The Founding Father
By the time he was a nine-year-old boy, Robert K. Ressler knew that monsters were not confined to fairy stories; there was a real one roaming the streets of his hometown, Chicago, Illinois.
On June 5, 1945, forty-three-year-old widow Josephine Ross had been stabbed to death when she had awakened to find a burglar in her apartment. Six months later, on December 10, 1945, a thirty-year-old ex-Wave named Frances Brown was discovered kneeling unclothed by the side of her bath, a knife driven through her throat with such force that it had come out the other side. On the wall above her bed someone had written in lipstick: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more—I cannot help myself.” There was no sign of rape.
Four weeks later, on the morning of January 7, 1946, James E. Degnan went into the bedroom of his seven-year-old daughter, Suzanne, and saw that she was not in her bed and that the window was wide open. He called the police, and it was a policeman who found the note on the child’s chair; it said she had been kidnapped and demanded $20,000 for her return. Later that afternoon, Suzanne’s head was discovered beneath a nearby manhole cover. In another sewer, police found the child’s left leg. The right leg was found in another sewer, and the torso in a fourth. The arms were discovered—also in a sewer—some weeks later. The horrifically brutal case shocked the nation, but the police seemed unable to develop any definite leads.
Six months later, on June 26, 1946, a young man walked into an apartment building in Chicago, and entered the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Pera through the open door. Mrs. Pera was in the kitchen preparing dinner. A neighbor who had seen the young man enter called to Mrs. Pera to ask if she knew a man had walked into her apartment. The young man immediately left, but the neighbor called out for him to stop. Instead, he dashed down the stairs, pointing a gun at the neighbor before running out of the building. Minutes later, he knocked on the door of a nearby apartment and asked the woman who answered for a glass of water, explaining that he felt ill. She sensed something wrong and rang the police. In fact, an off-duty cop had already seen the fleeing youth and ran after him. When cornered, the young man fired three shots at the cop; all missed. As the on-duty police answered the call, the burglar and the cop grappled on the floor. Then one of the other policemen hit the burglar on the head—three times—with a flowerpot, and knocked him unconscious.
Their prisoner turned out to be seventeen-year-old William George Heirens, who had spent sometime in a correctional institution for burglary. When his fingerprints were taken, they were found to match one found on the Degnan ransom note, and another found in the apartment of Frances Brown. In the prison hospital, Heirens was given the “truth drug” sodium pentothal, and asked: “Did you kill Suzanne Degnan?” Heirens answered: “George cut her up.” At first he insisted that George was a real person, a youth five years his senior whom he met at school. Later, he claimed that George was his own invisible alter ego. “He was just a realization of mine, but he seemed real to me.” Heirens also admitted to a third murder, that of Josephine Ross. In addition to this, he had attacked a woman named Evelyn Peterson with an iron bar when she started to wake up during a burglary, and then tied her up with lamp cord; he had also fired shots through windows at two women who had been sitting in their rooms with the curtains undrawn.
The story of William Heirens, as it emerged in his confessions, and in interviews with his parents, was almost predictably typical of a serial sex killer. Born on November 15, 1928, he had been a forceps delivery. An underweight baby, he had cried and vomited a great deal. At the age of seven months he fell down twelve cement steps into the basement and landed on his head; after that he had nightmares about falling. He was three years old when a brother was born, and he was sent away to the home of his grandmother. He was frequently ill as a child, and broke his arm at the age of nine. The family background was far from happy; his mother had two nervous breakdowns accompanied by paralysis, and his father’s business failed several times.
William Heirens stands in his cell on September 5, 1946, in the Cook County Jail in Chicago, after he was sentenced to serve three consecutive life terms for the murder of a little girl and two women. Heirens, although he claims to have been railroaded by the police, has been behind bars more than fifty years in the sensational Chicago murder case in which “Catch me before I kill more” was left scrawled in lipstick on a bathroom mirror. (Associated Press)
Heirens matured sexually very early—he had his first emission at the age of nine. Soon after this, he began stealing women’s panties from clotheslines and basement washrooms, and putting them on. (After his arrest, police found forty pairs of pink and blue rayon panties in a box in his grandmother’s attic.)
