Was the teenager guilty of three heinous murders or did he spend his life in prison for crimes which he did not commit?
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Chicago
Chicago in the 1940s was a juxtaposition of poverty and prosperity, security and crime, and optimism and pessimism. The city was segregated, with blacks and whites living in separate neighborhoods; the black middle class lived separately from the lower class blacks, as did the middle class and lower class whites.
In January of 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States and the first American soldier since the Civil War was executed for desertion. Three months later, in April, U.S. troops liberated the first Nazi concentration camp and landed in Okinawa, Japan, and Roosevelt died suddenly in Warm Springs, Georgia, making Harry S. Truman the 33rd president of the United States.
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| Josephine Ross (photo source) |
Josephine Ross
World War II was in its last days on the afternoon of June 5, 1945 when the body of housewife and widow Josephine Ross was discovered in her apartment on North Kenmore Avenue. Forty-three year old Josie had been widowed since July of the previous year and reportedly had dreams of opening a restaurant with the life insurance proceeds from her late husband's death. Her body had been posed in her bed and her head had been wrapped in a skirt. She had been stabbed repeatedly, including to her throat, before her body had been washed, the stab wounds covered with tape, her head covered with the skirt, and then her body posed. Although her killer had washed her body, investigators managed to find dark hairs clutched in Josie's hand.
Although nothing appeared to have been taken from the apartment, police assumed that Josie had surprised an intruder and been killed as a result. Based on the dark hairs in her hand, they believed the killer to be a dark complexioned man.
Several of Josie's previous boyfriends were questioned and all had alibis. Despite the gruesomeness of the crime, it barely made a blip in the media.
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| Frances Brown (photo source) |
Frances Brown
The Josephine Ross case was still open, but with no leads, on December 10, 1945 when stenographer Frances Brown was found dead in her apartment on North Pine Grove. Her apartment door was found open and a cleaning woman noted the sounds of a radio playing loudly. Thirty-two year old Frances was found naked and slumped over her bathtub. In addition to the gunshot wound to her head, a butcher's knife had been driven sideways through her neck with such force, the blade protruded from the opposite side. Like Josephine Ross, after death, her body had been washed and her head wrapped (this time with a towel).
Once again, nothing was taken from her apartment but the police still theorized she had surprised an intruder. Unlike the Ross crime scene, this time the killer left a message. On the wall in the living room, the killer had written a cryptic note in Frances Brown's red lipstick:
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It was this widely publicized note that led to the press dubbing the unknown perpetrator "The Lipstick Killer."
This unknown killer also left behind a bloody fingerprint smudge on the doorjamb to the apartment, as well as two witnesses. George Weinberg heard gunshots around 4 a.m. and the apartment building's night clerk, John Derick, noted a nervous man get off the elevator and head to the street on foot. Derick described the man as roughly 140 pounds and aged 35 to 40.
Inexplicably, the Chicago PD investigated the Brown murder for several days with the theory of her killer being a woman.
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| Suzanne Degnan (Photo source) |
Suzanne Degnan
In January of 1946, the killer had circled back to his previous hunting ground on Kenmore Avenue. At 7:30 on the morning of January 7, James Degnan realized that his six-year-old daughter Suzanne was missing from her bedroom and notified the police. Outside the girl's bedroom window, a ladder was discovered and in searching her room, the police found a crumpled, crudely worded ransom note demanding $200,000 and instructions not to notify the police or FBI and to wait for word from the kidnapper. Nine hours passed, during which time several ransom calls were made to the Degnan residence before authorities received an anonymous call to check the sewers. Suzanne's severed head was found floating in a sewer catch basin, blue ribbons still in her hair, less than a block away. Over the next several hours, both of Suzanne's legs and her torso were discovered in separate nearby sewers. Her arms were discovered a month later in a sewer drain, more than three blocks from the Degnan residence. Each of the sewer drains was capped and covered with cast iron manhole covers weighing over 100 pounds but no witnesses came forward to state they heard them being removed or slid back into place.
A standard neighborhood search unearthed a basement laundry room in an apartment building very close to where Suzanne's head had been discovered. In that laundry room, evidence was discovered in four tubs that seemed to indicate the child's body had been dismembered there. The floor was mopped but blood was found in the drains of all four tubs.
