The disorder PTSD had not yet been named in 1972, but by the time Shawcross would stand trial again in 1990 for his twelve murders in Rochester, the term PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—was well on its way to becoming a household term. Shawcross would milk it for all its worth. In her recent book Through the Eyes of Serial Killers: Interviews with Seven Murderers, Canadian journalist Nadia Fezzani interviewed Shawcross shortly before his death from a heart attack in prison in 2008. Shawcross told her his same loony-tune tales from Vietnam, which Fezzani found difficult to swallow. But in the end even the experienced journalist Fezzani seemed to buy into Shawcross’s bullshit. She wrote, “Shawcross’s years in the army appeared to have had a tremendous influence on his life. This was when he may have had his first experience with cannibalism.” In her book, Fezzani quoted a story of cannibalism that Shawcross had told her:

The most tender part of the body is the upper thigh of someone fourteen to twenty-six years old. . . . I saw a young female placing a spring in one of our C-ration cans. She was making a personal bomb! . . . I tied her hands behind her with stovepipe wire and blindfolded her plus gagged her. Picked her up and carried her up the side of the hill into the trees and stood her up against a huge teak tree [near the first hut where the dead woman lay]. . . . When the girl saw me again and the body of the woman she did not flinch. But when I cut the body in half and cut off the right leg at the hip and knee she was shocked. She watched my every move too. I carried the body that was not wanted up next to a large anthill and I tapped the outer edge of the hill and the ants came out quickly and covered the body fast and started to tear it apart. I went back and dug a shallow hole in the dirt and placed a quarter size ball of C-4 plastic explosives there and lit it with a cigarette. It burns like a small sun, very hot and bright. I added sticks and larger pieces of wood. Then cut some bamboo and shoved two lengths into the ground at each side of the fire. I then fashioned a crossbar and was about ready. I stripped the skin from the leg (which was about four inches across), then removed the cords and larger veins. Pour water over it and powder rock salt. Placed it over the flames and it cooked down somewhat like a roast. I went up to the woman and asked her questions and she just looked at me. I knew she could understand me by the way she moved her eyes. When I went back and picked up the meat, I bit into it and ripped off a chunk and started to chew. She urinated herself and passed out.

When Shawcross first made his Vietnam War claims, inquiries were made into his military service, information that is on the public record. The response from the military was that for Private Arthur Shawcross, serial number 52967041 with the Fourth Infantry Division assigned to a Supply and Transport Company at Pleiku, there were no records indicating he ever saw any combat or was wounded as he claimed while in Vietnam. He worked in the air-conditioned comfort of a supply depot in the safety of a fortified Army base at Pleiku, and the closest Shawcross ever got to combat was perhaps ducking into a shelter when an occasional randomly aimed mortar round was lobbed into the base by the Vietcong. The only jungle Shawcross saw was in the pages of National Geographic magazine or in the John Wayne Vietnam war movie The Green Berets or in the lurid tales of his father’s war in the Pacific told and garishly illustrated in men’s adventure magazines on which he grew up. Fezzani turned for advice to one of the psychiatrists who had evaluated Shawcross during his trial later in Rochester for his second series of murders, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a Radcliffe College and Yale University School of Medicine graduate, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York Universities and the author of Guilty by Reason of Insanity. Lewis has made assessments and testified for the defense in several high-profile criminal cases, including Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, and serial killers Joel Rifkin, Joseph Paul Franklin, Ted Bundy, Washington Beltway Sniper John Allen Muhammad and Arthur Shawcross. When she visited Ted Bundy a few days before his execution, Lewis infamously returned his kiss on her cheek with a kiss and a hug of her own for the necrophile who confessed to murdering at least thirty women. Lewis would tell journalist Malcolm Gladwell that she did not believe serial killers were evil. “To my mind, evil speaks conscious control over something. Serial murderers are not in that category. They are driven by forces beyond their control.” Lewis insisted that Shawcross was truly suffering from PTSD from combat in Vietnam and much more. She claimed that there was something suspicious about the Army’s statement that there were no records indicating that Shawcross ever saw combat. She told Fezzani:

Curiously enough, many of Shawcross’s records could not be found/obtained but we know that horrendous acts were witnessed and committed during the Vietnam War. Do not be too quick to dismiss his stories. Those particular ones have not changed over the years. We also do not know the nature of the training he received, but after World War II the army was determined to make their soldiers less squeamish and thus less reluctant to kill.

