Crime Junkie - INFAMOUS: Lipstick Killer

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

A young Chicago girl's brutal murder in 1946 led police to a dangerous criminal with more blood on his hands than anyone could have imagined. However, decades later those who re-examine the facts wonder if they got the wrong man.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/infamous-lipstick-killer/ 

Hi crime junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Britt, and the story I want to tell you today is one of those cases that sounds so simple on the surface. Three brutal murders, one sadistic killer, open and shut. But as soon as I really started researching the story, it got way more complex than I ever expected because as you're about to find out, nothing is quite what it seems. And sometimes getting answers only leads to more questions. This is the story of William Hirants, the man most people have dubbed the lipstick killer. On January 6, 1946, the Degnan family was settling in for a nice Sunday evening in their split-level home on Chicago's Northside. Jim and Helen's two daughters, Betty, who's 10, and Suzanne, who's 6, both had been enjoying their winter break from school.

But like all good things, Christmas vacation had come to an end, and the girls have to go back to school tomorrow. So Jim and Helen put their daughters to bed at a reasonable hour so they'll be well rested for classes. They tuck them in, kiss them goodnight, and leave them with one final wish of sweet dreams. Now, at some point during the night, Jim hears Suzanne get up once and go to the bathroom, but she goes right back to bed, goes to sleep with no difficulty. The next morning, Jim goes to wake the girls up for school. Betty gets up easily and comes for breakfast, but Jim notices something a little strange. Suzanne's bedroom door is closed. Now at 6 years old, she's hardly a baby anymore, but she's afraid of the dark, and according to an article I read on Crime Library,

she always sleeps with the door open. Jim goes inside to make sure she's awake, but instead of finding his youngest daughter, he finds her empty bed, and her bedroom window is open. Instantly, Jim is flooded with panic. He grabs Helen and Betty, and together, they all start searching the house, looking everywhere for Suzanne, hoping that maybe she's just trying to avoid going back to school after break. But as the search goes on, they get more and more frantic, calling her name and looking anywhere that could be a hiding place, even out in the fire escape, but Suzanne's not there. The Degnans turn to the upstairs neighbors, the Flynn's, for help, but Suzanne isn't up at the Flynn's house either, and now they're faced with their worst nightmare. Their little girl is truly missing.

The Degnans call the police, and by 10 a.m. that morning, their house is swarming with officers searching for little Suzanne. Detectives start in her bedroom as their ground zero, looking for clues when one of them notices a piece of tissue paper laying on the ground. At first, he thinks it's just a scrap of trash, but then he sees, no, this isn't just a tissue, it's a ransom note. And here, Britt, I'm going to have you read this for me. The spelling is a little weird, but I think you can get the gist. Okay, the note says, get $20,000 ready and wait for word. Do not notify FBI or police. Bills in fives and tens burn this for her safety. Wait, are the Degnans a wealthy family? You mentioned earlier that they lived in a split level with another family. Like, do they have like 20 grand laying around?

They don't. So Helen's a stay-at-home mom, and Jim's a government worker in the office of price administration, so they're not rolling in dough. What the heck's the office of price administration? I actually had to look it up, too. From what I understand, it was an agency set up to keep prices stable during World War II. So the OPA also worked with rationing food, and at the time of our story, there was a national meat packer strike going on. So OPA employees aren't, like, exactly popular people during this time, but all that's to say, no, Jim doesn't make a lot of money, but because of his job, police are wondering if maybe revenge could be a motive, not the money? Now, the ransom note doesn't give away who the kidnapper is in the text,

but police have a theory that they can possibly get prints off of it if they send it to the FBI. Why don't they just do it themselves? Well, I guess at the time, they said that they didn't have the right technology to do that, so they had to send it off. So police send the note off to DC, hoping for a breakthrough. While the police and the Degners wait to hear back from Washington, the search back in Chicago continues. All through the day on January 7th, police keep up their search for any trace of who could have snatched Suzanne and where she might be. Even though the Degners live on the first floor of the house, Suzanne's bedroom window is still high enough that her kidnapper couldn't have just climbed inside her window without any help. And sure enough, according to the Baltimore Evening Sun, police find a 7-foot ladder in the backyard which they believe could have been used to scale the house and pull Suzanne from her bed.

