Most Evil

by Steve Hodel

  They awoke the chilly morning of June 6 to discomforting news. A day earlier, an eighteen-year-old girl named Jacqueline Ross returned to the apartment she shared with her older sister and divorced mother to discover her mother Josephine’s nude, dead body lying in bed.

  Police investigators found bloodstains and blood splatter on the bedroom’s northeast wall, the radiator cover, and curtains. A violent struggle between the forty-three-year-old victim and her assailant had produced multiple bruises to the victim’s body and a deep laceration to her right hand. She’d also been struck five times in the head with a blunt instrument, which may have rendered her unconscious before the suspect finished her off by severing the jugular vein in her neck. Detectives found two strands of black hair, believed to be the suspect’s, clutched in the victim’s hand.9

  Rather than simply leaving Josephine Ross on the floor and fleeing the scene, the suspect left certain unique postmortem signatures that distinguished this from other burglary-rape-murders. He dragged Ross’s body to the bathroom, placed it in the bathtub and, using a douche bag, washed the blood from her wounds. Then he toweled the body dry, carried it to the bed, and placed white medical adhesive tape (3 by ¼-inch strips) over several of the facial lacerations. Finally, he covered the victim’s head with a red skirt and tied a silk stocking tightly around her throat in a form of “posing.” This extremely rare practice is found in less than 1 percent of all homicides. In my three hundred separate homicide investigations, I only had one case where the suspect posed the victim.

  Police found a woman’s housecoat, two towels, a roll of adhesive tape, a douche bag with the hose and nozzle attached, and a brassiere with the straps torn from the cups floating in the bathtub in five inches of bloody water. The victim’s white pajamas had been left at the foot of the bed.

  Two tenant witnesses came forward with descriptions of the likely suspect. Mrs. Bernice Folkman said she saw a man in the fifth-floor corridor at approximately ten thirty a.m., whom she described as male, twenty to thirty years old, black wavy hair, wearing a light-colored sweater. Witness Elmer Nelson provided a similar description and observed the man leaving the building via the fire escape.

  For a full year following the murder, the police were unable to produce a likely suspect. Six months later, as Chicagoans prepared for the Christmas holidays, they were confronted with more horror:

  4.1 Josephine Alice Ross

  On the morning of December 10, 1945, the nude, dead body of Miss Frances Brown, a thirty-three-year-old member of the WAVES (Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service) who had just been discharged from the Navy, was found in the apartment she shared with a female friend on Chicago’s north side, a quarter mile southwest of the Josephine Ross murder site. Miss Brown’s body was posed in a kneeling position on the side of the bathtub with her head resting on the bottom of the tub.

  Chicago detectives determined that the victim had been accosted in her bedroom, where she, much like Josephine Ross, had tried to fight off her knife-wielding assailant. As in the Ross case, they found defensive-wound lacerations near the web of Miss Brown’s right thumb.

  The struggle continued on Miss Brown’s bed, where she was stabbed through the neck with her own eight-inch bread knife. The suspect then finished her off with two shots from a .38 caliber handgun—one through the right arm and the second into the right side of her forehead.

  Her attacker then dragged the body through the living room and into the bathroom, where he removed her blood-soaked pajama bottoms, wrapped her pajama top around the knife that was still embedded in her neck, and used a douche bag and nozzle to wash her body clean.

  After posing the body in the bathtub, Frances Brown’s killer walked to the south living-room wall, removed a large framed picture and, using a lipstick taken from her purse, wrote in three- to six-inch letters:

  4.2 “For heavens sake catch me Before I kill more I cannot control myself.”

  All fingerprints were wiped away except for a badly smudged partial print that was found on the bathroom doorjamb. Detectives speculated that the suspect entered the apartment by climbing an exterior fire escape and coming in through a window.

