The Lipstick Killer PT 2

Summary

Buried Bones Podcast

Episode: The Lipstick Killer, Pt 2
Date: May 6, 2026
Hosts: Kate Winkler Dawson & Paul Holes
Network: Exactly Right & iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Theme & Overview

In this second part of their coverage of the infamous "Lipstick Killer" case, Kate and Paul critically examine the 1945–46 Chicago murders attributed to the so-called Lipstick Killer. Using a modern forensic lens, they dig into the details of the case’s three primary victims (Josephine, Frances, and Suzanne), the highly controversial investigation, and the fate of William "Bill" Heirens — a 17-year-old ultimately convicted after a deeply flawed Chicago Police investigation. The episode scrutinizes both the physical evidence and the disturbing tactics used by authorities, raising profound doubts about the integrity of the conviction and exploring the tragic consequences of investigative misconduct.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Case Recap and Timeline

• Victims & Crime Scenes
  • Josephine (First Victim): Brutalized, with bizarre post-mortem staging and lipstick message ("Please stop me because I won't stop killing") (03:24–05:47)
  • Frances (Second Victim): Shot and stabbed, apparent attempts at post-mortem washing with "douche" substance and further odd crime scene behaviors; similar bathtub elements as Josephine’s case (05:47–07:15)
  • Suzanne (Third Victim, 6-years-old): Snatched from her second-story room during the night; evidence of a ransom note and later found dismembered, her body parts scattered in the local sewer system (07:15–13:15)
• Paul’s skepticism: Paul is unconvinced that Suzanne’s killing is related to the first two (05:47, 16:59)

2. Crime Scene Analysis & Forensic Questions

• Suzanne’s Discovery:
  • Head discovered in a local sewer after an anonymous call directing parents to “check the sewers.” Torso and legs found in bags, feet dirty, arms found weeks later in a different location (08:39–11:09)
  • Paul's deduction: Dismemberment occurred outside the house, likely in a laundry room in a local residential basement (14:04–15:30)
• Potential Behavioral Links: The first two murders have similar staging/cleaning behavior and objects (housecoat, towels, douche bottles), but the third case differs in method and victim type (08:39–16:59)

3. Suspect Investigations & Police Misconduct

• Janitor Hector Vrbon:
  • Brutally interrogated and physically tortured by police despite no evidence; later awarded substantial damages in court for police abuse (19:55–22:32)
• False Lead – Two Young Sex Offenders:
  • Cleared after admitting to making the phone call about the sewers only for money, not involvement (24:16–24:49)
• Richard Russell Thomas:
  • Confessed to Suzanne’s murder (while already held for other crimes), but alibied by hospital records and recanted; no known withheld evidence (28:02–30:03)

4. William "Bill" Heirens & His Interrogation

• Circumstances of Arrest:
  • Caught during a burglary close to the Frances and Suzanne crime scenes, engaged in a shootout with police, beaten unconscious and hospitalized (35:13–38:01)
• Torture & Coercion:
  • Subjected to six days of sleep deprivation, physical abuse (including pouring ether on genitals), denial of legal counsel and parental presence, unnecessary medical procedures (spinal tap without anesthetic, forced “truth serum” injection)—all without confession (38:01–43:31)
• Lack of Evidence:
  • No souvenirs or bloody items found in his home/dorm; only an ordinary razor, a clean surgical kit, and model airplane tools (40:27–41:08)
• Questionable Forensics:
  • Initial fingerprint analysis does not match; later, findings are “re-reviewed” to claim a match between Bill’s fingerprints and the ransom note/Francis’s door jamb — but with highly questionable methodologies and unclear or insufficient points of similarity (44:51–53:26)
  • Paul: “With everything about this investigation and this fingerprint examiner reversing course… I can’t trust anything about this fingerprint work.” (47:52)
• No Confession:
  • Not even under “truth serum”; when the state is compelled to show lie detector results, tests indicate truthfulness (41:58–43:31)
• Media & Public Pressure:
  • Public demand for an arrest further drives the police's aggressive tactics.

5. Plea Deal, Confession, & Aftermath

• Coerced Confession:
  • Bill accepts a plea deal fearing the death penalty; asked by DA to reenact crimes to “prove” guilt to the public. His sexualized “fetish burglar” confessions appear likely fabricated for legal strategy, reportedly on the advice of his attorney aiming to land him in a hospital, not prison (56:39–60:38)
• Handwriting “Evidence”:
  • A handwriting expert claims the lipstick wall message matches the ransom note — Paul is dismissive: “I put no veracity on that opinion at all.” (58:43)
• Bill’s Fate:
  • Ultimately pleads guilty as legal options narrow, receives three consecutive life sentences, spends nearly 62 years continuously incarcerated (ages 17 to 83), dying in prison in 2012—“the longest serving inmate in the US at the time” (66:11)
• Lost Evidence:
  • By 2002, all original evidence is lost or destroyed, police files missing, precluding further DNA or forensic review.

6. Discussion on Justice, Police Integrity, and Serial Crime

• Systemic Concerns:
  • Paul is adamant: “You have to call into question any conviction and any confession coming out of this jurisdiction during this time frame.” (43:31)
  • The Chicago PD's tactics are condemned as criminal and unreliable for authentic justice.
• Lingering Doubt:
  • Neither Kate nor Paul is convinced that Bill Heirens was guilty, especially of Suzanne’s murder.
  • The hosts discuss the tragic injustice of possibly locking up the wrong person, and the impossibility of certainty given the destroyed evidence and environment of misconduct (66:11–71:22)
• Alternative Suspects/Theories:
  • Dolores Kennedy (1991) and Steve Hodel (Black Dahlia theorist) proposed Richard Thomas and even Hodel’s own father as the killer, though with no more evidence than decades earlier (68:32–69:21)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Paul on Suzanne’s Ransom Note and Investigation:

  “That ransom note was staging. He’s just trying to make it look like an abduction for ransom. And the reality is, he’s probably abducting Suzanne to victimize outside the house.” (12:00)

• Kate on Police Torture:

  “He is 17. And they start putting him through some medical procedures, unnecessary to try to get a confession out of him. ... They pour ether on his genitals. What does that even mean?” (38:01)

• Paul on Reliability of Evidence:

  “With everything about this investigation and with this fingerprint examiner reversing course… I can’t trust anything I’m hearing about this fingerprint work.” (47:52)

• Paul on the System:

  “You have to call into question any conviction and any confession that is coming out of this jurisdiction during this time frame.” (43:31)

• Kate on Loss of Due Process:

  “...to lose your life essentially at age 17 for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, breaking the law, but still ... it just is. It’s one of those, you didn’t get the bad guy, I don’t think, in the end.” (69:39)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Case Recap & Early Details: 03:18–07:15
• Suzanne’s Abduction & Dismemberment: 08:39–13:15
• Basement Crime Scene Discovery: 14:04–15:30
• Suspects & Janitor’s Ordeal: 19:55–22:32
• Bill Heirens' Arrest & Interrogation Begins: 35:13–38:01
• Torture/Medical Procedures: 38:01–43:31
• Fingerprint Evidence Discussion: 44:51–53:26
• Grand Jury, Plea Bargain, and Bill’s "Confession": 56:39–62:47
• Aftermath, Bill’s Life & Legal Legacy: 66:11–71:22

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Tone & Atmosphere

The tone is somber, direct, and critical. Both hosts balance forensic skepticism with historical outrage at 1940s police methods. Paul provides technical clarity without sensationalism, while Kate navigates emotional resonance for the unjust suffering endured.

