the death of a monster

Arthur Shawcross has died of natural causes while serving a 250 year sentence as a result of being convicted for ten murders in Monroe County as well as a life sentence for a single murder in neighboring Wayne County.

There is an article on him at Wikipedia, but I remember his reign of terror in the Rochester area during the late 1980's. He was well known to a lot of local prostitutes and had a strange fetish. While having sex with them he insisted that they lie perfectly still and pretend to be dead. If they did not comply he became enraged.

The majority of his victims were prostitutes. Before his identity was discovered he was dubbed "The Genesee River Killer" because most of the corpses were found near the river. He generally mutilated the bodies, and claimed to have removed and eaten the vaginas of three of the victims.

These were not his first murders, though. In 1972 he sexually abused and killed a 10 year boy and, four months later, raped and murdered an 8 year old girl. Having been captured and convicted of those offenses, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison but managed to obtain parole after 15 years. One year later (in 1988) he began killing women.

The law finally caught up with him because he liked to return to the scenes of his crimes to watch the authorities examining the sites. Oddly - or perhaps not so oddly - he was apprehended as he masturbated in his car while parked on a bridge over a creek where the body of his final victim was found.

His defense in court was insanity, but the jury rejected that argument. In my personal opinion the death penalty should be allowed for extreme cases and - again, this is my opinion - he should have been executed long ago.

At least he is finally gone.