The Lipstick Killer: Josephine Ross, Frances Brown and Suzanne Degnan

Episode 1The Murder of Josephine Ross

Part 1Cold Open

She fought him. That is the first thing the record gives you, and it gives it to you sideways. Not a scream a neighbor heard. Not a door broken off its hinges. Not a lamp knocked over in the front room. It gives it to you in her hand. When they found her, one of her fists was closed around several short black hairs.

Whatever happened in that flat, she got a hold of him first. The address was 4108 North Kenmore Avenue on the north side of Chicago. She was 43 years old. Her name was Josephine Ross. She was on a bed, and the bed was a ruin.

Nude, lying on a mattress soaked through. She had been cut four times across the throat. Deep cuts. One of them opened the jugular vein. Somebody had taken a red dress and tied it around her neck with a stocking. Her gown was in the bathtub.

So were her pyjamas. Both of them in a few inches of bloody water. Somebody had tried to rinse them out. And nothing had been taken. No money, no jewelry. Nothing missing from the flat at all. Then there is the detail that does not belong with any of the others.

The wounds on her throat had been covered. Strips of adhesive tape laid across the cuts, drawing the edges together. Closed up. The way you close a cut on a child's knee and the tape was dry. Cut a living woman's throat and the tape soaks through. That tape had never touched blood that was still moving. It went on afterwards. It went on after Josephine Ross had finished bleeding to death. So here is the shape of it. He killed her. And then he stayed. He stayed long enough to tape her throat shut. Long enough to carry her things into the bathroom and rinse them under the tap. And then he left. And by the account the police took from the janitor, he left by the back. Down the fire escape somewhere between noon and one. He was tall. He had dark hair. He was wearing a light colored sweater. That is the man. That is everything anybody has ever had of him. This is how a case is forgotten. Not in a locked drawer. Not in some small town where nobody was watching. And not in a file that nobody opened.

A case is forgotten in the middle of a city of three million people. On a street with a name. In a building with a number. In front of the police. And the coroner. And the newspapers. A woman is murdered on a Tuesday. And by the next Tuesday everybody has gone home.

Part 2Show Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby. Tonight we start something a little different. This is the first of three episodes, one case told three times, once for each of the women it happened to. Now, before we get into it, I wanna tell you something about how we pick these stories because we are about to break one of our own rules. We don't usually do famous cases, that's on purpose.

When a case gets famous, what gets famous is the killer. His name, his face, his motive, his childhood. The people he killed get one line in the middle of his story and then their scenery. That's the whole reason this show exists, to go back and pick up the people. But this one is famous, you know the name. If you know anything about true crime in Chicago, you know what they called him. And here's why we're doing it anyway.

Because there were three women, three women in seven months, in one city. And the first one has almost nothing written about her. No book chapter, no documentary, no nickname of her own. She was killed in June, five months before the case had a name. And by the time the name arrived, she had already been folded into somebody else's story and left there. That's the woman we're starting with, Josephine Ross, 43 years old,

4108 North Kenmore Avenue. And here's the thing I wanna put in front of you before we go any further, because it's the reason this story matters and it's the reason we're telling it. The police worked her murder for eight days. Eight days, one captain, one coroner, and not one other officer we can put a name to. And then it went quiet.

Five months later, when the second woman was killed, the city built a task force, a chief of detectives. Captains, a fingerprint expert, the state's attorney, the FBI laboratory, hundreds of people questioned, 170 polygraphs. For the first one, eight days. That's not a cold case. That's a case that was never warm. So over these three episodes, we're going to do the thing that nobody did in 1945. We're going to find out who Josephine Ross was, the three marriages, the two daughters, the house on Kenmore, the husband, who painted portraits for a living. All of it is in the record. All of it was findable. It just took somebody looking.

And at the end of this series, I'm going to tell you what I think happened. Not just what the record says, what I think. I'll show you my work and I'll tell you what would change my mind. Now real quick, if you're a first time listener, hit that subscribe button. So when the next two episodes drop, you'll be the first to know. And then head over to Section29 .com. That's where the case file for this one lives with the sources, the certificates, the photographs, and the newspapers I've been working from.

A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is a true story built from the record, the death certificates, the census pages, the coroner's files, and the newspapers of 1945. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out because that's the best way to live a story. The opinions you hear are mine. And in this one, I've got a few. And this is a murder and there is more than one in it. And some of what's coming is hard to hear.

So listener discretion. All right, three women, seven months, one city. This is the story of the one they forgot first. Now let's get on with the show.

Part 3The Woman on Kenmore

Before she was a name in a coroner's ledger, she was a girl in southern Minnesota, Josephine Alice Lunde. Everyone called her Josie. She was born the 5th of March, 1902, in Hayfield, Dodge County, Minnesota. Farm country, flat and cold, settled thick with Norwegians. Her parents were John and Anna Lunde, and she was the 4th of their 5 children.

And the only girl. By the spring of 1910, the family had come apart. The census taker who came to the house that April wrote down Anna Lunde, 41, born in Norway, divorced. And then in the column for children, 5 born and 5 living. Alfred, 15, Oliver, 13, Herman, 12, Josie, 9, Obert, 6. Under occupation, it says washwoman at home. A Norwegian woman in a small Minnesota town, divorced, raising 5 children alone, and taking in washing to do it. There is a lodger in the house that year too, a 19 year old named Jacob Frantsch.

That is the whole household. That is what Josie Lunde was 8 years old inside of. Her father was alive. He lived another 19 years. He just wasn't there. 10 years later, the family had moved, and so had she. January 2, 1920. The enumerator found them inside somebody else's house. Anna was the housekeeper for a man named Gilbert Olson. And on line 19, Lunde, Josephine, a daughter, female, white, 18, single, Minnesota, student. She was still in school. Her brothers were working by then, 24, 21, 20, and Josie was 18 years old and a student living in her mother's employer's house. Not long after that, she was married. She married 3 times. The first was John Walsh. The second was Herbert Miller. Both of those marriages ended in divorce, and each of them left her a daughter.

Jane, born about 1923, Josephine's daughter by John Walsh. Jacqueline, born about 1927, Josephine's daughter by Herbert Miller. So before she married Herbert Ross, she had been married twice, divorced twice, and was raising two small girls. And each of them carried her own father's name, because that is how it worked, and because neither of those men stayed.

On the 18th of December, 1931, she married for the third time. Herbert P. Ross, and on the marriage record she gave her name as Josephine Lunde, her maiden name, the name she'd started with, which is what a woman who has been divorced twice tends to do. By 1940, they were in Chicago, and they were four.

April 2, 1940, a rented flat in the 48th Ward, $40 a month. The census page lists them in order, Herbert P. Ross, 39, head of the household, born in Wisconsin, insurance agent, Josephine, 38, wife, born in Minnesota, no occupation, Jacqueline, 12, daughter, in school, Walsh, Mary Jane, 16, stepdaughter, two girls, one flat, and one surname, each that belonged to a different man. That is the household.

That is what the four of them were. Herbert was a portrait painter. That is what his death certificate says in his own line years later. Portrait painter, under occupation and under industry, own a business. These censuses say insurance agent. Somewhere in those years, he changed trade or was doing both.

On the 8th of July, 1944, he died of a coronary at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue, aged 43. He was buried at Irving Park three days later. The family had moved to Kenmore about a year before that. That both of their death certificates put the move in the middle of 1943 and they agree with each other. So when Josephine Ross was widowed, she was 42 years old and she was alone in the flat on Kenmore with the younger girl. She had lived in that apartment for two years when she died in it. That is who she was and none of it. Not the town. Not the mother taking in washing. Not the two marriages before Ross. Not the two daughters. Not the painter.

None of it is in the file on her murder. It took weeks to find. Census pages, marriage records, death certificates, a headstone. It was all there. It had been there the whole time. Nobody had gone looking.

Part 4Tuesday, the Fifth of June

Tuesday the 5th of June 1945. At 4108 North Kenmore Avenue on the north side of Chicago, Josephine Ross had lived for two years. She was 43 years old. She had been a widow for 11 months. The apartment had been hers and Herbert's. He had died in it the summer before. A coronary in the same rooms. After that there were three of them left in the flat and then two Josephine and the younger girl.

Her younger daughter worked in a food store at Wilson Avenue and Broadway. That is a few blocks east and a few blocks north. A short walk. Jacqueline Miller was 17 years old. She came home for lunch. She found her mother on the bed.

The police would say afterward that the woman was lying naked on a mattress that had been soaked through. That her throat had been cut four times, deeply, and that one of the cuts had opened the jugular vein. That a red dress had been tied around her neck and knotted at the throat with a stocking. They would say that her gown and her pajamas were in the bathtub in a few inches of bloody water, still in the tub, still wet when the police arrived. And they would say that nothing in the apartment had been disturbed. Nothing was missing, not money, not jewelry, not the small things people keep. There was nothing in that flat to suggest that anybody had come there for anything except Josephine Ross. There is one more thing, and it belongs to the scene rather than to the list. The wounds on her throat had been covered. Somebody had laid strips of adhesive tape across them and drawn the edges together. It had already dried. You cannot tape a wound like that and have the tape dry, not on a living person. The tape was put on after she had finished bleeding. It was put on by whoever cut her sometime in the minutes after she died in that apartment with the door closed. He was still in the flat when she was dead, long enough to tape her up and long enough to run her clothes under the tap in her own bathroom. Then he left. And the record of how he left and which way is the next thing that happens in this story.

And it does not come from the police. What happened next in that building? Who was called? How long it took? Who came through that door first? Nobody wrote down. What got written down is the rest of this story. What the police were told over the following days. What the coroner found. What the newspapers printed. The young woman who found her mother was taken somewhere else. She had a sister, 21, and married, living in the city. She had a stepfather who had died 11 months earlier. Her mother had been married three times and two of those marriages had ended in divorce.

Jacqueline Miller was 17 and that is where this story stops being only Josephine Ross's. Because the moment a body is found on a bed in a locked Chicago flat and nothing has been taken, the case belongs to somebody who is not a victim and not a witness and not a family. A man with a rank and a station house and a week ahead of him. The man who ran it, the only one we can name, was a captain out of Town Hall Station on the north side.

His name was Frank Reynolds. For the next eight days, this is his case. What he did with it is on the record, what he testified to, what he refused to say, what he asked a federal commissioner to do, and what he announced into a newspaper on the 12th of June. What he thought about any of it is not on the record at all. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody asked him. So the rest of this, the leads, the men brought in the knives, the witnesses, the girl they put on a lie detector a week later, is what he did. And it starts on Wednesday morning.

Part 5The Two Daughters

Josephine Ross had two daughters. Their names were Jane and Jacqueline. They were not sisters in the way that word usually means. They had the same mother, different fathers, four years between them and one flat. Jane was the older. She was born in Minnesota around 1923, and her father was Josephine's first husband, John Walsh, which is where her surname came from. The census taker in 1940 wrote her down as Mary Jane. The newspapers called her Jane. By June of 1945 she was married and in print she is Mrs. Jane Blanchard. Jacqueline was the younger, born around 1927. Her father was Josephine's second husband, Herbert Miller, and that is where her surname came from. She was 17 years old. She is the one who came home for lunch. There is a document that puts the two of them in one sentence. April 2nd, 1940. A census taker came to the flat and wrote four people down. Against the two girls' names, in the column headed Relationship to Head of Household, he wrote two different things. Jacqueline, daughter. Walsh, Mary Jane, stepdaughter. Two girls, one flat. One mother, two fathers. And the enumerator drew the line himself because he could see it. Now here is the part of this story that is easy to walk past. Jane Walsh Blanchard informed on her mother's death certificate. She sat down with the coroner's people and gave them everything. Her mother's date of birth, her parents' names and where they were from, what her mother did and where she lived, her mother's occupation, her mother's grave. She was 21 years old. She had done it once before. 11 months earlier, July of 1944, she informed on the death certificate of Herbert Ross, her mother's third husband, the man who had been in the house since she was eight. He had died of a coronary on the 8th of July in the same apartment, and Jane was the one who supplied the facts of his life to the coroner's office. She was 20. Both times she gave the same address. 4108 North Kenmore. Twice in 11 months. The same young woman, the same flat, the same form. And the next day, Wednesday the 6th of June, a photographer from the Chicago Tribune went into that apartment. The picture ran on page 34 under this caption. Mrs. Jane Blanchard left and Jacqueline Miller with dog Peggy, in apartment at 4108 Kenmore Avenue where mother, Mrs. Josephine Ross, was found dead, her throat cut. Two sisters, a dog. The room their mother had died in, less than two days earlier. They sat for it. And here is the thing that matters more than anything else in this episode. Nearly everything you are going to hear about Josephine Ross's life came from her children. Her three marriages, her two daughters, the divorces, the husband's names. The victim's marriages to John Walsh and Herbert Miller, the Tribune wrote on the 6th of June, ended in divorce, the daughter said. Not from a record, not from Josephine, from her two girls on the day after they lost her. They are the reason we can tell you who she was at all. They buried their mother and the man who raised them inside a single year. And then they told a reporter the truth about their mother's life.

Part 6Wednesday, The Man from Hammond

The first lead in the murder of Josephine Ross came from her own children. Jane and Jacqueline went to the police and told them about a man. They said he had been attentive to their mother, that he had asked her to marry him more than once, and that their mother had refused him and kept refusing him and had tried to make him understand that the answer was no. His name was Chester Rice. He was an ex convict. He worked as a switch engine operator, and by the time the police were finished talking to the two girls, they knew roughly where to find him. They found him in Hammond, Indiana, about 25 miles from the flat on Kenmore, across the state line. He was brought back and held for questioning, and the police said he told them that he had known her and that he had been in love with her. They said that when they told him she was dead, he burst into tears. They also said he had been drinking when they picked him up, and when they searched his room, they found a white sweater. That is the first day's work, and it is worth pausing on what it actually is. A man who wanted to marry a woman and was turned down. A daughter's testimony. A state line. A sweater. Nothing about it is absurd. This is what a real investigation looks like in its first 24 hours. Somebody who knew her names, somebody who wanted her, and a car goes and gets him. There is no laboratory, no task force, no profile. There is a name and a road and a room to search. And by Wednesday night, Chester Rice was free. He had been held for questioning, and he was released. As far as the record of this case shows, he was never charged with anything to do with Josephine Ross. He was the first man the police brought in, and he was out inside a day. There was one thing in that flat that did not fit anywhere, and it did not fit on Wednesday either. The wounds on her throat had been taped. Somebody had closed them up with strips of adhesive and drawn the edges together, and there was no explanation for it that the police could reach. It did not belong to the stabbing, it did not belong to the robbery that hadn't happened, it did not belong to the man from Hammond, and it did not belong to anybody else they had a name for. It was simply there, in the middle of the case, with nobody attached to it. It would still be there at the end of the week. And that same day, something else began. More quietly. The inquest opened. A coroner's inquest into the death of Josephine Alice Ross was convened in Cook County. The formal proceeding that would put the circumstances of her death on a legal record, take whatever testimony existed, and produce a finding. It did not finish that day. It was continued, put over to June the 27th. Which is what happens when a hearing is opened, and the police who are supposed to bring it evidence are still working. So, at the end of Wednesday, a dead woman with her throat cut four times. A daughter who found her. A suitor arrested and released. A sweater in a room in Indiana. A length of tape nobody could explain. And a legal proceeding opened that would wait three weeks for its answers. Nobody in Chicago was alarmed. There was no reason to be. It was one woman in one flat, and the police had a name. The trouble was that the name did not hold.

