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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how.
I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. Tonight, we stay in Chi-town. Chirac. City in a garden. The city of the big shoulders. The second city. The windy city. None other than Chicago. And what a time to be alive in the period this episode is set in. 1946.
Last episode, we introduced our cast of fedora-clad detectives, elegant women, jazzy music, and three grotesque murders. Our suspect, Mr. Bill Hirons, was put in custody, and the police and public at large were certain they had got their werewolf under lock and key. But did they?
Tonight, dear listener, we delve deeper into the twisting road of justice, injustice, and crime that make up the story of The Lipstick Killer. I know I mention Patreon every single week, and I will not pretend that I am not aware of the recent controversy regarding Patreon's activities towards prominent content creators.
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We left last week, just as the zealous William J. Toohy put heavy pressure on the police to make arrests.
Hector Verberg, the janitor at the Winthrop Street apartment, which housed the depository washtubs where the Degnan girl was cut up, came for a while the chief suspect, although of impeccable reputation. The sixty-five-year-old man suffered two days of physical battering at the hands of policemen. He was beaten so badly that he had a shoulder separated.
Upon his release, he was hospitalized for ten days due to the abuse thrust upon him. Immediately following his recuperation, he filed a $15,000 lawsuit against the department. After an investigation, the Verbergs were awarded $20,000. Back then, this was a significant sum of money. Now,
This is important, dear listener, because this episode made it quite clear to the police that they simply couldn't beat a confession out of random people in hopes of closing the case. They had to have a real lead, actual evidence, and hopefully witnesses. As the long winter turned into spring, the police had many theories.
so many that it was becoming difficult to keep the investigation focused. They still had no proper leads other than the ransom note found at the scene. The still fairly new Federal Investigation Bureau, under the stern leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, was putting the note to all sorts of tests at their laboratory, and they managed to find fingerprints
Most of the prints belonged to family members and policemen who had handled the paper. But a few unidentified smudges of prints were discovered. Thomas Laffey, the Chicago Police Department's expert, spent many months matching the fingerprint found against thousands on file. This was extremely dull, repetitive, and important work.
He didn't find a single match. The search seemed impossible. That is, until a college student named Bill Hirons turned up out of nowhere, and the spotlight of suspicion was turned on him with full force. We will return to how this came to be a bit later. As told in episode one, he eventually confessed to all three murders,
and this will be covered properly. However, this being the Serial Killer podcast, we must take a closer look at who the infamous William Hirons was as a person. Bill Hirons was born on the 15th of November, 1928, to parents Margaret and George, a couple whose marriage wasn't necessarily in trouble, but was far from happy.
always teetering on the edges of poverty. The coming Great Depression made matters worse. Mr. Hirons' meager paychecks, earned as an odd-job laborer, often went to treat himself and his buddies at the local bowling alleys. Money, or rather the lack thereof, continued to be the source of all family problems to come.
Hirons' childhood, for all practical purposes and despite the domestic problems, seemed outwardly normal and average. He was reportedly a restless boy, by some described as mischievous. Because his mother was forced to help provide income, he and his younger brother, Jer, born three years after him, were often left at home with babysitters who found them a handful.
In today's twenty-first century, the boys would probably be diagnosed with ADHD. But back then, this was not a thing. One afternoon, their mother returned from her job at the bakery to find the parlor draperies charred, and the section of the carpet burned. This was not to Hirons' boys proving to be burgeoning arsonists, but rather a science experiment simply gone wrong.
One other time, Mrs. Hirons found her son on top of their garage roof. He had cardboard wings strapped to his arms, and him seconds away from attempting to duplicate the Wright brothers' first flight, which would certainly have resulted in him breaking several bones or maybe breaking his neck. Luckily for Bill, and perhaps unluckily for the three murder victims all those years later,
Mrs. Hirons managed to talk him down from the roof. Friends remember Bill Hirons as a curious boy who liked toying with chemistry sets, taking things apart and putting them back together. Basically a loner, he would potter for hours. His mother recalled that he liked to work on model airplanes, fix old clocks, tinker with mechanical things, and draw.
