The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (37 page)

The police quickly built up a profile on Shawcross and his background before talking with him again. They also wanted to know how a sex offender who’d been imprisoned for manslaughter and paedophilia had been released into their area without anyone finding the records. This last part was on everyone’s minds, since they had done a thorough search several times. They were stunned when they discovered the truth.

It would appear that, following his release and the constant hounding he was receiving everywhere he went, the parole board decided to cover up his trail and made his file inaccessible (even to other police departments), settling him in Rochester with his wife. During the flurry of publicity surrounding this decision in the weeks that followed, the board defended its decisions by saying that Shawcross would have been released the following year anyway. A year was insignificant. Yet it was a year that had resulted in many deaths.

When officers asked Clara to show them where she and Shawcross had been for their lovers’ rendezvous, each place was significant: they were all areas where bodies had been dumped.

Following Shawcross’s release, the police kept him under surveillance, and then there was a new development in the enquiry. At a spot not far from where June Cicero’s body had been found, a deer hunter stumbled across the frozen body of Felicia Stephens, whose ID and clothing had been found previously on the roadside. She was lying face down, with her buttocks slightly elevated, the way many of the other victims had been found.

The police again went to see Shawcross and asked if he would
mind going with them again to clear some things up. In the amiable manner he had adopted with them, he agreed to go and they drove him to places where bodies had been found. They talked with him about Jo Ann Van Nostrand, letting him know what they knew: Shawcross seemed unfazed, even when they said they knew what he’d done. When they told him that he’d been spotted with one of the victims on the last day she was seen alive, he shrugged it off as coincidence. The police reminded him of his legal rights, but he said he didn’t have any problem talking to them. As they pressed a little more with evidence they had, Shawcross reacted in anger, but then settled down again. They feared the interview might reach an impasse, yet when Shawcross mentioned how concerned he was about Clara Neal the police knew they had his attention. They suggested that since the car belonged to Clara, she might be involved. Shawcross became agitated by this. He was asked again if Clara was involved. His reply stunned the police momentarily. ‘No,’ he admitted, hanging his head, ‘Clara’s not involved.’

The police now knew they were on the brink of Shawcross confessing. Within 28 minutes of starting the interview, he’d come close to admitting what he’d done. In another minute, he was talking about killing Elizabeth Gibson and, as they suspected, he offered reasons of provocation. She’d tried to steal his wallet, so he’d slapped her again and again. (Later he would say that the police had provided this excuse so he had used it.) At one point, he said, she had looked just like his rejecting mother, so he’d continued to hit her. She’d kicked at him and broke the gearstick of his car, which further angered him. He put his wrist against her throat and held it there until she went still. When he let go and checked, she was dead, so he’d driven around with her for a while, looking for a place to dispose of her. When he found one, he’d removed her clothes and placed her face down in the woods. Then he drove home, throwing her clothing out of the car window as he drove along.

Then the police got another vital break in the investigation. A
search of Clara’s car had revealed an earring that matched one they had found on June Cicero. Shawcross then went on the defensive. He did not believe the police actually had evidence. They brought in his wife and Clara for questioning and then pressured him to spare these two the anguish of a long-
drawn-out
investigation. He considered this and then asked for a map and the photographs of the victims that they had shown him before. They laid out 16 open cases and he eliminated those that were not associated with him.

For each murder, Shawcross had a reason. Some victims had ridiculed him, some had tried to steal, one would not shut up, several had threatened to turn him in as the killer, and one, the homeless woman, had said she’d tell his wife about their affair. The first victim, Dorothy Blackburn, supposedly had bitten his penis during oral sex. ‘There was blood everywhere,’ he said. ‘I thought I was gonna die.’ So, in retaliation, he had grabbed her by the throat and bit into her genital area and then later had strangled her to death. ‘I choked her for a good ten minutes.’ Some of them he smothered with something over their faces and with others he’d pressed his arm across their throats. As for the mutilation of June Stott, a woman he had known and had welcomed to his home for meals, it was to ‘aid in decomposition’, because he had ‘cared’ about her. His explanations were hollow, but at least he was offering details and solving the mysteries.