  The building’s night manager John Dedrick saw a suspicious man leave the elevator and nervously try to exit the front door at approximately four a.m. He described the person as a male Caucasian, thirty-five to forty years old, dark-complexioned, wearing a dark overcoat and dark fedora. Two tenants claimed that they had heard what sounded like gunshots between two and four a.m.

  Several days after the murder, the tenant directly below Miss Brown’s apartment reported a threatening phone call from an unidentified man who said, “I’m the lipstick killer. You’ll get it next if you don’t keep your mouth shut.”

  This sadistic murder, like the Josephine Ross crime, remained a disturbing puzzle with few prospects for being solved. Then four weeks later, an even greater act of evil shook the city of Chicago and the nation, grabbing headlines like the terrible Lindbergh kidnap-murder of 1932.

  Shortly after midnight, on Monday, January 7, 1946, blond, blue-eyed, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was tucked into bed and kissed good night by her father. James Degnan, an executive with the Office of Price Administration, had recently moved his wife and two daughters from Baltimore to the top floor of a house in the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago’s north side.

  When James went to awaken young Suzanne at around seven thirty a.m., he found an empty bed. And he noticed that the bedroom window that had been left nearly closed was now wide open. He and his wife, Helen, searched the house. Finding no sign of their daughter, they called the police.

  Within an hour, a hundred uniformed police officers and detectives began a house-to-house search of the neighborhood. In Suzanne’s bedroom, detectives found a ransom note written in pencil on a dirty piece of paper. The note, which had been freshly smeared with oil (possibly to cover any fingerprints), read:

  4.3 (Front) “Get $20,000 reddy & waite for word do not notify FBI or Police Bills in 5’s & 10’s.” (Back) “Burn this for her safty.”

  Between seven thirty and eleven a.m., the suspect phoned the Degnan residence four times and attempted to make arrangements for delivery of the ransom money. Chicago detectives at the time were confident this was the actual suspect because in his conversation he claimed to “have a lock of her blond hair and a piece of her blue pajamas.” The pajamas had not yet been found nor any description of them released to the public. Here is how James Degnan described one of the calls:

  Shortly after ten o’clock the police had the telephone fixed so that calls could be recorded and they instructed me to answer it and try to deal with the kidnapper from then on. In a short while a man called and asked if Suzanne was there. Before I could answer he was disconnected or had hung up. That call was traced to a drugstore in Rogers Park.

  In their search of the immediate area, officers found a seven-foot makeshift ladder with a broken rung that they speculated may have been used by the suspect(s) to climb through the bedroom window and abduct the child.

  Throughout the afternoon hours of January 7, Chicago radio station WGN broadcast a plea from James Degnan to the kidnapper not to harm his child. He assured the suspect that he would raise the $20,000 ransom and deliver the money.

  Late in the afternoon an anonymous tip arrived, most likely from the suspect, suggesting that “police search the storm drains in the neighborhood.” They did. At seven p.m. Suzanne’s decapitated head was found in a storm drain a half block south of the residence.

  In the macabre scene that followed, hundreds of Chicagoans followed police officers from alley to alley, sewer to sewer, as patrolmen called out “nothing here” or “we found a leg.” The left leg still attached to a partial torso was discovered in a sewer just south of the residence. The right leg lay in an alley catch basin two blocks farther west. The main torso had been dumped in a sewer two blocks south on Ardmore Avenue.

  Police eventually located the di
smemberment site in a basement on Winthrop Avenue, two hundred yards from the Degnan residence. They speculated that the suspect or suspects had broken in during the early morning hours and used the laundry tub to wash and dismember the body. Body parts had been wrapped in shopping bags and rags taken from some of the basement lockers. An examination of the basin revealed pieces of flesh and blond hair.

  Mrs. Joseph Hradek, who lived directly above the basement, said she was awakened at approximately two forty-five a.m. by the sound of a window being slammed and running water. Police confirmed that all the body parts were “washed clean.” Another resident reported that she heard footsteps and noises in the basement, followed by the sound of someone walking by her room, through the corridor, and out into the alley. She claimed that the person repeated these actions at least four times.