"'Some of our friends commented on Bill's ability to do such work with care and precision,' she said. "'They thought his drawings of airplanes and ships were especially good, and they predicted interesting things for him in the future,' end quote. But the little spats between mother and father, ever about money, turned into violent arguments. Bill couldn't stand it.'
Gere seemed able to cope with it, he explained years later. I couldn't. He would fly from his home at 714 Grey Street and take to the streets. He would go on long walks, stay away, anywhere, to avoid listening to his parents' squabbles. That is when he took to burgling, robbing houses, apartments and stores. He found it exciting.
an outlet for tensions that had dammed up daily at home. The dangers, he felt, thrilled him, and proved to be an antidote to overcome and forget his personal problems. Except for the occasional cash he stole, he seldom robbed for money, never tried to pawn off the objects he took, such as cameras, radios, jewelry, as he didn't know any fences on which to unload the merchandise.
He never cared to pursue that channel. It was simply the feelings he was able to conjure up from the act, a buzz of excitement as he was entering the homes of strangers, feeling the rush of being unseen, hidden, and potentially able to do whatever he wished to those homes if he felt like it. His first theft occurred when he was in seventh grade.
during his first job as a delivery boy for a local grocer. Finding that a customer had shortchanged him by a dollar, he panicked. Knowing that the grocer depended upon him to collect the correct amount from each customer, afraid he would lose his job, he determined to make up that dollar's loss. At the next stop he made, to a customer in a nearby apartment building, he spotted some singles lying unchecked on a table,
and took one. The surge of satisfaction came easy. In an interview with author Dolores Kennedy, Bill Hirons explained his modus operandi, which differed from season to season. I quote, In the winter I chose early evening between five and six p.m., because it drew dark early, and I could tell whether or not anyone was home. Often, especially in the winter,
In the summer months, Bill robbed mostly apartment hotels. There he gained access through the buzzer, then following a random hallway to possible luck.
Bill said in his interview, Tenants often left their doors open to catch the cross-draft, as this was before the idea of air conditioning. I could look into the room to see if there was anything of value. Fire escapes were a last resource because there was simply too much exposure. Author Lucy Freeman, in researching Hirons' modus operandi for her book Before I Kill More,
determines that, at times, Hirons proved somewhat of a Houdini. She quotes Earl R. Downs, who was in charge of the robbery investigations at the time. "'That kid was like a monkey. Back in 42 he used a narrow board to span a five-foot areaway from a third-floor porch to reach a third-floor bathroom window at 837 Belle Plaine.'
he crawled across the narrow board while thirty feet below him was a cement sidewalk death if he fell the same holds true for the time he lowered himself over a roof to a third-floor apartment at thirty nine thirty three pine grove something like a human fly
By the time he climbed up a wire mesh covered English basement window to grasp the window ledge and then pull himself up into the first floor apartment at 3744 Pine Grove, how he got a foothold in the wire meshing is beyond imagination. End quote. Most of what he stole he stashed in an unused storage shed on the roof of a nearby apartment building in no time.
The shed bulged with women's furs, men's suits, radios, utensils, and guns. Bill freely admitted he liked guns, as they fascinated him. His father had been a security guard at one time, and he loved to study the unloaded object, to investigate the mechanical gadgetry of it. Much in the same way he had tinkered with clocks and wristwatches.
In those days, as today, many residents owned a gun for protection against home invaders. While pilfering private abodes, he would occasionally find one in the dining room bureau, or in the bedroom dresser, and steal it. At age thirteen, right before grade school commencement exercises, he encountered his first run-in with the law.
involving a heisted .25 caliber automatic. A policeman stopped a suspicious-looking teenage Bill Hirons in a park and, in frisking him, uncovered the weapon on his person. The lad stammered, explaining that he had just found it on the ground, but the officer didn't believe his story. He escorted the boy to the delinquent's home, where he was locked up until his hearing some three weeks later.
