Just as it was for nearly every country involved in the Second World War, the early 1940s was a period of rapid change in America that saw nearly every city adapted to fit the war effort in some way. Chicago, Illinois, where our story today takes place, was no exception. Since the US’s entry into the war in 1941, the city’s already robust manufacturing sector had been expanded immensely, and by 1945, the year during which our story begins, more than 40 railroads then snaked through it. Each one ran day and night, importing raw materials to one of over 260 factories that produced everything from first aid kits and uniforms to engines for the now-famous B-29 bomber.
To staff these factories, women had now made their way into the workforce for the first time as most men were either performing other critical jobs or had been shipped overseas to fight. These women, combined with over 500,000 new residents that had come to Chicago seeking work, had jumpstarted the city’s economy, which had been left reeling up until this point from the decade-long great depression that preceded it. This had all turned Chicago into America’s second-largest metropolis with over 4 million people residing there permanently.
Yet, even as all of this was occurring, regular life marched on—as did crime and murder and death. Those things, unfortunately, are always lurking in the background of every story and in every time period, even the ones where most minds and eyes are focused on lands and conflicts an ocean away.
The First Murder: Josaphine Ross
On the morning of June 6th, 1945, exactly one year to the day after the historic D-Day landing at Normandy, the body of a woman named Josaphine Ross was discovered inside her North Side apartment at 4108 N. Kenmore Avenue. Josaphine, who was 43 years old, was a thrice-divorced mother of two daughters, Mary Jane and Jacqueline, all of whom lived together. Jacqueline had been the one to find her mother’s body when she returned home from work for lunch. She was also the one who had phoned the police.
When authorities arrived at the women’s small flat to investigate, they found a crime scene that was truly bizarre. The first and most obvious peculiarity was that the apartment appeared to have been ransacked: furniture was overturned; dresser drawers had been pulled out and riffled through; paper documents, newspapers, and magazines were thrown around the room haphazardly. It appeared as if someone had been frantically searching for something, yet nothing except some loose pocket change had been taken.
Inside the bedroom where Josaphine’s body lay, things got even stranger. Josaphine was posed atop her blood-soaked bed. She had been stabbed multiple times in the neck with such force that the walls, ceiling, and curtains around her were covered in blood spatter. Yet her body, which was completely naked and uncovered, was clean and mostly free of blood, making it stand out starkly from the scene around it.
Her face had been wrapped tightly inside a red dress, giving her the appearance of a mummy from the neck up. As the police looked closer, they realized that Josaphine had been bathed and her wounds had been bandaged post-mortem. The slashes across her neck had been closed using adhesive tape.
In Josaphine’s bathroom, police noted that her bathtub was filled with bloody water and several bloody garments, all of which belonged to Josaphine. This is ostensibly where she had been bathed after her death but prior to being bandaged.
Based on all this, police estimated that Josaphine had been attacked and killed inside her bedroom, dragged to the bathroom to be bathed and have her clothes removed, and then carried back to the bedroom to be posed. She had not, however, been sexually assaulted.
Looking for evidence inside the apartment, the police came up largely empty handed as there were no foreign fingerprints to be found. Their only possible lead was a few dark hairs wrapped around Josaphine’s fingers that likely belonged to her attacker, but these were of little use as DNA testing would not be possible for another 40 years.
The daughter, Jacqueline, was the first person that police questioned. This was done not only because she had been the one to discover her mother’s body but because the crime scene was so bizarre that the police believed it must have been staged. They suspected that Josaphine had likely been killed by someone she knew for personal reasons and that everything in the apartment was a panicked coverup to make the murder appear more complicated than it really was. As stated, the only thing missing was some loose change; none of Josaphine’s jewelry or valuables had been stolen, despite the fact that they were located in a very noticeable location.
Jacqueline told detectives that she and her sister had left the apartment for work earlier that morning at around 9AM and that their mother, who was currently unemployed, had decided to return to bed. She had received a psychic reading the previous day that had informed her that her life was about to improve dramatically. She had been so relieved that she had decided to take a day off for herself. Mary Jane corroborated Jacquline’s story, and both girls were cleared as suspects after passing polygraph tests.
Adhering the age-old rule of “it’s always the husband,” they then turned to Josaphine’s love life. As it turns out, Josaphine was a bit of a player. She had an ex-husband, several boyfriends, and one fiancé, Oscar Nordmark, to whom she had recently gotten engaged. All the men were questioned and later cleared. Oscar, the police felt, was the most likely suspect, but his alibi was airtight.
As for other witnesses, there were two: the building’s custodian and another of the building’s residents. Both stated that they had seen a slender, dark-haired man in a light-colored sweater fleeing the building around the time of the murder. Neither man had been told about the hairs found in Josaphine’s hand, so the police believed that both men had likely seen the killer with their own eyes. Yet, their description proved to be of little use in the long run.
Feeling desperate, the police attempted to link the crime to another strange murder that had occurred two years prior. In this one, a woman named Estelle Carey had been tied to a chair inside her apartment, tortured, and then set on fire. However, police eventually accepted that they were grasping at straws. Not only were the crimes themselves completely different, but Estelle had been the boyfriend of a notorious Chicago mobster, Nick Dean, an associate of Al Capone.
By then, it was all but confirmed that her death had been a mob hit orchestrated as revenge for Estelle’s cooperation with the police. Josaphine was not associated with the mob in any way, so the connection was eventually dropped.
After eight long weeks of fruitless investigation, the case went cold as detectives announced that no progress had been made but that they would continue searching for answers. They had no idea that this murder was the first of three that would eventually be attributed to a man the media would dub The Lipstick Killer.
Chicago’s Jack the Ripper
Approximately six months later, on December 11th, 1944, as Chicago’s frigid winter temperatures had turned the city streets into a snowy, ice-covered hellscape, the Chicago PD were called to an apartment at 3941 N. Pine Grove Ave, where another body had been discovered. This apartment was located less than two blocks from Josaphine’s apartment, but this time the victim was 33-year-old Frances Brown, a factory worker and former telegrapher for the US Navy WAVES.
[NOTE: WAVES stands for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. It was the women’s-only branch of the US Navy established in 1942 to fill the positions within the NAVY that were left vacant by the large number of sailors needed for WWII. This role was similar to the US Army’s WAACs (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps) and the WASPS (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots). These programs were some of the first that allowed woman to officially serve within the US military.]
The person who reported the body was Martha Engles, the building’s housemaid. She had been drawn to Frances’s unit by the sound of a radio, which she stated was turned up unusually loud for so early in the morning. Other tenants were complaining about the noise, so she had gone to investigate. That was when she had found Frances’s door ajar and, inside, noted that there was blood covering Frances’s bed, the walls around it, and on the carpet leading to the bathroom.
Concerned that Frances needed help, she had entered the unit and crept toward that bathroom. This is when she had first discovered Frances’s lifeless body stretched over the bathtub with a butcher’s knife sticking out of the side of her neck.
When the police arrived at the scene, they immediately connected Frances’s death to Josaphine’s as the similarities between the two were obvious: Frances had been stabbed multiple times, her body had been washed postmortem, several of her wounds had been crudely bandaged, and her face was wrapped like a mummy using either a towel or a pair of pajamas (reports vary). Likewise, her apartment had also been ransacked, yet nothing had been taken.
There were, however, some differences. Unlike Josaphine, Frances had also been shot once in the head with a gun and the killer had left something behind for the police. On the wall next to the blood-soaked bed, a message written in lipstick read:
“For Heavans sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself”
(Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070301191820/http://home.earthlink.net/~chicago1946/p3.html)
Reading this message, the officers felt a chill run down their necks, but as they fanned out to look for more evidence, they found little. The killer had taken the time to wipe away all his fingerprints as none were found on the knife, the wall, or near the body. This spoke to the fact that the killer was meticulous, careful, and vigilant; however, his efforts were not perfect. On the wall near the front door, one partial print smudged in blood was discovered.
Police believed that, due to the angle of the print, the killer had left it as he exited the apartment.
This belief was later corroborated when the apartment’s night clerk told detectives that he had witnessed a nervous looking man exiting the elevator and shuffling out the building’s main entrance not long after another resident claimed to have heard a muffled gunshot at around 4AM. This man was described as being between the ages of 35 and 40 and weighing approximately 140lbs. This was yet another similarity that tied Frances’s death to Josaphine’s.
Unfortunately, the clerk was not able to provide detectives with any further description; however, he did offer up one other piece of very useful information: he knew that the man was not a resident of the building, nor had he entered the building through its front door at any point in the night prior to the murder. This led detectives to speculate that the killer had entered Frances’s apartment through an open window, which was significant because this window was multiple stories above ground level. Since there were no obvious signs that a ladder had been used on the ground below, police assumed that the killer was extraordinarily adept at climbing.
Back upstairs inside the apartment, police examined Frances’s body and wounds more closely, noting that the killer had driven it into her neck with such force that the knife’s blade was protruding out the opposite side. In the police’s mind, this evidenced extreme passion, anger, hatred, and possibly lust. However, they were careful to note that, like Josaphine before her, Frances did not appear to have been sexually assaulted either before or after the murder.
The following morning, the city was abuzz when news of Frances’s death finally began to spread. While Josaphine Ross’s murder had only been reported deep within a few newspapers and obituary columns—primarily because her multiple divorces and secrets boyfriends made her a less-than-savory person in the 1940s—Frances was a much more sympathetic character. The former Navy WAVE veteran and the bizarre note written in lipstick became frontpage news across the entire city. To sell more newspapers, the press dubbed the killer names like “Chicago’s Jack the Ripper” and “The Lipstick Killer,” the latter of which would obviously stick.
Feeling the media pressure, the Chicago police made investigating Frances’s murder their top priority. They assigned several veteran detectives to the case who each began rounding up anyone and everyone they could find that may have been in the area at the time of the murder. They paid especially close attention to any known sex offenders, spousal abusers, and drunks, dragging nearly 70 people in for questioning withing the first few days.
Yet their efforts once again yielded no real results. Whoever this depraved killer of women was, he was smart enough to lay low, not make himself obvious to police, and not kill again while the heat was turned up.
Eventually, after exhausting nearly every lead, authorities changed course and made an unexpected announcement: despite the description that had been provided to them by multiple witnesses, they announced that the killer was likely a woman. This was due to several notable facts: first, Frances’s killer had chosen to use lipstick to write their message, even though there had been several other writing devices available inside her apartment. Second, the term “for heaven’s sake,” which had been used to start the message, was seen as a very effeminate phrase. And, finally, even though Frances was described as “a very handsome woman,” she had not been sexually assaulted, which the police believed was not indicative of a man because no man depraved enough to kill in such a gruesome manner could have resisted taking advantage of the opportunity.
Honestly, this reasoning sounds a bit shaky, but the police were getting more and more desperate. The media was continuing to hound them, not only for failing to solve these murders but for the city’s extremely high crime rates, abysmally low arrest rate, and complete failure to crack down on mob activity. Yet this avenue of investigation yielded no viable suspects once again.
