← Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelyn Moore
Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelyn Moore
The Lipstick Killer: The Murderer that Terrified Chicago
01:32:21
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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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This is Crime House.
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Today we're covering the 1946 case of the Lipstick Killer murders. After a series of bodies turned up mutilated in Chicago in the 1940s, police were horrified to see that at one of the crime scenes a message had been left behind in lipstick, potentially from the killer. Eventually, someone went to jail for this crime, but to this day, most people don't think it was the actual guy. We're going to get into all of that today, so stick around.
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Hi guys. Welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
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I'm Kayla Moore. I'm going to be the one digging into the timelines, the backstories, and the court files related to these cases.
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And I'm your Internet sleuth, Morgan Abshur. I'm going to be diving into anything I can find online and talking about some lesser known details and pulling at threads that just don't add up.
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At Crime House, we value your support. Follow clues and share your thoughts on socials for ad free listening and early access. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts and if you can't get enough true crime, go and follow Crime House daily. Our team's twice a day show bringing you breaking cases, updates and unbelievable stories from the world of crime that are happening right now. Let's get into this case and the clues that defined it. This episode is brought to you by Vuori. So Vuori is my new favorite loungewear. I must tell you. I just got a pair of the Dream Knit joggers and I'm completely obsessed with them. I never want to take them off. I can wear them to stretch in the morning, to run errands in the afternoon, but I also think they're just best when I'm lounging around the house at night. When I wear Vori, I still look put together despite the fact that the clothes are so comfortable. And what's great about Vori is that it's not your typical typical gym gear. Inspired by the laid back coastal California lifestyle. Everything is designed to move with you, perform with you, and still look amazing when you're out and about. These pieces are soft, they're lightweight, they stretch in all the right ways. It's basically like wearing a hug that lets you do whatever the day brings. Vuorie is also perfect as we move from fall into winter. I can't believe I'm saying that already the year has flown by. They're really easy to layer. I have a Couple tank tops that I can wear underneath their cozy sweatshirts, and it's perfect. Vuori is an investment in your happiness. And for our listeners, they're offering 20 off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet@vuori.com clues. That's V U O R I.com clues exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. Go to vuori.comclues and discover the versatility of Vuori clothing exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
- [02:57]
B
This is gonna be a big one.
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A
This is gonna be a big one. Oh, before we dive in, can I give you a recommendation on a documentary to watch? Okay, maybe.
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B
I've seen it.
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Have you watched Perfect Neighbor yet? No.
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B
Netflix.
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A
Has everyone been telling you to watch it?
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B
I've gotten a few, yeah.
- [03:13]
A
I think you. I think you would be really moved by it. It's only scary, though. It's not okay. Well, I mean, the situation obviously is horrible, but I wouldn't say it's like, horror scary. It's very suspenseful. It tells the story of this woman who I. I don't want to spoil anything for people that haven't watched it already. It tells the story of this woman in Florida who lives next to these, like, neighborhood kids, and she's renting a house, and the kids play next to her property. They don't even play on her property. And she will not stop calling the police on them. And she gets angrier and angry and angrier until, like, the whole thing escalates. But the whole documentary is told through the body cam footage of the police. There's not really any narration that's cool. So you just get to watch. Has this, like, strange voyeuristic experiment as, like, the whole thing unravels. Wow. It's incredible. And it's a. It's just like, a really good reminder that there's, like, real people at the center of all these stories. Like you. You just watch all the people react to what's happening in real time, and you really, like, live intense, horrific moments with them.
- [04:16]
B
On my list. I don't know how you find the time to do all of this, by.
- [04:19]
A
The way, this one, it's been out for a while. It took me a while to finally get to it, but so many people, so many listeners were telling us to watch it, finally put it on. But I definitely think, yeah, it's emotional.
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B
I will definitely watch it tonight. I'll do a little research. I saw a TikTok that kind of describes probably a lot of us out there where we can watch true crime type documentaries, but, like, horror movies are not for us. And like, I'm one of those, like, I really, I don't know what it is. Like, I can really, I like true crime stories and I think it's like the justice aspect of it all. Like, I want to see justice come to fruition, but I cannot do a horror movie.
- [04:56]
A
Wow.
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B
I know I can do all of.
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It, but they do, they occupy very different parts of my brain. Like sometimes I do want to watch just the most like atrocious gory horror movie and it's so far out of like the true part of my brain because it's like pure fiction. But I understand that.
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B
Yeah. Okay, let us know in the comments.
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A
Which one are you guys?
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Who are you? Where do you have. You do both?
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Is it just horror movies? Obviously everyone here listens to true crime, but I'm so curious about that.
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B
Yeah, you said something though that's sticking out is like at a lot of these cases, we have to remember there are real, real people affected by these cases. And today we're gonna talk about a lot of people being affected and one of them is someone who was put behind bars for these cases. And yeah, was he rightfully convicted or was this a scapegoat? Was this someone who was not guilty and was really innocent and just was tortured to tell a tale?
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We're going to spend a lot of time getting into that today. And a quick reminder, if you're watching this on YouTube, there's going to be some images, assets, videos that'll help you visualize the case. And if you're listening to the podcast version of this, you can find those same assets on our Instagram. That's at Clues podcast on Instagram.
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And just a quick content warning in this episode does contain discussions about the death of a minor dismemberment Brief talks of sa. So please listen with care.
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All right, so this case starts on June 5, 1945 in Chicago with a 43 year old woman named Josephine Ross. Now, Josephine had recently lost her third husband. Recently she's been like getting back out in the dating world. But as of now, she's living alone with her daughters. She's lived with these two daughters, 21 year old Mary Jane and 17 year old Jacqueline, who worked to support the household in general. So on the night of June 5, 1945, she's gonna have this afternoon out by herself at the Pantheon Theater. Both of her daughters leave for work that day, and Josephine decides that she's gonna lay back down, kind of rest up for a movie date that she has later on. But at 1:30pm her younger daughter Jacqueline decides she's gonna come home for lunch. She steps inside the house, and something immediately feels totally off about the situation. The whole apartment is completely ransacked. There's loose papers, like, scattered around the front room. It's like someone had gone through the place specifically looking for something. So Jacqueline, her heart is pounding. She races to the bedroom because the only thing on her mind in the situation is, where is my mom? Let me make sure my mom is okay. But instead, she gets into the bedroom, and it is just straight out of a horror movie. Her mother's nude body was laid out across the bed, and there was a red dress wrapped around her head and tied off with a stocking. Nothing in the apartment, though, seemed to be taken once. Jacqueline's kind of, like, looking around a little bit more. It doesn't look like she was actually robbed. The apartment was ransacked, but nothing was really taken aside from a couple of dollars that were taken from Josephine's purse. So Jacqueline immediately phones the police, and when they arrive, they're able to get a much better look at the scene, and they notice a couple more disturbing details about what's occurred. So as they look a little bit closer at the scene, they can tell that Josephine's throat was slit and there were four separate knife wounds that opened her jugular vein. Something strange about the situation, though, was it appears like the killer had actually tried to bathe her body in the bathtub, because when they go into the bathroom, the tub is full of five inches of bloody water, which they were not expecting. Her clothing, her towels, and a douching kit were still floating inside the tub as well. And another strange detail about the scene was it almost appeared like after Josephine was bathed, she was dried off, and the killer may have stuck adhesive tape to her neck as if they were trying to close up the wounds. So Josephine is eventually sent off for an autopsy, where it's later revealed that she had not been sexually assaulted, but corroborated everything that the police noticed about her body.
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Yeah, very confusing scene to find. Police are able to gather at least one clue from this scene. Aside from Josephine's body, the police were able to find some dark colored hairs that were clenched in Josephine's hand at the time. Loose hairs like this could only Be used as evidence if they were directly compared under a microscope to another sample they had collected. I mean, as you guys know, DNA testing was still more than 40 years away at this point, but it at least points them in a very vague direction for a potential suspect. When police do start interviewing neighbors, they kind of get what they use as their second clue, which is a dark haired man. There were two separate eyewitnesses who reported seeing a man who police thought could be the killer. First, the building janitor saw a dark haired man in a possibly blood stained, light colored sweater weighing around 190 pounds leaving the building through the fire escape at around noon. That would be about 90 minutes after the estimated time of death and 90 minutes before Josephine's body was discovered. Another neighbor also reported seeing a man with dark hair, wearing a white sweater and dark pants in the hallway outside Josephine's apartment that morning. So seeming like it's the same person, right?
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Exactly. And I mean, so the police obviously take that to heart. A lot of stuff about Josephine's murder I will say is pretty vague because it actually wasn't super reported in the media back then. Even after scanning several sources and newspapers from Chicago at the time. There's just not a lot of definitive information on what was going on with the investigation or the crime scene, any of that. Here's what we do know though. Those two eyewitnesses described a similar person. So police began looking for someone in Josephine's life who may fit that description. And I mentioned it before, Josephine was widowed, but she had just started dating again. And she had a couple suitors. One of them was a brick mason named Oscar Nordmark. He actually had proposed to her, but Josephine's daughters said that he was creepy. So she hadn't accepted the proposal just yet. Plus, Josephine was still on and off with this other guy, a 39 year old named Chester Rice. He was described as being this handsome steel worker. He did kind of have a sordid past though. He had this record of burglary. And it seems, at least from what we've read, like they had been on and off for a little bit of time at this point. He was also described as a heavy drinker. We know that he hadn't actually proposed to her at this point, and he lived about 30 miles away from her. So when the police are interviewing Josephine's daughters, they tell them that Chester Rice had actually at one point threatened to kill Josephine out of jealousy that they had known of. So detectives go ahead and they search Chester's apartment, and there they find a white sweater in his bedroom. So they decide that's enough to detain him. He ends up being out of lockup by the next day, though that's June 6, because turns out he had an alibi. There was a friend who had sworn he, he'd driven Chester home that morning between 9:15 and 9:45 in the morning after a round of morning drinking. Now, Josephine's other suitor, Oscar, was also detained for questioning, but he was also quickly released because he had an alibi as well. Another woman said that he was with her at the time of the murder.