As Shawcross continued his confession, it became clear what the strange marks were that had been found across Dorothy Blackburn’s chest. He said he liked to sit his victims in the front passenger seat of his car before disposing of them, so he used to use a bungee cord to tie them in place. The detectives showed him photographs of the two missing women, Maria Welch and Darlene Trippi. He admitted that he had killed them both and marked on a map where he had left the bodies. Later that evening, he led police to the exact places where he had dumped their bodies. One had been left sitting up in some bushes near the
river and the other was dumped in water near some houses. The pool had iced over, making the victim look like some ethereal underwater fairy out of Arthurian mythology. Both women had been strangled.

As police drove Shawcross back from these places, they took him by the area where they had found Felicia Stephens and noticed that he seemed to recognise it, though he initially denied it, saying, ‘I don’t do black women.’ Yet they used what they’d observed of his behaviour as leverage to get him to confess to her murder too. According to Shawcross, Stephens had run up to his car to solicit his business and her head had become caught in his automatic car window, nearly killing her, so he’d pulled her into the car to finish strangling her. He was adamant that there had been nothing intimate; he did not like black prostitutes. (He later told someone he had killed a black prostitute to throw the police off his trail.)

In November 1990, Shawcross was indicted on 10 first-degree murder charges and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. After five weeks of dramatic testimony and courtroom demonstrations, the jury was not sufficiently impressed with the defence interpretation of Shawcross’s behaviour. They took half a day to find him both sane and guilty of murder in the second degree (not premeditated) on 10 counts. Shawcross was sentenced to 25 years to life on each of the 10 counts, meaning that he would have to serve 250 years in prison before being eligible for a parole hearing.

A second trial for Elizabeth Gibson’s murder in Wayne County had been scheduled, but there seemed little reason to proceed. Shawcross’s attorney advised him to plead guilty on that charge, which he did, and he was given a further life sentence.

Shawcross died of a heart attack in November 2008.

Lemuel Warren Smith was born in New York in 1941. By the time he was 17, Lemuel stood a massive 6ft 4in tall and played
basketball for Amsterdam High. He was considered a local hero for the team and there was talk of a promising future in sports. But, in 1958, the family decided to move to Maryland. Shortly before the move, Smith was arrested for beating to death a woman, Dorothy Waterstreet, with a lead pipe in an Amsterdam dry-cleaner’s. It was the first of the many serious crimes committed by Lemuel Smith. However, due to legal technicalities, he never stood trial for this offence.

During the following summer, while under continuing pressure from Amsterdam police, Smith was relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where he abducted a 25-year-old female and almost beat her to death. A witness interrupted Smith and he ran away from the victim, who survived the savage attack. Smith was quickly arrested and, on 12 April 1959, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assault.

After nearly 10 years in custody, Smith was paroled in May 1968, and he quickly reasserted his violent nature. On 20 May 1969, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman, but she managed to escape. Later that same day, he kidnapped and raped a 46-year-old friend of his mother’s. When the woman convinced Smith to let her go, he was arrested again and eventually sentenced to 4–15 years in a New York prison. Freed on 5 October 1976, it was less than one month before he killed again.

In November, Robert Hedderman, 48, and Hedderman’s secretary, Margaret Byron, 59, were found brutally murdered in the back of Hedderman’s shop in Albany, New York. Both had been stabbed and their throats had been cut. Human faeces were found at the crime scene, which would later prove valuable. Lemuel Smith worked nearby and hair and blood evidence made him a prime suspect.

On 23 December 1976, while police were investigating the double murder, Joan Richburg, 24, was raped, murdered and mutilated in her car in a car park at the Colonie Shopping Centre, New York. The pattern of brutality and more hair evidence made Smith the prime suspect in that murder as well,
but police did not have enough evidence at that time to arrest and question him.

On 10 January 1977, a large black man tried to lure a 22-yearold woman out of a gift shop in Albany. When she resisted, he took her 60-year-old grandmother hostage and threatened to kill her. When members of the public came to her assistance, he threw the woman down, knocking her unconscious, and deliberately stepped on her hand, breaking it. Several years later, the grandmother saw a picture of Smith in the newspaper and identified him as her attacker.

