Fool me Once: Kenneth McDuff and Arthur Shawcross

The Golden Age of Murder: A True Crime Podcast

In the 1980s and 1990s Views on criminal justice shifted right-ward and one reason for this was that serial predators,Kenneth McDuff and Arthur Shawcross among them, were wrongly let out of jail and unleashed once again on the public. McDuff, known as the Broomstick killer, was sentenced to death in Texas in1966 for 3 murders. When the US Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 and McDuff's death sentence had not technically ruled out parole, a parole board would go on to parole him in 1989 and he would go on to murder at least 6 women over the next three years. Similarly Arthur Shawcross, who had been jailed in 1972 for child murder, was paroled in 1987 and went on to murder 11 women before being arrested again. Along with other causes, these two cases are emblematic of an emerging consensus in the 1980s that the criminal justice system was not doing its primary job of protecting the public from dangerous predators, and helped usher in a period where the US became far more fearful and suspicious of each other