The Misbegotten Son

From New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, known as "the dean of true crime," comes a shattering account of a killer the system created, enabled, and then set loose to kill again.

Little Artie Shawcross bullied classmates, started fires, tortured animals, and roamed the woods of upstate New York talking to imaginary friends. He also scored top grades, excelled in sports, and shared his toys with the children who ridiculed him. From second grade on, psychiatrists examined him and walked away baffled. No two experts could agree on what he was, or what he was capable of.

They were about to find out.

After serving in Vietnam, Shawcross returned home and murdered a ten-year-old boy and a young girl. He served fifteen years, less than half his sentence, then talked his way past a parole board and walked free. Community after community turned him away when his history became known. Desperate parole authorities finally smuggled him into Rochester in the dead of night, telling no one. Not even the local police.

The bodies began turning up locked in winter ice, covered by reeds in swamps, floating in streams. Soon the streets of Rochester were swarming with police. Residents were terrified. And still Shawcross killed. His tenth victim, then his eleventh. He had been hiding in plain sight for years, a seemingly ordinary man with a job, a wife, and neighbors who had no idea.

Jack Olsen tells this story through the voices of those who lived it: the killer himself, the detectives who hunted him, the psychiatrists who failed to understand him, and the families of those he destroyed. He also gives full voice to those the system failed: the mothers who warned authorities, the communities that tried to protect themselves, and the women whose deaths might have been prevented.

In his own handwritten words, Arthur Shawcross left one testament:

"I just a lost soul looking for release of my madness."

Publishers Weekly called it "a triumph of true crime writing." It is also something more: a damning indictment of a justice system that chose convenience over the safety of the innocent.

"Grim and riveting...the sort of terrifying thunderbolt that true-crime accounts usually promise but rarely deliver."

— Stephen King