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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. After eight episodes and many hours in 16th and 17th century Eastern Europe, we now travel back across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America for a story taken as if from straight out of a 1940s film noir.
fedora-clad detectives and beautiful damsels in distress and all in august nineteen forty six seventeen year old university of chicago student william george hirons confessed to three brutal murders
and closed a case that had enwrapped the full-time attention of the state's attorney and the Chicago police force over many months. It had kept city readers glued to the front pages of their newspapers. The tabloid press had feasted upon the lurid and graphic details that the murders entailed.
The case was from something straight out of a gothic novel by Edgar Allan Poe. Or maybe old Jack the Ripper had come to life in post-war America. The killer had left a note to the police, written on the wall with the victim's lipstick. The message was ominous, and the medium used forever gave Hirons the nickname of...
The Lipstick Killer. This episode is, thanks to you, dear listener, 100% sponsored ad-free. It is financed solely by my very loyal patrons, who are helping to produce the show via Patreon. As I have mentioned in the last couple of episodes,
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Feel free to post reviews, comments, or questions there. From night to night you'll find me Too weak to break the chains that bind me I need no shackles to remind me I'm just a prisoner of love Imagine if you will, dear listener, Chicago in 1946.
World War II had ended only a year prior, and the economy was on the rise. Hitler had blown his brains out in a bunker in Berlin with his wife, Eva Braun. Mussolini had been strung up outside a gas station by his betrayed Kumpari, and Emperor Hirohito shivered under the blast of atomic fallout.
Chicago was sick of violence, and peace had finally come like the summer sun after a terrible winter. Most men wore dapper suits with suspenders and narrow ties, with fitting fedoras to complete their look. Women, on the other hand, wore beautiful long dresses, long stylish coats, and usually plenty of lipstick.
Al Capone was bedridden with syphilis, and resided in his manor down Florida Way, a continent away from the Windy City. Prohibition had not been a thing for over a decade, and although the Mafia was far from gone, they no longer held the city in their iron grip.
Pericomo topped the charts with Prisoner of Love, a segment of which you just heard, and the general mood was one of optimism. So, when a killer showed up to smash this idyll to pieces, the public was not happy about it. Hirons had confessed, and the media were quick to throw any caution to the wind.
Innocent until proven guilty didn't seem too important when they thought they had the man in custody who had dismembered a six-year-old girl and brutally stabbed to death two women. Shikagoans felt safe again, walking the dimly lit streets and alleys, knowing that their so-called werewolf now was safely locked behind cold iron bars.
Hirons had been a central suspect since he had been arrested some fifty days prior to his confession. An admitted petty burglar, he was apprehended, in fact, during one of his house break-ins, while in custody he was targeted by authorities as the butcher of the three victims.
This was an era before the Miranda Act, and he was harshly interrogated, interviewed under the effects of a truth serum, and brutally treated by law officers. Hirens finally admitted to the murders in answer to a plea bargain that promised him immunity from death row. He was sentenced to prison for three life terms.
Opinions concerning his guilt differ. Both sides are equally headstrong, although from my own research today's media seems to favour the idea that he was innocent. The official records uphold his conviction, and the authorities then and now contend that justice was adequately served.
Social journalist Lucy Freeman has reported their side in her book Before I Kill More, and studies the synapses of his childhood that turned what should have been a normal college kid into a young man with antisocial destructive personality. To explain the method in Bill's killings, she writes, and I quote,
Two things must be considered. What psychiatrists call the predisposition toward deed and the precipitating factor. If the foundation of a life is one of excessive fear and anger, which then pervades the whole life, a person may be said to have a predisposition toward murder.
The precipitating factor is the straw that broke Bill's psychic back, allowing the anger to erupt into violence. But others, such as activist Dolores Kennedy, author of the investigative Bill Hirons, His Day in Court,
alleges that the boy in custody was a scapegoat, that he was shaped to look like what she calls a Jekyll-Hyde freak, to cover the inadequacies of a botched and ineffective manhunt by authorities. Kennedy, who heads a corps of lawyers, psychiatrists, handwriting experts, and other professionals who worked for Hiram's release, said, and again I quote,
He was convicted by a sensation-seeking press because he had no legal protection from media excesses. There was to be no trial for Bill Hirons, no testing of state's evidence, no introduction of state's witnesses. End quote. In my podcast, I will try not to take sides. I am not a criminal investigator, nor a criminal defense attorney.
