By now Heirens had a defense attorney. Police had Heirens do a writing sample test. They read the text of the ransom note. Heirens misspelled “ready” and “wait” exactly as they were misspelled in the ransom note: “reddy” and “waite.” Heirens would later claim that police had him copy the original note. Police insist that the text was dictated to him.
When confronted with the misspellings, Heirens first went silent, but then made a confession when he and his lawyer were promised that the prosecution would not seek a death penalty. The prosecutors called a press conference and brought out Heirens before a roomful of reporters to make his confession public. Instead, Heirens claimed he couldn’t remember anything. Embarrassed and enraged, the prosecution put the death penalty back on the table.
Over the next few days, Heirens repeatedly confessed and retracted those confessions, until finally the prosecutor, his own lawyer and his mother wore him down into making a cohesive written confession, the death penalty again taken off the table. The Chicago press, especially the Chicago Tribune, threw themselves on Heirens like a pack of dogs. A child killer is always a focus of lurid reporting, and Heirens became the subject of months of vitriolic coverage, false accusatory information and fabricated versions of confessions that he had never made. There was no way an impartial jury was going to be found in Chicago or anywhere in the state of Illinois for that matter.
Rather than going to trial, at the advice of his counsel, Heirens pleaded guilty in the three murder cases and a string of assault and burglary charges, and received a life sentence.
Innocent or “Kill-Crazed Animal”?
After his imprisonment, Heirens withdrew his confession yet again, and over the next six decades filed a series of appeals that were rebuffed by the courts. In 1972, he became the first inmate in Illinois to earn a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. He later took postgraduate courses in various languages, analytical geometry and data processing. He managed a prison garment factory for five years, overseeing 350 inmates, and when transferred to another facility, he set up their entire educational program. Always the polite charmer, the likable Heirens cultivated a legion of supporters who believed in his innocence. The older and more educated he became, the more harmless, gentle and vulnerable his persona became. Over the decades, he and his supporters argued that Heirens was a victim of a police “conspiracy” to frame him for the murders. The appeals courts condemned police and prosecutorial misconduct but upheld the conviction on the basis of the actual evidence (even if unconstitutionally acquired) and the fact that Heirens had confessed.
When Heirens became eligible for parole in 1983, Illinois attorney general Neil Hartigan pronounced, “Only God and Heirens know how many other women he murdered. Now a bleeding-heart do-gooder decides that Heirens is rehabilitated and should go free. . . . I’m going to make sure that kill-crazed animal stays where he is.” Heirens was turned down for parole.25
Chicago-area high school students and college kids were particularly touched by Heirens’s tender age at the time of his conviction and formed Free Bill Heirens clubs dedicated to his release. After my book Serial Killers came out in 2004, I occasionally received e-mails from Chicago students asking me to endorse their campaign to free Heirens. A class in “social justice” visited him in the minimum-security facility he had been transferred to, and saw him as a sweet old man, an unjustly incarcerated grandpa to a generation of kids, some of whose parents hadn’t even been born when six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was snatched from her warm bed in the middle of the night, strangled, decapitated and dismembered in a basement laundry tub, her severed body parts dumped into sewers.
In the 1990s, attorneys made a concerted effort to discredit the evidence cited in Heirens’s conviction. Pro- and anti-Heirens websites went up, characterized by virulent rancor and accusations of “conspiracy” from both sides. Again, Heirens’s advocates failed to persuade the state of Illinois to give Heirens a new trial.
In April 2002, Lawrence C. Marshall, a Northwestern University School of Law professor and cofounder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Steven A. Drizin of the Children and Family Justice Center formally took up his case, filing a petition with the governor of the state of Illinois and Illinois Prisoner Review Board to grant Heirens clemency without a new trial. The petition was rejected 14–0 by the Prisoner Review Board. Thomas Johnson, a member of the parole board, said to Heirens, “God will forgive you, but the state won’t.” Heirens was going to be kept locked up to the bitter end.