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Summary Takeaways

• The evidence against William Heirens was deeply compromised by police misconduct, questionable forensics, and coerced statements.
• The case against Heirens – especially for Suzanne’s abduction and murder – remains tenuous; modern standards would likely result in acquittal.
• Police and prosecutorial overreach in mid-20th-century Chicago ruined lives and undermined public trust.
• The tragic tale of Bill Heirens is as much an indictment of the criminal justice system as it is a haunting, unresolved murder mystery.

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For further details and supporting documents, listeners are encouraged to visit the Buried Bones Instagram (@buriedbonespod) and official website.

Transcript

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

This is exactly right.

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[Kate Winkler Dawson]

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

[Paul Holes]

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Each week I present Paul with one of History's most compelling true crimes.

[Paul Holes]

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens.

[Paul Holes]

Some are solved and some are cold. Very cold.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

This is buried bones.

[Paul Holes]

Hi, Kate.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Hey, Paul. You've been thinking about this case.

[Paul Holes]

I have. It's an interesting one.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Well, let me remind people. You know, in case you've forgotten all these details, we are talking about what appears to be a serial killer case in 1945 Chicago. It's called the Lipstick Killer case. Paul is not 100% convinced yet that these are all related, or at least the last one, which is a kidnapping so far. But we start with a woman named Josephine who is found on her bed. No obvious signs of sexual assault, but really brutalized. Her head tied up. And then some strange items like her housecoat and some towels and a douchebag found in her bathtub that has a little bit of water in it. And then about six months later, we have a woman named Frances who is found in her apartment also. And it sounds like she has been stripped naked. She is leaning over the bathtub, knees up against the bathtub and sort of leaning over. She's been shot, she's been stabbed. It seems like somebody has tried to wash her with douche substance. And they have no clues. And then less than a month after that, we have a six year old girl who is named Suzanne and she has been snatched from her second story bedroom while her father was there in the middle of the night. And there's apparently a ladder that they find leading up to her bedroom, but they aren't sure exactly how the offender got in because there's no dirt. And so there's some speculation there. There are some witnesses who say that Suzanne might have had an attempted dirt kidnapping done on her earlier, but we don't hear this from the father. And so I don't know if this is speculation or not. They do find tire tracks. There are also other witnesses who say that night that Suzanne disappeared, there were a couple of men arguing and dogs barking at. I think it was 1am and then an hour later, somebody saw a man and a woman carrying like a sack or something in a, in a bag or a sack in front of Suzanne's house. And this is at 2am but we have no other information other than that. There's also that really weird ransom note. And as a reminder, Josephine's crime scene at the very beginning has a note that essentially says, please stop me because I won't stop killing written in lipstick on her living room wall. So how's that for a summary?

[Paul Holes]

No, that's good. You know, there's some, some odd behaviors that the offender has done in the first two cases, such as putting tape over the stab wounds to that victim's neck. And then of course there seems to be, in those first two cases, attempts to clean up, he's going into the bathtubs in both instances, throwing a variety of the victim's clothing into the bathtub, including a ripped bra, plus that, that douche bottle. Right. And then in the second case, he's actually dragging the victim's body to the bathroom. She's probably already dead, likely shot by that point, and maybe even stabbed before being drugged. And then she's put in a kneeled position with her head in the bathtub itself. And there's also that, that douche bottle. You know, so I'm kind of trying to figure out what is he doing with that because it's in both those cases. The issue that I have with the third case, which is right now, abduction of a six year old girl with a ransom note being left behind, is that obviously a very different type of case. So this is where I want to know if they found Suzanne's body and you know, what had happened to her. And to see, is there any of these, these odd behaviors that could tie this child abduction case to the first

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

two homicides now we've had in the news, you know, over the last couple of months, you know, kidnapping cases where that are very high profile. How unusual would it be to kidnap a child even today? Let's just say that it's not difficult to pull off. Somebody kidnaps a child but there's a ransom note. Do we have a lot of cases like that where somebody is kidnapping a child but is looking for a ransom also?

[Public Sponsor]

No.

[Paul Holes]

You know, at least over the course of my career, you know, a true, like a stranger abduction of, of children is fortunately relatively rare. You know, it's such a high risk crime. You know, society has, has really kind of become very aware of, you know, the, the possibility of that occurring. And, and so I think there's a lot of diligence by parents and adults, you know, to look out for these kids.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yeah.

[Paul Holes]

You know, the one case that comes to mind in which there was a ransom note is JonBenet Ramsey. And you know, and that initially was considered a missing girl case until her body was found actually inside the house. Throughout my career, I can't think of a case, you Know, I've. I've got unsolved child abduction cases, but there wasn't a ransom note associated with those. That those are just kids that are snatched and presumed sexually assaulted and killed.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

So we're going to jump right into probably the most disturbing details just as a warning to people involving Suzanne. So she is found. This appears to be about 9 o' clock the next morning. There is a anonymous phone call. And on the other line a voice is saying to the parents to check the sewers. And of course they check the sewers around the family's house. And the police are, are scouring everything. And about 7 o' clock that night, they find Suzanne's head in the sewer. And it's about a block away. Yep. Just the head. It's about a block away from her house. It must be what, the head and the neck. Right. Because they say that she was strangled to death.

[Paul Holes]

They don't now, do they ever find the rest of her body?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

They do. Unfortunately, it's in parts. So there are nearby catch basins. I don't know what that means in relation to sewers. Do you know what that would mean?

[Paul Holes]

I have no knowledge. I'm just guessing that, you know, you have debris that's, you know, kind of flowing with, you know, whatever is going into the sewer itself. And then they have a deeper area that is catching that debris that then can be cleaned out by the maintenance guys.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yeah. And I'll tell you kind of what the official explanation was. So it's a catch basin, is I. I guess normally in a sewer system, underground grate like box structured to capture surface stormwater runoff and trap debris, like you had said, preventing from clogging pipes. So they are scouring everywhere. They had found her head in a sewer, and then in the nearby catch basins they find her torso and both of her legs in bags.