Part 7Thursday, The Fire Escape, and the Woman Five Blocks Away

By Thursday, the police had a description and they had put it out. Tall, dark hair, a light colored sweater. That was the man seen leaving the building at 4108 North Kenmore. And from that day forward, it was the shape the whole thing was looking for. And the man who put it there, the only person who saw him, was the janitor. His name was Elmer Nelson. He worked in that building. He knew the stairs, the back hall, and the fire escape the way you know a place you sweep every day. And on the afternoon of Tuesday, the 5th of June, somewhere between noon and one o 'clock, he saw a man come down out of 4108 North Kenmore and leave by the back, down the fire escape. The man was tall and his hair was dark and he was well dressed. And he was wearing a light colored sweater with what may have been blood on it. That is the only eyewitness description of a possible killer in the whole of this case. Three words of it are the man's appearance. And one of them is a garment, which matters because a white sweater is a thing you can look for. And they did. When the police searched Chester Rice's room in Hammond, Indiana, they found a white sweater. And that was not enough either because a man can own a white sweater. There is a second thing that happened on that same Tuesday and almost nobody has ever written about it. Five blocks away from 4108 North Kenmore, there was a woman in a basement. Her name was Eileen Huffman. She was 34 years old and she lived at 650 Waveland Avenue. She was in the basement of her own building, doing whatever it is you go down to a basement to do when a man came in. He had a gun. He made her put her hands together and he tied her wrists with clothesline. And then he tried to rape her. She screamed and he ran. That is her account and she gave it to the police herself. Read the shape of it again. A man, a gun, a length of rope, a woman alone in a basement, five blocks from where another woman's body was lying on a bed. And then this. The police said the man who did it answered the description of the man seen leaving the Kenmore building. Tall, dark hair, light colored sweater. So on the 5th of June 1945, the same day Josephine Ross was killed, there was a man in that neighborhood with a gun and a length of clothesline and he was going into buildings. She got away because she screamed, not because he stopped, not because somebody came, because she made a noise and he chose not to stay. She is the only person who saw that man at arm's length in a lit room with nothing between them. Now, the story of Josephine Ross's murder is not the story of that man's capture. It is the story of how close they came to him and how fast they stopped looking. And on that same Thursday, something else came out and it came out in a courtroom. The inquest had been opened on Wednesday and put over to the 27th. But before it was continued, one thing went on the record and it went on the record because the police had found it and told the coroner. In one of Josephine Ross's hands, closed, they had found several short black hairs. Her hand had come away with hair in it, short and black. The description said dark haired and she had a piece of him in her fist. The newspaper that printed it said the hairs may aid in identifying the slayer. The hairs went into the file and nothing ever came of them. And the two men they had been holding were let go. Chester Rice of Hammond, Indiana, released and never charged. And a second man, Oscar Nordmark, who had been brought in because he had also been seeing Josephine Ross and who was let go on an alibi given by a woman named Frances Ceran, which is all this case ever says about him. The two men who knew her were out. And the man from the basement, the one with the gun and the length of clothesline and the description that fit, had no name at all. And Eileen Huffman, she told the police what happened to her. She gave them the description. She is in the record for one day. And then she is never heard from again. Not in the papers that month. Not in the files we can find. Not in any of the books or the accounts written since. A 34 year old woman who was attacked in her own basement, five blocks from a murder by a man who fit. And the investigation that had her account never spoke to her again. She is the one person alive in this whole story who could have said, that's him. And nobody went back.

Part 8Friday, The Neighbour with the Knife

Friday, the 8th of June, 1945. And for one day, the police had everything. The man's name was Lawrence Gates, and he lived at 4062 Kenmore Avenue, a few doors from where Josephine Ross was killed. He was 32 years old, and he had been in custody since the day of the murder, picked up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the 5th of June, not for anything to do with Josephine Ross, but on a warrant out of California. He was wanted there for a burglary and for robbing a gas station in a place called Mill Valley near San Francisco in May of the year before. So a neighbor four doors away was already in a cell for something else. And then they looked at him, tall, slim, dark hair. That is how the newspapers described Lawrence Gates. And that is what the witnesses had said about the man on the fire escape, tall and dark haired. A captain named Frank Reynolds stood up in a federal hearing room on Friday and said it out loud that Gates's description tallied with what the witnesses had given that the man they were holding matched the man they were looking for. And there was a knife. The blade of a bolo knife had been found near Gates's house. A bolo knife is not a pocket knife. It is a heavy curved chopping blade, a working knife from the Philippines and a cutting tool rather than a stabbing one. And Josephine Ross had not been stabbed. She had been cut four deep gashes across the throat, one of them straight through the jugular. The wound on that bed looked like an edged weapon. The police had found an edge, a few doors from her flat. And Reynolds said the police believed the blade was his. And then they did something that shows how seriously the case had moved. They brought the witnesses into the courtroom. Several of the people who had seen the man leaving 4108 North Kenmore were placed in the back of the room where they could see the prisoner and he could not see them. And they were asked to look at Lawrence Gates. Nobody has ever told us what they said. Captain Reynolds refused to say. He was asked and he would not answer and the hearing moved on. But then he did something else. He asked the commissioner to raise the man's bond. Gates was being held on a federal bond of $3,500 for the California charge. That was the number on the paper.

Reynolds asked for $35,000, 10 times as much. The commissioner granted it. Read that again because it is the loudest thing in the whole file. A police captain walked into a courtroom, put witnesses behind a screen to look at a prisoner, would not say what they reported, and then asked a federal commissioner to multiply that man's bond by 10. The commissioner did it. Nobody wrote down what the witnesses said. But the number they put on Lawrence Gates suggests they said something. He did not go quietly. Gates cursed at the assistant United States attorney in open court and threatened him. And he denied everything. He said he knew nothing about the murder of Josephine Ross. Nothing at all. He said he was divorced and that he had two young daughters living in Los Angeles. He was already facing a burglary charge in another state and a gas station robbery. And now he was being held in Chicago on a bond that had just gone up 10 times. And he was saying he had nothing to do with any of it. So here is where the week had got to by Friday night. A dead woman, a neighbor in custody, a description that matched, a knife blade found near his house, witnesses brought in to look at him, and a bond that a judge put at $35,000. This is what a case looks like when it is about to break. They had a man, and they had him close, and they had him cheap. He was already locked up on somebody else's warrant, so they did not even have to charge him to keep him. If you were in that courtroom on Friday and you watched Frank Reynolds ask for 10 times the bond, you would have thought this was finished. There was one thing nobody had settled though. Gates had been arrested on the 5th of June, the day Josephine Ross died. And the man on the fire escape was seen at 4108 North Kenmore between noon and 1 o'clock. So the question was simple, and it was the only question that mattered. What time did they pick him up? If the FBI took Lawrence Gates into custody before noon, he was in a cell when that man came down the fire escape. He could not have been the man the janitor saw. He could not have done it that way, at that hour. If they took him after 1 o'clock, then the timings line up, and the man in the cell is the man on the stairs. The newspapers do not give the time. The court file does not give the time. Nobody has ever published it. It is one line in one arrest record, and it is the difference between a case closed and a case closed over. On Friday night, the police had everything. Except the hour.

Part 9The Following Tuesday

Monday, the 11th of June, a week after. And there was still one thing in the case that nobody could explain, the tape on her throat. Somebody had closed the wounds with strips of adhesive and drawn the edges together, and the police had no account of it at all. It had been sitting in the middle of this case since the first afternoon, attached to nobody. So they went looking for the person who could have put it there. There are only two kinds of people who could have taped those wounds. The person who cut her, or somebody who came in afterwards and found her. And they had already identified the somebody who came in afterwards. It was her daughter. So on Monday, the 11th of June, the police put Jacqueline Miller on a lie detector. She was 17. That is what the newspaper says. And it is worth reading exactly as it was printed, because the wording carries the whole thing.

Miss Jacqueline Miller, 17, of 4108 Kenmore Avenue, who a week ago found her mother slain in their apartment, was questioned on the lie detector yesterday by police, seeking an explanation for the presence of adhesive bandages covering slash wounds in the victim's throat. Seeking an explanation.

They wanted to know whether the girl had done it, not whether she had killed her mother, whether she had taped the wounds after finding the body, whether the thing in that flat that made no sense had come from her hands. The machine said no. The tests indicated that Miss Miller had been truthful in her earlier statements that she had not applied the bandages after discovering the body. She passed. And that is what the test was for. And that is what it bought them. Because look at what it left them with. If the girl didn't tape her mother's throat, then the person who did was the person who cut it. And then the next thing follows. And it is the thing this case never got past. The tape, police said, was dry and apparently had been affixed by the murderer after Miss Miller's mother, Mrs. Josephine Ross, had bled to death. The man who killed Josephine Ross stayed in that flat after she was dead and taped her throat closed and rinsed her clothes in the bathroom. The police knew that on the 11th of June 1945. They knew it because a 17 year old girl had been put on a machine and asked, and because the machine said she was telling the truth. Now, was it wrong what they did? Not on the evidence. She was the last known person in that flat. She was the one who found the body. When a scene contains an act nobody can account for and one living person was there, you start with the living person. Departments still do it. And she was cleared. And the clearing was correct. And it moved the case forward because it told them the tape was the killer's. But she was 17 years old. Her father was out of the household and had been for years. Her stepfather had died the summer before. Her mother had been murdered in the apartment she was standing in and she had walked in and found her. And seven days later they sat her down, put wires on her, and asked her whether she had done it. That is not in the file as a criticism of anybody. There is no report in which anyone says this was wrong. It is just what happened to her. And it is on the record, one paragraph long on page 19 of the Chicago Tribune. And then the week ended.

Tuesday, the 12th of June, seven days after the murder, the best lead the police had was in a cell on a $35,000 bond. There was a knife blade and a description and a janitor and a woman five blocks away who had given them a statement. And Captain Frank Reynolds gave the newspapers a sentence. All persons taken into custody for questioning concerning the crime have been released. Everybody home. The man from Hammond. The man from Fremont Street with the alibi. And that is the last thing anybody says about the murder of Josephine Ross for a while. Eight days from the body on the bed to the empty cells. And then the case went quiet.

Part 10The Inquest, and the Silence

Wednesday, the 27th of June, 1945. Three weeks after the murder and the date the inquest had been put over to. An inquest is where a death stops being a death and becomes an official finding. Somebody takes testimony, somebody decides what happened, and the answer goes on a piece of paper with a number on it. Josephine Ross's inquest had been opened on the 6th of June and continued to this date, and what the record holds from it is what was already read into it three weeks earlier. The hairs.

Several short black hairs closed in one of her hands. That is the last thing the machinery did with Josephine Ross. And then the summer. July. August. And in August, the war ended. The city had been waiting four years for that week, and it got it, and Chicago filled the streets. The photographs from that month are of crowds.

September. October. November. Nobody was ever charged with the murder of Josephine Ross. No arrest. No suspect named publicly. No reward. No composite drawing. No citywide search for a tall dark-haired man in a light-colored sweater. The last thing the police said in public was that sentence from the 12th of June that everyone taken into custody had been released. The official answer was written down three days after she died, and it fits in one line. On the coroner's certificate, the paper with the registration number on it, the one that makes a death a fact, the manner of Josephine Ross's death is given as caused by sharp instrument held in hands of person unknown. That is the finding. Not a name. A blank where the name goes. The most complete official document anybody ever made about Josephine Ross's murder names her, describes what was done to her, and then declines to name the person who did it. Because in June of 1945, nobody knew. And the flat on Kenmore stayed occupied. A week after the murder, the Chicago Tribune still had the daughter living there. Miss Jacqueline Miller, 17, of 4108 Kenmore Avenue. The same girl who had been on the lie detector, still at the address. A 17-year-old girl in the apartment where her mother had been found, while the case around her went quiet. People ask what a cold case looks like. It does not look like a room with a sign on the door. It looks like this. A calendar turning. A city with something bigger to think about. A file with a name on it, sitting in a building, not moving. And this one had a great deal to move with. A description. Tall, dark-haired, light sweater. A bolo knife blade found near a neighbor's house. A white sweater in a room in Indiana. A janitor who watched a man come down the fire escape between noon and one o'clock. And a woman five blocks away who had a gun held on her in her own basement and who gave the police a statement about it. And a 17-year-old put on a machine to find out whether she had taped her mother's throat, who told the truth. And in telling it, told the police that the man who cut her mother was still in that room when she was dead. Her killer was never identified. Not convicted. Not charged. Not named. Eight days of police work. Then a summer of nothing. By the end of 1945, Josephine Ross had been dead for six months and forgotten for five of them. But everything about Josephine Ross is not in that file. And that is not because it isn't there. It is because nobody went and got it.

Part 11THEN, What He Never Learned

What follows is not in the file, and the reason it is not in the file is not that it was hard to find. It was in the census. 1910. A Norwegian woman in a small Minnesota town, divorced, five children, taking in washing with a lodger in the house, a girl of eight in that house named Josephine. 1920. The same family in somebody else's home, and the girl is 18 and still in school. 1940. A rented flat in Chicago. Four people, $40 a month. Her, her husband, two girls with two different fathers. It was in the marriage records. Three of them. Walsh in the early 20s. Miller after that. Ross on the 18th of December, 1931. It was in her parents' marriage record. Dodge County, Minnesota, the 14th of February, 1894. It was in two death certificates. Her husband's from July of 1944, and her own. And it was on a headstone at Irving Park Cemetery, under a stone that says, Father Herbert P., 1901 to 1944, slash Mother Josephine A., 1902 to 1945. Herbert was a portrait painter. That is on his death certificate in his own line. Occupation, portrait painter, industry, own business. A man who painted people for a living, who had a studio and brushes and canvases, and who had a wife whose photograph a newspaper would print the day after she died. None of that is in any police file. All of it is in the public record. It was not hidden. It was not sealed. It was not in a locked room. It was in the census, and the county clerk's office, and the cemetery. And it had been sitting there since 1902, waiting for anybody who wanted to know who this woman was. For eight days in June of 1945, the police of the city of Chicago wanted to know who this woman was. And then they stopped. Now do the arithmetic. For Josephine Ross, one captain out of one station house, a name we have and nothing else about him, and one coroner, an elected official who also had another woman's murder to deal with six months later. That is the list. That is everybody. No detective assigned to her case that we can name. No other officer from that station house on that case in any record we can find. No task force, no reward, no composite drawing, no laboratory. Eight days, and then a summer of nothing. For the woman who came next, a chief of detectives, three captains, a sheriff, a state's attorney, a fingerprint expert. The Federal Bureau of Investigations Laboratory.

Hundreds of people questioned. A hundred and seventy of them put on a polygraph. And it would produce things. Some of them good police work, and some of them not. It would put a 65-year-old janitor in a hospital bed after two days of questioning he had nothing to do with, and he would sue the city and win. That is what a case looks like when a city decides it is a case. Josephine Ross never got that decision. She got eight days. And the thing that is worth saying, the thing the record makes plain and nobody has ever quite said out loud, is that those eight days were not lazy. Go back through them. A man arrested in Indiana inside 24 hours. A janitor interviewed, and his description put out. A neighbor picked up, matched to the description, and put in front of witnesses. A knife blade found and tested against a suspect. A girl given a lie detector test to close off the last unexplained thing at the scene. That is real police work. That is a competent eight days. And then it stops. Not because they failed, because the week ran out and nobody gave them another one. Which leaves this. A woman who had been married three times, divorced twice, widowed once, and who had raised two daughters and buried a husband. And who, on the 5th of June 1945, was in a flat on Kenmore Avenue with her younger girl, and a husband 11 months dead, and two years of rent paid on a place she had made into a home. Her neighbor four doors up was already in a cell. There was a man who came down the fire escape between noon and one, in a light-colored sweater, and a piece of his hair in her fist, and a length of tape on her throat that he put there himself after she died. And five blocks away, on that same afternoon, in a basement, there was a woman who had looked straight at him. The file closes on the 12th of June and does not open again. For six months, nothing. And then, in December, the city of Chicago found out that it had a problem. And it built the machine it had never built for Josephine Ross. It did not build it for her. It built it for the next woman.

Part 12The Second Woman

The 10th of December 1945, six months and five days after Josephine Ross, a different woman, a different flat, a different part of the city, 3941 North Pine Grove Avenue, apartment 611, in a building called the Pinecrest in Lakeview, Frances Brown. She had served in the war, in the Navy's women's reserve. She was found in her apartment on the 10th of December, or the 11th. The papers are not entirely clear which. She had been killed with a knife and with a gun, and nothing had been taken. And on the wall, somebody had written a message in lipstick, and the world has been quoting it for 80 years, usually tidied up. This is as it was written, capitals and all. For heaven's sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself. That is where this story changes shape. Because within days, the newspapers had a name for the person who did it. They called him the Lipstick Killer. And the name ran in every paper in the country, and it has never gone away. And here is what that name was on the 10th of December 1945.

It was a nickname for a man nobody had ever seen. There was no suspect. There was no arrest. There was no photograph. There was a wall and four sentences in lipstick, and a city that needed something to call the thing that was happening to it. So it made a monster, and it named him after the words he left behind. And the city turned on the lights. Join me next time as we dive into the next victim of the Lipstick Killer. Consider subscribing so when the next episode drops, you will be the first to know. My name is Trevor Shelby. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.

Episode 2The Murder of Frances Brown

Part 1Cold Open

Monday morning, the 10th of December 1945, about half past eight, the sixth floor of the Pine Crest Hotel, 3941 Pine Grove Avenue on the north side of Chicago, an apartment hotel, 15 apartments to a floor. A maid was working that floor, her name was Mrs. Martha Engles, and one of the doors was standing open, apartment 611. Inside, a radio was playing.

