Criminal Minds by Jeff Mariotte Read Free Book Online Page A

open and unsolved.
    Zodiac was a classic power and control killer. He liked to have absolute control at his crime scenes; the Lake Berryessa assault is the most vivid illustration of this, but even at the other murders, he was the man with the gun and he was the one who decided who died and in what order. He also wanted to have power over the authorities who investigated his crimes and the press that reported the crimes—hence the constant communication. He was extremely organized as well, planning his murders, leaving few clues, and presumably holding a job throughout. He is a rarity among murderers in that he simply stopped; if this was because he was arrested on some other charge, he never confessed to his crimes. Another possibility is that he died after his last letter in 1974.
     
     
    JACK TARRANCE isn’t the only man to have a family member claim that he was a killer, of course. Retired Los Angeles homicide detective and writer Steve Hodel is convinced that his father is the Zodiac Killer, the murderer of Elizabeth Short (the victim in the famous Black Dahlia case in Los Angeles), and, for good measure, the real killer behind the crimes attributed to William George Heirens, Chicago’s Lipstick Killer.
    Heirens is mentioned in the first episode of Criminal Minds when a message he wrote with lipstick on the wall of one of his victims turns up on the computer of a victim in the show. While Heirens’s name doesn’t come up in “The Big Wheel” (422), an event in that episode could be reminiscent of the act that earned Heirens his nickname: serial killer Vincent Rowlings writing “Help me” at a murder scene. He’s recording every moment of his activities, and the videotape gets into the hands of the BAU.
    Bill Heirens was undoubtedly a troubled boy. He was caught burglarizing homes at the tender age of thirteen, when he worked as a delivery boy for a drugstore. He wore women’s underwear that he had stolen, while he looked at pictures of Nazi atrocities. He liked guns and was once picked up for carrying a rifle on Chicago’s South Side. Heirens was a smart kid; he was only seventeen at the time but was already in his second year at the University of Chicago, having skipped senior year of high school.
    The first murder attributed to Heirens was that of forty-three-year-old Josephine Ross, a divorced mother who lived with her two daughters on the city’s North Side. On June 5, 1945, Ross saw her daughters off to school, then went back to bed. Her daughter Jacqueline found her body when she came home for lunch at 1:30. The apartment had been ransacked; Ross’s throat had been hacked open, a dress was wrapped around her head, and her body was sprawled on her bed. Her underwear was found in a pool of bloody water in the bathtub.
    On December 10 of that year, Frances Brown, thirty-three, a former member of the U.S. Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), came home to her apartment, which was not far from Ross’s, around 9:30 p.m. The next morning, a maid heard Brown’s radio playing loudly and noticed that her door was open. The maid went into the apartment, followed a bloody trail into the bathroom, and found Brown’s nude body slumped over the side of the bathtub. Her pajamas were wrapped around her head, she had a bullet hole in her skull and a butcher knife in her neck, and the following message was written on her living room wall in lipstick:
    For heAVen’s
SAke cAtch Me
BeFore I Kill More
I cannot control myselF
    The apartment had been ransacked, but nothing was taken. One smudged, bloody fingerprint, presumably belonging to the killer, was found at the scene.
    That won the Lipstick Killer his sobriquet, but it wasn’t until he was accused of the brutal murder and dismemberment of a six-year-old child that he instantly became Chicago’s best-known serial killer, a title he held until John Wayne Gacy stole it in 1978.
    Chicago celebrated its first Christmas and New Year’s after the