  4.4 Location of Degnan body parts

  1. Degnan home

  2. Murder room

  3. Head found

  4. Left leg found in sewer

  5. Right leg found in catch basin

  6. Torso found in sewer

  7. Arms found in sewer

  4.5 The basement “murder room” and basins where the suspect performed the dismemberment.

  The brutal horror of Suzanne Degnan’s murder was first reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune’s final January 8, 1946, edition:

  4.6

  Los Angeles and the rest of the nation quickly picked up the story:

  4.7

  News commentators referred to another “Jack the Ripper” loose in Chicago, while police dubbed the suspect “The Mad Butcher of Kenmore Avenue.”

  Teams of investigators acted quickly, locating important eyewitnesses and recovering valuable evidence. Here are the highlights of their early findings:

  • A witness going to work at three a.m. observed a man alight from a slate-colored car parked south on Kenmore. The man removed a bundle and transferred it from the front to the rear of the vehicle.

  • A milk wagon driver identified the seven-foot ladder as the same one he saw on the top of a car parked near the Degnan home on January 6, at six a.m. (some eighteen hours before the kidnapping). Inside the car was a lone male, thirty-five years old, dark complexion.

  • Police confirmed that they believed more than one suspect was involved in the abduction because “it would be impossible for a single suspect to carry the seventy-four-pound child down the rickety ladder without help.”

  • Police described this possible scenario: (1) Automobile used to carry victim from her home to basement on Winthrop Avenue, where body was dismembered. (2) Victim strangled, and an attempted rape occurred in the suspect’s automobile. (3) Kidnapper(s) used a sharp knife, and was highly skilled in cutting. Possible doctor or butcher? (4) Based on undisclosed secret analysis from the police crime lab, the ransom note was written one week before the crime occurred.

  • Police Chief Walter Storms told reporters that “the girl’s murderer was either a physician, a medical student, a very good butcher, an embalmer, or perhaps a livestock handler.” Dr. Jerry Kearns, the coroner’s expert, declared that “the killer had to be an expert in cutting meat, because the body was separated at the joints. Not even the average doctor could be so skillful.”

  • Soil particles found on the bottoms of the victim’s feet indicated she walked after being taken down the ladder. This indicated Suzanne was not slain in the bedroom.

  • Two men’s white handkerchiefs, twelve inches square (one blood-stained and twisted like a gag), were found near 6035 Winthrop Avenue.

  • Two black curly hair strands were found on the child’s torso when recovered from the storm sewer. According to police, “the hairs were found on the body inside the cloth bag and have to belong to the suspect.”

  • Police now believed that the killer may have taken the child out the front door when the neighbor’s boxer dogs first started barking at 12:25 a.m.

  • Mary and Thomas Keegan, third-floor tenants at the Degnan house, were awakened between one thirty and two a.m. when the neighbors’ dogs barked a second time. They heard two men arguing on the sidewalk. Fifteen minutes later, they heard a man and a woman talking. The woman said, “This is the best-looking building in the neighborhood, and the best looking couple.”

  • According to a Los Angeles Times article on January 12, 1946, under the headline KIDNAP VICTIM BURIED; AREA COMBED FOR CLUE, on January 11 as mourners attended the funeral of little Suzanne Degnan, police found a clue that possibly connected the Degnan crime to the “Lipstick Killer” of Frances Brown. A note handwritten in lipstick was found on a lamppost near the basement where Suzanne’s body was dismembered. It read “stop me before i kill more.”

  • On January 12 at ten thirty a.m., a witness, David Decker, saw a suspicious-looking man loitering in the vestibule at 1023 Thorndale Avenue, near the Degnan residence. The man dropped a yellow piece of paper on the floor and left. Decker recovered the note, which read “i did it. please get me.” He described the man as male, twenty-five to thirty years old, tall and thin, dark complexion, dark suit coat, light- colored slacks, wearing a dark cap.

