In 1990, Monroe County’s daytime television viewing habits were disrupted by a TV first: the live broadcast of The People v. Arthur J. Shawcross. Never before had home viewers anywhere been given access to gavel-to-gavel coverage of a sordid murder trial. The show lasted eleven weeks, September to December. Viewers who normally followed daytime dramas or game shows were instead focused on the trial of a serial killer who’d confessed to killing ten women in Monroe County and one more in Wayne County, but whose lawyers claimed he was insane and not responsible for his actions.
Fans of courtroom dramas like Perry Mason now saw the real thing, sometimes lazy in its pacing but raw and unfiltered in its subjects and language. The show ran on cable station WGRC (Greater Rochester Cable) and was set in teak-paneled Courtroom 206 of the Monroe County Public Safety Building, which had been equipped and wired as a TV studio.
A few watched the first day’s broadcast, were repulsed, and changed the channel.
Most viewers, however, were fascinated and watched for the rest of the fall.
It was all you heard, in a tone of disbelief: “You watchin’ Shawcross?”
One woman, Mary Colangelo, who passed away in 2017, bought $100 worth of blank videotapes and taped every second of the trial. She called those tapes her “treasures.”
“If I must go out, I go during the lunch recess,” she said during the trial. “I’ve fallen behind in my errands, but I’ll catch up when the trial is over. It is good entertainment. No one could’ve written a script like this. When this is over, I’ll feel lost. I’ll have to replay the tapes.”
The show’s villain obviously was Shawcross, yet he put no work into his role. He was the subject of just about everything that was said, yet in appearance he was an unremarkable slope-shouldered schlub. Throughout, he sat at the defense table motionless and silent, staring at his shoes.
The hero was the soft-spoken assistant district attorney Charles Siragusa, who led the prosecution. By the trial’s third week, Siragusa was receiving fan mail and baked cookies from “groupies” who were watching him on TV. High school classes viewed the trial in school and formed field trips to the courtroom to watch the action “in person.” (Siragusa was appointed in 1997 by President Bill Clinton as a senior United States District Judge, a position he still holds in the Western District of New York.)
Not every witness fared well under the lights. One defense witness, a forensic psychiatrist on the stand for many days, while trying to convince the jury of Shawcross’s insanity, drew unwanted laughter and was eventually satirized by morning radio shows because of her rambling answers and disorganized demeanor.
For several weeks, videotapes were shown in the courtroom (and on Channel 5) of the defendant supposedly under hypnosis, describing horrific acts that went well beyond what we’d ever heard discussed in our own homes: necrophilia, cannibalism, atrocities in Vietnam, cruel incestuous abuse. In one hypnotic session, Shawcross went back in time and spoke as “Ariemes, the thirteenth-century cannibal,” who taught young Artie to eat human flesh. In another session, Shawcross claimed in falsetto that his mother took over his brain when he killed, much like Alfred Hitchcock’s twisted villain Norman Bates in the movie Psycho.
The prosecution’s star witness was forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz. He, too, had extensively examined Shawcross but not under hypnosis. He concluded that Shawcross was faking his mental illness, that he was not psychotic but rather a malingering psychopathic—not crazy just extraordinarily mean.
“He is an anti-social. He lacks moral scruples and any sense of empathy,” Dr. Dietz testified.
Viewers were horrified to learn that Shawcross as a young man had killed two children near Watertown, NY, ten-year-old Jack Owen Blake, murdered on May 7, 1972, and eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill, killed May 7, 1972. For those crimes, Shawcross served only fifteen years in prison and was released into Rochester in 1987 to kill again.
Faithful trial viewers learned the names of the ten Monroe County victims and the locations where their bodies were found. Dorothy Blackburn, twenty-seven years old, Salmon Creek on March 24, 1988; Anna Marie Steffen, twenty-eight, on an embankment overlooking the Genesee River gorge just south of the Driving Park Bridge on September 11, 1988; Dorothy Keeler, fifty-nine, on an island in the Genesee River, October 21, 1989; Patricia Ives, twenty-five, on a west embankment overlooking the river gorge just south of Driving Park Bridge; Franny Brown, twenty-two, November 15, 1989 in the gorge near Seth Green Drive on the river’s east bank; June Stotts, thirty, November 23, 1989, off Boxart Street beneath a cement plant beside the river; Felicia Stephens, nineteen, December 31, 1989, in Northampton Park; June Cicero, thirty-four, January 3, 1990, frozen into the ice of Salmon Creek; Maria Welch, twenty-two, January 5, 1990, in a woods in Greece, off Island Cottage Road near Edgemere Drive; and Darlene Trippi, thirty-two, January 5, 1990, in a culvert off North Redman Road in Brockport. Shawcross killed with increasing frequency, seven victims in the final two months, until he was caught.
