Most Evil

by Steve Hodel

  By the end of June, Chicago detectives were frustrated and angry. They’d arrested four separate suspects and forced them to confess under physical and emotional duress, only to have to release them when their alibis checked out. Then a hapless, seventeen-year-old burglar named William Heirens fell into their net.

  Heirens was a mixed-up kid. At the age of thirteen he’d confessed to a series of eleven burglaries. Detectives found two .38 revolvers hidden behind his mother’s refrigerator and an army rifle on the roof, along with a cache of furs and men’s and women’s clothing.

  A quiet, pensive boy, raised in a troubled household, Bill Heirens was shipped off to a series of reform schools, where he seemed to blossom. Upon graduation he was admitted to the University of Chicago. He did well at first, but during his sophomore year he became disappointed with himself. “I was not making the grades I wanted,” he later explained. “I was allowing my love relationships to affect my life too much.”

  Unhappy and feeling financially pressured, Heirens returned to burglary. His methodology was simple. He’d knock on the front door of an apartment in a high-rise building and, if no one answered, enter through the front door and grab everything of value—cash, jewelry, guns, whatever small objects he could lay his hands on. He never committed physical or sexual assault.

  On the muggy afternoon of June 26, 1946, more than six months after the Degnan murder, Bill Heirens walked into the Wayne Manor Apartments on the north side and took an elevator to the third floor. In his pocket was a small pistol he’d nabbed during a previous burglary. Seeing an open apartment door, he entered and removed a single dollar bill from a wallet he saw in the living room. As he exited, a neighbor yelled out.

  A call was quickly made to police. Detective Tiffin Constant and his partner, who were in the area, cornered Heirens in the rear stairway of a nearby building. According to Detective Constant, Heirens pointed the handgun at him and pulled the trigger. When the gun didn’t go off, Constant responded with three quick shots that missed. Bill Heirens threw his gun at Constant, then leaped down the steps onto the detective.

  An off-duty policeman named Abner Cunningham was returning from the beach in his bathing suit when he heard the commotion. He subdued the teenager by breaking three empty flowerpots over his head.

  Suffering from a possible skull fracture, Bill Heirens was taken to nearby Edgewater Emergency Hospital, then to the Bridewell Jail Hospital where he was booked.

  Chicago detectives wondered why a hot prowl burglar like Bill would attempt an escape after having three shots fired at him. They suspected he was running away from something else. Their speculation quickly turned to the crime that had most frustrated them that year: Maybe Heirens was the sex maniac who broke into little Suzanne Degnan’s room six months before and knew he’d get the chair if he were caught.

  In days following his booking, the terrified teenager was grilled around the clock, deprived of sleep and food, prevented from seeing his parents, had ether poured onto his testicles, and was injected with Sodium Pentothal. When these failed to elicit a confession, he was subjected to very painful spinal taps without anesthesia and given a polygraph exam without consent.

  The analysis of Bill Heirens’s 1946 polygraph exam was kept secret until 1953, when it was obtained by polygraph experts. In their opinion, Heirens showed a truthful response about not killing Suzanne Degnan. This was a great puzzlement to the experts, since they had been told “his guilt had been established with absolute certainty.”

  Determined to make their case, investigators resorted to another dirty tactic: releasing information to Chicago’s five newspapers that they said “proved Heirens guilty.” Among the evidence cited by police were “hidden indentations” on the Degnan ransom note that they claimed connected it to Heirens. The FBI later dismissed this conclusion and determined that the “indentations” did not exist.

  Fingerprints on the Degnan note, which were initially unreadable smudges, mysteriously developed into readable prints, and identified as Heirens’s. On June 30, 1946, Chicago PD captain Emmett Evans had told reporters, “Heirens has been cleared of suspicion on the Brown murder because the fingerprint left in the apartment was not his.” Twelve days later, the police found twenty-two points of similarity, and the previously eliminated print became Heirens’s.

  Decades later, a reexamination of the fingerprint on the note by a court-qualified expert found that it is “a rolled fingerprint” of the type created during the booking of a prisoner. The expert indicated that in the thousands of crime-scene prints he had examined, he had never seen one like it. The state’s reward money was split between two individuals, both police officers. Half went to Sgt. Thomas Laffey, Chicago PD’s fingerprint expert who, in July, 1946, after personally fingerprinting Heirens, found a new fingerprint on the Degnan note, which he subsequently identified as Heirens’s. The other half of the reward money went to the arresting officer, Cunningham.

  Eyewitness George Subgrunski, who claimed he had seen a thirty-five-year old male with a dark overcoat and fedora near the Degnan residence, said it wasn’t Heirens when he was shown a photo of the suspect on July 11. Five days later, Subgrunski changed his mind.

  On July 16, 1946, George Wright of the Chicago Tribune breached all journalistic ethics by concocting a confession and publishing it as if it were real. The headline read THE HEIRENS STORY! HOW HE KILLED SUZANNE DEGNAN AND 2 WOMEN. Quoting “unimpeachable sources,” Wright’s story claimed that Heirens killed Degnan for ransom; shot Frances Brown, waited on her fire escape, and then returned to stab her; and stabbed Josephine Ross when she awoke during an attempted burglary. The so-called confession was picked up by the other Chicago papers and across the nation.