What escaped many of Heirens’s supporters was that “unfairly convicted” is not the same as “wrongly convicted.” Indeed, Marshall and Drizin’s appeal began with the declaration, “This petition—presented by Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) and Children and Family Justice Center (CFJC)—will not argue the issue of innocence.”26 The petition stated:
We believe that, irrespective of Heirens’s guilt or innocence, his case stands out as one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in the history of the United States. His conviction is contaminated by more sources of error—prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct, incompetent defense counsel, unprecedented prejudicial pre-trial publicity (orchestrated by police and prosecutors), junk science, probable false confessions—than any other case we have studied. Any one of these factors alone would be enough to have wrongfully convicted an innocent man, but the combination of all of them in a single case leaves us, as it should leave the Governor and Prisoner Review Board, with no confidence in the result.27
When Heirens began his appeals in the 1950s, the courts ruled against him on precisely the same issue, deciding that it was not the procedural breaches and irregularities, the fundamental breaches of fairness, that resulted in Heirens’s conviction, but his confessions and the evidence, however illegally obtained. Nothing had changed by the 2000s.
Preponderance for Guilt
The most compelling piece of evidence for Heirens’s guilt, in my opinion, was his revelation of something the police did not know. In his written confession, drafted with the help of his lawyers and his mother, Heirens stated that he had cut up Suzanne Degnan’s body with a hunting knife he had acquired in a burglary and that he had disposed of the knife by tossing it up onto El tracks from the alley behind Winthrop Avenue as he walked to the Granville El station three blocks away from the Degnan home. The police, who had not found the knife in their extensive search of the neighborhood, had not searched elevated tracks.
Upon investigation, it was discovered that a track maintenance man had indeed found a knife on the tracks in that area shortly after the murder and had kept it in his tool locker in the storage room at the Granville El station. It was the knife reported stolen by Guy Rodrick of 5000 South Cornell Avenue, the same Guy Rodrick who owned the .22 revolver found in Heirens’s dorm room. Rodrick identified the knife as his. (In later years, Heirens would change his story and claim that he was riding home to Lincolnwood on the El one day and did not want his mother to see the knife, so he tossed it from the El train and it just happened to land near the Degnan home.)28
But the available evidence, his numerous confirmed points of geographic and chorological proximity to all of the murder scenes and the assault scenes, appears to be beyond the realm of a mathematical anomaly: just too much a coincidence.
Yes, inconsistencies between his confession about times, places and dates and the facts of the crime can indeed be “signature elements of a false confession” as argued in the petition. They can also be errors of memory. Murderers don’t always remember with precise accuracy the details of their crimes; they often get dates, times and locations wrong. While some serial murderers remember and record with relish every minuscule detail of their murders, others commit them in a fugue state, in an alcohol- or drug-induced stupor, or a blind rage or hazy impulse. They don’t remember the details because they are in a state of chaos or robotic compulsion. As one impulse-drive
n serial killer explained to me, “It was like I was in fast-forward on my own remote control. It was fast and chaotic. . . . Afterwards, I didn’t dwell on it. I had no fantasies because I was living in my fantasies, doing whatever I wanted to do whenever I felt like I could get away with it. I didn’t have to think about it or fantasize about it, before or afterwards. I enjoyed the doing it. Afterwards I didn’t think about it, ruminate on it, or look it up in the newspapers or collect clippings.”
One can even argue that a perfect recollection of a crime scene is just as much “a signature element of a false confession,” suggesting that police had fed details of the crime to the suspect in order to “help” his memory along. The minor contradictions between known facts and Heirens’s confessions are evidence of nothing but Heirens’s imperfect memory.
* * *
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William Heirens is interesting because he was one of the first serial killers to be psychologically assessed shortly after the 1941 publication of The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality by Hervey M. Cleckley. His groundbreaking text laid the foundation for the modern concept of psychopathy, but not yet its inner mechanics and minutiae of accompanying physiological characteristics. The psychiatrists also deep focused entirely on his childhood and teenage years; there was nowhere else for them to go with a seventeen-year-old subject.