[Paul Holes]

Okay.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

And both of the soles of her feet are dirty. It sounds like the rest of her is clean. So they're saying maybe she was walking somewhere and then a few weeks later, her arms are discovered in a sewer near the Thorndale El station. So there are not photos of the body parts, but of the locations of where her body parts were found. If you want to look at them, it's photo number four in your packet.

[Paul Holes]

I'm trying to summarize this. It appears that they're pointing out manhole covers leading down to the sewer system at four different locations. These appear to be manhole covers in the middle of streets. One appears to be a residential street where her leg was found. Where her torso was found also appears to be a log residential street in the sewer system. And then where her head was found appears in an alley. It looks like a very narrow alley that has brick structures on both sides, possibly. I don't know if that's residential or maybe those are commercial buildings.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

These are all on Kenmore also. I know you probably noticed that at this point.

[Paul Holes]

I did.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Along that avenue.

[Paul Holes]

Yeah. And then where her other leg was found, again, it looks like just a surface street with maybe some residences in the backdrop. You had asked me if they determined strangulation, was it because the head was with the neck. That'd be part of it. Because if there is enough of the neck attached to the head, the pathologist would be able to take a look at the neck structures and see that strangulation had occurred. Also, it's the petechia, the eyes. Even if there isn't the neck present, the pathologist would be looking at the eyes and going, oh, there's petechia. So that would be indicative of strangulation. This is where. Was she alive when she was taken out of the house or was she strangled in her bed? And then the offender is just carrying a dead body, the ransom note, with her body being dismembered and scattered like it was so quickly after the abduction. I say that ransom note was staging. He's just trying to make it look like it's an abduction for ransom. And the reality is he's probably abducting Suzanne to victimize outside the house.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

And also, I think we've probably talked about this. The ransom note is a pretty big indicator that this was not just a crime of opportunity, that obviously he's been staking this out. It's a second floor building. I don't know where the ladder came from. I don't think he would have brought it. Must have been on the property. But, yeah, this is all. I mean, and this happens really quickly, too.

[Paul Holes]

My guess is that he's not targeting anybody else in the family. He's seen Suzanne, figured out where she lived. He could have just been passing by or driving by and sees the girl out front, and something in his mind is deciding she's going to become a victim. So he does surveillance and he comes ready with a note, and he's planned how he's going to get into the house and out of the house and what he's going to do to Suzanne.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Well, the police are now on the hunt for where this happened because a dismemberment, it seems clear, did not happen in her bedroom. Or anywhere in the house that day where they make this discovery. They are looking around and they have found a basement in the laundry room of a residential building on North Winthrop Avenue, which is about a block south of the brownstone. So in one of the basement's four laundry tubs, detectives discover clumps of matted blonde hair. She had blonde hair. And small amounts of human flesh. There are blood stains on the bottom of a coal bin. There's a string mop and a scrubbing brush. Now, this is what's interesting. They find out that there are bags that once contained children's toys that had been in a locker belonging to somebody in the building that had been taken out. And I don't know if they were found later on or what, but that was a pretty big note. So they have found out where she, you know, was taken. And then I have a photo. Now, this photo is more modern, as you'll see, but it's just showing you, I have to assume there's no chain link fence back in 1945, but just kind of showing you how easy it would be to access this laundry room.

[Paul Holes]

Yeah. So this photo is taken from what appears to be a parking lot showing a multi story brick building. And there's a circle around a window that is the bottom of the window. At most, it's four bricks above ground level. So each brick is generally three inches. So really, the windowsill to this window is just a little bit more than a foot high, you know, so anybody, you know, would be able to access this, this window. Now, the offender has to ahead of time know about this location, you know, and so now this location becomes key to the investigation is, you know, who occupies, who goes, who flows in and out of this location. You know, the. The offender obviously is comfortable enough to take this little girl and spend time with her down in this. This bas, to dismember her and package her up and remove her. So now, are there any witnesses seeing somebody carrying these bags out, et cetera?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Well, let's talk about the suspects because they have not had any luck trying to figure out what's happened to Suzanne. We don't seem to have any witnesses. And this is a terrible crime that pretty soon the media will really latch onto because of this little girl.

[Paul Holes]

And I do want to say at this point, as I'm still uncomfortable convinced Suzanne's case is, you know, connected to the first two, there's still not enough overlap for me to go, oh, this is part of a series.

[Public Sponsor]

Support for the show comes from public. The investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures [e-mail] disclosures your pet is

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[Martha Stewart]

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[Kate Winkler Dawson]

So let's start with this actual building, North Winthrop Avenue. There is a janitor at these apartments where they find him, and for two days they interrogate him. But it is, I think, more described like tortured. So his name is Hector vrbow, and he's 65 years old. He is blindfolded and handcuffed. They hang him by his arms for hours and demand a confession. They refuse him sleep and food, and they pressure his wife for a very long time to implicate him. There is no evidence. The only reason they have him, he doesn't have a criminal history. The only reason it sounds like they have him is because he's, you know, a janitor at this one building. And when he's finally released, he spends 10 days at the hospital. And he has so much shoulder damage from what they did to him, the Chicago police, that he's permanently disabled. And he sues the police department for physical abuse, false arrest, unlawful search, and he wins $20,000 judgment, which is $356,000 today. So this is just the beginning of where we're going with the Chicago police at this time. I am certainly not talking about the current police department, but this was not. This was the. This is the way we're heading here with these investigations.

[Paul Holes]

Well, you know, with that type of over the top tactic, you can't trust any statement you get out of anybody from these types of interviews. You know, so that's. That's where it's going to be hard, is if they end up having, you know, suspects who are confessing, sort of like we talked about in the first episode, is that these techniques are going to lead to false confessions. You just don't do that level of physical torture, if you will, during your interview, you know, sessions. That's crazy. You know, I think the suspicion of the janitor and the location of where Suzanne was dismembered, you know, that makes sense to me. I see why you would focus in. Because as I mentioned, the offender knew about this space and the janitor, of course, knows about this space. It would probably be the one that accesses the space the most. Right. He's the most comfortable hanging out in that space. He's supposed to be in that space. But you can't rely on anything Hector said during that type of interview technique at all.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Absolutely. And another thing, you know, about knowing the Space. This is so different than somebody knowing what floor and what window belongs to Suzanne in that house. I think anybody in Chicago walking down the street looking at an apartment building or a brownstone knows that any laundry room is there, which every building would have, is below ground. And you can see the windows to access the minimum. It's a big basement. So, yeah, Hector got a raw deal, unfortunately. So let's talk about the phone call. It's a little confusing. So you remember Suzanne's parents get a phone call saying, look in the sewers. So eventually they track down these two guys who are sex offenders. One's 18 and one's around that same age and they're roommates and they're both convicted sex offenders. And they interrogate them and they both say, you know, we made the phone call. And we made the phone call because we wanted to get the ransom money. Now the, the media is all over this, of course, a little girl who had been missing. And the police give out all of this information. And, well, of course the police say, well, how did you know to look in the sewer? And, and they said, it's just been on the streets like everybody says, oh, I. But they were dumped in the, you know, she was dumped in this sewer. Now, I don't know what word on the streets is. I know they were cleared, but they did a lie detector. We know how much that's worth, a lie detector test. They were cleared that way. But, you know, a lot of people had speculated, I mean, if I were going to take a kid and do something, I would then dump her in the sewers. So I don't know if they took a chance or what. I'm just throwing that out there that they were pretty quickly crossed off the list.

