Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERIOUS DEATH: The Lipstick Killer

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

In 1945, a series of shocking murders gripped Chicago, each more disturbing than the last, and one marked by a message scrawled in lipstick that would haunt the city. Police soon arrested 17-year-old William “Bill” Heirens, who quickly became known as the Lipstick Killer. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy examines the investigation, the intense interrogation that led to Heirens’ confession, and the lingering doubts that have fueled decades of debate over whether the right person was held responsible. Head over to our Murder True Crime Stories YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MurderTrueCrimeStories If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder True Crime Stories to never miss a case! For Ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios 🎧 Need More to Binge?  Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios YouTube: @murdertruecrimestories To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone, it's Carter. Exciting news. Video episodes of murder true crime stories are now on YouTube. Every Friday, I'll be dropping a full video episode going deeper into the cases that still haunt us, the mysteries that haven't been solved, and the stories that deserve more than just a headline. Same depth, same commitment to telling the real story. Now you can watch it. Subscribe at Murder True Crime Stories on YouTube.

to catch a new video episode every Friday. This is Crime House. A message written in a dead woman's lipstick. A teenager who claimed a murderous alter ego made him do it. A city so desperate for answers that police did unspeakable things. And a question that still haunts us decades later. Did they catch the right guy? In the mid-1940s, Chicago, Illinois was gripped

by fear. Three people had been murdered in the same north side neighborhood, a widow, a Navy veteran, and a six-year-old girl. The killings seemed random. The evidence was thin, and the press was hungry. What followed was one of the most controversial criminal investigations in American history. A 17-year-old boy eventually confessed to all three murders. He went to prison for the rest of his life. He died there at 83 years old, still insisting he was innocent. His name was William Hyrens, and this is his story. People's lives are like a story. There's the beginning, a middle, and an end.

But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder. True Crime Stories, the Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Thank you for being part of the Crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for ad-free access to every episode,

subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering unsolved cases with questions that I can. can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for murder, true crime stories, and be sure to like and subscribe. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of violence and murder. Please listen with care. Today's case is one that's always stuck with me, especially once I really dug into it.

On the surface, it seems open and shut. A troubled young man committed a series of violent crimes, eventually confessed and spent his life in prison. Case closed. But the deeper you go, the mercury it gets. There are fingerprints that didn't quite match. Handwriting experts who said the key evidence was forged. Torture, allegations, and a very controversial confession.

This is the story of William Bill Hyrins. The Lipstick Killer. Or at least the man the state of Illinois said was the lipstick killer. All that and more coming up. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road. And the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams.

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William George Hyrens was born on the north side of Chicago, Illinois, on November 15th. 1928. He was the first child of George and Margaret Hyrins. Two working class, Roman Catholics. When Bill was born, the family was doing pretty well. George owned a floral shop nearby and Margaret was a homemaker. But less than a year later, on October 24th, 1929, everything changed. The stock market crashed, kicking off the Great Depression. George's flower shop went out of business. Then in 1931, the family had a second son named Jair. Should have been a happy time, and it was, but it also meant the Hyrins had another mouth to feed in an already strained household.

But George and Margaret found ways to get by. George landed a job doing security for a steel mill, and Margaret worked part-time at a local bakery. Together, they made enough to keep food on the table, but there were some trade-offs. Young Bill and his brother spent most of their time with the neighborhood babysitter. And Bill seemed to thrive in his parents' absence, maybe because he had plenty of hobbies. He loved tinkering with old radios and broken appliances and got so good at fixing things

that he was known around the neighborhood as something of a whiz kid. When his parents were home, though, Bill struggled. He never described them as abusive. In fact, he often spoke warmly of them. But George and Margaret fought a lot, almost always about money. It seemed like Bill's brother, Jair, was 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. At only seven or eight years old, Bill would wander the street. streets of Chicago 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. He began to sneaking into the laundry rooms of apartment buildings to steal women's underwear and stash it around the house on making sure his parents never found it. And in the process, he discovered

something unexpected. The act of breaking in itself gave him relief, even more than wandering the streets did. The tension in his head would lift the moment he slipped through a door that wasn't meant for him. By the time Bill was 12, he had a job as a delivery boy for a local pharmacy. He used those drop-offs as a 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. And soon Bill began experiencing what he 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. Over the next several months, the 12-year-old committed at least nine burglaries, and he got more daring with each one. He moved on

from women's underwear to ladies' furs, men's suits, tools, radios, and firearms. Bill was particularly fascinated by guns. He loved taking them apart and putting them back together. 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-old broke into a building and was arrested after police found him with a gun. Officers searched the Hiren's home and discovered his stash of stolen items hidden in an empty shed on a nearby rooftop. He was charged as a juvenile and sentenced to a year in reform school. It seemed to help at first.