In that period, Bill admitted to 11 burglaries and to being the procurer of the booty that the police found in his rooftop hideaway. The juvenile courts sentenced him to the Catholic-run G-Ball School for Wayward Boys in Terhort, Indiana.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. Upon his release the following June, Bill returned to his slippery-fingered habits. Much like an addict, stealing had become an obsession. And even though he knew it was wrong—
He required the thrills it brought. And again, just as an addict, he was ever looking for that extra kick, that ultimate high. He was arrested again, now for prowling in the Rogers Park Hotel. In his possession was the front door key of another hotel down the block. At a nearest station house, a policeman beat him during his interrogation.
But the boy admitted to his mother, it was the punishment I deserved. This time, a judge ordered him sent to St. Bede's Academy, a detention center run by the Benedictine monks on the banks of the Illinois River in Peru, Illinois. In its fold, he proved to be an excellent student and a team player, earning top grades and partaking in the school's sports offerings.
It seemed discipline and tough love really worked on the troubled young man. In fact, Bill's scholastic average was so high that he was urged to take a test for admittance into a special learning program offered by the University of Chicago. Right before he left the center, he was notified that he was accepted into the program and was told to start classes the following fall term.
1945, skipping his senior year in high school. He would be only 16 years old. This achievement pleased his professors and, more than them, his mother, who figured her son had finally outgrown his insurgent ways. However, Bill was a tough learner when it came to the commandment, "'Thou shalt not steal.'" While he was in St. Bede's,
His parents had leased a rambling old frame house on a large lot in suburban Lincolnwood, with plenty of room for a restless boy to roam. His mother thought that new scenery would encourage new ideals. But even though he loved to roam, his adventures led him straight back to the dark world of break-ins.
Despite new surroundings, closer to country air, his parents still argued incessantly. Once again, Bill sought peace of mind, the only way he had come to know, by psychologically blanketing his problems with the thrill and adrenaline rush of burglarizing strangers' homes, standing in their dark living rooms, alone, total silence.
he would feel totally in command of his surroundings, and without hearing any sound of his parents arguing. It later became obvious that Bill only stole when he was spending substantial time at home. Bill is quoted as saying, "I wasn't even tempted. Then I would go home, and the tensions would build, and I would find myself burglarizing to ease them." Before we continue,
Does this ring familiar to you, dear listener? The feeling of tension building up and up and up until you cannot stand it anymore and simply must have release. These phrases are exactly the same sort of feelings and urges the later Ted Bundy, BTK, and Edmund Kemper would go on record as experiencing before they would end up killing again and again
And again. In the meantime, Bill had begun classes at the university, majoring in electrical engineering. He commuted at first, his father dropping him off and picking him up from Hyde Park on his way to and from the steel mills. But after realizing too much time was being spent on the road, Bill decided to board at Gates Hall, near his classes.
His parents could not afford the tuition, nor the dorm costs, so Bill grabbed whatever jobs he could find. He worked several evenings a week at Orchestra Hall downtown as an usher, and at university functions as a docent. For a while, all went well. By the second year, Bill's grades had begun to slip. He had discovered girls.
And they had discovered his smiling face and dark, wavy hair. And so it was that Bill began a series of romantic flings. His favorite date was attractive blonde fellow student Joanne Slama, who lived in the campus area. When not on a date, he and his roommate Joe Costello spent leisure hours discussing philosophy and playing games instead of attending to homework.
Then, of course, there were the burglaries. They continued without interruption, as, what Bill ascertained, a means to supplement his college costs. Hitting unwatched wallets and purses in homes and hotels in the campus area, Bill was able to quote-unquote save enough to buy two $500 U.S. savings bonds.
through underground channels, acquainted through university friends. He also garnered stolen war bonds that, once the owner's names could be etched off with a surgical scalpel, were worth seven thousand dollars. These he kept in a worn suitcase beneath his dorm-cot, beside the surgical equipment that had come his way via most things he owned, namely thievery.
Bill was described in 1955 in Lucy Freeman's psychological thesis, Before I Kill More, as follows. The expressions on his face, barometers of his moods, change swiftly. Most of the time it is a sensitive face, but every so often a look of hardness possesses it.