Suzanne's autopsy indicated her time of death was between midnight and 1 a.m. and that she had died from strangulation, leading authorities to theorize she had been taken from her home alive and strangled in a secondary location before being transported to the laundry room.
Six months went by with no arrests and no answers for Chicago's worried residents until June 26, 1946.
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| Heirens under arrest in 1946 (photo source) |
William Heirens
William Heirens was born in 1928 to immigrants from Luxembourg who ran flower shops in Evanston until their businesses faltered as a result of the Great Depression. A younger son named Jere soon joined the family, which was quickly fracturing from the tensions. Although his father managed to find work as a security guard, he spent most off his off-time drinking, forcing Heirens' mother to supplement the family's income by working various jobs.
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From the time he was young, Heirens worked; first, alongside his father in the flower shops before becoming a delivery boy for a local grocery store, an electrician's helper at a steel mill, and as an orchestra usher.
Heirens was an above-average and creative student, although noted to be prone to daydreaming. His first arrest came just before his graduation, when he was busted for burglary; a large cache of stolen goods was discovered near his home. As a result, Heirens was sent to a reform school for boys in Terra Haute, Indiana. He was allowed to return home at the end of the school year but before the summer was out, he was arrested once again for burglary. This second arrest sent him to be boarded at the St. Bede Academy in Peru, Illinois, where he excelled in his schoolwork and participated in the school's wrestling team and worked in the library.
Shortly after beginning his senior year at St. Bede, he was granted early acceptance to the University of Chicago, where he began studying electrical engineering. He quickly fit into the social life of the university and soon had a girlfriend, and although he had told himself he would not burglarize anyone again, the financial pressures of school and dating soon had him back to his old tricks.
On June 26, 1946, the seventeen-year-old Heirens had a date with his girlfriend planned for the evening but was short on cash. He planned to cash in a savings bond but his plan was foiled when he found the post office closed on his arrival. His Plan B was to fall back on his old habit of theft, which previous M.O. had been to check apartment doors and then burgle those that were unlocked. He found an unlocked door at the Wayne Manor Apartments, the home of the Pera family. He was stealing a dollar when he was spotted and took off running, with police officers in hot pursuit. He later claimed that the officers shot at him first; the officers claimed that Heirens fired off the first bullets. Heirens was carrying a gun in the back of his jeans, supposedly to protect himself from any potential muggers.
It was an off-duty police officer, still clothed in a bathing suit from his day by the water, who stopped Heirens by smashing several clay flowerpots over his head and knocking him unconscious. Heirens was taken to the hospital ward of the Cook County Jail, had his head stitched and was then subjected to a protracted and painful interrogation, during which he slipped in and out of consciousness. Detectives felt they had their killer although Heirens did not and would not confess and so disturbing and questionable tactics were used. A nurse was called in to pour ether in Heirens' genitals while Heirens was strapped down. When that failed to elicit a confession, a police officer repeatedly punched Heirens in the stomach while shouting details of Suzanne Degnan's abduction and murder, believing that would trigger Heirens' memory. When that did not work, Heirens was given a spinal tap without anesthetic. Following the spinal tap, a polygraph was ordered but it was determined that Heirens was in too much pain for an accurate reading.
While Heirens had been unconscious, his fingerprints were taken and said to have been a 9-point match to prints found on the Degnan ransom note. His room at the University was searched, as well as his parents' home and a locker he kept at the train station. Evidence of Heirens' years-long hobby of thievery was discovered but nothing tying him to the murders.
Heirens' parents had hired attorneys to represent their son but they were denied access to him for six days. Not until July 2 were they able to speak with him. Instead, authorities informed the media they had caught The Lipstick Killer and provided Heirens' name.
During the four days that Heirens was interrogated he was also injected with sodium pentothal ("truth serum"). The injection put him into a state of delirium and in between pain and bare consciousness he spoke of someone named "George" who could have committed the murders. As George was Heirens' own middle name, the cops believed it was Heirens' way of confessing.
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On July 12, 1946, seventeen days after he was arrested, William Heirens was indicted on twenty-three counts of burglary, for robbery, assault with intent to kill, and on three counts of murder.
