'Lipstick killer' looks at 80

Like the hardened bark of a tree, scarred by the binding and cord once used to correct it, inmate C06103 has by been shaped by, and grown old behind, bars. Confined to a wheelchair and the Dixon Correctional Center's Health Care Unit, he turns 80 next month. He'll mark the day watching TV from his cell and wondering whether making that confession was the right thing to do - same as he did last year. And the year before. Much the same as he has for the past 62 years: his entire adult life. In 1946, William Heirens was a handsome 17-year-old University of Chicago student who was arrested on burglary charges, then signed a confession to three of the grisliest murders in Chicago history. He was shipped to prison with three consecutive life sentences. It all happened in less than 10 weeks. The victims The first murder was page 10 news for the Chicago Daily Tribune. On the 1-year anniversary of D-Day, police found 43-year-old Josephine Ross dead in the bathtub of her North Side apartment. She had been repeatedly stabbed, and the killer slit her throat before taping the wounds shut and wrapping her head in a dress. He rinsed the blood away in the bathtub and left without taking anything. Six months later, police still had no serious suspects. Then the crime scene that earned Heirens his infamous nickname was discovered. On Dec. 10, 1954, police found ex-Navy WAVE Frances Brown dead in her apartment under near-identical circumstances as Ross. In the middle of the night, an intruder had savagely stabbed the attractive 33-year-old, a knife rammed into her throat with such force that the point shone through the other side. Her head was wrapped in a towel and her near-bloodless body was washed in the bathtub and propped up against the side. Nothing had been stolen, but on the bathroom mirror, written in her own pink lipstick, was the message: "For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself." The sensational scene was enough to incite citywide panic and light a fire in Chicago's tabloid press. Newspapers reported that a new Jack the Ripper was stalking Chicago, and they quickly dubbed the serial murderer "the lipstick killer." For all the mess, the killer had left a clean crime scene - police had only one fingerprint on the door jamb - and the case went cold. Pressure started to come down on Chicago Police and Cook County State's Attorney William Tuohy to find a credible suspect and lock him up. Less than a month later came "the day Chicago locked its doors." The murder and dismemberment of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan shocked the nation. On Jan. 7, 1946, her family discovered Susan missing from her bedroom, a ladder propped against the side of the house. In her place, police found a ransom note: "Get $20,000 ready & waite [sic] for word. Do not notify FBI or police. Bills in 5's and 10's. Burn this for her safety." The note turned out to be a cruel decoy. That same day, in a narrow alley about a block away, police found the girl's severed head discarded in a storm sewer. By day's end, the rest of her butchered body turned up in five different sewers within a 4-block radius. Again, police had several leads and dozens of suspects. But none stuck. Until they arrested William G. Heirens, nearly 6 months later. The interrogation Sitting in his wheelchair in the stuffy glass interview room at the Dixon prison, Heirens' good eye flashes when he tells the story of a ruthless 3-day interrogation, similar to many for which Chicago police have earned a national reputation. He can still remember the feeling of sleep deprivation. The feeling of being strapped to a table naked and "spread eagle." The lie detector test he passed. The sodium pentathol police pumped into him, allegedly on Tuohy's orders. "I didn't confess to nothing," Heirens said. "And they didn't like that." After 3 days of fruitless attempts to extract a confession, "They says, 'I'm going to give you this. It's going to put you to sleep.' I says, 'Leave me alone and I'll go to sleep.'" Under the influence of the truth serum, he mentioned the name George Murman, whom Touhy claimed was Heirens' alter-ego. He used the pseudo confession as leverage to threaten Heirens with the electric chair if he refused to cooperate. Police had nabbed Heirens on a burglary near the Degnan home, and though the boy was a bright student at the University of Chicago; he had a sordid past that had landed him a stint in a juvenile detention center. Draconian sentencing laws allowed Touhy to threaten Heirens with 13 life sentences for 13 burglary charges. "There was a lot of heat on the murder of Suzanne Degnan to get someone convicted, so they were pushing me real hard on that one," Heirens said. The confession In a plea deal many believe saved him from the electric chair, Heirens admitted killing the three North Side women. He agreed to sign the confession and serve all three sentences at once. "I figured it's better to be alive and be able to fight than to be dead, so I took the plea bargain." At a meeting in Touhy's office, before high-ranking detectives, assistant state's attorneys and a horde of reporters, "the state's attorney got up there and started ranting about 'We want the truth. We don't want nothing but the truth,'" Heirens said. He changed his mind. "I says, 'You really want the truth?' And he says, 'Yeah.' He didn't. So I told him the truth, and it got him very mad. "I told him I didn't know anything about the murders at all, and all I know about them is what I read and what I've been told. And it got them all upset, because they had all the newspaper reporters lined up outside, too. And all the high-up detectives from the police office in Chicago, and the state's attorney was really pissed off. "My defense attorneys, too, because they were all lined up with the state's attorney. Then they took me back to my cell in the county jail and the newspapers naturally say that I refused to make the confession story and they figured I was just being stubborn. My attorneys came around and said I'm really in trouble now." The only deal Touhy would offer turned the concurrent sentences into consecutive sentences. "I keep going over it in my head trying to figure out how this ever happened." The advocate By the time Chicago social activist Dolores Kennedy took up Heirens' cause, he had been in prison nearly 40 years - all the time fighting to have his name cleared. A man in Phoenix had confessed to the Degnan murder. The Illinois Department of Corrections and the state of Illinois considered him rehabilitated on the Degnan murder. And he had become the first prisoner in Illinois history to earn a 4-year degree from behind bars. Kennedy had been working for the Degnan family's attorneys - a group that lobbied and fought Heirens' every appeal and hearing. They wanted him locked up for the rest of his life. "As far as I was concerned - I read the papers and everything - this guy was a monster," Kennedy said. But her father, also an attorney, who had heard a different side of Heirens' story, insisted his daughter visit Heirens in prison and see for herself. "I thought, 'This guy's a monster, why would I want to do that?" Her father died of cancer before Kennedy ever made it for a visit, "but my dad's memory prevailed, and I went to meet the monster. And it turns out he wasn't a monster at all." At the time Heirens was in Vienna Correctional Center, where he'd taken a position as director of the law library. Kennedy got to know Bill personally. Quit her job. Started a book. And took a position at Northwestern University's Center for Wrongful Convictions. "By the time I was finished with the book, I was convinced that he hadn't committed the crimes," Kennedy said. "But we don't have what we need to outright prove his innocence." When Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted all inmates on death row and pardoned more, Kennedy believed Bill would walk. "But there's a lot of pressure to keep him locked up," she said. "A friend of mine at IDOC said to me, 'Dolores, you're wasting your time. This man is a poster child for being tough on crime." The conclusion The convict's story has been told so many times, and in so many ways, it's difficult to distinguish truth from rumor - and rumor from fantasy. With each passing day, facts in two of Chicago's grisliest murders become harder to uncover. The confession papers are gone. Interrogation transcripts have disappeared. And William Heirens, the longest-serving inmate in the United States, remembers fewer details about his coerced confession, the people who fought to have him exonerated and his life before prison. Kennedy has come to the "tough conclusion" that Heirens will die in prison. Heirens has not. He turns 80 on Nov. 15. He would like to visit the people who stuck with him through his 62 years. "How ya feeling, Bill?" A prison shrink asks inmate C06103 after 1 1/2 hours of talking in the stuffy interview room. "Oh, OK, I guess."