That was the wrong sound for that hour. Two women lived in 611, and at half past eight on a Monday morning, they were usually on their way to work. One of them, Viola Butler, had been away for the weekend. The door should have been shut, the radio should have been off. So Martha Engles stepped inside. The room was in disorder. There was blood. And on the bedroom wall above the bed, there was writing, red writing, big letters, some of them three inches tall and some of them six. The top line was about six feet off the floor. That is what she saw before she ever saw Frances Brown, the wall. And then she went on into the bathroom and she screamed.

The woman in the bathroom was Frances Brown, 33 years old, three months out of the Navy. The police came, and by the next morning, the newspapers had a photograph of that wall. The papers printed the message tidy with proper sentences and proper capitals. The photograph doesn't. On the wall, it's four lines in her own lipstick, half of it printed, half of it joined up. The capital letters land wherever they fall, in the middle of a word or at the end of one. And heavens and cannot are both spelled with an M where the N should be. The T comes out backwards. The K is never quite finished. This is what it says.

For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself. 13 words. And there's one more thing about that wall. The legend never kept it. There had been a picture hanging there. To make room for his message, he took the picture down.

A man who could not control himself by his own account. And before he wrote that, he stopped and took a picture off the wall to make room. The detectives who worked that room took it as a sign of care, of method. This is how a woman is forgotten in plain sight. Not in silence. In red letters, six feet up, the one thing in that room nobody could miss. The maid saw them first, then the police. By that same evening, the words were out on the wires and in the newspapers of other towns. A man writes 13 words on a wall, and the world remembers every one of them. It's the woman in the next room it forgets.

Part 2Show Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby. This is episode two of three. One case told three times. Once for each of the people it happened to. If you heard episode one, welcome back. And if you didn't, you're fine. In a couple of minutes I'm going to catch you up on everything you need. Every episode in this series is built so you can walk in on it. Last time, I told you we were breaking one of our own rules. We don't usually do famous cases. I'm not going to make that whole speech again, but here's the short version. When a case gets famous, what gets famous is the killer. The people he killed get one line in the middle of his story and then their scenery. This show exists to go back and pick them up. And the woman in this episode is the hardest one to pick up because there's something standing in front of her. If you've ever read a single paragraph about this case, you know what it is. It's a wall. And the writing on it. It has been printed and reprinted for 80 years. You may know it word for word. So that's the job tonight. She had a life before that wall. A birth certificate. A family. A hometown. A yearbook. A uniform. A job she went back to when the war was over. All of it is in the record. All of it was findable. It just took somebody looking. Now, real quick, if you're a first time listener, hit that subscribe button so when episode 3 drops, you'll be the first to know. And then head over to section29 .com. That's where the case file for this one lives. The newspapers I've been working from, the photographs, including the one of that wall, and a numbered source for every quote in this episode. Every time you hear me say somebody said something, there's a line on that page telling you who said it and when and where it was printed. The newspapers of 1945 didn't always agree with each other. And on this one, they disagree a lot. Where that happens, I'll go with the best source I've got and tell you I did. I'd rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes. So go and look at it yourself and decide for yourself whether I used it fairly. A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is A true story, built from the record, her birth certificate, the census pages, the photographs, and the newspapers of 1945. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out because that's the best way to live a story. The opinions you hear are mine. And this one is hard. It's violent and it happened to a woman alone in her own home. If you need to sit some of this one out, I understand. Listener discretion is advised.

Alright, everybody remembers the wall. This is the story of the woman in the next room. Now let's get on with the show.

Part 3Recap

This is one case told victim by victim, three killings in one city, and in the end, Chicago called it one case. The first was Josephine Ross, 43 years old, 4108 North Kenmore Avenue on the north side. On the 5th of June 1945, she was killed in her own flat, four deep wounds to her neck, and then whoever did it, stayed. He taped the wounds closed after she had already bled to death. He rinsed her clothes in the bath. A janitor saw a man leave the building by the fire escape.

Tall, dark hair. Men were brought in and questioned and let go. One captain ran the case. By the 12th of June, one week after she died, everybody held for questioning had been released. Nobody was charged. Not that summer, and not that fall. Six months later, in a different building on a different street, another woman was killed. And this time, the whole city noticed. Monday, the 10th of December 1945.

This is Frances Brown.

Part 4The Girl Who Played the Bass

Go back 33 years, the 21st of March 1912, about half past 10 in the morning. A house at 532 South 13th Street in Richmond, Indiana on the eastern edge of the state, close to the Ohio line. A girl was born there that morning. On her birth certificate, the clerk spelled her name F-R-A-N-C-I-S, the boys spelling. She was Frances.

Her father was Elisha Brown, 37 years old, born in Hagerstown in the same county. He was a conductor on the railroad, the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and Saint Louis, one of the Pennsylvania railroad's lines. On Frances's birth certificate, her mother was Mary, but she went by Ethel.

Frances was their second child. There was already a boy in the house, her big brother, John Harlan. The 1920 census calls him Harlan. In January of 1920, the census taker came to the door. The Browns owned their house by then with a mortgage on it. Elisha was a freight conductor. Harlan was 13 and already earning. The census lists him as a newspaper carrier. Frances was seven and in school. And there was a little sister now, Helen, five years old. A railroad man, his wife, and three children. Frances in the middle.

There is one line about her from her school days that says more than any census page. It's in her high school yearbook. Under her picture, the yearbook lists what she did. Commercial. That was the business course, the one that trained students for office work.

Girl reserves. The YWCA's club for girls. And orchestra. And then the editors added one line of their own. Frances can certainly play the big bass fiddle. The double bass. Grown up, Frances Brown stood a little over five feet tall and weighed 95 pounds. A double bass stands taller than that. That's what somebody at that school thought was worth remembering about her. There's a studio portrait from the same sitting as the yearbook picture. Dark hair set in waves. A string of pearls. That is her face.

In April of 1930, the census taker came again. Ten years on, the page looked different. Frances was 18 and still in school. The census spelled her name the boy's way too. Her father was 56 and still on the railroad. A conductor. Harlan was 24. A mechanic in a garage. Helen was 15. But the Browns didn't own their house anymore. They were renting. $40 a month. The next year, 1931, her father was killed in a train accident at New Castle, Indiana. Frances wasn't yet 20.

In 1934, she left Richmond for Chicago. She went to work as a clerk at the A .B. Dick Company, the firm that made mimeograph machines, the duplicators that ran off copies in offices and schools, the commercial course put to work. Then came the war.

Frances Brown joined the waves, the women's reserve of the United States Navy. A .B. Dick gave her a leave of absence to go. She served about three years. There's a photograph of her in her waves uniform. And in September of 1945, she was discharged on points, which was the Navy's arithmetic for deciding who got to go home first. And she went back to the same job, same company, the same work she'd left to go to war.

By that December, she was living on the north side in an apartment hotel called the Pine Crest at 3941 Pine Grove Avenue, apartment 611 on the sixth floor. She shared it with another working woman, Viola Butler, a stenographer. On weekday mornings, the two of them were usually out the door and on their way to work at the same time. Chicago had been her home since 1934, but her church was still the one at home. She was a member of Trinity Methodist in Richmond.

When the papers came to describe her, they didn't say much, but they kept saying the same thing. One wire service wrote that her friends described her as a quiet girl with many acquaintances and no known enemies. The Tribune's version? A woman beyond reproach who lived quietly and had many friends and no enemies.

Quiet. Quietly. Two papers and the same word both times. So here she is at the beginning of December 1945, 33 years old, three months out of the Navy, back at the same desk. A girl from a railroad family in Richmond Indiana who took the business course and played the bass in the school orchestra and came to Chicago and went to war and came back. That is the woman who lived in apartment 611. And on Sunday, the 9th of December, she went out to dinner with friends.

Part 5Sunday Night

Sunday, the 9th of December, 1945. Two weeks and change before Christmas, the first winter after the war. Frances Brown spent that evening at a friend's apartment at 4200 Hazel Street. Her hostesses were Virginia Tracy, 26 years old, a secretary, and Virginia Fessler, 43, a physical education teacher. Two Virginias and Frances. Dinner on a Sunday night. At 9 o'clock, Frances left.

That's the whole of it. A dinner with friends and a woman going home at a sensible hour on a work night. Her roommate wasn't there to meet her. Viola Butler had been away all weekend. On Sunday night, she went into the Loop for dinner and a movie. And afterwards, instead of coming back to the Pine Crest, she spent the night at a friend's apartment. Vivian Smith's on the same street, her reason went into the paper later. Miss Smith's apartment was nearer and Miss Butler feared to travel farther at night because of robbers.

So on Sunday night, Frances Brown went home to an empty apartment. Here's the building she went home to. The Pine Crest was an apartment hotel. People lived there in their own apartments and the building ran like a hotel around them. A maid worked the floors in the mornings. And downstairs, all night, there was a night clerk on duty. To get upstairs, you took the automatic elevator. No operator. You got in, you pushed the button, and you rode up yourself. At night, the front door was locked. Upstairs, the floors were long hallways of doors. Fifteen apartments to a floor. On the sixth floor, one of those doors was 611.

And then there was the back of the building. At the rear of the Pine Crest, there was a fire escape, climbing the outside wall. Her window, in 611, was close to it. Close enough that the newspapers would later print a photograph just to show how close. Between the fire escape and the world outside, there was a fence. Ten feet high. Barbed wire.

That's the Pine Crest. A locked front door with a man at the desk. An elevator anybody could run. A long hallway on 6. A window by the fire escape. A 10-foot fence out back. Sunday night, the 9th of December. Viola Butler was at her friends down the street on Pine Grove Avenue because she didn't want to travel any farther in the dark. The front door downstairs was locked for the night. The night clerk was on duty. The elevator was waiting for whoever pushed the button. And on the sixth floor, behind the door of apartment 611, Frances Brown was home. Alone.

Part 6Monday, Four in the Morning

Monday, the 10th of December, 1945, the small hours. Somewhere in the Pine Crest, in the dark, somebody heard shots. Exactly when depends on who you believe. The police captain on the case said it was about half past two. He said he had that from a man who said he'd heard shots at that hour. He would not give the man's name. But there was a man on the second floor who would give his, George Weinberg. He'd been ill and he couldn't sleep. His wife was asleep and she didn't hear the shots. George Weinberg told the police he believed he heard two shots. He put the time at about four in the morning. Half past two from a man with no name. About four from a man who couldn't sleep. Hold on to both of those. About four o'clock, down in the lobby, The night clerk was on duty. John Dedrick 69 years old, and the elevator came down. He came down the automatic elevator at 4 a .m., Dedrick said. He was a stranger. He fumbled at the front door, not realizing at first it was locked. The locked front door. Any tenant, Dedrick told the police, would have known this. The man got the door unlocked. He turned toward me once as he left, Dedrick said. He seemed very nervous. And he hurried out. He turned toward me once.

John Dedrick got a look at him. 35 to 40 years old, five foot six or seven, about 140 pounds, a dark overcoat, and a dark hat. Nobody had seen him come in. A quarter past five, Gerald Gilland, who delivered papers for the Uptown News Agency, came along the sixth floor and left a newspaper at the door of apartment 611. He said the door was closed. Everything appeared normal. About six. George Wyatt, who lived on the same floor, was on his way out of the building, and he noticed that the door of 611 was standing open, and the radio inside was playing loudly.

One newspaper put it in a single sentence. Sometime between 515 and 6 a .m., someone opened the door of the apartment after turning on the radio. The door stayed open and the radio stayed on until about half past eight, when the maid came along the sixth floor and stepped inside. This is how the police put it together. It is what they believed happened. The police captain believed the man surprised her in her room sometime after midnight. Detectives believed he got in from the fire escape through her window. She was in bed. He pressed her face down into the pillow. There was a deep oval hollow in the pillow afterwards. The shape a face would leave. There was a bread knife from her own apartment. The police believed she got hold of it to fight him off. She was shot once in the head and once in the arm. The knife was taken from her, and then she was stabbed. There was a small cut in the web of her right hand between the thumb and the index finger. She fought him. He dragged her to the bathroom, to the tub, and there, the police said, he tried to wash the blood from her body. Then he went through the apartment, the drawers, the closets, her purse, which he emptied. And then he took a lipstick out of that purse, and he went to the bedroom wall.

That is the police's account. The coroner's physician was Dr. Samuel Levinson. At first, the knife wounds were believed to have killed her. Levinson's autopsy said otherwise. The knife wounds, he said, could and would have been fatal, but it was the bullet in her head that killed her. And the autopsy settled one more thing. She had not been raped. Now put the night back together, in order, and look at it. If the police captain's man is right, the shots were at half past two. Then the stranger came down the elevator an hour and a half later, at four. Time enough, the captain said. But if George Weinberg is right, the shots were at four, which is when the stranger was walking out the front door. And at a quarter past five, more than an hour after that, the door of 611 was still shut. Everything appeared normal. Then, before six, someone turned on that radio and opened that door.

So if the shots were at four, who was still inside apartment 611 at a quarter past five? And the nervous man who fumbled with the front door at four in the morning may not have been the killer at all.

Part 7The Same Captain

The police who came to apartment 611 that Monday morning came out of one station house in particular, the Town Hall station on the north side. You've already met the captain on this case. He's the one who said the shots were at half past two and wouldn't name the man who told him so. So far, he's just been the police captain. His name was Frank Reynolds, Captain Frank Reynolds of the Town Hall station.

Six months before, in June, a woman named Josephine Ross was killed in her flat on Kenmore Avenue. That was a Town Hall case too. One captain ran it. On the 12th of June, one week after she died, that captain told the newspapers that everyone taken into custody for questioning had been released. That was Frank Reynolds.

Same station house, same captain, second woman. The apartment, he told reporters, showed evidence of a struggle and of ransacking. And there was the wall. Captain Reynolds read that message like a document. He said it had peculiarities. An M where the N should be in the word cannot.

Ks that were never finished. T's that were written backwards. The writing itself, the police said, might be a clue to the man who wrote it. He alerted police to be on the lookout for a short, stocky, middle-aged man, and he gave the newspapers a sentence. Whoever the killer was, he's a maniac, and we must get him.

Something else happened that Monday. The police crime laboratory was called in. It was run by a man named Charles M. Wilson, and the paper said it was called in promptly. Its experts went to the windows. On the sill of her window, and on the sill of the apartment directly below, they found smudges. They hoped to get fingerprints out of them. And then the Chicago Tribune took the credit. It said why the lab had been called so fast. The prompt call to the laboratory admittedly resulted from a recent series of articles in the Tribune revealing that police had often delayed use of the laboratory's scientific service, thus losing possible clues.

Admittedly, the police had called in the lab quickly, the paper said, because the paper had just run a series of articles about how often they didn't. In June, the papers never mentioned a laboratory. By the time the morning papers came out, the police already had a man, Francis Purkiser, 36 years old, a machinist. He had just come out of the Bridewell, the city jail, a few days before, after six months for burglary, the burglary of a woman's apartment. He'd been in a tavern at Grace Street and Broadway, a few blocks from the Pine Crest, and the people drinking around him went to a detective named Peter Harlib. They said Purkiser talked as if he knew more about the murder than had been in the newspapers, so he was picked up and questioned. Five foot four, about 130 pounds. Short, not stocky. Within days, the police said he had no inside knowledge at all. He'd been boasting in a tavern. He was cleared.

Tuesday morning, the 11th of December, 1945. The Chicago Tribune, the final edition. Frances Brown had been found the morning before. Nobody had been charged. Nobody had been identified. The only man anybody could describe was a stranger the night clerk had seen for a moment at four in the morning on his way out the door. And across the top of the Tribune's front page, the whole width of it, the paper ran this.

Hunt, mad, lipstick killer. On the same page, the Tribune's own story was still calling it the handwriting on the wall murder case, but the headline had already picked a name. The captain had said maniac. The headline said mad. One day, that's how long it took. A nickname for a man nobody could swear they had seen. Her name wasn't in that banner. His was.

Part 8Wednesday, The Machine

Wednesday, the 12th of December, 1945. The morning after the banner. Two days after Frances Brown was found, the case wasn't getting simpler. It was getting bigger and it was getting stranger. The Tribune put it on the front page that morning under a headline that said exactly that, mystery grows. And under the headline, one sentence that could stand for the whole week. Each new development appeared to controvert some previous conclusion, twisting the inquiry into a classic pattern of confusion. Then the paper listed the confusions. The first one was the clock. On Monday, the police had been hunting the nervous stranger the night clerk saw walk out the front door at four in the morning. By Wednesday, George Weinberg's two shots had fixed the time of the crime at about four and the closed door at a quarter past five and the open door by six now said what the police could see for themselves. The killer hadn't left that apartment until after a quarter past five. No one saw the Slayer leave the building at that hour, the paper said, if he did. The second confusion was the man himself. On Monday, the police were convinced they were dealing with a maniac. They hadn't given that up. But now they'd found something else. Whoever was in apartment 611 had wiped the fingerprints off the furniture. The papers word for him was methodical. The same man who'd taken a picture down to make room on the wall. Only one fingerprint was found on the jamb of the bathroom door badly smudged. The next day's paper called it a blurred impression apparently from a finger joint near a hinge of the bathroom doorway. On Tuesday night, it was in the crime laboratory being developed.