[Paul Holes]

Them in essence, making the admission of writing the ransom note or wanting to collect the ransom money. It, you know, again, what kind of interview were they subjected to? You know, when you start talking about even though they're registered sex offenders, you look at their age and that's, you know, falls into what I would say you're, you know, a vulnerable suspect that when you use, you know, extreme interview tactics, you're likely going to get a false confession. So right now, you know, part of this case and maybe the details that law enforcement is releasing to the media is hampering, trying to pin down if you've got the right suspect because you're going to want to have hold back information. And I don't know how much information was released out to the press about these three cases, but most Certainly if you have somebody who is now able to provide details about, let's say, putting the tape over the stab wounds, hopefully that was something that was not in the press is, you know, they was sealed in the, the autopsy report, you know, so now you have details that only the killer and law enforcement know. And so that's going to be the issue is how these investigators are approaching these various suspects. Are they demanding, you know, those types of details in the proper way? I know in a case that I reviewed out of the Chicago area and it obviously is a much more recent case, but still several decades old. And they're not, they weren't recording their interviews. And so now they, you know, have written statements from a suspect they're interviewing and, you know, he's providing details about the crime. Yet it's likely the investigators fed him those details. We don't know because we don't have the recordings to be able to verify that. That's my suspicion going back in 1945 of what was happening, you know.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yeah. And I'll say something else that is fishy. When I wrote American Sherlock, I have seen so many crime scene photos and especially my forensic investigator, he took so many photos. And just over the years I've seen lots of photos. I really haven't seen crime scene photos in these cases out of Chicago. And you know, there is a lot of talk about repressed files, not for people today, but just this is a fishy, fishy department in 45. And so it really, you're right, it's going to make this really hard trying to figure out who did this. They crossed the sex offenders off the list. The investigation into Suzanne's case has stalled, as has the investigation into Josephine's case and Francis case. And there's a ton of pressure on the Chicago police to find this killer. The media has really ramped up. And so on June 25, detectives get a tip from Phoenix, Arizona. The cops there say There is a 42 year old male nurse and he is confessing to have killed Suzanne in Chicago. So this is a guy named Richard Russell Thomas. He is a real nurse who poses as a surgeon at times. He has been previously convicted for attempted kidnapping, extortion, larceny, check fraud in Nevada and Pennsylvania and Kentucky. And in some cases he has written ransom notes. And in Phoenix, he is being held by police for sexually abusing his daughter.

[Paul Holes]

Okay.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

The next day the detectives from Chicago travel to Phoenix and they established that from January 3rd to January 7th of 1946 that this guy, Richard Russell Thomas, has been Employed at the Woodlawn Hospital in Chicago on the south side. And so he's in Chicago during this time period. They're not talking about the other two cases. They're talking specifically. Specifically about Suzanne. He says, I did it. I was motivated by money is what he keeps saying. So then he said at first he had planned to use a ladder to enter the brownstone, but he decided on a skeleton key.

[Paul Holes]

Okay.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

He says when he saw Suzanne, he scribbled a ransom note and carried her outside. I don't have a note on which way he carried her. She woke up, up. He stuffed her in a sack, suffocating her to death. He threw the sack down an open coal chute and then broke into the basement where this chute was. I guess he means the laundry room in the bottom of this apartment building. And then he said he dismembered her body with surgical equipment that he had stolen from a St. Louis hospital in the past. He disposed of her body in the sewers around the city and tossed the. The surgical instruments into Lake Michigan. So a supervisor at the hospital where he was working in South Chicago at the time says that he had been at work on the night of the 7th, so he couldn't have been Suzanne's killer. And then Thomas goes, just kidding. I didn't mean any of that. So I don't know what was withheld or not. I. I'm pretty sure nothing was withheld by the police, you know, at least in Suzanne's case. Certainly not the ransom note, because everybody knew about it. So how would they go about, you know, handling this? Because, you know, just at first blush, for me, there's no way the supervisor knows that he's at the hospital the whole time.

[Paul Holes]

Yeah, I think the, you know, the big issue is all the details that were released about the case, and, you know, the way to approach this Richard Thomas. Now it's a matter of going. Is he confessing? Is he seeking attention? And he's in the Chicago area, so he's probably seeing the Chicago headlines. If he's not involved, if he's just putting himself into the investigation because he wants that attention, which, as weird as it sounds, that's really what happens. You do have people, their nut jobs that, you know, they will come in and confess to something they didn't do, even as. As horrific as what happened to Suzanne, you know, but now I would want to have, okay, what has been released publicly and then the interview, in addition to just corroborating that information, you know, and trying to get really specific about, you know, aspects of the information that was released publicly that may not be completely complete in the public domain. That's part of it. But then there's going to be, there's going to be aspects that the offender experienced or observed during the commission of the crime. So, you know, one thing that pops into my head right away is, you know, Suzanne didn't go to bed naked. In all likelihood she had some pajamas on or something. If that wasn't released publicly, what did they did, how did dad describe though, that clothing? Okay, I'd be wanting to say, okay, you, you say you took Suzanne out of her room. What was she wearing, you know, and see, you know, if can he nail what dad said she went to bed in that night. And those types of filling in the gaps that only the offender, you know, would know if they actually committed the crime. And that's sort of the tactic that you would have to do in this day and age without the advanced forensic testing that we could do in a case like this.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yeah, and I think you're right. It really does come back to the fact that the Chicago police didn't seem to really withhold anything.

