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Welcome back to another episode of Murder

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Mystery Fridays where I'm covering unsolved cases

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with questions that I can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility.

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Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video to search for murder True crime stories.

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And be sure to like and subscribe.

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Please note this episode contains descriptions of violence and murder.

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Please listen with care. Today's case is one that's always stuck with me, especially once I really dug into it.

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On the surface, it seems open and shut.

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A troubled young man committed a series of violent crimes, eventually confessed and spent his life in prison. Case closed.

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But the deeper you go, the murkier it gets.

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There are fingerprints that didn't quite match

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handwriting, experts who said the key evidence

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was forged torture allegations and a very controversial confession.

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This is the story of William Bill

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Hirons, the Lipstick Killer. Or at least the man the state of Illinois said was the Lipstick Killer. All that and more coming up. You know that moment in spring when

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William George Hirons was born on the north side of Chicago, Illinois on November 15, 1928. He was the first child of George

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and Margaret Hirons, two working class Roman Catholics. When Bill was born, the family was doing pretty well. George owned a floral shop nearby and

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Margaret was a homemaker. But less than a year later, on October 24, 1929, everything changed. The stock market crashed, kicking off the Great Depression.

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George's flower shop went out of business. Then in 1931, the family had a second son named Jer.

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Should have been a happy time.

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And it was. But it also meant the Hirons had

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another mouth to feed in an already strained household.

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But George and Margaret found ways to get by. George landed a job doing security for

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steel mill and Margaret worked part time at a local bakery.

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Together they made enough to keep food on the table.

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But there were some trade offs.

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Young Bill and his brother spent most

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of their time with the neighborhood babysitter.

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And Bill seemed to thrive in his parents absence, maybe because he had plenty of hobbies.

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He loved tinkering with old radios and

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broken appliances and got so good at fixing things that he was known around the neighborhood as something of a whiz kid.

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When his parents were home, though, Bill struggled.

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He never described them as abusive. In fact, he often spoke warmly of them.

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But George and Margaret fought a lot, almost always about money.

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It seemed like Bill's brother Jer was

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able to tune the arguments out, but Bill couldn't. The fights gave him severe headaches and he started looking for ways to escape them. The first thing he tried was literally running away.

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At only 7 or 8 years old, Bill would wander the streets of Chicago

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for hours just to clear his head. But before long, he found another form of escape, One he knew he had to keep secret. At around nine years old, Bill developed a fetish for women's underwear. Sexuality was a taboo subject in his household. His mother had told him sex was dirty. But Bill couldn't help himself.

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He began sneaking into the laundry rooms of apartment buildings to steal women's underwear

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and stash it around the house, making sure his parents never found it. And in the process, he discovered something unexpected.

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The act of breaking in itself gave

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him relief even more than wandering the streets did.

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The tension in his head would lift the moment he slipped through a door

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that wasn't meant for him. By the time Bill was 12, he had a job as a delivery boy for a local pharmacy.

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He used those drop offs as a

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chance to learn the layouts of people's homes. Once he had a good sense of a place, he'd return and break in. It was thrilling.

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And soon Bill began experiencing what he

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later described as sexual stimulation from the act of breaking and entering. He got especially aroused by climbing through windows. Every burglary left him wanting more.

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Over the next several months, the 12 year old committed at least nine burglaries.

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And he got more daring with each one.

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He moved on from women's underwear to ladies, furs, men's suits, tools, radios. And firearms.

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Bill was particularly fascinated by guns.

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He loved taking them apart and putting them back together.

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He also liked just carrying them around, which is exactly what he was doing when he got caught. In June of 1942, the 13 year

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old broke into a building and was

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arrested after police found him with a gun.

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Officers searched the Hyran's home and discovered

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his stash of stolen items hidden in an empty shed on a nearby rooftop.

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He was charged as a juvenile and sentenced to a year in reform school. It seemed to help.

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At first it looked like Bill was genuinely sorry. He reportedly cried himself to sleep some nights.

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But whatever remorse he felt didn't last long. When the 14 year old returned to Chicago in June of 1943, he went right back to breaking and entering.

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Within two months he was arrested again.