Much had been made by Heirens’s advocates of his gentle and friendly demeanor, his intelligence and charm, affability and boyishly vulnerable persona, the apparently nonviolent nature of his juvenile burglaries, and his unusually young age (twenty-seven to twenty-eight years old is the statistical average age for a first serial murder). Those notions are undermined by the pathological nature of his burglaries as he described them to psychiatrists, and his childhood history. His childhood had many of the typical markers of a budding serial killer, as eventually cataloged by FBI behaviorists. But in the mid-1940s, serial killers were still too rare to establish any kind of comparative statistical norms. Psychiatrists recorded factors in Heirens’s history that seemed unimportant at the time but were very telling about Heirens’s personality and his potential for violence when assessed from a later vantage point.
Who Was William Heirens?
William George Heirens was born in Evanston, Illinois, on November 15, 1928. Both his mother, Margaret, and his father, George, were American-born Luxembourgers and devout Catholics. Three years later, his brother, Gerald “Jere” Heirens, was born. The two brothers reportedly lived and played together without any issues between them.
George grew greenhouse flowers and operated a florist shop, but both enterprises failed during the Great Depression. George apparently did not despair and quickly found a series of jobs, eventually landing a position in the Carnegie Steel Company police, rising up to the rank of special investigator with sufficiently lucrative pay for the family of four to afford middle-class housing. The family appears to have been functional and harmonious, with none of the alcohol-fueled Sturm und Drang so often reported in serial killer childhood histories. On the other hand, one can easily imagine the sense of insecurity and anxiety of having two family businesses fail during an age of mass unemployment, soup kitchens and homelessness; everyone in the family must have suffered the anxiety of the Great Depression. Margaret had two paralytic nervous breakdowns while raising her boys.
Parental interviews were contradictory on whether Heirens was a lonely asocial child or whether he happily played with his peers.
William had a spotty health record but nothing dramatic: he was a difficult forceps birth; Margaret had painful breastfeeding issues; his tummy was upset as a baby; his tonsils took longer to heal; he had measles and chicken pox; when brought to kindergarten, he had hysterical separation issues from his mother; when his brother contracted measles, Margaret kept William at home for the remainder of the kindergarten year. But millions of kids experienced similar things without becoming serial killers.
Inside a Serial Killer’s Mind: Psychopathia Sexualis
There were a few items in Heirens’s history, though, that are typical of serial killer childhood histories. For example, a head injury (or several) to the frontal lobe. His mother reported that when the infant Billy (the future “human fly”) was seven months old, he grabbed and twisted and pitched himself out of his baby pram over a stairwell railing, flying headfirst twelve feet down to a concrete landing. Apparently, the baby did not lose consciousness, and after the grotesque grapefruit-sized swelling on the front of his head subsided, he seemed recovered. Then at age twelve, Billy tumbled off the concrete steps of his school. It was reported that this time he lost consciousness and had “cut his head over his eye” (at the frontal lobe). After that, Heirens began suffering from frequent headaches.29
Like Earle Nelson and multiple serial killers to come, we have a childhood head injury—two, in fact.
Then there were the fetish burglaries. Sexual serial killers frequently stole, as children, the objects of their fetishes. Moreover, what are sometimes dismissed as “nonviolent” crimes, such as voyeurism, exhibitionism or burglary, are actually compulsive fetishistic sexual expressions of sadistic anger and lust for control. Serial offenders sometimes start young, breaking into premises while the occupant, often female, is sleeping. They stand over the sleeping subject, enjoying the control they have over the unaware victim, masturbate and leave without disturbing the victim. Eventually, either a victim wakes up and is murdered in a panic, or the fantasy escalates to that on its own, depending on the psychopathology of the particular perpetrator.
Heirens told court-appointed psychiatrists that since the age of nine, he had been obsessed with stealing and wearing women’s panties, that the feel of them aroused him. Heirens described a cardboard box he stashed in his grandmother’s attic when he was thirteen, which they then located. Inside were forty pairs of bright pink or blue rayon panties. At first, William stole the objects of his fetish from clotheslines and apartment house laundry rooms, but later he would go through people’s opened doors into their premises and eventually climb through their windows.