So the ladder wasn't like up against her window or anything? Well, so here's the thing, I'm actually not totally sure because different articles I read from back in 1946 have different information about where exactly they found it. So the Atlanta Constitution says that it was up against the window to her bedroom and that neighbors had seen it before in an alley near the house. So I can't be exactly sure where the ladder was found, but wherever it was found, it was obviously close enough to indicate to the officers that it was somehow used in the kidnapping. So now, between the ladder and the note, there's no doubt that we are looking for a kidnapper and police start canvassing the surrounding area to see if anyone was a witness to what happened. A woman named Ethel, who lives and works as a maid for the Flynn family upstairs, tells police that she actually heard the family dog barking between 1.30 in the morning and 2.00 that morning. And she heard, at the same time, Suzanne's voice saying, but I'm sleepy. Well, Ethel says she hears Suzanne.

Another witness, a guy named George, says he may have seen the kidnapper. He tells police he saw a man in the area at about 1 AM carrying a shopping bag. George says this man looked to be about 35 years old, about 5'9", wearing a fedora and an overcoat, but he didn't know the man or couldn't recognize him as anyone that he's had any kind of interactions with. So as the day creeps by, agonizingly slow, police continue to search for Suzanne. Jim and Helen wait, hoping and praying with every fiber of their being that their little girl will come home safe and sound. But instead, around 7 PM that night, after the sun goes down, they get the worst possible news imaginable. In a sewer catch basin, less than a block away from the family home, police have found Suzanne's head. Over the course of that night, the police keep searching the sewer system in the Degnan's neighborhood and make even more grisly discoveries.

They find Suzanne's legs and lower torso separately around 10 PM. And finally, around midnight, wrapped in a 50 pound sugar bag and dumped in a gutter, police find Suzanne's upper body, though there's no sign of her arms. Keep in mind, this is early 1946, so the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals are going on and the public are well used to appalling stories from the Holocaust and crimes against humanity that rival what was done to Suzanne. But those things all happened overseas, far away, making it easier to pretend that it'll never happen here and certainly wouldn't happen to a child. And yet, here it is, right in their own peaceful, well to do neighborhood and the media jumps on it. Right from the start, police are under tremendous pressure to catch the killer and they act accordingly. While the heartbroken Degnan family waits for answers, the Chicago police keep up their relentless search to find out more about what happened to Suzanne. The city's medical examiner determines that she was strangled to death shortly after being abducted and that the dismemberment took place after Suzanne was already deceased.

Okay, but that's not something the person can just do in public, even if it's super early in the morning, you would kind of need a place away from everybody, even if they were just sleeping. No, totally. I mean, that's the number one thing police are trying to find. This guy's, I mean, workshop or whatever you want to call it, because they believe that if they can find where this took place, it will lead them to who did this. So they start going door to door throughout the neighborhood and according to the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, they're down in the basement laundry room of an apartment building, a few blocks from where Suzanne lived looking for clues when they find traces of horror in the wash bins. There's blood, bone fragments, blonde hair just like Suzanne's and even bits of flesh that the killer failed to totally wash away. There's also a large hacksaw and some bloodstained rags, and so police are sure that this is the place they are looking for. And they're also sure that they have their killer.

A 65 year old Belgian immigrant named Hector, the building's janitor who has a key to the basement and access to the whole building. Now, despite Hector having an alibi, police arrest him on the spot and they spend the next 48 hours trying to violently coerce a confession out of him, though it doesn't work and eventually they release him without ever filing charges. Now, when I say they tried to violently coerce a confession from him, I'm not talking mental torture alone. Hector had been so badly beaten that he goes right to the hospital leaving police with a $20,000 fee after he sues for damages. Even after the Hector fiasco, though, the Chicago police spend the rest of January making arrests, performing shady interrogations, and continuing their investigation while the media frenzy gets stronger and stronger. Every time they make a new arrest, the state's attorney crows to the media.