I am the host of the podcast dedicated to the phenomenon of serial killers, and the lipstick killer story is very much such a case. Chicago remained in part, after the war, a city in conflict. It was caught between the wish to be sophisticated and yet remain a pioneer town.
It possessed some of the virtues of the larger city and some of its vices. Some of the virtues of a village and some of its vices. Nevertheless, its police failed to reduce an obvious and sudden criminal flow, and the public was fit to be tied. This made the politicians nervous. It made Mayor Edward J. Kelly nervous.
It made State's Attorney William J. Toohey nervous. It made Police Commissioner John C. Prendergast nervous. The word went out, and the word from the top was, in plural, arrest.
However, solutions come hard, and the city police seemed unprepared to damn the flood of rising crime stemming, in large part, from unemployed soldiers coming home from the war. The Chicago Police Department's Operations Director, Virgil Peterson,
came out rather defensive and simultaneously smug by reminding Shikagoans that, and I quote, we've been warning the public for four years that there would be a crime wave after the war. There has been one after every war, end quote. Peterson placed the responsibility on a letdown in moral standards during and after the war years.
the coming of age of juvenile delinquents developed during the war, and the return of millions of persons to civilian status from the armed services. J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reinforced the finding, stating that murders in America had increased an unprecedented 32% since the previous year.
During the first ten days of December in 1945, Chicago reported 109 robberies, 265 burglaries, 109 stolen autos, 4 rape cases and 8 murders. These were horrific numbers for that era.
Three terrible murders took place between the months of June 1945 and January 1946, to startle not only Chicago, but the rest of the nation as well. They shocked even the old-timers, who remembered the midnight sounds of machine guns during La Regima di Alfonso Capone, and shattered a public trust in the local law enforcement departments.
More than that, the killings rattled in many a belief in the stability of mankind itself. Crimes like this, they said, couldn't happen, even in Chicago. Josephine Ross, 43 years old, thrice divorced and unemployed, lived with her daughters Mary Jane Blanchard and Jacqueline Miller,
in a small Kenwood Avenue apartment in the Edgewood District on Chicago's north side. It was a pleasant area of small water-fountain parks, where nationality-conscious neighbors still clung to their own and partied with their own. Separating the Irish from the Germans and the Lithuanians from the Poles were freight yards and viaducts and a diversity of factories, now called industrial parks.
The resident north side claimed rows on rows of family-run markets on the main thoroughfares, Chicago's surface-line streetcars that rattled along the electric tracks, still horse-drawn vendors' carts that clattered over the cobblestone streets forming geometrically square blocks of latticed front porches and bungalows' bay fronts.
Single-family dwellings were brick and tile, roofed with a dormer, and the apartment buildings varied in size and shape, mostly brick, from two flats to three flats, to six flats and more, with decorative foyers, backyard sprouted oak trees, and sometimes fence-bottom gardens.
Wooden fire escapes clung to each apartment, overlooking gravel alleys that divided the blocks into neat cubes. Along those alleys, private garages stored one or two family automobiles. Most families, by 1946, claimed one car, something the rest of the world, at the time, could only dream about. In short, the area was reminiscent of
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For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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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. Josephine Alice Ross spent most of her time attending movies, visiting fortune tellers, and fighting her last husband's insurance company for a policy they said wasn't valid.
She had been planning to open a local restaurant with the money, but, financially, things looked bleak. Strapped for real income, she had set her eyes on a new husband, named Oscar. She was an attractive woman, and she secretly had two interested suitors.
The 5th of June, 1945, dawned with no apparent apprehension felt by any of the three women who occupied the apartment. Josephine had had a fortuitously good reading the day earlier at the psychics. The daughter had gone off to work by 9 a.m. Their mother decided to sleep in.
She had risen early, chatted briefly with her children, and then, after they left for their respective jobs, returned to bed. Her body was discovered at 1.30 that afternoon, when Jacqueline, her daughter, came home, as she usually did, for lunch. Finding the apartment a clutter.
Drawers pulled out. Cheers knocked over. Newspapers unfurled across the floor. She hurried to her mother's bedroom, where she found a horrendous sight. Josephine was sprawled across her bed. Her throat had been torn open by multiple knife wounds. Oddly, the killer had tried to tape the wounds shut with adhesive tape, as if trying to undo what had been done to her.