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What about that proposal, Oscar?
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I know. So they basically had eliminated everyone who might have had a personal or intimate reason to be angry with Josephine. So then police start looking back into the burglary angle. There was that few dollars that were missing, but other than that, there really wasn't anything missing from the house. So it was a really weak lead. If it was a burglar, why would they have taken the time to wash the blood off of Josephine's body and also patch her wounds together with tape? That was just like something that they weren't used to seeing in standard burglaries.
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No, that also takes a lot of time and. Yeah, energy, effort. Like being able to pick a woman up, put her in the bath, bathe her, pick her back up, put her on the bed. Like you're also looking at a bigger, like stronger person to be able to even do that.
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Absolutely. It was a very strange sequence of events. It seemed like, and they felt like because of how odd the crime scene was, the killer must have known the victim. It had to be way more intimate than just a regular run of the mill burglary gone wrong. But still, even though they start having these ideas, the case goes cold after this. What little coverage there was about Josephine's murder totally falls out of the headlines. There's just other stuff going on. And just five blocks away from Josephine's house, it almost seems like whoever did this to Josephine strikes again. And that brings us to 33 year old Frances Brown. Now Frances had previously enlisted in the Navy waves, which stands for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. There she served as a Navy telegraph operator until September. September of 1945. She ended up getting discharged due to the end of the war. Francis had since returned to her pre war job, which was being a stenographer. And she has shared an apartment on Pine Grove Avenue with a roommate, 32 year old Viola Butler. But on the night of December 9, 1945, Viola's out. Francis has the place all to herself. Viola's on a date across town and she said that she planned to stay the night with a friend nearby. Frances ended up returning home from dinner sometime around 9:30pm and she learned from a night watchman that she had missed a visit from a gentleman caller. The man hadn't left his name, but the whole situation seems odd to Frances. She's not expecting a gentleman caller. It's very strange that some someone showed up to her apartment basically asking for her, saying they were a gentleman caller. The night watchman is also confused by this because from the way that I guess the interaction with the man went, he totally got the impression that she would have been expecting someone. Frances doesn't really think much of it, though. She goes back up to her apartment and she makes a phone call to her mother. After that, she gets ready for bed. She showers, she rolls her hair in curlers, and she falls asleep sometime around 10pm we can imagine. The next morning at around 9am, a housekeeper arrives to clean the apartment. But she's surprised to find that the door is already open and the radio inside the apartment is on. And inside, when she pushes past the door, she sees this trail of blood that leads to Frances's nude body slumped over the bathtub. Housekeeper absolutely freaks out. She calls the police immediately. And when they arrive, it didn't take much time for them to see that there were a lot of similarities to Josephine's case from just a few months prior. For example, it seemed as if both bodies had been posed after death. Blood had been washed off of Francis's body in the bathtub using a douching kit. And there were towels wrapped around Francis head. Frances also had a knife wound to her neck. And Frances had been stabbed with her own bread knife. And they knew that because the killer left it inside of her neck. Her pajama pants were actually tied over it, as if whoever had done this was trying to conceal it. And just like Josephine, Francis was not sexually assaulted, despite the fact that she had been undressed. Also, her purse had been emptied. But just based on the rest of the apartment and the rest of the crime scene, it really seemed unlikely that robbery was the sole motive here. Now, even though what I just described in many ways feels almost identical to Josephine's murder, there were a couple of key differences, though. So the fatal wound for Frances, they very quickly discovered, was a gunshot wound to the head. It was a.38 caliber automatic weapon that did it. And then there was probably the most unusual part of the crime scene, and really the Marquee clue that gets spread around in magazines and newspapers about this entire case. But that is a note written in.
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Lipstick, which is our third clue. Sprawled on the living room wall next to Frances Murphy bed, the only bed in the apartment, actually. A framed piece of art had clearly been removed from the wall to make room for a large note. In 3 to 6 inch letters, written in bright red lipstick, was the disturbing message, quote, for heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.
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Oh, and that, to me, is so scary. It's the idea of, we see this in a lot of the notes we've covered from serial killers, but the like, please stop me. I will do this again if you don't catch me. Like, this person knows they're out of control.
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I know.
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Yeah.
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Which one did. Who did the drawings? Was it Golden State that left behind those drawings?
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BTK also did drawings and notes.
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Was it BTK that left behind those drawings? And. Yeah, I mean, there's been a few killers that leave those clues and notes on car doors with Golden State. I mean, it's.
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Yeah. And zodiacs on the car doors.
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Yeah. And investigators, like, they were creeped out. And when they looked further, like, they concluded that this sloppy handwriting was a strange mix of cursive and print letters with certain letters like B and F capitalized. Now, this lipstick message has been a huge subject of debate over the years. Because of this message's unique writing utensil, police start to suspect that their killer was a woman. Like a man using lipstick.
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A
I know.
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Not a chance.
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How would he know what it does?
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Much too feminine for a male killer. Couldn't be him. They also concluded that the term for heaven's sake would be an unusual phrase for a man to use. I don't know. That one came out of left field for me. Not to mention that this person had carefully removed the frame from the wall to make room for this writing. A man would have just tossed it aside. They wouldn't have cared about the picture. So they're. They're concluding that this has to be a woman.
- [19:26]
A
That's so wild to me.
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Of course, there are some doubts about their woman being a suspect, like the fact that the message was written six feet high in what seemed like a heavier hand than a woman might be.
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So whoever had done it was probably pretty tall.
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Yeah. Forcefully pushing it.
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Yeah.
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It's not clear if the killer left the lipstick tube behind or not. And, you know, at this time, papers in Chicago were insane. The mob was really present in Chicago. The papers were Competitive. I believe at the time there was five main ones, the Chicago Tribune being one of the biggest. And there is some speculation that this lipstick message might not have even been left by the killer. It actually might have been left by a journalist.
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Yeah, I read that there was maybe a little bit of time where the police were not at the crime scene and a journalist could have snuck in and written the note and then photographed it so that they could sell more papers.
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What sells papers? This would sell papers. And we have to know that at the time in Chicago, the relationship between reporters and police was. It was very different. It wasn't so like adversarial. They actually shared a lot of information at the time. So there's also speculation that, you know, it could have been tipped off that like, hey, there's a scene giving a reporter a chance to actually make it in there.
- [20:48]
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Yeah, it's easier to get along I guess when you're all corrupt at that point.
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Yeah. But we do get another pretty substantial clue from this scene. Clue number four is a fingerprint that was left behind. Most of Frances apartment was clean of unknown prints, which kind of suggested to police that the killer knew what they were doing and took kind of special care to keep from leaving prints and getting caught. But they did miss one spot. They found that there was a bloody smear with a fingerprint on the door jamb, either on the bedroom or the front door. Sources kind of conflict on this, but it was enough to lift it for comparison to other prints that they had on file. Unfortunately, no matches were found.
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A
Right. And even despite that, the police didn't leave the scene exactly empty handed though, because they did get another possible sighting of the killer.
- [21:49]
B
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- [21:51]
A
Morgan, I was just telling you how much I like Symbiotica because you were saying you can't really swallow pills.
- [21:58]
B
I cannot swallow pills, you guys.
- [21:59]
A
One of my favorite products that I take of Symbiotica is their magnesium L threonate. I love taking magnesium. I've taken magnesium for years. It really helps with my migraines and my stomach, all that stuff. But they have this really nice vanilla cream flavor, one that I rip open and just dump in my coffee and make myself a little magnesium latte in the morning. That's amazing. So easy to take. They also have this really delicious liposomal vitamin C that you rip open and drink. And it's orange flavor. It's really easy just to get like that nice hit of vitamin C. Especially now that we're getting into Flu, cold and flu season. It's really nice to have.
- [22:37]
B
And winter.
- [22:38]
A
And winter. I get sick every winter so trying to protect myself. And now for listeners of clues, we have a special deal with Symbiotica for you guys. You can go to symbiotica.com clues for 20 off plus free shipping. That's symbiotica.com, for 20% off plus free shipping.
- [22:59]
B
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- [23:15]
A
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- [23:41]
B
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- [23:56]
A
The best way to cook just got better. Go to hellofresh.com clues10fm now to get 10 free meals and a free breakfast for life. One per box with active subscription free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com/clues10fm to get 10 free meals and free breakfast for life. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. Here is my typical holiday pattern. I tell myself I'm going to be thoughtful and then I panic last minute. And I tend to buy a gift card for my family members. But this year I skipped the panic and I gifted aura frames to my family. Family members can be especially hard to shop for because you want to be personal, you want to be thoughtful, but also sometimes you don't see them a lot. So it's really hard to keep up with the things that they like.