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[Kate Winkler Dawson]

We are about to meet the most viable suspect and the one that the police will land on. And I want to see what his details are like when he talks about all of this. So let's push on and then we can always go back to Thomas and see what you think. So on June 26, the day after we hear from Thomas confessing, there is a burglary and the burglar is a 17 year old and his name is William. He goes by Bill Hirons. He's caught burglarizing one of the Wayne Manor apartments in Edgewater, which is just a few blocks away from this brownstone. So there is a tenant that sees him enter an open apartment and take a dollar bill from a wallet. And in the middle of this burglary happening, the police show up because the neighbor calls the police and Hirons pulls a gun. He can't shoot because the police officers shoot instead. Everybody misses and a police officer picks up a flower pot and hits him over the head three times. Totally knocks him out and he's now off to the hospital. And this is going to begin a series of, I think missteps with the Chicago police and a lot of accusations and it's hard to know which story to believe. So now this guy Bill is at the hospital because he's been beaten over the head. And of course, he pulled a gun on the police. And he is strapped to this bed. He's in and out of consciousness. And he is interrogated about Suzanne over the next six days. So that is the net that they are throwing out. You know, they lost Thomas because there was an alibi. And also they were saying there's inconsistencies in the details that Richard Thomas was providing them about Suzanne's kidnapping. So then when they get Bill, he's very close by the building, he's burglarizing it. This probably reminds them somewhat of Josephine and Francis's cases also. So they drag him in because he's 17, he's aggressive. So he is. Then what I can only say is tortured. He is 17. And they start putting him through some medical procedures, unnecessary to try to get a confession out of him. They are just convinced that he's involved with this, he's a criminal, and he's in the vicinity. And they're desperate. They do not get his parents consent. They're supposed to. He's 17. For any of this medical stuff they're doing. So they put a spotlight on him. They punch him in the stomach. They pour ether on his genitals. What does that even mean?

[Paul Holes]

Well, ether is a solvent. So diethyl ether, you know, working in a lab, ether, it's a very volatile substance. It's a very flammable substance. I can't speak to whether or not when it contacts skin, does it cause a burning sensation? It may be because it evaporates so fast. It could be very cold, I would guess. And maybe that's what they're trying to do is inflict pain through having this solvent that will rapidly evaporate and cause a cooling sensation that might be painful, especially on the scroll area. But that's. I mean, obviously everything that they've done, it's just, quite frankly, criminal. It's not. This is not how you interview. You know, even if you think this guy is responsible for this horrific crime, you don't treat individuals like this.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

No, it's like war crimes. They tell them, of course, then there's a psychological part of it. They do something stupid, in my opinion. They roll out all of these gruesome details about Suzanne's murder, which, of course, you know, there's no withholding whatsoever. They're telling their main suspect this stuff, and they tell him that his prints match the prints Found on the ransom note, which isn't true. He asks for attorney and they say no. He asked for his parents, they say no. They get into his University of Chicago dormitory room where he is a student in engineering. So he has a history of burglarizing, but he also is in Chicago going to school here to become an engineer. And he is breaking into apartments to try to pay for, you know, his schooling. And so they break into this dorm room and into his parents house with no warrant. And they don't find souvenirs from any of these three cases. They do find a razor blade and they find surgical kit. He said, you know, I use the razor blade because I make model airplanes, which they also found. And there's no blood on this surgical kit. And he said, I have no idea what you're even talking about with this. I was breaking into somebody's place. I was not killing a little girl.

[Paul Holes]

Right.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

So does that, is that a thing that there is just nothing, there's no bloody clothes, there's any, there's nothing in either location to say that this 17 year old did anything.

[Paul Holes]

Well, they don't, yeah, they don't have physical evidence. Now they are, they're telling him, you know, his, his, you know, fingerprints were on the ransom note. You know, law enforcement is permitted to lie during interviews, you know, because that, you know, if somebody is truly innocent, they should vehemently deny. Right. That's kind of what you're looking for. So you know that I'm assuming they did not find his fingerprints on the ransom note. That was just a, that was just a tactic that they were using.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yep.

[Paul Holes]

You know, no physical evidence. And then the interview tactic itself, whatever statements he made under such a, you know, a drastic criminal interview, you can't put any veracity on those statements because he's just going to go into self preservation mode to get them to stop, you know. So at this point with what you've told me, I said, well, they got nothing. Just because he's breaking into an apartment. I mean that happens all the time, you know, in the same apartment complex where you have homicides, you have people that are breaking into those apartment complexes. And that happens in every city across the nation. So right now I'm not hearing anything that I'm going, oh, they might have the right guy here right now. They got nothing.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yep. And it gets worse. They use truth serum on him and they say now of course there's no recording, even though they should have been recording. There's no recording of this that he says, I Have, as you know, an alternate personality named George. But George doesn't confess either. Neither of them do. I mean, they are trying and trying. And they say, at first, but he did confess with the truth serum. And then later on, the police and the DA say, no, that actually wasn't the case. He didn't confess during the truth serum portion of this.

[Paul Holes]

Nor. Nor, you know. Well, first, you can't. I mean, you can't do that during an interview. But second, now you have an altered mental state. You can't put any weight on what somebody says.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

I mean, this is unreal. Paul. They give this guy Bill a spinal tap without any anesthetic. While he is in pain, they strap him onto a lie detector and they give him two tests after all of this, they say the tests were inconclusive. And then actually, when they have to, they are compelled to provide the results from these tests. It actually shows that both of them show that he was being truthful. So even under this kind of duress, I mean, I know how we feel about lie detector tests, but even under that, they cannot get a confession out of him or, you know, a sign that he's guilty. But they are torturing this person.

[Paul Holes]

No. Well, you know, just to expand away from this case, you know, this, in my mind, I think you have to call into question any conviction and any confession that is coming out of this jurisdiction during this time frame.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yep. Isn't that scary? I know. I mean, isn't it? I. I had heard, of course, corruption of police departments throughout history, and I had heard about Chicago, but this is. I've never really, really read about a case like this, so this was really disturbing. Okay, well, we're going to stop with the torture for now, and we're going to go to July 2, where he is transferred from the hospital to Cook County Jail. He has to go to the jail hospital first for a little bit because he is just in an awful shape. Of course he's in awful shape. So he ends up at Cook County Jail and he gets a cell. So there is a handwriting expert who comes in, and he says initially that Bill's print does not match the print in Frances apartment and the door jamb. But then he comes back a week or two later and says, well, I've reexamined it, and not only does Bill's print match the print in that door jamb with Frances murder, but it also matches the fingerprint that they found on the back of the ransom note.