When a remark angers Bill, he loses the amiable expression. His hazel eyes glow grazed, and an invisible and impenetrable curtain rises. He has the hands of an artist, long, tapering, well-formed fingers that look as though they would be skilled in whatever they attempted. Once in a while, he puts his hand on his head to concentrate." End quote.
Imagine, if you will, dear listener, a grey and humid afternoon in Chicago. The date is the 26th of June, 1946, and Bill Hirons has left his dormitory and walked in the direction of Howard Street Elevated Station. His ultimate destination was the post office in suburban Skokie, immediately north of the city.
He knew the area well, and had used the post office many times to cash checks. Today he found himself low on available funds, and spontaneously had decided to cash at least one of the bonds. College debts were due, and, besides, he had promised to take Joanne to the movies tomorrow night. As he boarded the elevated tramcar, the bonds were tucked into the fold of his wallet.
In the inside of his coat, he secreted an old pocket revolver, all seven chambers loaded. He later claimed that he wasn't even certain the gun worked. It, according to him, just there for show. A comfort factor, while carrying large sums of money. Arriving at the post office at 3 p.m., he discovered it locked and dark.
A sign he had never before noticed in the window announced that the place closed after noontime during summer months. Angered at having taken the long, hot trip for nothing, and realizing that he would have no cash for the upcoming eagerly anticipated date with his girl, he turned to what had worked so well before in a pinch—burglary.
The Wayne Manor apartments on Wayne Avenue were familiar to Bill. He had memorized the layout of the six-story building, which had been his target several times before, and his operations remained the same. He opened the front door and approached the buzzer panel, and a woman answered. "'I would talk gibberish,' Hirons recalls. "'In those days, communication in such buildings was through brass tubes,'
And by the time the sound got to the receiving end, it was hard to tell what was being said, since they couldn't understand me, and I kept ringing the bell, they would simply buzz me in." As was his custom once inside, he rode the passenger elevator to a chosen floor, then paced the hallway until he spotted an open doorway. On the third floor, he found one. From his angle, he could see a wallet resting on a cabinet.
Scanning the empty living room, he entered. But as he reached for the wallet, the adjacent neighbor, witnessing the deed, yelped. Bill was startled at the outcry and tore for the stairwell. Behind him, he could hear the other's footsteps closing in hot pursuit. Not until he rounded the nearest intersection and darted down a private gangway did Bill realize he probably lost his annoying tail.
wheezing, but afraid the nosy interloper might be circling the block roundabout, he climbed the wooden fire escape behind 1320 Farwell Avenue to gain a better vantage point of the alley beyond. A tenant, Mrs. Willett, saw the breathless, scared teenager and phoned the police. Officers Tiffin Constant and William Owens responded.
When Hirons saw their approach through the yard, he attempted to run. Seeing that the officers had blocked both ends of the staircase, however, the young man knew he was trapped. There was no safe way down. Both policemen neared him from opposite ends. Above them, on the landing, and frustrated, he saw no alternative but the wheel with gun in hand toward the closest officer, Tiffin Constant.
The officer ducked, but when the fugitives started away, the cop charged, and the brawl ensued. In the meantime, an off-duty patrolman named Abner Cunningham had witnessed the melee and joined it. He had seen Hirons point the gun. The suspect later expressed that he had no intention to fire it, only to scare Constant out of the way that he might break through. If this were the case—
He had done the worst thing anyone could have done to a policeman on a sweltering June day when tempers needed little to push them over the edge. The first to reach the struggling duo, Cunningham grabbed three adobe clay flowerpots of a railing and dropped them, one at a time, in angry, erratic but rhythmical succession onto Hirons' head.
He would never aim a battle at a cop again. For Bill Hirons, it was lights out. The most powerful designer drugs are the digital ones we use daily. And we get high off them. One touch, tap, like, scroll at a time. You know, just like tech creators want us to. Use digital without digital using you. Learn more at sync.ithra.com
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But we do return next week for its exciting continuation. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun, and this podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons, who pledge their hard-earned money every month. There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person.
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