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This time he was sentenced to two additional years at St. Bede's Academy, a school run by monks about 100 miles from home. By all accounts, Bill excelled at St. Bede's. He got along with other students, earned good grades and impressed his teachers with how mature he was. But In June of 1944, when the

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15 year old came home from summer break, his old habits were back in full force. Bill went right back to breaking and entering. Despite the arrests and the Stinson Reform

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School, Bill seemed pretty well adjusted. He was admitted to the University of Chicago at only 16 years old in 1945. This wasn't quite as impressive as it sounds. At the time the university was running a special enrollment program.

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With millions of young Americans away fighting

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In World War II, the university opened its doors to exceptional high school sophomores and above.

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As an average student with a criminal record and three years of reform school

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behind him, Bill was hardly the model candidate. But he applied anyway.

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And thanks in part to a glowing

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letter of recommendation from the principal of St. Bede's, he was accepted.

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Bill was ecstatic.

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He wrote in his journal, quote, this is my first chance at showing how good I am to society and I intend to show even better signs tonight. I feel as if the world were mine.

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That feeling wouldn't last because the summer before he left for college, his parents arguments started up again and so did the headaches. And this time Bill's need for relief was more powerful than ever. On the morning of June 5, 1945,

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Chicago was unseasonably cold with a low of 36 degrees. But 16 year old Bill Hirons had a terrible headache.

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So he bundled up and headed out. As he later told a psychiatrist, quote, it seemed as though I was in a Dream. I did not have any feeling.

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It was like walking through darkness and

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pushing a mist aside. In that muddled state of mind, Bill

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climbed a fire escape to the sixth

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floor of an apartment building and slipped through a window. The person renting the space was a woman named Josephine Ross. Josephine was a twice divorced widow in

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her early 40s who lived in the

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apartment with her two adult daughters. Bill broke in, expecting it to be empty. It wasn't. Josephine had seen her daughters off to work and gone back to bed. When Bill climbed through her bedroom window, she was right there and she screamed. Instead of running, Bill silenced her. When Josephine's daughter came home that afternoon, she found her mother's body. Josephine was naked with a dress and stockings tied around her head. Her throat had been cut. She had multiple stab wounds. The apartment had been ransacked, and there were signs that the killer had masturbated multiple times, either during or after the murder. At the time, no one could connect Bill Hirons to Josephine Ross's death. There was little forensic evidence, no witnesses, and DNA testing was decades away.

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Over the next several months, investigators proposed countless theories. But they all agreed on one thing.

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This was not the accidental outcome of a routine burglary. Whoever killed Josephine Ross had deeply enjoyed it. In September of 1945, three months after Josephine's murder, Bill's freshman year at the University of Chicago began.

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He was 16 years old, enrolled in

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one of the country's most prestigious universities and apparently a killer.

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At school, he made choices that, in

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retrospect, tell a troubling story. He chose to study German, an odd decision for a boy who'd failed classes in his native English.

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He also began reading the philosopher Friedrich

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Nietzsche, whose work Adolf Hitler famously admired.

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He'd also stolen a neighbor's private collection of Nazi memorabilia. He also picked up a book by German philosopher Richard von Krefft Ebing called Psychopathia sexualist. Published in 1886, the book explores a broad range of human sexuality, including practices

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that are considered healthy today.

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But the book also contains descriptions of

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violent, non consensual acts like lust, murder, violation of corpses, and the kidnapping and dismemberment of children. Whether Bill read it to try to understand himself or the book gave him some new ideas, that's still up for debate. On December 11, 1945, just as school was letting out for the winter holidays, 17 year old bill got another headache. He went back to the same neighborhood where he'd allegedly murdered Josephine Ross and broke into an apartment in the middle of the night. The tenant was 33 year old Frances

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Brown, a woman who had served as a volunteer naval reservist during World War II and was known for living a quiet life. According to Bill's later testimony, he expected the apartment to be empty and only killed Frances to keep her quiet.

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But there were some holes in that explanation. Bill said the same thing about Josephine's murder.

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And in that case, it did take place in the early morning when the apartment might have plausibly been empty.

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But this one happened in the middle of the night when people would obviously be home. Either way, what happened in Frances Brown's apartment was worse than the first murder. Bill allegedly shot her in the head, then stabbed her body repeatedly. He removed her clothes, wrapped her pajamas around her head and left.

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But before he did, he apparently did

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something that would define the entire investigation and his legacy.

