In 1990, Monroe County’s daytime television viewing habits were disrupted by a TV first: the live broadcast of The People v. Arthur J. Shawcross. Never before had home viewers anywhere been given access to gavel-to-gavel coverage of a sordid murder trial. The show lasted eleven weeks, September to December. Viewers that normally followed daytime dramas or game shows were instead focused on the trial of a serial-killer who’d confessed to killing ten women in Monroe County, and one more in Wayne County, but whose lawyers claimed he was insane and not responsible for his actions. Fans of courtroom dramas like Perry Mason, now saw the real thing, sometimes lazy in its pacing, but raw and unfiltered in its subjects and language. The show ran on cable station WGRC (Greater Rochester Cable) and was set in teak-paneled Courtroom 206 of the Monroe County Public Safety Building, which had been equipped and wired as a TV studio.
A few watched the first day’s broadcast, were repulsed and changed the channel. Most viewers however were fascinated and watched for the rest of the fall.
The show’s villain obviously was Shawcross, yet he put no work into his role. . Throughout, he sat at the defense table motionless and silent, staring at his shoes.
The hero was Assistant District Attorney Charles Siragusa, who led the prosecution. By the trial’s third week, Siragusa was receiving fan mail and baked cookies from “groupies.”
Not every witness fared well under the lights. One defense witness, a forensic psychiatrist on the stand for many days, while trying to convince the jury of Shawcross’s insanity, drew unwanted laughter and was eventually satirized by morning radio shows because of her rambling answers and disorganized demeanor.
For several weeks, videotapes were shown in the courtroom (and on Channel 5) of the defendant supposedly under hypnosis, describing horrific acts that went well beyond what we’d ever heard discussed in our own homes: necrophilia, cannibalism, atrocities in Vietnam, cruel incestuous abuse. Shawcross claimed in falsetto that his mother took over his brain when he killed, much like Alfred Hitchcock’s twisted villain Norman Bates in the movie Psycho.
The prosecution’s star witness was forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz. He, too, had extensively examined Shawcross, but not under hypnosis. He concluded that Shawcross was faking his mental illness, that he was not psychotic but rather a malingering psychopathic, not crazy just extraordinarily mean.
“He is an anti-social. He lacks moral scruples and any sense of empathy,” Dr. Dietz testified.
Viewers were horrified to learn that Shawcross as a young man had killed two children near Watertown, N.Y., ten-year-old Jack Owen Blake, murdered on May 7, 1972, and eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill, killed May 7, 1972. For those crimes, Shawcross served only 15 years in prison and was released into Rochester in 1987 to kill again. THE TRIAL OF ARTHUR J. SHAWCROSS: And Other Stories of Rochester Murders—Michael Benson