He came to think of sex as something “dirty” and forbidden. This was confirmed when, at the age of thirteen, he walked into the school washroom and found two boys playing sexually with a mentally retarded boy; he refused to join in. Being a good-looking boy, he was attractive to girls; on eight occasions he attempted some form of sex play, touching their breasts or pressing their legs, but this had the effect of upsetting him so much that he cried. There was a deep conflict between his sexual obsession and his rigid Roman Catholic upbringing. He found normal sexual stimulation repellent.
From the age of thirteen he had been burgling apartments, entering through the window, and experiencing sexual excitement—to the point of emission—as he did so. After this, he lost interest in underwear, and began to experience his sexual fulfillment by entering strange apartments through the window. He often urinated or defecated on the floor. He also began lighting small fires.
He was arrested for the first time at the age of fourteen, charged with eleven burglaries and suspected of fifty; in many of them he had stolen guns and women’s dresses. He was sentenced to probation and sent to a semi-correctional Catholic institution. After a year there he transferred to a Catholic academy, where he proved to be a brilliant student—so much so that he was allowed to skip the freshman year at the University of Chicago.
Back in Chicago, the sexual obsession remained as powerful as ever, and led to more burglaries. If he resisted the urge to burgle for long, he began to experience violent headaches. On one occasion, he put his clothes in the washroom and threw the key inside in order to make it impossible to go out; halfway through the night, the craving became too strong, and he crawled along the house gutter to retrieve his clothes.
Once inside an apartment, he reached such a state of intense excitement that any interruption would provoke an explosion of violence. This is why he knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious with an iron bar when she stirred in her sleep. On another occasion he was preparing to enter what he thought was an empty apartment when a woman moved inside; he immediately fired his gun at her, but missed.
He raped none of the victims—the thought of actual sexual intercourse still scared him. Sexual fulfillment came from the “forbiddenness,” the excitement of knowing he was committing a crime. After the ejaculation, he felt miserable; he believed that he was a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. He even invented a name for his Mr. Hyde—“George.” Although he later admitted that the invention of an alter ego was partly an attempt to fool the psychiatrists, there can be no doubt that he felt that he was periodically “possessed” by a monster. This is why he scrawled the message in lipstick on the wall after killing Frances Brown. It may also explain why he eventually courted arrest by wandering into a crowded apartment building in the late afternoon and entering a flat in which a married woman was cooking dinner as she waited for her husband to return from work. Mr. Hyde was turning into Dr. Jekyll.
In July 1946, Heirens was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment in Joliet Penitentiary.
Ressler states that as a nine-year-old boy he used to fantasize about catching Suzanne Degnan’s killer—although he admits that the fantasy was a way of coping with his fear. But the detective fantasies lasted all that year of Heirens’s arrest.
After a stint in the army, Ressler took a course in criminology and police administration at Michigan State University. But when he applied for a job with the Chicago police force, he was passed over; they were not interested in recruits with too much schooling because they “might make trouble.”
He reenlisted into the army, and was posted to Germany, where he was named provost marshal of a platoon of MPs in the small town of Asschaffenburg, and, in effect, became its chief of police. Back in the United States, four years later, he opted to remain a soldier when offered a job as CID commander of a plainclothes investigation unit at Fort Sheridan, near Chicago. He was in charge of a complex operation to penetrate a narcotics ring, when a number of his undercover agents came close to being exposed and murdered. (They were posing as troublemakers awaiting dishonorable discharge.) Finally, in exchange for signing on for two more years, the army paid for him to complete his master’s degree in police administration, and he applied to join the FBI. It was 1970, he was thirty-two, and his real career was about to commence.