This is the one we promised we'd get him this time and we did. But then he would basically have to eat his words when the suspect is released and the lead ends up going nowhere. I mean, this happened over and over again. Now, around this time, this is mid-January, mind you, the FBI comes back with two prints that they were able to pull from the ransom note, but the prints don't seem to match any of their previously identified suspects. Then, in late February, they get what feels like another huge break. Suzanne's arms are found by a pair of utility workers in a sewer three blocks away from the Degman's house. The Chicago Tribune reported that there was evidence to show that the arms were put in the sewers later,

since they were better preserved and less discolored than they would have been if they'd been out there since January 7th when she went missing. Despite what felt like big breaks in the case, the fingerprints, the rest of Suzanne, these leads don't bring the police any closer to a culprit. But the coroner's physician tells the Chicago Tribune whoever dismembered her body knew what they were doing. And the DeCantor Daily Review describes Suzanne's killer as a quote, expert carver, because whoever dismembered her body didn't damage her joints in the process. So someone who would be like familiar with how the body works, where the joints are like a doctor, maybe? Well, I mean, I guess that's what they're thinking, but from everything I can tell,

there were no people on their radar who fit into this box solely because of their profession. Like, again, no doctors, pathologists, or whatever. So it's helpful to know, but ultimately probably wouldn't be useful until they found the right guy. But there was no right guy to even look at. By June of 1946, the case is all but cold. Until a hot summer day, when an unlikely suspect turns the case upside down. On June 26, almost six months after Suzanne was murdered, police spot a young man trying to break into a house. The man tries to run, he aims a gun at police threatening to shoot,

but he's not unconscious after a couple of flower pots drop on his head. Police learned that this young man is 17-year-old William Hirons, and when they take a beat after the dust settles, they realize that there was something interesting about this arrest. That apartment they caught him trying to break into was just blocks away from where Suzanne was taken and killed. That's when they're sure there has to be a connection here. Wait, they're that convinced just because they found this guy in the same neighborhood? That seems really fragile for a connection, like to jump straight to this person was here. He must have killed and dismembered a little girl.

Well, no, on its own totally. But remember the fingerprints that the FBI got off the ransom note found in Suzanne's bedroom? Well, police take William's fingerprints once he's in custody and they find what they say is a match. And that is what has them convince that they have the right guy. Plus, the more they look at William, the more they realize they didn't arrest a choir boy. At only 17 years old, William doesn't match the witness description of a 35-year-old man. But since witnesses' memories aren't always totally accurate, police don't think too much of the age difference, especially not when they learn William's history.

It turns out that William's got a pretty extensive criminal record already, starting with an arrest when he was just 13 years old and later getting sentenced for over 10 counts of burglary. And according to Adam Higginbotham in GQ Magazine, William's done time at reform schools in both Illinois and Indiana before returning to Chicago for college. So at the time of his arrest, William's a student at the University of Chicago, so police hurried to search his dorm room and what they find is shocking for the time. In addition to loot from his burglary career like jewelry, war bonds, there's a scrapbook with photos of Nazi soldiers, philosophy books by Nietzsche,

Dr. Hannah Stones, a marriage manual, a practical guide to sex and marriage. He also had a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis, which is one of the first modern sexual pathology guides and goes into all sorts of detail about various sexual practices and deviances. But most disturbing of all, police also find a set of surgical tools, including a scalpel. Armed with the evidence from William's room, investigators begin their interrogation and the Chicago media laps it right up. Every detail sells gobs of newspapers and keeps the frenzy going.

And it only gets more intense when police announce out of nowhere that William is not only under arrest for the murder of Suzanne, but they have also linked him to not one, but two more unsolved murders in the area. Oh my God, so they think that they have a serial killer on their hands. Possibly. So here's the thing. In 1945, there were these two really ugly murders that had never been solved. From the June before Suzanne was murdered, there was a middle-aged single mother named Josephine Ross, who was stabbed to death in her apartment on the north side of Chicago around 10.30 in the morning.

