American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  a serial killer operating in a perceivable geographic territory;

  a public awareness of his existence in a community he is targeting;

  the use of an automobile to lure victims and transport their bodies;

  a “forensic awareness” (perpetrator uses a strangling technique intended according to him “not to leave any marks” and avoids leaving fingerprints);

  the claim of a behavior-changing head injury;

  the assertion that true-detective magazines and erotic imagery inspired the rapes and murders;

  the collection of trophies from the victims and their presentation as gifts to girlfriends;

  witnesses recalling a marginally odd but otherwise harmless neighbor, a seemingly hardworking individual who had no problems attracting girlfriends and female admirers;

  a pervasive double standard where the murders of black women are less thoroughly investigated and less reported on by the media.

  Perhaps the most foretelling of serial murder to come was the challenge for investigators to recognize and connect multiple murders committed by the same perpetrator, especially in interjurisdictional cases, a phenomenon known as “linkage blindness.” It became a dramatic problem in the 1970s in the wake of the Ted Bundy murders across multiple states and has not been conclusively solved to this day.

  The 1941 congressional management committee review of policing in Washington, DC, found, as an example, that the murder of Mary Baker on a road next to Arlington National Cemetery, fell across five jurisdictions. Baker was last seen in Washington, DC, and that brought the Washington Metro PD into the investigation; she was a Naval Office employee, and that brought the police section (today Naval Criminal Investigative Service [NCIS]) of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) into the case; as Arlington Cemetery is military property, it also brought in the military police; and since military property is federal property, it brought in the US Justice Department; and finally, the property was geographically located in Arlington County, Virginia, whose police were also in on the investigation.

  Washington itself was not only policed by the Metropolitan Police, but also by the White House Police covering the White House grounds and its vicinity, the Capitol Police covering the Senate and House territories and the Park Police covering the vast number of parks in the city. There were too many chefs in the kitchen.

  And finally, just as in the 1970s, there was a call to bring in the FBI to coordinate murder investigations between the various jurisdictions in Washington, DC.22 It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the FBI would indeed become a quasi-“clearinghouse” agency and “authority” on US serial murders, although the primary investigation of serial murders to this day remains with local jurisdictions with few exceptions.

  Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe represented almost everything to come in the world of serial murder, except perhaps his race. When the “epidemic” would hit in the 1970s, the serial killers would be primarily, although not exclusively, white males.

  William Heirens, “The Lipstick Signature Killer,” Chicago, 1946

  As the slaughter of World War II was winding down in the Pacific in the summer of 1945, police in Chicago were stymied by a series of three murders:

  Josephine Ross, forty-three, was found on June 3, 1945, in her fifth-floor apartment bedroom at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. Somebody had entered through an unlocked door in the late morning while Ross was still in bed, stabbed her in the throat and face and slit her jugular vein, killing her. The murderer then carried her into the bathroom, washed the blood off her body in the bathtub, which police found half-filled with bloodied water, her pajamas and two towels floating in it, and bandaged her wounds. He carried her washed body to the blood-soaked bed and wrapped a skirt around her head and throat with a nylon stocking. The victim was not sexually penetrated. Despite her body being washed, a few strands of coarse dark hairs were found clutched in her hand. The apartment was completely wiped clean of fingerprints. The coroner determined that the bandages were placed on her body about ninety minutes after her death; her killer had lingered that long in her apartment, yet took no valuables.

  Frances Brown, thirty-one, was found December 10, 1945, in the residential Pine Crest Hotel at 3941 North Pine Grove Avenue, six blocks from the Ross murder scene. The victim was found nude from the waist down, kneeling over the edge of a bathtub, her head hanging into the tub. Several bloodied towels lay on the floor near the bathtub. Her pajama top was pulled up and wrapped around her throat and head. When police removed the garment, they found a bread knife driven through her neck from one side out the other. She had been shot once in the right side of her head and once in her right arm. A deep defensive cut was found between her right thumb and index finger. The killer had soaped and bathed her body and taped her wounds after her death but did not sexually penetrate her.23 The perpetrator had gained entry through a window by making an acrobatic leap from a fire escape down to a narrow ledge. A message was scrawled on her living room wall in bright red lipstick, starting about six feet from the floor:

  For heavens

  Sake catch me

  Before I kill more

  I cannot control myselF

  The killer had wiped down the apartment but missed one bloody partially rolled fingerprint left on a doorjamb between the living room and bathroom.

  During the night of January 6–7, 1946, about two and a half miles away from the scene of the Frances Brown and Josephine Ross murders, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was abducted from her bed at 5943 North Kenmore Avenue. The intruder entered through her bedroom window by placing a ladder beneath the window ledge. A ransom note written on a grimy, oily scrap of paper was found on the floor. It read, “Get $20,000 Reddy & wAITe foR WoRd. do NoT NoTify FBI oR Police. Bills IN 5’s & 10’s. BuRN This FoR heR SAfTY.” A partial fingerprint was lifted from the note despite the oil.

