Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  He wouldn’t go suddenly from causal, if repeated, burglaries to the murder and mutilation of a six-year-old child, brazenly taken from her own bedroom.

  It just doesn’t happen like that!

  Please keep this phrase in mind as we delve further into the minds and methods we’ll be exploring as we go along.

  I might have pegged this suspect for a voyeur or a fetish burglar, who steals underwear or personal objects; in spite of the way he was caught, and his carrying a gun, he would be essentially nonconfrontational. I wouldn’t see this type trying to pull off a kidnapping, or even going through the motions of one, because it would involve too much interaction with a victim and police.

  Just as important, whether the ultimate intent in the Degnan case was kidnapping or murder, a guy as young and meek as Heirens would not be able to exert the kind of control over the victim that the evidence clearly indicated. A six-year-old is not going to go willingly or quietly with a stranger who breaks into her room and tries to take her away. This would require more experience and finesse than a seventeen-year-old like Heirens could muster. Even the idea of someone with this personality transporting a live or dead child to another location is almost unthinkable. Also, I would have been surprised by the use of a ladder in the crime, as it had not been previously part of Heirens’s breaking-and-entering MO.

  And here’s the most critical factor of all from a profiling perspective, and this is pretty much an ultimate truth. After the Suzanne Degnan murder and mutilation, you would have seen a profound change in the offender’s actions and personality. This would be true no matter who the UNSUB was, but it would be even more pronounced the younger the killer. He would become acutely nervous. Those around him would notice negative changes in his appearance. He might lose weight. He might drink heavily. He would seem distant and preoccupied. He would definitely follow the investigation and probably talk about it. He would not have gone unnoticed around his own circle in his home area or in school.

  According to multiple accounts he later gave, this is what happened to William Heirens following his arrest:

  As we’ve noted, he was brought to Bridewell Hospital, adjacent to Cook County Jail, to be treated for the injuries sustained when the off-duty police officer knocked him out with the flowerpot. He was questioned for long periods around the clock for six days, during which he was given little to eat or drink and was struck repeatedly. He said he was punched in the testicles and burned with ether. He was refused attorneys and, until near the end of this phase of the confinement, was not able to see his parents.

  Two psychiatrists, Dr. Roy Grinker and Dr. William H. Haines, administered Sodium Pentothal—then thought to be a “truth serum”—and questioned him for three hours, during which the “George Murman” alternate personality emerged. Since there are no written or recorded transcripts extant of that session, it is unclear whether Heirens came up with George or whether he was suggested by the doctors or someone else who might have been in the room. What is clear is that several years later, one of the psychiatrists confirmed that Heirens never implicated himself in any of the three murders.

  Afterward, in the presence of police captain Michael Ahern, state’s attorney for Cook County William Tuohy and a stenographer, Heirens is said to have given additional details about George Murman, who sent him out to rob, and that he was always taking the rap for George. Again, since the transcript no longer exists, I don’t know how much is accurate, but had I heard it, I would have been very skeptical. Once this information leaked out, though, the newspapers went crazy with it. Who wouldn’t love a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde angle to grisly murders? Add to that the stolen dissecting kit found in his dorm room and the book about deviant sexual practices and you had the perfect portrait of a bright young college student as perverted rapist and killer.

  It is not at all unusual for suspects to attribute blame to another imaginary figure. David Berkowitz, known as the “Son of Sam” and the “.44-Caliber Killer,” who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977, claimed a three-thousand-year-old black dog had ordered him to kill. The shrinks had gone to town with this and labeled him a paranoid schizophrenic. It all sounded too familiar to me, so when I interviewed him years later in Attica State Prison and he started up on this dog, I faced him and said, “Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it.” He grinned and admitted I was right. The fact was that this was just one angry son of a bitch who came up with the dog to enhance his own image and maybe get himself off the hook mentally.

  Convicted killer Sedley Alley at one point claimed that an alternate personality forced him into the absolutely horrific murder of U.S. Marine lance corporal Suzanne Collins. In fact, though I’ve seen several clearly legitimate cases of multiple personality disorder (MPD) in young children—all of them physically and/or sexually abused—I have yet to see an authentic MPD diagnosis that emerged postarrest for murder.

  If I had been presented with this George Murman business, I would have concluded one of two things: Either the suspect was using it to set up an insanity or diminished-capacity plea, or the investigators had suggested it to him as a way to make their case.

  Shortly after this, Heirens was subjected to a spinal tap, apparently to rule out any brain damage resulting from being conked on the head by the flowerpot. For reasons unknown, this painful lumbar puncture was performed without anesthesia, and then he was carted over to the detective bureau for a polygraph exam. He was in so much pain that the test was rescheduled for four days later, at which time the results were officially “inconclusive.”

  I have never been a big fan of the polygraph. Innocent people are often totally spooked by the process and the emotional assault on their honesty, and sociopaths often have no more trouble lying to a box than they do to other humans. It is mainly a tool that investigators will use to segue into an interrogation. In this case, I would consider the test absolutely worthless, regardless of whether it implicated or exculpated the subject.

