Nearly 56 years after he confessed, pleaded guilty and received a series of life sentences for one of Chicago’s most shocking murder sprees, the longest-serving inmate in Illinois is again seeking his freedom.
William Heirens, 73, has asked in a petition filed late last month with Gov. George Ryan and the state prisoner review board that his sentence be commuted and that he be granted what commonly is called “compassionate release.”
His attorneys, Lawrence Marshall of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and Steven Drizin of the school’s legal clinic, say in their petition that Heirens’ exemplary prison record merits his release.
Moreover, they say a new and better understanding of wrongful convictions and false confessions–both of which have plagued the Cook County justice system–suggests that Heirens is a victim of both.
Heirens was 17 and a bright student when he was arrested and charged with the murders of Josephine Ross in June 1945 and Frances Brown in December 1945, and then the January 1946 abduction-murder of Suzanne Degnan, a 6-year-old Chicago girl.
“Bill Heirens’ case,” Drizin said Friday, “contains more sources of wrongful convictions than any other case that the Center on Wrongful Convictions has studied.”
County prosecutors and relatives of the victims have steadfastly opposed Heirens’ release in numerous parole hearings.
Suzanne Degnan’s younger brother, James, hasn’t missed a parole or clemency hearing since 1983 and said Sunday he hopes he will not have to attend more.
“I would hope that the law students and the law professor and Heirens would have the decency to hang it up, stop trying and not bother anyone with it again,” he said.
John Gorman, spokesman for State’s Atty. Dick Devine, said last week that prosecutors would continue to oppose Heirens’ release. Heirens’ petition is scheduled to be considered in April.
“He was convicted of killing three people. He pled guilty to that,” Gorman said. “We don’t think somebody who killed three people should be released.”
Officers investigating Brown’s murder found the words “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more” scrawled in lipstick in her apartment. Suzanne Degnan’s body was dismembered and left in sewers and catch basins.
Heirens confessed and pleaded guilty to avoid an almost certain sentence of death in the state’s electric chair.
Prosecutors admitted that they would have had a hard time convicting him without confessions, and Heirens’ attorneys acknowledged that they facilitated his confessions and guilty pleas.
Heirens quickly recanted his admissions of guilt and, since then, has said that he is innocent.
As reasons to doubt his guilt, Marshall and Drizin point to questions about handwriting on a ransom note supposedly left by Heirens, doubts about fingerprint evidence and inconsistencies in Heirens’ confessions.The attorneys also say that prosecutors forcibly injected Heirens with a sodium pentothal “truth serum” and that another man confessed to one of the murders to police in Arizona before Heirens’ arrest.
In addition, they say Chicago police arrested another man in connection with the Degnan murder. That man later claimed that detectives tortured him.
Heirens’ attorneys acknowledge they cannot prove that Heirens was wrongly convicted, in part because police reports and much of the evidence from the case has been lost or destroyed.
But they say there is “more than a reasonable doubt’s worth of evidence” that Heirens is innocent.
Heirens, the first prisoner in Illinois to get a college degree behind bars, made his last bid for release in a 1995 clemency petition.