At one point, there were rumblings that authorities had someone in custody, but this unnamed person was later released and details about them have either been lost to time or were never made public in the first.
For now, the police and media had to simply wait and hope that someone with more information would come forward; however, as they waited, another crime would shake the city to its core just days after the start of the new year: the kidnapping of a six-year-old girl, Suzzane Degnan.
The Kidnapping
By the time 1945 was coming to a close, spirits in Chicago were on the rise. The war had officially ended in September, and by Christmas, approximately one million US troops had been discharged and were beginning to arrive back home to the United States. Of those million, thousands had returned to their families in Chicago, and there was still more good news to come as, before the end of the year, the US government announced that all troops eligible for demobilization would arrive home no later than February of 1946.
Thus, the streets in Chicago were alive with activity and celebration as, for the first time since before the start of the great depression, the new year seemed bright with the promise of hope. However, for one family, that promise would be broken in the most heinous way imaginable.
On the night of January 6th, 1946, approximately one month since the murder of Frances Brown, James Degnan tucked his daughter into bed and kissed her goodnight, fully expecting—as every parent does—that she would be there waiting for him the following morning. However, when he and his wife, Helen, returned at dawn to wake Suzzane for school, they found her bed empty. Across the room, the window stood open.
Immediately, James and Helen began searching the home. They checked in closets and under furniture, calling out to Suzzane but receiving no response. They then contacted their upstairs neighbors, the Flynns, asking if she had wandered up there for any reason but were told that she had not. Suzzane, they quickly realized, was nowhere inside the home. They then called the police.
Within minutes, officers from the Chicago PD arrived, and it wouldn’t take them long to make a startling discovery: on the floor beside Suzzane’s bed, what had first appeared to be a crumpled-up tissue was revealed to be a hastily written ransom note that read:
“Get $20,000 reddy & waite for word. Do not notify FBI or police. Bills in $5’s and $10’s. Burn this for her safty.”
James and Helen struggled to stay on their feet as all hope for an innocent explanation evaporated. They began to panic when they realized that, in their haste to find Suzzane, they had failed to notice the note and had accidentally disobeyed the kidnapper’s orders.
Recognizing the gravity of the situation, police from across the city then began congregating outside the Degnan residence in droves. They arrived in patrol cars packed with up to six officers each from various precincts to offer their assistance. They walked the neighborhood’s icy streets, going door to door in the hopes that someone had noticed something suspicious the prior night.
As this was happening, detectives continued to search the home from top to bottom while speaking with James and Suzan. According to them, they had walked Suzzane to the bathroom at around midnight before James had put her to bed, after which time they both retired to their own bedroom at around 12:30 AM. Neither had left the room until the following morning. At one point in the night, Helen said she thought she had heard someone shuffling around but had assumed that Suzzane had gotten up to go to the bathroom.
The upstairs neighbor, Mary Flynn, and her husband, whose bedroom was directly over Suzzane’s, claimed that they had heard noises and talking coming from below them at around 12:50. At the same time, they had heard their dogs barking outside. At first, they said they had tried to ignore the dogs but, fearing that the barking would wake the Degnans, eventually ventured down from upstairs to silence them sometime shortly after 1AM. They claimed that, during this time, they didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary inside or outside the home.
Back inside Suzzane’s bedroom, little evidence besides the ransom note had been discovered, but outside her window, detectives noted that there was an old ladder lying on the ground near the home’s garage. It was not directly below Suzzane’s window, but when the ladder was stood upright, it was just tall enough for a man of average height to reach the windowsill above and climb inside. Because the Flynns had not noticed whether or not the ladder had been propped up the prior night, police could not say for certain that this was how the kidnapper had entered the home; however, they considered it the most likely point of entry.
When the police’s efforts to interview the other neighbors also led them nowhere, they then spread out to canvas the neighborhood’s back alleys. As they did, the Degnans’ home rotary phone rang several times. James, Helen, and the police assumed that the caller was Suzzane’s abductor reaching out to provide further instructions as promised, but they couldn’t be sure because the line would disconnect immediately after someone answered. The caller was either losing their nerve before speaking, or they were taunting them; police could not be sure of which.
As they waited for the caller to phone again, all the police and the Degnan’s could do was sit, wait, and hope that the officers putting in the real legwork outside would stumble upon something. They also hoped that the kidnapper might release Suzzane on their own once they realized how much trouble they were in, but the longer everyone waited, the less likely this outcome seemed.
Eventually, all hope would be lost when another call was received by the Chicago PD dispatch, pushing the investigation in a much more sinister direction. In this call, an anonymous man ominously suggested that the police should begin searching the sewers surrounding the Degnans’ home. The caller did not leave his name and the call could not be traced.
Seeing as it was now nearly 7PM and the fleeting winter sun had already begun to set, officers paired up into teams and ventured out on foot to walk the alleyways once again. It didn’t take long for one of the teams to notice that the lid to a catch basin had been recently disturbed. As they approached it, two officers lifted the heavy steel cover as another shined his flashlight down into the sewage below. There, among the muck, he spotted Suzzane’s bright blonde hair shining.
Moving the beam of light further down, he then saw her face—but there was nothing more; it was only her head.
Unfortunately, despite what the note had claimed, no kidnapping had occurred; Suzzane had been dead the entire time, since long before her parents had awoken to find her missing.
Within the next few days, the child’s torso and severed legs would be discovered in two separate sewers nearby. Police did not, however, immediately find her arms. Those would not be located for another several weeks. By then, the rest of Suzzane’s body would be buried.
The Facts of the Case
Now, if you thought that the police’s response to Suzzane’s kidnapping was already large, be aware that you haven’t seen anything yet. Once it was confirmed that the little blonde girl everyone was searching for had been murdered in such a brutal fashion, authorities knew that her name and photo would be frontpage news by no later than the following morning. They were desperate to find something to prove they weren’t just sitting on their hands.
So far, all they had were a few reports of bumps in the night, a ransom note, and a whole lot of speculation, so hundreds of officers poured into the area to participate in what would become one of the largest manhunts in Chicago’s history. They didn’t have a clue who they were searching for, but they knew that somebody, somewhere, must have seen or heard something. Fortunately, it wouldn’t take long for them to round up several potential suspects; however, before we speak about them, let’s talk about what the police knew, what they didn’t know, and what they strongly suspected.
This will be very important as we move forward because, as the tile of this script suggests, there is much reason to believe that the person police would ultimately charge with Suzzane’s murder—as well as the murders of Josaphine Ross and Frances Brown—may have been innocent. I’ll give you the facts so that you can decide for yourselves.
Let’s begin with was else discovered on the night of January 7th:
In the basement of a building near the catch basin where officers located Suzzane’s head, police stumbled upon a room that the media would soon refer to the “murder room.” That name was a bit of a misnomer for reasons will get into in just a moment, but let’s first discuss what was found inside this room.
At first glance, the basement appeared normal, but inside a washbasin in the room’s center, police recovered several tiny pieces of human flesh. Near this washbasin, at the bottom of a coal bin used to stoke the building’s furnace, a large bloodstain was found with fresh coal scooped overtop it in a way that was meant to disguise the stain. This stain was relatively fresh, and police soon declared that they were standing exactly where Suzzane had been dismembered less than 24 hours earlier; however, they were hesitant to declare that she had been killed there because they did not want to rule out the possibility that an undiscovered third location may exist elsewhere nearby.
As for what was not in the room, there were no tools, no saws, and no knives. There were also no fingerprints as it appeared that, in addition to hiding the bloodstain, the killer had thoroughly cleaned the room sometime after dismembering and disposing of the body, indicating to police that they were entirely comfortable inside that room.
Understanding that acquiring a full timeline of the night Suzzanne disappeared might be the most important step in solving her murder, detectives then set out to interview as many people as possible. Upstairs residents of the building were all thoroughly questioned, and many reported hearing loud and unusual noises coming from below sometime between 3 and 4 AM. They also reported hearing running water in the building at around 2:30 AM when, according to them, no reasonable person should have been awake. None of the residents took responsibility for making the noises or running the water, so police assumed that the killer had been dismembering Suzzane between 2:30 and 4 AM.
To further fill the timeline, they then turned to the coroner who examined Suzzane’s body. He stated that, based on the contents of her stomach, she had likely died sometime between 12:00 and 1AM, further fueling speculation that she had been killed prior to being transported to the “murder room.” The coroner also believed that the body—like Josaphine and Frances before her—had been washed prior to dismemberment.
When speaking to other witnesses, a furloughed soldier named George E. Subgrunski claimed to have seen a man in a trench coat and a fedora walking toward the Degnans’ home shortly after midnight on the night of the murder. He said that the man was 5’9”, 170lbs, and had been carrying a shopping bag; however, he was unable to provide a description of the man’s face because he had not seen it.
After this, no other witnesses came forward and the only other abnormality that police suspected may be relevant was a home burglary that had occurred a single block from the Degnans’ home on the night before Suzzane’s murder. This home’s occupant, a veteran named Harry Gold, owned several pieces of nazi memorabilia that he had collected from dead German soldiers during the war. These items had been stolen during the burglary, but police were once again unable to track down any suspects.
So, to recap and summarize everything they had learned, the police knew that Suzzane had been put to bed at around midnight, that the killer had likely entered her room less than 30 minutes after her parents had gone to bed, that he had killed and transported her to the “murder room” to begin the dismembered process by no later than 2:30, and that he had dumped her body before sunrise. That last part was an assumption, but the police felt comfortable stating it as fact because the dumpsites were not in secluded locations, meaning that the killer would have surely been spotted if he had attempted to dump the body after sunrise.
All this information together meant that their killer worked fast and was proficient. In less than 6 hours, he had done everything previously mentioned while also managing to return and clean the basement without being noticed. This became even more impressive when the coroner revealed that the cuts on Suzzane’s body were clean and showed:
“…absolutely no signs of hacking.”
Up until this point, police were already considering the possibility that the killer was a surgeon of some sort, but the coroner blew this theory out of the water when he went on to declare that the killer was:
“…either a man who worked in a profession that required the study of anatomy or one with a background in dissection… not even the average doctor could be as skillful, it had to be a meat cutter.”
Consequently, police then began looking into Chicago’s many local meatpackers, and that’s when something else happened that further confirmed their new theory:
A few days after the murder, Chicago’s Mayor, Edward Kelly, received the following letter in the mail:
“This is to tell you how sorry I am not to not get ole Degnan instead of his girl. Roosevelt and the OPA made their own laws. Why shouldn’t I and a lot more?”
To understand this, let’s slow down a moment and talk about the OPA:
The Office of Price Administration (OPA) had been established four years earlier, in 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt via an Executive order. The agency’s job was to enact price controls to limit the cost of goods during the war so that inflation would not devour the economy and to place rations on critical supplies to prevent hoarding and scalping.