Chicago area residents felt they could breathe and sleep easier, not knowing that Heirens had been grilled and tortured for four days, that he had been denied legal representation, that his residences and locker had been searched without a warrant, that his handwriting did not match the ransom note or the printing on Frances Brown's wall, that the 9-point fingerprint match fell short of the 12-point requirement and that his so-called "confession" was disputed by nurses.
The media played their part in "reporting" on the case. Although Heirens had not confessed, George Wright, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, fabricated a full confession in order to sell papers. Other newspapers picked up on Wright's article and not only reprinted his fabrication but began making their own. All the newspapers called for Heirens to be executed for his crimes.
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Decades later, Heirens would recall that after seeing the newspaper stories he felt he had little hope and wanted to avoid being executed. He made a deal with the State's Attorney for three consecutive life sentences in exchange for pleading guilty on all three murder charges. On September 4, 1946, he admitted his guilt in court. Although he was given the opportunity to take the stand, he declined to do so. The following day he was sentenced to three life terms, as well as a one-to life term for burglary, assault, and robbery. That night, he attempted to hang himself in his cell. He was revived by the jail physician.
Heirens continued to deny his guilt in the murders.
Other Possible Suspects
The Office of Price Administration
James Degnan worked for the Office of Price Administration as a senior executive. At the time his youngest daughter was killed, he had been recently transferred to Chicago and there was a nationwide meatpackers' strike. The OAP had threatened to extend its rationing to dairy products as well, leaving some very disgruntled folks.
At the time of Suzanne's murder, a man involved in the black market meat trade had been murdered and decapitated. Another OAP executive had received threats against his children and armed guards were assigned to protect him and his family around the clock.
Chicago's mayor, Edward Kelly, received a note wherein the author stated he was sorry to get Suzanne instead of James Degnan and mentioned the OPA laws.
Despite this, and other than considering that Suzanne's killer was a meatpacker, the authorities never looked into the OPA connection in the Degnan case.
Hector Verburgh
A 65-year-old janitor named Hector Verburgh, who worked in the same building the Degnan family lived in, was arrested and initially considered Suzanne's killer by the police, who went so far as to inform the media. Verburgh, like Heirens, did not fit the profile that was determined following Suzanne's autopsy. The coroner believed the killer had surgical knowledge, or at least experience working as a butcher.
Verburgh was also a Belgian immigrant who did not know English well enough to write the Degnan ransom note.
Verburgh was held for 48 hours and during the interrogations was subjected to beatings that left him with a separated shoulder, among other injuries, that sent him to the hospital for ten days. He continued to deny his involvement. Police even pressured Verburgh's wife to implicate him. Verburgh later said that the police blindfolded him and pulled him up on a bar while handcuffed. He was given no water or nourishment. He said that had it continued for much longer, he would have confessed to anything.
He later sued 17 members of the Chicago Police Department for $15,000, receiving $10,000 for himself and $5,000 for his wife, who had been pressured to implicate him.
S. Sherman
The examination of the Degnan crime scene uncovered a handkerchief that police initially thought could have been used to gag the little girl. It bore a laundry mark reading "S. Sherman." Going through records, including military records, they found Sidney Sherman, a Marine who had served in World War II and had been recently discharged. His current address was the Hyde Park YMCA, roughly 15 miles from the Degnan residence. Officers were immediately dispatched the YMCA to question Sherman but discovered he had left without checking out, even quitting his job without picking up his last paycheck. Feeling it a clear sign of guilt, a nationwide manhunt ensued, ending in Toledo, Ohio four days later. Immediately taken in for interrogation, Sherman denied the handkerchief was his and said he had left Illinois because he had eloped with his girlfriend. He was given a polygraph test, which he passed and authorities cleared him of the Degnan abduction and murder.
The handkerchief was later found to belong to a gentleman in New York who had no idea how it got to Chicago. As he himself was out of the country when Suzanne Degnan was kidnapped and murdered, he was not considered a suspect.