And one more, whether the killer was a man at all. It had started in Tuesday's paper with three words on the wall for heaven's sake. That phrase, the paper said, suggested a feminine hand to some detectives who held that it was more common among women than among men. By Wednesday, it had a heading of its own. Slayer could be woman. The police weren't ruling it out, but they admitted the evidence for it was, in the papers words, purely speculative based on the phrasing. And they had one new clue. A small card with a printed holly wreath and a woman's name printed in a hand the police said was somewhat resembling the handwriting on the wall. The paper didn't print the name. Two weeks before Christmas, a Christmas card went to the crime lab and by Wednesday night, the lab had weighed in. Some investigators were still holding on to the theory, but the laboratory's tests indicated the message on the wall was written by a man. The weight of police authority, one wire service put it, inclined to a man. There was one more line in Wednesday's story right at the end. On Tuesday, the coroner's inquest into the death of Frances Brown had been opened and continued to the 10th of January at the request of Captain Frank Reynolds. In June, Josephine Ross's inquest had been opened and put over too.

Then, on Wednesday night, the chief of detectives spoke. Walter G. Storms, the chief of detectives of the Chicago police. He wouldn't list his clues. He said there were at least 35 and the one he was known to count most important was the writing on the wall and the police let it be known they were looking for a Jack the Ripper type. Storms said why. Investigators, he said, were impressed by the similarity of Miss Brown's murder to the slayings of two other women during the last two and one half years within a half mile of the pinecrest. The first was Miss Estelle Carey, 34. Dice Girl was the paper's word for her work. Her throat was slashed on the 3rd of February, 1943, in her apartment at 512 Addison Street. And the second was Mrs. Josephine Ross, 43, stabbed in the neck in her apartment at 4108 Kenmore Avenue.

Josephine Ross, after six months of quiet, her name was back in the paper. In the chief of detectives story about somebody else's murder. The paper even got her date wrong. It printed the 3rd of June. She died on the 5th. The paper set out what the three had in common. Women without marital ties, their own apartments, knives, and one thing two of them shared. In two cases, those of Mrs. Ross and Miss Brown, the slayer washed blood from his victims bodies. He washed her. That was the police's account of Frances Brown in apartment 611. At the bathtub, he tried to wash the blood from her body. In June at Kenmore Avenue, the papers had reported her clothes rinsed out in a half filled bathtub. In December, the paper said he'd washed the blood from her. Either way, it was a killer who didn't run, a killer who stayed and washed. No motive had ever been established in the Ross and Carey murders, the paper said, and the police had none yet for Frances Brown. In June, the city never built the machine for Josephine Ross. In December, it built one for Frances Brown. And two days in, the machine turned around and said her name.

But look at the three women the chief of detectives put together that night. Estelle Carey, Josephine Ross, Frances Brown. It's a set of three that made sense to the police in December of 1945. It isn't the set history kept. When Chicago, in the end, called this one case, Estelle Carey wasn't in it. For now, though, it was Wednesday night, a smudged print in the laboratory, a Christmas card, 35 clues nobody would list, and a woman dead since June pulled back into the light by the murder of another six months late and with the wrong date.

Part 9Arrested, Questioned, and Generally Cleared

By the end of that first week, the Chicago Tribune could sum up the hunt for Frances Brown's killer in five words. Suspects, the paper said, were being arrested, questioned and generally cleared. Here's what that looked like. George Catraboni, 41 years old, a butcher, was arrested for questioning on Tuesday night, the day after she was found. The police gave him a lie test. They called the result inconclusive because his answers conflicted. And then the police admitted there was no evidence to link him to the slaying. Two days later, he was still, in the paper's words, technically detained.

Other suspects, it said, were cleared almost as rapidly as they were brought in for questioning. Albert F. Tripp, 24, an itinerant, was held when detectives found bloodstains on his trousers. He told them he had cut his finger. And he admitted that on Monday he'd been working as a wall cleaner in a flat near her hotel. On Thursday, the 13th, the state's attorney's office came in. Two assistant state's attorneys, Alex Napoli and John Philip Reed, questioned her roommate, Viola Butler, at the detective bureau. And they said what it was for. It was to learn as much as possible of the background of the slain girl.

Her background, who she was, it's the question this series exists to ask. Three days after she died, somebody inside the investigation was asking it too. Half a dozen of her women friends were to be questioned next. And there was a book. In her apartment, the police had found a tiny address book, an indexed one. It had one name in it on the last page.

J .F. Hathaway, bosun's mate, first class, United States receiving station, general detail, San Diego, California. By December, that man was a chief bosun's mate at the naval shipyards on Terminal Island in San Pedro, California, John Fletcher Hathaway. Reporters reached him that night. They were only good friends, he said. He had last seen her in March. Nobody called him a suspect. He was a Navy man she knew, and a name in a little book. So that was what the investigation had so far of who Frances Brown was. A roommate, a handful of friends, and one name on the last page. That weekend, Town Hall police picked up Donald I. Montgomery, 27, at his home on an anonymous tip. He gave his occupation as dishwasher. The paper called him a poet. His pockets were full of poems, written on restaurant menu cards. The poems went to the crime lab to be compared with the writing on the wall, and Captain Frank Reynolds asked him to write out the words from the wall himself. This is how the paper printed the words he was asked to write. For heaven's sake, stop me before I kill more.

Stop me. The wall says, catch me. Whose slip it was, the paper doesn't say. But five days in, with the photograph of that wall in the papers, the message was already drifting. As he wrote, Donald Montgomery said, so that's what you want me for, to ask about the murder of the woman.

Tuesday, the 18th. Two more men picked up in two different places, both over things they'd said in taverns. They were accused of talking obscenely. Alois Mueller, 41, taken in at Wilson Avenue and Broadway. Arthur Birkland, 24, a former soldier, in a tavern near Belmont and Pulaski. The police took samples of their handwriting for the wall, and by then, five women who knew Frances Brown had been put on the lie detector. Captain Reynolds said the tests corroborated their statements that they knew nothing of the murder.

A butcher, a man from a tavern, a wall cleaner, a poet. Two more from the taverns, brought in, questioned, generally cleared. It was June's shape again, at a bigger size. Nobody was charged, not that week. But go back to Thursday, the 13th. Early in the morning, a man telephoned Charles H. Dole in room 511 at the Pine Crest, directly below hers. He didn't give a name. He used the one the newspapers had given out. I'm the lipstick killer. You'll get it next if you don't keep your mouth shut.

Dole reported it. The police said it was probably the work of a crank. They were investigating, however. The man who wrote on her wall still hadn't been identified. Nobody knew who he was. And by the fourth day, the name the papers had made for him was something anybody could pick up and say into a telephone.

Part 10Saturday in Richmond

Saturday, the 15th of December 1945, Richmond, Indiana. Her hometown paper had printed the arrangements that week. Services at two o'clock on Saturday afternoon in the Stegall-Berheide Chapel. In charge, the Reverend Paul Stephenson, the pastor of Trinity Methodist. Her church, the one she'd kept her membership in all those years in Chicago.

Frances Brown had come home. The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter. Her name was Gladys Priddy, and the first sentence she wrote that day was this. Frances Brown, 33, was buried here today in rites so simple, the bizarre circumstances of her death were hard to imagine.

Her second paragraph was the wall. Even here, in the story of her funeral, the paper called her the lipstick murder victim and printed the message one more time, 13 words. But the room Gladys Priddy described didn't have any of that in it. 50 people came, 50 family friends. There were no curiosity seekers at the rites.

Most of the mourners, the reporter wrote, were white-haired women, friends of her mother. Her mother was Ethel Brown, a widow. Her husband, the railroad man, had been killed in 1931. 14 years on, she was still in Richmond, and she kept a shop, the paper's words, proprietor of a little notions shop.

Notions in 1945 meant the small things, thread, buttons, needles, pins. As people began to arrive, Ethel Brown stepped out of a side room and sat down at the front of the chapel. And one group at a time, the people who came walked up to the casket, and then they came to her.

When the service began, her family joined her, her son, John, and his wife. That was the big brother, the boy who'd carried newspapers when he was 13, and her daughter, Mrs. Thomas Adelsperger, and her husband. Viola Butler was there, the roommate, the woman who'd been away from the pinecrest that weekend. There was one more thing Gladys Priddy noticed about the room. There were no waves. Not one woman from the Navy's women's reserve had come, but there were flowers. They had come from the offices where Frances Brown had served during the war, and the reporter wrote that those flowers showed they had remembered her.

Then the drive out to the cemetery. It began in a flurry of snow, 13 cars in the procession, and a police car out in front as an escort. And Gladys Priddy put down one more sentence. Even the police who manned the escort car to the cemetery inquired whose funeral they were leading.

Think about that. Five days earlier, the words on her wall had gone out on the wires to newspapers all over the country. A nickname for the man who wrote them had been on the front page since Tuesday, and the men driving at the head of her funeral had to ask whose it was. Everybody knew the wall. The men leading her to her grave didn't know her name.

The snow cleared as the procession came inside the cemetery. Earlham Cemetery. At the grave, there was a squad from the American Legion. The hometown paper had said it would be the Harry Ray Post, and one of them, a Legionnaire named James Lentzeris, presented her mother with the flag that had draped the coffin. It was at the graveside, the reporter wrote, that Mrs. Brown gave away a little to her grief.

The Legionnaires fired a volley, and taps ended the service. That same Saturday, back in Chicago, the police picked up the dishwasher with poems on his menu cards. You've already heard about him. Captain Reynolds had him write out the words from her wall. The next morning, the Sunday Tribune printed both stories. On page nine, her funeral and the man copying her wall on the same page.

She is still there in Earlham Cemetery in Richmond. The stone is flat and plain, a carving of flowers and the lettering. Frances Brown. 1912-1945. Nothing on it about the Navy. Nothing about Chicago. A girl from a railroad family, who took the business course and played the big bass fiddle in the school orchestra, and kept her membership at Trinity Methodist. Her name and the years. And nothing about a wall.

Part 11The Paper Gets Smaller

Back in Chicago, there's a simple way to measure how long a city keeps looking at something. You don't need a calendar, you need the page number. Watch where the Chicago Tribune put Frances Brown. Tuesday, the 11th of December, page one, her story down the side and the banner across the top. Wednesday, the 12th, page one again. Thursday, the 13th, page seven, the chief of detectives and Josephine Ross.

Friday, the 14th, page three, her roommate at the detective bureau, the telephone call to the man downstairs. Sunday, the 16th, page nine. Wednesday, the 19th, page 10, the two men from the taverns. And Thursday, the 20th, page 12. Page one, page one, page seven, page three, page nine, page 10, page 12.

The story on page 12 was three paragraphs long. The day before, the police had established that a fragment they had was part of the bullet that went into her head. And then the paper said this, the second bullet, which struck her left arm, has not been found. So they were going to look for it. Her room would be searched. And so would the ground outside, below her window. On the chance, the paper said, that the bullet might have passed through the open window. Nine days after she was found, the police said they were going back to apartment 611 and down to the ground below her window to look for a bullet. The last paragraph said the state's attorney's office was still studying handwriting samples taken from a number of men women picked up during the investigation, all of it being held up against one wall.

And there was one more small change in the first line. The man quoted on page 12 was still Captain Frank Reynolds, still the captain speaking for her case. But the Tribune didn't call him Captain Frank Reynolds of the town hall station anymore. By the 19th, it had him at a different station, Albany Park.

Then it was Christmas, the early hours of the 27th of December. Three o'clock, the wire said, a woman woke up the Chicago police. Her name was Mary Lou Sandling Mathis, and she was from Fulton, Kentucky. She wanted to confess to two murders. The International News Service put them in a single line. The lipstick murder of Frances Brown and that of Mrs. Josephine Ross last June 5th. Josephine Ross, in a wire story six months later, and this time with the right date, the police didn't believe her. The wire story didn't bother pretending otherwise. It called them the murders which she didn't commit. What got her arrested wasn't the confession, it was the hour. She awakened police at 3am to confess. Disgusted police then promptly jailed her. She said she was just trying to be mean. The paper in Springfield, Illinois gave it a headline in six words, tries to be mean, succeeds, arrested.

By the 29th, a news photograph from Chicago was in the papers. It wasn't of Frances Brown. It was a portrait of a man, and the caption under it began like this. Chicago police are trying to link the baffling lipstick murder of ex-wave Frances Brown and the victim of that city's latest murder, Lawrence A. Lang. He had been found in his apartment. The caption called it luxuriously furnished. He had been slashed 14 times.

On the 12th of December, the chief of detectives had held her murder up beside two women killed with knives, Estelle Carey and Josephine Ross. Now, at the end of the month, the police were holding it up beside a man. In three weeks, the police had held her murder up against three other knife killings.

So that was the end of 1945. A search for a second bullet. Handwriting from men and women still being compared with a wall. A woman from Kentucky in a cell for waking up the police.

Part 12The Nineteenth

Tuesday, 8th January 1946, Moline, Illinois, across the state from Chicago on the Mississippi River. The evening paper there was called The Dispatch, and on its front page that evening, in a small box, there was an item from the United Press out of Chicago. The heading on the box was four words, 19th in six weeks.

The box opened with Chicago's newest murder, the 19th in the city, United Press said, in six weeks, and then it got to her. Police still hunted today the slayer of Wave Frances Brown, 33, who December 10th stabbed and shot the woman to death in her apartment and left a lipstick printed note on the wall urging that he be caught before I kill more.

Still hunted, one sentence, her name, her age, her date, and four words of his. Wave, the box called her. That was the whole of who she was in that sentence. Not the clerk from the A .B. Dick Company, three months back at the same desk. Not the railroad conductor's daughter from Richmond, Indiana. None of that fit in the box. The next sentence was the man from the end of December, Lawrence Lang, 38, a private secretary to an executive of the Fairbanks Morse Corporation. His killer, the box said, was still being sought to. That was the whole box. Two unsolved murders filed one after the other underneath the newest one. Josephine Ross wasn't in it at all. Four weeks before, the whole country had printed Frances Brown's wall. In December, Josephine Ross had come back into the papers as a few lines in the story of somebody else's murder. By January, that was where Frances Brown was. Her inquest was still waiting. It had been put over to the 10th of January at Captain Reynolds's request, two days away. Nobody had been charged with the murder of Frances Brown. Not in December, not by the 8th of January.

By the 8th of January, she was a paragraph in a box, one of 19 in six weeks. And the box was on the front page of somebody else's story. Because the day before, in the small hours of Monday morning, on the north side of Chicago, a six-year-old girl had been taken from her bedroom. Her name was Suzanne Degnan.

Next time.

Episode 3The Murder of Suzanne Degnan

Part 1Cold Open

Sunday night. The sixth of January, 1946. The North Side of Chicago. A big brick house on the corner of Kenmore and Thorndale, 5943 North Kenmore Avenue, set well back from the street behind the shrubbery. Two families live in it. Upstairs is the lawyer who owns the place, with his wife, their daughter and her husband, a maid, and two boxer dogs. Downstairs, on the first floor, is a government man named James Degnan, his wife Helen, and their two girls. They came to Chicago and couldn't find a home of their own. So the lawyer's wife offered them the first floor. The older girl, Betty, is ten. She sleeps in one room. The younger one sleeps by herself, in the back bedroom. She's six years old. Her name is Suzanne.

At half past twelve, Suzanne wakes up and goes to the bathroom. Her mother and father see her. Then she goes back to bed. About an hour later, at half past one, the maid upstairs hears something in the room directly below her. A commotion. In the child's room. And the dogs start barking.

Right about then, the lawyer's daughter and her husband drive into the garage. They hear the dogs too. They look around. They see no one. Downstairs, James Degnan hears the dogs as well. He figures they woke up and are barking at the car coming in.

And the rest of the night passes quietly. Monday morning. The seventh of January. Half past seven. James Degnan went to the back bedroom to call his daughter for school. The windows in that room hadn't been locked. Her clothes were on the chair, right where she'd left them when she went to bed. Her heavier things were all still there. So were her blankets. The bed was empty. Wherever Suzanne was, she was in her pajamas.

