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Catch Me Before I Kill More: The Lipstick Killer Case · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the wall of a ransacked apartment on Chicago's north side,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: in December of 1945, someone wrote a message in red lipstick.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: cannot control myself. The woman who lived in that apartment,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Frances Brown, was dead in her bathroom, shot in the head,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: a butcher knife driven through her neck. And that message,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: 11 desperate words scrawled in a dead woman's cosmetics, would
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: give a killer his name, ignite the biggest manhunt in
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Chicago's history, and put a 17-year-old college student in prison
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. 65 years. He died
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: there in 2012, the longest-serving prisoner in the state of Illinois,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: insisting until his final breath that he never killed anyone.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: This is a story you have to hear twice. The
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: first time, I'm going to tell it to you the
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: way Chicago heard it in 1946. A monster caught, a
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: city saved, a confession signed. The second time, we are
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: going to take that same story into the light and
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: audit it, piece by piece, with everything modern forensic science
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: and modern law now know about how confessions are made.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I want to be honest with you from the start.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: No court ever overturned this conviction. William Hirons was never exonerated,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: and the families of his victims went to their graves
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: believing justice was done. But almost nothing the state used
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: to convict him in 1946 would be admissible in an
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: American courtroom today. Both of those things are true at once,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: and holding them together is the whole point of the
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: next half hour. Start with the victims. because they are
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: the reason any of this matters. Josephine Ross was 43
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: years old, a widow living alone in an apartment on
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: North Kenmore Avenue. On June 5, 1945, she was found
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: stabbed to death, her head wrapped gently, almost carefully, in
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: one of her own dresses. Her apartment had been torn apart,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: drawers open, belongings scattered, and yet nothing of value was taken.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Think about what that told detectives. A burglar takes things.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: This person had come for something else. Police chased a
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: boyfriend angle, found nothing, and the case of Josephine Ross
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: went quietly cold, the way cases of middle-aged widows living
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: alone tended to do. Six months later came Frances Brown.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: She was in her early 30s, a former Navy wave
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: who had served her country during the war, and come
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: home to an office job in a small apartment at
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: the Pinecrest Residential Hotel. On the night of December 10th,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: someone entered that apartment and killed her with a gun
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: and a knife, and draped her body over the edge
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: of her bathtub. On a doorjamb, investigators found a single
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: smudged bloody fingerprint. And on the living room wall, they
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: found the lipstick message. The newspapers, and Chicago in 1945
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: had four of them, locked in a circulation war, fell
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: on that message like wolves. The unknown killer now had
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: a name, the lipstick killer. Hold on to one detail
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: as we go because it matters later. Decades of retrospectives
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: have kept alive the allegation, never proven and never disproven,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: that the message on that wall may have been written
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: or embellished by a reporter chasing a headline. In this case,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: even the most famous piece of evidence has an asterisk.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: And then, four weeks later, the case stopped being a
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: newspaper story and became a citywide trauma. In the early
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: hours of January 7th, 1946, someone entered the Degnan family
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: home in Edgewater through the window of a first floor
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: bedroom and took Suzanne Degnan out of her bed. She
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: was six years old. Her father, James Degnan, was a
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: federal official with the Office of Price Administration. A ransom
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: note demanded $ 20, 000 and warned the family to wait for instructions.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: But there would be no exchange, because Suzanne was already gone.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: She had been carried to a basement laundry room a
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: short walk away, strangled and dismembered, and her remains were
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: distributed into the sewers and catch basins of the neighborhood.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Her head was recovered from a sewer basin that same evening.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Other remains were found over the following weeks. I am
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: not going to dress that up for you, and I
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: am not going to linger on it either. She was six.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: She had gone to sleep in her own bed, in
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: her own home with her family down the hall. Whatever
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: else this episode questions, it never questions the horror of
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: what was done to Suzanne Degnan, only who paid for it.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Chicago erupted. Understand the city this happened in. Post-war Chicago
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: in January of 1946 was a metropolis stuffed with returning soldiers,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: rationing fatigue, and four daily newspapers fighting each other for
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: every reader on every corner. The murder of a six-year-old
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: from a respectable middle-class home was not just a crime.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: It was a referendum on whether the city worked at all.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Mayors and police commanders faced headlines every single morning demanding
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: to know why the lipstick killer was still free. That
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: pressure is not an excuse for what came later, but
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: it is the furnace everything later was forged in. And
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: if you want to understand how an investigation goes wrong,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: you start by measuring the heat. Hundreds of suspects were
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: hauled in and questioned, and by some later accounts, not gently.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: One report describes an elderly janitor from the very building
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: where Suzanne was taken, interrogated so harshly that, in his
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: own words, He almost confessed to a crime he did
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: not commit, and who was later compensated for his treatment.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Keep that phrase in your pocket. Almost confessed. An innocent man,
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: under enough pressure, edging toward the words that would destroy him.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: That is not a detail in this story. That is
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: a preview of it. And here is the first thread
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: I need you to hold. One of them was a
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: drifter from Phoenix named Richard Russell Thomas, a man with
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: a nursing background and an extortion record. And Thomas confessed
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: to the Degnan murder. Sit with that. In 1946, A
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: grown man with a history of extortion confessed to killing
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Suzanne Degnan, and the moment police arrested someone they liked better,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: Thomas was dropped and sent on his way. Remember him.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: He is the road not taken in this entire story.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: The investigation's best physical lead was the ransom note. The
