January 7, 1946.
Edgewater, Chicago.
The Degnan family woke to discover that six-year-old Suzanne was gone.
Her bedroom window was open.
Outside, investigators found evidence that someone had apparently used a ladder to reach the window.
Inside the home was a ransom note.
It demanded $20,000.
The writer instructed the family to prepare small-denomination bills.
The note warned them not to contact authorities.
On the reverse was another instruction telling the family to burn the note for Suzanne's safety.
But the crime quickly moved beyond kidnapping.
Police searched the neighborhood.
Later that day, human remains identified as Suzanne's were recovered from sewers and catch basins around the North Side.
Investigators also located a nearby basement that they believed had been used during the crime.
The disappearance of a child from her own bedroom terrified Chicago in a way even the lipstick message had not.
Police were under enormous pressure.
The press followed almost every development.
Rewards were announced.
Suspects were questioned.
Investigators tried to learn whether Suzanne's father, who worked for the federal Office of Price Administration, had somehow been targeted because of his job.
Other theories came and went.
But the ransom note became the center of the investigation.
It had handwriting.
It had paper.
It had fingerprints or partial latent impressions.
And, for a time, investigators believed it might contain something even more extraordinary.
A newspaper artist named Frank San Hamel claimed he could see faint writing impressions pressed into the paper.
The theory was that someone had written on a sheet resting above the ransom note, leaving invisible or nearly invisible indentations below.
If those impressions could be read, they might reveal words written by the killer before the ransom demand.
The story was irresistible.
Police and newspapers began pursuing it.
But decades later, critics of the Heirens case would point to a major problem.
The FBI had reportedly examined the note and concluded there was no meaningful hidden indentation writing of the kind San Hamel claimed to see.
The history of how the note was handled would itself become part of the controversy surrounding the case.
Handwriting comparisons were also being made.
Was the ransom note written by the same person who had written the lipstick message in Frances Brown's apartment?
Some experts saw similarities.
Others did not.
At different stages, investigators and newspapers increasingly presented the two writings as connected.
That was a powerful idea.
If true, police were not looking at separate crimes.
They were looking at one offender moving from adult women to a child.
But handwriting comparison in 1946 was far less objective than DNA analysis would become decades later.
Experts could disagree.
And in this case, they did.
One independent expert, George W. Schwartz, later stated that the individual characteristics of Heirens's writing and the questioned writing did not match.
Herbert J. Walter eventually testified or concluded that Heirens could be connected to the writings, but earlier he had reportedly described the lipstick message and ransom note as containing only superficial similarities and many differences.
Decades later, retired FBI handwriting examiner David Grimes also concluded that known Heirens writing did not match the famous questioned writings.
That later criticism did not erase the 1946 case.
But it made the famous “handwriting solved it” version much less straightforward.
At the time, however, police still did not have William Heirens.
They had a citywide hunt.
Hundreds of people were questioned.
Leads came from across the country.
And one alternative suspect became especially interesting.
Richard Russell Thomas had lived in Chicago and was later incarcerated in Arizona.
He had medical training as a nurse.
A handwriting examiner in Arizona reportedly believed Thomas's writing strongly resembled the Degnan ransom note.
Thomas even confessed to killing Suzanne during questioning before later retracting that confession.
Chicago investigators ultimately did not build their case around him.
Because another suspect appeared.
And this one was not a middle-aged drifter.
He was a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago student.
His name was William Heirens.
He was arrested not for murder.
He was caught during a burglary.
And within days, police would announce that one of the fingerprints connected to Suzanne's ransom note belonged to him.