- [24:45]
B
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A
Yes.
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- [24:56]
A
And I found that my Family always wants to see more pictures of what's going on in my life always. And you know, I'm having a baby after the holidays, so I know that I'm going to be able to send those photos really easily. And I don't even have to put them on social media also, which is huge. That's crucial for a limited time. Save on the perfect gift by visiting Oraframes.com to get 35 off Aura's best selling Carver Matte frames named number one by wire cutter by using promo code clues at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code clues. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, you guys. So order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Francis's neighbor, this guy George said that he heard gunshots between 3 in the morning and 4 in the morning. And then a night clerk that was interviewed said that he saw a man fleeing the scene around 4am and so that lines up with what George heard. But this person was about 5 foot 6, around 140 pounds. So not a big guy at all. The clerk described the man as, quote, dark, stocky and nervous, with a dark overcoat and dark hat. The dark hair matched the witness statements they had from Josephine's murder. But the previous witnesses also described a larger man, around £190 or so. It wasn't long before their short list of suspects kind of washed up and detectives began just really grasping at straws. At this point, they've basically decided that the killer is probably a man, even though he maybe used lipstick one time. It seems like all of the sightings of him are definitively male. But detectives decide that they're still going to give Frances female friends lie detector tests. All of them get cleared though, when this happens. And then on December 12, the Chicago Police made a disturbing announcement. Maybe it was for the sensationalism of the case at this point, but they decide to say that they're looking for a, quote, Jack the Ripper type. And that same day, something pretty wild happens. There's this 41 year old butcher, his name is George Cachoboni. He reportedly confesses to the crime. Now, he did have a previous record of a sex offense in New York, but he was not kept in police custody for all that long. He offered a lot of inconsistent responses during the interrogation. That, along with his inconclusive polygraph test results convinced the police that he probably was not the killer. If there is a transcript of this confession somewhere, it's never been released, no one's ever read it. But after that, George pretty much disappeared and there's little information about him. Now at this point it seems like whoever is doing this has an MO that they're known for. They're very good at not leaving much evidence behind. So they're a very elusive killer. It's almost like if they're ever going to get caught, they would have to commit more crimes and make more mistakes and maybe leave some more behind. And only a few weeks later another crime is committed. But I want to kind of dig into the details of this one because there's a lot of controversy over whether this one actually fits into the, the classic lipstick killer crime that we've just covered in the previous two. So on January 6, 1946, Jim and Helen Degnan put their six year old daughter Suzanne to bed around 9pm, ready to tuck in their nine year old daughter Betty. Next, they say goodnight to Suzanne. She's this extroverted little girl with a Shirley Temple face, she has this strawberry blonde hair. They leave her window open just a crack for air, despite the fact that it's like pretty cold outside. It's the middle of January. They live right next to Lake Michigan in this town called Edgewater. It's about three miles north of both Frances Brown and Josephine Ross's apartments. It was this wealthy area known for its architecture, its hotels. The Degnans had recently moved there from Baltimore, Maryland, and they were renting the first floor of this attractive older three unit home. And it is set up so that the other two units are on top of them. Jim worked for the opa, the Office of Price Administration, which was responsible for controlling prices and inflation during the war. And that made him, as you might imagine, very unpopular in some parts of Chicago. But by January 6th, the war is over. Jim and Helen are now settling into life outside of Chicago in the suburbs. Around midnight on January 7th, Jim returns from a nighttime walk and he wakes Suzanne to take her to the restroom. This was part of their nighttime routine in order to prevent bedwetting. And when Jim takes her back to bed, he says that he was willing to stay up for a little bit longer with her. She wanted to play or just hang out and chat, but she said, quote, I gotta hurry and get to sleep because I have to go to school tomorrow. So Jim left her bedroom door open just to crack in case she came out in the middle of the night or whatever. And then he goes to bed himself. But at some point in the middle of the night. There's these strange sounds in the house that end up waking up people on all three floors. The Degnans on the first floor hear it. The Flynns, who live on the second floor, hear it. And the Flynn's adult daughter and her husband who live in the attic of the building also wake up because they hear something. And all of the people involved don't really think that much of it because they live in this older house. I mean, it's. They're right next to the lake, it's constantly windy, it's the middle of winter. The house is always adjusting. So they kind of just think it's the foundation settling even though it's loud enough for all of them to wake up. But then the next morning, at around 7:30 in the morning, Jim goes to wake Suzanne and her bedroom is empty. At first, Jim and Helen thought Suzanne was playing a prank on them, like maybe she got up early and was hiding somewhere in the house. The Degnan searched their home, sure that at any moment they would hear Suzanne hiding behind something coming out, being able to find her. But soon they realized that she is not there. She's nowhere in the house. Cecilia Flynn, who's the landlord upstairs, called a friend with the Chicago Police Department's detective Bureau. And by 10am the house is swarming with detectives and reporters. And that's when they find something that Jim and Helen had missed that morning.
- [31:20]
B
Discovered on the floor of Suzanne's bedroom, crumpled and discarded like a used kleenex. Is our fifth clue a ransom note. Quote, get $20,000 ready and wait for word. Do not notify FBI or police. Bills in fives and tens. Burn this for her safety. The Degnan's hearts just sank when they saw this note. Now it was clear that obviously Suzanne had been kidnapped. And the $20,000 ransom the kidnapper was asking for, which is equivalent to over like 300,000 today, was not a sum that they could just easily come up with. Like the lipstick note that was found on Frances Wall. The handwriting was super sloppy, a mix of capital and lowercase letters. But the consistently capitalized letters aren't the same. For example, the ransom note capitalizes the R's while the lipstick message wrote R's in lowercase. And they're even more frantic because now they're realizing, like, it's obviously too late to convince the kidnappers into thinking that they hadn't called the police. There were already 45 people in their house and marked police cars all over the street. So the police tried to figure out where the note itself came from on the day of the kidnapping, January 7, Charles Wilson, head of the Chicago Police Department's crime lab, announced that the ransom note and lipstick message in Frances were not written by the same person. Two more notable handwriting experts actually were brought on to analyze these two notes, and they came to the same conclusion. Which brings us to our sixth clue, which is kind of an odd collection of items that were discovered all around the Degnan household. Remember, Suzanne's window was left open a crack, so it's believed that's how the intruder entered and exited the home. There were four unidentified fingerprints found on Suzanne's windowsill. One newspaper article said that they belong to the family's maid, but the coverage only mentioned two fingerprints, whereas there had allegedly been four on the windowsill altogether. Again, this is old time sources, so a little bit of conflicting information out there. There was a ladder found outside the home that turned out to be stolen from a nearby daycare facility. Presumably, the ladder was tested for fingerprints, but no findings were ever announced to the public. There were also two footprints found near the back porch where someone might have walked while carrying a ladder to Suzanne's window. But again, very little is actually reported on those footprints. About a block north of the house, though, investigators find something suspicious. Discarded under an apartment building's rear staircase was a handkerchief and a loop of wire. Police thought that this wire could have been used for strangulation. And the handkerchief itself was folded into a shape that looked to them like it might have been used for a gag. The wire also had some blonde hairs stuck to it, though we don't know if those matched Suzanne's strawberry blonde hair or not. But there was something else on that handkerchief, which is a name quote, S. Sherman. Police began a citywide search for anyone with S. Sherman. They ultimately found two, but both of those people had solid alibis. But that same day, investigators receive another pretty solid lead.
- [34:54]
A
Word starts spreading really fast by the afternoon of what's happened. And as the city learned of Suzanne's disappearance on June 7, this 25 year old veteran named George Subgrunsky comes forward with a story. Now, George was dropping his girlfriend off at her apartment near the Degnan's house on the night of the kidnapping around 1 in the morning. This was around the same time that multiple people in the house said that they heard those strange noises. And he claims that when he was making this drop off, he saw a man, probably about 35 years old, approaching the Degnan's house while carrying a shopping bag. George said that he wasn't able to see the man's facial features, but he could tell that this guy was probably 5, 9, around 170 pounds, wearing a light fedora and a dark overcoat. Police were unable to find the girlfriend that George was talking about. He would only refer to her as Marge. He didn't really give any more details other than that, which is sus a little odd. So they were never able to really corroborate his story. However, there was another neighbor who did report that she had seen George while she was walking her dog around that time. So it does seem like he was there and would have made this observation. Though she didn't see a girlfriend with him, she never saw this Marge and she also didn't see a fedora wearing man with a shopping bag. Police didn't seem to find George or the situation that strange, though he had called the tip in himself. There was no reason for him to. But they're going to need more information than this if they're going to really try to go after someone. And it's not the only tip that's called into the police though, luckily. So Jim Degman made a radio appearance the same day that Suzanne disappeared. And afterwards a call was made to the police department at around 7pm that night. The anonymous caller suggested that they should search the area's sewers and storm drains. It was one of a bunch of tips that were pouring in. I mean, the community really wanted to help find this little girl. So initially police didn't really know what to make of it. Do we take it all that seriously? Like that's a lot of effort and money to like go search all these storm drains. But then they noticed that there was an area outside of one of the neighbor's buildings in the neighborhood and the ground around it looked like it had been disturbed. So they decided that they were going to take a closer look. Thirteen detectives, all in fedoras and trench coats gathered in the alley south of the Degnan's home. And they found that there was a lid to a sewer drain that looked like it had been tampered with recently. So they go ahead and they pull it off. And as soon as one of the policemen shines his flashlight into the dark water filled basin, they know that the search is over. They know that they found what they were looking for. And just a quick warning to everyone listening, there's going to be some graphic details that I describe about the scene. So it's a good time if you want to take a minute or two and just skip ahead to avoid this part. Inside of that sewer, police found Suzanne's head, meaning that the kidnap investigation was officially now reclassified as a murder case. And not to mention now they realize that whoever had called in and suggested that they needed to check the sewers might actually have been the person that did this.