It was an emergency measure, and within its first two years of operation, the agency had placed controls on everything from sugar and coffee to automobiles and housing. At its peak, it had locked in the prices of over 90% of all grocery store items. Depending on who you ask, this move may have saved countless Americans from bankruptcy, but towards the end of the war, the agency’s popularity in Washington DC took a nosedive.
One of the unintended and unfortunate consequences of the OPA’s price controls was the emergence of black markets for various food and supplies. The mob was famously involved in many of these black markets, all of which hurt local workers because black-market goods often circumvented the local unions. In 1946, tensions between unions and their employers were already at an all-time high due to several strikes over low wages. One of the unions that were striking was the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, AKA the meatpacker’s union.
Because there were also talks of the OPA further cracking down on dairy product prices, a series of violent threats had been made against OPA executives, with one member feeling forced to surround himself and his family with armed guards after a direct threat was made against his children. James Degnan was also a senior executive for the OPA.
Now, with more context, let’s reread that letter:
“This is to tell you how sorry I am not to not get ole Degnan instead of his girl. Roosevelt and the OPA made their own laws. Why shouldn’t I and a lot more?”
After this, many within the Chicago PD began to believe wholeheartedly that Suzzane’s killer was a local meatpacker; the motivation was there, as was the skill. Plus, violence by union meatpackers was not unheard of as, just weeks before Suzzane’s murder, a black-market meat seller had been decapitated in the streets for being a scab. This man’s killer had not been caught—nor would he ever be. However, others were not as convinced because of speculation that the letter may have been faked by someone attempting to damage the reputation of the meatpacker’s union.
Was the letter a fake? Nobody can say for sure, but if you are tempted to dismiss this theory because it sounds too outlandish, I strongly encourage you to research the history of union busting. It won’t take you very long to find countless examples of wealthy employers hiring shady figured to paint union members as “immoral communist seeking to undermine the American way of life.”
Either way, as you can tell, this was a very confusing time for everyone involved with the investigation, and even after everything the police had learned, the only piece of real, tangible evidence they had found was the kidnapping note, but that note brought with it many more questions than answers: had the killer written it before he arrived or had writing it been a last minute decision while in the room with Suzzane? Had the kidnapping been a ruse from the start, or had the killer genuinely intended to keep her alive and something had gone wrong? If so, how was he so well prepared to dismember and dispose of her body?
Had he done this before? If so, why had he gone to such lengths to hide her body if he had intended to lead the police to her remains anyway? Was that always the plan, or did he feel remorse for his actions after the fact?
Furthermore, police still couldn’t say for certain where Suzan had been killed or how the killer had entered the Degnan’s home. Suzzane’s window showed no signs of forced entry, and the ladder theory wasn’t all that convincing in hindsight: if the killer had used the ladder beside the garage to reach her windowsill, why had he taken the time to lower and place it back where it belonged near the garage? Was Suzzane alive while he was doing this? If so, how did he keep control of her while focusing his attention on the ladder?
To the police, nothing about this case made logical sense, and the pointless brutality of it all was baffling. Yet the public and media were relentless in their demand for justice.
On January 24th, two weeks after Suzzane’s murder, 400 people gathered outside a local elementary school to protest the police’s lack of progress. The media’s coverage of this event was brutal, as was the coverage over the next three months, during which time 60 separate articles were published by the Chicago Tribune alone. Of these, at least 8 featured Suzzane on the front page. They refused to let the story fade into the background of public consciousness, and this pressure, some have argued, is what caused the police to make so many mistakes along the way.
A Series of Slapdash Arrests
Up until this point you might be thinking that the police have been doing an excellent job overall with this investigation, and I can’t say I blame you considering the information I’ve provided. In fact, on paper, the investigation seems incredibly thorough.
To quote Lucy Freeman, author of Before I Kill More, the 1955 true-crime book written about Suzzane’s kidnapping and murder:
“[The Police] worked around the clock, often driving their own cars and using their own time… [they] worked day and night questioning suspects. They interviewed more than 800 persons suspected of the crime; gave lie detector tests to 170. The crime laboratory compared 7,000 sets of handwriting with the ransom note. A total of 5,250 tips were received from all over the world offering clues or theories; 3,153 were investigated.”
However, the tactics the police used throughout these interviews and interrogations left much to be desired. Infamously, the Chicago PD in those days was corrupt as all hell, and their reputation for violence against those in their custody was unparalleled.
One of the first real suspects the police homed in on was a 65-year-old Belgium immigrant named Hector Vergurgh. Out of all the people they had been interviewed, detectives felt that Hector was their best suspect because he worked as a janitor in the Winthrop Street apartment building where Suzzane’s body had been dismembered. He and his wife also lived in an apartment directly across the street from the Degnans’ home.
Police theorized that Hector would have easily been able to watch Suzzane through her window and would have felt right at home inside the murder room as it was one of the rooms he was charged with cleaning and maintaining daily. They also recognized that the ransom note had multiple misspellings and had been covered in dirt, two things that pointed toward a poorly educated man with dirty hands having written it.
Although there was no physical evidence directly linking Hector to the crime and he had no prior criminal record, Police felt that they had enough to warrant an arrest. They picked Hector up, transported him downtown, and beat him so severely for 48 hours straight that he had to be hospitalized for ten full days after refusing to confess to the murders.
Of his time in custody, Hector said:
They hanged me up, they blindfolded me … I can’t put up my arms; they are sore. They had handcuffs on me for hours and hours. They threw me in the cell and blindfolded me. They handcuffed my hands behind my back and pulled me up on bars until my toes touched the floor. I no eat. I go to the hospital. Oh, I am so sick. Any more and I would have confessed to anything.
While in hospital, Hector was diagnosed with some very serious bruising and a dislocated shoulder, yet the police were still not finished with him. They kept pressuring Hector relentlessly, even going as far as to pressure his wife into confessing on Hector’s behalf by threatening to arrest her as well as an accomplice.
If this wasn’t bad enough, they also announced to the public early in the investigation that Hector was Suzzane’s murderer. They didn’t say that they had made an arrest or that they suspected they knew who had killed her; they stated, “this is the man,” as fact.
Soon, Hector’s name was frontpage news right alongside Suzzane’s, and he wasn’t released from custody until his janitors’ union began fighting the arrest in court. They filed a writ of habeas corpus on Hector’s behalf and pointed out that, as a Belgium immigrant, he couldn’t even write in English, meaning that it would have been impossible for the police’s accusations to be true.
After this, the police were then forced to make a statement declaring Hector’s innocence, yet the damage to his and his wife’s reputation was already done. Years later, however, Hector and his wife would have the last laugh as his union helped them file a lawsuit against the Chicago PD for police brutality. They asked for $15,000 ($252,000 when adjusted for inflation), but the judge felt that Hector had been treated so grievously that he was awarded $20,000 ($337,000) instead.
The next unfortunate soul that fell onto the ham-fisted Chicago PD’s radar was a man named Sidney Sherman. Sidney was a recently discharged veteran that had fought overseas in the Second World War, and he had returned to Chicago during the first rounds of military discharges, mere weeks before the murder. The police suspected Sidney for one reason: the back alley behind the Degnans’ home contained a piece of wire and a handkerchief with the name “S. Sherman” embroidered on it nearby.
Officers theorized that these items could have been used as a garrot and gag for Suzzane during the kidnapping.
Sidney Sherman’s name was discovered when police ran “S. Sherman” through the military’s personnel database. There was nothing else connecting him to the crime, yet the police wasted no time in obtaining an arrest warrant. When they arrived at the YMCA where Sidney was supposed to be living, however, they learned that he had left Chicago in a rush just days earlier. He had not even notified his employer that he was leaving, further cementing the police’s belief that he was their killer.
This was not a completely unreasonable assumption to make, but the police’s handling of Sidney’s search was far from perfect. His name was released to the Chicago public in a statement where the police once again stated definitively that he was the killer, which caused a nationwide manhunt that lasted for over four days to ensue. Sidney was eventually located and arrested in Toledo, Ohio, but upon being interrogated, it became clear almost immediately that he was innocent.
He had an alibi for the night of the murder, and his sudden departure from Chicago was not nearly as suspicious as the police first believed; he had eloped with his new girlfriend that he had met after returning from the war. They had moved to Ohio to start their life together.
After being cleared by multiple polygraphs tests, Sidney was released when it was determined that the handkerchief didn’t even belong to him. The “S. Sherman” stood for Seymour Sherman, a resident of New York City who the police then shifted their focus to. However, they were forced to drop him as well when it became clear that Seymour’s alibi was also airtight; he hadn’t even been in the country in January of 1945.
After this series of blunders, the police were then forced to announce that neither Sidney Sherman nor Seymore Sherman were Suzzane’s killer, further eroding the public’s trust and making them look like incompetent buffoons. They also determined that the handkerchief and wire were likely irrelevant to the case, which is why I had not mentioned them up until this point.
This cycle of arrest, declaration of guilt, and release continued for several more months as multiple other suspects, each one less viable than the last, were arrested and beaten until they either managed to convince the police of their innocence or had to be hospitalized. The reason the police were doing this, many have speculated, was out pure desperation because the city’s election season was fast approaching.
The Perfect Suspect
On the afternoon of June 26, 1946, police were dispatched to a residence on Farwell Ave after receiving reports that a young man was on the run after being caught burglarizing a nearby apartment building in broad daylight. This young man’s name was William Heirens, and he was a 17-year-old college student on summer break after his freshman year at Chicago University. He was also a known burglar with a juvenile record.
Earlier that day, William had traveled north from his dormitory at UofC to sell one of the two Savings Bonds he kept tucked inside his wallet that were valued at $500 dollars each, not a small amount in those days. He was selling one because he was strapped for cash and had a date that afternoon; however, when he arrived at the post office at around 3PM, he found that it had closed earlier than expected, as it sometimes did during the hot summer months.
Frustrated, William had chosen to burglarize the Wayne Manor Apartments at 6928 N. Wayne Avenue to steal just enough to hold him over until the following day. He chose these apartments because he knew the building’s layout well; this was by no means the first time he had chosen to burglarize it, and he assumed an unlocked door would make for a quick and easy job.
As he walked up and down the building’s third floor, he noticed a door was standing ajar to allow a breeze to lessen the afternoon heat. When he looked inside the entry, he saw a wallet lying on a table just within reach. He grabbed it, but as he did, a neighbor threw open his front door, spotted William, and a confrontation ensued. The neighbor chased William out of the unit and back down the stairs to the first floor.
As this was happening, the neighbor’s wife had called down to the building frond desk to make them aware of what was going on. When William reached the lobby, he was confronted by the building’s custodian, Frances Hanley, who purposefully placed himself between William and the front door, holding his arms out wide and waiting to catch him.
Still being hotly pursued by the neighbor, William pulled a small revolver from his pocket and pointed it at the man. He yelled:
“Let me get out, or I’ll let you have it in the guts!”
