THE MISBEGOTTEN SON

Mesmerizing, mournful portrait of serial-killer/rapist Arthur Shawcross—who also practiced necrophilia and cannibalism—that digs deep to lay his tortured psyche bare. Olsen has profiled numerous madmen before (Predator, 1991, etc.) but rarely with such diligence—or one so heinous. He presents Shawcross's story in oral-history form, binding together testimony from the killer (mostly Q&A transcripts), cops, psychiatrists, relatives of Shawcross's victims, etc., with his own extensive narration. An expert storyteller, Olsen begins with high melodrama: the disappearance in 1972 in Watertown, New York, of ten-year-old Jack Blake—Shawcross's first victim, raped, mutilated, and killed. Despite the insistence of Jack's mother that neighbor Shawcross—then a notably eccentric 27-year-old Vietnam vet—had slain her boy, it took a second killing, of a local girl, to put Shawcross behind bars for a presumed 25 years. But after 14 years, the killer convinced a parole board of his rehabilitation and was freed. Moving to Rochester and marrying a prison pen-pal, Shawcross went on a years'-long spree of killing prostitutes. Dogged police work and a lucky break finally did him in. Olsen closely details Shawcross's gruesome crimes and the cops' counterpoint, but his focus is on motivation: What made Shawcross kill? The author excavates the murderer's early years, uncovering an unhappy home but no striking abuse; explores Shawcross's own rational—that he became a killer in Vietnam—and finds his stories of jungle savagery to be tall tales; and locates only a few clues in Shawcross's accounts of his murders. The unexpected answer is revealed at book's end, in testimony from a psychiatrist who discovered behind the killer's compulsion a terrible biological imperative: an extra Y chromosome and a rare chemical imbalance. Olsen explains Shawcross without excusing him, creating an unforgettable portrait, horrifying yet compassionate, of a doomed modern-day monster.