- [38:16]
C
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- [39:16]
D
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- [40:22]
B
Sadly, Suzanne's Body parts and items found near them are our seventh clue in this case. Afterwards, police fanned out. They checked all other sewers and storm drains in the area, and they were able to locate her right leg, torso and left leg. Those were all found in three separate storm drains nearby. Stuck to Suzanne's torso were two black hairs, eerily similar to the black hairs found clutched in Josephine's fist, though we don't have a note if they were ever compared or tested against each other. A grayish green fedora was also found lying near one of the catch basins, which fit George's description of a man in a light fedora. They also found a paper bag near the sewer where Suzanne's right leg was found. After the autopsy, her time of death was determined to be before or around 1:30am the coroner felt that only someone with butchery experience could have neatly dissected her body and probably did so. After Suzanne's death, a very sharp knife would have been used, and the bones were separated at the joints. Police later announced that they believed the guilty party must either be a physician, a medical student, embalmer, butcher, or could have been someone else working in the meat or livestock industry that had butchery experience. Suzanne's arms, initially not found with the other body parts, were located nearly a month later in a storm sewer just a few blocks southwest of the Degnan's home. And I do just want to make a note here that is kind of an interesting tidbit. Suzanne's dad, Jim, worked for the Price and Inflation Bureau, essentially. But at this time in Chicago, Chicago was actually home to one of the largest stockyards in the country. And so Jim actually worked very closely with the meat industry. So that's just kind of another, like, oh, interesting. Police are speculating this is a butcher, someone with livestock experience, like, neatly cutting out joints, like, Jim did kind of work in that industry.
- [42:23]
A
I know the locations where Suzanne's other body parts were found indicated that she was probably killed either in her home or close to home. And the person was kind of like, dumping the parts as they went walking south from her house. So, yeah, obviously the police start looking a little bit, like, inward at the family, too, at this time.
- [42:46]
B
Well, and you mentioned close to home. So that's actually our eighth clue. It's actually a basement laundry room of an apartment building on Winthrop Avenue, and this is just a block south of the Degnan home. Actually, the basement had recently been broken into, and there were traces of human blood and tissue in the laundry tubs. So investigators are immediately looking at this as the place that Suzanne's dismemberment took place. But for some reason, they believe that she was actually killed somewhere different, since there was no coal dust in her lungs like there might have been if she had been in that laundry room, actually breathing in the air before she died. I guess it was a really cool, dusty basement. On top of that, paper bags and rags had been stolen from lockers in the laundry room, which the tenants used for extra storage. Detectives realized that the rags were used to wrap Suzanne's body parts, and the paper bags were used to transport them to those sewers. So maybe this person was just kind of taking what they could carry and, like, not look suspicious as they were walking about. A tenant that was actually residing above the laundry room had reported hearing footsteps repeatedly going in and out of the alley where the entrance of the laundry room was at around 3.40am in the morning that Suzanne was taken. At the time, she didn't think anything of it because there was a hotel on the other side of the alley. So people were kind of always coming and going through there. But her recollection aligned with the coroner's estimated time of death, which was about two hours earlier. So it seemed like this resident could have very likely heard the killer.
- [44:25]
A
Now, as police are looking more into the circumstances surrounding this murder, there's this one big, looming question that they just can't seem to answer. And that is, why did the killer leave a ransom note and then immediately murder her? Which, I mean, it kind of harkens back to JonBenet Ramsey in a way, like just this very, very confusing ransom note. While many of the detectives believed that the killer never intended to pursue a ransom, that the note was merely a distraction or a way of, honestly, to psychologically torture the parents, either way, the news created a level of public pressure well beyond anything that the Chicago Police Department had ever experienced.
- [45:04]
B
And because of that, I mean, Reddit kind of goes down the rabbit hole of, like, oh, the lipstick message could have been fake. They didn't find the ransom note right away. The ransom note could have been fake. And the lipstick message was already published in the papers. So it could have been easily for someone to replicate. I know, in order to induce that.
- [45:22]
A
Hysteria, another situation where maybe a journalist got in there and wrot this ransom note. Yeah.
- [45:28]
B
And looking at the cases we have thus far, to me, not a detective, not a cop, not back in Chicago, clearly 1946, but they don't even feel the same. So.
- [45:40]
A
No, no, like, this is. This feels so different.
- [45:42]
B
You have Two older women stabbed. The second one, I would even kind of be like, were those two connected? Because she was actually shot. And then you have a six year old little girl that's dismembered. It's.
- [45:54]
A
Yes.
- [45:54]
B
It feels like they're all so unrelated. So it's interesting that they would even correlate them. But again, that pressure, I mean, they were feeling the heat.
- [46:03]
A
There was so much pressure. I mean, at the time we talk about how they set up these tip lines so that people could call in with tips and they could not keep up with the amount of tips that were coming in. Not even tips. They couldn't keep up with the amount of calls that were coming in because there's also record that a lot of these calls were just local mothers that had no one else to really talk to about this, but were so worried about what was happening. So they would call just to cry to the police about how scared they were for their own children clogging up.
- [46:32]
B
That tip line and clogging up the.
- [46:34]
A
Tip line and just putting more pressure on the police. And so it just was like this really, really wild situation. And there's other tips coming in too, aside from just the tip line. Like one of Jim's co workers came forward to speak with detectives claiming that Jim was actually in serious debt and he had a habit of borrowing from his colleagues without paying them. That led some people to think that Jim might have been responsible for kidnapping his own daughter, hoping that the publicity would lead to a cash reward. Basically for information. Maybe Jim would use another party to claim and receive the reward. He would share a cut of it, who knows? And then another kind of like damning piece of evidence against Jim is there's a picture of Suzanne's bed that appears in the newspapers. And once people of the public see this bed, they really just take it as further evidence against Jim. Because in this photo, Suzanne's bed appears neatly made. It's not rumpled up. So they start speculating that Suzanne maybe went with the kidnapper willingly. It was not a struggle. Either she got out of bed and turned around and made it really quickly, or she got out of bed in a way that didn't disturb it very much and then like went off with the person.
- [47:48]
B
It is an interesting detail because, like, why would the bed be made? Like there's a clear difference between slept in it and a little girl taken out of the bed versus like it's neatly made.
- [47:58]
A
Yeah.
- [47:58]
B
And did the parents do that after they discovered she was missing?
- [48:02]
A
Yes.
- [48:02]
B
And before, you know, reporters Got there?
- [48:05]
A
No, this is really a photo that like moms throughout Chicago would just sit at the kitchen table and look at it and talk for hours about what kind of 6 year old would have gotten out of the bedlight. Like they must have known the person as my 6 year old would have torn up the whole bed if it was a stranger, you know. So it's really something that people like hold on to but use ultimately as evidence against Jim. And then later, several anonymous notes come to the Chicago PD accusing the Degnan family of basically committing the crimes themselves. And we don't know if these are real notes or just people who are writing in because they felt so passionately that they had solved it. But police ultimately decide that this theory is a little bit far fetched. And they don't ever consider Jim to be a suspect, especially because none of the, I guess what they're calling like real physical evidence of the scene points towards him necessarily. But there are a couple of calls that come in that provide some more useful tips to hopefully lead in a better direction. Like one that comes from this guy, Robert Freudle. He's a commercial printer who lives on Kenmore Ave. Near the Degmans. He left for work at around three in the morning on January 7th and he reported seeing a slate colored car parked just 100ft away from the family's home that morning. And as he watched, there was a male driver who appeared to move a heavy bundle from the front seat to the back seat. Now there's other witnesses that come forward and corroborate this story. Another neighbor was sitting in a car with a friend at 2:30 in the morning on Kenmore Avenue when she saw a gray sedan with a man and a woman inside. She said that they were driving repeatedly past the Degnan house. Another witness saw a woman carrying a heavy bundle in her arms towards a parked car that fit the same exact description. Several cab drivers also confirmed seeing a couple in a gray or light colored car in the area of the Degnan home that morning. And after comparing the facts repeated in all of these separate sightings, police take this mysterious couple pretty seriously. On January 9th, Chief of Detectives this guy, Walter G. Storm makes a radio announcement asking the public to help identify a woman who they're describing as 5, 6 and 130 pounds, wearing a gray coat with a fur collar and a small hat. They describe the vehicle that she's in as being like a 1940 or 1941 Ford four door sedan with an Illinois license plate that began with an 11. They don't have the whole license plate, but they have enough to know that it begins with 11. As for the driver, they describe him as being a gray haired man not wearing a hat. But even after police question more than 200 people, all of whom drive four door sedans with license plates starting with elevens, they're not really any closer to finding this mysterious couple. Now, the same day that that radio announcement comes out on January 9th, police questioned Hector Verberg. He's a 65 year old Belgian immigrant. He worked as a janitor and a handyman at the apartment building where the laundry room was located, where they believed that the murder took place. Hector was known by tenants as being just this really kind old man who loved children, wouldn't hurt a fly. The only real evidence against him in this case was that he had access to the laundry room and the fact that, that the ransom note was written crudely by someone who had dirty hands, like maybe a janitor. But on the basis of that connection alone, police told the press that Hector was guilty. They just straight up say it to them that they believe Hector. Not even that they believe Hector's guilty, but that he is guilty. And then they end up going on to really, I mean, torture him for two straight days to try to get him to confess to this crime. We haven't really been keeping up with the botchboard as much this case because, like the whole thing is like corrupt.