It looked like Bill was genuinely sorry. He reportedly cried himself to sleep some nights. 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. Within two months, he was arrested again. This time, he was sentenced to two additional years at St. Beads Academy, a school run by monks about 100 miles from home.

By all accounts, Bill excelled at St. Beads. 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 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 in the Stinson Reform 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. With millions of young Americans away fighting in World War II,

the university opened its doors to exceptional high school sophomores and above. As an average student with a criminal record and three years of reform school behind him, Bill was hardly the model candidate, but he applied anyway, and thanks in part to a glowing letter of recommendation from the principal of St. Beads, he was accepted. Bill was ecstatic. 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.

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 5th, 1945, Chicago was unseasonably cold with a low of 36 degrees, but 16-year-old Bill Hirons had a terrible headache. 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. It was like walking through darkness and pushing a mist aside. In that muddled state of mind, Bill climbed a fire escape to the sixth 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 her early 40s who lived in the 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 Hyrins to Josephine Ross's death. There was little forensic evidence, no witnesses, and DNA testing was decades away. Over the next several months, investigators proposed countless theories, but they all agreed on one thing.

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. He was 16 years old, enrolled in one of the country's most prestigious universities, and apparently a killer. At school, he made choices that, in retrospect, tell a troubling story.

He chose to study German and a decision for a boy who'd failed classes in his native English. He also began reading the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work Adolf Hitler famously admired. He'd also stolen a neighbor's private collection of Nazi memorabilia. He also picked up a book by German philosopher Richard Vosier. Von Krebbeing called Psychopathia Sexualist, published in 1886. The book explores a broad range of human sexuality, including practices that are considered healthy today. But the book also contains descriptions of 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 Francis 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 Francis to keep her quiet.

But there were some holes in that explanation. Bill said the same thing about Josephine's murder, and in that case, it did take place in the early morning when the apartment might have plausibly been empty. But this one happened in the middle of the night when people would obviously be home. Either way, what happened in Francis 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. But before he did, he apparently did something that would define the entire investigation and his legacy. He picked up one of Francis's lipsticks and wrote a message on the wall.

It read, For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control. myself. Amazon presents Jeff versus taco truck salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour.

Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. After finding the lipstick message in Francis Brown's apartment, police were baffled. They couldn't understand why a killer would murder a woman and then leave a note like that. Without a strong theory from law enforcement, the press stepped in and had a field day. Reporters dubbed the unknown killer, the lipstick killer. The name stuck. During this period, 17-year-old Bill Hirens had been wondering where his impulses came from. He compared himself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and he had his own name for the part of himself that committed crimes.

George. Bill later told psychiatrist 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 they were. and murders. Bill said that at first he tried to argue with George, but when he did, the headaches got worse. 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. And it wasn't long before George was rearing for another escape.

In the late hours of January 6th, 1946, a married couple on the north side of Chicago, James and Helen Degnan, were woken up by what sounded like their six-year-old daughter, Suzanne, crying. 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. The police arrived quickly. 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. But outside her room, the police found a ladder tall enough to reach her window and in her bedroom. crumpled on the floor, almost like garbage, they found a ransom note. Written in odd block letters with multiple misspellings, it demanded $12,000 in fives and tens and promised further instructions. That would be more than $200,000 today. Suzanne's father went on the local radio to try to reach the kidnapper.

Investigators went door to door. hours passed without any word. Then, that evening, an anonymous tip came in. The caller told police that if they were looking for Suzanne Degnan, they should search the sewers 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. Chicago had five daily newspapers at the time, all vying for subscribers in the same city, and they found everything they needed in Suzanne's story.

