Suzanne Degnan

Case background and investigation

Suzanne Degnan, 6, lived with her family in an apartment at 5943 North Kenmore Avenue in the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago's North Side. On the morning of January 7, 1946, her family found that she was missing from her first-floor bedroom. A note demanding $20,000 in ransom and warning the family not to contact the police or the FBI had been left behind.

Police searched the area the same day and found parts of the child's body in sewers and drains near her home. According to a DNAinfo Chicago retrospective, investigators concluded that she had been dismembered in the laundry room of a nearby apartment building on North Winthrop Avenue, and the last of her remains were not recovered until more than a month later. Her funeral was held on January 11, 1946.

The killing was investigated alongside the 1945 murders of two Chicago women, Josephine Ross and Frances Brown. At the Brown scene, a message written in lipstick on a wall asked to be caught before the writer killed again, which led newspapers to call the offender the Lipstick Killer.

On June 26, 1946, William Heirens, a 17-year-old University of Chicago student, was arrested after an attempted burglary on the North Side. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, he was questioned for days without a lawyer and was given sodium pentothal; he later said that police had beaten him. Prosecutors relied on fingerprint and handwriting evidence that they said linked him to the ransom note. On September 4, 1946, Heirens pleaded guilty to the three murders, and on September 5 he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.

Heirens withdrew his confession shortly afterward and said for the rest of his life that he had pleaded guilty only to avoid execution. His supporters argued that the fingerprint and handwriting evidence was unreliable and that the confession had been coerced. The courts and the state did not accept those arguments: a clemency petition was denied in 2002, and the Illinois Prisoner Review Board repeatedly refused parole, voting unanimously against release in 2007. Members of the Degnan family opposed his release at those hearings.

Heirens died on March 5, 2012, at the age of 83, after being taken from Dixon Correctional Center to a Chicago hospital. He had been in custody for more than 65 years, and his conviction was never overturned.