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He picked up one of Francis lipsticks

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and wrote a message on the wall. It read, for heaven's sake, catch me

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before I kill more.

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I cannot control myself.

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After finding the lipstick message in Frances Brown's apartment, police were baffled.

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They couldn't understand why a killer would

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murder a woman and then leave a note like that.

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Without a strong theory from law enforcement,

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the press stepped in and had a field day.

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Reporters dubbed the unknown killer the Lipstick Killer.

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The name stuck during this period. 17 year old bill Hirons had been wondering where his impulses came from.

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He compared himself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyd.

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And he had his own name for the part of himself that committed crimes. George. Bill later told psychiatrists that George first appeared sometime around 1942, when he was 12 or 13. When his parents fought and the headaches came, George was the one who planned their Escapes. Those escapes became burglaries and then murders. Bill said that at first he tried

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to argue with George, but when he

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did, the headaches got worse.

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So he started going along with his alter ego, following him wherever he wanted to go. He even had a phrase for it. When George wanted to act, Bill said he wanted to, quote, get out.

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And it wasn't long before George was raring for another escape. In the late hours of January 6, 1946, a married couple on the north side of Chicago, James and Helen Degnan, were woken up by what sounded like

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their six year old daughter Suzanne, crying.

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But she quieted down and they went back to sleep. The next morning, James went to wake Suzanne up for school. Her door was closed, which was strange because he'd left it open for her the night before. And when James went inside, his heart sank. She was gone.

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The police arrived quickly.

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Chicago PD had been on high alert since Francis Brown's murder a few weeks earlier. So when they heard a child was missing from the same neighborhood, they feared the worst. There was no sign of Suzanne anywhere.

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But outside her room, the police found a ladder tall enough to reach her window. And in her bedroom, crumpled on the

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floor, almost like garbage, they found a

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ransom note written in odd block letters with multiple misspellings. It demanded $12,000 in fives and tens and promised further instructions.

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And that would be more than than $200,000. Today, Suzanne's father went on the local

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radio to try to reach the kidnapper. Investigators went door to door.

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Hours passed without any word. Then, that evening, an anonymous tip came in.

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The caller told police that if they were looking for Suzanne Degnan, they should

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search the sewer behind her apartment. They did. They found her dismembered body in a sewer grate. It seemed like the Lipstick killer had struck again. The murder of Suzanne Degnan shook Chicago to its core. A six year old girl abducted from her bedroom and dismembered. It's the kind of crime that makes people lose sleep, demand answers, and sometimes stop waiting for due process. The press was relentless.

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Chicago had five daily newspapers at the time, all vying for subscribers in the same city.

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And they found everything they needed in Suzanne's story.

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For months, reporters hounded officials hungry for updates.

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Detectives obliged, offering theories in exchange for tips.

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The publicity generated over 5,000 tips about Suzanne's murder alone, which investigators suspected was

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connected to the killings of Josephine Ross and Frances Brown.

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They followed up on more than 60% of those leads. They interviewed over 800 persons of interest,

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administered 170 lie detector tests, and compared over 7,000 handwriting samples to the ransom note. They found nothing. Even four men who confessed to Suzanne's murder were released. Their stories were so clearly fabricated that police had no choice but to let them go. As the weeks dragged on, the pressure mounted.

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Letters poured into public officials, police stations and newspaper editors demanding to know where, why the killer was still free.

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And it wasn't long before that pressure began to warp the investigation. Sometime in early 1946, police arrested the 65 year old custodian of Suzanne Degnan's building. They kept him in custody without access to a phone or a lawyer. Reportedly, they beat him, trying to force a confession. After two days with no confession and no evidence, they released him to his attorneys. The search for the Lipstick Killer was back at square one. Meanwhile, Bill Hirons went back to school in January, looking by all accounts, like

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any other happy student.

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But in April 1946, he came close to getting caught. He was walking down the street with a loaded rifle when police stopped him. He talked his way out of it, pointing out correctly that carrying an unconcealed rifle was legal in Chicago at the time. The officers, apparently unaware of his record, let him go. The near miss didn't slow Bill down.

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By the end of the spring semester, Bill was, as he later put it,

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at the height of his powers. On June 26, 1946, a few weeks after returning home for the summer, Bill

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broke into the basement of an apartment

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building on the north side. But this time, a custodian caught him in the actual Bill bolted.

