William Heirens earns title "Lipstick Killer" - 3941 Pine Grove, Chicago, IL - Infamous Crime Scenes on Waymarking.com

“CATCH ME BEFORE I KILL MORE” – Miss Brown was found draped over the edge of the bathtub face down with her legs parted, a long, slender knife had been driven straight through her throat from side to side and left in place. On the living room wall was a message written in lipstick: "For Heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself."

Heirens became infamously known as The Lipstick Killer for what he wrote on the wall in apartment 611.

How awful.

Excerpted from The TruCrime Library
By Joseph Geringer
The Sneak Thief
(visit link)
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 chains".

Heirens (pronounced High-rens) 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-breakings. While in custody, he was targeted by authorities as the butcher of the three victims. Harshly interrogated, interviewed under the effects of a truth serum and brutally treated by law officers (it was the age before the Miranda Act), Heirens finally admitted to the murders in answer to a plea bargain that promised him immunity from death row. ("I confessed to live," he later said.) He was sentenced to prison for three life terms.

He lives today, still in prison, 53 years later. He continues to assert his innocence."

See (visit link) for more details of this and the other crimes Heirens committed.

Date of crime: 12/10/1945 Public access allowed: no Fee required: no Web site: [Web Link]

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