In July 1977, Marilee Wilson, 30, was abducted from downtown Schenectady. She was taken to a wooded area, where she was raped and her body brutalised before being left to die. Her attacker rammed sticks into her mouth and other parts of her body, causing massive internal injuries. She was burnt with a cigarette and bitten on her nose, face and nipples. The bites on Wilson’s body left definitive impressions, which would later be of evidential value. Smith was known to frequent the area and witnesses recalled Wilson being accosted by a large black man. Schenectady police made Smith the prime suspect in her murder.

On 19 August 1977, Marianne Maggio, 18, who worked in the same area as Marilee Wilson, was kidnapped and raped. Following the rape, her attacker forced her to drive towards Albany, where police stopped the car and arrested Lemuel Smith without incident.

Now that Smith was in custody, the police had to try to gather as much evidence as was possible to link him to the murders they suspected him of. An officer looking at photographs of Marilee Wilson noticed that a mark on her nose might be a bite mark. She was exhumed and the bite mark was positively matched to an imprint of Lemuel Smith’s bite pattern. The police also tried an ingenious experiment, which would turn out to be a major turning point in the investigation of the murders.

In October 1977, Smith was taken to a sports stadium in Albany. He and four other men were randomly placed behind
five screens at one end of the stadium. At the other end of the stadium, a police dog was given the scent of the faeces and stained clothing from the Hedderman store murders 11 months earlier. The dog crossed the entire stadium directly to Lemuel Smith. Out of sight of the dog, the five men were randomly rearranged and the experiment was repeated with the same result. It was successful a third time as well.

On 5 March 1978, with the pressure from the dog experiment and the bite mark match, Smith confessed to five murders, including the murder of Dorothy Waterstreet nearly 20 years earlier.

Along with his confessions, Smith revealed disturbing secrets about lifelong mental problems including a claim that he suffered from multiple personality disorder. He said that the spirit of his deceased brother, John Junior, who had died as an infant before Lemuel was born, was controlling him. One counsellor described that other personalities besides John Junior might exist inside Smith. They also determined that he had suffered multiple head injuries as a child and teenager and that he had suffered further mental abuse as a result of overzealous religious convictions, especially from his father.

Smith’s lawyers and doctors feared he might not be fit to stand trial by reason of insanity. However, it was decided to go ahead with the rape and kidnapping trials. Two doctors testified to his delusions but stopped short of saying that he was criminally insane. Smith was found guilty of rape in Saratoga County, New York, on 9 March 1978 and was sentenced to 10–20 years in prison.

On 21 July 1978, a four-day trial in Schenectady ended with Smith being found guilty of kidnapping and he was sentenced to another 25 years to life. Soon after this, Lemuel Smith unsuccessfully attempted suicide. In Albany, Smith was indicted for the Hedderman double murder. He was found guilty on 2 February 1979 and sentenced to another 50 years to life. Despite the weight of evidence against him for the murders of Marilee
Wilson and Joan Richburg, it was decided not to proceed with a trial as there was no death penalty, and with the sentences already given to him there was no likelihood of him ever being released. However, despite being incarcerated he would have one last opportunity to kill again; this time, the murder would cause outrage around the country.

In 1981, Lemuel Smith was serving his sentence in the maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility. On 15 May 1981, Green Haven corrections officer Donna Payant mysteriously disappeared while on duty. Hundreds of corrections officers combed the entire prison grounds throughout the night and into the following morning. Rubbish bins were periodically emptied into a truck, which two senior correction officers escorted to a rubbish tip 20 miles away. When the rubbish was spread out at the tip, officers found Payant’s mutilated body. Her hands were tied around her back. Her uniform was ripped and there was a dark-coloured cord wrapped tightly around her neck. She had severe cutting injuries on her nose, lips and eyelids. Her nipples appeared to have been either cut or bitten off and there were some strange bruises on her cheek and neck. It was the first time in the United States that a female corrections officer had ever been killed inside a prison. New York governor, Hugh Carey, officially vowed ‘a swift response’.