Also, her head was wrapped in her dress, which was drawn up from her nude body, almost as if concealing the dead woman's eyes from the murderer after the deed was done. Blood had spewed across the room, onto the walls, the drapes, the furniture, and it soaked the mattress.
in the adjoining bathroom several articles of the woman's clothing and undergarments lay in a pool of bloody water in the tub only change money was missing from the premises no finger-prints were found and her suitor oscar nordmark had an air-tight alibi the police were stumped
A pair of witnesses, the building's custodian and a fellow tenant, both scribed an unfamiliar, swarthy, dark-haired male in white sweater and dark trousers, whom they had seen seemingly without purpose wandering through the building. Janitor Elmer Nelson estimated the stranger to weigh in at about one hundred and ninety pounds.
"'Lodger Bernice Folkman called him slender. "'Eight weeks after the incident, "'Police Captain Frank Reynolds admitted that the department had, "'to date, drawn a blank on motive and culprit, "'but that the investigation would continue. "'The grisly murder was soon on its way to be filed away and forgotten, "'along with the culprit.'
Honorably discharged U.S. Navy women accepted for volunteer emergency service, WAVES for short, Frances Brown was petite, brown-haired and demure. She was a homespun, homely girl and lived in room 611 at the Pinecrest apartment building on Pine Grove Avenue. This was not far from where Josephine Ross had lived.
and she was home alone the evening of the 10th of December, 1945. Roommate Viola Butler was spending the evening at a friend's house, and Miss Brown, arriving home late, about 9.30 p.m., was told by a desk clerk that a man had entered the foyer earlier, inquiring about her. When informed that she was out, he left. According to the clerk,
Francis seemed to have been expecting the caller. She continued up the elevator to the sixth floor and spent what remained of her quietude relaxing and arranging her next day's wardrobe. She called her mother to say she'd be visiting for Christmas, then showered and retired to bed. Outside, a winter wind blew quietly and coldly. The streets were glazed with ice.
It was apparently a good night to stay indoors. Her nude body was discovered the following morning by Martha Engels, the housemaid. Curious as to why the tenant's radio was playing so uncharacteristically loud at nine a.m., and why her door was ajar, Engels peeked into room 611 to find Brown's bed splattered with blood.
and a trail of it leading to the bathroom. There she found the tenant stretched over the bathtub, her head wrapped in her pyjamas, a butcher knife rammed into her neck, and a bullet hole in her skull. Starkly written, in odd lettering, on the living-room wall, letters of lipstick were the words, and I quote—
For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself. End quote. As in the Ross apartment, the place was ransacked, but no valuables were missing. But this time they had one fingerprint, a bloody one, smudged on a doorjamb. This fingerprint would prove to be an important factor in the months to come.
George Weinberg, a neighbor, had heard what sounded like gunshots around 4 a.m. Night clerk John Dedrick told police that about that time a man had emerged from the down elevator looking very nervous, fumbled at the front door, and left. By description he was about 35 to 40 years old, and weighed about 140 pounds.
Police determined he had entered, through the fire escape, into the victim's apartment. Suspects were meager. One theory was that the message-writing killer might have been a woman, since the term, for heaven's sake, was more feminine than masculine. A local butcher named George Caraboni confessed to the crime, but his story changed so many times that the police didn't take him seriously.
Although his story changed several times, for the police to rule him out as a suspect is rather odd looking back. Caraboni was at the time under investigation for no less than 13 murders in Cleveland, many of which involved men and women being decapitated and dismembered. Nevertheless, the police were baffled.
And the first peacetime Christmas since 1940 came and went, without anyone suspecting that the worst was yet to come. Jim and Helen Degnan bore a happy family. Living at Thorndale and Kenmore, in the Edgewater district, with their two daughters, Suzanne and Betty, they shared a huge turn-of-the-century home with another family.
"'The Degnans occupied the first floor, and the Flints lived upstairs. "'Mr. Degnan worked for the Office of Price Administration, O.P.A., "'and had recently been transferred from Baltimore, bringing his family with him. "'Good at his job. "'His salary nevertheless barely afforded him the necessities of life, "'but he had managed to show his children a happy Christmas just the same.'
The sixth of January had been a busy Sunday for the Degnans. They had been out all day, not returning until late, at which time Helen made sandwiches for both her daughters and shuffled them off to bed. The next day both would return to their school, the Sacred Heart Academy, since the holidays had now ended. Rosy-cheeked, toe-headed six-year-old Suzanne Degnan
went to bed that sunday evening with visions of sugar-plums still dancing in her head from the holiday season during the night the only sounds the household heard were the momentary barking of the flynn dogs a disturbance not out of the ordinary and some men talking in the street cecilia flynn thought one of the men had said this is the best-looking building around
"'Mrs. Degnan, at one point, sat up in bed, waking her husband beside her in the process. She explained that she thought she had heard Suzanne crying. The couple listened a few more minutes, heard nothing more, then returned to sleep. In the morning, Jim went to wake his daughters for school. He thought it odd that Suzanne's door was closed. The child was much too afraid to sleep in the dark.'