  Various handwriting experts were called in to compare past exemplars of Heirens’s handwriting with the lipstick scrawl and ransom note. The best they could come up with was inconclusive. Several found no similarity, nor did they believe the “catch me” slogan and ransom note were written by the same individual. Many years later, in 1996, FBI handwriting expert David Grimes stated that the exemplars of Heirens’s handwriting taken from his college notes did not match either the lipstick scrawl or the ransom note, which did not even match each other.

  Having discounted the Murman details, the polygraph and the handwriting, I would have fallen back on one of the key principles of profiling: Past actions suggest future actions. There was nothing in Bill Heirens’s past to suggest that he would even feel comfortable confronting a woman during a break-in, much less killing her so brutally. Even if he had been surprised and panicked at a burglary scene, someone like this might possibly have shot the victim to keep her from pursuing him or testifying against him. He would not have stabbed her multiple times. That is the work of an individual with a long-standing rage against women. When you get to the third crime in the supposed string, as we have shown, it would be incomprehensible for him to deal with a child in the way the Degnan scene and dump site indicated.

  As you may have gathered by now, I don’t think the Degnan killing was carried out by the same individual who perpetrated the Ross and Brown murders. Those two are more opportunistic, more the work of a thrill-seeking burglar who is sexually motivated and prone to rape if the situation presents itself. This belief is certainly bolstered by the fact that no valuables were taken from either scene. And neither one fits the pattern that Heirens had already established in his own burglaries, nor had anything in his behavior or evidence at any of his scenes given an indication that he had progressed or evolved in his criminal intents.

  By the same token, we can’t ignore the established past actions of the Chicago police in the Hector Verburgh incident. If they were so hot to get a confession
from this poor elderly custodian that they put him in the hospital for ten days and left him with lasting physical problems, how can we suppose that they wouldn’t do it again? Whatever confession they got out of Heirens is tainted from the get-go. Even ignoring all other allegations of brutality against the Chicago police of that era, what they did to Verburgh makes Heirens’s claims highly plausible and believable.

  This was a phenomenon I would see over and over again. Frankly, it has shocked me each time I have come across it: that a suspect who had been grilled for hours and hours in a high-stress environment would not only give interrogators whatever he thought would get them off his back, he would actually start to lose hold of reality and think that maybe he could have done what he was being accused of. And it didn’t just happen to individuals of demonstrably low IQ, such as David Vasquez. It has happened to numerous highly intelligent and sophisticated people, too.

  As far as the most damning piece of physical evidence—the bloody fingerprint smudge on the doorjamb of the Frances Brown murder scene—we’ve got to be suspicious of that now, too. It was said to match a print from the ransom note, but that could have been obtained by letting Heirens examine the document. Even more alarming, a number of experts later asserted that the Brown scene print appeared “rolled,” as if it had come from the technique used to put prints on a fingerprint card. In other words, it may have been planted. No other physical evidence tied Heirens to any of the three scenes.

  There’s another factor. Like just about everyone else in Chicago, Heirens’s attorneys, brothers Malachy and John Coghlan, along with Alvin Hansen and Roland Towle, were concerned that he was guilty and felt their first responsibility was to keep him out of the electric chair. As it later turned out, while state’s attorney Tuohy also felt he was guilty, he wasn’t confident about a conviction based on the rather skimpy physical evidence of the one partial print and the possible print on the strange ransom note. So the prosecution and defense lawyers got together to talk about a plea bargain. The general agreement among them was that in exchange for a guilty plea, Heirens would receive a single life sentence for all three murders, saving him from execution and conceivably making him eligible for parole at some time in the distant future.

  Four days later, the Tribune led with the inside story of Heirens’s “second confession,” despite the fact that all concerned denied there had been one. So great was the Tribune’s prestige with this made-up account that the other Chicago papers quickly followed suit.

  As it turned out, though, the Tribune version of the murders was helpful to Heirens’s lawyers in fashioning the confession they would present for him in court, filling in many of the “details” their client claimed not to know. Heirens agreed to sign, then balked, prompting Tuohy to threaten him with adding yet another unsolved murder. Actually, Heirens was in a reform school in Indiana at the time, though Tuohy might not have been aware of or focused on this fact. Heirens’s attorneys pressured him and his parents to confess and take the plea, and as far as I can tell, genuinely thought they were serving their client’s best interests.

  On July 30, William Tuohy assembled various officials and the press in his office to hear Heirens’s official confession. At the last second, though, William Heirens balked. The defense attorneys were shocked and the state’s attorney was mortified. As soon as the public spectacle was over, Tuohy changed his offer to three life terms, instead of one, and Heirens’s lawyers warned him that the electric chair loomed if he didn’t start playing ball.