For months, reporters hounded officials, hungry for updates. Detectives obliged, offering theories in exchange for tips. The publicity generated over 5,000 tips about Suzanne's murder alone, which investigators suspected was connected to the killings of Josephine Ross and Francis Brown. They followed up on more than 60% of those. leads. They interviewed over 800 persons of interest, 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, and their stories were so clearly

fabricated that police had no choice but to let them go. As the weeks dragged on, the pressure mounted. Letters poured into public officials, police stations, and newspaper editors, demanding to know why the killer was still free. 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 Hyrins went back to school in January, looking by all accounts, like, any other happy student. 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. By the end of the spring semester, Bill was, as he later put it, at the height of his powers. On June 26th, 1946, a few weeks after returning home for the summer, Bill broke into the basement of an apartment building on the north side. But this time, a custodian caught him in the act. Bill bolted. The custodian raised the alarm. Bill was surrounded before he could get far. 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 that building, he was pretty much immediately seen as a suspect in Suzanne's murder. For three days, Bill allegedly remained in custody without access to a lawyer. He was questioned endlessly about Suzanne's death.

He repeatedly denied any involvement. Then word came back on his fingerprints. Investigators had found a print on the ramed, ransom note left in Suzanne Degnan's bedroom, and apparently it matched bills. State attorney William Tuwee took that and ran with it. He announced to reporters that the lipstick killer was in custody. But privately, Tuey wasn't as confident as he sounded. The match had been made using the so-called Galton system, which identifies patterns or points

in the human fingerprint. The FBI required a match on at least 12 points to make a positive identification. Bill's print only matched nine of those points on the 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. 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 bag in Suzanne Degnan's neighborhood when shown Bill's photo in a lineup. Neither could identify him. Tuwe needed more. And he was willing to go further than the law allowed to get it. According to reports, police beat the 17-year-old suspect repeatedly, punching him in the stomach and the testicles in an effort to force a confession. They allegedly had a nurse or ether 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 of it, Bill insisted it was innocent. But his attitude toward the victims raised eyebrows. He didn't seem to grieve them the 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. On June 30th, 1946, four days after his arrest, police reportedly brought into 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.

They told him to count backward from 100. He got to 94 before slipping into 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 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 get out.

When the tension at home got to be too much, 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. He told state attorney Tuohy that George was real and that George may have been responsible for all three murders. It was the closest thing to a confession the investigators had gotten, but Tuey 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 to a hospital instead of a federal prison. Too, he wanted to prove Bill was of sound mind before proceeding.

So on July 1st, 1946, five days after Bill's arrest, doctors administered a spinal tap, ostensibly to check for markers of brain damage. They allegedly did it without. anesthesia, Bill was ordered to lie in a fetal position while the needle was inserted between his vertebrae. As the 17-year-old groaned in 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 that the Polygraph had to be rescheduled. Maybe investigators felt they had gone a step too far

because the next day, July 2nd, 1946, Bill was finally allowed to see his lawyers. By the time Bill's attorneys arrived, the damage had largely been done. 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. On its own, that wouldn't mean much, but those items had been stolen on December 3rd,

1945, from a home close to where 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan had lived. They also found a medical kit containing surgical knives and scalples. None of them had blood on them, but they suggested an interest in dissection and Suzanne's body. had been dismembered. Investigators then conducted another search of Francis Brown's apartment and found a partial fingerprint that matched bills. Bill still refused to officially confess. After his truth serum questioning, he'd only said it was possible he had something to do with the murders. But that distinction didn't matter to the press. In mid-July, 1946,

newspapers and radio programs began running stories that made it sound like he had fully admitted his guilt. And they described the murders in lurid detail. By then, Bill was convinced he'd be found guilty in the court of public opinion before ever setting foot in a courtroom. And if he was convicted in courts, he was sure he'd get the death penalty. State Attorney Tewy offered him a deal. Confess to just one murder, Suzanne Degnans, and receive a single life sentence, meaning he could be eligible for parole in roughly 20 years. To a 17-year-old boy, a life sentence sounded like an eternity.

But the elector 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. At the moment Bill was supposed to reveal all, he announced he knew nothing about the murder. The room went silent. Defying Tooie may have satisfied some impulse in Bill, but it was a catastrophic miscalculation. Tui was furious and swift in his response. The deal was off.

Bill would now face 23 counts of burglary, three counts of murder, and a charge of attempting to kill a police officer by pointing a gun at him during his arrest. Tui also promised to seek the death penalty. But Tui left a door open. If Bill confessed to all three murders, 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.