And on the floor, near her bed, there was a note. It was written in pencil, on a piece of paper smeared with oil. Get twenty thousand dollars ready, and wait for word. Do not notify FBI or police. Bills in fives and tens. On the paper, "ready" is spelled R-E-D-D-Y, and "wait" has an E on the end. Then on the back, five more words. Burn this for her safety. Except "safety" is missing its E. S-A-F-T-Y.

Nobody burned it. That morning, her father told reporters he had no money, and he couldn't think of one reason why anybody would pick his family. Somebody got into a little girl's room in the middle of the night, in a house full of people, with two dogs barking upstairs. And left a note behind telling her father to wait.

Part 2Show Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby. This is episode three of three, the last one. One case, told three times, once for each of the people it happened to. If you've been here for the first two, welcome back. And if this is the first one you've picked up, you're fine. In a couple of minutes I'll catch you up on everything you need. Every episode in this series is built so you can walk in on it. Here's what this series is about, in one breath. When a case gets famous, what gets famous is the killer. The people he killed get a line in the middle of his story, and then they're scenery. This show exists to go back and pick them up. And the person in this episode is the hardest one to pick up. Not because the record is empty, but because it's so full. More was written about her case than about the other two put together. And almost all of it starts with how she died. So that's the job tonight. She was six. She was in first grade. A few weeks before any of this, she played an angel in the Christmas pageant at her school. On her death certificate, where it asks for an occupation, the state of Illinois wrote: School Girl. She gets the front of this story. Everything else waits its turn. I'll tell you up front, this episode is long. Longer than anything we usually do. That's on purpose. This is where the case ends, and I didn't want to cut her short to make a clock happy. Now, real quick. If you're new, hit subscribe, so you'll be the first to know when the next case drops. Then head over to Section29.com. That's where the case file for this one lives: photographs of Suzanne, the house on Kenmore Avenue, the note, the front pages from that January, and a numbered source for every quote in this episode. Every time you hear me say somebody said something, there's a line on that page telling you who said it, and when, and where it was printed. The newspapers of 1946 didn't always agree with each other. Where that happens, I'll go with the best source I've got and tell you I did. I'd rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes. So go look at it yourself, and decide for yourself whether I used it fairly. A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is a true story, built from the record: the newspapers of 1946, the court opinions, the census pages and the public documents that survive. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out, because that's the best way to tell a story. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you. The opinions you hear are mine. And this one is the hardest of the three. The victim is a child. I won't describe more than I have to, but I can't tell this story without some of it. If you need to sit this one out, or skip ahead, I understand. Listener discretion is advised. All right.

Everybody in Chicago knew her name by Monday night. This is the story of the little girl it belonged to. Now let's get on with the show.

Part 3Recap

This is one case, told victim by victim. Two women and a girl, killed in one city in the space of seven months. In the end, Chicago called it one case. The first was Josephine Ross. Forty-three years old. 4108 North Kenmore Avenue, on the North Side. On the fifth of June, 1945, she was killed in her own flat. Four deep wounds to her neck. Whoever did it stayed long enough to tape the wounds closed after she had bled to death, and to rinse her clothes in the bath. One captain. One week. By the twelfth of June, everybody held for questioning had been let go.

Six months later, the tenth of December, Frances Brown. A former WAVE, three months out of the Navy. The Pine Crest hotel, 3941 Pine Grove Avenue. She was shot, and stabbed with a bread knife from her own kitchen. Her purse was emptied. And on her bedroom wall, in her own lipstick, somebody wrote thirteen words, begging to be caught. By the next morning, the papers had a name for him: the Lipstick Killer. A name for a man nobody had seen. The same captain walked into that room. Then a chief of detectives, and the crime lab, and a smudged print off a bathroom doorjamb. By the first week of January, nobody had been charged with either murder.

And then, in the small hours of Monday, the seventh of January, 1946, two miles up that same street, a six-year-old girl was taken out of her bed. This is Suzanne Degnan.

Part 4The Christmas Angel

Suzanne Degnan was born on the seventeenth of April, 1939, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father was James Edwin Degnan. He came from Worcester, about forty miles west of Boston, and he'd gone to Holy Cross, the Jesuit college there. Her mother was Helen Elizabeth Cassidy, from Philadelphia. They had both been to college, which in the 1930s was not a small thing. He'd done four years. She'd done two. By 1935 they were living in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Their first girl was born in Pennsylvania. On paper they named her Helen, after her mother. Everybody called her Betty. Then, four years later, came Suzanne.

The first time the government wrote her down was in April of 1940. The census taker found the Degnans on a rural route outside Millville, New Jersey, in a rented house, fifty dollars a month. James was thirty-one. He ran his own business, a retail tire distributorship, and the week before the census taker came by, he'd worked sixty hours. The year before, he'd made thirty-six hundred dollars.

Helen, thirty. Betty, five. And then the page ran out. So the last of the family went at the top of the next sheet. Line forty-one. Suzanne. Daughter. Born in Massachusetts. Under age, the census taker wrote the way they did for babies: eleven over twelve. Eleven months old.

Then the war came. In 1942, James Degnan gave up the tires and went to work for the government, for the Office of Price Administration, the O.P.A. If you were alive in the 1940s, you knew the O.P.A. It was the agency that ran rationing during the war: the ration books, the stamps for sugar and meat and gasoline, and the local boards in every town that decided who got what. His end of it was the boards themselves.

Personnel. Management. The people who ran the ration boards. The job moved the family around: Washington, and Baltimore. And in Baltimore the neighbours got to know the younger girl. When her name went out on the wires that January, the people there remembered her, and the way they put it made the papers. She was "a chubby, honey-haired, friendly worry-wart."

A worry-wart. That's what they called a kid who frets: a little girl who wants to know where everybody is and when they're coming back. Five or six years old, and the neighbours already had a word for her. Around the start of 1945, James Degnan was sent to Chicago. He was in charge of board operations for the whole Chicago metropolitan district of the O.P.A., at seventy-five hundred dollars a year. He went on ahead. That summer the girls were in Philadelphia, their mother's hometown. Somebody took a snapshot of the girls with their aunt, Helen's sister. Suzanne is on the left. And by the middle of the year, Helen and the girls had come out to Chicago too.

There was just one problem. They couldn't find anywhere to live. The family "could not locate a dwelling," as the paper put it. So a lawyer named A. Louis Flynn and his wife, who owned a big brick house on the corner of Kenmore and Thorndale, up on the far North Side in a neighbourhood called Edgewater, offered them their first floor. The Flynns lived upstairs. The Degnans lived downstairs. Betty had her own room, and Suzanne had the little bedroom at the back.

That fall the girls started school at Sacred Heart academy, just north of the house, on Sheridan Road. Blue and white uniforms. Betty was ten. Suzanne was in first grade. She was six now. Blue-eyed, and her hair was a light honey blond, and it curled. And in December, just before Christmas, the school put on its pageant. Suzanne Degnan played an angel. That's all of it. That's what the record keeps. A birth in Boston. Eleven months old at the top of a census page. A worry-wart in Baltimore. A snapshot in Philadelphia. Six months in a borrowed flat in Chicago.

First grade. An angel in the Christmas play. It's not much. It's what she had time for. Christmas came and went. Then New Year's. School went back. And on Sunday, the sixth of January, 1946, the Degnans put their girls to bed in the borrowed first floor at 5943 North Kenmore Avenue.

Part 5Monday, Small Hours

Here's that night again. Only this time, step outside the house, and put everything that anybody heard on one clock. Sunday, half past nine at night. Suzanne has something to eat. The coroner's office will care about that later. Half past twelve. She wakes up and goes to the bathroom. Her mother and father see her, and she goes back to bed. About half past one. Upstairs, the maid, a woman named Ethel Hargrove, hears a commotion in the room below. The dogs are barking. The couple from upstairs drive into the garage at about the same moment. They look around. They see no one. Now, the next morning, the police commissioner gave the reporters one more detail. He said the maid had heard Suzanne, through the floor, pleading: "I'm sleepy." It went out on the wires. It's in a lot of the books.

A week later, the maid said she never heard Suzanne say a word. Never heard her mumble anything, and never said she did. Her father had been quoted saying something like it too. That he'd heard her say she was sleepy and didn't want to get up, and he thought she was talking in her sleep. He told police he never heard her talk, and never said he did. Two weeks after that, the same paper that printed the denial printed the quote again, at a different time.

So I can't give you her voice. I'd like to. It's the only thing anybody ever claimed to hear her say that night, and the woman who supposedly heard it said she didn't. What the maid did say she heard was a commotion. And the dogs. About half past one, a block and a half away. There's a building on the corner of Glenlake and Winthrop, and a woman lives in the flat right above its basement laundry room. In the dark she hears bottles being knocked over under her window. Somebody's down there, trying to get a basement window open. She looks. And all she can really see is a man's leg, in gray trousers. Hold on to that. She told the police that same day, Monday, hours before anybody knew why it might matter. A quarter to two. Another time on the record. The police will later say the dogs were barking at one forty-five, and they'll build their clock around it. About a quarter to three. Farther down Winthrop Avenue, another building. A woman who lives right above that building's basement hears something too. "I heard what sounded like a door or window being slammed in the basement. I also heard water running." She didn't think much of it at the time. Water running, in a basement, at a quarter to three in the morning. And then, at the Degnans', the rest of the night passed quietly, until half past seven, when James Degnan went to wake his daughter for school. Now look at that back bedroom the way the police saw it Monday morning. The windows weren't locked. The bed covers were in perfect order. The police took that to mean nothing violent had happened in that bed. Out in the back yard, near the incinerator, was a ladder. Seven feet long, six rungs, one of them a rough board nailed on in place of the one that was missing. The kidnapper could have used it to reach her window, or he could have reached it from the back porch. The fingerprint man found "several good fingerprints" on the window sill. That sounded like a lot, on the first day. Then they found out whose they were. They belonged to a maid. Maybe from a visit two days earlier. Maybe from that same morning, when the flat filled up with people. The police argued about which. On the ladder, no fingerprints. No footprints. Nothing. And it had been a mild night, above freezing, the ground soft and wet. But there was no mud on the window sill. No mud in the room. And no mark where a ladder would have rested against that sill.

Then there's the clock. Her parents saw her at half past twelve. The coroner's doctors, working from what she'd last eaten, put the time she died at twelve-thirty or one. The police, working from the dogs, put the kidnapping at one-thirty to two. They can't all be right. Nobody ever made them agree.

By half past seven that Monday morning, there was an empty bed, an unlocked window, a ladder without a fingerprint on it, and a note on the floor. And a block and a half away, a woman on Glenlake was about to call the police about a man's leg in her window.

Part 6Please Be a Good Girl

The note said: do not notify the police. James Degnan already had. He called them when he found her bed empty, before he ever saw the note on the floor. He said so himself, later that day, on the radio. So by the middle of Monday morning, the flat on Kenmore Avenue was full. Uniforms. Detectives. The fingerprint man at the window sill. Neighbours. The maid from upstairs. And at the center of it, the girls' mother. The papers said Helen Degnan was "prostrated."

The new police commissioner, John Prendergast, had been on the job exactly one week. He took personal charge. The county sheriff, Michael Mulcahy, came too. The papers called him a friend of the family. Three agents of the FBI came and sat down with James Degnan. Kidnapping had been a federal crime ever since the Lindbergh baby, more than a decade before, but only if the kidnapper took the child across a state line. Nobody knew yet whether that was what this was. And the chief of detectives arrived: Walter Storms. If you heard the last episode, you know that name. A month earlier, standing over the Frances Brown case, he was the man who told the papers to look back at Josephine Ross.

At ten o'clock, the phone rang. Degnan's private line. A number that wasn't listed. A man's voice. He repeated what the note said. The twenty thousand dollars. The threats. And he said he'd call again. The police traced the call to a number in Rogers Park, the next neighbourhood north. A little after eleven, Walter Storms came out of the house fast, drove to the Summerdale station, collected six squads of policemen, and raced west with them.

Out front, the reporters were asking the obvious question. Why this family? James Degnan didn't have an answer. "Someone may think I have a lot of money, but I haven't. And I have no way of getting money. All I can ask is that the girl be returned unharmed." He made seventy-five hundred dollars a year. He managed the people who ran ration boards. His boss at the O.P.A. said there was nothing in the man's work that would make anyone want to hurt his child.

The police had a theory of their own. It was the house. The big brick house on the corner, set back behind the shrubbery. Whoever did this had looked at it, they figured, and decided a rich man's daughter slept inside. He was a government man in a borrowed flat.

Within a few hours, James Degnan went on the radio. Three times. Three networks. On WMAQ: "If you have any sympathy or understanding in your heart, you will return the child to the family. Please let me know what I can do, how I can contact you. I'll give you the money. I'll do anything to get my child back. If you harm her, God will repay you. Please, please do not harm her."

On WGN, he asked the kidnapper to take care of her. "She had no clothes except those white pajamas. Please keep her warm and wrap her in blankets if you can, so she won't catch cold." On WBBM: "I give you my promise there will be no trap." He offered immunity. No prosecution, if she came back. "If you can turn her loose," he said, "she'll find her way home." And somewhere in there, he spoke past the kidnapper, to her. In case she could hear. "If Suzanne is listening, please be a good girl and do as you are told. If you do this, Suzanne, I know that no harm will come to you." And he told the man one more thing. "I assure you that I have burned the note."

He hadn't. By then the note was at the police crime laboratory. Remember what the back of it said? Burn this for her safety. Nobody burned it. And the one man who said he had was her father, on the radio, telling the only lie he had, to the only person who could bring her home. The man on the phone had said he'd call again. If he ever did, nobody said so. The parents waited all day. The papers said they "maintained hope" through all of it, that they'd pay the twenty thousand dollars somehow and get their girl back.

And outside, seventy-five policemen were working through a five-block square around the house. Every basement. Every parked car. Every sewer.

Part 7The Canvass

The canvass was methodical. Seventy-five policemen, a five-block square, every building in it. At about half past four that afternoon, two detectives on that canvass, Lee O'Rourke and Harry Benoit, came to a catch basin under the sidewalk between two apartment buildings on Kenmore Avenue. It was half a block from the Degnan house. They lifted the iron plate off it.

What they found there was Suzanne. Nobody had sent them. There was no tip. It was a routine search, of the kind the police were doing in every basement and every sewer for blocks around. And it found her in the first afternoon. They left everything where it was until the coroner's man and the city sewer crews got there. Then, through the evening and into the night, they kept looking. By just before midnight, they had found the rest of her. Four catch basins, all within about a block of her house. All of her but her arms.

The coroner said she had been strangled. And he said that everything else was done after she was already dead. That is all I'm going to tell you about that. While the sewer crews were still working, the parish priest from St. Gertrude's, Father Kearney, went to the house on Kenmore Avenue. The newspapers wrote down what happened in that room.

Mrs. Degnan was lying on a divan, and she sat up. The priest asked them, "Do you have strong faith?" "I have faith," she said. The priest didn't say anything. "I understand," James Degnan said. He sat down next to his wife and put his arm around her. "We understand," he said. "Don't we, Mom."

And then she asked the priest one question. "Was she disfigured, father?" James Degnan had asked that his wife not be told how their daughter had been found. The reporter who was there wrote that the priest appeared to shake his head. Slowly. That day on the radio, a father had told a kidnapper he'd burned the note. By that night, the people around Helen Degnan were keeping one more thing from her. The house didn't empty out that night. It filled up. The mayor, Edward Kelly, came. So did the heads of the police department, the coroner's office, the state's attorney's office and the sheriff's office. They set up headquarters in the Degnans' flat and stayed until morning. Outside, hundreds of people milled around in the street. Parents in the neighbourhood were begging the police for protection for their children. The mayor called it "even too horrible for a maniac." And the next morning, in a little box on a front page in Moline, Illinois, a wire service did the arithmetic. Chicago's nineteenth murder in six weeks.

Part 8The Laundry Room

Tuesday morning, the eighth of January. A police captain, Joseph Goldberg, was put in charge of a hundred picked men for the search, and he gave them one sentence. "Men, the police force is on trial. Nothing must be left undone to solve this case."

They went house to house and store to store. Every janitor in the neighbourhood. Every shopkeeper. Anybody who showed up at the county morgue asking to see the child was questioned on the spot. By the first morning, six men were in custody, most of them janitors, and every one of the six had an alibi. The rewards came in that same day. Five thousand dollars from the mayor, five thousand from a newspaper, five hundred from the father of two children at Sacred Heart. And five hundred from a man who made musical instruments. His came with a condition. It would pay out for the killer's arrest, his conviction, and his execution.