  4.8 “stop me before i kill more”

  • Another note, with what appeared to be deliberate misspellings, was mailed to the Chicago police by a person claiming to be the killer:

  “Why don’t you catch me. If you don’t ketch me soon, I will cummit suicide. There is a reward out for me. How much do I get if I give myself up. When do I get that 20,000 dollars they wanted from that Degnan girl at 5901 Kenmore Avenue. You may find me at the Club Tavern at 738 E. 63rd St. known as Charlie the Greeks. Or at Con-way’s Tavern at 6247 Cottage Grove Av. Please hurry now.”

  • On January 30, 1946, a severed human ear was mailed to Mrs. Degnan. The handwritten message that accompanied it read “WILL CUT YOUR EAR NEXT.” It was later determined that the ear had been stolen from a medical laboratory. The package was double-stamped, and if the evidence still exists, the saliva under the two stamps could be a potential source for DNA.

  • On February 20, 1946, some six weeks after the murder, city utility workers found the child’s severed arms inside a sewer three blocks from the Degnan home. Both arms were found palms downward next to a four-foot section of broom handle, which authorities believed was used to pry open the sixty-pound manhole.

  • Cause of death was found to be manual strangulation. Both finger and ligature marks were found on the victim’s neck. In an alley-way nearby the “murder room,” police recovered two white, knotted, precut lengths of clothesline cord, which appeared to show bloodstains.

  • The coroner estimated the time of death at between twelve thirty and one a.m.

  The weight, value, and interpretation of much of this evidence would change and modify itself, depending on what suspect was taken into custody. By the time Chicago investigators focused on William Heirens, some six months later, many of these original facts would vanish and be forgotten, especially those that directly contradicted law enforcement’s new theory of the case.

  Chapter Five

  I can’t tell you if she suffered, Sheriff Mulcahy. I didn’t kill her.

  Bill Heirens to Sheriff Michael Mulcahy, September 6, 1946

  Throughout 1946 Chicago police investigators tracked down evidence and pursued every lead in the Suzanne Degnan murder case with zeal. “We’re leaving nothing undone,” Captain Joseph Goldberg told reporters. Thousands of people were questioned, including busboys, bartenders, postal clerks, cab drivers, ex-convicts, and anyone with a past record of sexual misconduct. Police went so far as to wiretap the phone lines of neighboring butcher shops and tree surgeons. Several suspects were arrested and cleared.

  5.1 January 9, 1946

  The most notorious of these was Hector Verburgh, the sixty-five-year-old janitor in charge of maintenance at the Winthrop Avenue building where the dismemberment took place. Despite an alibi from his wife of thirty years and a reputation for being “as harmless as a fly,” the stocky na
tive of Belgium was grilled by State’s Attorney William Tuohy, Police Commissioner John C. Prendergast, Chief of Detectives Walter G. Storms, and Mayor Edward Kelly. Also, Verburgh’s wife, Mary, was hauled to the police station and badgered by detectives who tried to get her to implicate her husband.

  After two days of torture the elderly janitor was released and hospitalized with a separated shoulder and other ailments. From his hospital bed, Verburgh described his ordeal.

  Oh, they hanged me up, they blindfolded me. . . . They had hand-cuffs on me for hours and hours. They threw me in a cell and blindfolded me. They handcuffed my hands behind my back and pulled me up on bars until only my toes touched the floor. I no sleep, I no eat, I go to the hospital. Oh, I am so sick. Any more and I would have confessed anything.

  Two years later, in 1948, the city of Chicago would agree to settle Hector Verburgh’s claim for wrongful arrest and police brutality for a sum of $20,000—a considerable amount in 1948 dollars.

  The police didn’t stop looking for suspects. A young man named James Freutel, who lived two doors down from the Degnans, said that he was afraid to go outside. “I felt that if I looked to the right or the left, a cop would jump from behind a tree and grab me. They were taking everyone in.”