Peering in, he saw that her bedroom window was fully raised, the curtains blowing in the ice-cold breeze, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. The rest of the family scoured the entire apartment—closets, window seats, even outside on the fire escape. Then they woke the Flints and asked them to search their premises. Panic emerged. When it became apparent, Suzanne was gone.
Because of the nature of the crime, a child's disappearance, and because of the heat it had been taking over unsolved crimes, the police department dug into this case with fervor. The new police commissioner, John C. Prendergast, became personally involved. The Degnan apartment was immediately filled with police from the area, eager to resolve the disappearance of little Suzanne Degnan.
On the floor of the girls' bedroom, they found what at first appeared to be a discarded tissue, but turned out to be a ransom note, probably blown from the bed by the wind, which gushed through the open window. It read, and I quote, "'Get $20,000 ready and wait for word. Do not notify FBI or police. Bills in fives and tens.'
On the backside was a warning, burn this for her safety. The note was poorly written, with several grammatical errors, such as wait being spelled w-a-i-t-e, and safety being spelled s-a-f-t-y.
Outside the apartment, police found a seven-foot ladder that, when held upright, reached to the sill of the girl's window. The ladder, police learned, had been stolen from a nursery several blocks away. Investigators spread throughout the area, searching, asking questions, hoping to find witnesses.
An anonymous call suggested they check surrounding sewers. That evening, on the 7th of January, Detectives Leo Rourke and Harry Benoit did just that. Noticing that a sewer cover on nearby Winthrop Avenue looked misplaced, they shone their flashlight into the well and found what looked like the head of a golden-haired doll.
But it was no dull's head. An alarm went out. Before the evening ended, the rest of Suzanne Degnan, her legs and torso, were found scattered in the debris of adjacent sewers. Her arms were found several weeks later. A basement wash-tub, for common usage, below an apartment off Winthrop Avenue, proved to be the place of dismemberment.
Blood, pieces of human flesh, and blonde hairs were found in its drain. And so it was that Chicago's greatest manhunt, and probably the biggest one in the nation since the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, was on. Police had the task of trying to pluck the killer out of a city of four million. They worked around the clock, often driving their own cars and using their own time.
Police worked day and night, questioning suspects. They interviewed more than 800 persons suspected of the crime, gave lie detector tests to 170. The crime laboratory compared 7,000 sets of handwriting with the ransom note.
A total of 5,250 tips were received from all over the world, offering clues or theories, of which 3,153 were investigated. Police believe that the kidnapper-killer must have driven a car the few blocks to the place of dismemberment.
"'carrying a seventy-four-pound child, "'through the streets would have drawn too much notice. "'After all, the streets were not exactly empty, "'this being Chicago and not some small quiet hamlet. "'Witnesses had seen a woman in the vicinity "'carrying a large bundle in both her arms. "'In the vicinity of the Dagenham home, "'she got into what seemed to be an awaiting automobile, "'where a balding man sat behind the wheel.'
Another witness, a serviceman on furlough, saw a large dark man carrying a shopping bag. The phantom couple and the man with the bag were never identified.
The most promising suspects were arrested, and upon each of those arrests, State's Attorney William J. Tuhey and Chief of Detectives Walter G. Storms would tell the press that this time they had found the killer. Inevitably, the suspect passed the lie detector test or came up with an alibi, or the police were forced to admit that the fingerprints did not match.
Each fizzle was a blow to William J. Toohey, reportedly a man with high political ambitions, and his eyes on the circuit court. Mayor Kelly's right-hand man, the enforcer of Chicago laws, could not afford to fail after so many successful stepping stones up under Toohey's thumb. The police were hard-pressed to find the killer.
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And so ends part one of the Lipstick Killer story. This series will not be in as many parts as the Bathory Case, 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 Warburg-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. These patrons are my 16 most loyal patrons. They have contributed for at least the last 15 episodes, and their names are
You guys really helped produce this show, and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you. As always, I thank you, dear listener, for listening.
Please feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app, my Facebook page at facebook.com slash the SK podcast or Reddit. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Good night and good luck.