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The custodian raised the alarm. Bill was surrounded before he could get far.

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After a brief chase, a pursuing officer knocked him unconscious. When Bill woke up hours later, he was strapped to a hospital bed in Cook County Jail, surrounded by men in suits and police uniforms. He was informed that he was a suspect in the murder of Suzanne Degnan. When Bill was first arrested, the police were already looking for anyone committing burglaries. Since Bill had tried to break into

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that building, he was pretty much immediately

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seen as a suspect in Suzanne's murder.

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For three days, Bill allegedly remained in

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custody without access to a lawyer.

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He was questioned endlessly about Suzanne's death. He repeatedly denied any involvement.

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Then word came back on his fingerprints.

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Investigators had found a print on the ransom note left in Suzanne Degnan's bedroom,

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and apparently it matched Bill's.

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State Attorney William Tuohy took that and ran with it.

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He announced to reporters that the Lipstick Killer was in custody. But privately, Twohy wasn't as confident as he sounded. The match had been made.

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Using the so called Galton system, which

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identifies patterns or points in the human

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fingerprint, the FBI required a match on at least 12 points to make a positive identification. Bill's print only matched nine of those

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points on ransom note. That meant it may not have been Bill's print. It left room for reasonable doubt. And the problems didn't stop there. There was no forensic evidence linking Bill to Josephine Ross's murder at all.

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His connection to Francis Brown's murder was minimal. Witness testimony was virtually non existent. One man had seen a nervous looking figure leaving Francis Brown's building the night of the murder. Another had spotted someone with a shopping

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bag in Suzanne Degnan's neighborhood.

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When shown Bill's photo in a lineup,

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neither could identify him. Twohey needed more and he was willing to go further than the law allowed to get it.

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According to reports, police beat the 17

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year old suspect repeatedly punching him in the stomach and the testicles in an effort to force a confession.

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They allegedly had a nurse poor ether

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over his genitals which could have caused severe chemical burns. These were not interrogation tactics. It was torture. Despite all of it, or perhaps because

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of it, Bill insisted he was innocent.

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But his attitude toward the victims raised eyebrows.

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He didn't seem to grieve them the

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way an innocent person might. When asked how he'd felt reading about Francis Brown's murder in the paper, he said it was just like anything else. But suspicion wasn't evidence and Bill seemed to know that. After all, why would they need to torture him if they had more than just a partial print? That might be why.

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On June 30, 1946, four days after his arrest, police reportedly brought in two psychiatrists to administer sodium pentothal truth serum. They did it, allegedly without obtaining legal permission. As Bill lay restrained on a hospital bed, doctors placed two vials above his head and inserted a needle into his arm.

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They told him to count backward from 100.

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He got to 94 before slipping into

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semi consciousness under the drug. Psychiatrists asked Bill a series of questions. Some were casual. When asked about his favorite movies, he said he especially liked Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the story of a good man with a violent alter ego, he said

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he identified with it, that it reflected his life. The doctors pushed him on that and Bill began to tell them about George. He described how George would appear when he wanted to, to get out. When the tension at home got to be too much.

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George would entice him to commit crimes. George was the one in control. After the drug wore off, Bill confirmed Most of what he'd said.

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He told State Attorney Tuohy that George was real and that George may have

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been responsible for all three murders. It was the closest thing to a confession the investigators had gotten.

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But Touhy wasn't satisfied. He believed Bill was fabricating George as a mental illness defense. That if Bill convinced a jury he had a split personality, he'd be sent

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to a hospital instead of a federal prison.

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Tuohy wanted to prove Bill was of

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sound mind before proceeding. So on July 1, 1946, five days

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after Bill's arrest, doctors administered a spinal

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tap, ostensibly to check for markers of brain damage.

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They allegedly did it without anesthesia. Bill was ordered to lie in a fetal position while the needle was inserted between his vertebrae.

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As the 17 year old groaned in

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agony, police reportedly pulled him out of bed, strapped him to a chair and pushed him into a patrol wagon. They planned to administer a polygraph test at the police detective bureau. But Bill was in such excruciating pain

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that the polygraph had to be rescheduled. Maybe investigators felt they had gone a step too far. Because the next day, July 2, 1946, Bill was finally allowed to see his lawyers.

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By the time Bill's attorneys arrived, the

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damage had largely been done.