An irritating but oddly significant incident almost prevented this from happening. Told to report to a certain classroom by 8 a.m. on a February day in 1970, he arrived in plenty of time only to find a notice saying the class had been shifted to another room several blocks away. On arriving there, he was bawled out by the instructor for being late. He replied that he had been ten minutes early at the other classroom. Irritated, the instructor sent him to see a high official, Joe Caspar, deputy assistant of the Training Division, known as the “Ghost” after the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Caspar informed him that everyone had been sent a letter about the change of venue. Ressler replied that he hadn’t received it. He added that he had been in the army for several years and knew all about orders, both giving and receiving them. “I thought steam was going to come out of the Ghost’s ears as he threatened me with being kicked out of the FBI at that very minute.” Ressler said maybe that would be best for everyone, if the FBI didn’t know how to treat new agents. Caspar gave way and told him to hold up his right hand to be sworn in, adding sourly: “We’ll be watching you.”
This was typical of Hoover’s old FBI, with its “do it by the book” ethos, and this would not be the last time Ressler encountered it. But it was doubly significant in that Caspar’s downright refusal to admit that he was in the wrong is also typical of the behavioral pattern of a certain type of criminal to which the majority of serial killers belong. This behavioral pattern, which will recur many times in the course of this book, may well be worth further discussion here.
In the early 1960s, the Los Angeles science-fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt had a brilliant psychological insight that has considerable application to criminology: a concept that he called the “Right Man,” or the “Violent Man.” The Right Man is one who belongs to what zoologists call the “dominant 5 percent,” for 5 percent of all animals are more dominant than their fellows. This dominance is inborn. But if a person is too young to be aware of his dominance, or if circumstances have never allowed the expression of that dominance, he will feel oddly frustrated and resentful, without understanding why. Such people have “a chip on their shoulder,” and are inclined to be aggressive and self-assertive. His self-esteem depends upon feeling himself to be always in the right: he cannot bear to be thought in the wrong, and will go to any length to deny that he can ever make a mistake. Van Vogt also called him the Violent Man, because if you can prove that he is in the wrong, he would rather hit you in the face than acknowledge it.
Such a person’s work colleagues may not notice his dominance, for if he wants to be liked, it is important to appear easygoing and nonaggressive. But for his wife and family he can be intolerable, for the Right Man’s determination to be absolute master in his own home may be enforced by bullying.
Men like this, says Van Vogt, are at their worst in their intimate relations with women, since their sensitive egos make them wildly unreasonable if any disagreement arises. In one case he cites, the husband had divorced his wife and set her up in a suburban home, on condition that she remained unmarried and devoted herself to the welfare of their son. The husband was promiscuous—and always had been—but because his wife had confessed that she had not been a virgin when she met him, he treated her as a whore who had to be reformed at all costs. During their marriage he was violently jealous and often knocked her down. It was obviously essential to his self-esteem to feel himself her lord and master.
But perhaps the most curious thing about the violent male, Van Vogt observed, is that he is so basically dependent on the woman that if she leaves him, he experiences a total collapse of self-esteem that sometimes ends in suicide. For she is the foundation stone of a tower of fantasy. His self-esteem is built upon this notion of himself as a sultan brandishing a whip, with a submissive and adoring girl at his feet. If she leaves him, the whole fantasy world collapses, and he is faced with the prospect of an unlivable life. Van Vogt suggests that many dictators were Right Men—Hitler, Stalin, Mao—and that their urge to dominate was based upon this need to make the world conform to their fantasy of infallibility. Since submissive and adoring girls are hard to find, particularly for men like Glatman and Meirhofer, the serial killer is choosing this extreme method to ensure that the woman conforms to his fantasy.
A dominant person is, by definition, a person with a craving to be a “somebody.” And if lack of talent or social skills frustrates this urge, the result is anger, self-assertiveness, and mild paranoia. This may happen very early in the career of the Right Man, and become so much a character trait that subsequent success makes no difference—it has come too late as far as he is concerned. This is why a Hitler, a Stalin, a Saddam, remains a Right Man all his life.