[Paul Holes]

You know, of course, I'm a red flag as this fingerprint examiner changing his opinion about the bloody print that was found on the door jamb. This is where I'd want to see that bloody print. Is there sufficient detail for a fingerprint examiner to actually affect a good comparison with the exemplars from Bill? I actually did casework in the fingerprint unit. I'm not a fingerprint different examiner, but I sat down with some really, really good experts and saw how they affect an identification, if you will. And this is, you know, back in the 1990s. And of course things have progressed in the comparative sciences like we've talked about, you know, when we first started with buried bones, you know, but when you start having partial prints and an examiner is waffling one way or the other, then I start questioning if there is any type of overlap between Bill's reference prints and this bloody print. And then do you know on the ransom note how many points that the examiner was saying?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

He says there are eight points of similarity between Bill's prints and the ransomwriter's prints in joint prints. And there's six points of similarity between Bill and the ransomwriters middle joint prints. Now, it was. I don't know if this is still the case, but you needed 12 points of similarity to generally be required, you know, for this to be a positive

[Paul Holes]

match, you know, and there's. Yeah, you know, at least over time, you know, there's been more weight put on certain, if you want to call them points, because you have some very rare types of ridge detail that an examiner will put more weight on. And then you have some very common things that everybody sees. And now it's that spatial relationship between all these points. I am not blown away by eight points. This is sounding to me that it's a partial print that they developed off that ransom note. And, you know, it would, I would have to see. Okay, do you have some features that a fingerprint examiner would go, oh, you know, that is rare. And he possesses that rare feature, you know, so I'm going to put more weight on that and maybe not need 12, 15 points to have confidence that this print was left by Bill. You know, with everything about this investigation and with this fingerprint examiner reversing course on the bloody print, I'm just now calling into question. I can't trust anything I'm hearing about this fingerprint work.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yeah. And actually I'm sending you an email, Paul, because this, you know, I didn't include this. I don't know if I thought it was just not going to be a good enough photo, but it's the back of the ransom note. And, you know, it's a photograph, of course. And I don't know if this is police taken or what, but when you get it up, let me know, because, I mean, it could be important, but we can't believe anything you write anyway. But I just wanted to, you know, let you see it whenever you get it.

[Paul Holes]

I have the photograph of the back of the ransom note. I can see where you have the writing. Burn this for her safety.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

I don't even see. Do you see where the print is?

[Paul Holes]

You know, I think, you know, part of the issue with this photograph is that, you know, it's. It's probably been through multiple generations of copying, you know, so everything I'm seeing on this has a. Almost a grid pattern. There is nothing in this photograph that is showing what my eye is detecting as ridge detail. And I just think that we need the original in order to see what ridge detail is present for him to do an identification. If this matches the original, then I would say there is nothing here that could be used to be compared to Bill's exemplars.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

There is a shot of a fingerprint.

[Paul Holes]

I'd be able to tell if it's a rolled print, if it's a good enough photo.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

So this is. It's like a collage of his life, which I thought was interesting.

[Paul Holes]

Life collage? Yeah, that's a rolled print.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

So that's. So that's him. That's not any of the evidence. Right, Right.

[Paul Holes]

Yeah. By all looks, that. That is a rolled print. You never see Laytons look this pristine. If you get one like that, that's like, whoa, that's. That's one in a million from a latent. You know, I can't.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

It.

[Paul Holes]

It pixelates too much with a rolled print, especially if it's. If it's been done right. Oftentimes you can see the pores along the tops of the ridge detail. And then, you know, okay, you know, that's. That's. That's a rolled product. This here, the quality of that print is like. No, that's just off of his 10 print card.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Okay, so this is interesting. And you tell me what you think. So there were people who were coming to his defense, and I will say over the years, and one of the defense experts said the bloody fingerprint found at Francis's door jamb, they said when you look at it, it's actually a rolled fingerprint, like one you would see on a fingerprint card at a police station. And unlike those, you know, found at actual crime scenes. And so the assumption is, is that this was the police who took this fingerprint from Bill and planted it there. Now, I don't know what the sequence of events with that was, but I don't know if that makes any sense because. Because when they saw that rolled print, but they saw it a couple weeks later when they saw that rolled print, they had not found Bill yet. I mean, Bill had not burglarized anything yet. But I could be wrong. I could do the math, because it was a month in between these two cases.

[Paul Holes]

That's the bloody print on the door jab. Right?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

That's what they said. How do you mistake blood? And they also said oily. So that's what this. Again, it's back to being unreliable, you know?

[Paul Holes]

Yeah, that's where I need to see the photo. They obviously have photos of that print. I need to see what's going on there. A fingerprint examiner would be able to tell. You think about if you touch a surface, a certain part of your finger is going to come in contact with that flat surface. If you have a wide part of your finger from edge to edge that is in that bloody print, then that possibly suggests that whoever left that print did kind of roll their finger in order to do that. It's not outside the realm of possibility that that could happen. But most of the time, most latents that we recover or fingerprints that we recover are what we call partials. It's because most of the time, when you are handling various objects, you are not handling them in a way to leave good fingerprints. They're going to be smears. But every now and then you touch an object and part of your fingerprint is left behind, but not the entirety of the ridge detail. That's very, very rare.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Well, and you know, to me, what's very clear is that they found this fingerprint in the door jamb days, just a few days after Francis is discovered, which is a month before Suzanne is murdered. And then, you know what, maybe about six weeks or two months before Bill is burglarizing anyone and he becomes a suspect. So I don't know if the assumption is that they went back or they changed the printout and evidence or what it was. But this is the thing. The chief of police is saying that on this ransom note, Bill's print matches 22 points. So he's added, you know, 17 points or something, and he said it is conclusive. He is the one who wrote this ransom note.

[Paul Holes]

Yeah. You know, that that's where, you know, first I'd want to see it, but then I'd be putting that in front of a modern fingerprint examiner that I trust. And go, tell me what you see.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

So there is a grand jury. He's indicted for the murders of Josephine and Frances and Suzanne. And even though I think the state admits they don't have any evidence regarding Josephine, and the only evidence they have, you know, is this fingerprint that we know is questionable at Frances House. And then this ransom note. The state says, we're going to give you a plea deal. Three concurrent life sentences with a chance for parole in 20 years. They say, if you don't confess and take this deal, then we're going to go for the death penalty. And so he is put in solitary confinement and has to think this step over. But in the meantime, psychiatrists come and talk to him, and he tells psychiatrists some things that are really interesting. So he grew up in an impoverished Catholic family. He began burglarizing homes when he was nine years old. He said at first he stole luxury items like expensive clothes and radios and guns and stuff like that, and he stockpiled them in a stored shed. But soon, he says, he felt like stealing became kind of a fetish for him. And this is what he's telling investigators. And when we start getting into what he says his motives for burglarizing are, I would call into question a lot of what he's saying, because, remember, he's now thinking he might have to take this plea deal, right? So he says he started stealing women's underwear and using them to masturbate. So over the years, he says he's hoarded 40 pairs of women's underwear, which he kept in a cardboard box in his grandmother's attic. And by the time he was 12 or 13, he found burglarizing to be sexually arousing. And so he would ejaculate wherever he had broken into. He doesn't talk about touching anybody, but he says he would also urinate and defecate in the homes before ejaculating to further increase his sexual excitement. He said that he just. I mean, he basically goes on and on and says conventional sexual relations, you know, eluded him. He just didn't. He wasn't interested in women in that way or men or anybody. And he felt dirty when he was doing that kind of thing. Things escalate. When he's 13, he's arrested for having a 25 millimeter handgun, and he's sent to school for wakeward boys in Indiana. He keeps burglarizing they send him to a different school where he does really well. He skips the 12th grade and actually gets into the University of Chicago at 16 as an electrical engineering major. But he keeps burglarizing as we've now come to present day, you know, because he has to pay for this education. His parents can't afford it. So you know, this is now the media has dubbed him the Lipstick killer. And you know, now we have a grand jury who is hearing this evidence that implicates Bill in Frances case and Suzanne's case. And the big expert I think is a handwriting expert who comes in besides the prince who conclusively says that the lipstick on the wall matches the ransom note in Suzanne's case.

