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Buy it with ACAST. Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how.
I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Vyborg Thun. We stay in Chi-Town, Chicago, for one last time to cover the fascinating case of Bill Hirons, infamously accused of being none other than the lipstick killer. I know I mention Patreon every single week, and I will not pretend that I am not aware of the recent controversy regarding Patreon's activities towards prominent content creators. However, I am proud to say this show is 100% politics free.
This episode is, thanks to you, dear patrons, 100% sponsored ad free, and is so only because of Patreon and my patrons. I will not be dragged into the quagmire, that is the current trench warfare between the left and the right here in the west. Suffice to say is that Patreon has never treated this show poorly, and I am absolutely reliant on my patrons if this show is to continue. I understand, many of you have strong feelings and opinions regarding Patreon, and if you absolutely cannot tolerate to contribute to the show financially via Patreon, there is an alternative available to you.
If you go to paypal.me slash thomasviborgthune, T-H-O-M-A-S-W-I-B-O-R-G-T-H-U-N-E, you can support the show financially with as much you are comfortable with directly. We left last week's episode just as Bill Hirons had pulled a gun on a police officer in an attempt to flee after he had been caught red-handed breaking and entering. Bridewell was the hospital attached to the Cook County Jail. The first thing Bill became aware of when he awoke there, cranium bandaged, were a couple of words.
Hirons. Suspect. Child. Tegnan.
Whispered near his ear. His eyes still closed. He could feel his fingertips being forcibly pressed down, one after another, onto a cold ink pad, then onto the crinkle of paper. It was a sensation he recognized even half-conscious.
People into his room, people out, voices fading, voices lingering into a monotonous undertone saying nothing. He wasn't sure, but he thought he felt himself being wheeled from one room to another, a jarring movement under his mattress, the squeak of bedwheels, interns in white coats, something about taking x-rays of his head, then a voice saying something like, now rushing back to the examining room where everyone's waiting, then being wheeled once more, down fuzzy hallways with fuzzy overhead lights, and into a room with more fuzzy overheads, where many voices mixed together, cartically this time, to an orgy of babbling, turd voices most of them, loud voices, and faces too, blurred and twisted. Fat noses, shoving into his, glaring eyeballs, nearly tapping his own. He felt hands, meaty hands, shoving him, while he lay in bed, and now he became aware he was strapped in, and the shoving continued, big hands with fingers and thumbs, like little logs, pushing his shoulder, pinching his elbows, pounding his hips and jabbing his ribcage, and the more he woke, the harder they pushed and pinched and pounded and jabbed.
It soon became apparent to Hiram's, that he was being accused of more than break-ins. He listened to their questions, and he slowly realized they, the police, were blaming him for killing the Dignan girl, never asking questions about her, and asking why he loved to cut up little children. The more he protested, he said later, the more they beat him. Hour after hour, the grueling person weighed until it heated red hot.
At one point, a patrolman allegedly slammed his fist so hard against his testicles, he nearly vomited. One shift of policemen left, and another took their place. Aren't you sorry, Bill? His tormentors continued.
Tell us how you did it. You know how you did it, and God knows you did it. Confess, Bill, and save yourself. We know you're guilty.
You killed her, you son of a bitch. The game's over. You're guilty. Now tell us how you did it.
Tell us, Bill. Grueling questions and threatening accusations drummed without let up over and over and over the first few days he was in Bridewell Hospital. Whether it was day outside or night mattered to neither the suspect nor the inquisitors. Whenfully conscious, Hirens found himself strapped, spread-eagled, onto his cot, with each arm and leg tied down.
The policeman, whose name he thought was Hanrahan, picked up where other interrogators had left off, asking the same questions, hurling the same accusations, but walloping harder physically than any of the others. The small examining room where he lay was, at any given time, packed with scowling men in uniforms blue, silent eyeballs sunken in umbrage, other detective sets in fedoras, inquisitive brows that spoke strange lingo, like doctors would speak. Two psychiatrists, who introduced themselves to Hirens as Dr. Haynes and Grinker, told him that they were going to put him to sleep.
The doctors both only smiled unaffected, as Hirens told them he didn't need drugs to sleep, and simply resumed their business with the nonchalance of a family physician taking a patient's temperature. They pricked the boy's right bicep with a needle, and asked him to count backwards, starting with one hundred. They watched him smirk, until he, at number ninety-four, drifted off into the subconscious depths that only sodium pentothal, also known as truce serum, could induce. According to authorities, Hirens, under the power of the serum, spoke of a strange alter ego, a shadow named George, who committed his crimes for him.