  5.2 July 30, 1946 : Heirens in white shirt (center ring) about to give his “confession.”

  In the face of this very public assault, seventeen-year-old Bill Heirens’s own defense attorneys convinced him that the only way he could save himself from the electric chair was to plead guilty and “take a deal.” The terrified youth agreed and confessed to the Ross, Brown, and Degnan murders. The confession was accepted as truth despite the fact that all three statements contained glaring errors and factual impossibilities about the murders.

  At the September 1946 sentencing hearing, State’s Attorney William J. Tuohy in his closing arguments to the judge, made what in my opinion, has to be one of the most shocking and bizarre judicial statements I’ve ever heard. Recognizing Heirens’s defense attorneys, the lead prosecutor said to the court:

  Without the aid of the defense, we would to this day have no answer for the death of Josephine Ross. Without their aid, to this day a great and sincere public doubt might remain as to the guilt of William Heirens in the killing of Suzanne Degnan and Frances Brown.

  In his closing comments, Heirens’s lead defense attorney, John Coghlan, thanked the prosecutor for his kind words and concluded:

  When we became convinced that the State had a prima facie case . . . our duty at that time required that we in no manner assist him in defeating justice . . .

  On September 6, 1946, the day after Bill was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life in prison, he was visited by Sheriff Michael Mulcahy, who said, “You probably didn’t realize this, Bill, but I’m a personal friend of Jim Degnan. He wants to know, did his daughter suffer?”

  “I can’t tell you if she suffered, Sheriff Mulcahy,” Bill Heirens answered. “I didn’t kill her. Tell Mr. Degnan to please look after his older daughter, because whoever killed Suzanne is still out there.”

  While Chicago authorities and a majority of its residents were relieved by Heirens’s conviction, doubts about his guilt began to surface immediately. One skeptic was popular mystery writer/researcher Georgiana Craig, who wrote under the name Craig Rice and who’d been hired by the Chicago Herald-American to produce a series of analytical articles about the murders. After poring over police records and interviewing Heirens and others, she concluded, “Let’s think abou
t Billy Heirens. I’ve seen him. I’ve talked to him [and] I believe him innocent.”

  Another early doubter was the chaplain at Statesville Prison. William Heirens, for his part, started telling anyone who would listen that he was innocent. According to a prison psychological profile filed in 1951, “He [Heirens] denies the alleged murders although he frankly admits the numerous robberies. He states: ‘I confessed because there was a chance of being condemned to death.’”

  In 1953 Heirens petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court for a retrial. In denying his request, the Court admitted that “the search of the petitioner’s living quarters, the incessant and prolonged questioning of petitioner while he was confined to a hospital bed, and the unauthorized use of Sodium Pentothal and a lie detector were flagrant violations of his rights.” But the Court concluded that since the case was settled on a plea bargain, the violations were not the mitigating factor in the conviction.

  In the decades since, numerous appeals for retrial, clemency, and parole have been turned down. Meanwhile, Bill Heirens developed into a model prisoner, overseeing production in the prison garment factory, running a television and radio repair shop, and counseling other inmates. On February 6, 1972, after taking courses offered by visiting professors and through television from nearby Lewis College, Heirens became the first inmate in Illinois to receive a college degree.

  In 2007, Columbia University forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael H. Stone examined the Degnan murder evidence and interviewed William Heirens. His conclusion: “I feel his profile simply does not match that of a murderer.”

  In early June 2003, I flew to Chicago and met with author Dolores Kennedy, Clinical Professor of Law Steven A. Drizin, and members of William Heirens’s defense team at the Northwestern University School of Law. Later that day, Dolores and I drove to the Dixon Correctional Center in northwestern Illinois. As we approached the lockup, I reflected back to the photos of the strong, handsome young man I’d seen as he was arrested fifty-six years earlier in 1946.

  As the prison guards walked inmate number C-06103 toward us, I saw an old man broken in body and spirit. Bill Heirens was so frail and diabetic, it was difficult for him to speak.

  At that moment I experienced a special kind of pain that comes from witnessing a great injustice. After returning to California, I felt compelled to write an appeal to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board stating my professional belief that Heirens is innocent and asking them to “at long last free Bill and allow him to live his final few years in dignity and respect.”

  So far my request and thousands of others have been denied. My hope is that this book will open a new examination of the Ross-Brown-Degnan murders by pointing to a much more likely suspect.

  5.3 William Heirens, 2003

  Chapter Six

  Stop me before I kill more.

  Note written in lipstick near the Degnan murder scene, January 1946

  Knowing what I did about Elizabeth Short’s interest in the Degnan murder, I shifted my investigative compass to 1946 Chicago shortly after the publication of the Black Dahlia Avenger. Almost immediately I found a number of remarkable matches between my father’s MOs as BDA and the murders of Josephine Alice Ross, Frances Brown, and Suzanne Degnan.