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While he was in custody, police had searched his dorm room and his parents home without a warrant and recovered a collection of stolen Nazi memorabilia.

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On its own, that wouldn't mean much,

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but those items had been stolen on

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December 3, 1945, from a home close to where six year old Suzanne Degnan had lived. They also found a medical kit containing surgical knives and scalpels.

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None of them had blood on them,

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but they suggested an interest in dissection and Suzanne's body had been dismembered. Investigators then conducted another search of Frances

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Brown's apartment and found a partial fingerprint that matched Bill's.

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Bill still refused to officially confess after

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his truth serum questioning. He'd only said it was possible he

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had something to do with the murders. But that distinction didn't matter to the Press.

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In mid July 1946, newspapers and radio

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programs began running stories that made it sound like he had fully admitted his guilt. And they described the murders in lurid detail.

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By then, Bill was convinced he'd be

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found guilty in the court of public

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opinion before ever setting foot in a courtroom. And if he was convicted in court, he was sure he'd get the death penalty. State Attorney Touhy offered him a deal. Confess to just one murder, Suzanne Degnanz, and receive a single life sentence, meaning he could be eligible for parole in roughly 20 years.

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To a 17 year old boy, a life sentence sounded like an eternity. But the electric chair sounded worse. After several days of discussion with his lawyers and parents, Bill agreed to take the deal. On July 30, 1946, Bill was escorted to the state attorney's office. The room was packed with reporters expecting a direct confession. Instead, they got a stunning surprise.

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At the moment Bill was supposed to reveal all, he announced he knew nothing about the murder.

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The room went silent.

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Defying Touhy may have satisfied some impulse

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in Bill, but it was a catastrophic miscalculation. Touhy was furious and swift in his response. The deal was off.

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Bill would now face 23 counts of burglary, three counts of murder, and a charge of attempting to kill a police

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officer by pointing a gun at him. During his arrest, Touhy also promised to seek the death penalty.

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But Touhy left a door open. If Bill confessed to all three murders,

Carter Roy (36:17)

he would now receive three consecutive life sentences. He would never be free again, but he would live. Bill's lawyers pressured him to take the deal.

Katie Ring (36:30)

They knew what the defense attorneys in these cases always know. Once the press has made up its

Carter Roy (36:36)

mind, the jury is rarely far behind. Then, a new piece of evidence emerged that made the decision even harder to fight.

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in the suburbs of D.C. a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered.

Carter Roy (37:35)

Which emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer.

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For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC audio in 2020 blood and water. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Carter Roy (38:00)

After a fake confession was published in the papers on July 15, 1946, reporters

Katie Ring (38:06)

had been looking for the knife allegedly

Carter Roy (38:09)

used to dismember Suzanne Degnan's body. And there was a rumor that Bill had thrown it under the subway tracks near her home. Police hadn't seriously pursued it, but a few journalists asked workers at the nearby station if anyone had found a discarded knife. Someone had not Realizing what it was, a worker had put it in storage. The journalists turned the knife over to

Katie Ring (38:35)

police, who discovered it had been stolen from a man named Guy Rodrick about a month before Suzanne Degnan's murder. During the same burglary, the assailant also took Guy's gun. That gun turned out to be the firearm Bill had been carrying when he was arrested.

Carter Roy (38:57)

Now the prosecution had something concrete.

Katie Ring (39:00)

Bill had stolen a gun and a

Carter Roy (39:03)

knife on December 3, 1945.

Katie Ring (39:05)

There were no fingerprints on them, and

Carter Roy (39:08)

DNA testing didn't exist yet, but the implication was clear.

Katie Ring (39:12)

A little over a week after stealing

Carter Roy (39:15)

those weapons, someone broke into Frances Brown's apartment and shot her. Three weeks after that, someone kidnapped Suzanne Degnan and dismembered her. For Bill, who'd escaped consequences so many times before the walls were closing in. As his 18th birthday approached, Bill made his decision. On August 7, 1946, he appeared at a second press conference with State Attorney Touhy, this time with a 19 page confession in hand. He said, quote, I first started to steal when I was about 10 years of age.

Katie Ring (39:57)

The mere act of stealing and carried

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with it a certain sex satisfaction. From there, he explained how burglary had become an addiction he couldn't stop feeding. He described how that compulsion led him to murder, saying he killed Josephine Ross, Francis Brown and Suzanne Degnan to stop them from screaming.