  The next day while conducting an area search for the missing girl police looked down a street sewer catch basin. At first, officers couldn’t wrap their minds around what they were seeing. It looked like a pink doll’s head with shiny golden hair floating in the black murk of the sewer water. It was Suzanne’s severed head, found about a block away from where she lived. Her right leg was found in another nearby sewer and her left leg in yet another. Her torso was recovered from a storm drain at a third location, and a month later both her arms would be found in a fourth location. The body parts had apparently all been washed clean of blood. Police determined that the dismemberment had been carried out in an apartment building basement laundry tub facing the alley where her head was found. Beneath an alley stairway, police found a wire noose with a strand of the victim’s blond hair clinging to it. They concluded the killer left the girl’s body there while searching for a location to dismember it.

  The first two murders were similar enough and close enough in proximity to be easily connected, but the murder and dismemberment of Suzanne Degnan wasn’t as obviously related. Yet it shared some striking similarities: the perpetrator surreptitiously entered into the victim’s premises, and the body and body parts had been washed clean of blood.

  In the same period, police were also investigating a series of attacks in which women survived.

  On October 1, 1945, nineteen-year-old Veronica Hudzinski was writing a letter at her desk in her first-floor apartment at 5722 North Winthrop Avenue when she was shot in the arm through the window. The .38 caliber bullet was similar to the one that Frances Brown had been murdered with, but because the bullet that wounded Hudzinski was damaged, a conclusive ballistic match could not be made.

  Four days later, October 5, Evelyn Peterson was struck unconscious from behind and her skull fractured by a prowler who dropped through a skylight into her penthouse apartment on 6020 Drexel Avenue, which she shared with her sister. He tied her up with a lamp
cord, and after ransacking the apartment, left, locking the door behind him. Peterson’s sister returned around lunchtime and found the apartment locked. She did not have her keys and assumed her sister had stepped out. She encountered a helpful teenage boy in the hallway who promised to look for the superintendent while she went to see if she could find her sister. In the meantime, Evelyn regained consciousness at the sound of somebody knocking on her apartment door. When she stumbled to the door and managed to open it with her hands still tied, she found a teenager in the hallway who asked her if she was all right and helped her back into the apartment to a chair but did not untie her. He then went down to the superintendent and told him that a tenant upstairs was “not well” and needed help and departed before leaving his name. Peterson was found conscious but dazed and was taken to the hospital. Police discovered that the intruder had defecated outside the skylight window.

  On December 5, 1945, while Marion Caldwell was seated in the kitchen of her home on 1209 Sherwin Avenue, a .22 caliber bullet entered through her window and grazed her arm. Police determined that the shot was fired from a roof across the street. This shooting occurred five days before the “lipstick murder.”

  A Suspect Arrested

  The Degnan child murder and dismemberment in January shocked not only Chicago but the nation. It was closely followed by the press, and there was tremendous pressure on the police to solve the case. Despite several confessions to the Degnan murder, the police found them to be false, and the case dragged on without much progress.

  Six months later, on June 26, 1946, a caretaker in an apartment house plagued by burglaries confronted a teenage male prowling the building. The teen threatened the caretaker with a handgun and fled. Arriving police officers caught sight of him near 1320 Farwell Avenue, and as they approached him, he drew the handgun and attempted to shoot one of them. The gun misfired twice before the officer tackled him. (It was later determined that the stolen handgun had been kept loaded in a desk drawer for many years, and the cartridges became inert over time.) The police officer found it difficult to control the slippery and athletic suspect, who succeeded in twisting out of his grip and disarming the officer. As the struggle became dangerously desperate, another officer jumped in to the rescue and attempted to knock the boy unconscious by breaking a heavy clay flowerpot over his head. The boy seemed impervious to pain. The officer had to smash three clay pots over his head before he went limp.

  The prisoner was identified as seventeen-year-old William “Bill” Heirens, a University of Chicago student who had a notable juvenile record of pathological compulsive burglaries, or “neurotic burglaries” as they had been described at the time. Back in 1942, on the day Heirens was to graduate from eighth grade at the age of thirteen, he made the Chicago newspapers when he was arrested and charged in eleven burglaries and suspected in another fifty. Papers described him as a one-boy crime wave. Bill Heirens was a student at St. Mary’s of the Lake parochial school, and the charges came as a surprise to his teachers and fellow students, who remembered him as a friendly, intelligent and well-behaved boy. To help support his family, he worked several after-school jobs, while police reported that his burglaries had netted him some $3,500 in furs, clothing, jewelry, guns, old coins and cash (equivalent to $52,000 in 2020). Many of Heirens’s burglaries had occurred on Pine Grove Avenue near the site of the later Ross and Brown murders and a few blocks away from where he lived at the time of his arrest on 714 West Grace Street.

  The thirteen-year-old Heirens was sentenced to reform school where, after a failed escape attempt shortly after his arrival, he eventually adjusted well and was considered a model student in its academic program. Shortly after he was paroled home, he was caught burglarizing another apartment complex and charged with burglary again. By then the family had moved to 1020 Loyola Street, a mile away from the Degnan home.

