by Colin Wilson
Between December 1968 and October 1969, five apparently “motiveless” murders were committed in the San Francisco area by a killer who called himself “Zodiac,” and who signed letters to newspapers with a cross over a circle, the astrological sign of the zodiac. The killings and the letters ceased abruptly, although whether this was because of the death of the killer, or some other reason, is still unknown.
On Halloween 1970, eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family and secretary were murdered near Santa Cruz, California, by a dropout named John Linley Frazier, who left a note saying that World War III had just begun and would not cease until “misusers of the environment” had all met the same fate; the killer proved to be a local hippie on a bad mescaline trip.
In October 1972, another dropout, Herb Mullin, committed the first of fourteen murders in the Santa Cruz area, ordered by “voices in his head.”
In May 1972, Ed Kemper, a six-foot nine-inch ex–mental patient, began a series of sex murders of coeds, also in the Santa Cruz area, decapitating and mutilating six of them. He concluded his spree in April 1973 by killing and beheading his mother and her best friend. He had earlier spent five years in an institution after murdering his grandparents.
In January 1974, failed law student Ted Bundy committed in Seattle the first of a long series of sex murders that continued until his final arrest in Florida in April 1978, and probably exceeded forty victims. He seemed such a good-looking, intelligent, charming person that many people felt there must be some mistake and the wrong man had been arrested.
If New Yorkers felt like congratulating themselves that the craziest killers seemed to originate on the West Coast, they were forced to think again when a series of apparently motiveless shootings commenced in July 1976, and continued until the arrest of David Berkowitz, known as “the Son of Sam,” a year later.
Clearly, something strange was happening; murder had ceased to be as straightforward as in the days of Harvey Glatman, or even the Boston Strangler. Ever since the first police forces had been created in the nineteenth century, crime detection had taken its starting point from the concept of motive; killers like Zodiac, Frazier, Kemper, and Berkowitz seemed to defy the normal classification. Which is why, it seemed to Ressler, it would be sensible to talk to some of these killers and find out what had driven them to murder.
One of the earliest successes of “criminal profiling” involved the murder of a schoolgirl. On September 2, 1977, fourteen-year-old Julie Wittmeyer disappeared on the way home from school in Platte City, Kansas. Her clothing—minus her panties—was found in a field a few days later, and her naked and mutilated body the next day. The local police turned to the FBI’s new Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. After studying the evidence, BSU sent back a “profile” of the offender: he knew the victim, he was a sexually frustrated “loner,” probably of below-average intelligence and of more than average physical development, and his contemporaries probably regarded him as “strange.” Police Chief Marion Beeler exclaimed: “Sure as shootin’, that’s him”—for the description fitted a youth named Mark Sager. In fact, Sager was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to ten years.
While the Criminal Research Project was still waiting for approval, Ressler decided to talk to a killer who was largely responsible for his interest in murder, William Heirens, who was now in the Vienna Correctional Center in Southern Illinois. At the time Ressler went to see him, he had been a model prisoner for more than thirty years. What Ressler knew about him was that he had become a panty fetishist in adolescence, and began burgling apartments to obtain them. What Ressler wanted to know was about the development of Heirens’s sexual urges.
He was to be disappointed. Ever since his 1946 conviction, Heirens had been pleading his innocence. Why then had he confessed to three murders? Because, he explained, the cops had decided that he was guilty, and had told him that unless he confessed, he would be sentenced to death on the evidence they had. Naturally, he decided to confess.
What about the burglaries and the stealing of panties? Ressler writes: “Heirens did acknowledge having had some sexual problems and having committed the break-ins that he now deprecated as adolescent pranks . . .” But Heirens insisted that he was innocent of all the other crimes. Understandably, Ressler did not believe him. Here was a man who admitted burglary and “sexual problems,” and who had been arrested during the course of a break-in and tried to shoot the policeman who arrested him. If he was just an ordinary burglar, why risk becoming a cop-killer? Ressler left the prison feeling slightly disgruntled.
I had written about Heirens in the Encyclopedia of Murder. To me, his confession sounded authentic enough, since I had personal acquaintance with fetishism. Even as a child of preschool age, I had been fascinated by my mother’s knickers, and put them on when she was out of the house. With the awakening of adolescent sexual urges, I found myself continually glancing furtively at knickers in shop windows or on clotheslines. I never actually stole any, but when the opportunity presented itself, used them for autoerotic purposes. Unlike Heirens, however, I never suffered agonies of guilt about my fetish, and when the opportunity of trying the real thing with girlfriends came along, found that my appreciation of how they looked in their underwear enhanced the pleasure. When I eventually came across biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance”—the notion that forms of learned behavior can be socially transmitted by a kind of telepathy (see the epilogue)—it seemed to me a way to explain how a three-year-old child had wanted to pull on his mother’s knickers.
