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Frank Gitro believed the bogeyman lived in downtown Rochester. He is convinced it made him an anxious child. Years later, he finally left and moved to New York City with his partner, Scott McKay. There he discovered that Scott also believed in the bogeyman. But here is where Frank and Scott part ways. Scott welcomed the bogeyman. Frank was afraid that the bogeyman could hurt him or someone he loved. Frank was right.

The Highland Park Diner on Clinton Avenue South has a poster on the wall of Rochester’s landmarks. It’s faded and yellowed and looks like it’s been hanging for decades, although it’s no more than ten years old. Photographs of a town waterfall, the Eastman Kodak House, and a shot of the city’s brewery, Genesee Beer and Ale, scatter the page. Rochester’s desolate and dank neighborhoods are not shown. But one look out the window of the 1950s-style diner and it’s clear that Rochester is haunted by something more menacing—a mixture of poverty and violence and crime.

Frank grew up in West Irondequoit, one of the suburbs of Rochester. His mother still lives there in a yellow, squat house that sits on the corner of a tree-lined street. The streets look sleepy and unassuming. So do the people. Still, Frank grew up believing that the world was too chaotic and random, and that something bad could happen at any moment. His family would fill his head with warnings: Don’t cross the street because you might get hit. Don’t go into the woods because you might get shot. Don’t go near water; you can’t swim. He’d watch the nightly news and imagine all of the horrible things that could happen. And as he did, he grew ever more nervous.

“My life was informed by, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this, you might get hurt, you might get hurt, you might get hurt,’ ” he said. “So that was in my head all the time. I was constantly thinking I could get hurt. I could die and leave my mother alone.” Frank thought bad things happen when you leave home.

Rochesterians will tell you if you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes and it’ll change. One minute, the city is winter white with snow and fog. Two minutes later, the sun is shining. The city lives in the shadow of small upstate New York cities like Buffalo and Syracuse, and the local airport boasts its international status for flights only as far as nearby Toronto. Rochester was once known as the Flour City, for the flour mills that bustled along the waterfalls of the Genesee River. It’s now called the Flower City, for the seed companies that later replaced the mills. Eastman Kodak has been the center of business here for years, with a large portion of the economy riding on its coattails. But the city has recently seen a great deal of layoffs and downsizing. Rochester is in constant flux. Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Junior lived here. So did the man thought to be Jack the Ripper.

There’s a one-in-one-hundred chance of being killed while walking down the streets of downtown Rochester. The murder rate is the highest in the state, higher than New York City. For years the suburbs have been separated and segregated from the city in a way that only money and, perhaps, skin color can. Rochester was host to its own race riot in 1964. The continuing divide between the suburbs and the city shows little change in the more than three decades that have passed. The suburbs are predominantly white, the city predominantly black. Houses in the city go for five to seven thousand dollars, in the suburbs, hundreds of thousands.

In February, an acquaintance took me on a downtown crime tour. He’s a cop. We drove through a five-minute blizzard, along the Genesee River. The streets were desolate, give or take a hooded figure slowly ambling toward the nearby bar. The houses are small and rundown. One yard was piled high with trash bags and spare auto parts. As we turned onto Lyell Avenue, two police cars pulled up to a two-story, rundown house that my guide told me is a brothel. Around the back, women in faded jeans, baggy coats, and sneakers scurried out of the house like field mice. Down the block, a row of abandoned warehouses and buildings line the bank of the Genesee River. Chain-linked fences hem them in. My guide then told me that this is where the prostitutes take johns. Nearby is the site where twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Blackburn was found dead, swollen, and ravaged, in March of 1988.

Little attention was paid to “Dottie” when she was found. Violence against prostitutes has a long history in Rochester; two or three are typically found each year. Even though Dottie’s body had bite marks along the outside of her vagina, the police weren’t alarmed. They chalked it up to the price of her trade. But as time went by, more and more women were found. Two women were found shot. One was dumped alongside the highway. Nobody thought the murders were linked. A woman was found floating in the river, her body badly decomposed. The police couldn’t figure out who she was, but they knew she had died of asphyxiation. After a forensic anthropologist used the victim’s skull to reconstruct her face, a photograph was published in the local newspapers. Her father identitified her and said that she had been a prostitute. Nobody thought there was reason for alarm. Soon after, two more women’s bodies were found near the Genesee Gorge. Both were prostitutes and both had been smothered to death. The police began thinking they had a serial killer on their hands. The press called the murderer the Rochester Strangler and the Genesee River Killer, after the river that flows through the city and suburbs.

Frank, then seventeen, was getting nervous. A body could be found near his house. If not him, then what about his sister and mother? The danger was coming closer and closer. He was afraid.

