William Heirens was seventeen and a University of Chicago student when he was arrested in June 1946 after a burglary in Rogers Park. Within weeks he had been named for three killings: Josephine Ross, 43, in June 1945; Frances Brown, 33, in December 1945; and six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, taken from her bedroom in January 1946 and dismembered. The Brown scene carried a message written in lipstick on the wall, and the newspapers gave him the name that stuck.
He pleaded guilty in September 1946 and was given three consecutive life terms. He said afterwards that he had taken the plea to escape the electric chair, believing he could prove his innocence later. He recanted within days, and for the next sixty-five years he never accepted guilt again.
The case against him has been contested for almost as long as he was in prison. 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. Suzanne Degnan’s family opposed every application he made.
No court has ever set the conviction aside, and that is the position this archive records. He died at a Chicago hospital on March 5, 2012, aged eighty-three, still a prisoner. What the case leaves is not a resolved question but a durable one: a guilty plea entered at seventeen under the shadow of the electric chair, disowned immediately, and never tested at trial in the sixty-five years that followed.