn, the first victim of serial killer Arthur Shawcross, goes missing.

Shawcross also directed police to two bodies that had not been found.

Ten months after his confession, Shawcross was tried. A Monroe County jury convicted him of 10 murders; he later pleaded guilty to the Wayne County homicide.

A jury convicted Shawcross in 1991; he was sentenced to 250 years in prison.

Shawcross died in 2008 at the age of 63. Prison officials had been slow to transport him to a hospital after he suffered a pulmonary thromboembolism — an artery blocked in the lung by a blood clot

For Johnston, the investigation into Arthur Shawcross stays seared among the recollections of his career that spanned more than a half of a century

He remembers the exhaustion that was oddly coupled with frenetic bursts of energy — these were the prices paid for an investigation into a serial killer that stretched out for more than a year.

Days after the January 1990 arrest of Shawcross, Johnston was at a son's hockey game. Typically, he would be glued to the action on the ice, but not on this day.

Instead, it was as if his body was rebelling, the pace of the sport too slow. He found himself wandering the rink, jittery, unable to focus.

"I was so wrapped up in this for so many months," Johnston said. "It was so intense and all of sudden it stops. It was like hitting a brick wall."

The evening after Shawcross' confession had also been emotional. Johnston had gone home at the end of that day and walked up the stairs of his Fairport home, planning to finally rest.

Instead, he found himself pausing, overwhelmed.

"I cried like a baby," Johnston said.

GCRAIG@Gannett.com