Seeing the gun, the janitor stepped aside and allowed William to pass by. He watched as the boy took off down the street. Then he phoned the police.
Upon exiting the Wayne Manor Hotel, William fled down the street on foot and ducked into an alley between two residential buildings on Farwell Avenue. He then scaled the exterior wooden fire escape of 1320 W. Farwell and hid himself on the building’s roof in a way that gave him an unobstructed view of the alleyway and street below. He intended to stay there until the heat died down; however, one of the building residents, a women named Mrs.
Willett, had spotted William climbing her fire escape. She recognized that the boy was running and attempting to hide from someone and assumed that he was in some sort of trouble. She had called the police as well.
Soon, two officers from the Chicago PD were on the scene. Their names were Officer Constant Tiffen and Officer William Owens. They parked their patrol car at the end of alley with the lights on and proceeded on foot toward the building. There were two ways down from the roof, so the officers split up, each taking a separate route to effectively block William’s only two means of escape.
From above, William spotted the officers’ approach and attempted to flee back down the fire escape, but Officer Tiffen was too quick for him. He was already ascending the staircase, leaving William to frantically begin searching for another way down. Finding none, William pulled the revolver from his pocket in an act of desperation and pointed it at Tiffen, shouting at him to stay back the same way he had done a short time earlier with the doorman.
Seeing the revolver, Tiffen ducked out of sight and drew his own gun. He then leaned out and fired a single shot at William, missing him. He then ducked back to safety.
Intending to rush past the officer and flee deeper into the alley, William took the opportunity to dart down the staircase, believing that Tiffen would not shoot him in the back. In this, William was correct; however, as he passed Tiffen, the man reached out and took hold of William’s clothes, dragging him to ground.
As the two struggled in vain to overpower one another, an off-duty patrolman named Abner Cunningham happened to overhear the commotion from the street and decided to intervene. Seeing the gun in William’s hand, Cunningham grabbed a clay flowerpot from a nearby porch, raised it high in the air, and brought it down hard onto William’s head. The pot cracked, and William’s limp body dropped to the ground.
The last thing William remembered before blacking out was the officers standing over him. He had no idea that in less than a week’s time, every man, woman, and child in the city would know and despise his name.
Little Billy Heirens
Little William Heirens was born to parents Geroge and Margaret Heirens on November 15th, 1928, just one year before the start of the great depression. As such, he and his younger brother, Jere, who was born three years later, had grown up poor as Geroge was unable to find regular employment for many years. He worked as a day laborer when odd jobs were available but never earned enough to ward off the financial strain that was always looming over the family’s head. Margaret eventually found work at a bakery, but this was still not enough.
When William was a child, Geroge and Margaret fought often over money, yet despite this, William was obviously a bright boy. In his spare time, he would sketch crude designs for planes and boats, and those designs were described as advanced for his age. He didn’t focus on the things that other boys typically would, like guns and other artillery; he focused on the shape of the plane’s wings, trying to determine what made them fly.
Over time, flight became an obsession for the boy, and one day, Margaret returned home to find her son perched atop the garage roof with a pair of floppy cardboard wings strapped to his arms. He was preparing himself to take flight when Margaret screamed at him to come down.
Beyond this, William was also a tinkerer who liked to take things apart to see how they worked. He would challenge himself to reassemble them. Sometimes he was able to, but the family once went without a clock for several days because William’s curiosity became… overzealous.
However, as William and his bother grew older and the depression worsened, Geroge and Margaret’s money troubles became even more severe, as did their constant bickering. Now, instead of attempting to hide their anger from their children, they began arguing bitterly for hours each night. They would scream at one another, and William claimed that those arguments drove him to a breaking point. He claims that he took to the streets to find some reprieve.
He didn’t have anything to do out there, but he would spend hours each evening walking alone, avoiding returning home for as long as possible.
Years later, William would remark:
“Jere seemed to be able to cope with it; I couldn’t.”
Eventually, when he was about twelve years old, William saw an opportunity for him to fill his spare time in the afternoons while also earning money for himself; he took a job as a delivery boy for a local grocery store. Working in this role, he transported bags of groceries on foot to nearby apartment homes, took payment for those groceries, and then returned to the store to deliver the money. However, it was while performing this job that William’s real troubles would first begin.
William claims that his first brush with theft occurred while he was making deliveries one morning after he was shortchanged a dollar by a customer. In those days, when everyone was pinching pennies to afford bread, a missing dollar was more than enough to see him fired, possibly arrested. Fearing this, William claims he saw an opportunity to make up for that lost dollar as he was dropping off his next delivery.
As he unpacked the groceries at his next stop, he noticed several dollar bills lying unguarded on the counter nearby. He looked over his shoulder, saw that the customer was out of sight, and quickly grabbed one of the bills, slipping it into his pocket and praying that he had not been spotted. With his heart galloping and sweat pouring down his face, William finished unloading the groceries, thanked the customer, took payment, and then exited the home. He had not been spotted.
Outside, he says he wanted to hide and vomit out of shame, but he also says he felt something rising above that negative emotion: gleeful satisfaction; William was a kleptomaniac, and he had just experienced his first high from stealing.
After this elation wore off, William said he continued to feel immense guilt for what he had done, even though he was never caught. Yet the more time that passed after the initial theft, the more eager William became to do it again.
Still avoiding home because his parents were still constantly fighting, William’s innocent evening walks morphed into something more sinister. Now, he began looking for opportunities to relive that rush, and he soon started swiping things for the pure enjoyment of it.
In the summer months, William would primarily target large apartment buildings by ringing the front door’s buzzer until someone answered. He would claim that he was there on a delivery. Sometimes this was true, but on days when he would be on the hunt for things to steal, it wasn’t. When nobody would answer the buzzer, he would sneak around to the back alley and try the back door, which was usually unlocked.
Once inside, William would make his way up and down the halls, and because air conditioning didn’t exist yet, most residents left their front doors and windows open to create a breeze. This presented many opportunities for the boy.
On days when William couldn’t get inside through any of the buildings’ traditional entrances, he would instead scale their exteriors, sometimes using a fire escape but oftentimes climbing fences, clamoring up stone works, and hoisting himself atop other architectural features to reach an open balcony door or window above him. Most criminals would never attempt the types of dangerous feats that he performed, but William seemingly had no fear. Like he had been years earlier while perched atop his family’s garage planning to take flight with cardboard wings, William was completely unafraid of heights.
Earl R. Downes, one of the police officers charged with investigating the string of burglarized homes that young William left behind, would later say:
“That kid was like a monkey… Back in ‘42, he used a narrow board to span a five-foot areaway from a third-floor porch to reach a third-floor bathroom window at 837 Belle Plain. He crawled across the narrow board while 30 feet below him was a cement sidewalk - death if he fell… The same holds true for the time he lowered himself over a roof to a third-floor apartment at 3933 Pine Grove, something like a human fly. Or the time he climbed up a wire mesh-covered English basement window to grasp the window ledge and then pull himself up into the fist-floor apartment at 3744 Pine Grove. How he got a foothold in the wire meshing is beyond imagination…”
The items that William stole were completely random, and most of them were of no use to him. William was a kleptomaniac in the truest sense of the word. He didn’t steal because he needed the money—even though he and his family still did—he stole purely for the rush. He took purses and mink coats, belts and suit jackets, cameras and radios, cooking utensils, and other miscellaneous valuables like watches and jewelry; however, he rarely sold any of them.
He instead stashed everything inside a rooftop shed near his parent’s apartment where he could easily visit them. He enjoyed looking at his collection and walked through the overflowing shed like he was at a museum. However, there was one item that William did often target specifically because he liked them: guns.
As a tinkerer, guns were a particularly interesting item for William. Not only did holding a gun fill him with a sense of power and control, but he also viewed them as a mechanical marvel worthy of study. Like his parents’ clock, William loved to disassemble his father’s unloaded handguns and rifles to study the tiny parts and learn how they operated. He made sketches of the guns, designing his own custom ones that people would later say could have been perfectly functional.
He even jotted down ideas for several improvements to some existing guns. He undoubtedly had a bright future ahead of him, but that future was forever changed when he made one critical mistake:
At only 13 years old, William was arrested for the first time when a Chicago PD officer noticed him acting suspiciously in a park. It’s not clear exactly what this officer saw William do, but it was enough to make him detain the boy and frisk him. This is when he found a .25 caliber automatic pistol hidden away in William’s clothing.
Panicked, William insisted that he had merely found the gun abandoned on a nearby street corner and did not intend to use it, but the officer did not believe him. He transported William to the local lockup and proceeded to interrogate him. This is when William admitted that the gun had been stolen. The terrified 13-year-old boy then went on to admit to at least 11 separate burglaries and directed the police to his rooftop collection so that the items could all be returned.
After this, William was declared a “young delinquent” and held in custody for three weeks, after which time he was brought before a judge in juvenile court. This judge sentenced William to one year inside the Gibault School for Wayward Boys, a Catholic reformatory school in Terre Haute, Indiana that claimed to specialize in rehabilitating young men who were raised in broken homes. (If the name of that school sounds familiar, that’s because it was the same school that Charles Manson attended in 1947; although William and Manson missed one another by at least 7 years.)
While enrolled at Gibault, William lived under constant supervision from staff members who would deal out corporal punishment at the slightest infraction. Needless to say, there was little opportunity for William to act out in any meaningful way, so he was released in June of the following year without incident. However, he would not be free for long as his kleptomaniacal urges returned just as soon as he arrived back at home.
Of this time, William said:
“I wasn’t even tempted. Then I would go home, and the tensions would build, and I would find myself burglarizing to ease them.”
This time, William was arrested after being caught slipping into guest rooms inside the Rogers Park Hotel, a fully furnished, nine-story hotel and apartment building that provided rooms to both overnight guests and year-round tenants. In William’s possession, officers discovered stolen property and a copied key to yet another hotel down the street. After being booked into jail yet again, William was then taken to an integration room where an officer questioned him about how he had gotten the key. The officer told William he would not be in too much trouble if he told him everything; however, tensions escalated when William refused to talk.
Despite the fact that William was still a teenager, the officer laid hands on the boy, beating him severely, both for the repeated thefts and for refusing to talk.
When Margaret later asked William what had happened to him inside the jail, William told her:
“It was the punishment I deserved.”
When brought before a judge for the second time, William was ordered to return to a reformatory school; however, this time, he was sent to St. Bede’s Academy in Peru, Illinois. Here, he fared much better than expected.
While it had always been obvious to those that knew him, William now had the opportunity to prove just how smart he was. He excelled at St. Bede’s, achieving higher than average marks and drawing the attention of the schools’ headmaster. At his recommendation, William applied to the University of Chicago, and because his grades were so impressive, he was permitted to skip his senior year and immediately enroll in classes for the 1945 fall semester. He was only sixteen years old during his freshman orientation.
