Serial Killer of the Month: William George Heirens

Police thought nothing of the young robber caught that June evening in 1946, but his class­mates at the University of Chicago were shocked to hear that William George Heirens had been arrested for burglary. With his arrest, the police halted a one-man crime spree which included three murders on Chicago’s north-side.

Josephine Alice Ross, a widow, died of stab wounds to her neck. Apparently she had surprised a burglar who was ransacking her front room in June of 1945. In December of the same year, a perky 30-year-old named Frances Brown was stabbed in the neck and was shot twice. In red lipstick on her wall was written, “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself.”

For all his begging, the police couldn’t oblige the killer now known as the “Lipstick Killer.” Being true to his word, the lipstick killer left the body of a six-year-old Suzanne Degnan murdered, dissected and left to stand in various sewers near her home. Her death was in January 1946. Like the other two, her body had been carefully cleaned of blood and lovingly washed. None were sexually assaulted.

Two other women were wounded by shots fired through windows into their homes and another was beaten and tied up by an intruder. All these came amid a rash of robberies near the University of Chicago. Heirens’ downfall came when he was caught at the scene of one of the thefts. He beat back the arresting officers until knocked unconscious by a flower pot. The only burgled thing in his possession was an oversized dollar bill.

But stolen goods worth thousands of dollars were found in his dormitory room. An incrimi­nating note signed George indicated there might be a burglary ring. Heirens was silent for the police for three days. Finally after being given Sodium Pentothal as a “truth serum,” he admit­ted that his friend George Murman had com­mitted the child’s murder. A full scale search found no George Murman. And when ques­tioned, Heirens described the robberies as occur­ring during cloudy times in his mind. He saw them only darkly. He entered other people’s homes because it was his only avenue of sexual release. He guessed he might have committed five hundred burglaries.

Heirens’ problems seem to lie firmly in his childhood, when he had been told that all sexu­al contact was wrong, evil and caused dis­ease. Deeply ashamed of his own sexual impulses, he began sneaking into homes and stealing panties. He experienced orgasm putting them on; later he would wear women’s panties while masturbating with pictures of Hitler and other Nazis as pornography.

He was a practiced burglar and arsonist when he was arrested at 13 for carrying a loaded pistol. He was sent to a special school where he did very well academically, and he entered the University of Chicago at 16. But he kept break­ing into people’s houses, often he would take nothing but his own guilty pleasure.

It quickly became clear that Murman was simply a self-deluding ploy by Heirens against his own conscience and as a preventive measure against the state. After lengthy interviews with psychologists Heirens was found to be sane, and to have understood at the time his crimes were committed that they were wrong and illegal.

Heirens was convicted of three murders, 26 counts of robbery, burglary and assault. He was sentenced on September 5, 1946 to three consec­utive life terms in prison, plus additional time for the lesser offenses. While in prison he became more pointedly insane and was trans­ferred to a criminal hospital. Later he recovered and in 1977, he received his college degree, the first convict in Illinois to do so. Heirens remains behind bars in the Vienna Correctional Center, the longest-tenured inmate in the state of Illinois. —St. Feltcher

Read more Serial Killer of the Month:
Serial Killer of the Month: Frank Sweeney
Serial Killer of the Month: Gerard John Schaefer

Enjoying the archives? Consider joining our community of donors!