Katie Ring (40:23)

After Bill finished reading, Touhy loaded him

Carter Roy (40:26)

into a sheriff's department vehicle. Together with a caravan of law enforcement, journalists and lawyers from both sides, they

Katie Ring (40:34)

drove to the scenes of the crimes. At each location, Bill was prompted to

Carter Roy (40:40)

reenact the murder he had just confessed to committing. At Suzanne Degnan's house, onlookers gathered as

Katie Ring (40:48)

a ladder was propped against the building

Carter Roy (40:50)

leading to Suzanne's window. Bill showed them how he'd gagged the six year old girl, carried her down the ladder and taken her to the basement of a nearby building. The level of detail disturbed many who had doubted his guilt.

Katie Ring (41:09)

But there were still a few who weren't convinced. One of them was Josephine Ross's adult

Carter Roy (41:16)

daughter, Mary Jane Blanchard.

Katie Ring (41:18)

Mary told at least one reporter that she believed Bill had been framed.

Carter Roy (41:25)

As she put it, quote, hirons just does not fit into the picture of my mother's death.

Katie Ring (41:31)

She also found it strange that nothing belonging to her mother had ever turned up in Bill's stash of stolen goods.

Carter Roy (41:39)

The counter argument was that Bill himself

Katie Ring (41:41)

had admitted in letters to his parents written from jail that he didn't burglarize Holmes for material gain.

Carter Roy (41:49)

He did it for the Sexual thrill. Sometimes he broke in only to masturbate and leave. Which people pointed out was precisely what happened in Josephine Ross's apartment. The killer had broken in, masturbated multiple times, then murdered her. Whether or not Mary Jane Blanchard was

Katie Ring (42:12)

right about Bill being framed, he was

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officially a convicted murderer in the eyes of the law. On September 4, 1946, he pleaded guilty to killing Josephine Ross, Francis Brown, and Suzanne Degnan. That night, Bill tried to take his own life. He tied his sheets to the bars of his cell and attempted to hang himself. Guards caught him in time. The next morning, he was taken to court for sentencing. As agreed, the judge handed down three consecutive life terms. On September 6, 1946, one year after gaining early admission to the University of Chicago, Bill was chained to a dozen other prisoners and loaded onto a bus.

Katie Ring (42:59)

Before he boarded, reporters asked him to say farewell to his mother for the cameras.

Carter Roy (43:06)

He complied. His mother kissed him goodbye and told him to be a good boy. Bill told her he would. Then he got on the bus.

Katie Ring (43:16)

On board, he was reportedly approached by a sheriff who was friends with Suzanne Degnan's father. The officer asked Bill if Suzanne had

Carter Roy (43:26)

suffered before she died. Bill replied, quote, I can't tell you if she suffered, Sheriff. I didn't kill her. Tell Mr. Degnan to please look after

Katie Ring (43:38)

his other daughter, because whoever killed Suzanne

Carter Roy (43:43)

is still out there.

Katie Ring (43:45)

Officially, the case was closed.

Carter Roy (43:48)

Bill Hirons was a convicted murderer.

Katie Ring (43:51)

Chicago could breathe again. But the questions didn't go away.

Carter Roy (43:56)

Away.

Katie Ring (43:57)

They followed Bill into prison, and they outlasted him. In the years after his conviction, serious doubts emerged about the evidence at the

Carter Roy (44:07)

heart of the case.

Katie Ring (44:09)

An independent forensic examiner said the fingerprint on the ransom note appeared to have been planted. Handwriting experts showed that Bill's writing didn't match the ransom note or the lipstick message on Francis Brown's apartment wall. And multiple Chicago journalists have claimed that

Carter Roy (44:31)

famous message, for heaven's sake, catch me

Katie Ring (44:34)

before I kill more, was actually written after the fact by a reporter looking

Carter Roy (44:40)

to make the story more sensational. There were also the circumstances of the confession, confession itself. Bill had been held without counsel for days.

Katie Ring (44:53)

He'd been beaten, had ether applied to

Carter Roy (44:56)

his genitals, had an unannounced drug administered by psychiatrists, and had undergone a spinal

Katie Ring (45:03)

tap without anesthesia, all before his lawyers arrived. A confession extracted under those conditions would

Carter Roy (45:11)

be considered inadmissible in virtue, virtually any court today.