Heirens described the transmutation of his sexual obsessions from the object—the female underwear—to the process—the act of acquiring it. He became primarily aroused by the thrill of the surreptitious and illicit act of entering an apartment, occasionally even ejaculating as he slipped through an open window into someone’s private place. He would linger inside, sometimes not bothering to steal anything, and leave, having sexually satiated himself for the moment. Other times, he would proceed through the burglary in a state of arousal, remaining inside for hours, gathering up not only female garments, but also jewelry, firearms, books, cash and other loot, until he ejaculated or simply lost his erection. He sometimes compulsively defecated and urinated on the floor or bed or into drawers or jewelry boxes and set small fires. Once he reached a climax, he would sometimes leave the loot behind, but more often he took it with him and stashed it in various hidden locations.
Heirens was a frustrated, perhaps angry, sexually wound-up boy but developed an abhorrence to the idea of actual sex with women and sublimated it with a shifting range of fetishes and compulsions. While Heirens dated in college, he found the idea of sex repulsive. Sex, burglary and murder were all equally “dirty” to him, and when he gave in to his various compulsions in the worst way—murder—he afterward soaped and washed their corpses clean and taped their wounds closed, in his own version of a Catholic-inspired penitence.
Among the books Heirens had in his campus dorm room, many of them stolen, was a well-thumbed copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the pioneering study of abnormal and criminal sexuality and fetishes associated with it. The book featured a number of cases of mutilation murders of children and women. Heirens must have been trying to understand his own compulsions and fantasies. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he said, had been his favorite movie, and pr
obably inspired his homicidal alter ego “George Murman,” a fantasy so real to him that for a while he convinced police that George actually existed.
Heirens claimed that he would “black out” when he was aroused and only regain consciousness after ejaculation. He described how he would “come to” and find his victims already washed and laid out where they’d be found by police. In the case of Degnan, at first he claimed he regained consciousness in the basement laundry room, finding its tub and his knife covered in blood, with no memory of dismembering his victim. Later, he recalled lifting sewer tops and throwing body parts into the water. He stated that he wrote the ransom note in the laundry room and then returned to toss it through the girl’s bedroom window in order to give her parents “hope” that their child was still alive. He said that he had strangled the girl in the bedroom, either with his hands or the length of wire that was later found a few blocks away, and that he had carried her corpse through the open window down the ladder.
When asked if he felt any remorse, he said no. In 1946, this would have been a confounding thing, but today we easily understand it as just old-fashioned psychopathy. After murdering and dismembering Suzanne Degnan, Heirens went for a hearty breakfast and then returned to his dorm room to study a little before attending morning lectures, just like on any other day that semester.
Heirens was both interviewed and physically examined by a Cook County panel of psychiatrist MDs. Had he been in their hands three hundred years earlier, he would have been pronounced a witch or werewolf. But now it was 1946, and the doctors reported that Heirens had
a remarkable reduction to the perception of pin pricks, however strong, as “pain.” This was present all over the body with the exception of the glans penis. Sharp pin pricks inside the nose on the mucous membrane and the soles of the feet was denied as being painful and no motion of withdrawal was made there or elsewhere. This was also true as regard the mucous membranes of the lip and the scrotum and body of the penis. A sharp needle could be pressed more than four millimeters under the nails without inducing pain or defense withdrawal movements. As the sensory examination proceeded, the “analgesic cloak” deepened. . . . He became unable to feel pin prick[s] as other than “not blunt.” The corneal reflexes at first were greatly reduced, and at the close of the examination had disappeared so that it became possible to tap the eyeballs with a closed safety pin without his winking or giving any motor sign of sensation. Deep pain produced by pressure on calf muscles and Achilles tendons and the testes was also reduced. The perception of vibration and the other forms of sensation were normal. The visual fields were found to narrow progressively as the test continued, so that they became finally almost pin-point. This phenomenon is known as a “spiral” or “helicoid” visual field, and is positive objective indication of profound hysteria.30
American Serial Killers Page 9