The first arrest came from St. Louis, and it had nothing to do with anything. A man named Grover Casey had telephoned the Degnans three times. He told them their child was safe, and he wanted five hundred dollars. He'd telephoned a family in the worst hours of their lives, to sell them the idea that their child was safe. The FBI agent in St. Louis called it "an attempt to chisel in." Back in Chicago, four detectives were going through basements, block by block. Sergeants Jack Hanrahan and Frank Pape.

Detectives John Moss and Rudolph Friedl. The paper called it a routine but detailed search. About a block from the Degnan house, at 5901 Winthrop Avenue, they went down into the basement laundry room. Four laundry tubs. Hanrahan looked into one. "This is it, boys."

Three of the four tubs held what the police called evidence. And across the room, one of the twelve storage lockers the tenants used had been forced open. Inside was a hack saw, wiped clean. Remember the woman who heard water running, in a basement on Winthrop Avenue, at a quarter to three in the morning. She lived right above that room.

Then the four of them did something that would tell you a lot about the next six months. They waited. The paper's words were that they waited "for someone. In fact, anyone." And the janitor walked in. His name was Hector Verburgh. He was sixty-five. He looked after that building and another one across the street from the Degnans. He'd spent Monday helping the police. He'd shown them where the manholes and the sewers were. Policemen and reporters had been using his telephone all day. They took him in. "Why should an old man like me kill a little girl like that?" He told them anybody could have got into that laundry room, because the windows were always open. "My conscience is clear." He had no police record. None.

That night, Sergeant Hanrahan announced that the janitor's handwriting showed "similarities" with the ransom note. The Y's, the S's, the T's. The same newspaper, in the same story, reported that Hector Verburgh could read, but could not write. So the first handwriting match in the Degnan case came from a man who couldn't write.

Wednesday, they gave him a lie detector test. The result was called inconclusive. The operator said he was too tired and too upset to take a fair test. The police took his tax returns to compare them with the note. And the case had started correcting itself in public.

In the furnace room, a few feet from the tubs, the police had found bones. On Tuesday they told the papers these were "beyond doubt" the child's arms. On Wednesday an anthropologist from the University of Chicago looked at them. They were not human bones. Her arms were still missing.

The "several good fingerprints" on her window sill turned out to belong to a maid. That, the paper said, "also cleared Verburgh." And one of the bags the killer had used turned out to be a shopping bag with a name printed on it, "Frank M." The police took the M for an initial. It belonged to a tenant whose ten-year-old son had printed his own name on it to hold his toys. Frank the Third. He'd written "Frank," and then three little lines. "III." The police had read it as an M. The boy told them that himself, in tears.

By now Hector Verburgh's family had gone to court. The judge who heard it was the chief justice of the Criminal Court, Harold G. Ward. He gave the police twenty-four more hours. Charge him, or let him go. Sergeant Hanrahan said, "The case is getting hotter and hotter all the time. In twenty-four hours we will know the answer." The state's attorney, William Tuohy, said the evidence so far pointed to Verburgh.

Thursday, the tenth of January, four o'clock in the afternoon. They let him go. The paper said the police "admitted they had no case." The state's attorney's office told Judge Ward there was no evidence to charge him. The paper also said why he'd been held at all. It was "largely because" he was the janitor. And when he came out, Hector Verburgh told reporters what those two days had been like. "O, they hanged me up. They blindfolded me. I can't put up my arms, they are sore. They had handcuffs on me for hours and hours. I no sleep, I no eat." Sergeant Hanrahan denied that anyone had mistreated him. The accounts written since say those two days left him with a separated shoulder, and that he spent ten days in the hospital. Two days after his release, his own doctor told a wire service he was exhausted, but otherwise in good condition. Either way, he walked out of that jail a sick old man, and nobody had charged him with anything.

By that summer, Hector Verburgh was suing high police officials for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, for false arrest. How that came out, I haven't been able to find. Two days in, the Degnan case had its first suspect. He was the man who'd spent the first day helping them look for her.

Part 9The Mass of the Angels

On Thursday, the same day the janitor walked out of jail, a letter came to the Degnans. No name on it. Inside, someone had written out the words from the wall in Frances Brown's apartment. "For heaven's sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself."

The police called it "the work of a callous crank." Somebody had read the newspaper, and sat down, and copied out a dead woman's wall, and mailed it to a mother and father the week their daughter died. That's the first time, anywhere in this story, the Degnan case and the Frances Brown case touch. A crank's letter, in the mail.

Friday, the eleventh of January, 1946. Half past ten in the morning. St. Gertrude's church, 1420 Granville Avenue. Her parish. More than thirteen hundred people came. It wasn't a requiem. The church sang a different mass for her, the one sung for children, the Mass of the Angels. A hundred voices from the parish children's choir sang it. The priest who gave the sermon had come from Boston. He'd been a friend of James and Helen Degnan all their lives. He explained what that mass was. It was the song of the angels, he said, welcoming one more to sing before the throne of God.

And the paper that covered it added one line. "Suzanne had portrayed the role of a Christmas angel in the Sacred Heart school pageant shortly before Christmas." Her whole school was there. More than a hundred children in blue and white uniforms, with their heads bowed over their missals. Six tall white candles stood by a small white casket at the altar rail. Four boys from a boys' school, boys who had known her, carried it. Her sister was at the mass. She did not go to the grave. The priest said that in the hearts of the Degnans, "there is no room for vengeance." And he prayed that mothers and fathers everywhere in the country would be spared what had happened to them. Many of the women in that church wept openly. Helen Degnan didn't. Neither did her older girl.

Ten policemen held back the crowd of mothers who wanted to reach her as she came out on her husband's arm. Detectives worked the crowd, watching faces. In the apartment building across the street, the windows were full of people watching through binoculars. A month before, at Frances Brown's funeral in Richmond, Indiana, the policemen leading the procession had to ask whose funeral it was. Nobody at this one had to ask. That afternoon, seventy-five people followed her out to All Saints cemetery, near Des Plaines. A bitter wind was blowing. The casket went down into a tiny grave beneath a bare maple tree. The wind took the petals off the flowers and blew them across the green felt carpet laid around the grave.

Helen Degnan stood in black, shivering, with her head up. And James Degnan, at some point, let his hat go. His fedora slipped out of his fingers and fell. He couldn't see it for crying. It lay there on the ground near his daughter's casket, and he didn't notice. The one spray of flowers that went into the ground with her was from the two of them. A cross of pink camellias, and forget-me-nots.

There was no stone put on that grave. As far as I can find, there still isn't one. That same day, Friday, someone found something else near the building on Winthrop Avenue, the one with the laundry room. A sign, on a post. Printed in lipstick. STOP ME BEFORE I KILL MORE.

The paper ran a photograph of it. It didn't say who made it. Nobody knows. The day they buried a six-year-old girl, somebody put Frances Brown's words on a post in lipstick, near that laundry room on Winthrop Avenue. On Sunday, a reporter went to see Hector Verburgh. He was in bed, sick. He'd been getting flowers. Eight of his tenants had sent them. Other janitors had come by. He called it "the most horror filled week in my life." He told her how it happened. The reporters had been using his phone all day Monday, and they needed change for it. "I went down to the store to get a bunch of nickels for reporters who were using our telephone. When I came back, the police nabbed me and led me to a laundry tub where they said there was blood. They wouldn't turn on the lights."

"It doesn't all seem fair." He told her he lived right across the street from the Degnans. He hardly knew the family. But he remembered the two girls. "The girls used to play in the front yard," he said. "But never crossed the street."

Part 10A Cold Trail

By the end of the first week, the Degnans couldn't stay in their own home. Strangers were calling. Hundreds of them, the papers said. Telegrams. Letters. People had tried to talk their way into the funeral home to look at her. The family moved into a friend's apartment, and the calls followed them there. There were so many that the police started listening in on every one. A psychologist at the University of Chicago was asked what kind of person does that. Some of them, he said, "just enjoy seeing other people tormented."

On Saturday night, the twelfth, James Degnan talked to reporters one more time. He'd had five days to think about the note on his daughter's floor. The twenty thousand dollars. Wait for word. He told them he now believed the note had never been about money at all. It was simply to mystify the police. And then he took Helen and Betty, and they left Chicago. They went to his people in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the clues were falling apart, one at a time. Take the ladder. The papers had been comparing it to the ladder in the Lindbergh kidnapping. Seven feet, six rungs, one of them a rough board nailed on in place of a missing one. It wasn't the police who traced it. It was reporters from the Chicago Tribune. They found it belonged to a woman who ran a plant nursery a block away, at 6033 Winthrop. It was half of an old extension ladder some roofers had left behind two years earlier, worthless. It had been stolen out of her yard about two months back. The other half was still there, and it matched. And James Degnan told the police something else about that ladder. He'd seen it in the same spot the day before. The day before the kidnapping. Sitting right there in the yard.

So maybe the kidnapper brought a ladder. Or maybe the ladder had been lying around for a day, or for weeks, and had nothing to do with anything. On Saturday the police released four more men. The one they'd had the most hope for was a handyman who had once worked at the building with the laundry room. He'd worked there three days, in the summer of 1944, before the Degnans ever came to Chicago. The chief of detectives called him "one of the liveliest clues since the tragedy." A lie test said he was innocent, and they let him go. The first suspect was a janitor. The liveliest clue, a week later, was another one.

Monday, the fourteenth of January. One week. The wire services had a phrase for it now: "a cold trail." "Clues have collapsed one by one." Letters were pouring in from all over the country, hundreds a day. City Hall did what city halls do. The mayor announced he'd hire a thousand new policemen: all ex-servicemen, back from the war, walking beats in their old service uniforms with police stars pinned on, and belts, and guns. Two million, seven hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars a year. And the FBI? Remember those three agents in the Degnan living room the first morning? The Bureau said it "has not entered the case and is not authorized to." Kidnapping only became federal if the victim was taken across a state line. Here the whole thing had happened within a few blocks. Suzanne Degnan never left Illinois. So it stayed a Chicago case.

And that same Monday night, a phone rang at a house on the North Side. The parents were out of town. A maid answered. There were three children in the house. A man with an accent asked whose house it was, and whether there were any children there. He said his name was Nick Charles. If you know your old movies, that's the detective from The Thin Man. William Powell, with a martini in his hand. Somebody thought that was funny. The maid wouldn't tell him anything. He called back. The police put a guard on the house. That was Chicago a week after Suzanne Degnan.

Wednesday, the sixteenth. Go back to the woman on Glenlake. A man's leg in gray trousers at her basement window, at about half past one. Bottles knocked over in the dark. She'd told the police that first Monday, hours before anybody found the laundry room. On Wednesday, a detective named Adolph Valanis went over the backs of the buildings on that corner inch by inch. Behind 6035 Winthrop, a building that faces Glenlake too, there's a back stairway. Caught in a rough wooden plank on those stairs, he found five or six wisps of yellow hair. It matched Suzanne's.

Now the police had a route, or believed they did. They thought he had carried her about a block and a half from her bedroom to the bottom of that stairway, and that she may have died there. They thought he'd tried that laundry window, the one the woman upstairs heard, and couldn't get it open. And from there he went down the alley, to the other building, the one with the laundry room that was open. How he got her that last stretch, by carrying, or by car, or on a cart, the paper said, were "still matters for police speculation." And right near that same stairway, way back on the first Tuesday, a janitor had picked something up off the ground. It had been sitting in a police file for a week. It was about to become the biggest name in the case.

Part 11Sherman

The first Tuesday, the eighth of January, a janitor was working behind that same building, the corner of Winthrop and Glenlake. On the ground, near the laundry room, he found a length of picture-frame wire, twisted into a loop. Tied to its ends were two handkerchiefs. And caught on the wire was a single blond hair, about three inches long.

The coroner's office said Suzanne had been strangled, probably with a wire or a cord. As far as I can find, that wire and those handkerchiefs didn't reach the papers for more than a week. The handkerchiefs interested them more than the wire. Handkerchiefs went to laundries, and laundries marked them. By the fifteenth, detectives were saying the marks had been traced, and at least one man was under watch. On the eighteenth, they went public. Two cotton handkerchiefs, twelve inches square. One of them, the paper said, was "twisted as if it had been used as a gag." In one corner, in ink, two letters: S. S. And in another corner, a number and a name.

3168 S. Sherman. The Army went through its records. Nothing. The Navy had no S. Sherman at all. Several men named Sherman around Chicago were looked at and quickly cleared. Captain Tim O'Connor flew to Washington, and the Army ran eight million service cards through its sorting machines looking for that number. Then the police found one Sherman who had disappeared.

Monday morning, the twenty-first of January. The Tribune's front page: "Search Turns to Sherman." Sidney Sherman. Twenty-two years old. An ex-Marine. He'd been living at the Y.M.C.A. hotel on 53rd Street, on the South Side, and on the twelfth of January, five days after the kidnapping, he walked out of it without checking out. The chief of detectives, Walter Storms, chose his words very carefully. Sherman, he said, "is not viewed at present as a suspect." There was no order out for his arrest. The number on the handkerchief didn't even match his Marine serial number. And even if those handkerchiefs had been his once, they might have been lost, or stolen. But his face was in the paper. His name was in papers across the country. And it had been, as the Tribune put it, "early Monday morning, Jan. 7, just two weeks ago." In Toledo, Ohio, somebody reading the paper recognized the name, from a different column. The marriage licenses.

Sidney Sherman had walked out of the Y to get married. He came back to Chicago with the detectives, on his own. He said he knew nothing about any of it, and that he'd never seen the handkerchief. His handwriting, the police said, bore no resemblance to the note. They gave him two lie tests, and he passed both. The state's attorney said he'd apparently been at home in Chicago on the night of the sixth. Cleared. The next day's headline: "Police Left Without Suspect."

That same day, the Degnans came home from Worcester. The police were planning to go through the house with them, and walk back through that night. A week later, the twenty-eighth of January, the Tribune ran the biggest headline the case had had yet. "CONFESSES PART IN DEGNAN KIDNAPING; NAMES KILLER." A young man named Theodore Campbell had told the police a story. It was a plot for money, he said, planned a week ahead, for three men. He was supposed to be the third, and he'd been dropped at the last minute. He named a friend of his, Vincent Costello, as one of the other two. And he quoted one of them saying, after it was done: "Well, we killed her. Now we've to get the money." He even told them about a phone call. On that first Monday morning, he said, he'd rung the Degnan house and asked, "Is Suzanne there?" And somebody in the house had answered, he said: "She's down in the basement, wait a minute." And the police checked. There had been a call like that. The officials said it out loud: "It's hot."

It lasted one day. The next morning the state's attorney called it a hoax. The two of them had made it up, he said, hoping to sell the story to the newspapers. The FBI compared their handwriting to the note, and it didn't match. Their fingerprints didn't match. They had an alibi: a movie on Sunday night, then a night at one of their houses. The "third man" was, in the chief of detectives' words, "purely imaginary." "We were able to find nothing on which to hold these kids any longer." But the phone call was real, and now there was an explanation for it. On that first Monday morning, the two of them had been on the elevated platform at Thorndale, a block from the Degnan house, and they'd overheard police and reporters talking. So they went up to the next station, Granville, found a phone, and called the house. At 9:28 a.m. A police captain picked up and handed the phone to the lady from upstairs. Whatever they heard, they panicked and hung up. Two boys, playing reporter.

There was another call that morning, though. At ten o'clock, on her father's unlisted line, a man repeated the ransom demand, and the police traced it to Rogers Park. Nothing in anything I've found ever explains that one. The headline on the twenty-ninth had named a killer. The one on the thirtieth said the police "must start over." Three weeks in, they were back to the beginning.

Part 12Six Weeks Later

The investigation went on. The papers got thinner. Then, on the nineteenth of February, six weeks after she was taken, some men from Commonwealth Edison, the electric company, were working on Broadway, about three blocks from the Degnan house. They weren't looking for anything to do with the case. They were tracing a power leak. They opened an underground manhole, a hundred feet north of Hollywood Avenue. And that is where Suzanne Degnan's arms were found.

The city had searched every sewer, every basement and every coal pile for blocks around. A wire service called it "Chicago's most extensive manhunt." Policemen, firemen, sewer crews, neighbours. And at the end of it, the last of her was found by men who were looking for something else.

After that, the story goes quiet. I want to be straight with you about this part. The newspapers I've been working from, which ran the Degnan case on the front page every day in January, almost stop. February. March. April. May. There are no new suspects in them worth the name, no new headlines, no new clues.