[Paul Holes]

Yeah, well Bill is a, he is a standard fetish bird. You know, this is what fetish burglars do. You know, they're going into the house or they, they, you know, the most common thing that they take is women's undergarments. They, it is a sexually motivated crime. They do masturbate at these crime scenes in some instances they are defecating at these crime scenes. I mean it ends up being, you know, critical evidence and, and it's often overlooked but it's, you know, it's something that, that I even actually it wasn't a fetish berg but I had a woman's body dumped on the side of a road and there was a pile of poo next to her body and I told the rookie collect that oh my gosh, that could be from our bad guy. Right. But he has a level of sexual deviance. What I'm listening for because what he's doing and what fetishbergs typically do is he's going into unoccupied residents when they start going into occupied residence. This is the number one predictor of future violence for this type of offender. And right now with Bill, I haven't heard anything where now he's doing more of a cat burglary while you have somebody inside the residence. So there's a little bit of a disconnect from a behavioral standpoint that he's not crossing over yet. Where I'm going, oh, hold on now he's showing sort of an escalation away from this lower level property sexual based crime. Up to now he's going to go hands on potentially with an occupant inside the residence. And then secondly, a handwriting expert comparing a writing on the wall. No, I'm sorry, I put no veracity on that opinion at all.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Bill has been offered a plea deal Three concurrent life sentences, and he is eligible for parole after 20 years. He does not want to take this deal, but he realizes that his attorney thinks this is a good idea. He's afraid that if they go to trial, he'll be convicted and they'll be, you know, giving him the death penalty. He won't have a choice. So Bill is trying to figure out a way to perhaps not have to take the plea deal and kind of get out of this. And Instead of being 20 years in prison, he'll be in, like, a mental health facility. So what the defense attorney says is, you need to do it. And the DA Says, okay, if you're going to plead guilty, then you're going to have to have a full confession and you're going to actually have to reenact the crimes. Because the DA wants to prove to the public in the media that they have the right person in these cases. Bill says he doesn't want to go to prison. He wants to go to a mental health facility. So he believes, and he talks to his attorney about this, that his best strategy is this sexual angle that I've been describing, and that's why he starts telling the psychiatrists this. So when he ends up ultimately doing an interview with the Chicago Tribune, he said, I got no sexual satisfaction from burglarizing. He said, I was constantly in fear, and there is no way of, you know, getting sexual satisfaction out of that for him in general. So he essentially said he made all that stuff up. They didn't find proof of 40 panties hidden anywhere. I mean, there was not a lot of there there. But he was trying to do it for a purpose, if you believe all this. So, you know, he is rehearsing this confession with his attorneys and memorizing these stories that the police have so generously given to the media that have all the facts laid out.

[Paul Holes]

When you take a look at what he went through during his interview, you know, for the plea deal, you know, what is he going. You know, what would he logically do? You know, it seems like, well, the best course of action is to give the prosecutor what they want so I can have the lesser deal or something that's more beneficial to him than the death penalty. For me, I think the critical aspect about this comes down to those latents that is your objective identifying evidence in this case. I can't trust anything that Chicago CD is saying Bill told them, or, you know, just because it's. It was under such extreme coercion. And I know in this case, if the evidence has been preserved you know, those, you know, the photos of those latents or those latent cards, however they. They got those latents off, you know, like with the ransom note. It'd be photos of the. The ransom note and then photos of that. That bloody print. You know, we would be able to determine are they sufficient for ident. Are they. Do they, you know, overlap with Bill's fingerprints? Can you inter. Compare? I'm not sure, you know, between the two cases. I still, to be frank, I'm not convinced that Suzanne's case was committed by the same offender as the first two. You know, and unless there is that, oh, it's the same person that has left Prince and, you know, in the second case, as well as in. In Suzanne's case.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Yeah, I mean, it really does feel like a different person. It feels like in Suzanne's case, this is not a fearful person to me. You know, he's taking her out. There's not this huge cleanup. It sounds like, you know, in the. There's just a lot of crossover than this dismembering part of it. I don't know. You know, I. I think the first two seem pretty close, especially with the douching. It seems pretty clear that they're connected,

[Paul Holes]

you know, serial predators, you know, over the course of their series, they do have of, you know, different, you know, cases that really seem different from the others. So I'm not necessarily saying this can't be the same person. It's just like, right now, I am unconvinced. There isn't enough overlap, you know, for me to go, yeah, you know, I'm convinced the first two, you know, that's the same guy. Suzanne's case is completely different at this point.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Well, listen to this. You know, he shows up and he says, okay, I'm gonna confess. And, you know, it's July 30th, the media is packing this courtroom, and he says, I need more time. He does not want to do this. He does not want to confess. He also does not want to spend, you know, the rest of his life in prison. The state's attorney is pissed, I would say is a nice word. And he changes the agreement. He said, yeah, okay, you're going to hem and haw on this. We're changing it. Instead of concurrent, we're now going to have three consecutive license. And you're going to be happy that I'm not going to have you executed, essentially. And so Bill thinks about this for another eight days or so, and then he eventually confesses. Whatever he says, it seems okay. And he ends up in prison with three consecutive life sentences. And also they impose a statutory sentence on the other indictments to run concurrently with each one, but I mean consecutively to the murder indictment. So this is, is, you know, I mean, he's clearly never getting out of jail that night. He tries to hang himself and he, you know, it doesn't work. And, you know, just to kind of speed through the end of this part over the next 60 years, there are a countless amount of petitions and appeals and people standing up for him. I mean, literally up until basically 2002, where the Northwestern Innocence Group comes to take a look at the case too. And I think with every appeal or every petition reinvestigation, there's more and more evidence that everything that was done was total bs, that there is not a shred of evidence that this guy did anything, but it didn't seem to matter because, you know, everything was denied. And I think that, you know, when they talked about coerced confession, when they talk about he was wrong about the facts, oftentimes then, you know, it seems pretty clear that this was a derailment of justice. And then when we had the Northwestern University center for Wrongful Conviction step in in 2002, they said, we think he's innocent, but all the original evidence is gone, and it's either been lost or destroyed, and many of the original police files are missing. And so while we believe he's innocent and while Bill has said for 60 years that he's innocent and has been a model citizen, there's nothing that we can do about it. And ultimately he is. He dies in prison on March 5, 2012, not very long ago. So listen to this, Paul. He, at that time, when he died, 2012, he was the longest serving inmate in the US prison system. He was continuously incarcerated for almost 62 years from the time he was 17 until he died when he was 83.