And she was found on her bed with a dress wrapped around her head and tape over the wounds on her neck. She lived with her two teenage daughters, one of whom found her body when she had come home for lunch. Even though police had some leads in this case, there was like this potential boyfriend and a man Josephine's daughter said was quote, unquote, attentive, the case was ice cold by December. But then in December, another woman was found murdered nearby. The second victim was a young woman named Frances Brown, who had just gotten back from serving in the women's branch of the Navy, which was known as the waves.

Now she was stabbed and shot in her apartment while her roommate was gone overnight. Just like Josephine, her head was also wrapped in her own clothes. Her body was found slumped over in her bathtub and the butcher knife used to stab her was still embedded in her neck. As shocking as that is, it gets even more unusual for police because the killer left a note on the living room wall. And here I want you to read it for me. For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself. And that note was written in red lipstick. So this is when the press coins the name lipstick killer back in December and it's stuck even after Francis's case went cold.

So now it looks like police may finally have the infamous lipstick killer in their hands because they match Williams fingerprints to a bloody print that was found in Francis Brown's apartment. Now there's not a huge amount of stuff that I could find linking William to Josephine Ross, but since her murder was so similar to Francis's, police think that it had to have been the same killer. So he's almost connected by association. While he's in custody, police have William do a handwriting test to compare his handwriting to the ransom note from Suzanne's room and the lipstick note on Francis's wall. And here's what's really interesting.

His sample has the same misspellings as the ransom note where safety, which is normally spelled S-A-F-E-T-Y, is written as safty, S-A-F-T-Y, no E, and weight was written as W-A-I-T-E. So to police with these same misspellings in each note, this is even more proof of his guilt. And all along, as I'm sure you can imagine, this is like catnip for the media. And since this is the era of giant headlines, every new revelation is splashed on the front page. The story is everywhere and the media coverage drives public opinion. Public opinion in turn drives votes, which drives elections and public funding, and you can see how the pressure on Chicago police and on the state's attorney would get out of control really fast.

Even William's own defense lawyers are so horrified by the crimes and the pressure to solve them that they're starting to have their own questions about their client. It doesn't help that William's behavior deteriorates after several days in police custody. For the first few days, he won't confess to any of the murders, but after several days of hard questioning, he's injected with sodium pentothal, a.k.a. truth serum. After the injection, he reveals an alter ego named George Merman, who according to the papers all over the country, William claims is responsible for the murders. Wait, just let me sort this out real quick.

So, William's in jail, he's not confessing to anything. They give him this truth serum and he's like, I didn't do it. My alter ego, George Merman, did. Exactly. At least that's what's being reported in the papers. Reporters seize on this whole George Merman thing and decide that Merman sounds a lot like Murder Man, and Murder Man Hirons dominates the headlines. I mean, it's a heck of a story, right?

It's like Dr. Jekyll, this harmless petty thief getting good grades and studying for a college degree, and then Mr. Hyde is this killer alter ego. Totally. Due to the crazy details and the horrific nature of the killings, this whole thing explodes into a media sensation and is really one of the first, like, highly covered cases in the country after the end of the war. Now, here's where the timeline starts to get a little unclear. Despite the reports about George Merman and William's, quote, confession,

by mid-July, the state's attorney of Illinois is still denying that William has actually confessed to anything. And I don't know exactly where or when the George Merman story originated, and the earliest mention I could find was on July 1st, 1946. But the papers in Chicago and all over the country picked up this story and ran with it like it was 100% fact. Fact and fiction only get messier on July 16th when the Chicago Tribune runs a huge story all about William committing the crimes with the headlines, How Hirons Slew Three. The story walks police and the public through William's mindset along every step of his gruesome exploits that led to the three murders, and the public just eats it up.