By November 1989, ten women had been found murdered along the Genesee River. The police were baffled, and the murders were increasingly gruesome. One of the women had been found decomposed, like many of the victims. But this time, the killer had visited her body, long after she had been sodomized and asphyxiated in the woods. Her frozen torso had been cut open from her chest to her vagina after she had been dead for some time. Rumors that the killer had removed her vaginal lips spread across the city. She was soon identified as a woman who had no known involvement with prostitution or drugs.

Also in the late eighties, Scott McKay, then seventeen, was living in the suburbs of Rochester, in a remote, marshy, and rural part of town named Spencerport. He was desperate for something to pull him out of the doldrums of his hometown. When he began driving, Scott would sometimes make turns with his eyes closed, playing a game to see how long it would take him to panic. He stopped when he almost slammed into an oncoming truck.

When he began to drive, he started visiting nightclubs in downtown Rochester. Although he knew the city was rife with crime and danger, it was a world away from the suburbs. Crime did not scare him; what Scott feared was not being able to get out of Rochester.

Scott heard about the Genesee River murders on the news. But he was intrigued, not frightened. He was certainly not scared for himself or his family. “That’s the difference with something like Son of Sam, where you could just have been a woman with long, dark hair and you could be a target,” Scott said earlier this year, as he sat in the apartment he shares with Frank. “Whereas this, you’re never going to be a target, because you’re not a prostitute and you don’t go downtown, so it’s entertaining . . . ”

“ . . . but frightening,” Frank added.

Rochester was now abuzz. Suburban Rochesterians focused more on staying away from the city than protecting themselves in their own backyards. People erected psychic barriers between themselves and the victims; they multiplied the distance between the women dying and the women living in the suburbs. “It was reinforcement that the city was bad. That’s what happens to prostitutes and that’s what happens if you go downtown. That’s what happens to black people,” said Scott. That the victims were black was a widespread perception. Interestingly, only one of the women murdered was black.

But that excitement quickly turned into something far darker after helicopters came swarming over Scott’s neighborhood in January 1990. Another victim’s body was found at a park on the bank of the Genesee near Scott’s house. Police had decided to leave the body floating in the river, in hopes that the murderer would return to the scene. He did. Arthur Shawcross was found masturbating in a nearby car, overlooking the location of the body.

“There was a moment of fear after they found the last body near my house,” Scott recalled. “There was the excitement and thrill of it, and then a day or two later, after people kind of had a moment to think, ‘this guy murdered a woman and dumped her body right near my house,’ there was that definite sense of realization.”

“It did hit close to home,” Frank added.

Very close. One of the last women found turned out to be Frank’s cousin, Elizabeth, or Liz, Gibson. She had been a babysitter for Frank and his younger sister for years, but as they grew older, they lost touch.

Because Liz was a good ten years older than him, keeping in touch was not easy. She had been using drugs with the man she had married. The last he had heard, she and her husband had sold all of their belongings for drugs, and Liz had become a prostitute. She was found strangled in a swamp in neighboring Wayne County. Her body was the only one to be found outside of Rochester. In the ten cases tried in Rochester’s Monroe County, Shawcross’s defense team claimed he was insane, but at his attorney’s suggestion he pled guilty to Liz’s murder in Wayne. The trial attracted intense coverage, and people marveled at his claims that he’d cannibalized his victims. Rochesterians were glued to their televisions, watching their serial killer.

Learning of Liz’s death had a surprising effect on Frank. Despite proof that bad things, indeed, can happen close to home, Frank’s anxiety abated. He said that although he didn’t think Liz deserved to find death at Shawcross’s hands, her lifestyle made her less of a random victim and him less of a potential target for danger.

“Finding out the details of it made me feel more and more safe, because I don’t consider myself vulnerable in the way that those women were. I’m not out at all hours of the night. I’m not a prostitute. I’m not a drug addict. I’m a participant in society in a different way; therefore, I’m less at risk of that kind of thing.”

Before he came to Rochester, Arthur Shawcross had been convicted of murdering and raping a young boy. When he was released, one of his parole officers was quoted as saying that he “was possibly the most dangerous individual to have been released to this community in many years.” About a year after the last murder in Rochester, he was found guilty of killing all eleven women and is now serving life in New York State’s Sullivan Correctional Facility.

In the years since, Rochester has had two more serial killers. They, too, have murdered prostitutes, but not as many as Arthur Shawcross.

Frank and Scott moved away from Rochester and, over the next ten years, made their way to New York City, where they now live. They both say they are less afraid walking the streets there than they were in the Flower City.

Original link: http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/801mag/rochester.htm