Arthur Shawcross And The Murder Of Karen Ann Hill

In May 197218, an eight-year-old girl, Karen Ann Hill, was reported missing. Watertown Police Officer, Augustine Capone, saw her feet sticking up above the water, with “the whole upper torso buried in rocks”18, and “her mouth stuffed with dirt and mud to keep her quite”. Arthur Shawcross was arrested and brought to questioning at the age of 27 when a sniffer dog led the police to Clover Street, the house of Shawcross and his third wife. After three days, the police try and make Shawcross admit his guilt and plead guilty, however he didn’t make an “airtight confession, he said something to the effect of I could have done it or I might have done it”. However, Shawcross repeatedly told interviewers that he “wouldn’t talk about anyone in Watertown”.

Shawcross frequently went fishing with the boy, and police suspected that he was responsible for this. However, with no hard evidence and only a vague confession that linked him to the death of Karen Ann Hill, the police decided to give Shawcross a deal: tell them what happened to the body of Jack Blake and face a lesser charge for the murder of Karen Hill. Within a conference, Shawcross accepted the plea bargain and revealed the location of Blake’s body. The body was found near the rail tracks, naked, it “seemed that he had been raped and strangled to death”18. But as part of the plea bargain, Shawcross wasn’t charged with the murder of Jack Blake and given a lesser sentence of 25 years for manslaughter. However, he served less than 15 years of his plea bargain before being released on parole in April 1987, despite the warnings of psychiatrists who characterised him as a “schizoid psychopath”18. The fact that he was identified as a “psychopath” evidently meant that nature had a role as to why he committed the crime. Being a psychopath meant that Shawcross couldn’t function like normal human beings due to his symptoms of being