  In the case of Josephine Alice Ross:

  • The victim was assaulted in her residence and strangled. Her body was then placed in a partially filled bathtub. (Bauerdorf)

  • After cutting and slashing the nude body, the suspect used a douche bag and nozzle to wash the body clean. (Short)

  • The victim’s nude body was posed. (Short, French)

  • After a brutal overkill assault, the attacker covered the nude body with the victim’s personal items of clothing and tightly tied the woman’s own silk stocking around her throat. (French, Springer, Ellroy)

  • Two witnesses described the suspect as male, age twenty to thirty, with black wavy hair.

  In the case of Frances Brown:

  • Her body was stripped nude and posed in the bathroom. (Short, French)

  • The suspect used a douche bag and nozzle to wash the body clean. (Short)

  • The suspect stabbed the victim with a knife that was then wrapped in cloth. (Kern)

  • Night manager John Dedrick saw the killer exit the elevator and described him as male, Caucasian, thirty-five to forty years old, dark complexioned, wearing a dark overcoat and dark fedora hat.

  6.1 George Hodel, Franklin House, circa 1949

  George Hodel, who would have been thirty-eight in 1946, was Caucasian, six feet tall, and dark complexioned. This photograph shows him sitting on his desk in our Franklin Avenue house circa 1949. His physical appearance three years earlier would have been virtually the same.

  The most critical piece of evidence left by the suspect at the Brown crime scene was the note written on the wall in bright red lipstick.

  6.2 “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself”

  A month after the Brown murder, the Degnan murder suspect left a similarly worded message, also handwritten in lipstick, adjacent to the murder room basement where Suzanne Degnan was slain. It read:

  Stop me before I kill more.

  And when witness David Decker observed the suspicious-looking man you may recall he described as “male, Caucasian, twenty-five to thirty, tall and thin, dark complexion, dark suit coat, light-colored slacks, dark cap” in the vestibule across from the Degnan residence, the description was consistent with how George Hodel appeared in 1946, when he was thirty-eight.10 Although George Hodel was slightly older than the estimate, eyewitnesses’ estimates frequently vary as much as five to ten years. The suspect had dropped a note, which Decker retrieved and gave to police.

  6.3 “Please get me”

  A handwriting expert who examined the note at the time concluded, “It was written using the left hand, possibly to disguise the handwriting.”

  In January 1947, a year later, my father—calling himself the Black Dahlia Avenger—mailed a postcard that was intercepted by Federal Postal Inspectors. It read:

  We’re going to Mexico City—catch us if you can.

  2K’s

  In all three instances—the Lipstick Killer, the Degnan kidnapper, and the Black Dahlia Avenger—we find the same Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic. Dr. Jekyll (the good half) asks desperately to be caught. While Mr. Hyde (the murderous monster within) taunts the police, demanding ransom money, and promising more victims, more murders, more blood.

  The suspect in the Suzanne Degnan murder also left a ransom note in the victim’s bedroom.

  6.4

  6.5

  It contained what seem to be deliberate misspellings—“Reddy,” “waite,” and “safty.” My father in his Black Dahlia Avenger mailings misspelled common words like Herald as “Hearld” and “Herld,” and Los Angeles spelled “Los Angels.” To repeat what nationally recognized handwriting expert Clark Sellers concluded from his analysis of the Avenger mailings:

  It was evident the writer took great pains to disguise his or her personality by printing instead of writing the message and by endeavoring to appear illiterate. But the style and formation of the printed letters betrayed the writer as an educated person.

  Also of special interest in the Degnan ransom note was the symbol that appears to represent an ampersand sign. Closer examination shows it to the musical notation known as a treble clef (also called a G clef) written backward.

  During William Heirens’s confession, Chicago police ordered him to rewrite the note. Heirens, who had no musical training, didn’t know what the treble clef was and was unable to reproduce it. This comes through clearly in the confession transcript of Bill Heirens being questioned by State’s Attorney William Tuohy and his assistant Wilbert Crowley, which reveals the suspect clumsily responding to questions about the symbol despite the questioner’s attempt to lead him through this difficult spot.

  Q: Do you remember discussing with Mr. Tuohy the fact that you did not know how to make
the character “&”?

  A: That is right.

  Q: You do know how to make that character, don’t you?

  A: Made an “S” but I did not know how to make that. I never made that character before in my life.

  Q: Before you did make that character on that ransom note?

  A: Yes.

  Q: That is a photostat. No, that is a photograph of the ransom note that was written, that is exactly how you wrote it, isn’t it?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Can you see that?

  A: Yes.

  Q: That is how you made it, isn’t it?

  A: Yes.

  George Hodel, on the other hand, had been a musical prodigy since age seven. Not only had he seen the treble clef symbol on a daily basis throughout his childhood, he would have handwritten the symbol hundreds of times while scoring his own compositions.

  In the Chicago Tribune of January 10, 1946, handwriting expert Vernon Faxton concluded that “the ransom note, while attempting illiteracy, indicates a more educated person.”

  The author of the article also pointed out that “Musicians pointed to the backward ampersands, similar to treble clefs, as indicating the author of the ransom note was a musician.”