  Heirens was again put on probation and boarded in a Catholic school outside of Chicago, away from temptation, except that he would return home on weekends. In an attempt to further stymie Bill’s proclivities for apartment house burglaries, the family moved to Lincolnwood, a more rural residential suburb, about a twelve-mile bus and train ride into downtown Chicago.

  On January 19, 1945, Bill Heirens was released from probation for a second time. Over the winter, spring and summer Bill lived in Lincolnwood, went to high school and commuted to his summer job as a laborer on the Central Railroad in downtown Chicago. On the morning of June 3, the day Josephine Ross was murdered, Heirens had gone into Chicago for work but never showed up at his jobsite that day. Ross lived 450 yards from a station on the same El Line that Heirens took to his jobsite.

  Heirens had done so well at school in the meantime that in September 1945 he was admitted to the University of Chicago without having to complete high school. He moved into a dorm rather than make the twenty-four-mile round trip to his parents’ home in Lincolnwood. Heirens was a popular, well-liked and sociable student, a member of a number of clubs, including the university gun club, and a popular date with some of the female students, although apparently the dates remained platonic. His grades, however, were poor.

  Now Heirens was under arrest a third time for burglary. After being knocked unconscious by the police, he remained in what appeared to be a catatonic state, handcuffed in a hospital bed. He seemed unable to answer any questions put to him by police, staring off into space instead. The doctors thought he was feigning.

  When police searched Heirens’s dorm room (without a search warrant), they found two suitcases crammed with handguns, jewelry, wristwatches and other stolen items, including a set of pictures of prominent Nazi leaders (which became a significant circumstantial link to one of the murders) and $1,800 ($24,000 in 2020) in negotiable war bonds. Later, Heirens directed police to a locker in the Howard Street El station where they found an additional $7,355 ($101,500 in 2020) in war bonds. When in the end police totaled up the value of cash and property seized from Heirens’s campus room, his parents’ home and the station locker, it came to $80,000 ($1.1 million in 2020). Heirens had not attempted to sell any of the loot—his burglaries were purely pathological.

  Heirens had been described as a “human fly” for some of his acrobatic burglaries, and the fact that the murderer of Frances Brown had made a precarious leap from a fire escape to a narrow window ledge to gain entry to her apartment aroused suspicions. Police wondered if there was more to him than just burglaries. Why would a juvenile burglar (or any other kind of burglar) be so desperate as to attempt to shoot a police officer? It did not make sense. Now his prints were sent down to the identification bureau to see if they matched any crime scenes.

  Confession

  Sergeant Thomas A. Laffey was Chicago PD’s fingerprint expert, and over the past six months he had compared more than seven hundred sets of suspect prints attempting to find a match to the print on the Degnan ransom note. By now, Laffey knew the ransom note fingerprint by heart, its every swirl and loop as intimately familiar to him as those of his own hand. When Heirens’s fingerprints arrived at his desk, Laffey immediately recognized the match he’d been searching for. Heirens’s little finger matched the print left on the ransom note in fifteen points of similarity. Police would also match Heirens’s print to the bloodied rolled print left at the “lipstick murder” scene and a print found at the Evelyn Peterson bludgeoning scene.

  The .22 bullet that wounded Marion Caldwell was ballistically matched to one of the handguns found in his dorm room. The handgun’s serial number was traced to a handgun stolen in a burglary two days prior to her shooting.

  The photos of the Nazis came from an album stolen the night before Suzanne Degnan’s murder, from an apartment at 5959 North Kenmore Avenue overlooking her bedroom.

  Even though the Ross and Brown murders were several miles from the Degnan murder, Heirens had lived in both neighborhoods near the murder scenes, and the shooting scenes, and property from burglaries in the vicinity of
all the crime scenes was found in Heirens’s possession.

  Numerous witnesses identified him, including Evelyn Peterson, her sister and their superintendent, who recognized him as the concerned teenager at the scene. Heirens burglarized one building so frequently that the caretaker had assumed he lived there and readily identified him.

  But Heirens wasn’t talking. He just lay strapped in his bed, staring blankly into space. Frustrated, Chicago police allegedly roughed up the teen, slamming his bandaged head into a wall, in the hope that would help his memory. It didn’t.24

  When the beating did not get a response, they pumped him up on sodium pentothal, believed in those days to be a “truth serum,” and for good measure gave him a spinal tap without an anesthetic, and kept him awake for long hours. All this without an attorney present. Of course, this being 1946, Heirens’s parents were not present either and he was not read a Miranda warning (that would not be introduced until 1966). For six days, the Chicago Police probed, pricked, drugged and battered Heirens.

  At first, the most Heirens would admit to was that he had an accomplice, “George Murman,” who had killed Suzanne Degnan. For a while, police believed that George actually existed, as they found in Heirens’s pocket a typed letter signed by “George” referring to burglaries “they” had committed together and, in his dorm room, a letter from Heirens to “George.” Eventually, police realized that the signature on the letter from George was Heirens’s; “George Murman” (for “Murder Man,” as some argue) was his alter ego, his Mr. Hyde. George Murman did not exist other than in Heirens’s imagination. (George was also his father’s first name and Heirens’s middle name.)