Five months. The Degnans were back on Kenmore Avenue, in the borrowed first floor, with Betty, in the house where their younger girl had slept in the back bedroom. And nothing happened. Well, almost nothing. On the last night of April, at about half past one in the morning, police on the South Side stopped two young men near 61st Street and Drexel Avenue, not far from the University of Chicago. One of them was carrying a gun. He was booked. He was arraigned in the first week of May. And that month, he was let go. Somebody from the university had come down and spoken up for them, by one account. By another, the charge just didn't stick. It was the kind of thing that happens in a big city every night. By the end of June, 1946, it had been almost six months since a six-year-old girl was taken out of her bedroom on Kenmore Avenue. Nobody had been charged with her murder. Nobody had been charged with the murder of Frances Brown, in the Pine Crest hotel, six months before that. Nobody had been charged with the murder of Josephine Ross, a year before, two miles down that same street.

And then, on the twenty-sixth of June, on a back stairway up in Rogers Park, a policeman cornered a burglar.

Part 13The Twenty-Sixth of June

Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of June, 1946. Rogers Park, the far north end of the city, up by the lake. The Wayne Manor apartments, 6928 Wayne Avenue. A young man came out of one of the flats who had no business being in it. In his pocket was a single dollar bill, an old one, the big oversized kind they'd stopped printing years before. It belonged to the tenant. The janitor saw him. The young man pulled a revolver, pointed it at him, and ran.

A detective named Tiffin Constant caught up with him on a rear stairway around the corner, on Farwell Avenue. The young man turned the revolver on the detective and pulled the trigger. Nothing. The gun failed. He pulled it again. Nothing. Constant fired back, and missed. And then the young man jumped him, and the two of them were fighting on the stairs. Now, here's the part I love. Coming home just then was Abner Cunningham Jr. He was a traffic policeman, off duty, walking back from the beach. In his swimming suit. He saw the fight. And he picked up flowerpots. Three of them. Empty. He brought all three of them down on the young man's head. That ended it. When Cunningham told the story in court, months later, he said, "Constant was doing a pretty good job, but I think he was glad to see me." They took the young man to the hospital with a concussion. The newspaper story the next morning ran inside the Tribune, on page seven.

"Student Seized in Fight After Revolver Fails." A prowler. A gun that wouldn't go off. A cop in a bathing suit. It doesn't say the word Degnan anywhere in it. The young man's name was William Heirens. He was seventeen years old. He was a student at the University of Chicago, down on the South Side, and he lived in a dormitory there. And remember the last night of April? The two young men stopped by police at 61st and Drexel, at half past one in the morning, near the university? One of them carrying a gun, booked, arraigned, and let go in May? That was him. The same day he was caught, the twenty-sixth of June, something happened fifteen hundred miles away that should have been the bigger story. In Phoenix, Arizona, a man sitting in the county jail on another charge confessed to the murder of Suzanne Degnan. Two days later he took it back. He said he'd confessed because he would rather be executed than face the charge he was already in jail for. By then, the Chicago police had something else to look at. They searched the young man's room at the university. The police added up what they found, and put a value on it: three thousand, four hundred and twenty-one dollars and sixty cents. Three guns. Cameras. Women's jewelry, and women's watches. War bonds made out in other people's names, some of them traced to a burglary the November before. Hypodermic needles. And two surgical kits, each with a small saw and a knife. Some of the police latched onto those surgical kits right away, because of what had been done to Suzanne Degnan. That was the police thinking out loud. Nothing in that room was ever shown to have touched her.

But a dormitory room full of other people's watches and other people's bonds is a burglar's room. And some of what was in it would turn out to come from burglaries on the North Side. Around Kenmore Avenue. And with the young man lying in a hospital bed under guard, somebody asked a question nobody had asked about him yet. What about his fingerprints?

Part 14Six Days

They had him in the hospital at the Bridewell, the city jail. The newspapers described how. Strapped, arms and legs, to a hospital cot. He had a concussion from three flowerpots. He wasn't talking. The chief surgeon said he was faking it, that the unconsciousness was an act. The X-rays showed no fracture.

Detectives came in and asked him questions, and got nothing. The chief of detectives tried talking to him in German. He was seventeen. And while he lay there, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune named James Gavin made a suggestion to the police: compare this kid's fingerprints with the prints on the Degnan note. His fingerprints were easy to get. They'd been on file since the last night of April, since 61st and Drexel. According to the Tribune, the comparison took ten minutes. Months earlier, the note had gone to the FBI laboratory in Washington, where it was treated with chemicals to bring up faint fingerprints. On Saturday, the twenty-ninth of June, the papers reported that Captain Emmett Evans and Sergeant Thomas Laffey said one of those prints matched the young man's left little finger. They counted seven points of similarity. After they took a fresh set of his prints, the state's attorney said there were nine possible points, "with the rest not varying." How many points did you need? Evans himself said eleven was the number normally accepted. Sometimes, he said, four could be enough. The prints, the paper wrote, were "none 100 per cent satisfactory but good enough." That night they sent it to Washington. And the FBI wired back that his print was "identical" with one on the ransom note. Sunday's front page: "FBI CONFIRMS DEGNAN CLEW."

Here's what I can't tell you. His prints had been sitting in a police file since April. Was the note ever checked against them, any time in May or June? Nothing I've found says so either way. Now, the same Saturday the print story broke, there was another story. It came from the man who'd found the laundry room back in January. Sergeant Jack Hanrahan. At about one o'clock in the morning, Hanrahan said, he was at the young man's bedside, and the young man talked. Think about where he was. Seventeen. A head injury. Strapped down at the arms and legs. One in the morning. No lawyer. No parents. This is the conversation the way Hanrahan told it to the paper. "Did you kill Suzanne?" "Yes." How did you get in? "Thru the front door." Did you cut her up? "Yes." Where? "In the cellar." With what? "A knife and saw." What did you cut off? "Her toes." And Hanrahan said: "You know you didn't cut off her toes." And the young man answered: "You tell me, and I'll tell you." Then he turned to another policeman in the room. "Help me. You promised to help me." The police believed the kidnapper came in through her bedroom window, not the front door.

Everything else he said yes to, the cellar, a knife, a saw, had been in the newspapers since January. And the one detail he added himself, Hanrahan told him was wrong. "You tell me, and I'll tell you." I'm not going to call that a confession. You can decide what to call it. But the police kept building. On Sunday they had the neighbourhood. In January there had been a burglary at 5959 Kenmore, just up the block from the Degnans. Some of the loot in his dormitory room came from that flat. And from its back windows, the paper said, you could look right across the back yards to the window of the room Suzanne was taken from. They had his class schedule. On Monday morning, the seventh of January, he missed his nine o'clock mathematics class. His first recorded class that day was at ten. And his alibi for the night: he'd been out drinking with his roommate. The roommate couldn't say where he himself had been. A burglary down the block. A missed class. A shaky alibi. None of that puts anybody in that bedroom. But it was a picture, and the police were filling it in fast. And that Sunday, two other names came back into the newspaper. Frances Brown. Josephine Ross. The police said they were looking at him for those too. And then, the same day, they said this: his fingerprints "do not correspond" to the one found on the door in Frances Brown's apartment. Somebody else might have left it, they said. Hold on to that sentence. That night they carried him into the detective bureau for a lie test, wrapped in a blanket and strapped to a chair. The test was "futile." And somewhere in those days, the doctors gave him a drug. Sodium pentothal. The papers called it "truth serum." On the first of July, whether he'd been given it "remained a mystery." A psychiatrist said he had recommended "some form of the truth drug." The state's attorney, William Tuohy, said: "I will neither confirm nor deny use of the drug, because I do not know." His lawyer said, "If you are in a coma, you did not give your consent." Twelve days later, the authorities said the serum had been given "solely" to find out whether he was faking. Five days after that, Tuohy said: "I neither touched, smelled, nor saw any truth serum."

Eight years later, the Supreme Court of Illinois settled that one. The state's attorney had directed it. Nobody asked the boy or his parents. At half past two in the morning on the first of July, he started answering questions. The state's attorney told the papers he had "made no confession of the Degnan case." By then his lawyers had a petition ready: charge him, or let him go. Then, on the first of July, three things happened. One. A telegram came in from J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI had matched his left palm print to a palm print on the ransom note. When they showed him, the paper said, he "collapsed on his cell bench. He said nothing."

Two. They had him write from dictation. Words from the note. Remember the note on Suzanne's floor? "Ready" with two D's. "Wait" with an E on the end. And on the back, "safety" missing its E. He wrote "waite." And he wrote "safty." Exactly the way the note had them, according to the Tribune.

Three. That afternoon, the young man was formally charged with a crime for the first time. It wasn't murder. It was a woman named Marion Caldwell. On the fifth of December, 1945, she was sitting in her kitchen on Sherwin Avenue when a bullet came through the window and went through her nose. The ballistics matched it to a twenty-two from his room. Assault with intent to commit murder. And on the second of July, his lawyers lost the fight in court. He was held on four counts of assault and twenty burglaries. The papers said it plainly. None of the charges were connected with the Degnan kidnapping.

Six days. A fingerprint the FBI called identical. A palm print. Two misspelled words. A boy strapped to a cot at one in the morning, saying "You tell me, and I'll tell you." And not one charge of murder.

Part 15George Murman

On the ninth of July, a grand jury indicted him. Four counts of assault with intent to kill and murder: the woman shot through her window, the detective on the stairs, the janitor and a tenant at the Wayne Manor. Twelve burglaries. Another seventeen were on the way. And not one word about Suzanne Degnan. The police kept asking him about all those watches, and bonds, and rings in his room. Where did they come from? He said a man gave them to him. A man named George Murman.

The police went looking for George Murman. They found exactly one man by that name, and he had never set foot in Chicago. They decided the George Murman in the young man's story didn't exist. And they turned up a note signed "George M. S." that the police judged to be in his own handwriting. The paper ended its story with four words. "George Murman has it." That same week, a cab driver came down to the detective bureau. On the night Suzanne was taken, he said, at about two in the morning, he'd seen a man in the yard of the Degnan house. They showed him the young man's photographs. The police wouldn't say whether he recognized him. Two in the morning. That's one more time on that night's clock. Then, on the twelfth of July, came the print. You heard about it in the last episode. In Frances Brown's apartment, the police had found one fingerprint, on the frame of the bathroom door, near a hinge. Smudged. They sent it to the lab. And on the thirtieth of June, the police said the young man's prints "do not correspond" to it. On the twelfth of July, Sergeant Laffey said they did. His right forefinger. Twenty-two points, he said, nine on the first joint and thirteen on the second. The chief of detectives, Walter Storms: "This print in the Brown case puts Heirens right in there at the time of the crime." The next night, the FBI confirmed it. The newspaper that printed that story didn't mention that, twelve days earlier, the police had said the opposite. And for the first time, the newspaper put them side by side. "SEE SIMILARITY IN DEGNAN AND WAVE SLAYINGS. Police Also Compare Two with Ross Case."

Suzanne Degnan. Frances Brown. Josephine Ross, in her flat on North Kenmore, thirteen months before. If you heard the first two episodes, this is where they come back in. Seven months after Frances Brown and a year after Josephine Ross, their names were back on the front page, both of them filed under somebody else's. The same story said there was "no definite evidence" connecting him to Josephine Ross. And it called the link to the Degnan case "tentative."

That weekend, the Tribune called a widow in Richmond, Indiana. Frances Brown's mother. Frances had owned a wristwatch, white metal, a Christmas present from her father, the railroad conductor who was killed in 1931. It was missing from her apartment. Her sister still had the matching one. There were two women's watches in the young man's room that nobody had identified. A jeweller in Richmond was going to check his records. What came of it, I haven't found.

Sunday, the fourteenth of July. His lawyers, the Coghlans, phoned the state's attorney and asked for a meeting. On a Sunday. Tuohy and his first assistant came in on their day off. They were in a room for two and a half hours. When they came out: "There'll be no comment on this meeting." One of the defence lawyers looked, the paper said, "visibly shaken." The papers filled the silence. A plea, they said. A guilty plea, to save him from the electric chair. The name Leopold and Loeb was everywhere, the two rich boys from the University of Chicago who'd killed a child in 1924 and escaped the chair. And on Tuesday, the sixteenth of July, the Chicago Tribune ran this across its front page: "HOW HEIRENS SLEW 3." Under the byline of a reporter named George Wright, the paper told the whole story of all three murders. Josephine Ross. Frances Brown. Suzanne Degnan. Where he went, how he got in, what he did, and what he did after. Told as fact, it said, "from unimpeachable sources." And on that same front page, the same paper said this: "no legal confession exists." Whatever he'd said, he could "repudiate" it at any time. The state's attorney didn't sound like a man with a confession. "If they have a confession from him," Tuohy said, "they had better bring it in to me." And his lawyer said that when they asked him, "he said no." I'm not going to read you that story. It'll matter later, when we get to what he actually signed. For now, here's what you need to know: three weeks before there was any confession on paper, a newspaper that sold more than a million copies a day had already printed one. And notice something about this whole investigation. The Tribune's reporters found the ladder in January. A Tribune reporter suggested the fingerprint comparison that took ten minutes. The Tribune made the phone call to Frances Brown's mother about the watch. And now the Tribune had told the city how it happened. The newspaper wasn't just covering this case. It was working it. The same week, another story ran, much smaller. The papers had been talking to the young man's classmates at the university. One of them remembered January, the week of the Degnan case, when the talk turned to the janitor the police were holding, Hector Verburgh. And the young man had said: "No, that's not the guy. He's innocent."

He blamed the police methods, the classmate said. By the middle of July, the newspaper had already told the city how he did it. And he still hadn't been charged with a single murder.

Part 16Solely by Chance

Tuesday, the thirtieth of July, 1946. William Heirens was brought into Criminal Court in front of Chief Justice Harold G. Ward, the same judge who'd given the police twenty-four hours with Hector Verburgh back in January. The clerk read out two indictments. The murder of Suzanne Degnan. The murder of Frances Brown. For the first time, he was charged with murder. He stood there and didn't answer. The plea was put off to the fourteenth of August. And then they took him upstairs.

It had all been arranged. His lawyers and the state's attorney had worked it out between them. After the arraignment, in Tuohy's office, he would tell the whole story, of all three murders, Josephine Ross's included. The floor was closed to visitors. The police commissioner was there. A court reporter sat with his notebooks open. They sat the young man down across a big flat-topped desk from William Tuohy, and Tuohy started asking questions.

"I don't remember." That was the answer to every one. His lawyers sent for his parents. At one point his mother was heard to say: "Tell the truth, Bill." Then she sat alone with him for nearly twenty minutes. He kept his head down, the paper said, and twisted a handkerchief in his hands. Even after that, he wouldn't talk. The state's attorney came out and told reporters, "He made no statement, made no admission. We will go right ahead with our case." And: "We have gone up the hill and down again."

Now, here's something to notice about that same day. That morning, the thirtieth, the Tribune had printed what it called "statements made by William George Heirens." It hadn't come out of any courtroom. In the paper's version, after the murder he walked west from the Degnan house to the elevated railroad embankment. He walked north along it, and just south of Granville Avenue he threw the knife onto the "L" tracks. He burned his coat. He had breakfast. And he took the "L" back to the university. That night, the Tribune went looking. It found a track walker for the elevated railroad, who said that on the day of the murder, or the day after, he'd picked up a hunting knife on the right of way, not far from the Degnan house. Right about where the statements said. The next day, the thirty-first, a twenty-one-year-old named Guy Rodrick walked into Tribune Tower and looked at it. "Yes, it's my knife. It's my knife, all right." It had been stolen from his family's apartment the December before, from the same drawer as a twenty-two-caliber pistol. That pistol was the gun from the young man's room, the one that matched the bullet through Marion Caldwell's window. Rodrick had described the knife to the police crime lab, and drawn them a sketch of it, three weeks before the Tribune turned it in. The police called it "by far the most important circumstantial evidence yet uncovered in the Degnan case." The state's attorney said, "My hat is off to The Tribune." What it proved: a knife from a burglary the police laid at his door was found near the Degnan house in January. What nobody reported, then or after, in anything I've found: a fingerprint on it, or her blood. Without a confession, the state said, it would try him for both murders. And the papers said that when there's no plea, the state usually asks for the electric chair.