The problem is, it's totally fake. Like, the author cites unimpeachable sources as his main source and gets super imaginative about what he assumes William was thinking, breaching all kinds of journalistic ethics in the process, because, I mean, I think the general rule is you can't make stuff up about real people, like it's liable. And it doesn't even matter that at the end of the piece, the state's attorney again says William hasn't confessed. But of course, that last line is not what people pick up on. That same day that this ran, July 16th,

the witness from outside the Degnan's house identifies William as the person they saw that night Suzanne was murdered. Between the Tribune article and the positive ID, the public is whipped into a frenzy, and they're screaming for William's head. This sounds like it's like the 1940s version of, like, O.J. or Jean-Pierre Ramsey. Like, everyone is obsessed with it. It's everywhere all the time. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, that's a great comparison. The entire city was on edge waiting to find out what's gonna happen next. I mean, parents were locking their doors and windows now,

afraid that another boogeyman like William is gonna come snatch their children. But finally, on August 7th, 1946, the clouds lift when William confesses to all three murders. The Windsor Star publishes pictures of police actually taking him down to the basement where Suzanne was dismembered, and even though he says he doesn't remember actually cutting up her body or putting the parts in the sewer, he reenacts every step of his killing spree for them as crowds gather to watch, leaving little doubt in observer's minds that this is the murderer. Heavily encouraged by his lawyers to accept full ownership and responsibility, William also takes a guilty plea in addition to confessing to the murders,

and in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, he's given three consecutive life sentences, one for each victim to be served back to back. So that should be it, right? Crimes are solved, killers behind bars, where he'll never hurt anyone again, and now everyone can get back to their lives. Except, it's not that simple. Even though he's confessed and pled guilty, William almost immediately recants, and from then on adamantly maintains his innocence, and for those who took the time to reexamine the case, stunning new revelations began to come to light over the years,

and a surprising question started getting asked. What if William's telling the truth? Is there any chance the lipstick killer could actually be an innocent man? Almost from the moment William is incarcerated after his guilty plea in the fall of 1946, his handful of supporters start looking through the evidence against him, and their findings over the next few decades raise some really disturbing questions. I want to take you through it piece by piece and see what you think. So first, there's the handwriting.

We have the lipstick message scrawled on Frances Brown's wall and the ransom note left in Suzanne's bedroom. While police are adamant that William's handwriting is a match to both samples, I found an article in the Chicago Tribune from January 20th all the way back in 1946, like right around the time this happened, that ran with the headline, Handwriting Expert Doubt's Murderer of X-Wave Slew Child. So that's a little confusing, but like I mentioned before, Wave was the woman's branch of the Navy during World War II, and Frances had been in the Navy, so she was the X-Wave that the headlines were talking about.

So in other words, long before William was ever even arrested, there were doubts that the same person wrote the note on Frances' wall and the note in Suzanne's bedroom. Not only that, this handwriting expert in the Tribune article was a guy named Herbert. Herbert is the same one who later was hired by the state's attorney to say, Hey, guess what? I decided the handwriting matches now. And so, I mean, I'm not saying money helped change his mind, but I think we have to ask the question. I mean, what changed from day one to now when you're on the stand?

Plus, do you remember the spelling errors from that ransom note and how William made those the same exact ones? I mean, that's what made the police, like, sure, without a doubt, it was him. Right. Yeah, I remember. So William said that police told him to misspell those specific words in that specific way and to follow the ransom note exactly. So you can't judge someone's spelling if you're telling them how to spell things. Right. According to Crime Library, the police and the state's attorney also went expert shopping

because Herbert was brought in after another handwriting expert compared William's school papers to the lipstick note and the ransom note. And this first guy said it wasn't a match. So they're just trying to find someone who will say what they want them to say. Exactly. I mean, and they ended up getting somebody who had a different story to begin with. And I read in GQ2 that there was actually a longstanding rumor among the journalists in Chicago that one of them had actually planted the lipstick note before the police got there to spice up the crime scene and sell papers, which I can't even begin to, like, contemplate

