Serial Slayer of 10 Women Gets 250-Year Prison Term

Serial murderer Arthur J. Shawcross was sentenced Friday to a minimum of 250 years in prison for the killings of 10 women in the Rochester area since early 1988.

“If anybody ever deserved the maximum sentence, it was Shawcross,” said prosecutor Charles Siragusa, who said he would have asked for the death penalty if it were an option in New York.

Monroe County Judge Donald Wisner sentenced Shawcross to the maximum 25 years to life on each of the 10 counts of second-degree murder, with the terms to run consecutively. The 250-year sentence does not include the possibility of early release.

Before the sentencing, Siragusa reminded Wisner of a statement Shawcross made on Jan. 4, 1990, the day he confessed to the murders.

“He was asked what he thought the police should do with him,” Siragusa said. “He said he should be put in jail for the rest of his life, because, if he was ever released, he would kill again.”

At the time of the killings, Shawcross was on parole after serving 15 years in prison for the 1972 stranglings of two children in Watertown.

“A very dangerous individual who never should have gotten out in the first place will never get out again,” Siragusa said after the sentencing.

Shawcross, 45, also has confessed to an 11th slaying in neighboring Wayne County, where he faces a separate trial this year.

He was convicted in December of the murders of 10 Rochester-area women from March, 1988, to January, 1990. He preyed mostly on prostitutes and street people. The killings terrorized prostitutes, particularly in the rundown Lyell Avenue section, where many of the victims were last seen.

Jurors rejected defense arguments that he was legally insane at the time of the killings because of brain damage, abuse during childhood and his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam.

The courtroom was packed with relatives of the victims, officers who worked on the case, the jurors who convicted Shawcross and spectators who had followed the 13-week trial throughout the fall and winter.

Siragusa, while arguing for the maximum sentence, called Shawcross a “real-life monster” and “a killer without conscience” who showed no remorse for the lives he had taken.

Siragusa read letters he had received from two of the victims’ families, describing how their lives had been devastated by the murders.

“The nightmares don’t stop for the relatives of the victims,” Siragusa said. “It’s a cross they will bear for the rest of their lives.”