That summer, William moved into Gates Hall and embarked on his journey toward becoming an engineer. He passed his classes easily while also working several hours each week as an usher at the downtown Orchestra Hall. At night, William and his roommate, a boy named Joe Costello, would stay up talking about life and discussing philosophy, another of William’s interests that he had discovered at UofC.
In his sophomore year, William started dating a young woman who had one of the most unfortunate names I have ever read: JoAnn Slama. It was while “courting” Joann that he would revert to his old habits to make ends meet. He stole anything he could get his hands on from nearby apartment buildings, and this is how he had saved up enough money to afford the two $500 savings bonds that were found in his wallet after his third and final arrest in the summer of 1946.
Marked
When William awoke in hospital, he found that his hands were bound and that he was strapped to his hospital bed. His head hurt from the flowerpot that had been used to incapacitate him, and he could barely see straight. Around him, doctors and nurses performed tests before ultimately announcing that his skull had been fractured. He would, they said, need to rest up to prevent any permanent damage, but officers from the Chicago PD had no intention of allowing that to happen.
What follows in this chapter is a summary of William’s own account of his time in custody, and while I would not normally rely solely on the word of a potential murderer, I think you’ll find that his claims are well within the realm of possibility considering everything we already know about the Chicago PD.
According to William, he was tortured for six days straight while in hospital, during which time officers did not allow him to sleep and withheld both food and water. He said that groups of officers would come into his room, surround his bed, and begin questioning him. They would not tell him what he was being charged with, nor would they allow him to see either his parents or a lawyer, despite him still legally being a minor. It was during this questioning that he first learned of his suspected involvement in Suzzane’s killing when one of the officers asked him why he liked to chop up little girls.
When William attempted to claim innocence, he said that the officers would become irate and begin verbally and physically abusing him. This treatment went on uninterrupted for hours, but when William would begin to pass out from both exhaustion and the head trauma he had endured, his interrogators would jam their fingers into his stomach and press them up and underneath his rib cage, sending pain shooting through his body and jolting him back to life. In his exhausted state, they would continue to berate him:
“Aren’t you sorry, Bill? Tell us how you did it. You know how you did it and God knows you did it…Confess, Bill, and save yourself…We know you’re guilty. You killed her, you sonofabitch. The game’s over. You’re guilty. Now tell us how you did it. Tell us, Bill.”
When one officer exhausted himself, another would enter the room to take his place.
At one point, William said that one of his interrogators became so frustrated by his refusal to confess that he drew back his fist and punched him in the testicles as hard as he could. William writhed in agony, pulling against his restraints, but the officer continued to beat him mercilessly.
William also claims that his doctors and nurses, who had been assured by police that their patient was a coldblooded killer, were no help and that two doctors even participated in the abuse at one point. According to William, while he was still strapped to his bed, two men in white lab coats, Dr Haines and Dr Grinker, entered his room and informed him that they were there to administer medicine to help him sleep. William said that one of the doctors held two vials in his hand, one of clear liquid and another of white powder.
They then began combining measurements of these two ingredients into a single container, drawing the mixture up into a syringe. Seeing the needle, William protested, saying that he could sleep perfectly fine on his own if the officers would leave him be, but the doctors did not listen; they injected William in his right bicep and then started counting backwards from 100. William recalls hearing the number 94 before passing out.
When he awoke sometime later, William said that his head was even foggier, and he could recall almost nothing about what had been done to him while unconscious. This was because Dr Haines and Dr Grinker had injected William with sodium pentothal, also known as Trapanal, a fast-acting barbiturate general anesthetic that was used as a truth serum during the early 20th century. Both Dr Haines and Dr Grinker later confirmed under oath that William had been given Trapanal for this reason.
Unsure of what had been done to him, William once again asked to be let go, but the police informed him that that wouldn’t be possible. According to them, William had admitted to two things while under the influence of the doctors’ truth serum: that he had an alternate ego named Geroge Murman that made him do terrible things like lie and steal… and that Geroge Murman had killed Suzzane.
After his supposed confession, William was finally allowed to rest, and his parents were allowed to see him for the first time:
(Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20071202120346/http://home.earthlink.net/~chicago1946/p16.html)
According to them, it took four days for this initial meeting to happen, meaning that William had been tortured for at least 4 days straight before supposedly offering his confession; however, the police were still not finished with him.
In what can only be described as one of the worst tortures imaginable, William was then given another large dose of the truth serum via a lumbar puncture, but he was not provided with any anesthetic before the needle was inserted. While once again under the influence of the truth serum, William was transported from the hospital to the local police station to undergo a polygraph interrogation, but police were not able to make William cooperate because he was in so much pain that he could not sit upright. He had to be returned to the hospital to be sedated. Later, William would undergo two more polygraph tests, both of which would return results that the police reported were inconclusive.
Once William was well enough to be released from hospital, he was taken into custody and placed in solitary confinement. It was while being held here and still being denied a lawyer that he first heard his name on the radio. To his dismay, William’s tussle with Officer Tiffen had been heavily reported, as had the fact that police were now charging him with the murders of Josaphine, Frances, and Suzzane.
Once again, the police had announced that William was the killer, citing his confession as well as the name of his alter ego, Geroge Murman, as proof. Media outlets ate this story up and eventually twisted the name into “George Murder-man.”
According to William, hearing his name on the radio made everything seem more real. He hadn’t killed anyone, but the police were going to pin everything on him anyway. He immediately recanted the confession he could not recall giving, but the police informed him that they were past all that. They said that, with or without his confession, they had found concrete evidence to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The Case Against William Heirens
Now that we’ve heard William’s side of the story, let’s change gears and focus on what authorities claim they learned while investigating William Heirens and address the evidence they had against him. To start, we’ll begin with the circumstantial so that we can understand what led police to connect William to the Degnan case in the first place:
Shortly after William’s arrest, officers searched both William’s dorm room and his room inside his parents’ house. As they had done years earlier, they found a plethora of stolen items, and among them were the missing Nazi memorabilia that had been stolen from veteran Harry Gold’s home the night prior to Suzzane Degnan’s murder. This placed William in the Degnan’s neighborhood exactly 24 hours before Suzzane was killed. Since he had been capable of quietly slipping inside Gold’s window undetected, police speculated that he would have also had no trouble returning the following night to do the same at the Degnans’ residence.
As for motive, the police speculated that William was a boy of many dark secrets. In his dorm room, they had also found a copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, one of the first in-depth books written about sexual pathology. In it, Krafft-Ebing coins both the terms “sadism and masochism.”
Unsure of why a college student enrolled in engineering courses would be interested in researching sexual psychology, the police determined that William owning the book was evidence that he was a sexual deviant and theorized that, because Krafft-Ebing speaks about homosexuality in the book often, William was secretly gay. This would explain why neither Josaphine Ross nor Frances Brown had been sexually assaulted. Alongside this, they also found stolen medical equipment that they theorized could have been used to dismember Suzzane, including scalpels and other surgical equipment.
Additionally, police also suspected that William was involved in even more shady dealings because the gun he had pointed at Officer Tiffen was soon linked to another crime that had been committed months earlier on December 5th, 1945. That night, a woman named Marion Caldwell had been sitting in her 8th story apartment when a bullet fired from that gun flew into her window, wounding her. William and Marion did not know each other, so it is unclear what the motivation for this attack would have been. The gun’s original owner, a man named Guy Rodrick, had reported it stolen two days before the shooting on December 3rd.
Now, with the circumstantial out of the way, let’s look to the real, hard-hitting evidence: the fingerprints, the handwriting analysis, and the eyewitness.
According to police, William’s fingerprints matched both the bloody fingerprint found inside Frances Brown’s apartment as well as fingerprints found on the back of Suzzane’s ransom note. They also stated that a handwriting expert had confirmed both the note and the lipstick writing found on Frances Brown’s wall were a match to the handwriting seen in William’s college essays. On top of this, George E. Subgrunski confirmed that William was the person he had seen in a trench coat walking toward the Degnans’ home on the night of the murder.
All this combined painted a very convincing picture for police, which is why they claimed to be pushing so hard for a confession in the first place; however, after William’s name was released to the public, this evidence would come under some serious scrutiny over the coming months.
Let’s begin with the fingerprints, as they are extremely suspect for several reasons:
The first group to formally search the note for prints was the Chicago Crime Detection Laboratory. They found that there were no usable prints on the note whatsoever; however, one of the department’s captains, Timothy O’Connor, was not satisfied with this answer and enlisted the help of the FBI to conduct further testing. He shipped the note off to be examined by their more qualified team.
Using a newer, more sophisticated method of fingerprint collection called iodine fuming, the FBI was able to lift two partial prints from the front of the note. They were then immediately photographed, and both the note and the photographs were returned to O’Connor in Chicago.
After this, O’Connor then turned the note and the photographs over to Sergeant Thomas Laffey. Laffey then spent over six months comparing the prints to all those within the Chicago PD’s records, coming up empty handed. However, three days after Heirens’s final arrest on June 26th, Laffey announced that he had made a match, citing at least nine separate points of comparison between William’s fingerprints and those found on the front of the note. This indicated to Laffey that William had handled the note himself at some point.
It was after this match was made and William had given his coerced, drugged-up confession that State’s Attorney William Touhy announced William’s guilt to the public. He said:
“there can be no doubt now”
However, that quote was very disingenuous as there was still much doubt. To start, the “nine points of comparison” that Laffey found did not live up to the FBI’s standard of twelve points, meaning that the prints would be very unlikely to hold up in court. Additionally, Laffey had also gone on the record months before William was arrested to say that the prints were:
”… so incomplete that it is impossible to classify them.”
If that wasn’t enough, Laffey himself had also already compared the note’s prints to the prints the Chicago PD had on file for William months before his final arrest and had determined that they were not a match.
So, had William’s prints changed, or was there something fishy going on?
We’ll come back to the note’s fingerprints in just a moment. For now, let’s jump over to the bloody print that was found inside Frances Brown’s apartment. This one was also originally determined to not be a match for William; however, twelve days after William’s arrest, Laffey came out and stated that the fingerprints did match with at least 22 points of comparison.
Was this true? Probably not considering that Laffey would later tell a judge that he was only able to prove an eight-point comparison for this print as well; however, this did not stop the Chicago PD from announcing to the media that both prints were a perfect match.
Once rumors about the prints began to circulate around the department, Laffey then came out and reported that new prints had been discovered on the reverse side of Suzzane’s note. This time, it was a palm print that he said also matched William perfectly.
Now, if your BS meter is not already going off, let me explain a few of the reasons that this discovery is incredibly suspicious:
First, this reverse-side palm print was not discovered until approximately two weeks after William’s arrest, meaning that the Chicago PD had somehow held the note in their possession for over six months without discovering it. Missing a print like this would have been highly unlikely as, during those six months, the Chicago PD’s Crime Detection Laboratory, the FBI, and Laffey himself had all examined the note extensively without discovering it. The print also did not appear in the photographs returned to Chicago by the FBI, meaning that it was not present during their testing.