Theodore Campbell and Vincent Costello
Two local teenagers, Theodore Campbell and Vincent Costello, came under scrutiny in the Degnan murder. Costello had a record, having been convicted of armed robbery at the age of 16 and he lived only blocks from the Degnans. Campbell claimed that Costello had confessed to abducting and killing Suzanne and had coerced him (Campbell) to make the ransom calls to the Degnans. Police arrested Costello and administered a polygraph exam to him. The polygraph indicated that neither Costello nor Campbell knew or had anything to do with the murder.
Richard Russell Thomas
A 42-year-old nurse by the name of Richard Russell Thomas was briefly considered a suspect. He had lived in Chicago at the time Suzanne Degnan was killed but had moved to Phoenix in the months after, where he had been imprisoned for molesting one of his daughters. He had been convicted of attempted extortion, using a ransom note in which he threated to kidnap a little girl and had a history of spousal abuse. Thomas's medical background matched the profile authorities had come up with for the Degnan killer and his jailers noted similarities in his handwriting and phrasing and that of the Degnan ransom note. Furthermore, when he had lived in Chicago, he had often gone to a car yard located across the street from where Suzanne Degnan's arms were eventually found. When confronted, Thomas admitted to having abducted and killed Suzanne. It was June 26, 1946, the same day that William Heirens was arrested. Authorities lost interest in pursuing Richard Russell Thomas and he eventually recanted his confession. In 1974, he died in prison in Arizona. The majority of his interrogation over the Chicago murders, as well as his prison records, have been lost and/or destroyed.
The Newspaper War
In 1946, the year Suzanne Degnan was killed and William Heirens was arrested and convicted, Chicago had five daily newspapers, each struggling to best the others in the city's circulation fight. The end of World War II left a dearth of news stories and pages to fill. Postwar life was upbeat but it didn't sell papers. An exclusive, or a juicy headline, could boost circulation by 30,000 in a day.
The murders of Josie Ross and Frances Brown, as terrible as they were, were not front-page stories. The abduction of a senior executive's small daughter from the bedroom of her family home and her resulting dismemberment, however, was. In a sickening and ironic way, the Suzanne Degnan case was the answer to the newspapers' prayers, as well as the eventual arrest of the white, middle-class teenager William Heirens. The lack of an apparent motive by Heirens to commit the murders fed the public's morbid fascination.
The newspapers were fortunate that the police department and, eventually, the prosecution was incredibly cooperative, sharing every lead and even questionable suspicion they had and leaking false information to then be printed as fact. With their help, the papers were able to cast Heirens in the most negative light possible, with everything involving him suggesting a sinister significance.
Eventually, the reporters were in competition with the police, sometimes arriving before them at crime scenes and picking up leads before they did. Although the papers initially relied on the police for information, they now mocked the police for failing to apprehend the killer. Reporters found family members of the victims and pressured them to make a positive identification of Heirens; they contacted psychological experts for their expert opinions, opinions fostered by facts provided by the press, much of which they manufactured.
It was the July 16, 1946 Tribune cover story, in which a manufactured Heirens confession was published, that broke the dam and pushed Heirens, still protesting his innocence, to accept a plea deal.
The Attorneys
From July 2, 1946, the day that Heirens' attorneys were finally allowed to speak with him, they had a nearly unprecedently cooperative relationship with the State's attorney. Although they apparently had their own questions about whether Heirens was actually guilty, they worried that the slanted press would quickly earn their client a one-way ticket to the electric chair. So their first priority was to keep Heirens from going to trial. By doing so, they believed they could save his life, even if he were convicted for crimes he perhaps did not commit.
Equally uncertain, apparently, was the State's attorney, William Touhy, who worried that he might not get a conviction, once the reality of the paucity of evidence became apparent in a courtroom.
And so the prosecution and the defense worked together, sharing practically every scrap of information, until a mutually acceptable plea bargain was conceived and born.
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The Next Six Decades
William Heirens became prisoner number C-06103. On September 5, 1946, while waiting to be transferred from the Cook County Jail to Menard Correctional Center, Heirens was asked if Suzanne Degnan had suffered. "I can't tell you," he said, "because I didn't kill her. Tell Mr. Degnan to please look after his other daughter because whoever killed Suzanne is still out there."