- [52:02]
B
I've been thinking about it over here.
- [52:03]
A
I don't even think there's like a tally for it. I think you just have to color the whole thing in at this point because let me tell you how Hector describes this, quote, interrogation that the police put on, quote, oh, they hanged me up. They blindfolded me. I can't put up my arms. They are sore. They had handcuffs on me for hours and hours. They threw me in the cell and blindfolded me. They handcuffed my hands behind my back and pulled me up on bars until my toes touched the floor. I no sleep, I no eat. I go to the hospital. Oh, I am so sick anymore. And I would have confessed to anything. He admits that, like, if they kept torturing me like this, I just would have said I had done anything.
- [52:42]
B
I mean, and they wanted to get a confession, like they thought this was their guy without any evidence.
- [52:48]
A
Yeah.
- [52:49]
B
What is, does torture feel like an automatic 5 on the botched board?
- [52:52]
A
Yeah, I think, yeah, police torture. I think it's an automatic five.
- [52:56]
B
Automatic five.
- [52:57]
A
Hector is part of this janitor's union in Chicago. And so they're able to provide lawyers that get him released from this. That's the only reason that they don't continue torturing him until he confesses to the crime.
- [53:08]
B
Which is insane. It's insane. I literally just went to the Tower of London and getting handcuffed and then put on a bar like that is medieval torture. That is not police interrogation. Like that is torture.
- [53:22]
A
Yeah. Hector's injuries after this torture were so severe that he ends up being in the hospital for 10 days afterwards. But to his credit, I don't know how he was this strong. He does not confess the entire time. He knows he's innocent. He's not going to throw himself under the bus just because they're torturing him. His wife Mary, who also got arrested at one point in during his interrogation, does not implicate him either. She also knows that she's not going to speak eventually. The police did have to admit that Hector could not write well enough in English to have even penned the ransom note in general. So. I know. And then just like another one on there. And Hector is not the only person who ends up being arrested in connection with Suzanne Degnan's murder. He wasn't even the only janitor. It seems like the police really zoned in on the fact that they thought this must have been a janitor because of the dirty hands. He has a 35 year old friend and colleague who just happened to work on the same block who also gets taken by police and also five points on the board, gets tortured by the police. Man. For a while, every man in the Degnan's neighborhood is on high alert. They all know what the police are doing. They all know how horrible it's getting for anyone. Detectives are patrolling every street corner. Spitting on the sidewalk was enough to get someone picked up, fingerprinted, and quote, unquote, interrogated.
- [54:48]
B
Spitting on the sidewalk, you have people doing chew tobacco. They're spitting constantly. What do you mean?
- [54:53]
A
Yeah, there's a neighborhood woman who comes forward to identify the stolen ladder that had likely been used in the abduction. And police essentially detain and interrogate her son after she comes forward because they're like, well, how did you. How would you have known about that? So now they're also scaring off people who have legitimate tips to call into the police.
- [55:13]
B
Yeah. Why would anyone want to come forward and help when they're going to be picked up and tortured?
- [55:17]
A
They end up up interviewing over 400 suspects. And I keep saying interviewing, we. I mean there's not descriptions for what happened to each one of these people, but we can only imagine there's 700 other people just to see if they know anything about the crime. And even through all that, police fail to charge anyone for Suzanne's abduction and murder. They also still have not charged anyone for Josephine or Francis's murders for that matter.
- [55:45]
B
So finally, on June 25, 1946, which is almost six months after Suzanne was murdered, the police's luck looks like it might have changed. Which gives us our ninth clue. The Maricopa County Sheriff in Phoenix, Arizona, contacted his colleagues in Chicago about a prisoner who had confessed to killing Suzanne. The prisoner, Richard Russell Thomas, was a former nurse who had been living and working in Chicago from December 5, 1945 to January 22, 1946. And trigger warning essay here. Richard was actually awaiting sentencing in Arizona after being convicted of sexually assaulting his 13 year old daughter. Richard confessed in detail to Suzanne's murder and asked to be extradited to Chicago to, quote, face his medicine. He said he was willing to accept whatever punishment he received, quote, even if it's the chair. But the Woodlawn Hospital, more than two hours drive away from the Degnan residence, said that Richard was actually working a night shift the morning Suzanne was killed. So it couldn't have been him. However, Richard himself insisted that he had called in sick and the hospital records were wrong. But during their investigation of him, Richard wasn't able to give police any details of the crime that hadn't been published in newspapers. Still, Richard's experience in nursing and access to surgical tools did fit the profile of this killer. And fellow inmates even claimed that he was having nightmares about Suzanne's murder leading up to this confession of his. Richard even signed a very detailed 63 page written confession, but he ended up retracting it after he received a 19 year sentence in Arizona. Honestly, the police might have done more to check his story if it weren't for what happened the very next day.
- [57:59]
A
That brings us to June 26 6, 1946, when a 17 year old named William or Bill Hirons was short on money. He was getting ready for a date with his girlfriend Joan, and he was starting to panic. Now, William was what many described as an unusual teenager. He had developed a habit of burglary around age 14, and he was so successful at it that the papers labeled him a, quote, one boy wave of crime. He was sent to a reform school and it seems like that sort of turned his life around. His academic performance was very good there and he ended up getting accepted to the University of Chicago at age 16. But there were signs in his life that he had not exactly turned over a new leaf. He began living off of savings bonds that he purchased with the proceeds of his past burglaries. He also had stolen some war bonds that he intended to cash. And then on May 1, 1946, he was arrested and fingerprinted for carrying a gun on the Chicago's south side. Now, these charges were eventually dropped because he hadn't tried to conceal the weapon and he appeared to be a good student. But not even two months later, he found himself out of cash and too embarrassed to cancel on his girlfriend. So he went back to his old ways. He ended up burglarizing an apartment on North Wayne street, less than a mile from the Degnan residence. He chose this target poorly, though, as all William managed to take was a novelty oversized $1 bill. He was spotted while he was leaving the apartment. And that's when two officers showed up, at which William made another poor decision. He pulled out a gun and he aimed it straight at the police. They said that he tried to shoot at them and the gun jammed. But William says that he never pulled the trigger. He just ended up throwing the gun at the cops. The uniformed officers shot at William. They didn't hit him. They chased him past an off duty cop who broke three flower pots over his head one by one with great force. And they ended up arresting William for burglary while he was completely unconscious from this head trauma that he had received from the police officer.
- [60:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, three flower pots feels a bit excessive.
- [60:19]
A
Yes. The time that it takes to lift up each flower pot one more by one and drop it on someone's head. Yeah, he suffered from a concussion. He probably had worse injuries than that. There's evidence that he maybe had a fractured skull from this. He was so badly injured that he would later claim he woke up to see a priest was in the hospital with him, giving him his last rights. But little did he know things were about to get a lot worse from there. On June 27, police conducted a warrantless search of William's dorm room. Now, when they get in there. I know, just mark it again. You're just gonna have to hold the botchboard the whole time.
- [60:56]
B
I'm just gonna. Yeah, that's gonna sit.
- [60:58]
A
Do not have a warrant to go through his dorm room. They go in anyways, and they see that he has just all of these stolen goods from about 50 separate burglaries he'd committed over the years. And among the items that police see in the dorm room, there's a couple that really disturbed them. There's actually a copy of a book called Psychopathia Sexualis. It describes sexual crimes against children. There's even a part of the book that talks about the dismemberment of children.
- [61:28]
B
It's a book about, like, the psychology standpoint of these things, though.
- [61:32]
A
Yeah.
- [61:32]
B
It's, like, meant to be almost like a diagnostic journal, it seemed.
- [61:36]
A
Yeah. Who knows why he had this book? When I initially read that, the police found it in his dorm room, I'm like, oh, during a warrantless search, you found something incriminating, like, huh, sounds like you planted it there. William does admit that this book was his. He says, though, that he stole it out of curiosity. And he had an English assignment at one point where he wrote a critique of the book, which would have been.
- [61:57]
B
Really easy to verify. Hey, where's the paper?
- [62:00]
A
I know. Do you have the paper?
- [62:01]
B
They have no note of this in the research?