who would do that or why. But if that's the case, I mean, that kind of throws off everything. So the other thing I think it's important to look at is how William was treated after his arrest. Obviously, policing tactics were different back in 1946, but abusing prisoners was still definitely illegal. And as we mentioned before, the Chicago police were already out 20 grand for beating up another suspect while he was in their custody. William, who, remember, was just 17 when he was arrested, was beaten, deprived of sleep,

deprived of most food for almost a week, relentlessly interrogated, forbidden to see his parents for four days, and they kept him from seeing his lawyer for six days after he was arrested. Now, this is long before Miranda vs. Arizona, which was like the Supreme Court decision, that made Miranda rights a thing, but deliberately keeping Amir away from legal representation and his parents, to me, is just, like, shady as all get out in my opinion. And then there's the question of, I mean, torture while he's in custody. According to a GQ article written by Adam Higginbotham,

during those six days, William was tied to a bed and had ether poured on his genitals, which, I mean, is not only humiliating, but literally burned his testicles. And on the fifth day, he was given a spinal tap without a warrant, without his consent, and without any anesthetic. Supposedly, it was to make sure that he wasn't brain damage or faking brain damage before a polygraph test, which, I mean, again, didn't even consent to the polygraph. But, I mean, I guess what I'm like, don't understand, his spinal taps aren't used to diagnose brain injuries as far as I know.

Like, there's no medical basis for giving him one. It's certainly not without painkillers. Right, and all of this sounds like torture to me. I cannot even imagine, like, what I'd be willing to say just to make it stop. No, I mean, his spinal tap is a really invasive medical procedure, and it's notoriously painful on its own because it's, I mean, inserting a needle inside the spine to collect fluid for testing. But patients are supposed to stay still for a few hours afterwards

to give the spine time to recover and get back to, like, healthy pressure levels. But William was loaded into a moving car just minutes after the procedure, driven to the polygraph site, and proved to be in so much pain that the police were unable to even do the test. The next day, when William was finally given the polygraph, the results supposedly came back inconclusive. Why do you say supposedly? Well, according to Crime Library, the two guys who actually invented the polygraph machine

wrote a book in 1953, and they said not only were his results totally conclusive, but they also showed that William was telling the truth when he said he didn't kill anyone. This isn't the only revelation that comes out in the early 1950s about William's time in police custody. The truth serum injection, the one that the press was so adamant, got him to confess about his alter ego, George, committing the murders. That was also done without a warrant.

And there's also the fact that there's no specific proof that the truth serum is legit outside of fiction. I mean, sodium pentothal doesn't make someone tell the truth, but what it does do is cause drowsiness and makes a person highly susceptible to suggestion. Now, George just also happens to be both William's middle name and his father's name, so it's not completely unreasonable to me that that particular name would come to him when he was under this kind of influence.

Plus, at least one of the doctors who gave William the injection later testified under oath that he never actually confessed to murder while in the truth serum mind state. And get this, the transcripts of William's entire time under the serum have mysteriously been kept secret. Oh no. Oh yeah, the state's attorney said at the time that they just weren't ready, but to this day, they've never been released, which seems odd to me in a case that thrived under so much media attention.

Like the fact that this still has never come out, I mean, drives me crazy. What are we not seeing? And here's something else that's super shady. The state's attorney lied about having anything to do with the injection. At first, he claimed he didn't even know about it until after it was already done, but according to William's clemency plea, he too was forced to admit under oath in 1952 that he lied about the whole thing because not only was he there, the state's attorney was the one who ordered it.

I'm totally with you that all of this is super shady and I don't like any of it, but going back, didn't he confess again when he wasn't under the influence of the truth serum? Yeah, he did, but I think we have to ask if that confession can be trusted in light of everything we know about how he was treated in jail. I mean, how reliable is the word in a scared, hurting, exhausted teenager who's been physically tortured and threatened with the death penalty? I mean, he at this point already attempted suicide multiple times while in custody. When would the pain stop if he didn't do what they said?

