He became the "Lipstick Killer" after scrawling a message in lipstick at a crime scene: "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more."
After three brutal murders that terrified residents, and especially parents, across the city in the mid-1940s, University of Chicago student William Heirens was arrested and confessed to the crimes. He was held in prison for 65 years, becoming one of the longest-serving inmates in Illinois history.
Heirens' time in custody, and his unsuccessful fight to prove his innocence, ended late Monday when he died at 83 in the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, where he had been moved from a prison infirmary, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office and the state Department of Corrections.
"It's over," said Jim Degnan, 65, who was born 10 months after his sister Suzanne was killed in the final and perhaps most brutal murder attributed to Heirens. "I just never thought this day would come. I was numbed by the previous 29 years of going to parole board hearings."
Heirens had been in deteriorating health for some time, suffering from diabetes and other illnesses. He also had a pacemaker implanted several months ago, according to a close friend. An autopsy to determine the cause of death was scheduled for Wednesday.
Heirens, who was born in Evanston, will forever be known for three murders that shook the city, created a media sensation, and changed the way residents thought about their own safety and the safety of their children. Police and prosecutors said the North Side murders prompted many people to start locking their doors.
Heirens was a 17-year-old college student when he confessed to the killings. In June 1945, Josephine Ross, 43, was fatally stabbed in her home. Six months later, Frances Brown, 32, was shot and stabbed in her apartment. Then in January 1946, 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan was taken from her first-floor bedroom. The girl's body was dismembered before being placed in the city's sewer system.
About five months later, police captured Heirens during an attempted burglary in Rogers Park, where officials said he attempted to shoot an officer. He told police the gun misfired. Fingerprint evidence linked to Heirens was found at a murder scene, including Heirens' fingerprints on a ransom note.
As might be expected, police tactics at the time were far different than from those today. Heirens was forcibly injected with sodium pentothal, or "truth serum," and prosecutors took him to the murder scenes to re-enact the crimes for the press. But when he was brought to court to plead guilty on July 30, 1946, in exchange for a single life term, he instead defied authorities -- and advice from lawyers and his parents -- and insisted he was innocent.
After more pressure, and with the deal from angry prosecutors now up to three life terms, Heirens pleaded guilty, saying he feared he could not get a fair trial amid sensational media coverage and wanted to avoid a death sentence.
He then recanted his admission of guilt and ever since insisted he was innocent. His account, friends and lawyers said, never wavered.
"There was no deathbed confession. He always said he was innocent," said Delores Kennedy, intern coordinator at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, who wrote a book about Heirens, became a close friend, and was his power of attorney to make his medical decisions. "I've known Bill 27 years. There was never an instant where he indicated he had any guilt in those murders."
Over the years, attorneys and supporters of Heirens have raised questions about his guilt, looking at the case anew with what has been learned over the decades about false confessions and wrongful convictions, especially those involving teenagers. Doubts have been raised about the handwriting on the ransom note linked to Heirens, about fingerprint evidence some say was falsified, and about inconsistencies in his confession. In addition, attorneys have said a man in Arizona confessed to one of the murders before Heirens' arrest.
But the attorneys also conceded that Heirens' innocence likely would never be proved. In a case more than a half-century old, and with many of the principals dead and much of the evidence gone, it was impossible to mount anything but a theoretical challenge to the convictions.
"We chased lots of leads," said Steven Drizin, legal director at the Center on Wrongful Convictions and Heirens' attorney since 2002, who still points to Heirens' initial refusal to plead guilty as a key moment. "But bottom line, short of proving that the police framed him or finding DNA evidence that exonerated him and implicated someone else, we just could never prove his actual innocence. But the case sure looks different with what we know now. The case for Bill's guilt is anything but certain."
Heirens' only real legal victory came nearly 60 years ago, and even that did not move him any closer to winning his freedom. In 1954, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed with his lawyers' assertions that the police investigation violated Heirens' rights. But the court also said Heirens willingly chose to enter his guilty plea rather than challenge how the investigation was handled, and so it allowed Heirens' convictions to stand.
Heirens' sentence allowed for the possibility of parole. But in spite of being a model prisoner and first in Illinois to earn a college degree behind bars, he was denied a chance at freedom more than two dozen times. At a parole hearing in 1991, then Assistant State's Attorney Thomas Epach scoffed at Heirens' claims of innocence. Epach detailed the evidence he said pointed to Heirens' guilt -- and noted that Heirens had also pleaded guilty to assault to kill a police officer, robbery and 25 burglaries, adding a term of one year to life in the penitentiary.
"This is a man who cut a helpless little girl into six pieces and decapitated her, who murdered two women in their homes and remained with their bodies, bathing them," Epach said at the hearing. "Before Stephen King ever thought of any of these kinds of acts, William Heirens was doing them."
Heirens asked former Gov. George Ryan for clemency, but it was never granted and his hopes began to diminish over his final years.
Degnan, a Northbrook resident, said his parents often spoke of Suzanne but never discussed her death or mentioned Heirens. He said he did not learn of the circumstances of her death until a classmate told him about the murder when he was in fifth or sixth grade, prompting him to ask his parents about it.
There were other signs that his parents never recovered from Suzanne's death, Degnan said. His mother installed bars on his bedroom window when they moved into a fourth-floor apartment several years after the killing, and she did not allow him to buy black pants as a child because she associated them with Heirens, he said. He called Heirens' death a "moment of relief" and said he believed his parents, now dead, would have been relieved as well.
"It never left her (or) my father either," Degnan said. "Their odyssey is over too."
Degnan, who attended parole hearings for decades urging authorities to keep Heirens behind bars, said he researched the case while he was in his 20s, after Heirens began claiming he was innocent. After examining some of the evidence and speaking with the authorities and a retired judge, he said he was satisfied that Heirens was guilty. He said Heirens' supporters had decades to prove his innocence, but never could.
"I always waited for the other shoe to drop," he said, "and it never did."
Suzanne Degnan's older sister, Betty Finn, said she remembers riding to school in a police car for a time after the murder because of the attention that surrounded the case and the fear over a killer at large. She said her sister's murder remains painfully clear. With Heirens' death, her children will not have to relive the horror of the crime by attending his parole hearings. As for Heirens' guilt, she said she never had a doubt.
"Hopefully he's at peace and we don't have to worry about it anymore," Finn said. "I hope he made amends. I never wished him ill. I just wanted him in prison for everybody's safety. It was never out of retribution. It was out of fear that he could hurt somebody else, and if we did not go to all these parole hearings and protest it and he got out and he hurt a child, you just couldn't live with it."
In recent years, Heirens' attorneys have sought his release on medical grounds, emphasizing his ailing health as well good behavior. He had been on morphine to manage his pain in his last weeks and, according to Kennedy, did not want any extraordinary measures taken to prolong his life. She said his mental health had been deteriorating too, and he had been speaking of going to work on a farm in southern Illinois.
Kennedy said there would not be a funeral, though the Center on Wrongful Convictions, which backed his efforts to win release, might host a small memorial at some point. She said Heirens wanted his body cremated. He loved flowers, she said, so his ashes will be scattered at a garden somewhere.
Copyright 2012 - Chicago Tribune
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