The figure of which he spoke was reflective of Robert Louis Stevenson's fictional character, Edward Hyde, who haunted Dr. Henry Jekyll. George, according to those who were present at the interview, slipped in and out of Hirens' life uncontrollably, a hoodoo relentless and deadly and void of conscience. In short, Hirens showed strong indications of being schizophrenic, living two personalities within one flesh and blood shell, called William Hirens.
Years later, Hirens told author Lucy Freeman, who wrote Before I Kill More, that he woke up remembering very little of what he said under the eminence of the serum. Upholding his innocence, he nevertheless recalled one thing in particular. I quote, When Hirens, under the drug, was asked George's last name, he supposedly told the examiners he wasn't quite sure that it was a murmuring name. According to Hirens, the police translated it to Merman, and the press, afterwards, dramatized it to Murder Man.
Immediately after Hirens' arrest, the police began to wonder the young man they had in their custody, this college kid who admittedly had been so adept at climbing in and out of high apartment windows to steal, and who in all likelihood might have butchered the Degden youngster, had also killed Josephine Ross and Francis Brown. He was being uncommunicative, and, outside the ramblings of a George Murder Man fantasy character, had withstood their torrents of punches, kicks and taunts to leave them highly suspicious, yet, still guessing. Pressure was suddenly put on the lab to find the one incontestable piece of evidence against Hirens, a fingerprint, and the police had at their disposal two sources from which to decipher a possible Hirens print. One was the ransom note, and the other was the doorjamb from Francis Brown's apartment, where a bloody smudge was found.
While Hirens was still prone in the Bridewell Hospital bed, the Chicago Police Department announced that the print made by a small left finger on the corner of the ransom document matched that of Bill Hirens. Fingerprints are measured by loop patterns. The loop pattern of Bill's fingerprints was of the most common pattern found that of the majority of the populace, but in points of comparison, nine points matched the print on the note. Hirens supporters at the time, however, were quick to allude to the FBI handbook, which stated that twelve, not nine, identical points is needed to make a conclusion.
Nevertheless, the department believed it had its man, and, with renewed glow, their eyes turned to the evidence left at Miss Brown's death scene. On the 30th of June, Captain Emmett Evans had told newspapers that Hirens had been cleared of suspicion in the Brown murder, as the fingerprint left in the apartment was not his. In addition, the night clerk, who had seen a man leaving the hotel shortly after the time of the murder, viewed Bill at Bridewell Hospital and announced he was not the man he had seen. However, twelve days later, Chief of Detectives, Walter Storms, revealed to the press that a bloody smudged print on the door of the victim did, after all, belong to Bill.
Chicagoans remembered the case well. The Navy WAV was maimed and mutilated, and upon whose walls had been written in red lipstick, reading, Catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself. At that point, Bill Hirons became the author of that message, and from then on was known as the Lipstick Killer, a hellish moniker he would carry into infamy.
George W. Schwartz, a handwriting expert, was summoned. After comparing both samples of the killer's writing, note and wall, to term papers Hirens had written at the university, he declared the individual characteristics in the two writings do not compare in any respect. Another professional opinion was immediately sought.
This time, too, he hired Herbert J. Walter, the man whose handwriting analysis had cornered the killer of the Charles A. Lindbergh baby twenty years earlier. For four weeks, Walter poured over available Hirons-authored school papers.
Finally, he announced that not only was that University of Chicago student described by the ransom note, but also had scrawled the Lipstick message. Despite some attempts to disguise his natural hand, Hirons undoubtedly had authored both, he said. On the fifth day in custody, a nurse and doctor lay Bill in a fetal position, and ordered him to remain so until they were done with what they needed to do. What they planned was a spinal tap, drawing fluid from Hirons' spine.
This was done with no anesthetic preparation, apparently to rule out any possibility of brain damage. For Bill, the pain was excruciating. At the bureau, officials carted him into a small den, where they told him to take a lie detector test. Hirons was in such physical agony that the test was rescheduled for four days later, at which time it was administered.
Test results were, said State's Attorney Toohy. Inconclusive. In 1953, John E. Reed and Fred E.
Inbaugh, inventors of the instruments that measured Hirons' responses, published test findings in the textbook Lie Detection and Criminal Interrogation. According to them, the test was not inconclusive, and again I quote, Murderer William Hirons was questioned about the killing and dismemberment of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan. On the basis of the conventional testing theory, his response on the card tests clearly, establishes him as an innocent person. End quote.
Before the lie detector test, but not long after the truth-seam fiasco, Bill Hirons asked to see Captain Michael Ahern, one of the few policemen who had showed him some kindness. He told Ahern that he had more to say about his alter-ego, George. Ahern sent for the State's Attorney Toohy and the stenographer, in front of whom Hirons admitted a kinship to his dark other half. He admitted that there was a George he talked to, who did things for him, who may have been responsible for the crimes after being attacked to Bill Hirons.