- [62:04]
A
No. There was also a cult revolver in his room that was stolen from this man named Guy Rodrick. He's going to come up later. Remember that name. William's stash also contained not one, but two surgical kits, which he said that he used to scrape names off of stolen war bonds. He also had a scrapbook that he had stolen. And inside of the scrapbook, there were some photos of Nazi leaders. So the police were able to hunt down the owner of this scrapbook, a former GI named Harry Gold, who created a scrapbook as a memento of his service in World War II. And that's when they learned that this scrapbook was stolen just 100ft from the Degnan residence. So William had been in the area committing crimes. The scrapbook was stolen also, they noted, on January 5th, which was just two days before Suzanne was killed. Due to the lack of a search warrant, none of this information would go on to be admissible in court. But it didn't stop the Chicago newspapers, who you brought up, were really close with the cops at this time from getting their hands on all of this. And they just started publishing all of these findings in the newspapers. And soon the whole city knew about all of the contents of William's dorm room.
- [63:17]
B
And so at this point, police are really thinking, trying to make William their guy. So they. They start to take a closer look at William's fingerprints, which leads into our 10th clue. Using the ransom note found in Suzanne's bedroom, they want to see if any prints on it could match William's. Now, in the days after this was discovered, the Chicago Crime Lab wasn't actually able to find any prints on the note using their traditional methods. So they handed the note over to the FBI on January 18, 11 days after the kidnapping and murder, the FBI tried a process called iodine fuming, which was a state of the art forensic technology at the time. Basically, when iodine encounters the oils, an amino acid's left behind from someone's hands. It turns into a brownish, visible fingerprint. Afterwards, the ransom note revealed two partial fingerprints on its front side. The FBI photographed this since the prints would disappear after some time. And they sent it to a fingerprint expert with the Chicago PD but they determined that the prints were, quote, so incomplete that it is impossible to classify them. Impossible.
- [64:34]
A
Impossible. They use that word.
- [64:36]
B
Still, they tried. Anyways, they spent the next six months comparing the prints to all fingerprints taken from people arrested so far in 1946 in Chicago, which sounds like a big number. And nothing came back as a match. Which cut to June 29, 1946. William is now in custody and is told that his fingerprints do match the prints found on the ransom note. The initial story was that his partial left pinky was on the front of the note. However, Sergeant Thomas Laffey, the examiner who found the match, later testified that there was only one print on the front side of the note. And it wasn't Williams after all. It was the fingerprint and palm print on the back that matched Williams. But here's the thing. The FBI had this note. The FBI looked at this ransom note, used their state of the art technology, and they didn't find any prints on the back of this note. Over the years, a number of experts have reexamined the ransom note's fingerprints with pretty conflicting findings. I don't know if we're ever gonna get a clear answer on that. But there was another fingerprint clue to check. The bloody smear on the door jamb in Frances Brown's apartment. On June 30, Chicago PD captain Emmett Evans announced that William was cleared in the Francis Brown case. The fingerprint on the door jamb wasn't his. Again, Wasn't. But just because the print and match didn't mean the police were done with William just yet.
- [66:19]
A
No. Once again, it's about to get a lot worse.
- [66:21]
B
It is. And I'm giving a botched mark here. The fingerprint stuff, it. It really feels fishy to me. Especially given what we know the Chicago police is okay with doing at this point. Which is torture. Yeah. So the fact that the FBI got.
- [66:36]
A
Your without a warrant. Yeah.
- [66:38]
B
I mean, FBI didn't find A palm print or fingerprint on the back. Like how did it get there after the fact? It's given. It's given. Fishy. But either way, botched.
- [66:49]
A
Yeah. Planted. So Sergeant Laffey admitted that he was eager to find a fingerprint match because he simply just didn't like William. That is something that he said out loud. Laffey thought William was, quote, feigning a coma. You know, the thing that happened after he got his head smashed in by the police officer. Three pots.
- [67:08]
B
Three pots.
- [67:09]
A
He thought that he was just feigning a coma to avoid interrogation. Although, I mean, there's medical records that William really did have a head injury that was probably worse than they even stated it being.
- [67:20]
B
Concussion. Potential fractured skull. As someone that's had a concussion, I don't remember the. Anything around the event or like the whole week after. Yeah, like it rocks you. So feigning. Okay.
- [67:34]
A
Having a. Maybe a tbi and they're telling you that you're doing it so you don't have to be interrogated. Which also. We know what the word interrogation means in this context. So it's like, oh, you're fit. You're faking being hurt so that we can't torture you. Yeah. Okay. Sergeant Laffey was at this point a highly respected 26 year veteran of the force. His word carried a lot of weight within the department. With findings at hand, detectives were completely determined to get William to admit he was guilty. Now, it's kind of unclear here exactly what they wanted him to admit guilt to. If it was just Suzanne's murder, if they also wanted him to take responsibility for Francis and Josephine. Like it's, it's a little confusing, but they just want him to say he's guilty of something. So they aggressively interrogate him while he's still in the hospital with the head injury they gave him as often as five times a night. They're interrogating him without letting the 17 year old see either his defense attorney illegal or his parents. And when he still doesn't confess anything to them, they. This is really gonna hurt to talk about and read about, but they inject him with this thing called truth. They call it true serum. It's sodium penothol the way. Do you know how they inject this?
- [68:54]
B
It doesn't sound good. I don't know. I'm scared for you to tell me.
- [68:58]
A
Spinal tap. They don't just stick you in the arm with it. They hook you up to a spinal tap and they inject it through your spine. He does not give his consent to have this happen. The attorney is not there to give consent to this happening.
- [69:13]
B
No. Because he can't see his attorney.
- [69:15]
A
Exactly. And I'm sure you can imagine. But whether or not truth serum actually makes people tell the truth is incredibly debatable.
- [69:25]
B
There's a lot I've seen on it.
- [69:26]
A
Where it's very debunked at this point.
- [69:27]
B
Yeah, it doesn't make someone tell the truth. It, like, lowers inhibitions and, like, they can be very coerced at this point too. Yes.
- [69:36]
A
Yeah. I. I have notes here on a little bit more of. On how it works. It's basically an anesthetic. And so the. The right dose can allow people to hold a conversation while some of their other higher brain functions have already been shut down by anesthesia. I imagine it's sort of what they gave me when I had an endos. Upper endoscopy where, like, they kept telling me I was awake the whole time.
- [69:56]
B
But, like, I'm not awake.
- [69:57]
A
I don't remember a single thing. And theoretically they said, at least at the time, that this would maybe turn off your ability to lie because of the state of consciousness that you're in. It is not that simple. That's not really how it works. According to the Mayo Clinic, studies of sodium pentothal have found that it makes people highly suggestible and it can actually cause them to develop false memories. Based on an examiner's leading questions.
- [70:26]
B
This is what we're saying. Yes. Botched. I gave it. I don't. I'm losing count. But, like, we're at 20 marks on the botched board right now.
- [70:32]
A
Really bad. These days, the use of truth serum is mostly considered illegal under international law. It's equivalent to a form of torture. Very on brand with what they were doing at the time. We still, to this day, we don't know exactly what William said when he was under the influence of sodium pentathol, because the recording of this or the transcript of it is never been released. The whole interview he did while under the truth serum has not been released. But we do know that after he was strapped to a hospital bed, prevented from sleeping, given very little to eat or drink, not allowed to see his parents or his attorney, he allegedly told a pretty incriminating lie on June 30, according to the police. This is what the police said. Take it with a grain of salt. William said that he did not commit the crime, but a man named George Merman might have. He then explained exactly how this George person committed the murders. And so when police hear this under whether it was like the truth serum or whether he was just sleep deprived. At this point, when they hear William talk about this guy George, in their minds, they immediately go to, oh, this is a Jekyll and Hyde situation where this kid, this 17 year old, has this full other personality who he's calling George Merman. And that's who committed these crimes. They think they've like cracked the case in this brilliant way. Now, William would later go on to admit that he was just saying whatever he could think of to get the police to leave him alone. He had no idea that by saying this, he was basically, at least in the police's mind, admitting to guilt.
- [72:11]
B
I mean, think about our janitor. He literally said, if it would have gone on longer, I would have admitted to anything.
- [72:17]
A
And this kid's 17.
- [72:18]
B
This is a 17 year old. I think in 1946, that's still considered a minor. I don't know if the rules were different back then, but again, not allowed to see a lawyer. Parents like this was insane for him. And the grilling did not stop after William mentioned George. If anything, it intensified and got way worse. Which brings us to our 11th clue. Polygraph results, which we've talked about this quite a bit. Polygraph results aren't the most compelling evidence, not even typically allowed in court.
- [72:52]
A
So in 1946, anyone under 21 was a minor. It wasn't till 1970 that it became 18 because of a voting rights act that was passed.
- [73:01]
B
Yeah. Even more so then.
- [73:02]
A
Yeah. So he was 17. Yes.
- [73:05]
B
Four years from an adult.
- [73:07]
A
Yes.
- [73:08]
B
So, as we mentioned, William underwent a spinal tap with no anesthesia, one that he did not consent to. I've heard him describe in an interview. It felt like they were swirling his brain around with this spinal tap and like he had a headache for six weeks afterwards.
- [73:24]
A
Oh, my God. That. Ugh.
- [73:26]
B
It. It doesn't stop there, though, because according to his lawyers, this was just one of several painful procedures that William was subjected to. Other procedures, torture that was committed, was burning his testicles with ether to try to get him to confess.
- [73:49]
A
It feels wrong to only give that one mark on the botch because I.