It was mid-December when the last witness testified, the lawyers gave their final arguments, and the jury deliberated. After an evening and early morning of thinking it over, the jury sent word that a verdict had been reached.
Faithful viewers in the courtroom and on their couches at home sat riveted, as jury foreman Robert Edwards announced, “We find the defendant guilty of ten counts of second-degree murder.”
After that there was a break, weeks passed, the holidays came and went, but The Arthur Shawcross Show had one episode left: the sentencing. On the morning of February 1, 1991, Courtroom 206 was noisy at first, folks catching up, but went silent when Shawcross entered through a side door. When conversations in the gallery resumed, everyone spoke in whispers.
The court bailiff said, “Please rise,” and Judge Wisner, robe billowing, entered through a door behind his bench.
The judge gave Shawcross one last opportunity to speak: “You have remained mute throughout these proceedings. All of us wish to understand what it is that happened. Here is your last chance to speak.”
Shawcross continued to look glumly at his feet. Then, barely audible, Shawcross spoke, “No comment at this time.”
Charles Siragusa had a final comment: “Your Honor, what type of man is it that stands before this court? He is a real-life monster, a killer without a conscience. Judge, I want to remind you that years before Shawcross killed the ten women he’s been convicted of here, he killed two children in Watertown, New York. I ask you to consider the impact his actions have had on his victims and their families and the impact these slayings have had on our community.”
Thomas Cocuzzi for the defense said, “Your Honor, we stand firm to our beliefs that this is a man who cannot control his violent urges. The record does not demonstrate that Mr. Shawcross does this for enjoyment. It does demonstrate that Mr. Shawcross remains and has always been a severely emotionally and mentally disturbed individual.”
Family members of victims were invited to give statements, but only a few did, one of them in the form of a letter written by Theresa Trippi-Caldwell, sister of Darlene Trippi, read aloud by Siragusa: “Arthur Shawcross has changed many—even hundreds—of people’s lives forever. We still have sleepless nights dreaming of Darlene fighting that man off, trying to gasp for her last breath of life.”
Liz Vigneri, Maria Welch’s mom, was there in person and rose to speak. “Shawcross has robbed me of the chance to see my twenty-two-year-old daughter one last time. If someone died on a hospital bed you can sit there and hold their hand and say good-bye. He didn’t give me the opportunity.”
Siragusa rose and said, “Your Honor, Mrs. Vigneri has also written a poem which she has asked me to read to the court.”
I see her murdered in my nightmares.
I see her murdered in images that come at me.
I see her fighting, trying to get free.
I hear her screams.
I feel her fear.
Greater Rochester, as one, cried.
“One last thing, Your Honor,” Siragusa said. “I’d like to read something Mr. Shawcross said to investigators when being questioned. He said, ‘I should be put in jail for the rest of my life, because if I am ever released, I will kill again.’”
Judge Wisner then put a happy bow on The Arthur Shawcross Show. He sentenced Shawcross to 250 years in prison, ten twenty-five-year sentences running back-to-back. Monroe County District Attorney Howard Relin later said that it was the longest sentence in the history of New York State.
Following Shawcross’s sentencing, now forever out of the TV camera’s view, the killer was driven by sheriff’s van to the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, NY, where he was imprisoned until his death from cardiac arrest in 2008 at the age of sixty-three.
For the television industry, the experiment had been a huge success, clearly showing the proceedings to exceptional ratings and without legal consequences. The success led to the launch of cable channel Court TV in 1991 and national-sensation TV trials, such as the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995.
In the meantime, because he’d been tried and convicted in the living rooms and bedrooms of the (585), Arthur Shawcross became “our serial killer,” a demon vanquished, now a mere sinister stitch in the hometown tapestry of lilacs, snow, Red Wings, garbage plates, and Wegmans.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of (585).
Views: 19