And even more than that, I think it's well known that people who hurt kids are often treated far worse by other prisoners. So, I mean, who's he supposed to get help from? What deals were made behind the scene? The Chicago police have already shown him what they're capable of. I mean, they tried to beat a confession out of Harold the janitor. The public is screaming for William's head due to all the sensational media coverage and even William's own lawyers had made up their minds about his guilt

and opted to cooperate with the prosecution. What I found out is that his lawyers were actually pretty close with the state's attorney to the point that he actually thanks them during sentencing. I read in the Chicago reader how one of William's defense lawyers, and remember, these are the guys that encouraged him to take the guilty plea that at first we thought was just to like save his life. This is the best thing for you. This guy justified their methods by saying he felt like he had a quote unquote

public duty to see William get just punishment. That is not what defense attorneys are supposed to do. That is not zealous advocacy, and it adds to the perfect storm for a false confession. But even beyond all of those circumstances, there's more supposedly damning evidence that's been disproven or shaken up. The witness from the night Suzanne was murdered, the one who said that he saw that 35-year-old man.

He's brought in once William is arrested, and at first he's unable to identify William as the man he saw. According to the Chicago reader in 89, it takes him until a court appearance magically on July 16th of 46 to say, oh yeah, just kidding. I know I said I didn't know before. I know I didn't recognize him, but William's totally the guy now. I saw him clearly in the headlights of my car.

And to me, that's not a credible witness testimony. Okay, so there's questions about the handwriting, the witness, the interrogations. What about the fingerprints? Didn't they say they had William's prints from Francis' apartment and the note from Suzanne? So here's the thing about those prints. At first, according to the clemency plea, fingerprints experts don't think William's fingerprints

match the one found at Francis' apartment. And then, just like with the handwriting, another expert is brought in, and this time the new expert decides, yeah, no, it's a match after all. Plus, the print didn't resemble the typical type of print left at a crime scene. It wasn't smudged or anything like that. It was very clean and it was neatly rolled,

almost as if it had been taken professionally and as if it might have been planted. And since William had a criminal record long before he was ever arrested for murder, police would have had access to his prints. If they wanted to plant them and pin it on him, I mean, they had the means to do it. And the fingerprints from the ransom note are equally questionable. The chain of custody that's supposed to keep evidence protected and untainted

was broken multiple times as the note was passed around both law enforcement and the media. Plus, the print that was supposedly William's didn't meet the criteria for an actual match. As hardcore crime junkies might know, fingerprints are analyzed by looking at ridge characteristics called points. And the higher the number of equivalent points between two prints, the more likely it is that it's a match.

I mean, it's not like DNA. You know what I mean? Like this is, you kind of got to eyeball it. It's a little bit of art, a little bit of science. But in 1946, the FBI standard required a minimum of 12 points in order to confirm a match. Despite William's print only having nine matching points, the Chicago police called the evidence indisputable, which, no, that's just, that's just not accurate.

And then on July 13th, months after the FBI first returned the ransom note to Chicago, the chief of police himself announces that his department has found another print. This time it's a palm print that has 10 points matching for William. Now, keep in mind, the whole reason Chicago police sent the note to the FBI in the first place was because they said they couldn't get any prints off of it with their own technology. Right. And now suddenly they get it back from the FBI and they find a palm print.

Like, are you seeing the inconsistencies of the story? Yeah, this is crazy. Yeah. So I'm not saying he's guilty and I'm not saying he's innocent. But I think once you factor in everything we just learned, then I think we have to look beyond the black and the white of guilt and innocence and ask, is William guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? And if William's telling the truth, and he's not the lipstick killer, then who is?

You might be surprised to know that another man actually confessed to murdering Suzanne before William Hirons was ever arrested. This man, whose name was Richard Russell Thomas, was in jail in Phoenix, Arizona. He was waiting to be sentenced after he was convicted of sexually abusing his daughter when a handwriting expert noticed similarities between Richard's handwriting and Suzanne's ransom note. Approached with the similarities, Richard actually gave a detailed confession literally just days before William was ever connected to Suzanne's murder.