- [73:53]
B
Think, again, torture, the worst thing you could do. Ether on your testicle. You guys, all the guys out there are like shriveling. And this is really concerning, too. Fifteen minutes after the spinal tap and kind of unclear if there were multiple, William was strapped to a chair, carried to a police van, and taken for a bouncy ride on a rough road for this detective to administer the polygraph test. Right after the Spinal tap, right after a spinal tap. Like, I, as an ot, like, could not even work with patients that had spinal taps. Like, there are strict protocols after a spinal tap. Like, you have to lay a. And rest, and you're not allowed to do anything.
- [74:35]
A
You can get infections, you can get.
- [74:37]
B
It's very, very serious complications. Very serious. And William was in so much pain by the time that they arrived, he wasn't able to even answer any questions. The examiner marked the test inconclusive due to William being, quote, uncooperative. And this polygraph is. This is supposed to be our 11th clue here. But, like, this is very clearly not admissible evidence. This is more torture. A few days later, William was tested again, and the results were again reported by police as inconclusive. But in reality, and this is something we don't find out until a little later, William did pass this test, according to the examiner himself, who later published the results in a book he wrote.
- [75:26]
A
Okay. Adding another tally to that one.
- [75:29]
B
I mean, inconclusive. Like, you're putting this out to reporters that it's inconclusive to stir more angst in the media. Like, why are we lying about a polygraph results? And again, polygraph, smallygraph, like, they're not great, but, like, why are we lying?
- [75:47]
A
So on July 9, they indicted him on several charges related to his burglaries and alleged attempt to shoot police officers. On the day that he was arrested on July 13, more than six months after Suzanne died and almost three weeks into William's time in custody, police revealed that they actually did in fact, have a match to the bloody fingerprint that was found at Frances Brown's apartment. When this print was originally documented, it was the one that we described as the bloody smudge print. We talked about it earlier, but now all of a sudden, it seems like this print was clear enough to match William's prints at 22 points of comparison. And that was pretty surprising because, remember, the police had previously told the press that the fingerprint in Francis's apartment was not Williams and that he was cleared of suspicion in her murder. Well, seems like they went away and came back with a perfect match on it. Now they were saying that they changed their mind. It was him after all. And this was good enough for the public, too, when they heard about this, because by now they considered William a monster. And that was mostly because of the press and the way that they were presenting him. Then on July 16, the Chicago Tribune ran a front page story giving details of Williams confession to killing. Now all three women, Josephine Francis, And, Suzanne, there was only one problem, though. He hadn't actually confessed at all, nor had he been charged in any of those cases. The whole Tribune story was an invention that was picked up by several other papers the following day. By this point, William's own lawyers were pressuring him to just take a plea deal for life in prison because it was looking so bad for him. The whole press had run with this story that he had said he was guilty. He's lost in the public opinion. He's just gonna keep getting tortured by police. Like, even his own lawyers are, like, just take a plea deal. Go to prison for the rest of your life, because it's better than what you're about to face, essentially.
- [77:51]
B
And there's some stuff that comes out about his lawyers that one of them was running for, like, a higher position and didn't want this case to dampen his career. Yeah.
- [78:02]
A
Is this the hill you die on for this kid, or do you just let him go to jail so that everyone feels like the case has been solved?
- [78:08]
B
So there's. There's pressure from all angles.
- [78:11]
A
Well, his lawyers, they believed he would get life in jail for the numerous burglary charges anyways. So really, he had nothing to lose by confessing to the murder, too. And this way, he might be able to avoid the electric chair. So after hearing all of this, I mean, this young kid, he agrees that he's going to confess after all, in exchange for a plea deal that would see him serving three life sentences concurrently, leaving the possibility of parole in about 25 years. Then on July 26, 1946, he was formally indicted for two of the murders, Suzanne and Francis. And that same day, he and his parents signed a typed confession that was mostly written by his lawyers.
- [78:56]
B
In this confession, William said that after dismembering Suzanne, he threw his knife onto the nearby L train tracks while walking away from the crime scene. This bit about a knife was completely new information. A potential murder weapon investigators could go and find. Which turns out to be our 12th clue in this twisty case. Somehow, reporters at the Chicago Tribune got a hold of the confession and managed to search the area before police did. Which, let's think about this. Who gets the confession? Police. How did reporters go search the area before police? Yeah, Come on, guys. So these reporters were able to go out. They found a maintenance worker who remembered picking up a knife from the tracks around this time. Again, you guys, this is, like, months and months later, but happen to remember this. And he still had the knife in storage. It turns out to be A knife stolen from Guy Rodrick, the same guy Roderick, who William had stolen the gun from. Later, after William retracted his confession, he said he really did chuck the knife onto the tracks, but that it was just because he was riding the train on his way to see his parents and didn't want to be caught with a knife. Without DNA testing, we'll never really know for sure if this was a murder weapon or just another knife. And as far as we can see, there has been no DNA testing.
- [80:28]
A
Yeah. Right. Well, on July 30, 1946, Williams accepted a plea deal to plead guilty in exchange for one single life sentence. But then instead, in court, he ends up insisting that he was actually innocent. He has this really big outburst where he basically says that he was. I mean, you. You read the outburst?
- [80:50]
B
Yeah.
- [80:51]
C
It.
- [80:51]
B
It seemed like he was just so frustrated by the commotion in the courtroom and, like, no one wanting justice, really. Just more of this being a theater.
- [81:01]
A
Like. Yeah.
- [81:02]
B
The press and how they handled court cases and trials in Chicago at that time was not described as justice. It was literally. It was a show for them. It was theater.
- [81:10]
A
Yeah.
- [81:11]
B
And so I think this was kind of like a breaking point where he was like, what. What am I doing? Like, I'm not. You want to know the truth?
- [81:18]
A
Like.
- [81:19]
B
Like, you're asking me what the truth is? Not guilty. Like, I did not do this.
- [81:23]
A
And this kind of screws up everything because the prosecutors have to then withdraw the initial deal that they had struck.
- [81:30]
B
They're pissed.
- [81:31]
A
And now what's on the table for William? Instead of one consecutive life sentence where he. He could be out after a certain amount of time, now there's three consecutive life sentences on the table.
- [81:42]
B
Yeah.
- [81:42]
A
And if they go to trial, the death penalty, the electric chair is still on the table.
- [81:47]
B
And this is something that William really notes, too, as a part of the reason why he confessed is every single day, like, after he was released from the hospital, every single day that he was in police custody being interrogated, they would walk him by the electric chair and be like, this is going to be you, Right. This is. You see this chair? This is your future, kid.
- [82:09]
A
They don't care. Yeah.
- [82:10]
B
So it was really, you know, difficult to hold out in his words and, you know.
- [82:17]
A
Yeah.
- [82:18]
B
Plead a case when, like, you're scared. That's what's, you know, standing on the other end of this for you.
- [82:23]
A
So then on August 6, William ends up publicly confessing to everything in great detail. Though he later said that he was just using what had been fed to him from the fake Tribune confessions and what he knew about the case from newspaper coverage. That's really, like, where his confession was invented from, he says. On September 5, William's sentencing date arrived. And as per his revised plea deal, William ends up getting sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. We're not ever gonna know all of what transpired during the hearing because the court reporter, in, like, this really strange twist that just. I don't know, with everything else that's happening in this case, is very suspicious. But the court reporter died before they were able to type up all the notes on this trial. Yeah.
- [83:10]
B
Botched. Sorry, buddy, you shouldn't have died. Botched.
- [83:16]
A
We do know that his lawyers didn't introduce any mitigating evidence. In fact, the lead prosecutor thanked Williams attorneys for helping convince him to take the deal by saying, quote, without the aid of the defense, we would to this day, have no answer for the death of Josephine Roth. To this day, a great and sincere public doubt might remain as to the guilt of William Hirons and the killing of Suzanne Degnan and Frances Brown.
- [83:40]
B
Yeah, because it does seem at this point, too, after, you know, William's outburst, it seems that that was kind of the turning point for them to just, like, throw mud at the wall. And that's when they tacked on Josephine Ross.
- [83:52]
A
Yeah.
- [83:52]
B
Cause, like, he was only admitting guilt to two, and they were only tying him with evidence to two. Like, again, this is something that's interesting is, like, his lawyers didn't introduce any evidence to kind of speak to his case, but, like, yeah, of course. Where was the evidence tying him to Josephine?
- [84:08]
A
Well, William would later go on to learn that one of his attorneys was running for Cook County State's attorney, which you mentioned earlier. And defending the accused lipstick killer would have definitely hurt his campaign. Yeah, so there's that. As soon as the attention from the outside world died down on the case a little bit, William Hirons would go on to retract his confession and just focus on appealing the case. I confessed to live is a quote from him. It was a doomed effort that would occupy the rest of his life. He became the first Illinois inmate to earn a college degree behind bars. He helped develop the education system and library systems in the Illinois prison system. He even became a prolific jailhouse lawyer and would go on to help several other prisoners get new trials or sentencing relief. But his own case for innocent went absolutely nowhere.
- [85:00]
B
Nowhere. I mean, William did appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court multiple times. I think, like, from what I gathered from the research, like, 1954, 1963, 1967. He appealed on grounds that, like, the torture wasn't okay on one of the times. And like, the Supreme Court essentially was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, torture bad. But you still pleaded guilty. And obviously, you guys, I'm not a lawyer. Please, if you're a lawyer, chime in. I'd love to hear like a little dissection on maybe some of these Supreme Court rulings because, like, as I read their decisions, it's very difficult for me, a lay person, normal person. So I'd love for you guys to chime in, but they essentially said, like, yeah, it doesn't matter that you were tortured. Like, you still pleaded guilty, still pled guilty. Yeah, there was another appeal that he was like, I pleaded guilty under duress, like, like habeas corpus violations, like all of this stuff. And so every time the Supreme Court of Illinois denied his motion for an appeal. So he was never granted an appeal.