In August 1991, I saw an advertisement in an American bookseller’s catalogue for a new book, William Heirens: His Day in Court by Dolores Kennedy, published by Bonus Books of Chicago, and sent off for it. To my astonishment, the author argued that Heirens was innocent. Kennedy had been legal secretary to the lawyer who represented the Degnan family, who, oddly enough, believed that Heirens should be released. In 1983, a federal magistrate did order the release of Heirens—after thirty-seven years in jail—because the parole board had failed to comply with his parole requirements. There was immediate uproar, and the attorney general declared: “I am going to make sure that kill-crazed animal stays where he is.” The magistrate’s decision was reversed.
Dolores Kennedy’s father began to work for Heirens’s release, and when he died, she went to see Heirens in the Vienna Correctional Center in Illinois to discuss what further could be done. She found Heirens likable—as do most people who meet him—and helped form a committee for his release. But Heirens himself presented a curious obstacle. He argued that he did not want to be released on parole—or at least, that he was not willing to pacify the parole board by taking what they regarded as the essential first step in considering him for parole: admission of guilt. He declared: “In 1946 I had to plead guilty to live. I was seventeen years old and I wanted to live, and sometimes I wanted to die. I am sixty years old now and I will never admit to murders I did not commit.” In other words, he had been forced to plead guilty only because the alternative to this “plea bargain” was the electric chair. As Kennedy looked into the case, she began to “uncover the magnitude of the misrepresentations connected with his conviction,” and decided to write a book about it.
My immediate reaction to her book was skepticism. At least 50 percent of criminals claim that they have been “framed.” Where Heirens was concerned, the case against him seemed to hang together so well that I found it virtually impossible to believe in his innocence. And as I read the book, it seemed to me that Dolores Kennedy deliberately underplayed the most powerful evidence—the box of panties found in the house of Heirens’s grandmother. I wrote to her to tell her so. She replied politely, declaring that Heirens had concocted the fetishism story because he hoped to be found insane. She said that Heirens himself would write and confirm this.
In March 1992, I received a letter from Heirens in which he did exactly that. He pointed out that although he had twice been arrested for burglary in his early teens,
there had been no suggestion of stealing panties. “None of these examinations remotely indicated fetishism.” He also pointed out that, at his arrest, it was the police who fired the three shots, not he. He went on to explain how, when he was nine, he had found a trunk of old clothes on a garbage dump near his grandmother’s home, and had taken from it various items, which included women’s underwear—bloomers and slips—as well as some men’s swimming trunks. He put these in a cardboard box and hid them behind the chimney in his grandmother’s house. “None of the underwear was of the frilly sort common with panty fetishism.” In fact it was made of cotton and was of the prewar variety. There were no semen stains, as there would have been if it had been used in masturbation. And, according to Heirens, it was only after he had agreed to the plea bargaining, which included the fetishism story, that he told the police of the whereabouts of the box, which had been there for almost ten years.
On the whole, I was not convinced. Yet I had to admit that his refusal of parole unless he was given the opportunity to establish his innocence was a persuasive argument in his favor. My wife suggested that perhaps he didn’t really want to be released. After all, a man in his sixties is likely to find the modern world a bewildering place after forty or so years in jail. He replied to this comment by pointing out that his prison “is not as comfortable as you seem to believe . . . it is still a prison where you are told what to do and when . . .” I asked him if there was any documentary evidence indicating that the box found in his grandmother’s attic contained a mixture of male and female clothing; he replied that, as far as he knew, no inventory had been made.
When in 1993 a publisher asked me to compile an anthology of murders of the 1940s, it was obvious to me that Heirens had to be included, and that I had to make some mention of Dolores Kennedy’s belief that he was innocent. That is why I decided to write to Heirens and ask him to write me a simple and brief account of his own side of the story, which I would print alongside my own account of the case. It began:
My name is William Heirens. I have been imprisoned in Illinois for forty-seven years for murders I did not commit. Many of you over the age of fifty will remember the murder and dismemberment of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan in January of 1946. If you are younger, you may have read about it in crime anthologies or studied the case in classes. And, based on your reading, you may have been satisfied that the person responsible is paying for the crime. I did not murder Suzanne Degnan. I did not murder Frances Brown and Josephine Ross—two women whose unsolved murders I was also forced to take the blame for to save my life. Over the years many writers have canvassed my case in crime anthologies. Almost without exception they have been carelessly written with no regard for the facts.
The account was impressive, and there was no point where I could fault it or point to distortions of fact. So I concluded my piece on Heirens by saying that, while I was not convinced of his innocence, I was now rather less certain of his guilt.
And so matters rested over the next few years. But in 2000, I was involved in editing a crime part-work called Murder in Mind, and one of the issues I had to read and check was on the Heirens case. It was many years since I had looked at the case, and I had forgotten many of the details. And at that point I came across something that suddenly left me in no doubt that Heirens was guilty.
On October 5, 1945, a retired army nurse, Lieutenant Evelyn Peterson, was in bed sleeping late in her flat not far from the University of Chicago when someone struck her on the head with a metal bar. When she woke up she found that she was tied hand and foot with electrical cord. She worked her way free, and noticed that $150 was missing from her purse.
As she was about to call the police there was a knock on her door. She opened it to find a dark-haired young man. He seemed greatly concerned about the blood on her face, and said he would notify the apartment manager that she needed help. Then he left. When the police arrived, they discovered that the apartment had been wiped clean of fingerprints. The dark-haired young man—Heirens—was nowhere to be seen.
