Suzanne Degnan, six, was taken from her first-floor bedroom at 5943 North Kenmore Avenue, in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, in the early hours of Monday, January 7, 1946. A ladder stood outside the building and a ransom note demanding $20,000 lay in her room. That same day a detective ordered the sewers and drains of the neighborhood searched, and her head was found, then her torso and legs, each in a different place; her arms were not recovered until February 20. She had been dismembered in the basement of an apartment building on North Winthrop. About 1,300 people attended her funeral at St. Gertrude's Church. For weeks the case was on the front page of every Chicago paper, and the police, under enormous pressure, detained and released suspect after suspect, among them the sixty-five-year-old janitor of the Winthrop building, who was held and questioned for forty-eight hours and later won $20,000 from the city for his treatment.
William George Heirens was born on November 15, 1928, in Evanston and grew up in Lincolnwood, the son of George and Margaret Heirens. He had been arrested for burglary at thirteen, and in June 1946 he was a seventeen-year-old sophomore at the University of Chicago. On June 26 he was caught in an attempted burglary of an apartment in Rogers Park, resisted, allegedly fired a pistol at one of the officers without effect, and was subdued when an off-duty officer smashed three flowerpots over his head. The police fingerprint specialist, Sergeant Thomas Laffey, reported that one of his prints matched a print on the ransom note, and the announcement turned the Degnan case into the Heirens case. The Chicago Daily News later obtained an FBI telegram, signed by J. Edgar Hoover, reporting a palm print on the note identical to his left palm.
He was also named for two earlier killings of women in their apartments. Josephine Ross, forty-three, was stabbed to death in June 1945; the date is given as June 3 and as June 5. Frances Brown, thirty-three, a former WAVE, was shot and stabbed on December 10, 1945, and on the wall of her apartment someone had written in lipstick, "For heaven's sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself." The newspapers called the killer the Lipstick Killer.
What happened to him between June 29 and September 5 is disputed in its details, but much of it is well established. He was taken to Edgewater Hospital, then to the hospital section of the Bridewell jail, where he was strapped to a bed and questioned almost continuously for at least five days. Without his consent, and before he had seen the lawyers his parents had hired, he was injected with sodium pentothal, the so-called truth serum, and questioned under its influence, and he was given a spinal tap without anesthetic. The chairman of the Chicago Bar Association said the use of any such drug to obtain information was as unlawful as a beating. Under the drug he reportedly blamed an alter ego, George Murman, and his answers were leaked selectively to the press; on July 16 the Chicago Tribune ran a front-page story by Gilbert Wright describing how he had killed all three, before he had agreed to any plea or given any confession. Two lie-detector tests were reported as inconclusive and their results were never released.
The rest of the evidence was thin. The police first said the print on the doorjamb of Frances Brown's apartment did not match him and later said it did. Nothing presented linked him to the Ross killing, and the desk clerk who had seen a nervous man leave that building could not identify him. The clerk at Brown's building, who had seen a man leave shortly after her death, viewed Heirens at the Bridewell and said positively that he was not the man. There were no witnesses to any of the crimes, and a man who identified him as the figure he had seen near the Degnan home that morning had earlier said he could not see the man's face.
His own lawyers joined the State's Attorney, William Tuohy, in urging him to plead. The first offer was three concurrent life terms in exchange for a public confession, but at a staged session in Tuohy's office he answered many questions with "I don't know," and Tuohy changed the terms to three consecutive life terms. He agreed a second time and went through with it, reenacting parts of the killings. On September 4 he tried to hang himself in his cell. On September 5, 1946, without a trial before judge or jury, he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms for the murders and one year to life for burglaries and assaults, and the State's Attorney publicly thanked the defense for its cooperation, saying he doubted he could otherwise have won a conviction. The next day he arrived at Stateville. He said later that he had confessed to save his life, and he recanted almost at once.
The case against him has been contested ever since. Books by Dolores Kennedy in 1991 and Lauri Kallio in 1999 argued he was innocent, while Lucy Freeman's in 1955 had accepted his guilt and called him mentally ill. In 2002 the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University petitioned for clemency, and its lawyers said the case contained more prosecutorial misconduct, incompetent defense, prejudicial publicity, junk science, probably false confessions and mistaken identification than any other they had studied. No court ever set the conviction aside.
He was paroled institutionally on the first life term, for Suzanne Degnan, on December 15, 1965, and discharged from it on June 15, 1966, to begin the second, and the Prisoner Review Board refused him parole on that sentence in 1978, 1981 and 1983, citing the Degnan murder, which the appellate court held it was entitled to do. In all he sought parole or pardon nearly thirty times. At the 2002 clemency hearing a Chicago police official, Thomas Epach, called him the yardstick by which all evil is judged, and Suzanne's sister, Betty Finn, went before the board year after year to oppose his release. His last parole hearing was in 2007. He was a model prisoner, the first inmate in the Illinois system to earn a college degree, and he set up education programs for other prisoners. In his last years he had diabetes, used a wheelchair and suffered from dementia. He was the longest-serving prisoner in Illinois history when he was found unresponsive in his cell at Dixon Correctional Center and pronounced dead at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago on March 5, 2012, aged eighty-three.