Freud once said that a child would destroy the world if it had the power—which explains why Right Man criminals are so dangerous. They regard society itself as the enemy that is frustrating them, with the result that they commit their crimes entirely without conscience, with a grim feeling of justification. Society is “getting what it deserves” for treating them so badly. The American mass murderer Carl Panzram, executed in 1930, declared: “If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.” Panzram committed twenty pointless murders, engaged in a weird and totally illogical principle of “reciprocity.”
So it may be regarded as significant that Ressler’s career as an FBI agent was nearly aborted because of an encounter with a Right Man.
Following his FBI training, Ressler spent the early 1970s doing fieldwork in Chicago, New Orleans, and Cleveland, before being transferred to Quantico in 1974, in time to participate in the profiling and capture of David Meirhofer. And here Ressler was able to observe an element that is typical of a certain kind of killer: telephoning the kidnapped child’s parents on the anniversary of her disappearance. The serial killer wishes to see himself as a “mover,” one who can change events. There is a need for dramatization that leads him to scan newspapers for every item referring to his crime, and to revisit the crime scene. The German sadistic mass murderer of the 1920s, Peter Kürten (on whom Fritz Lang based his film M) regularly returned to the crime scene after the victim had been found, enjoying the horror of the spectators and often achieving a sexual climax. If investigators had known this at the time, he might well have been caught sooner.
Ressler soon observed this central role played by fantasy in the life of the serial killer (although in fact, it would be another decade before he coined the term). He would comment later: “They are obsessed with a fantasy, and they have what we must call non-fulfilled experiences that become part of the fantasy and push them on towards the next killing.”
A major step in the development of his new techniques was his involvement in teaching hostage negotiation. A large number of FBI recruits came out of the military after the end of the Vietnam War; many of them were trained crack marksmen and became involved in SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics). SWAT snipers were used to kill criminals, and heavy weapons often used in attempts to free hostages—which led to a great deal of needless slaughter. Rather than sending in SWAT teams, however, the New York City Police Department pioneered the use of bargaining by trained negotiators. This demanded an understanding of criminal psychology of the kind that obsessed Ressler. The new approach was slow to replace the old one, partly because many old-school cops disliked what they saw as compromise with criminal scum (an attitude that made the Dirty Harry movies of Clint Eastwood so popular). But this attitude had its practical disadvantages, not least of which were expensive lawsuits against the police for excessive use of force.
Ressler took note of the new approach and melded it into the idea that was taking shape in his mind, and that would become his own brand of criminal profiling.
What fascinated him was the psychology of the criminal. What drove Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, and the Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman (who had killed sixteen people from the University of Texas Tower)? But the books about these killers contained insufficient information for a full assessment of their motives. As to his colleagues at the FBI, he comments wryly on the “Bureau’s belief that if there was something worth knowing about criminals, the Bureau already knew it.”
By the late 1960s and mid-1970s, however, a whole series of bizarre mass murders made it clear that there was a great deal to be learned. The five killings at the house of film star Sharon Tate on August 9, 1969, followed by the slaying of supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, the next day, traumatized the American public. When it emerged that December that an ex-convict named Charles Manson had ordered his drug-dependent “Family” to commit the murders, there was universal bafflement about his motive, which the subsequent trial failed to disperse.
Between December 1968 and October 1969, five apparently “motiveless” murders were committed in the San Francisco area by a killer who called himself “Zodiac,” and who signed letters to newspapers with a cross over a circle, the astrological sign of the zodiac. The killings and the letters ceased abruptly, although whether this was because of the death of the killer, or some other reason, is still unknown.
On Halloween 1970, eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family and secretary were murdered near Santa Cruz, California, by a dropout named John Linley Frazier, who left a note saying that World War III had just begun and would not cease until “misusers of the environment” had all met the same fate; the killer proved to be a local hippie on a bad mescaline trip.
In October 1972, another dropout, Herb Mullin, committed the first of fourteen murders in the Santa Cruz area, ordered by “voices in his head.”
In May 1972, Ed Kemper, a six-foot nine-inch ex–mental patient, began a series of sex murders of coeds, also in the Santa Cruz area, decapitating and mutilating six of them. He concluded his spree in April 1973 by killing and beheading his mother and her best friend. He had earlier spent five years in an institution after murdering his grandparents.