So what was Heirens doing knocking on a stranger’s door at nine in the morning?
Heirens’s story, as told in Dolores Kennedy’s book, is that, arriving early for classes, he had decided to commit a quick burglary in the apartment block where Evelyn Peterson lived. He saw a woman banging on Peterson’s door and asked if he could help. The woman, Peterson’s sister, Margaret, said she couldn’t get in and her key would not turn in the lock. Assuming that her sister must be deeply asleep, she went off to get some breakfast. Heirens left with her, but as soon as she was out of sight, went back up to the apartment with the intention of breaking in. As a precaution, he knocked on the door. And it was opened by a woman with blood on her face.
This is Heirens’s story, and in my view it is preposterous. He is asking us to believe that, by pure chance, he decided to try to break into an apartment where, by some extraordinary coincidence, another burglar had already knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious—a million-to-one likelihood, like lightning striking the same place twice.
I wrote to Dolores Kennedy and told her that, with the greatest regret, I could no longer entertain the slightest doubt of Heirens’s guilt. Being a nice lady, she replied patiently that while she could see my point, she still believed his story, a million-to-one likelihood or not.
What must have happened strikes me as fairly obvious. Heirens had broken in, knocked the sleeping woman unconscious, and rifled her purse. He then cleaned off any fingerprints he might have left and departed. Then, in the manner of a guilty person wondering if there is some trace of his presence that he had overlooked, he decided to go back to check. He returned, but found her sister trying to get in. Clearly, Peterson was still unconscious. So he left the building with Margaret, and then slipped back, only to find that Peterson was by then fully conscious. It must have been an embarrassing moment when she opened the door. How could he explain why he was knocking on her door? He made his excuse about summoning help and left—for good this time.
If it was Heirens who knocked Peterson unconscious—and who else could it have been?—then he was not the fairly harmless teenager he wanted Dolores Kennedy to believe. He could have cracked her skull or caused brain damage. And as soon as we have this image of Heirens striking a sleeping woman with an iron bar—if he was so harmless, why not just take her purse and vanish?—we also glimpse the person who beat and stabbed Frances Brown, killed and dismembered Suzanne Degnan, and stabbed Josephine Ross through the throat.
Why did he not, in order to obtain parole, simply tell the truth? Because, I suspect, his shame about the sexual aspect of the murders made him incapable of admitting that his victims had seen him masturbating at the side of their beds, and driven him to kill to expunge the humiliation.
Ressler goes on to say that, although the interview with William Heirens was a disappointment, even the failure left him doubly certain that this direct contact with criminals could bring new insights.
4
Fantasy Finds a Victim
In early 1978, Ressler, due to travel to northern California on a teaching assignment, decided that this would be a good time to make a start with his project of interviewing killers. In theory, he should have obtained permission from his superiors. But he had been present at lecture by a naval computer expert who had described her own scheme for cutting through bureaucratic red tape. It was better, said Grace Hopper, to ask forgiveness than to ask permission, because permission might be refused, whereas one could always apologize later for transgressions. Ressler took her point, and contacted a friend in California who was the liaison officer for the prison system, and asked him the whereabouts of the murderers he wanted to interview: these included Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, John Linley Frazier, Juan Corona (a killer of migrant workers), and Sirhan Sirhan (the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy). Because FBI agents could enter any prison in the country by showing their badges, and did not have to give a reason for wanting to talk to inmates,
all of this presented no problems.
Sirhan happened to be the first interviewee on the list. He had shot Robert Kennedy ten years earlier, on June 5, 1968, as Kennedy was on his way to a press conference at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after winning the California presidential primary. Kennedy was making his way through the food service area when Sirhan began shooting with a .22 revolver. Convicted of first-degree murder, Sirhan, a Palestinian, was sentenced to death, but a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court brought an end to the death penalty in 1971, before he could be executed.
Sirhan had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, and his demeanor bore this out. Ressler says: “He entered the room with his eyes wild, frightened and apprehensive. He stood against the wall, his fists clenched, and refused to shake hands.” Sirhan seemed to believe that Ressler had some connection with the Secret Service, and declined to be tape-recorded. But when Ressler asked his view of the prison system, he became more forthcoming, and talked angrily about a cellmate who had betrayed him by giving an interview to Playboy. But finally he relaxed and sat down at the table.
He told Resssler that he had been instructed to assassinate Kennedy by voices in his head, and that when he had been looking in a mirror, he had seen his face cracking and falling in pieces. Ressler noted that he referred to himself in the third person—Sirhan did this and Sirhan did that—and believed that he was in protective custody because the authorities were treating him with more respect than common criminals (whereas the truth was that other prisoners might attack him).
He shot Kennedy, he explained, because Kennedy had once supported the selling of jet fighters to Israel, and if he became president, he might be pro-Israeli and anti-Arab. He believed that in killing Kennedy he had changed the course of world history, and that when he returned to Jordan he would be carried shoulder high as a hero. The parole board was afraid to release him, he said, because they feared his personal magnetism.
