Criminal Minds by Jeff Mariotte Read Free Book Online Page B

war ended. On January 7, 1946, Jim Degnan went to wake his six-year-old daughter, Suzanne, for school. Her door was closed, her window was wide open, and she was gone. A ransom note demanded twenty thousand dollars for her safe return. The FBI investigators later found smudged fingerprints on the note, but it had already been handled by dozens of cops and reporters.
    The police searched everywhere for the girl. An anonymous caller suggested that they check the sewers, and when they did, they found Suzanne’s head. Not far away, they found more bits and pieces of her body. They discovered that the dismemberment had been done in the basement washtub; bits of flesh and hair clogged the drain.
    Hundreds of suspects were interviewed and discounted. Months passed.
    On June 26, 1946, Bill Heirens, still committing burglaries while attending college, was surprised as he was sneaking into an apartment. He ran, the police were called, and he was apprehended. During the scuffle, an off-duty police officer hit him on the head with three flowerpots, one after the other. Heirens was knocked out cold.
    By the time he awakened, he was being accused of more than just petty burglaries. Police officers hit him, pinched him, and asked why he liked cutting up little girls. Heirens denied having anything to do with Suzanne Degnan’s murder, so they just hit him harder. After days of being beaten and ordered to confess—without being allowed to see the lawyers his parents had retained—he was given Sodium Pentothal, or truth serum.
    Under the influence of the powerful drug, Heirens blamed “George Murman” for the murders. Murman, it turned out, was a name he had given a fictional character in a school writing assignment. The police told the press that it was his version of “Murder Man.” No transcript of the interrogation has ever surfaced, and in spite of the truth serum’s use as a tool to pressure Heirens to confess, one of the two doctors present says that at no time did Heirens claim responsibility—either as himself or as George Murman—for the crimes.
    Other attempts were being made to pin the murders on Heirens. Although the fingerprints discovered at the Brown murder scene and on the Degnan ransom note were smudged, and some investigators had determined that they didn’t match Heirens’s, others insisted that they did. Heirens’s handwriting was said to match that of the message on the wall and the ransom note—or not, depending on which expert one consulted.
    Heirens suffered through a spinal tap administered without anesthetic, apparently to rule out some mental deficiency, and then, without being allowed to recover first, he was given a polygraph test. The police declared it inconclusive. Later it was shown to be entirely conclusive, but the conclusion was not the one the police wanted. Anyway, it was argued, a coldhearted killer could beat a polygraph.
    Six days after his arrest, Heirens was finally allowed to see his lawyers. He was arraigned, then he promptly collapsed from exhaustion, spending the next ten days in the hospital. His attorneys and his parents pressured him to accept the plea bargain that, he was told, was the only thing standing between him and the electric chair.
    Finally he agreed. The police had been feeding every detail of the investigation to a voracious press—five daily Chicago newspapers competed for readers, and the slightest hint of an exclusive on the case skyrocketed circulation. When Heirens relented and accepted the deal, which required a confession, the Chicago Tribune jumped the gun, printing a fictionalized confession written by its own reporter with no input from the supposedly guilty party.
    The response was enormous. Newspaper sales went through the roof, and the other papers picked up the story. All of Chicago read a confession that Heirens had yet to deliver. Heirens claimed later that he tried to match the Tribune ’s phony confession, because when he tried to give his own