It was George who stole those guns, who may have crawled into Suzanne Degnan's window, and who may have killed those other women. In less than a week, the State's Attorney's Office had built up an almost impenetrable case against Bill Hirons. With the evidence mounting against him, the accused was refused permission to speak to his lawyers until six days after his arrest. He didn't know much about lawyers, and of his counsel he knew only their names.
Yeah. there. three. The two Coughlin brothers, John and Malachy, a pair of the smartest criminal lawyers in Chicago, enroll in Towle, a whiz in civil law.
On the 1st of July, they petitioned to have Hirens, who was looking quite the worst for wear, released from the custody of the Chicago police and transferred to the sheriff's office. The lawyers met with him the next day to represent him at his arraignment, where he was charged with a large number of burglaries and the murders of Josephine Ross, Francis Brown, and Suzanne Degnan. Bail was set at $270,000, an enormous sum back then, and Coughlin saw that he was safely transported from the city's police headquarters downtown to the county jail under the wardenship of Frank Syene. After signing in at his destination, he collapsed from fatigue at the admissions desk.
He was hospitalized for 10 days. Do you keep hearing podcast ads, like this one for example, but always wonder how you actually get involved with them for your own brand or organization? Well, it's easier than you think. We're Acast, and we give you the platform to do it all yourself.
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While there, the police raided his childhood home and his college apartment. Whereas for Hirens, the police uncovered a scrapbook on Nazi soldiers and a copy of a book on sexual deviation entitled Psychopathia Sexualis. The latter book is a history of dark fetishisms and sexual oddities. It includes tales of famous dismemberments and other sadomasochistic crimes.
The press ran wild with the revelation of the find of a surgical kit. It absolutely tilted over the presence of that particular book. In light of what happened to Susan Degnan, Psychopathia Sexualis was the worst possible keepsake for anyone accused of her death to have had in his possession. Also, the prosecution team worked overnight to find the victim's hairs or bloodstains on Hirens' clothing, who could detect nothing.
State's attorney, Toohey, understood that so far even the macabre sex book was circumstantial evidence. He needed more to convince the public of the young man's guilt. The state admittedly needed an eyewitness. For instance, someone who had seen Bill in the vicinity of the Degnan home, at the time of the killing.
They found that persona in twenty-five-year-old George E. Subgrunsky, a soldier on furlough. When shown a photo of Bill Hirens on the eleventh of July, Subgrunsky said he was unable to identify the man as Hirens. Only five days later, at a criminal hearing, Subgrunsky pointed a finger at Bill and said, That's the man I saw.
The testimony and evidence continued to pile up, and Hirens knew the end was near. He knew that the state's attorney's office and the police already had condemned him, and were expecting a confession. The five metropolitan newspapers were literally at war, scrambling over each other, for the first to run the confession story when it came. Within days, Bill Hirens, on the advice of his lawyers, would accept the plea bargain offered by the office of the state's attorney.
The police, he felt, had found him guilty. The newspapers advertised his guilt and hammered it home with a fiery eloquence. He was confessed to the three murders to avoid the electric chair. In a later interview, he simply stated, I had to be guilty to live.
The date was set, the 30th of July, for his official confession before the state's attorney. I managed, dear listener, to find a newspaper article in the Crescent News Advertiser, from the 30th of July, 1946. It writes as follows. Chicago, Illinois.
I'm allowed a plan for William Hirens to confess formally to the Suzanne Degnan killing and two other slayings collapsed today when state's attorney, William J. Toohey, announced the youth would say only, I don't remember. The prosecutor had received the 17-year-old University of Chicago student at the behest of the youth's attorneys, who announced Saturday he was willing to sign a confession. Toohey had announced at 10.12 a.m.
that Hirens had started making his statement on the Degnan case. He disclosed three hours later, however, that the responses were of no consequences, and that would not be transcribed. The prosecutor said that as a result of the youth's position, he would proceed with the murder charges against Hirens. End quote.
Embarrassed by the aborted confession, Toohey changed the premise of his plea bargain from one life term to three life terms. Hirens' attorneys, livid at their client's display of silence, an act on which they hadn't been pre-consulted, warned him to reconsider. They reminded him, frankly, of the electric chair and that the probability of his being strapped into it, as a road's end, was coldly, calculatingly, real. Toohey would not wait and was not open to bartering, they stressed, and because of his behavior at the hearing there was now no way that he could hope for a fair trial.
Hirens, cooled down, opted for the one way out of the death chamber. And so it was that on the 7th of August, Bill Hirens fully admitted his guilt. He told in detail how he had committed the Degnan slay. He described how, after he threw the ransom note into the Degnan window, he tossed a knife, with which he dismembered the body, onto the elevated tracks near the Degnan home, burdened his bloodstained topcoat, ate donuts and coffee in a nearby restaurant, took the EL back to the university and studied, before he went to class at 8 a.m.
