Free The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter, David Everitt

Sometimes, they will resort to suicide (see Death Wish ). On other, rare occasions—knowing that they are powerless to prevent themselves from committing future horrors—they will beg for someone else to intervene.
    The most famous instance of this latter phenomenon occurred in the case of William Heirens. Raised by sexually repressive parents who filled him with the belief that “all sex is dirty,” Heirens grew up to be a fetishist who achieved sexual climax from breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear. Intellectually gifted, he won admission to the University of Chicago in 1945 at the tender age of sixteen. Even while leading a stereotypical collegiate existence—dating, hanging out with buddies, cutting classes—he continued to pursue his clandestine life as a cat burglar and panty fetishist.
    On June 5, 1945, a forty-three-year-old Chicago woman, Josephine Ross, surprised an intruder who was looting her bedroom. She was found that afternoon, sprawled across her bed, her throat slashed, her dress wrapped around her head.
    Six months later, on December 10, the naked corpse of a petite, thirty-three-year-old brunette named Frances Brown was found in the bathroom of her Chicago apartment not far from the scene of the earlier crime. She had been shot in the head, a butcher knife protruded from her neck, and her housecoat was draped over her head. Scrawled in lipstick on the living room wall was a cry for help that would become the single most famous serial-killer message of the century: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”
    The “Lipstick Killer” (as he was instantly dubbed by the press) committed his last—and most heinous—crime in early January, when he abducted six-year-old Suzanne Degnan from her bedroom, strangled her, dismembered her body with a hunting knife, and dumped the pieces into the sewer.
    Heirens was captured the following June, after the largest manhunt in Chicago’s history. Drugged with sodium pentothal—“truth serum”—he initially claimed that the killings had been committed by an evil alter ego named “George Murman,” short for “Murder Man” (see Multiple Personality ). To avoid the chair, he agreed to confess to all three slayings in exchange for life in prison. On the day of his formal sentencing, he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet but was saved by a quick-acting guard. Since the day he entered prison, Heirens—who has recanted his confession and stoutly maintains his innocence—has been a model prisoner, earning a college degree in 1972.
    (Fritz Lang’s 1956 thriller, While the City Sleeps, features a teenaged “Lipstick Killer” modeled on Heirens and played by a young John Drew Barrymore, future father of the actress Drew Barrymore.)
    Of course, not all lipsticked messages left by serial killers have been desperate pleas for help. Richard Ramirez —the “Night Stalker,” who terrorized Los Angeles in 1985—used a victim’s lipstick to inscribe an inverted pentagram on the inside of her thigh: a further desecration of her body and a vicious taunt to his pursuers.
    Unlike Heirens, Ramirez wasn’t crying out to heaven but invoking the devil.
    L OVERS ’ L ANE M ANIACS
    Driving home from the movies one Saturday night, a high school boy and his date pulled into their favorite lovers’ lane to do some necking. The boy turned on the radio for a little mood music. Suddenly, an announcer came on to say that a crazed killer with a hook in place of his right hand had escaped from the local insane asylum. The girl became scared and begged the boy to take her home. He got angry, stepped on the gas, and roared off. When they reached her house, the boy got out of the car and went around to the passenger side to let her out. There, hanging from the door handle, was a bloody hook!
    So goes the story of the “Hookman”—a homicidal maniac who preys on adolescents as they make out inside a