Katie Ring (45:15)

And the sodium pentothal itself, the truth serum, is now understood to be an unreliable interrogation tool.

Carter Roy (45:24)

The drug doesn't compel honesty.

Katie Ring (45:27)

It lowers Inhibitions in ways that can

Carter Roy (45:30)

make a subject more susceptible to suggestion, more prone to saying what the questioner seems to want to hear. A confession made under its influence proves very little about what actually happened.

Katie Ring (45:46)

Despite numerous appeals, Bill's conviction was never overturned.

Carter Roy (45:51)

He spent decades in Stateville Correctional center

Katie Ring (45:54)

in Illinois, eventually becoming the longest serving

Carter Roy (45:58)

inmate in American history.

Katie Ring (46:01)

In that time, he earned a college degree and several graduate degrees. Through correspondence programs. He became something of a model prisoner.

Carter Roy (46:11)

Although he was denied parole multiple times,

Katie Ring (46:14)

not for behavioral problems, but because he refused to express remorse for crimes he

Carter Roy (46:20)

maintained until the very end he had not committed. He died on March 7, 2012, of complications from diabetes. He was 83 years old. After everything, here's what I keep coming back to. Bill Hirons was a sexual burglar. That much was established long before his arrest. He had a documented compulsion to break into homes. He was caught with stolen weapons.

Katie Ring (46:51)

He was seen near the scenes of the crimes. A partial fingerprint connected him to Francis Brown's apartment. Stolen items linked him, at least circumstantially, to Suzanne Degnan's neighborhood on the night she was taken.

Carter Roy (47:06)

And his behavior was, to put it gently, suspicious. He didn't show much concern for the victims.

Katie Ring (47:14)

He claimed a murderous alter ego made him do it. He confessed under questioning, recanted, reconfessed in

Carter Roy (47:22)

a 19 page document complete with a

Katie Ring (47:25)

public reenactment, then denied everything again on the way to prison. But the fingerprint that kicked the whole thing off didn't meet the FBI's own

Carter Roy (47:35)

standard for a positive identification.

Katie Ring (47:39)

Experts said the handwriting evidence pointed away from him.

Carter Roy (47:44)

His confession was extracted using methods we now recognize as torture and an interrogation drug we now know doesn't work.

Katie Ring (47:55)

And the evidence from his dorm room was seized without a warrant. But there's one more thread that's worth

Carter Roy (48:04)

pulling at Bill Hiron's case. And the fear it generated in Chicago in the mid-1940s inspired a young boy named Robert Ressler to pursue a career in law enforcement.

Katie Ring (48:17)

Years later, Ressler joined the FBI, where he and his partner became the first officials in the country to systematically study multiple murderers, developing the methodology and eventually

Carter Roy (48:29)

coining the phrase serial killer. In other words, the investigation that may have sent an innocent teenager to prison

Katie Ring (48:38)

for life also gave us the modern

Carter Roy (48:41)

science of understanding serial killers. The Lipstick Killer case has no clean ending. There's no moment of clarity, no piece of evidence that resolves it one way or the other. We're left with what we always have in cases like this, a collection of facts that don't quite add up. A dead man who insisted he was innocent and victims whose families deserve the truth. What do you think?

Katie Ring (49:11)

Did Bill Hirons kill Josephine Ross, Francis Brown, and Suzanne Degnan? Or was the investigation that led to

Carter Roy (49:19)

his conviction a textbook example of how

Katie Ring (49:22)

public pressure, media hysteria, and institutional desperation can corrupt justice?

Carter Roy (49:30)

You tell me. Because all these years later, it's up to us to decide where to go from here.

Katie Ring (49:48)

Thanks so much for listening.

Carter Roy (49:49)

I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media and at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram.

Katie Ring (50:14)

Don't forget to rate, review and follow

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Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime

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Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House

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plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Cassidy Dillon and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.

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Carter Roy (51:36)

Thanks for listening to today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories. Not sure what to listen to next?

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Check out America's Most Infamous Crimes hosted by Katie Ring.

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From serial killers to unsolved mysteries and

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game changing investigations, each week Katie takes on a notorious criminal case in American history. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous crimes now. Wherever you listen to podcasts.