So, does that mean that Laffey himself planted the prints? Well, not necessarily because there was actually another reason that these fingerprints—and the note itself—would eventually be considered inadmissible in court: police had broken the note’s chain of custody multiple times throughout the investigation.
According to Walter Storm, Chicago’s police chief at the time, only William Heirens handled the note before it was collected as evidence, but according to the chief of Chicago’ Crime Detection Laboratory, Charles Wilson:
“When we got the Degnan note, it came late after other people had photographed it and handled it.”
Furthermore, the FBI’s report also stated:
”… it is evident that the note has been handled considerably.”
On the morning of the note’s discovery, everyone from Suzzane’s parents to multiple detectives at the scene had touched it, and none of them were wearing gloves or following proper protocol. If you recall, the police that day didn’t even realize it was a ransom note at first because it was discovered balled up on the floor of her room. They thought it was a tissue at first glance.
Beyond this, it was also later revealed that the note had been given to Chicago Daily News reporter Frank San Hamel shortly after it was returned by the FBI. This was done so that Hamel could search the note for cryptographic “hidden messages.” Why he was not provided with a copy of the note instead of the original is beyond imagination.
But, even if the note had been allowed to proceed as evidence at trial, it would have proved little as the police’s initial claim that William’s handwriting matched the note and the lipstick writing on Frances Brown’s wall was also dubious. This claim stemmed solely from the “expert analysis” performed by that same reporter, Frank San Hamel, who was not actually an expert by any definition of the word; he had merely eyeballed it. After the origin of this claim was revealed, an independent handwriting expert named George W.
Schwartz—who was an actual expert—was called in to provide a second assessment. By this point, the chain of custody was already out the window, so it didn’t really matter who handled it. Schwarts stated without doubt that: ”… the individual characteristics in the two writings do not compare in any respect.”
Later, the FBI agreed with Schwartz’s assessment and stated that reporter Frank San Hamel’s assessment: ”… indicated either a lack of knowledge on his part or a deliberate attempt to deceive.” To many, this proved without doubt that the handwriting did not match; however, the police could not accept this and brought in yet another expert. This time it was a man named Herbert J.
Walter, who had worked on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping a decade earlier in 1932. After comparing all the writing, he declared there were: “…a few superficial similarities and a great many dissimilarities.” Months later, however, Walter would pull a complete 180 by changing his mind and publicly supporting the police’s claims that the handwriting matched.
Was he pressured by the police to do this? Well, there is no direct evidence of any pressure, so that’s up for you to decide, but please keep in mind that he certainly wasn’t the first person the Chicago PD pressured into saying something that wasn’t true. Speaking of which, that brings us to the final claim linking William to the murders: the eyewitness account… but in my opinion, this eyewitness’s testimony is unreliable at best.
George E. Subgrunski originally told authorities that he had spotted someone wearing a light-colored fedora and a dark overcoat walking toward the Degnans’ residence with a shopping bag on the night of Suzzane’s murder. He later ID’ed William as that man; however, in the original description given to police, Subgrunski claimed the mysterious man was 5’9”, 170 pounds, and 35 years old.
This was a far cry from the lanky 17-year-old boy police now had in custody. Subgrunski had also originally stated that he could not give a description of the man’s face because it was too dark, but he later changed his story after William’s arrest, claiming that he had seen the boy’s face as he crossed in front of a pair of headlights. Further complicating things, Subgrunski failed to recognize a photo of William when it was first shown to him, and it wasn’t until the police either found or fabricated other evidence against William that Subgrunski’s story very conveniently changed.
So, after hearing all that, what evidence was the police left to work with? They had the gun that had been used to shoot Marion Caldwell through her apartment window, but it could never be proven that William had pulled the trigger. Plus, the Chicago PD had been the ones to link the gun to the shooting through ballistic analysis, and I’m not sure anything they said can be taken at face value, especially since proof of this ballistic testing was never made public.
They had the “suspicious items” from William’s dorm room: the book on sexual psychology and the bag of stolen medical supplies. However, the book proved absolutely nothing, and the tools were later determined to be too small to effectively dismember a cat, much less a human child. These tools also had no traces of biological material on them, and William was able to provide a very good explanation for why he had stolen them in the first place: the scalpel was useful for scraping away the real names from stolen war bonds so that they could be cashed without raising suspicious.
However, even if William hadn’t had a good explanation, it wouldn’t have mattered because the police had searched William’s dorm without a warrant, meaning that nothing they found was admissible in court anyway. So, I ask once again: what evidence was the police left to work with? Absolutely nothing.
All they had was a drugged-up, coerced confession made by a teenage boy who had been held in custody and tortured for at least four days straight without a lawyer or his parents by his side. The Plea Deal Simon, I assume that by this point in today’s episode you must have already pointed out at least once that any half-decent lawyer could rip the Chicago PD a new one before any jury. To that, I wholeheartedly agree, but William unfortunately did not have a half-decent lawyer and no jury ever heard his story because his case never went to trial.
Instead, William was pressured into accepting one of the worst plea deals I have ever read about. This is how it happened: After being transferred from the hospital to jail, William was housed in solitary confinement and kept away from his parents and the other prisoners as much as possible. He was, however, allowed to meet with members of the media, who all jumped at the opportunity to speak with the cold-blooded killer, to ask him why he had butchered Suzan and killed the women, and if he was sorry for what he had done.
In response, William denied his guilt, but his denials were reduced to single sentences within page-long articles that outlined all the ironclad “evidence” that police had against him. By now, his guilt was all but confirmed in the public’s eyes, and reporters were only interested in hearing about William’s nefarious alter ego, Geroge Murder-man. Instead of doing any type of investigative journalism, they printed stories about how William would “change into” Geroge Murder-man in a split second, about how his eyes would narrow and become wolflike as he stared at you, dreaming of ripping you to pieces like he had done to Suzzane.
It was all beyond sensationalized. Wanting to help their son in any way they could, Geroge and Margaret attempted to hire an attorney, but they could not afford one. Instead, William was provided with multiple court-appointed attorneys to serve as his defense council; however, it was clear from the very beginning that these attorneys were not on William’s side.
There were three in total; their names were John and Malachy Coghlan, two brothers who had practiced criminal law together for many years, and Rowland Towle, a civil attorney. At first, all three men claimed to the press that William was innocent, but what they told the media and what they told William in private were two vastly different things. Now, whether these three attorneys were in the pocket of the Chicago DA’s office has been hotly debated for over 80 years, and no definitive answer has been reached.
I’ll once again allow you to decide for yourselves based on what information has been released and what William claims happened between him, his attorneys, and State’s Attorney William Touhy behind closed doors: Almost immediately, John Coghlan and William Touhy began meeting up regularly behind William’s back to discuss the case and iron out a potential plea deal. The deal that Touhy offered William via Coghlan was simple: confess to the murders of Suzzane Degnan, Frances Brown, and Josaphine Ross, and William would be given a single life sentence with the option to be released on probation after 20 years. There would be no charges for the many burglaries, and the possibility of the death penalty would be completely removed from the equation.
When William was informed of the deal, he says that he was shocked and confused. He once again claimed that he was innocent, but he said those claims fell on deaf ears as not even his own attorneys would believe him. John Coghlan told William in no uncertain terms that he should accept the deal because he could think of no way to mount a credible defense because the evidence against him was so strong.
Plus, even if a plausible defense could eventually be crafted, the case had garnered too much public attention for impartiality; any jury comprised of Chicago residents would be biased in a very unfavorable way. He urged William to take the deal both for his own sake and to avoid the further negative publicity that a lengthy trial would generate. When William continued to protest his innocence because he couldn’t imagine spending at least 20 years of his life in prison, Coghlan then informed him that prison was unavoidable with or without the plea deal; even if William somehow beat the murder charges, his prior criminal record meant that his many burglary charges would easily warrant a life sentence.
Without the immunity the plea deal guaranteed, he would almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison. Coghlan then also told William that, if the case did go to trial and he lost, Touhy would seek the death penalty, which in those days meant being sent to the electric chair. This was a nightmare scenario for young William who had only weeks earlier been in college and on the fast track to an engineering job that would permanently put his and his family’s money struggles behind them.
Because the boy was still hesitant, Coghlan also told William that he should accept the deal soon because 20 years for 3 homicides was by far the best deal he had ever negotiated, especially considering the high publicity of the case. If William took too long to consider, he risked the police “finding” more evidence against him and rescinding the deal entirely. Under such immense pressure, William caved and agreed to cooperate.
The next day, with the help of his lawyers, William sat behind closed doors and wrote out a detailed second confession explaining exactly how he had killed all three victims. In it, he admitted that he had butchered Suzzane with a large hunting knife that had been stolen from Guy Roderick’s home. This was the same home that the gun William had pointed at Officer Tiffen had been stolen from.
He then said that, after the killing, he threw the knife out a train window near the Degnan’s residence to dispose of it. The police were able to recover this knife exactly where William said it would be; however, they were not able to find any traces of blood or other biological material anywhere on the blade. He provided similar details about the other two murders as well, effectively convincing many that he was guilty because had intimate knowledge of the crimes.
However, this second confession was not reliable either because William’s attorneys essentially told him what to write. They provided him with a copy of an article from The Chicago Tribune, which outlined everything the press had reported about the killings. William was pressured to make his confession fit the press’s narrative.
In an interview years later, William stated: As it turned out, the Tribune article was very helpful, as it provided me with a lot of details I didn’t know. My attorneys rarely changed anything outright, but I could tell by their faces if I had made a mistake. Or they would say, ‘Now, Bill, is that really the way it happened?’
Then I would change my story because, obviously, it went against what was known [in the Tribune]. Once the confession was complete, William and his parents signed it, believing that doing so would put an end to the nightmare they had all been living through the past month. However, it would take less than a day for William to change his mind and attempt to recant his statement, and he would do so in a way that would make everything 10x worse for himself.
On July 30th, William was transported alongside his attorneys to the office of prosecutor Touhy, where his confession was scheduled to officially be accepted and entered into the record. Because of the notoriety the case had garnered, several members of the press had been invited to witness the process to prove that William had made a confession. William was marched before the press by Touhy and told to state his guilt and answer any questions the press asked of him honestly.
This is when William’s anger at the situation boiled over. According to him: It was Tuohy himself. After assembling all the officials, including attorneys and policemen, he began a preamble about how long everyone had waited to get a confession from me, but, at last, the truth was going to be told.
He kept emphasizing the word ‘truth’ and I asked him if he really wanted the truth. He assured me that he did… Now Tuohy made a big deal about hearing the truth. Now, when I was being forced to lie to save myself.
It made me angry…so I told them the truth, and everyone got very upset. In front of the press, William refused to take responsibility for the murders. He would not answer their questions and instead told them exactly what was on his mind and what he thought about the investigation.
Exactly what was said is not documented, but William was quickly ushered out of the room and placed into a holding cell. There, he was berated by both Touhy and his own attorneys for changing his story. Touhy was so furious at the embarrassment that his face was blood red.