Shortly after his conviction, the stress of the case led to Heirens' parents divorcing. They, and Heirens' brother, changed their surname to avoid the connection with Heirens.
The same year Heirens was convicted, 1946, Josie Ross's daughter, Mary Jane Blanchard, publicly stated her belief that he had not killed her mother.
In 1952, Heirens filed a post-conviction petition. By that time, many scientists were disavowing the value of sodium pentothal interrogations due to the high level of suggestibility to persons who had been administered the drug. The State's attorney, William Tuohy, admitted after the petition was filed that he had known of the issues and problems with truth serum and that he had personally paid the psychiatrist to administer it to Heirens in 1946. That psychiatrist, Roy Grinker, said that same year that Heirens had never implicated himself during the sodium pentothal examination. Furthermore, Grinker had filed a report back in the summer of 1946 that he believed Heirens to be "a disassociated psychotic schizophrenic," a "mentally sick boy." Tuohy had been provided with Grinker's report but had chosen not to share it with Heirens' attorneys, who could have used it to plead insanity for their client.
The court found, in its answer to Heirens' petition, that he had not been coerced into a confession or accepting his plea.
In 1953, a textbook called Lie Detection and Criminal Investigation was published. In direct contradiction to Tuohy's claims that Heirens' two polygraph examinations were inconclusive, the authors said the tests were not inconclusive but clearly established him as innocent.
In June of 1965, Heirens completed his sentence for the murder of Suzanne Degnan. His conviction was officially discharged on December 15, when he was given an institutional parole.
Three years later, in 1968, another appeal was denied. One judge dissented, feeling that Heirens' guilty plea and sentencing was nothing more than a "post-mortem of a prior public trial conducted by and in the press."
By that time, in the late 1960s, although Heirens had a clean prison record with no infractions, and with his institutional parole asserting his rehabilitation, the public had grown weary of prison rehabilitations. He would eventually be denied 29 times.
Based on the 1946 parole regulations, Heirens should have been discharged for the Brown murder in 1975, from the Ross murder in 1983 and from the other assorted charges six months after that. At least one parole board member admitted that the publicity from the case was the sole reason Heirens was never granted parole. Other parole board members said that they believed Heirens was fully rehabilitated within a decade, or fifteen years, of his incarceration.
In 1980, Heirens' father died.
In 1983, after an inmate named Gary Welsh set a precedent on overturning parole denial on the basis of deterrence grounds, Heirens, who had helped Welsh with his lawsuit, appealed his own parole. It went so far as federal court, where the Magistrate ordered Illinois to release William Heirens at once.
The public was outraged at the Magistrate's order. Suzanne Degnan's brother and sister came forward and made an appeal to authorities to fight the ruling. Their plea got the Attorney General on board, who suggested that only Heirens himself knew how many women he had actually murdered. The AG promised to see that Heirens stayed put in prison. The Illinois Senate stepped in with a resolution stating that the release of Heirens would be detrimental to the people of Illinois, as he was the confessed killer of Suzanne Degnan. All parties ignored that Heirens had been legally discharged from the term of that murder nearly 20 years earlier.
The Illinois Department of Corrections asked the federal court to review the Welsh decision, which had to that point been uncontested. The court did so and promptly reversed its decision, now saying that inmates convicted before 1973 could be held to post-1973 rules on deterrence.
Also in 1983, parole rules changed and inmates, including Heirens, were no longer allowed to apply for parole each year but rather every three years - with threats of extending that to ten.
Where once freedom had seemed within reach for William Heirens, it now appeared he would spend the remainder of his natural life behind bars.
In 1987, his younger brother Jere died.
In May of 1993, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board notified Heirens that he had satisfied his lesser sentences.
In April of 1995, a case for Heirens' innocence in the murders of Josephine Ross, Frances Brown, and Suzanne Degnan was presented before the Prisoner Review Board. Defense attorney Jed Stone and his team, composed of psychiatrists, lawyers, handwriting analysts, fingerprint experts and even friends of Heirens, studied the evidence in each of the cases. Although most of the evidence in all three cases had been either lost or destroyed, and almost all the principals involved in the original investigation were deceased, the Stone team found the evidence against Heirens to be weak.
