Arthur Shawcross

Arthur Shawcross is one of those cases that stays with you precisely because nothing about his surface screamed monster. Born in Kittery, Maine in 1945, he looked and talked like the forgettable guy bagging your groceries — and that ordinariness is exactly what made him so chilling to true-crime researchers and criminologists alike. He killed a child in Watertown in 1972, did fourteen years, got out, and then killed eleven women in the Rochester area between 1988 and 1989 before police finally caught him fishing under a bridge, casually eating lunch near a victim he had just disposed of. The banality of that image is hard to shake. He died in prison in 2008, and while I won't romanticize him, his case remains a genuinely important study in how parole systems and community notification failures can cost lives.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Arthur Shawcross

Name (Japanese)

アーサー・ショークロス

Reading

あーさー・しょーくろす

Born

June 6, 1945 – November 10, 2008

Origin

Kittery, Maine, United States

Occupation

serial killer

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Gemini / Rooster

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%20Shawcross
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A3%E3%82%A6%E3%82%AF%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B9
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q607935

Tags

• Maine
• serial killer

Last updated

September 18, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.