Chicago.
December 1945.
The war had ended only months earlier.
Soldiers were coming home.
Factories were changing back to peacetime production.
Chicago was trying to move forward after years dominated by casualty reports, rationing and military news.
Then, inside a North Side apartment, police found a message that seemed to speak directly to the entire city.
Frances Brown had served in the WAVES during World War II before returning to civilian life.
She lived in an apartment building at 3941 North Pine Grove Avenue.
On the morning of December 11, a housekeeper noticed something unusual.
Brown's radio was still playing loudly.
Her door was partly open.
Inside, the apartment showed signs of violence.
Brown had been shot and stabbed.
Nothing obvious suggested a straightforward robbery.
Then investigators saw the wall.
Someone had taken red lipstick and written a message directly across it.
The capitalization was erratic.
Some letters were strangely emphasized.
But the meaning was unmistakable.
“For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”
The exact capitalization reproduced in police photographs varied sharply from word to word, which would later become important when handwriting specialists tried to determine whether the writer had deliberately disguised his natural hand.
The message changed everything.
A homicide had become communication.
Whoever wrote those words appeared to be speaking to police.
Or perhaps to newspapers.
Or perhaps to himself.
It suggested more violence might follow.
Chicago newspapers immediately understood its power.
The phrase spread across front pages.
A name followed.
The Lipstick Killer.
Police searched Brown's apartment carefully.
One potentially important clue was a bloody fingerprint or partial print associated with a doorjamb.
Witnesses also offered a description.
A building employee reported seeing a nervous-looking man leaving around the period of the crime.
The man he described appeared to be roughly thirty-five to forty years old.
That detail would become uncomfortable later.
Because the young man ultimately blamed for Brown's death was only seventeen.
At the time, though, no William Heirens was anywhere near the center of the investigation.
Police looked in many directions.
They considered whether Brown had surprised an intruder.
They examined people from her personal life.
They worked through anyone who might have been in the building.
And they wondered whether this crime had happened before.
Months earlier, on June 5, 1945, another Chicago woman named Josephine Ross had been found dead inside her apartment.
Ross was forty-three.
She too had suffered a violent attack.
Her apartment had been disturbed, yet robbery did not provide an obvious explanation.
Investigators reportedly found dark hair clutched in her hand, suggesting she may have struggled with whoever attacked her.
Police did not immediately prove that the Ross and Brown cases had the same offender.
But similarities were difficult to ignore.
Two women.
Two apartments.
Two unsolved deaths.
Then one extraordinary wall message promising there might be more.
For Chicago, the most frightening words were not “I killed.”
They were:
“I kill more.”
If the writer meant them, police were racing against the next crime.
And less than a month later, a six-year-old girl disappeared from her bedroom.
Her name was Suzanne Degnan.