In January 1974, failed law student Ted Bundy committed in Seattle the first of a long series of sex murders that continued until his final arrest in Florida in April 1978, and probably exceeded forty victims. He seemed such a good-looking, intelligent, charming person that many people felt there must be some mistake and the wrong man had been arrested.
If New Yorkers felt like congratulating themselves that the craziest killers seemed to originate on the West Coast, they were forced to think again when a series of apparently motiveless shootings commenced in July 1976, and continued until the arrest of David Berkowitz, known as “the Son of Sam,” a year later.
Clearly, something strange was happening; murder had ceased to be as straightforward as in the days of Harvey Glatman, or even the Boston Strangler. Ever since the first police forces had been created in the nineteenth century, crime detection had taken its starting point from the concept of motive; killers like Zodiac, Frazier, Kemper, and Berkowitz seemed to defy the normal classification. Which is why, it seemed to Ressler, it would be sensible to talk to some of these killers and find out what had driven them to murder.
One of the earliest successes of “criminal profiling” involved the murder of a schoolgirl. On September 2, 1977, fourteen-year-old Julie Wittmeyer disappeared on the way home from school in Platte City, Kansas. Her clothing—minus her panties—was found in a field a few days later, and her naked and mutilated body the next day. The local police turned to the FBI’s new Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. After studying the evidence, BSU sent back a “profile” of the offender: he knew the victim, he was a sexually frustrated “loner,” probably of below-average intelligence and of more than average physical development, and his contemporaries probably regarded him as “strange.” Police Chief Marion Beeler exclaimed: “Sure as shootin’, that’s him”—for the description fitted a youth named Mark Sager. In fact, Sager was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to ten years.
While the Criminal Research Project was still waiting for approval, Ressler decided to talk to a killer who was largely responsible for his interest in murder, William Heirens, who was now in the Vienna Correctional Center in Southern Illinois. At the time Ressler went to see him, he had been a model prisoner for more than thirty years. What Ressler knew about him was that he had become a panty fetishist in adolescence, and began burgling apartments to obtain them. What Ressler wanted to know was about the development of Heirens’s sexual urges.
He was to be disappointed. Ever since his 1946 conviction, Heirens had been pleading his innocence. Why then had he confessed to three murders? Because, he explained, the cops had decided that he was guilty, and had told him that unless he confessed, he would be sentenced to death on the evidence they had. Naturally, he decided to confess.
What about the burglaries and the stealing of panties? Ressler writes: “Heirens did acknowledge having had some sexual problems and having committed the break-ins that he now deprecated as adolescent pranks . . .” But Heirens insisted that he was innocent of all the other crimes. Understandably, Ressler did not believe him. Here was a man who admitted burglary and “sexual problems,” and who had been arrested during the course of a break-in and tried to shoot the policeman who arrested him. If he was just an ordinary burglar, why risk becoming a cop-killer? Ressler left the prison feeling slightly disgruntled.
I had written about Heirens in the Encyclopedia of Murder. To me, his confession sounded authentic enough, since I had personal acquaintance with fetishism. Even as a child of preschool age, I had been fascinated by my mother’s knickers, and put them on when she was out of the house. With the awakening of adolescent sexual urges, I found myself continually glancing furtively at knickers in shop windows or on clotheslines. I never actually stole any, but when the opportunity presented itself, used them for autoerotic purposes. Unlike Heirens, however, I never suffered agonies of guilt about my fetish, and when the opportunity of trying the real thing with girlfriends came along, found that my appreciation of how they looked in their underwear enhanced the pleasure. When I eventually came across biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance”—the notion that forms of learned behavior can be socially transmitted by a kind of telepathy (see the epilogue)—it seemed to me a way to explain how a three-year-old child had wanted to pull on his mother’s knickers.
