William Heirens, his legs swollen from diabetes, pushes himself slowly in his wheelchair toward his visitors at the state prison.
“I figure I’ll be getting out this year,” he predicted last week in a Tribune interview. “It’s a bad thing on the reputation of Illinois that they lock people up forever.”
Heirens has served more than six decades in prison — longer than any other inmate in Illinois history — for one of the most shocking murder sprees in Chicago annals.
With the Illinois Prisoner Review Board set to rule Thursday on yet another parole bid by Heirens, the case raises fundamental questions about justice and punishment, rehabilitation and retribution.
Heirens has spent a virtual lifetime, from age 17 to 78, as a model prisoner. He was even the first Illinois inmate to earn a college degree behind bars.
Now Heirens’ advancing age is forcing the state to decide what his efforts at rehabilitation are ultimately worth. Has he earned a measure of mercy in his final years, or do his crimes carry a price that can never be paid?
While his lawyers argue that Heirens should be freed because of good conduct and his failing health, the murder victims’ relatives, who have long fought to keep him behind bars, say they live in fear of the day he might be released.
“There can be no sense of security if he gets out,” said James Degnan, who was born after his sister Suzanne died at the hands of Heirens.
Cook County prosecutors argued to the board this spring that his crimes were too heinous to be forgiven.
Heirens pleaded guilty in 1946 to killing two women in their homes and strangling 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan, whose body was dismembered and disposed of in city sewers.
“For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more,” read a chilling message scrawled in lipstick on the wall of one victim’s apartment. “I cannot control myself.”
Heirens was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. But under the law of the day, life didn’t mean life without parole.
Claims of innocence
In dozens of hearings since the 1960s, the review board has repeatedly denied him parole, in part because he insists he is innocent — a claim he repeated in last week’s interview.
Despite that, some board members have praised and encouraged him, including one who in 1975 called Heirens “a good example of what rehabilitation is all about.”
He can be set free if the parole board determines that he presents no risk to the public and his release would not “deprecate the seriousness of his offense or promote disrespect for the law,” according to Illinois law.
Even Nathan Leopold, whose 1924 murder with Richard Loeb of a 14-year-old boy was Chicago’s original “crime of the century,” was paroled after serving 33 years in prison. He had been sentenced to life plus 99 years in prison.
“It’s a problem that’s been with us forever,” said Andrew Leipold, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “You want to punish for what’s been done. You also hope to rehabilitate. You want to send a deterrent message. … There’s no agreed measure of what’s the proper balance.”
Change in strategy
At the latest parole hearing, Heirens’ lawyers shifted tactics, downplaying his claims of wrongful conviction and emphasizing his poor health and years as a model prisoner.
Heirens long ago met the criteria that would win parole for any other inmate, said his attorney, Steven Drizin, a professor at Northwestern University Law School.
“When the Bill Heirens case is mentioned, the blindfold is taken off Lady Justice,” he said.
But county prosecutors, in opposing Heirens’ release, said his murders, particularly the grisly Degnan killing, were a defining moment in post-World War II Chicago, in essence robbing the city of its innocence.
“His crime spree changed the way people thought, the way they acted, the way they lived,” Assistant State’s Atty. Gina Savini said in papers filed with the parole board. “Children who were once free to play outside were kept inside. Doors that were once left opened were now locked and bolted.”
He is “a creature … not worthy of living among the civilized,” the prosecutor wrote.
An accomplished burglar
Heirens was a student at the University of Chicago — and already a seasoned burglar by his own admission — when Josephine Ross, 43, was fatally stabbed and Frances Brown, 32, was shot and stabbed six months apart in 1945.
Then in early 1946, an intruder used a ladder to climb into the window of another home and strangled Suzanne Degnan.
For months, newspapers headlined the story as the police investigation foundered. In June 1946, police were called to a burglary in Rogers Park and found Heirens armed with a gun. Police said he tried to shoot the officer, which Heirens denies, but the gun misfired.
In the days that followed, police and prosecutors trampled Heirens’ rights, interrogating him for hours in his hospital bed, searching his dormitory room without a warrant and forcibly injecting him with sodium pentathol, so-called truth serum, to try to extract a confession, courts have found.
Prosecutors even pushed Heirens to make a public confession at a news conference. When he didn’t cooperate, they pulled a more favorable plea bargain off the table.
After he pleaded guilty in September 1946 to the murders and numerous burglaries, prosecutors took him to the Degnan home to re-enact the crime for the press.
“A lot of what happened then [with the media] would not be allowed today,” conceded Colin Simpson, an assistant state’s attorney leading the state’s opposition to Heirens’ parole. “But those were different times.”
Heirens has spent the last 60 years trying to undo his guilty pleas. He said he made a false confession and then, amid the media frenzy, despaired of ever getting a fair trial.
Through the years, Heirens became a jailhouse lawyer who, he says, won many other inmates their freedom. But his numerous bids for a new trial of his own have failed, stymied by his decision to plead guilty, his confession and damaging fingerprint evidence left in two of the murders. His print was found on a ransom note in the Degnan murder, but his lawyer contends the evidence may have been falsified.
Ryan denies clemency
Even then-Gov. George Ryan, who cleared Death Row in 2002, refused to grant Heirens clemency, despite Northwestern lawyers calling his case “one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in the history of the United States.”
Today, Heirens largely uses a wheelchair because of diabetes. His speech is slowed by age, but he is mentally alert and speaks confidently about his case.
His manner is polite and folksy, but he flashes resentment when the topic turns to the conduct of his lawyers and the news media in 1946.
He lives in a hospital section at the Dixon state prison. Heirens said he writes about five letters a day to friends and cousins and reads Prison Legal News from front to back.
In the interview last week, he fondly recalled his days long ago at the state prison in Downstate Vienna when he and other inmates traveled with a guard to pick apples at an orchard, address Christmas cards at a nursing home and shop.
If released, Heirens said he wants to travel the world, preferably by train.
“I’d just like looking out the window and seeing things go by,” he said.
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mjhiggins@tribune.com
IN THE WEB EDITION
Listen to murderer William Heirens make his case for parole after 61 years in prison, and see a Tribune documentary about the state’s growing population of geriatric prisoners at chicagotribune.com/heirens
