William Heirens became one of the longest-serving prisoners in American history.
He entered the Illinois prison system as a teenager in 1946.
He remained incarcerated through the Korean War.
The civil-rights era.
Vietnam.
Watergate.
The rise of DNA testing.
The internet.
The twenty-first century.
The world that convicted him disappeared almost completely while he remained alive inside it.
He repeatedly sought parole.
He repeatedly maintained his innocence of the murders.
Suzanne Degnan's surviving family remained equally certain that the right man had been convicted.
Her sister Betty Finn publicly opposed his release.
To her, the decades of innocence claims were simply another injury inflicted on a family that had already lost a child.
That conflict is important.
Cases like this are often retold as a clean battle between corrupt police and wrongly accused prisoner.
Or, on the other side, as a clever murderer manipulating sympathetic journalists.
The historical evidence does not allow such an easy ending.
Heirens unquestionably had a serious history of burglary.
He unquestionably pleaded guilty.
Courts repeatedly upheld the convictions and rejected his legal challenges.
Fingerprint evidence was used to link him to the cases.
His own attorneys participated in the plea negotiations.
Those facts matter.
But other facts matter too.
The eyewitness description from Frances Brown's building did not neatly fit a seventeen-year-old.
Handwriting experts disagreed.
Later review challenged the handwriting attribution strongly.
The history of the Brown fingerprint contains contradictory announcements.
The claimed indentation evidence on the ransom note became deeply questionable.
Another suspect had confessed to the Degnan crime.
Heirens was injured during arrest, interrogated repeatedly, given sodium pentothal and confronted with the possibility of death in the electric chair.
And the public learned almost every development through a press environment that had already turned “Lipstick Killer” into one of the most marketable crime stories in America.
The University of Chicago's own archive describes the case as one of the most sensational episodes in Chicago history.
For weeks, Heirens effectively became the city's central news story.
That environment mattered.
In a sensational case, every new clue receives enormous weight before anyone has time to examine it.
A fingerprint match becomes certainty.
A handwriting resemblance becomes certainty.
A psychiatric theory becomes certainty.
A confession becomes certainty.
Then decades pass.
Records become incomplete.
Witnesses die.
Memories deteriorate.
Evidence disappears.
And the certainty becomes almost impossible to test again.
That is exactly what happened here.
By the 1990s and early 2000s, innocence advocates were publicly arguing that Heirens had been the victim of one of Chicago's worst miscarriages of justice.
The Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions became involved.
Attorneys sought clemency.
Experts revisited handwriting and fingerprints.
The Guardian reported in 2002 that Heirens's supporters alleged both major categories of physical evidence had been compromised.
Still, no court vacated the convictions.
Heirens died in 2012.
He was eighty-three.
He had spent more than sixty-five years imprisoned.
At the time of his death, he was widely described as Illinois's longest-serving inmate.
He died legally guilty of murdering Josephine Ross, Frances Brown and Suzanne Degnan.
He also died insisting that he had not killed them.
And so the Lipstick Killer case ended without the kind of final answer modern audiences want.
There was no DNA retest clearing him.
No newly discovered photograph proving guilt.
No confession from another person verified beyond doubt.
No definitive modern reinvestigation that could reconstruct every piece from scratch.
Only the old record.
And the contradictions inside it.
Return to Frances Brown's apartment.
December 1945.
The room is quiet now.
Police stand inside.
One woman is dead.
One message is on the wall.
Red lipstick.
Large uneven letters.
“For heaven's sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”
Imagine being a detective seeing that in 1945.
There is no DNA database.
No surveillance footage.
No phone-location history.
No digital trail.
No searchable nationwide database of every movement.
The writing feels like the killer has handed you his mind.
You photograph it.
You copy it.
You send the image to the newspapers.
Chicago reads it at breakfast.
Suddenly the killer is no longer invisible.
He has a personality.
Unstable.
Compulsive.
Taunting.
Dangerous.
Then a child disappears.
A ransom note appears.
The handwriting looks odd.
Different capitals.
Strange formations.
People begin comparing letters.
Maybe the same person.
Maybe not.
Months later, police catch a teenage burglar.
His fingerprints are taken.
A print is said to match the ransom note.
Another is eventually said to match the Brown scene.
Handwriting experts are called.
Some say no.
One eventually says yes.
The teenager is facing death.
His lawyers negotiate.
He signs a confession.
Three life sentences.
Case solved.
That was the story Chicago accepted.
But history is rarely as neat as a front page.
The fingerprint evidence would be challenged.
The handwriting evidence would be challenged.
The hidden impressions would be challenged.
The confession would be challenged.
Even the idea that one person wrote both famous messages would be challenged.
And yet the conviction remained.
That is why the most unsettling part of the Lipstick Killer case is not actually the sentence written on Frances Brown's wall.
It is what happened to that sentence afterward.
Those few red words created a character before police had a suspect.
The city began hunting for a man who could have written them.
Then William Heirens appeared.
For the next sixty-five years, almost every debate about his guilt returned to exactly the same question:
Did the seventeen-year-old burglar truly write those words?
Or did investigators find a boy whose real crimes made it easier to believe he had committed crimes far worse?
The courts never changed the official answer.
William Heirens remained convicted.
The historical answer is less comfortable.
It remains disputed.
And perhaps that is why the message on Frances Brown's wall still feels disturbing more than eighty years later.
Not simply because someone wrote:
“Catch me before I kill more.”
But because even after someone was caught, people never completely stopped asking whether police had caught the person who wrote it.