He immediately rescinded his plea agreement and said that William would also face additional charges with the murder of Estelle Carey. If you recall, Estelle was the girlfriend of Chicago Mobster and Al Capone associate Nick Dean who had been tortured and killed after cooperating with authorities. At the time of this fourth murder, William was only 14 years old and had been attending Gibault’s School for Wayward Boys in Terre Haute, Indianna, meaning that he was nowhere near Chicago when the murder took place.
Despite this, however, William’s attorneys once again said that he would be convicted and desperately urged him to apologize to Touhy and reconsider cooperating for his own sake. Now that he had cooled down, William agreed; however, Touhy was still reeling from the embarrassment. According to William, Touhy told him that he had blown the best deal he would ever get.
Touhy then offered William a new deal with new terms, but in this one, William would now serve three consecutive life sentences, one for each murder, and would not be eligible for parole. The only benefits the new deal would provide is the guarantee to avoid a trial, safety from the death penalty, and no additional charge for the burglaries or the murder of Estelle Carey. William was terrified; everyone in the room was against him, and he felt that he had no option but to accept the new terms without question.
Anything else was a surefire ticket to the electric chair. William was marched back out before the press. This time he took responsibility for the murders, answered the press’ questions in a manner that Touhy deemed appropriate, and even acted out the murders for everyone’s amusement.
From this moment on, William Heirens was officially guilty, both in the eyes of the public and the law. A Life Lost After one of the worst days of William’s life was over, he felt a mixture of relief, anger, and depression as he was transported to Stateville Prison in Joliet, Illinois to begin serving his sentence; however, his beaten attitude would not last long as he refused to accept his fate lying down. After finding his bearings inside prison, William began preparing to file his first appeal.
He worked for 3 full years reading and learning everything he could about the law, about trial procedure, about appealing plea deals. He sought only one thing: a real trial. He wanted his coerced confessions acknowledged and the rotten plea deal to be thrown out.
He wanted to go before a jury and show them how the police had nothing against him, how they had framed him, and that the real killer was still out there somewhere. In 1952, William was transported back to Chicago to stand before a judge for the first time since his sentencing. He spent ten full days watching as over 40 witnesses testified about their involvement in his investigation, his interrogation, and the plea deal itself.
Many things were learned during these testimonies: First, it became clear that State’s Attorney William Tuohy had been pulling strings to secure William’s guilt since the very beginning. Touhy admitted on the record that he had personally paid one of the doctors, Dr Grinker, $1,000 to administer the truth serum to William that resulted in his first confession. This confession was also revealed to be completely fabricated as Dr Grinker testified that Williem had never rendered a confession while under the influence of the truth serum, directly contradicting what the Chicago PD had told the press at the time.
Grinker also said that William had never admitted to having an alter ego named “Geroge Murder-man,” who made him commit crimes. This whole sensationalized aspect of the story arose after interrogators asked William who had killed Suzzane, to which William simply responded “Geroge.” Because no transcript of this interrogation has ever been released, no one can say for sure who Geroge was, but it is believed that William was likely calling out for help from his father, Geroge, as opposed to implicating anyone.
The police were the ones that had turned Geroge into William’s alter ego. Additionally, William had never once given the last name “merman.” Instead, he had simply murmured when the interrogator asked for Geroge’s last name.
The name written down by police was “Geroge Murmur,” which was then changed to “Geroge Murman,” which was then reported as “Geroge Murder-man.” Furthermore, because of this appeal, speculation arose that the police had also purposefully suppressed information that could have aided in William’s defense, had his attorneys been attempting to organize one: If you recall, the police claimed that the two polygraphs test they administered shortly after William’s arrest were “inconclusive,” but the veracity of those claims were called into question when later reassessments of the tests’ results showed otherwise. In 1953, John E.
Reid put all doubts to rest. Reid was a former Chicago police detective and the creator of the now famous Reid Technique. That year, he reexamined William’s results for a textbook he was writing called Lie Detection and Criminal Investigation, in which he states in no uncertain terms that the tests show William had been truthful about not killing Suzzane.
In my opinion, that fact alone settles the debate about whether the police were attempting to frame William. Even if you don’t trust the results of the polygraphs, it doesn’t matter; the police trusted them, and they still lied to leave open the possibility of guilt. All in all, William’s appeal led to much of the information in this episode being revealed and is one of the only reasons that questions regarding his guilt arose in the first place.
Yet despite everything, these ten days of hearings were not enough; William’s appeal was denied. In an Interview years later, William said: “It was politics from the get-go. When a crime happens, people want it solved right away, and they don’t care how it’s solved.”
After recovering from this crushing defeat, William set out to start a new appeal, refusing to accept his life behind bars and holding on to the hope that someone would eventually give him a fair trial. He said that prison life never felt real to him. It always felt like an interim period that he would eventually move on from.
Determined to stay productive, William spent all the money his parents sent him every month on his education, taking every college course that was available to him and becoming the first prison inmate to earn a bachelor’s degree in the state of Illinois. After this, he then returned to his engineering roots by taking courses on radio and television repair, eventually becoming so proficient in the classes he enjoyed that the prison’s administration made him the official instructor. He was also allowed to operate his own repair shop for the prison and other inmates.
In his downtime, William also helped other inmates appeal their convictions, watching many go free and continuing to hope that he would someday be freed as well when one of his appeals landed in the hands of the right person; however, as the years dragged on, that possibility seemed less and less likely. During one of his failed appeals during the 1960s, long after William’s youthful teenage face had morph into that of a hardened adult man, William was told: “You have done beautiful things, [but] there are just too damn many people that remember this case… You have to just allow time to be in your favor on this.” William tried to take this advice, but he could never make himself see prison as his home.
He couldn’t be content until he was let out, so he continued to file appeals. In the 1970s, when William was in his late 40s, he was transferred to Stateville Honor Farm, a minimum-security farming prison where food crops were grown and harvested by prisoners. According to William, he hoped that this would be a nice reprieve from the maximum-security lifestyle he had grown accustomed to, but it wasn’t.
Many of the prisoners housed at the Stateville Honor Farm were former and current Chicago gang members. Without a strong warden to keep them all in line, William said, the mob effectively ran things. When an opportunity for him to be transferred yet again arose, he took it.
This time, William found himself housed in Vienna, an experimental, minimum-security, coed prison where inmates was referred to as “residents.” This time, William’s life did improve as he described Vienna as more of a college campus than a prison, saying that residents and staff were kind and courteous to one another. There were no fights, no stabbings, and no sexual assaults.
There were also no bars on the windows and no fences around the property’s perimeter because nobody wanted to escape; all the residents knew that, if they tried, they would be recaptured and sent back to a maximum-security prison for life. For those who had grown accustomed the freedom Vienna provided, that was a fate worse than death. Things in Vienna were so lax that William began taking EMT classes while there and was eventually allowed to get a job outside the prison working as an ambulance driver.
He was truly one of the most trusted inmates in the entire state, and it was while living in Vienna that, after nearly 40 years in prison, William received his first bit of good news: In 1983, US Magistrate Gerald P. Cohn ordered that William be released upon time served after his latest appeal. He stated that continuing to deny William parole was unconstitutional, because—despite changing laws that were prioritizing punishment over rehabilitation—William was legally considered “rehabilitated.”
All his charges had officially been discharged that year, so absolutely nothing was preventing his release; however, this ruling would be short lived. When word reached the public that William was going to be released, people protested, leading to the creation of the Committee to Remember Suzzane Degnan. This committee was staffed by 7 retired police superintendents and Illinois Attorney General Neil Hartigan: Of Judge Cohn, Hartigan said the following: “Only God and Heirens know how many other women he murdered.
Now a bleeding-heart do-gooder decides that Heirens is rehabilitated and should go free … I’m going to make sure that kill-crazed animal stays where he is…” After this, Judge Cohn began receiving innumerous death threats, and his decision was ultimately reversed by the Illinois State Senate in 1984, just before William’s scheduled release date. This was perhaps the most crushing blow of William’s life, and things only got worse from here. Eventually, the Vienna experiment was deemed a failure and shut down after several high-profile mobsters were transferred into the program and the entire campus became a hotbed for drug dealing, violence, and riots.
Vienna was retrofitted with bars, fences, and guard towers, turning it into just another prison. By 1998, William developed diabetes and soon lost the ability to walk. He was transferred to another minimum-security prison in Dixon, Illinois, where he resided permanently in the hospital ward.
Throughout this time, he continued to file new appeals, and in the 2000s, new efforts were made to have William released when activists took an interest in his case. This interest revealed evidence that the fingerprints the police had used to tie William to the murder showed evidence of being “rolled,” meaning that they were almost certainly planted by someone within the department. There were also scattered reports that the lipstick message on Frances Brown’s wall wasn’t even written by her killer as it was alleged that a member of the press had hastily scrawled the message at the crime scene himself to make the murder more interesting to the public.
Around this time, the FBI also conducted new handwriting analysis on the note. They arrived at the same conclusion as several experts had in the 1940s: William had not written it. Furthermore, because William had been instructed to craft his second confession around the publicly available information reported by the media, a new comparison between William’s confession and the known facts of the case yielded 29 serious inconsistencies, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that William’s confession did not reflect reality.
All of this resulted in new calls for clemency with Steven Drizin from the Northwestern Law School’s Center for Wrongful Convictions leading the charge. Yet no headway could be made. Drizin said: ”…I don’t know that they really care so much about his guilt or innocence anymore.
I think they’re just invested in keeping him locked up for the rest of his life.” In one of his final parole hearings in 2007, the Illinois parole board unanimously voted 14-0 to deny William any sort of release. One of the board members stated: “God will forgive you, but the state won’t.”
William never stopped fighting for release; he filed over 30 appeals throughout his life, yet every single one was rejected. He died in prison on March 5th, 2012, due to complications from his diabetes. He was 83 years old, and 65 of those years had been spent behind bars, making him the state’s longest serving prisoner.
Who Else? The first article I read about this case stated with certainty that William Heirens was a guilty man and that the idea that the Chicago PD forced him into a confession was a fringe conspiracy theory pushed online by anti-police trolls. Because of this, I dove into this case with a much different direction for this script in mind.
The idea of writing about a fringe conspiracy theory excited me, so I eagerly reserved the topic with my only concern being that there would not be enough credible evidence behind the “conspiracy” to make it believable or interesting. I assumed, based on this initial reading, that William was guilty, but I have now arrived at the exact opposite conclusion. Truthfully, I cannot say with certainty that William did not kill today’s victims, but what I can say is that justice was not served either way.
Even if William did kill them, the process by which he was convicted and imprisoned for life has left a black mark on the justice system that I don’t think can be easily repaired. I choose to believe that William was innocent, not only because his past offenses do not fit the leadup to cold-blooded murder but because there was also nothing tying him to this case other than his confession, which was dubious from the very start. I believe that, had Willam’s case gone to trial, he would have been found not guilty.
