The Lipstick Killer
Between June 1945 and January 1946, a serial killer terrorized Chicago under the press-given name "the Lipstick Killer," responsible for three murders including that of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, who was abducted from her bedroom, strangled, and dismembered — her body parts distributed across the neighborhood's catch basins. The crimes were linked by the killer's practice of leaving taunting messages at crime scenes, including one written in lipstick that read "For heavens sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself," which gave the perpetrator his nickname.
Police arrested seventeen-year-old William Heirens in June 1946 following a rooftop struggle with officers after a burglary call. Investigators found circumstantial evidence connecting him to the murders, including a partial fingerprint and handwriting samples. Under pressure — and amid allegations of coercive interrogation — Heirens confessed to all three murders, describing an alter ego he called "George Murman" who committed the crimes. He pleaded guilty in 1946 to avoid the death penalty and received three consecutive life sentences.
Heirens spent the rest of his life in Illinois state prison, becoming the longest-serving inmate in state history. From the 1980s onward, he recanted his confessions entirely, maintaining that they had been coerced and that he was innocent of all three murders. His case attracted significant legal and journalistic scrutiny: several investigators and attorneys who reviewed the evidence concluded that the forensic case against him was extremely weak and that his confession had been extracted under duress by investigators seeking a quick resolution to a case that had gripped Chicago with terror.
William Heirens died in prison in March 2012 at age eighty-three, having served sixty-five years — longer than any inmate in Illinois history. Whether he was actually the Lipstick Killer remains genuinely contested: some criminologists believe he was guilty; others regard his conviction as one of the most troubling miscarriages of justice in American criminal history. The case became a landmark in discussions of false confessions, coercive interrogation techniques, and the reliability of criminal justice in high-pressure cases.