[Paul Holes]

Having, you know, worked a lot of these, these old cases, you know, I've run into, it's not surprising. The case from 1945, there wouldn't be any of the original evidence. You know, law enforcement just was not on top of, you know, you know, keeping evidence. And especially after the case is considered adjudicated, they got it. You know, they got this guy. You know, he pled guilty. You know, at a certain point, the judge will sign off and say, yeah, the evidence can be destroyed. And so law enforcement will clear out space in their property room. But I'm wondering what I've seen is, you know, especially when you have a Case that goes to court is evidence, of course, gets admitted into court. And in my experience, courts are pretty poor both at, you know, holding, you know, keeping evidence the right way. But they're also not very on top of purging their evidence. And so I'm wondering, is there, you know, somewhere tucked back in, you know, whether it's. What is that? Cook county, you know, courthouse. Do they have, you know, a warehouse of old cases? And nobody's ever even really tried to track down evidence that was admitted during, you know, the, the court process back in the day on this. You know, the. My hope would be is that there is at least, you know, photographs of those prints from the cases that are a sufficient quality to be able to affect a comparison. And that's, you know, that really, for me, is the critical evidence. If it matches Bill, like bonafide match under today's standards. And then, okay, I'd be definitely on board that, that, you know, if, if it's both the bloody print from the second case as well as the, the ransom note from Suzanne's case, if he matches both, and then, okay, I, I'm, I'm convinced it's him as long as it's not something that's, you know, looking like it was planted. But that's kind of hard to fool a competent fingerprint examiner with a planted print. Yeah, yeah, I, I, I definitely am skeptical about Bill's involvement in these cases. With the information that you presented, I'm still skeptical that Suzanne's case was committed by the same offender for the first two cases.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

That's where I'm at, you know, forever. There will be skepticism about Bill's guilt. And, you know, I mentioned that this author, Dolores Kennedy, wrote in 91, her book about Bill, and she believed that Richard Thomas was the killer. Now, you know, alibis can be thrown out, and I think it was the consistency with the kidnapping and that there was a note involved, that he was in Chicago at the time. Again, no evidence of that. I mean, just no evidence. And then Steve Hodel, who has always believed that his father was the killer of Elizabeth Short, Black Dahlia, also believes that his father was the serial killer in this case, too. Yeah, and we're not going to get into either of those theories, I don't think.

[Paul Holes]

No, you know, I just think the Richard Thomas suspect, you know, this is where, okay, what details did he provide in his confession? Was it under extreme coercion, just like we saw with Bill, and really, you know, tease that out before I would be convinced that they got the Right, Guy.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

This is a frustrating case because we talk about throughout history, people being wrongfully convicted and wrongfully executed for crimes, and to spend more than 60 years in prison and for something that I think you and I both doubt, and a lot of people doubt that Bill did. Must have been excruciating. I mean, he did some. Actually, some really great things in prison, and he was a great role model for a lot of prisoners. But, you know, to lose your life essentially at age 17 for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, breaking the law, but still, it just is. It's one of those, you know, you didn't get the bad guy, I don't think, in the end. And so this is not the cleanest ending for our serial killer episodes, but it is what it is. You know, it always teaches us something.

[Paul Holes]

I think I've heard of this series, and I've heard of Bill. You know, I was unfamiliar with the exact details, but I. What stands out to me is the. The deplorable actions on law enforcement. And fundamentally, you know, it's just that I cannot trust anything that they ended up up Forwarding to the DA's office for prosecution. In essence, it's almost like it's. You violated somebody's rights, and now you don't have the ability to utilize the evidence and the statements that you obtained under such extreme coercion. And it just calls into question all these other cases is that Chicago PD was handling, you know, in the mid-40s with this, least, this group of investigators. Right.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

And.

[Paul Holes]

And probably it would. It expands out. There's probably a cultural aspect, you know, so it's probably a much longer time frame in which now you have to take a look at any of these convictions that happened during this time frame.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Absolutely. I mean, I. I think you and I are both stunned every time we talk about a case. Case, and. And then we see the evidence, quote, unquote, evidence that. That district attorneys used to convict somebody, and we kind of go. Both go, how is that possible? You have an eyewitness or an ear witness, and that's pretty much it. And so. So I. You know, that's one of the sad things about some of the crimes in history that we talk about. But sometimes, you know, we also have medical examiners and coroners and witnesses and. And investigators who get it right. So I'm hoping next week we have. I will try to arrange for us to have somebody who gets it right, because I was so disappointed in the investigators in this case. We need some kind of a redemption story. I guess we'll see.

[Paul Holes]

All right, well, I'll be looking forward to it as always, Kate.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Thank you.

[Paul Holes]

All right, thank you.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

This has been an exactly right production.

[Paul Holes]

For our sources and shown notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com buriedbones sources our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi, research by Alison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

[Paul Holes]

Our theme song is by Tom Breyfogle.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac, executive

[Paul Holes]

produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Danielle Kramer.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Buried Bones Pod.

[Paul Holes]

Kate's most recent book, all that Is A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind is available now.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

And Paul's best selling memoir, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases is also available now.

[Paul Holes]

Listen to Buried bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Martha Stewart]

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[Kate Winkler Dawson]

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[Paul Holes]

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[Kate Winkler Dawson]

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[Paul Holes]

M&M's popped caramel do sound different.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Oh no.

[Paul Holes]

People are gonna be obsessed. What do you mean?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

People hate the sound of chewing.

[Paul Holes]

Maybe they won't like the crunch. Maybe we're saved.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Wait a minute.

[Paul Holes]

Yellow.

[Martha Stewart]

Have you been eating them this whole time?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Mmm.

[Paul Holes]

So tasty. Hands off us. M&M's popped caramel. It's more fun together.