Tuesday, the sixth of August. A little before eleven in the morning, the second floor of the Criminal Courts building was cleared. His three lawyers went into Tuohy's office. The sheriff brought him over from the jail. He sat across the desk from the state's attorney again. This time, a shorthand reporter sat right beside him. And this time he talked. He talked until half past three. Then they took him out to the scenes, and brought him back. He started again at half past eight. A little before midnight, the whole thing was read back to him, and he signed it, and initialed every page. Here is what the Tribune printed, the next morning, about Suzanne. He said he picked her "solely by chance." He said he climbed into her bedroom early on the morning of the seventh of January. That he strangled her with his hands. That he carried her to the basement at 5901 Winthrop. That afterward he wrote the note on a piece of paper he'd picked up in a library at the university and carried in his pocket for days. That he smeared it with oil, so it wouldn't take fingerprints, and put it through her window. That he threw the knife onto the "L" tracks. Burned his raincoat. Had coffee and doughnuts at a restaurant nearby. And took the "L" back to school. That's all I'm going to read of it. He said he'd worn one handkerchief that night, a big one, over his head like a babushka. So the wire and the two handkerchiefs marked "Sherman" had nothing to do with it. Sidney Sherman's name had been in the papers for nothing. He said "George Murman" was a fantasy, something he'd made up. And then he said George Murman was "as real as anybody else is to me." About Frances Brown, he said he didn't remember stabbing her. He did remember writing on the wall. About Josephine Ross, he said the door of her apartment was open, he went in to steal, and she woke up. Now, put the dates side by side. On the sixteenth of July, the Tribune printed "HOW HEIRENS SLEW 3." On the thirtieth, the paper printed his "statements" about the walk to the "L", the knife, the coat, the breakfast and the train. On the sixth of August, he signed his name to a confession. A lot of what he signed, Chicago had already read. That doesn't make it false. A man who did it would know those things too. But it does mean the question isn't whether his confession matches the facts. It's whether there's anything in it that wasn't already in the paper. I'll come back to that. The terms of the deal were printed that same morning, in the same paper. The state would not ask for death. In return, he would give a complete confession. And the state's attorney had a condition: the sentences would have to put him beyond any possibility of parole. Life terms, one after another.

The prosecutors were willing, the paper said, because without the confession, the state's case was "none too strong." The same morning the knife story ran, the paper had put it more plainly: the chief evidence against him was a fingerprint and part of a palm print, and because of the "lack of direct evidence," his lawyers had been bargaining for his life. His lawyer, John Coghlan, put out a statement. They were acting, he said, on "the written directions of the accused and his parents." On the burglary charges alone, he had no freedom left to bargain with. And: "When he advised us as to his guilt, our course became clear." And in the middle of all that, at half past three, they took him out. Back to 5943 Kenmore Avenue. A crowd was waiting. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt over a white shirt and tie. He pointed out the ladder. And with his handcuffs off for a minute, he climbed it, reached in through Suzanne's window with both hands, and went in feet first. "As nimbly as a panther," the Tribune wrote. Then to the basement on Winthrop. Then across the city to Josephine Ross's building, where her old apartment was locked. So they took him through a similar one, a floor below, and sent the reporters out. Then the Pine Crest. Then down to the university, to a hall on campus, where he led them to three suitcases full of jewelry and guns. The state's attorney said he was "calm, cool, and collected." So exact, Tuohy said, that he pointed out where furniture had been moved.

And when they asked him about another attack, from around that time, he said, "No, I couldn't have done that. That was the day of the Ross killing." Almost seven months to the day after Suzanne Degnan was taken, William Heirens had put his name to it. What was left was to say it in court.

Part 17Twenty-Four Minutes

Wednesday, the fourth of September, 1946. Criminal Court of Cook County. Chief Justice Harold G. Ward. William Heirens stood in front of the bench, and the clerk started reading indictments. There were twenty-nine of them. Burglary. Robbery. Assault. And three murders. To each one, the paper said, he answered "in a loud clear voice, and without apparent emotion." "Guilty."

Judge Ward kept stopping him. The penalty for burglary was one year to life, he said. For robbery, one to twenty. For murder, at the discretion of the court, death in the electric chair. "Having been advised of this, do you still persist in your plea?" "Yes, sir."

Twice, after an indictment was read, he said, "That's right." And twice the judge told him that wasn't the question. Guilty, or not guilty? "Guilty." It took twenty-four minutes. Three assault charges were dropped. One of them was the shooting of Marion Caldwell through her kitchen window. He'd said he was firing at random from a hotel roof half a block away, and intent would be hard to prove. The murder of Suzanne Degnan. The murder of Frances Brown. And the murder of Josephine Ross, on the fifth of June, 1945, at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. In the first episode of this series, I told you nobody was ever charged with Josephine Ross's murder. That was true in 1945. On the fourth of September, 1946, a man stood up in a Chicago courtroom and pleaded guilty to it. There was no jury. There wouldn't be a trial. But the state still had to put its case on the record, and it started calling witnesses. The first one that mattered was James Degnan. He was there to prove that his daughter was dead. That's what the law calls the corpus delicti. He told the court about the night she was taken, and they showed him a photographic copy of the note, and he identified it. It was the first time he had ever seen the man who'd confessed to killing her. He testified, the paper said, "with his eyes straight ahead." He never looked at him. Heirens sat slumped in a chair behind his lawyers and looked at James Degnan without any expression at all. Then Frances Brown's case. The maid who found her that Monday morning. A friend from work who'd identified her at the morgue. And a police captain who identified a photograph of the writing on her wall, and told the court he'd been in the room when Heirens confessed to the Brown murder, and to the Ross murder. Captain Frank Reynolds.

Then Mary Jane Blanchard, Josephine Ross's daughter. Twenty-two now. She told the court she'd seen her mother alive on the morning of the fifth of June, when she left for work. When the court broke for lunch, Mary Jane Blanchard came out into the hallway and broke down, crying, against a telephone booth. And Margaret Heirens, the young man's mother, came out of the courtroom on her husband's arm, saw her, and walked over to her. "They exchanged a few inaudible words," the paper said, "and embraced lightly, both with tears in their eyes." The rest was the case the state had built. The captain who took the note to the FBI, and the chemistry they used on it. Sergeant Laffey, on the little finger and the two palm prints on the note, and the print on Frances Brown's doorjamb. A handwriting examiner, Herbert Walter: the ransom note, the writing on the wall, and that "George M. S." note were all written by Heirens, he said. Two psychiatrists: hysteria, no psychosis, legally sane. The chief of detectives held up the knife from the "L" tracks. And Tiffin Constant and Abner Cunningham told the story of the stairway and the flowerpots.

"Constant was doing a pretty good job," Cunningham said, "but I think he was glad to see me." And Heirens grinned. The paper said it was the first time all day he'd shown any interest in anything. Thursday, the fifth of September. It was nearly six in the evening, after the hour the court usually sat, when Judge Ward came back to the bench. Earlier that day, the paper said, Heirens had tried to hang himself.

First the state's attorney spoke. Then the defence. And what they said, two men who had made this deal together, is the most important testimony in this episode. William Tuohy asked the judge not to sentence him to death. And he told the court why. Without the confessions, he said, the state could have proven a dollar burglary the old bill from the apartment on Wayne Avenue and an assault on a policeman.

The loot from his room might have been thrown out of court, the paper explained, because there'd been no search warrant. "All the prosecution had in the Degnan case was a partial finger print." For Frances Brown, a fingerprint. For Josephine Ross, nothing. "Without the aid of the defense, to this day we would have no answers for the death of Josephine Ross."

He asked for life in prison on each murder, one after the other. "An imprisonment from which he will never return." Then John Coghlan, for the defence. They had agreed, he said, that they would not do anything that would put this young man back into society. And then: "I must confess that there still exists in my mind many doubts as to Heirens' mental condition." And: "This defendant in these cases will never get out of prison."

Judge Ward sentenced William Heirens to three terms of life in prison, to run one after another. On the other charges, more years on top. The paper did the arithmetic: under the most favourable conditions, sixty-one years before he could be free. Just before the sentence, he'd mumbled that he was "very sorry." He'd expected the chair, the paper said. Only then did he feel relief. They put the handcuffs on him and led him out. His mother rushed forward. "I want my Bill! I want my Bill!" She collapsed into the arms of his lawyer. The paper called it "a case of the defendant convicting himself." That's what the record says. He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced. Nobody ever put the evidence in front of a jury, because nobody had to.

Part 18Sixty-Five Years

He went to Stateville prison, outside Joliet. And he started saying he didn't do it. In September of 1946 the court had his plea, and his signature on every page, and his own lawyers had said publicly that he'd admitted it to them. But for the rest of his life, William Heirens said the confession was false. He said he'd been beaten in custody, and drugged. He said he'd signed to stay out of the electric chair. Years later he put it in four words. "I confessed to live." And, another time: "Back in '46, I buckled under." In 1952 he went back to court. There was a nine-day hearing, with nearly forty witnesses. In 1954 the Supreme Court of Illinois ruled on it. It found that the state's attorney had ordered the truth serum, without his permission or his parents'. It called what the police and prosecutors had done to him "flagrant violations of his rights." It said the conduct "deserves the severest condemnation." And it said the guilty pleas would stand. Whatever had been done to him in June, the court said, wasn't what made him plead guilty in September.

That was the pattern for decades. He went back to court, again and again, and the convictions stood. In 1965 he was paroled, inside the prison, on his first life sentence, and in 1966 he was discharged from it. He started serving the second. On the sixth of February, 1972, through Lewis College, he became the first prisoner in Illinois history to earn a four-year college degree. And in the spring of 1983, a federal magistrate named Gerald Cohn ordered him released on parole. The state appealed. In February 1984 the federal appeals court reversed it. The parole board, it said, was allowed to consider punishment and deterrence. He stayed. For some thirty years, every time he came up for parole, somebody from Suzanne's family came to the hearing. In April of 1988, his twenty-eighth time, it was her sister, Betty, now Betty Degnan Finn. She'd been ten years old, asleep in another room, the night Suzanne was taken. And her brother, Jim Degnan.

Suzanne never met him. Jim Degnan was born ten months after she died. He grew up in a family that had already lost a child before he got there. And here he was, a grown man, asking a parole board to keep in prison the man who'd pleaded guilty to killing a sister he never knew. They asked the board to keep him in. The board said no to parole, for the twenty-eighth time.

In 1995 the last of his appeals came back from the Illinois Appellate Court with one sentence that summed it all up. "Litigation has a beginning and, of necessity, an end." In 1996, a handwriting examiner trained by the FBI, David Grimes, went on national television and said William Heirens had not written the ransom note or the words on Frances Brown's wall. Fifty years earlier, the state's examiner had told a courtroom he had. Two experts, fifty years apart, and no jury ever heard either of them.

In 2002, lawyers and students from Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions asked the governor of Illinois for clemency. Their argument was that the confession was coerced, and the evidence was flawed. At the hearing, Jim Degnan said: "Nothing's changed." A police official at the same hearing called Heirens "the yardstick by which all evil is judged." The clemency petition was denied.

In August of 2007, William Heirens was seventy-eight, diabetic and in poor health. The parole board voted, fourteen to nothing, to keep him in prison. One of the board members told him: "God will forgive you. But the state won't." By then he'd asked to be let out about thirty times.

On the fifth of March, 2012, William Heirens died in custody, in a hospital in Chicago. He was eighty-three. He had been locked up for sixty-five years, longer than anyone else in Illinois. He had never had a trial. And he never stopped saying it wasn't him.

Part 19What the Record Says

So here's where I come down. I've spent three episodes on this case, and I told you at the start that refusing to give an answer is an answer too, just not a useful one. So I'm going to tell you what I think. And I'm going to keep separate what a court decided, what the record shows, and what's only my opinion. Here's what a court decided. On the fourth of September, 1946, William Heirens pleaded guilty to the murders of Josephine Ross, Frances Brown and Suzanne Degnan. He was sentenced for all three. That's the legal record, and it has never been overturned. Here's what the record shows about how it got there. The man who prosecuted him stood up in court and said that without the confession, the state had a fingerprint for Suzanne Degnan, a fingerprint for Frances Brown, and nothing for Josephine Ross. A dollar burglary and an assault on a cop, he said. That's what he could have proven. The confession came out of a deal made against the electric chair. Before he signed it, a seventeen-year-old had been strapped to a hospital cot and given a drug the state's attorney first said he knew nothing about. Eight years later the Illinois Supreme Court found the state's attorney had ordered it. And before he signed it, a newspaper that sold more than a million copies a day had already printed its own account of all three murders, and then his "statements" about the knife. None of that is opinion. It's what the record says. Now my opinion.

I don't think William Heirens killed Josephine Ross. In June of 1945 he was sixteen years old. The prosecutor himself told the court he had no evidence on her murder except the confession. In July 1946, the papers were reporting "no definite evidence" linking him to her. When they took him back to the scenes, her apartment was locked, so they walked him through a different one, and they sent the reporters out first. And everything about her murder had been in the papers a year earlier. The address. The bath. The tape. A man who wanted to confess to it had plenty to work with.

So here's the part that bothers me most. If I'm right, then whoever did kill Josephine Ross never had to worry again after September 1946. The case was closed. Not solved. Closed, inside somebody else's sentence. What would change my mind? One detail about her murder in that confession that wasn't already in print. A fingerprint. A witness who put him on Kenmore Avenue that June. I haven't found any of that. I haven't seen the full text of the confession yet either, and if somebody has it, I want to read it. Frances Brown is harder. There's a fingerprint on her bathroom doorjamb. On the thirtieth of June, the police said it didn't correspond to his. Twelve days later, the same police said it matched on twenty-two points, and the FBI agreed.

Nobody ever had to explain the change, because nobody ever cross-examined anyone about it. I can't tell you what that print proves. I can tell you it was never tested in a courtroom. And Suzanne. This is the case with the most evidence, and also the case where the evidence was most handled. On one side: a fingerprint and a palm print on her ransom note, both confirmed by the FBI. "Waite" and "safty," written his way in a dictated test, the same way they were on the note. A knife from the "L" tracks, stolen from the same drawer as a gun from his room. Loot from a flat whose back windows looked across the yards at hers. On the other side: his prints sitting in a police file since April, and nothing to show anybody compared them to the note until a reporter suggested it. "Nine possible points," when the police's own expert said eleven was the usual standard. A boy on a cot at one in the morning saying, "You tell me, and I'll tell you," and getting it wrong. A drug. A newspaper that told the story before he did. A confession made to escape the chair, and denied for the rest of his life.

I can't tell you he didn't do it. I'm not going to tell you that. What I can tell you is that the case against him for Suzanne Degnan was a real case, a stronger one than the other two, and it was never tried. No jury ever heard the fingerprint man cross-examined. No jury ever heard about the cot, or the serum, or the newspaper. The state didn't have to prove it, and the defence didn't have to fight it. A deal decided it. What would settle it for me? The full confession, laid next to the newspaper stories that came before it, line by line. Whatever the lab found on that knife. The original photographs of the prints on that note. That's my read. The city wanted an answer, and in September of 1946 it got one. What it never got was the proof. And three families had to live the rest of their lives with that answer, whichever way they felt about it.

Part 20Section Three

All Saints cemetery, in Des Plaines, just outside Chicago. Section three. Block eight. Lot two. Grave one is Helen Degnan. She died in 1972. Grave two is James Degnan. He died in 1975. And grave three, beside them, is Suzanne. As far as I can find, there's still no stone on any of the three. When William Heirens died, in March of 2012, the reporters called Suzanne's family one more time. For some thirty years, somebody from the family had gone to every one of his parole hearings. Her sister Betty told them why. It was "out of fear that he could hurt somebody else." And then she said: "We outlived him." Her brother Jim was sixty-five. He was born ten months after his sister died. He had never met her. He'd spent decades going to those hearings for her anyway. He said two words. "It's over." This was one case, told three times. So let me say their names one more time. Josephine Ross. Forty-three. 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. The fifth of June, 1945. Frances Brown. Thirty-three. A former WAVE, back three months at her old desk. The Pine Crest hotel, 3941 Pine Grove Avenue. The tenth of December, 1945.

Suzanne Degnan. Six. 5943 North Kenmore Avenue. The seventh of January, 1946. Two women and a girl. The city gave the case a name, and a confession, and a monster. It gave us eighty years of books and articles about him. This was about them. And the last word belongs to the youngest. A few weeks before any of this, at Sacred Heart academy, on the North Side of Chicago, they put on a Christmas pageant. A little girl with honey-coloured curls played an angel. When the state of Illinois filled out her death certificate, it came to the line that asks what a person did with her life. And it wrote: School Girl. Her name was Suzanne Degnan.

Part 21Outro

That's the end of the story. And that's the end of this series. Three episodes. Three people. I told you at the start that when a case gets famous, what gets famous is the killer, and the people he's accused of killing turn into scenery. I hope that after these three episodes, you know a little more about Josephine Ross, and Frances Brown, and Suzanne Degnan, than you did before. That was the whole point. Thank you for staying with me for all of it.

Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If you got something out of this series, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves true crime. It really does help the show find people. And head over to Section29.com for the case file on all three episodes: the photographs, the front pages from 1945 and 1946, and the full source list, so you can check every line I read you. All the links are in the description below.

Until next time, I'm Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special and you are loved.