We of course know exactly “the nature of the training” that Shawcross received. After basic training that every soldier receives, he was trained as a supply and parts specialist at Fort Benning, Georgia, before being assigned to a safe-and-sound supply depot in Vietnam. In Lewis’s own book, couched in conspiratorial prose of innuendo that dangles questions but furnishes no answers, the “expert” defense psychiatrist claimed that “reports based on CIA documents indicate that during that period civilian and military prisoners, as well as ordinary citizens, were used in these mind-brain experiments.” That the CIA conducted mind-brain experiments is true enough, but then Lewis follows with a kooky chain of Alice in Wonderland leaps of logic to suggest perhaps Shawcross was a subject of those experiments and that the prosecutor might be related to somebody who ran a CIA mind-control drug-testing safe house in New York State. She writes in prose tinged with paranoia:

When I tried to get hold of Mr. Shawcross’s army records, I was told that most of them, which were from the Vietnam era, were missing, burned in a fire. Unfortunately Mr. Shawcross could remember almost nothing about his army experiences except for the name of Westmoreland. It was as though his memory had been erased. He had some wild recollections of slaughtering women in Vietnam and cooking and eating their parts. No one believed him. The prosecutor, who fought the insanity defense tooth and nail, dismissed these bizarre memories as the ravings of a sane man. Since then I have seen two other serial killers with similar memory impairment for their Vietnam years. One of them has only wild, grotesque recollections—half-dreams that no one believes. Their army records have also been destroyed. In my Shawcross workup, had I stumbled on something the Powers That Be were not too eager to reveal? Is that why I was made to look so incompetent, hung out to dry?

Funny thing. According to CIA records, a man of the same name as the prosecutor’s, an uncommon name, ran a safe house in New York State in the 1960s where the CIA conducted experiments on mind control. It could, of course, be a coincidence, but I can’t help wondering whether the prosecutor and the operator of the safe house are related to each other.

The name of the New York Monroe County prosecutor leading the case against Shawcross to whom Lewis refers was Charles J. Siragusa, not an exceptionally rare Italian surname. He is a federal district judge today. Both his Italian immigrant grandfather and father worked their entire lives for the Prudential Insurance Company in Rochester. A Charles Siragusa of no known relation to the prosecutor was indeed accused in the 1970s of running a CIA safe house. Charles Siragusa worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (a predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA]) from 1935 to 1963 and rose to the rank of deputy commissioner. In 1977, he appeared as a witness before a Senate Hearing Subcommittee on Human Drug Testing by the CIA where he was asked by Senator Ted Kennedy whether he had set up a safe house in Greenwich Village for the CIA to run mind-control drug experiments. Siragusa responded that the Narcotics Bureau office in New York and the CIA jointly operated a safe house on 13th Street off Sixth Avenue “to debrief informants, to work undercover operations,” but denied knowledge of any drug experiments taking place there.

The issue here is not the veracity of Siragusa’s testimony, but the logic and quality of Dr. Lewis’s “expertise” to assess a perpetrator like Arthur Shawcross. Maybe that’s why, as she complains in her book, she “was made to look so incompetent, hung out to dry.” With “expertise” like that, it’s also the reason juries began rejecting insanity pleas from serial killers, even in cases like those of Frazier and Mullin despite the fact they were delusional to the point of legal insanity.

(Source: American Serial Killers The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 by author Peter Vronsky)