According to an article from the Danville Morning News in 1946, a trio of Chicago police officers were actually already on their way out to Phoenix to interview him when William became the main suspect. So then the Richard lead just kind of fizzled out. Police later claimed his whole confession was a bid to get out of serving his jail sentence in Arizona, and Richard ended up recanting his confession after William was arrested. Is there a chance that Richard was just a creep who wanted more attention? Oh, I mean, absolutely.

But there are a handful of factors around him that I think are important to look at. He was in Chicago at the time Suzanne was murdered, and he had a previous conviction for kidnapping and extortion. And according to the clemency petition, his handwriting was a lot closer of a match to the ransom note than Williams was. But Richard's not the only person who's been identified as a potential suspect in Suzanne's murder. Because I came across a much more recent idea that blew me away. So in 2009, another theory comes to light,

and it links back to one of the most infamous unsolved cases in American history. The murder of Elizabeth Short in 1947, better known as the Black Dahlia. What? I know, it sounds bananas, but hear me out. So in 2003, this guy named Steve Hodel, who's a retired LAPD detective, comes out with a book called Black Dahlia Avenger, where he accuses his own father, Dr. George Hodel, of murdering Elizabeth Short and lays out his whole case.

Although Steve's evidence against his dad is pretty circumstantial, Steve isn't just shooting into the darkness, because as he learned after his dad died in the late 90s, George was actually one of the prime suspects back in 1947. Plus, George was a pretty nasty character, even without the Black Dahlia allegations, because he was suspected of murdering his secretary, and then tried for incest after years of allegedly raping his 11-year-old daughter. I mean, we could spend hours talking about the Black Dahlia case,

and we actually have a whole episode about it over on our fan club with two very special guests, so I won't get to the details too much. But after he publishes this book, Steve keeps digging into other crimes George might have committed. During his research, he comes across something shocking that he believes is a critical link between Elizabeth Short and Suzanne Degnan, the way they were dismembered. According to the coroner's report from both LA County out in California and Cook County in Illinois that Steve posted on his website,

both Suzanne and Elizabeth were cut between the second and third lumbar vertebrae on their lower backs, which apparently is the only place to bisect a human body without going through the bones. I mean, this is a complex procedure that was commonly taught in medical school during the 1930s when George was training as a doctor. I don't know why doctors need to know how to cut people in half, but apparently this is something that they were trained to do. And didn't you say even back before William Hirons was ever arrested, police were thinking that Suzanne's killer may have been a doctor?

Yes, they believe that whoever dismembered her had at least some level of medical or surgical training because, I mean, it was so precise and so clean. And William never went to medical school. The surgical instruments that police did find in his room were apparently too small for cutting up a human body, and there was no proof to suggest they'd ever been used on a human being since they tested negative for things like a dissection would leave behind, like blood and hair and stuff like that. Okay, my brain is officially a puddle. I cannot comprehend the idea that the Black Dahlia killer

and the lipstick killer could be the same person. I mean, it's a lot. Of all the things that I expected to find when I started researching this case, this was not it, which, I mean, honestly, is how I feel about so much of this case. But even armed with all of the evidence that we talked about, I mean, we've got all the physical evidence that isn't what we thought it was or doesn't add up. I mean, William's time in prison, he was a model prisoner. He was the first prisoner in Illinois to earn a four-year college degree. He was helping out with other inmates to help them learn trades.

I mean, again, model prisoner, but William's numerous bids for freedom were always denied, even with his good behavior, even with the massive amount of reasonable doubt. He got close to parole more than once over his long decades in jail, and his case for release was championed by numerous legal clinics in Chicago, like the Children and Family Justice Center and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern, but it just never worked. He died in prison on March 5, 2012, at the age of 83. After his death, everyone kind of just let it go,

because there was no one to fight on behalf of anymore. But if he didn't do it, his incarceration and the state's refusal to investigate more could very well have helped someone else get away with murder. And many of us are still left to wonder, was he the lipstick killer? And more than that, are these cases even really connected, or should we still be looking for more evil men? You can find pictures for this case, along with all of our source material, on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.

And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?