SUZANNE DEGNAN - 6 yo - (1946) /Convicted: William Heirens Chicago IL

notorious 'Lipstick Killer' dies in Illinois pen


Tuesday, March 06, 2012, 10:42 PM


Chicago -- William Heirens, the notorious "Lipstick Killer" who
confessed to three murders on Chicago's North Side in the 1940s, has
died.

Heirens, 83, was pronounced dead at 8:45 p.m. CST Monday at the
University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, according to the Cook
County medical examiner's office. He was the longest-serving inmate in
Illinois history.


AP FILE PHOTO A young William Heirens stands outside the Illinois State Penitentiary in
Joliet, surrounded by prison guards, on Sept. 6, 1946.
Officials at Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon found Heirens
unresponsive in his cell and he was brought to the UIC Medical Center, a
medical examiner's spokeswoman said. An autopsy is scheduled.

Heirens was a 17-year-old college student when he confessed to
killing two women in their homes and strangling 6-year-old Suzanne
Degnan, whose body was dismembered and disposed of in the city's sewers.

The slayings caused a media sensation in 1940s Chicago. "For heaven's
sake, catch me before I kill more," read a message scrawled in lipstick
on the wall of one victim's apartment. "I cannot control myself."

Heirens said he confessed to avoid an almost certain sentence of
death in the electric chair. He recanted his admissions of guilt and,
ever since, maintained he was innocent.

Suzanne Degnan's older sister, Betty Finn, said Heirens' death will
prevent her children from having to relive the horror of her sister's
murder every year, as she and her brother have done for the last 29
years while attending Heirens' parole hearings in an effort to ensure
that he remained in custody.

"I was always worried I would die before he did, and I didn't want my
children to have to go through this and go to parole hearings," said
Finn, who was 10 when her sister was killed.

Finn, whose bedroom was next to Suzanne's, said the horror of her
sister's abduction and murder is still painfully clear. "Your mother
comes to wake you up to go to school and [your sister's]not there," she
said. "It was terrifying."

ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS/ VIA APWilliam Heirens, in an undated photo, in his later years during incaercration.
Finn, of Wilmette, Ill., had bars installed across her bedroom window
after her sister's death, and she rode to school in a police car for a
time after the murder because of the attention surrounding the case and
the fear that -- until Heirens was arrested -- the killer was still
free.

Finn said she never doubted Heirens' guilt, but she said her desire
to keep him in prison for his entire life was not motivated by a desire
for vengeance.

"Hopefully he's at peace and we don't have to worry about it
anymore," Finn said. "I hope he made amends. I never wished him ill. I
just wanted him in prison for everybody's safety. It was never out of
retribution. It was out of fear that he could hurt somebody else, and if
we did not go to all these parole hearings and protest it and he got
out and he hurt a child, you just couldn't live with it."

Jim Degnan, who was born 10 months after his sister, Suzanne, was
killed, described the news of Heirens' death as "a moment of relief."

"It's over," said Degnan, 65, who had attended Heirens' parole
hearings for the last three decades, urging authorities to keep him
behind bars. "I just never thought this day would come. I was numbed by
the previous 29 years of going to parole board hearings."

Degnan, a Northbrook, Ill., resident, said his parents often spoke of
Suzanne but never discussed her death or mentioned Heirens. He said he
didn't learn of the circumstances of her death until a classmate told
him about the murder when he was in fifth or sixth grade, prompting him
to ask his parents about it.

Degnan said he researched the case against Heirens while he was in
his 20s, after Heirens began claiming he was innocent. After examining
some of the evidence and speaking with law enforcement officials and a
retired judge, he said he was satisfied that Heirens was guilty.

"I always waited for the other shoe to drop, and it never did,"
Degnan said of Heirens' claims that he was innocent. "They had [decades]
to prove it, but they didn't."

Despite being a model prisoner, Heirens was denied parole more than
two dozen times. At a parole hearing in 1991, Assistant State's Attorney
Thomas Epach Jr. scoffed at Heirens' claims of innocence.

Epach noted that Heirens' fingerprints were found on a ransom note in
the Degnan case and in the apartment of one of the other murder
victims.

Epach also said that when Heirens was arrested six months after
Suzanne Degnan's murder, he aimed a gun at a Chicago police officer and
pulled the trigger twice. The weapon misfired.

In addition to the three murders, Heirens pleaded guilty to assault
to kill the officer, robbery and 25 burglaries and was sentenced to an
additional term of one year to life in prison, Epach said.

"This is a man who cut a helpless little girl into six pieces and
decapitated her, who murdered two women in their homes and remained with
their bodies, bathing them," Epach said. "Before Stephen King ever
thought of any of these kinds of acts, William Heirens was doing them."

An official with the Illinois Department of Corrections was unavailable for comment Tuesday morning.

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