In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that I believe his case would never have gone to trial in the first place if he hadn’t confessed. The police would been forced to back down and recant their statements to the media, just as they had done multiple times with multiple prior suspects. As for why William’s appeals for release were never granted, that is something else I don’t have the answer to.
Unless there is something about the case we don’t know, something that hasn’t been reported or something that I—and everyone else—have somehow missed, this is by far the most egregious miscarriage of justice I have ever written about. Yet, it all seems even worse when you realize that, if William was innocent, Suzzane, Frances, and Josaphine’s real killer/killers went free and almost certainly died without ever facing justice. In my opinion, the best suspect police ever found was a man named Richard Russell Thomas.
Thomas was a resident of Pheonix Arizona who worked as a male nurse in a hospital but occasionally posed as a surgeon to his friends because he liked the attention. He was visiting Chicago on the night Suzzane was killed and had returned home to Pheonix immediately after. He also had an extensive criminal history of spousal abuse and burglary and had been previously convicted of extortion after threatening to kidnap a little girl for ransom.
At the time William was arrested, Thomas was sitting inside a jail cell in Arizona on charges that he had molested his own daughter. While being questioned by authorities in connection with this, Thomas openly confessed to murdering Suzzane without prompting. He said that the Degnan’s residence was directly across the street from a car rental agency he frequented and that he had snuck into her room, killed her, dismembered her, and then distributed her body parts before returning to Arizona.
One of the drains where several parts of her body were discovered was directly adjacent to this rental agency. Very soon after this, Arizona authorities notified the Chicago police, who then sent down several detectives to interview Thomas themselves the following day. They administered their own polygraph and were attempting to determine if Thomas’s confession was legitimate when they were then suddenly called back to Chicago without warning; William, they later learned, had given a confession, and the police had decided to shift all their focus to him in order to not confuse the narrative.
According to police, William was a much better fit for the crime as Thomas’s confession contained elements that were not consistent with the facts of the case. He had also recanted his confession almost immediately, and there was no physical evidence tying him to scene. Thomas was never investigated again in relation to Suzzane’s murder.
He died in prison on unrelated charges in 1974. All documentation of his confession had been destroyed, meaning that no further research into him can be conducted. Key Takeaways William Heirens was convicted of three 1945-46 Chicago murders based on coerced confessions obtained through torture and truth serum, not credible evidence.
Fingerprint evidence against Heirens was highly suspect: prints initially deemed unmatchable were later claimed to match only after media pressure, with chain of custody broken. Police suppressed exculpatory evidence including polygraph results showing Heirens was truthful, and fabricated details like his ‘George Murman’ alter ego. Heirens’s court-appointed attorneys actively worked against him, pressuring him to accept a plea deal by threatening death penalty and claiming defense was impossible.
A more credible suspect, Richard Russell Thomas, confessed unprompted to Suzanne Degnan’s murder but was never investigated after Heirens’s arrest. Frequently Asked Questions What was the Lipstick Killer’s message written in lipstick at Frances Brown’s crime scene? The message written in lipstick on the wall next to Frances Brown’s blood-soaked bed read: ‘For Heavans sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself’ What were the similarities between the murders of Josephine Ross and Frances Brown?
Both women were stabbed multiple times, their bodies were washed postmortem, several wounds were crudely bandaged, their faces were wrapped like mummies (Josephine with a red dress, Frances with a towel or pajamas), and both apartments were ransacked yet nothing was taken. How old was William Heirens when he was arrested for the murders? William Heirens was 17 years old when he was arrested on June 26, 1946.
What was the original plea deal offered to William Heirens, and what happened when he initially refused to confess in front of the press? The original plea deal offered William a single life sentence with the option for probation after 20 years, no burglary charges, and no death penalty. When he refused to confess in front of the press on July 30th, prosecutor William Touhy rescinded the deal and offered new terms: three consecutive life sentences with no parole eligibility.
What evidence suggested that the fingerprints used to convict William Heirens may have been planted? The palm print on the reverse side of Suzanne’s ransom note was not discovered until approximately two weeks after William’s arrest, despite the note being examined by the Chicago PD’s Crime Detection Laboratory, the FBI, and Sergeant Thomas Laffey over six months. The print also did not appear in FBI photographs.
Additionally, Laffey had previously stated the prints were ‘so incomplete that it is impossible to classify them’ and had already compared them to William’s prints months before, determining they were not a match. Later analysis in the 2000s showed evidence the fingerprints were ‘rolled,’ suggesting they were planted. What did Dr.
Grinker testify about William Heirens’ supposed truth serum confession? Dr. Grinker testified that William had never rendered a confession while under the influence of the truth serum and had never admitted to having an alter ego named ‘George Murder-man.’
He also confirmed that he had been paid $1,000 by State’s Attorney William Touhy to administer the truth serum. Who was Richard Russell Thomas and why was he considered a suspect? Richard Russell Thomas was a male nurse from Phoenix, Arizona who occasionally posed as a surgeon.
He was visiting Chicago the night Suzanne Degnan was killed and returned to Phoenix immediately after. He had an extensive criminal history including spousal abuse, burglary, and a previous extortion conviction for threatening to kidnap a little girl for ransom. While in jail for molesting his daughter, Thomas openly confessed to murdering Suzanne without prompting, providing details about the Degnan residence’s location relative to a car rental agency he frequented.
What did John E. Reid conclude about William Heirens’ polygraph results? In 1953, John E.
Reid, creator of the Reid Technique, reexamined William’s polygraph results for his textbook ‘Lie Detection and Criminal Investigation’ and stated in no uncertain terms that the tests showed William had been truthful about not killing Suzanne. How did William Heirens’ attorneys allegedly pressure him into writing his second confession? William’s attorneys provided him with a Chicago Tribune article outlining everything the press had reported about the killings and pressured him to make his confession fit the press’s narrative.
William later stated: ‘As it turned out, the Tribune article was very helpful, as it provided me with a lot of details I didn’t know. My attorneys rarely changed anything outright, but I could tell by their faces if I had made a mistake. Or they would say, ‘Now, Bill, is that really the way it happened?’
Then I would change my story because, obviously, it went against what was known.’ What was the coroner’s assessment of how Suzanne Degnan’s body was dismembered? The coroner stated that the cuts on Suzanne’s body were clean and showed ‘absolutely no signs of hacking.’
He declared that the killer was ‘either a man who worked in a profession that required the study of anatomy or one with a background in dissection… not even the average doctor could be as skillful, it had to be a meat cutter.‘
Key Takeaways
- William Heirens was convicted of three 1945-46 Chicago murders based on coerced confessions obtained through torture and truth serum, not credible evidence.
- Fingerprint evidence against Heirens was highly suspect: prints initially deemed unmatchable were later claimed to match only after media pressure, with chain of custody broken.
- Police suppressed exculpatory evidence including polygraph results showing Heirens was truthful, and fabricated details like his ‘George Murman’ alter ego.
- Heirens’s court-appointed attorneys actively worked against him, pressuring him to accept a plea deal by threatening death penalty and claiming defense was impossible.
- A more credible suspect, Richard Russell Thomas, confessed unprompted to Suzanne Degnan’s murder but was never investigated after Heirens’s arrest.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Lipstick Killer’s message written in lipstick at Frances Brown’s crime scene?
The message written in lipstick on the wall next to Frances Brown’s blood-soaked bed read: ‘For Heavans sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself’
What were the similarities between the murders of Josephine Ross and Frances Brown?
Both women were stabbed multiple times, their bodies were washed postmortem, several wounds were crudely bandaged, their faces were wrapped like mummies (Josephine with a red dress, Frances with a towel or pajamas), and both apartments were ransacked yet nothing was taken.
How old was William Heirens when he was arrested for the murders?
William Heirens was 17 years old when he was arrested on June 26, 1946.
What was the original plea deal offered to William Heirens, and what happened when he initially refused to confess in front of the press?
The original plea deal offered William a single life sentence with the option for probation after 20 years, no burglary charges, and no death penalty. When he refused to confess in front of the press on July 30th, prosecutor William Touhy rescinded the deal and offered new terms: three consecutive life sentences with no parole eligibility.
What evidence suggested that the fingerprints used to convict William Heirens may have been planted?
The palm print on the reverse side of Suzanne’s ransom note was not discovered until approximately two weeks after William’s arrest, despite the note being examined by the Chicago PD’s Crime Detection Laboratory, the FBI, and Sergeant Thomas Laffey over six months. The print also did not appear in FBI photographs. Additionally, Laffey had previously stated the prints were ‘so incomplete that it is impossible to classify them’ and had already compared them to William’s prints months before, determining they were not a match. Later analysis in the 2000s showed evidence the fingerprints were ‘rolled,’ suggesting they were planted.
What did Dr. Grinker testify about William Heirens’ supposed truth serum confession?
Dr. Grinker testified that William had never rendered a confession while under the influence of the truth serum and had never admitted to having an alter ego named ‘George Murder-man.’ He also confirmed that he had been paid $1,000 by State’s Attorney William Touhy to administer the truth serum.
Who was Richard Russell Thomas and why was he considered a suspect?
Richard Russell Thomas was a male nurse from Phoenix, Arizona who occasionally posed as a surgeon. He was visiting Chicago the night Suzanne Degnan was killed and returned to Phoenix immediately after. He had an extensive criminal history including spousal abuse, burglary, and a previous extortion conviction for threatening to kidnap a little girl for ransom. While in jail for molesting his daughter, Thomas openly confessed to murdering Suzanne without prompting, providing details about the Degnan residence’s location relative to a car rental agency he frequented.
What did John E. Reid conclude about William Heirens’ polygraph results?
In 1953, John E. Reid, creator of the Reid Technique, reexamined William’s polygraph results for his textbook ‘Lie Detection and Criminal Investigation’ and stated in no uncertain terms that the tests showed William had been truthful about not killing Suzanne.
How did William Heirens’ attorneys allegedly pressure him into writing his second confession?
William’s attorneys provided him with a Chicago Tribune article outlining everything the press had reported about the killings and pressured him to make his confession fit the press’s narrative. William later stated: ‘As it turned out, the Tribune article was very helpful, as it provided me with a lot of details I didn’t know. My attorneys rarely changed anything outright, but I could tell by their faces if I had made a mistake. Or they would say, ‘Now, Bill, is that really the way it happened?’
Then I would change my story because, obviously, it went against what was known.‘
What was the coroner’s assessment of how Suzanne Degnan’s body was dismembered?
The coroner stated that the cuts on Suzanne’s body were clean and showed ‘absolutely no signs of hacking.’ He declared that the killer was ‘either a man who worked in a profession that required the study of anatomy or one with a background in dissection… not even the average doctor could be as skillful, it had to be a meat cutter.‘
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Lipstick Killer: The Shocking True Story of a Serial Killer who Left a Message in Lipstick
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
