American serial killer of 14 people, mostly sex workers in upper New York; he was dubbed The Genesee River Killer, The Monster of the Rivers or The Rochester Strangler.
A weird kid, he was unusually quiet and baby-talked up to the time he was five or six. He was a bed-wetter who played with imaginary playmates, and tried to run away from home frequently. He was violently and painfully raped by an older man when he was a kid.
As a youth, he claimed that he had sex with girls and as a teen, he began a relationship with an older women who taught him all the tricks including oral sex. He learned to please the older women whom he saw and also had sex with younger boys and farm animals. He found that torturing and killing an animal was a great rush, especially during bestiality.
During military duty in Viet Nam, Shawcross witnessed and participated in sadistic acts. He related that he killed and butchered victims, sex-tortured and cannibalized Vietnamese women. By this time he was unable to tell the difference between truth and fantasy; records show that he was never in combat or on jungle patrol. After ‘Nam, he returned to home to a cold welcome from his mom and resumed residence with the third woman whom he married.
He began a spree of felony, arson, rape, murder, and cannibalization of the genitalia of both male and female victims.
At 26, Shawcross strangled an 11-year-old boy, Jack Blake, on 7 May 1972 at 12:30 PM in Watertown, New York. He then sexually molested and killed a little girl. Caught, he was sentenced to 17 years prison.
Released on 28 April 1987, Shawcross did manual labor, food packaging in produce marketing. Within short order, local prostitutes were reported missing and their bodies found later. Shawcross was caught, and convicted in November 1991.
Later resonance imaging showed brain lesions and right-brain formations resulting from childhood injuries, apparently from being brutally abused. He also had an XYY chromosome pattern, lead poisoning and pyroluria (weak ability to deal with stress.
Shawcross was held at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York, until he died on 10 November 2008 at 9:50 PM at age 63 from cardiac arrest at the Albany Medical Center.
Link to Wikipedia biography