The 1945-6 Chicago Lipstick Killer Murders; The Teen William Heirens Letters and the George Hodel Timeline

January 26, 2024
Birch Bay, Washington

Note to Readers providing questions/responses in my Comment section.

Since the inception of my blogging (2005) I have always welcomed and encouraged questions, comments, and constructive criticisms (“feedback method that provides specific actionable suggestions for improvement”) from readers. That said, of late, I have been receiving several rude and profane responses from several of the “Don’t Mess with My Myths” followers. the “Dr. Walter Bayley Did It”  Club, and the MAGA-(Murder Ain’t a Game for Amateurs) groupies.
As I understand it, WordPress does not permit individual blocking by name, consequently, to keep my COMMENTS section open to readers, I have to remove the profane messages as they are received. This I will continue to do.

In today’s blog, I want to present some personal letters written by young William Heirens (age 17), arrested for a daytime burglary and six months later, charged as the “Chicago Lipstick Murderer” and forced to “confess” to three horrific crimes HE DID NOT COMMIT. * These letters, written to his mother while in custody, were unbeknownst to young Heirens “intercepted” by the Chicago PD and leaked to the public and two years later, in 1948,  reprinted in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 38, Issue 4, “Psychiatric Study of William Heirens.” (Complete PDF attached)
* Numerous other “suspects” (at least six to my knowledge) had been arrested, brutalized and wrongfully accused of being “The Lipstick Murderer” by Chicago PD in the six months preceding young Heirens arrest. One of the arrestees sued the police department and was eventually awarded a large dollar settlement for his injuries and false arrest. 

 The Heirens letters will be followed by my Dr. George Hill Hodel’s Timeline, as some of the recent naysayers wrongfully claim it was “not possible for Dr. Hodel to commit the crimes as he was in China.” I will include excerpts from a copy from the book, The China Letter (Thoughtprint Press 2020) published three years ago, where I document my father’s movements in 1945-1946.

But first, let’s take a bullet point reality check and examine some of the facts surrounding William Heiren’s arrest and so-called “conviction.” (SKH Note- The teenager William Heirens, was never “convicted” of any crime. There was no trial, just his forced “confession” and sentencing to prison where he spent the next sixty-five years incarcerated and died on March 12, 2012, at age 83.

William Heirens a few years before his death 2012

• William Heirens was a 17-year-old teenager and small-time opportunist burglar who did not drive and had no car and took the bus to the north side of Chicago to commit his daytime burglaries. He had a prior record, with no violence, and was on juvenile probation and attending college at Chicago University.

• 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 ill the living room. As he exited, a neighbor yelled out. A call was quickly made to the 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.

  17-year-old William Heirens booking June 26, 1946

• In the 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.”

• 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.

  (Excerpt from the transcript):

  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 a “5” 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.

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

Backward G Clef was written by “Lipstick Killer” on Degnan Note which Heirens was unable to reproduce for attorneys.

G Clef

• The below map shows the location of the “Murder Room” and the distribution of Suzanne Degnan’s body parts. It is inconceivable that a teenage boy, alone on foot without a car, could with a surgeon’s skill, in a darkened basement, using a hunting knife, perform a hemicorporectomy then carry and distribute the body parts and hide them in the sewers as far as three blocks away from the crime secene as shown below?
  

• After the Chicago coroner examined the assembled pieces of Suzanne Degnan’s body parts, he concluded: “It was a very clean job with absolutely no signs of hacking as would be evident if a dull tool was used.” Dr. Jerry Kearns, the coroner’s expert, added: “The killer had to be an expert. … Not even the average doctor could be so skillful.”

  SKH Note- The Chicago Coroner’s report determined that a surgical procedure known as a “hemicorporectomy”  had been performed on the Degan child’s body. Her killer divided the body by cutting through the 2nd and 3rd lumbar vertebrae, identical to the procedure performed on Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short one year later. (Short’s body was posed off a street named DEGNAN, the name of the child murdered in Chicago a year earlier.)  William Heriens, a teenager with no surgical training would not have been able to perform this operation as he claimed he did, “in a darkened basement using a hunting knife.”

• There were four taunting notes written by “Chicago’s Lipstick Killer” as shown below. On January 31, 1946, the killer stole a human ear from a Chicago Medical Laboratory and mailed it in a cardboard box to the Degnan residence threatening to “cut off Mrs. Degan’s ear next.” (I would postulate this action (obtain a human ear from a medical lab) while easily accessible and attributable to a psychopathic medical doctor; is much more difficult to conceive being attributed to the actions of a teenage student.)

   
Degnan Jan 7, 1946,      Frances Brown, Dec. 10, 1945, Degnan   Jan 7, 1946, Degnan human ear sent to her mother Jan 31, 1946

Here we see that in the Frances Brown and Suzanne Degnan murders the killer, used red lipstick to write his messages, just as he did on the L.A. Lone Woman Murder victim, Jeanne French just over one year later. In those crimes, the killer wrote on a wall, a post, and in the L.A. murder on the victim’s body.
Also, note that the killer writes, “Catch Me Before I Kill More, I Cannot Control Myself” just as “Zodiac” in 1969 wrote in his handwritten messages:

                  ” …I will loose control again..”                                          ” …I will loose all control of my self..”

THE HEIRENS LETTERS:

Here are the letters the teenager wrote to his mother while in jail in the months after his arrest and before he was sent to prison. Judge for yourself if these are the words of a highly skilled serial killer or those of a frightened teenager who has recently been subjected to police brutality and threatened with “confess or die.” (That is not in question. The newspapers of the day printed the fact that “Heiren’s attorney is advising him to plead guilty and “take the State’s offer of life in prison to avoid execution.” Heirens did so, but then immediately recanted his “confession” claiming he was coerced and that he did not commit any of the murders.

The Heirens Letters to his mother were unknowingly “intercepted” by Chicago PD in the months shortly after his arrest on June 26, 1946.

 Dr. George Hill Hodel’s TIMELINE was recreated by me and published in his “The China Letter” book, published in 2020.

Attached below is the “psychiatric study” published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 38, Issue 4 in 1948. The “study” was conducted by three psychiatrists, Drs. Kennedy/Hoffman/Haines, which to my reading comes off mostly as “psychobabble.” They ask extremely leading questions as if they have already predetermined that he the teenager is a sexual psychopath. Much to their dismay, Heiren’s response to their questions is surprisingly normal. (He admits making up an alternate ego named “George” (hows that for coincidence) which just happens also to be his middle name.) Again, judge for yourself.

Psychiatric Study of William Heirens

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