In August 1991, I saw an advertisement in an American bookseller’s catalogue for a new book, William Heirens: His Day in Court by Dolores Kennedy, published by Bonus Books of Chicago, and sent off for it. To my astonishment, the author argued that Heirens was innocent. Kennedy had been legal secretary to the lawyer who represented the Degnan family, who, oddly enough, believed that Heirens should be released. In 1983, a federal magistrate did order the release of Heirens—after thirty-seven years in jail—because the parole board had failed to comply with his parole requirements. There was immediate uproar, and the attorney general declared: “I am going to make sure that kill-crazed animal stays where he is.” The magistrate’s decision was reversed.
Dolores Kennedy’s father began to work for Heirens’s release, and when he died, she went to see Heirens in the Vienna Correctional Center in Illinois to discuss what further could be done. She found Heirens likable—as do most people who meet him—and helped form a committee for his release. But Heirens himself presented a curious obstacle. He argued that he did not want to be released on parole—or at least, that he was not willing to pacify the parole board by taking what they regarded as the essential first step in considering him for parole: admission of guilt. He declared: “In 1946 I had to plead guilty to live. I was seventeen years old and I wanted to live, and sometimes I wanted to die. I am sixty years old now and I will never admit to murders I did not commit.” In other words, he had been forced to plead guilty only because the alternative to this “plea bargain” was the electric chair. As Kennedy looked into the case, she began to “uncover the magnitude of the misrepresentations connected with his conviction,” and decided to write a book about it.
My immediate reaction to her book was skepticism. At least 50 percent of criminals claim that they have been “framed.” Where Heirens was concerned, the case against him seemed to hang together so well that I found it virtually impossible to believe in his innocence. And as I read the book, it seemed to me that Dolores Kennedy deliberately underplayed the most powerful evidence—the box of panties found in the house of Heirens’s grandmother. I wrote to her to tell her so. She replied politely, declaring that Heirens had concocted the fetishism story because he hoped to be found insane. She said that Heirens himself would write and confirm this.
In March 1992, I received a letter from Heirens in which he did exactly that. He pointed out that although he had twice been arrested for burglary in his early teens, there had been no suggestion of stealing panties. “None of these examinations remotely indicated fetishism.” He also pointed out that, at his arrest, it was the police who fired the three shots, not he. He went on to explain how, when he was nine, he had found a trunk of old clothes on a garbage dump near his grandmother’s home, and had taken from it various items, which included women’s underwear—bloomers and slips—as well as some men’s swimming trunks. He put these in a cardboard box and hid them behind the chimney in his grandmother’s house. “None of the underwear was of the frilly sort common with panty fetishism.” In fact it was made of cotton and was of the prewar variety. There were no semen stains, as there would have been if it had been used in masturbation. And, according to Heirens, it was only after he had agreed to the plea bargaining, which included the fetishism story, that he told the police of the whereabouts of the box, which had been there for almost ten years.
On the whole, I was not convinced. Yet I had to admit that his refusal of parole unless he was given the opportunity to establish his innocence was a persuasive argument in his favor. My wife suggested that perhaps he didn’t really want to be released. After all, a man in his sixties is likely to find the modern world a bewildering place after forty or so years in jail. He replied to this comment by pointing out that his prison “is not as comfortable as you seem to believe . . . it is still a prison where you are told what to do and when . . .” I asked him if there was any documentary evidence indicating that the box found in his grandmother’s attic contained a mixture of male and female clothing; he replied that, as far as he knew, no inventory had been made.
When in 1993 a publisher asked me to compile an anthology of murders of the 1940s, it was obvious to me that Heirens had to be included, and that I had to make some mention of Dolores Kennedy’s belief that he was innocent. That is why I decided to write to Heirens and ask him to write me a simple and brief account of his own side of the story, which I would print alongside my own account of the case. It began:
My name is William Heirens. I have been imprisoned in Illinois for forty-seven years for murders I did not commit. Many of you over the age of fifty will remember the murder and dismemberment of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan in January of 1946. If you are younger, you may have read about it in crime anthologies or studied the case in classes. And, based on your reading, you may have been satisfied that the person responsible is paying for the crime. I did not murder Suzanne Degnan. I did not murder Frances Brown and Josephine Ross—two women whose unsolved murders I was also forced to take the blame for to save my life. Over the years many writers have canvassed my case in crime anthologies. Almost without exception they have been carelessly written with no regard for the facts.