  A week later, on August 7, 1946, Heirens did, reenacting his crimes before an eager mob of media. Then, on September 5, before Chief Justice Harold G. Ward, of the Criminal Court of Cook County, William Heirens presented his confession and pled guilty to the three murders. He later said, “I confessed to save my life.” It was an eerie reprise of Hector Verburgh’s comment that had he been held and abused any longer, he “would have confessed to anything.”

  Of all those present, it seemed that the only one who doubted Heirens’s guilt was Josephine Ross’s daughter, Mary Jane Blanchard. “I cannot believe that young Heirens murdered my mother,” she told a reporter from the Chicago Herald-American. “He just does not fit into the picture of my mother’s death. I have looked at all the things Heirens stole and there was nothing of my mother’s things among them.”

  That evening, he tried to hang himself in his cell in the Cook County Jail, but he was discovered before he suffocated. He said he was in despair over being perceived as guilty and that if he were dead, maybe that perception would be different. To me, what he was saying was that he couldn’t tolerate the impossible emotional box in which he’d been placed.

  On September 5, after statements from both prosecution and defense, Judge Ward sentenced Heirens to three life terms, effectively eliminating the possibility of future parole. As Heirens was being transferred from Cook County Jail to Statesville Prison, where I would meet him more than thirty years later, Sheriff Michael Mulcahy, one of the few officials who had treated him with kindness and consideration, confided, “You probably didn’t realize this, Bill, but I’m a personal friend of Jim Degnan. He wants to know, did his daughter Suzanne suffer?”

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

  When William Heirens—frail, sickly and wheelchair-bound—passed away on March 5, 2012, at the Dixon Correctional Center, at the age of eighty-three, he was the longest-serving prisoner in the United States. In addition to his previously mentioned educational achievements, his record over the years was essentially spotless, and he had earned the respect of numerous prison officials.

  Several efforts to have him pardoned, or at least paroled and released, were mounted, the most formidable by Dolores Kennedy, a legal assistant with the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, and author of the book William Heirens: His Day in Court/Did an Innocent Teen-ager Confess to Three Grisly Murders? He was denied parole at least thirty times.

  By now, it is probably too late to determine with absolute certainty whether or not William George Heirens actually committed any or all of the three vicious murders to which he confessed. But, after examining all of the available facts and evidence, from my years of experience in profiling and criminal investigative analysis, I no longer believe him to have been a killer, and he spent the vast majority of his life behind bars for nothing. Though he is now beyond our justice, I would be happy to testify to those beliefs under oath in a court of law.

  I wish I had known enough when I first encountered Bill Heirens to have come to this conclusion and put forth these views. I have spent considerable energy both in and after my FBI service to make up for my initial naiveté.

  I have spent my career helping to put away the bad guys: kidnappers and killers, bombers and sexual predators, the worst of the worst. And I’ve derived an enormous amount of satisfaction from that pursuit. But for that effort to have any meaning, our first allegiance must always be to justice. And to approach justice, we must first seek truth—whatever it means and wherever it takes us.

  The American criminal justice process is an admirable and often copied system. But as we have noted, it is not a perfect one. Innocent people are convicted, and guilty ones evade the law or are let go, and I weep for all the victims. It is therefore incumbent upon all of us to have the humility to realize that we can, and must, improve.

  Justice is often uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean we should turn our heads away. And perfect justice is an ultimately unattainable goal for us mere mortals. But that in no way suggests we shouldn’t continually strive toward achieving it. The examinations of the cases that follow represent some of my personal steps along the way.

  MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

  CHAPTER 3

  “AN INNOCENT MAN IS GOING TO BE MURDERED TONIGHT”

  What is it about murder t
rials that capture the imagination? For me, they represent the culmination of months, sometimes years, of investigation, analysis, prosecutorial strategy and preparation of witnesses. For “normal” people, though, I think there’s something else at work.

  A murder trial is the ultimate mystery and morality play—not only a whodunit, but also an examination of what human beings are capable of at their most extreme. It is a contrast between the individual and the society in which he lives, and about emotions that we all experience played out in real life rather than suppressed in conformance to social norms. I think it is interesting to note that three of the great institutional contributions of Western culture—the drama, the Mass and the trial—are all narrative-driven pageants with three acts—a beginning, a middle and an end—that focus on the individual in relation to society, the struggle between right and wrong, and how it may ultimately be resolved.

  It is no wonder, then, that murder trials always seem to fascinate. In almost every time and place, the media focus on one particular trial to play out the ongoing conflict between truth and lies, between good and evil, between justice and lawlessness. Nowhere is that more acute than when the defendant’s own life hangs in the balance in the determination of whether or not he took the life of another.

  In 1976, through a group of five cases clumped together under the heading Gregg v. Georgia, and called by some scholars the “July 2 Cases” because of the date of the decision, the United States Supreme Court overturned a four-year moratorium on capital punishment and set forth new standards by which the death penalty could be imposed.