As to the Brown and Ross murders, he described how he entered each apartment, how he killed each woman. Sentencing was slated for the 4th of September. Chief Justice Harold G. Ward presided.
In attendance were the main players of the drama from the legal and law enforcement circles, as well as many of the people whose names had been front-page news throughout. These latter included Mr. and Mrs. Hirens, James Degnan, father of the murdered Suzanne, and Mary Jane Blanchard, Josephine Ross's daughter.
Surprisingly, Blanchard remarked to the Herald-American that she thought Hirens was framed. I quote, I cannot believe that young Hirens murdered my mother. He just does not fit into the picture of my mother's death, she stated. I have looked at all the things Hirens stole, and there was nothing of my mother's things among them, end quote.
The session opened with a concentration on the burglary charges, and to each charge Hirens pleaded guilty. The courtroom rustled, but when the murder indictments were read, a silence fell over it. The clerk read the Degnan indictment, and Bill hesitated. His hands clenched, he moistened his lips with his tongue, and glanced swiftly at John Coughlin, who nodded encouragement.
Then, taking a deep breath, Bill plunged forward, guilty, and then the Ross and Brown indictments, and Bill's reply of, guilty, to all charges. Judge Ward sighed deeply and observed. That, it seems, disposes of all the murder cases. Because of the long afternoon, hearing witnesses, reading indictments, methodically collecting Hirens' replies to each indictment, sentencing was postponed until the following day, the 5th of September.
That night, Hirens tried to hang himself in his cell. He threw a bedsheet across an overhanging pipe, climbed the top of a chair, slipped a noose around his neck, and jumped. The guards had been in the middle of shift change, but the quick reaction of some who spotted him dangling saved his life. In 1955, Hirens recalled to journalist Lucy Freeman the frustration that drove him to attempting suicide.
I quote, The following day, the court pronounced Bill Hirens guilty of all charges. Even though his lawyers had told him privately that he could expect parole consideration in time to come, Hirens soon discovered that his chances to ever see the light of day again would turn out to be like an impossible dream. That evening, while Hirens sat in his cell waiting to be escorted to Stateville Prison, Sheriff Michael Mulcahy, who was in charge of the young man during his weeks at Cook County Jail, paid him a visit. His manner was almost beseeching.
I quote, You probably didn't realize this, Bill, but I'm a personal friend of Jim Degnan. He wants to know, did his daughter Suzanne suffer? Hirens' eyes caught those of the sheriff, who had been one of the very few who had not treated him like a monster. Hirens said, I can't tell you if she suffered, Sheriff Mulcahy.
I didn't kill her. Tell Mr. Degnan to please look after his other daughter, because whoever killed Suzanne is still out there. Now, dear listener, I do not, as you know, like to make assumptions or speculation too much on this show.
I prefer to let the story and the facts speak for themselves. However, the Hirens case, aka the Lipstick Killer case, is very polarizing. You have people insisting he's guilty, and a still growing number of people insisting he was innocent. In my research, I found much evidence, as told here, that indicated he was innocent.
But I also found several incriminating things that I think the media tends to gloss over. There are a few of them I would like you to consider before making up your own mind. Bill Hirens has in later interviews stated that he burglarized the hundreds of homes in order to smell women's underwear and masturbate over them. This, in addition to his claim that he only burglarized in order to feel in control and to feel the thrill, paints a picture of a very disturbed mind.
He also states that his mother suppressed his sexuality growing up, and that he had violent sexual fantasies. The claims of a dominating dark-minded alter ego is very real, and not a result of coercion. He stood by this all the way. In addition to actually confessing, let's not forget that, to the three murders in graphic detail, Hirens repeatedly changed his story, seemingly to fit the changing narrative.
He had no alibi. And the killings? They did have a very typical psychopathic serial killer murders of a randai. They stopped immediately after Hirens was arrested.
After Mr. Hirens went to prison, his parents and brother changed their names to Hill. He left no known survivors. While serving the fifth longest prison term in America's history, Bill Hirens became the first prisoner in Illinois to earn a degree from a four-year college.
He also managed a prison garden factory and set up several education programs. In recent years, his diabetes damaged his eyesight and used a wheelchair. He didn't make many lasting friends while in prison, and told newspapers and media that prison friendships were fleeting. William Hirens, who at the time had served 65 years and 181 days incarcerated, was found dead in his cell at Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Illinois, in 2012.
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So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Vabog Thun, and this podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons, who pledge their hard-earned money every month. There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 17 most loyal patrons.
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