The account was impressive, and there was no point where I could fault it or point to distortions of fact. So I concluded my piece on Heirens by saying that, while I was not convinced of his innocence, I was now rather less certain of his guilt.
And so matters rested over the next few years. But in 2000, I was involved in editing a crime part-work called Murder in Mind, and one of the issues I had to read and check was on the Heirens case. It was many years since I had looked at the case, and I had forgotten many of the details. And at that point I came across something that suddenly left me in no doubt that Heirens was guilty.
On October 5, 1945, a retired army nurse, Lieutenant Evelyn Peterson, was in bed sleeping late in her flat not far from the University of Chicago when someone struck her on the head with a metal bar. When she woke up she found that she was tied hand and foot with electrical cord. She worked her way free, and noticed that $150 was missing from her purse.
As she was about to call the police there was a knock on her door. She opened it to find a dark-haired young man. He seemed greatly concerned about the blood on her face, and said he would notify the apartment manager that she needed help. Then he left. When the police arrived, they discovered that the apartment had been wiped clean of fingerprints. The dark-haired young man—Heirens—was nowhere to be seen.
So what was Heirens doing knocking on a stranger’s door at nine in the morning?
Heirens’s story, as told in Dolores Kennedy’s book, is that, arriving early for classes, he had decided to commit a quick burglary in the apartment block where Evelyn Peterson lived. He saw a woman banging on Peterson’s door and asked if he could help. The woman, Peterson’s sister, Margaret, said she couldn’t get in and her key would not turn in the lock. Assuming that her sister must be deeply asleep, she went off to get some breakfast. Heirens left with her, but as soon as she was out of sight, went back up to the apartment with the intention of breaking in. As a precaution, he knocked on the door. And it was opened by a woman with blood on her face.
This is Heirens’s story, and in my view it is preposterous. He is asking us to believe that, by pure chance, he decided to try to break into an apartment where, by some extraordinary coincidence, another burglar had already knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious—a million-to-one likelihood, like lightning striking the same place twice.
I wrote to Dolores Kennedy and told her that, with the greatest regret, I could no longer entertain the slightest doubt of Heirens’s guilt. Being a nice lady, she replied patiently that while she could see my point, she still believed his story, a million-to-one likelihood or not.
What must have happened strikes me as fairly obvious. Heirens had broken in, knocked the sleeping woman unconscious, and rifled her purse. He then cleaned off any fingerprints he might have left and departed. Then, in the manner of a guilty person wondering if there is some trace of his presence that he had overlooked, he decided to go back to check. He returned, but found her sister trying to get in. Clearly, Peterson was still unconscious. So he left the building with Margaret, and then slipped back, only to find that Peterson was by then fully conscious. It must have been an embarrassing moment when she opened the door. How could he explain why he was knocking on her door? He made his excuse about summoning help and left—for good this time.
If it was Heirens who knocked Peterson unconscious—and who else could it have been?—then he was not the fairly harmless teenager he wanted Dolores Kennedy to believe. He could have cracked her skull or caused brain damage. And as soon as we have this image of Heirens striking a sleeping woman with an iron bar—if he was so harmless, why not just take her purse and vanish?—we also glimpse the person who beat and stabbed Frances Brown, killed and dismembered Suzanne Degnan, and stabbed Josephine Ross through the throat.
Why did he not, in order to obtain parole, simply tell the truth? Because, I suspect, his shame about the sexual aspect of the murders made him incapable of admitting that his victims had seen him masturbating at the side of their beds, and driven him to kill to expunge the humiliation.
Ressler goes on to say that, although the interview with William Heirens was a disappointment, even the failure left him doubly certain that this direct contact with criminals could bring new insights.