They knew what the defense attorneys in these cases always know. once the press has made up its mind, the jury is rarely far behind. Then a new piece of evidence emerged that made the decision even harder to fight. A beloved 75-year-old man washing up getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

After a fake confession was published in the papers on July 15th, 1946, reporters had been looking for the knife allegedly 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 police who discovered it had been stolen from a man named Guy Roderick about a month before.

or 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. Now, the prosecution had something concrete. Bill had stolen a gun and a knife on December 3rd, 1945. There were no fingerprints on them and DNA testing didn't exist yet, but the implication was clear. A little over a week after stealing those weapons,

someone broke into Francis 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 Tuey, 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. The mere act of stealing carried 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. After Bill finished reading, Tui loaded him into a sheriff's department vehicle. Together with a caravan of law enforcement, journalists and lawyers from both sides, they drove to the scenes of the crimes.

At each location, Bill was prompted to reenact the murder he had just confessed to committing. At Suzanne Degnan's house, onlookers gathered as a ladder was propped against the building, 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. But there were still a few who weren't convinced. One of them was Josephine Ross's adult daughter, Mary Jane Blanchard. Mary told at least one reporter that she believed Bill had been framed, as she put it, quote, Hyrins just does not fit into the picture of my mother's death. She also found it strange that nothing belonging to her mother had ever turned up in Bill's

stash of stolen goods. The counter argument was that Bill himself had admitted in letters to his parents written from jail that he didn't burglarize homes for material gain. 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 right about Bill being framed, he was officially a convicted murderer in the eyes of the law. On September 4th, 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. Before he boarded, reporters asked him to say farewell to his mother for the cameras. be 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. On board, he was reportedly approached by a sheriff who was friends with

Suzanne Degnan's father. The officer asked Bill if Suzanne had 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 his other daughter because whoever killed Suzanne is still out there. Officially, the case was closed. Bill Hirens was a convicted murderer. Chicago could breathe again. But the questions didn't go away. They followed Bill into prison and they outlasted him. In the years after his conviction, serious doubts emerged about about the evidence at the heart of the case. 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 famous message, for heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more, was actually written after the fact by a reporter looking to make the story more sensational. There were also the circumstances of the confession itself. Bill had been held without counsel for days.

He'd been beaten, had ether applied to his genitals, had an unannounced drug administered by psychiatrists, and had undergone a spinal tap without anesthesia all before his lawyers. arrived. A confession extracted under those conditions would be considered inadmissible in virtually any court today, and the sodium pentothal itself, the truth serum, is now understood to be an unreliable interrogation tool. The drug doesn't compel honesty. It lowers inhibitions in ways that can make a subject more susceptible to suggestion, more prone to saying what the question seems to want to hear.

A confession made under its influence proves very little about what actually happened. Despite numerous appeals, Bill's conviction was never overturned. He spent decades in Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, eventually becoming the longest-serving inmate in American history. In that time, he earned a college degree and several graduate degrees through course of respondents programs. He became something of a model prisoner, although he was denied parole multiple times, not for behavioral problems, but because he refused to express remorse for crimes he 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. 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. And his behavior was, to put it gently, suspicious. He didn't show much concern for the victims. He claimed a murderous alter ego made him do it. He confessed, under questioning, recanted, reconfessed in a 19-page document complete with a 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 standard for a positive identification. Experts said the handwriting evidence pointed away from him. His confession was extracted using methods we now recognize as torture and an interrogation drug we now know doesn't work. And the evidence from his dorm room was seized without a warrant. But there's one more thread that, it's worth pulling at.

Bill Hyren'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. 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 coining the phrase, serial killer. In other words, the investigation that may have sent an innocent teenager to prison for life also gave us the modern 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? Did Bill Hyrins kill Josephine Ross, Francis Brown, and Suzanne Degnan?

Or was the investigation that led to his conviction a textbook example of how public pressure, media hysteria, and institutional desperation can corrupt justice. You tell me, because all these years later, it's up to us to decide where to go from here. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories.

Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios here at Crime House. to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow, murder, true crime stories, wherever you get your

podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder, true crime stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House 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 crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team.

Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protofsky, Lori Marinelli, Cassidy Dillon, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Dead on a doorstep, gone after a hike, vanished without a phone, wallet, or trace. 12 of America's top scientists with ties to classified programs and not a single explanation. This is Vanessa, host of Crime House 24-7. These weren't random people. They held secrets most Americans will never know about, and someone, or something, is making them disappear.

One researcher texted a friend before she was found dead. Quote, if you see a report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not, end quote. Since then, the cases of only. only multiplied. Now Congress is demanding answers from the FBI, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. And the question nobody can answer is simple. Who is targeting America's scientists? And that's just the surface. We're going deeper on Crime House 24-7, where we cover breaking true crime news daily, follow Crime House 24-7 wherever you listen to podcasts. So you never miss what happens next.