William heirens biography

"Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

In August, 1946, 17-year-old University of Chicago student William George Heirens confessed to three brutal murders and closed a case that had enwrapped the full-time attention of the states attorney and the Chicago Police Force over many months.

It had kept city readers glued to the front pages of their newspapers. Reports were lurid and tawdry, for they rang of depravity and reminisced of the darkest prose of Edgar Allen Poe. After one murder, the killer had left a note to the police, written on the wall with the victim's lipstick thus the name "Lipstick Killer"

According to his confession, he had, in the course of six months, murdered two women and dismembered a six-year-old child.

When he confessed, relieved Chicagoans read in any one of their five dailies that walking the streets at night was now a bit safer, now that (as one circulation put it) "the werewolf was in cha