The team found that after analysis of the confession, numerous inconsistencies were revealed. Heirens was wrong about the locations, times, related events and other basic facts of the case. The bloody fingerprint found on a the doorjamb of the Brown apartment was a "rolled" fingerprint, like those found on police station fingerprint cards - not often found at crime scenes. A fingerprint that had reportedly been found on the face of the Degnan ransom note was actually found on the back and like the Brown doorjamb print, was a "rolled" print; again, not often found on ransom notes or other random pieces of paper. The handwriting on the Degnan note was not Heirens'. The indentation handwriting that Chicago Daily News artist Frank San Hamel claimed to have found on the ransom note was a fraud; it didn't exist but the hoax helped to send Heirens to prison. The lipstick message on the wall of the Brown apartment was not Heirens', nor did it match the author of the Degnan ransom note. Perhaps most explosively, it was found that an enterprising newspaper reporter, arriving at the Brown crime scene before the police, had written the message himself in order to create more interest and headlines.
Stone's team brought the name of Richard Russell Thomas to the forefront once again. Their experts found that the handwriting on the Degnan ransom note very clearly matched Thomas's known writing.
The petition was denied in January of 1999, a year after Heirens' mother died.
In 2002, Heirens, through his attorneys, filed a petition seeking clemency. That petition was denied. It would be the end of the legal line for Heirens.
In 2003, former LAPD police officer Steve Hodel, who had done his own extensive investigation into the infamous Black Dahlia murder and who was investigating the crimes for which Heirens was convicted, met William Heirens and became convinced that Heirens was innocent, going so far as to write a letter of appeal to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board.
William Heirens Behind Bars
The first few years of Heirens' incarceration, suffering with depression and wanting to be out of the public eye, he was held in the Psychiatric Division at Menard Correctional Center. In 1951, he transferred to Stateville Prison, where he would remain for the next 24 years.
Heirens spent his first five years at Stateville at the Vocational School learning radio and television repair and teaching the craft to other inmates. It was the start of many productive decades. For ten years he was employed as an office manager in the prison garment industry. For five years, he was secretary to the Stateville School Program Superintendent. He filled in as a mathematics and English teacher when needed and helped fellow inmates to obtain their GEDs.
In 1970, Heirens was transferred to the Stateville Honor Farm and spent five years in the radio-tv shop, maintaining radios and tvs for the institution and its staff.
In 1975, Heirens transferred to Vienna Correctional Center, a minimum security facility and enrolled in the Emergency Medical Technician. He completed the program and worked in the prison's ambulance service for a brief period. For seven years, he worked in the prison library, maintaining the law library and assisting fellow prisoners with their legal problems. While at Vienna, Heirens became eligible for a day release program and worked in a nearby orchard. He also worked as the secretary to the prison's chaplain, a position he held until 1998, when he left Vienna for Dixon Correctional Center. Shortly before he left Vienna for Dixon, he took a course in computers. In addition to his busy work schedule, Heirens founded the Seven Steps program, a self-improvement organization for inmates. He also helped to form a three-day religious retreat at Vienna.
At the time Heirens was initially incarcerated back in 1946, the prison did not provide college-level courses so he took correspondence courses from various universities at his own expense. In 1972, he became the first Illinois prisoner to receive a degree when he graduated from Lewis University with a degree in liberal arts. He continued to study after graduating, amassing 250 credit hours.
Heirens also developed an interest in art while in prison, eventually becoming expert in watercolor painting and calligraphy; his paintings won ribbons in art shows.
In his later years, Heirens suffered with diabetes, affecting his eyesight and swelling his legs to the point of needing a wheelchair. On March 5, 2012, William Heirens died at the University of Illinois Medical Center at the age of 83, effectively serving his sentence in full.
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Sources
All That's Interesting (December 5, 2018). William Heirens Was 17 When He Was Convicted of Beheading a 6-Year-Old Girl But Did He Do It?
Chicago Reader (August 24, 1989). Kill-Crazed Animal?
Crime Traveler (July 12, 2015). William Heirens: The 1946 Lipstick Killer.
Northwestern University Law (April 2002) Clemency Petition,
Wikipedia (2021). William Heirens.
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