- [86:00]
A
I mean, one thing also that was working against him was Suzanne Degnan's siblings, Betty and James, the latter of whom wasn't actually even born yet. When Suzanne died, they were very, very, very opposed to, to any possibility of William's release. It seems like they fully believed he did it or just didn't want to go through the trauma of the whole case again. And so they just really never wanted him to be released.
- [86:27]
B
But again, it's not necessarily a release. It would have been an appeal for a new trial.
- [86:32]
A
Yeah, right. So but then they have to go through the trial again. No, it's horrible. Yeah. William did have allies throughout this process though, including the prestigious Northwestern center on Wrongful Confessions. And Mary Jane Blanchard actually would go on to vouch for his innocence, at least in her mother Josephine's case. From the very beginning, Mary Jane Blanchard never felt like he had anything to do with her mother's murder. I. There was a quote from her too, where she said something like, it just doesn't make any sense that a 17 year old boy would have murdered my mother. Like, it just when I think of who would have done this, it never once crossed my mind that someone like William would have done this. Yeah, basically. In 1975, Marguerite Sturgis with the Illinois Parole and Pardon Board praised William saying, quote, I've never seen so much accomplishment. You are a good example of what rehabilitation is all about. And even then, though, the board did vote against his parole. By 2010, at age 82, William was the longest serving prisoner in the United States. On March 6, 2012, he died in prison at the age of 83.
- [87:42]
B
And that leaves us to where we're at today. I mean, William has now passed. There's no chance at an appeal. But a lot of people, you know, when he was alive, still making these appeals, did go through the evidence. They reexamined it. They had experts come on in. One documentary I watched, there was an old FBI fingerprint expert came in and looked at, you know, the fingerprint from the Francis Brown case and what they compared to be Williams and this and that. And again, like, it was initially reported, not a match. Williams in custody were, you know, maybe six months. Whatever it was down the line. Oh, Williams. A match like this fingerprint expert looked at the prints they were claiming were a match and noticed a lot of abnormalities that you would not see in an authentic fingerprint that was left behind.
- [88:38]
A
Right.
- [88:38]
B
This expert noted that the lateral, like, upper edges of the fingerprint were taken, which would not be left authentically. Like, that is seen by someone giving their fingerprints and actually rolling to the edges.
- [88:53]
A
Roll the whole thing.
- [88:54]
B
Because as a grip, you only get that pad. Yeah. And so this expert deemed that that fingerprint was planted.
- [89:02]
A
Wow. Wow. I mean, I could see that, because you're not gonna get that whole fingerprint unless you're doing the. Have you ever had to be fingerprinted?
- [89:11]
B
Yeah, you're really rolling. You really roll. You're rolling. So there was that. I mean, if you look at all these different descriptions, like, none of them really made sense. They were, you know, kind of all different. Especially the description about the people carrying bundles or grocery bags. Like, that didn't match. So.
- [89:30]
A
Right.
- [89:31]
B
Essentially, they did have lawyers come on. And in this documentary, multiple different lawyers were like, if this case was today, this never would have stood. Like, there wasn't enough evidence to convict him.
- [89:42]
A
I want to know more about that couple.
- [89:44]
B
I mean, there was also that weird tip from George Sabrunski. Like, I saw the person in the fedora with a bag, but, like, other witnesses saw George and didn't see the fedora guy. So it's like, was George just kind of, like, giving this tip to police to, like, it wasn't me. It was this guy. Definitely don't look at me. And so, like, I kind of put a botched board mark for that. Because it did feel like this is a weird lead coming. You. You're gonna interrogate the kid who happened to live at the house the ladder was stolen from, but you're not gonna look at George a little more closely? Right.
- [90:17]
A
Right.
- [90:17]
B
When witnesses did see George outside of.
- [90:20]
A
That home, George and I just keep going back to this couple who were the weird couple in the car that had, like, a bundle of something. And the woman was seeing heavy bundle. And the man had gr. So I imagine he was older. He definitely wasn't 17. So I just. And that was. And the car given up on the.
- [90:37]
B
Fact it was going back and forth multiple different people saw this car. Like, why did we just give up on that? Especially, like, yeah, the bundle of it all. And where did those people live? Did those people live in the building with the laundry room? Did they know about it? Like, that kind of feels like insider info. Like, how would William have just known about this laundry room?
- [90:58]
A
Right, right.
- [90:59]
B
There's so much in this. And I. I feel like, me personally, like, I don't know where I fall, but I do know that, like, the way this case was handled was so severely botched that William, at the very least, like, did not get a fair trial. Right.
- [91:15]
A
Right.
- [91:15]
B
Did not get what he is owed under our laws. So, like, with that, I'm just like. I don't know. I'm very pissed. I'm very pissed.
- [91:28]
A
I still don't even know if the same person committed all three of the crimes.
- [91:32]
B
I'm gonna be honest.
- [91:32]
A
I don't.
- [91:32]
B
Even forgiving hot takes today.
- [91:34]
A
Yeah. There's part of me that thinks it was three completely separate people. I mean, maybe the two women were the same because theirs were so similar, like, the bathtub being full and stuff.
- [91:44]
B
But maybe she was getting ready to take a bath. Like the first one, Josephine. I definitely feel like Josephine was bathed and then put on the bed because there was blood, five inches of bloody water in the tub. But, like, Frances, I'm like, maybe she was getting ready to take a bath and then was, like, interrupted and was shot.
- [92:03]
A
Right.
- [92:04]
B
Like, they do feel, all three of these cases, they do feel to me very, very different. Different.
- [92:10]
A
I agree.
- [92:11]
B
Especially Suzanne. We are gonna definitely want a lot of comments from you guys.
- [92:17]
A
What you guys think?
- [92:18]
B
What are your speculations? What do you think about all the torture? Do you think William was guilty? Do you think, you know, there was justice not served? Cause at the end of the day, if William wasn't the guy, like, justice was not served.
- [92:32]
A
Yes.
- [92:32]
B
And I. You guys, I dug. I tried searching every possible term I could to, like, find out if there were more murders like these after, you know, William was arrested. And there are a couple dismemberment cases near Chicago afterwards of, you know, young girls. There's another very famous case of two girls going missing in Chicago shortly after Suzanne was killed. So there's similar cases. So it I'm just left with so many thoughts and I need your help in the comments. Please let me, let me chat further.
- [93:07]
A
With you guys just to wrap up this case is that that janitor we spoke about earlier, the one that was tortured to try to get a confession and his wife was also brought into custody. That janitor and his wife would later successfully sue the city of Chicago for abuse and they won a judgment of $20,000 at the time, which today is over $350,000. And then on January 24, 1946, over 400 people gathered at the Swift Elementary School to protest alleged police inefficiency and brutality. That was according to a Chicago Tribune story.
- [93:40]
B
And on that note, let's move on to our Missing Person of the Week week.
- [93:44]
A
This week we wanted to highlight the case of Heaven Desiree McGee. Now, Heaven is described as being a 21 year old black woman, 5ft tall, about 140 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair. She was last seen wearing a white jacket and brown pants. McGee's mother reported her missing to the Oakland, California police on January 26th. Heaven has been missing since January 20th, 2025. Police say that McGee's mother last saw her on January 17th in Oakland, California. She was then seen again in Stockton on January 20th and has not been seen since.
- [94:20]
B
She is thought to possibly be a victim of sex trafficking. And the FBI is offering a reward of up to 10, 000 for information leading to the location of Heaven Desiree McGee.
- [94:30]
A
According to the FBI, Heaven does have several tattoos that might be helpful in identifying her. The words Aaron Pryor above a red rose that's below her left collarbone. Unknown words above her left and right collarbone. At least four butterfly tattoos on her chest and sternum. A possible Chinese characters on her left forearm just above her wrist. And the words Darius III in Roman numerals on her right posterior forearm. Anyone with information on heaven's whereabouts is asked to call the FBI at 1-800-225-5324. And a tip can be submitted online at tips.FBI.gov or people can call the Oakland Police Department at 510-238-3641.
- [95:15]
B
And that is all we have for this episode of clues. I've got 25 on the botch.
- [95:23]
A
Yeah, we've exhausted the dashboard, but now we want to hear from you guys. I mean, we've discussed a lot in this episode. Episode. But what do you guys think? Now is the time to give all your thoughts, your theories, feedback, anything in the comments. We're going to be reading through some of those. And all of that is what helps make this community so special.
- [95:38]
B
Yeah, I've actually read quite a few of your comments lately. I saw you responded to the same one I responded to of just people sharing how special this show is for them, how much it means to them in this community, and just what we're doing here and trying to do. So. Yeah, keep commenting. Those other missing person cases in the comments, we want to really highlight ones that you guys know about but aren't getting big coverage. And at Crime House, we really value your support. So again, share all those thoughts and remember to rate, review and follow clues. Subscribe and subscribe to help others discover our show. Bye guys. Bye guys.