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: pad it was written on carried impressions from an adjoining page,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: and detectives traced that thread toward a restaurant near the
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: University of Chicago, and then hit a dead end. The
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: note lead died. What broke the case was not forensics
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: at all. It was luck. On June 26, 1946, a
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: 17-year-old university student named William Hirons was caught fleeing an
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: attempted burglary in Edgewater. He resisted, and an off-duty officer
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: ended the struggle by dropping flowerpots on his head. Irons
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: was knocked unconscious and woke up in custody, bandaged, strapped
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: to a hospital bed next to the Cook County Jail.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Who was William Hirons? A genuine paradox. Born in Evanston,
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: raised in Lincolnwood, He was a chronic burglar first arrested
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: at 13 carrying a loaded revolver, shipped through reform schools.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: And he was also bright enough to be admitted to
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: the University of Chicago at 16 through a special early
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: entrance program. A brilliant student who robbed apartments for the
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: thrill of it. When police searched his dorm room, they
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: found suitcases of stolen goods, some traceable to the victim's buildings,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: and a strange letter signed George M. The press could
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: not have invented a better villain, the honor student with
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: a secret life. And that is exactly the problem. From
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: the moment of his arrest, this case stopped being investigated
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: and started being narrated. Now, here is where I need
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: you to slow down with me. Because what happened over
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: the next six days is the hinge of everything. William Hirons,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: 17 years old, injured, was interrogated around the clock for
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: six consecutive days. He was refused a lawyer for all six.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: He was not allowed to see his parents for four.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: He later said he was beaten and deprived of food
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: and drink. On his fifth day in custody, He was
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: given a lumbar puncture, a spinal tap, without anesthesia. And
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: on June 29, two psychiatrists, Drs. Roy Grinker and William Haynes,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: injected him with sodium pentothal, the so-called truth serum, without
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: a warrant, without his consent, and without his parents' consent,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: and then questioned him for three hours while he was semi-conscious.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: During those two polygraph examinations he was also given, under
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: all that pressure, he maintained his innocence, results the investigators
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: at the time labeled inconclusive. and which later researchers characterized
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: as indicating truthfulness. Out of that drugged interrogation came the
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: detail that made this case legendary. Authorities announced that under
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: the drug, Ahrens had attributed the crimes to an alternate personality,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: a shadowy alter ego named George Merman. A split personality.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: A monster living inside the honor student. The newspapers feasted.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: And now, the question I want planted in your mind
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: for the rest of this episode, what did William Hirons
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: actually say in that room? Because here is the astonishing answer.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: We do not know. The original transcript of the sodium
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: pentothal session disappeared. It has never been found. The single
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: most important document in the entire case simply vanished from
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the record. And in 1952, one of the psychiatrists who
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: had been in that room reportedly said that Irons never
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: actually implicated himself in any of the murders during that session.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: The George Merman story that convicted a teenager in the
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: court of public opinion rests on a document nobody can produce,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: and an account one of its own authors reportedly contradicted.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: That is the resort of this story. The spring that
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: snaps everything that came before into a different shape. Because
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: ask yourself the modern question. Would any of this survive
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: a courtroom today? A juvenile interrogated six days without counsel. Inadmissible.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Statements extracted under a drug administered without consent. Inadmissible categorically.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: American courts have long held that drug-induced confessions are involuntary
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: by definition. A spinal tap without anesthesia on a suspect
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: in custody. That is not evidence collection. That is something
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: a modern court would call by harsher names. This interrogation
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: happened at the birthplace of what became the Reed technique,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the guilt-presumptive, psychologically coercive interrogation method that was developed in
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Chicago in exactly this era. The same style of interrogation
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: that false confession researchers have since linked to documented wrongful
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: convictions across the country. Aaron's six days were not an aberration.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: They were a prototype. And what the research built on
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: cases like his has established is deeply counterintuitive. False confessions
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: are not rare. and they are not confined to the weak-minded.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: They cluster among the young, the exhausted, the isolated and
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: the frightened, which describes a 17-year-old with a head injury,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: six days into custody, perfectly. Ask yourself honestly, after six
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: days without a lawyer, without your parents, without sleep, with
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: a needle in your spine and a drug in your veins,
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: what would you have signed? But the state had more
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: than the drug session. So let us weigh the rest
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: of it the way 1946 did, and then the way
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: 2026 does. First, the fingerprints. Police announced that Irons' print
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: matched a partial print on the Degnan ransom note, and
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Sergeant Thomas Laffey, the department's fingerprint specialist, declared the match
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: to the press before any court ever examined it. They
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: also tied him to the bloody smudge at the Francis
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Brown scene. Now the audit. A police captain, Emmett Evans,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: had first told newspapers that Irons was cleared of the
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Brown murder because that fingerprint was not his, and 12
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: days later the department reversed itself and said it was.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: The comparison on the ransom note was reported to rest
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: on nine points of similarity at a time when the
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: standard was 12, and additional prints on the note were
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: reportedly discovered only after Iron's arrest, despite the note having
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: been handled for months. Decades later, a forensic team working
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: with the journalist Dolores Kennedy alleged that the brown-seam print
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: showed characteristics of a rolled print, the kind taken from
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: a fingerprint card in custody, rather than a print left
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: on a surface at a crime scene. No court ever
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: accepted that challenge, but no jury ever tested it either.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: and we will get to why. Second, the handwriting. In 1946,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the state's expert, Herbert Walker, concluded that Aaron's printing matched
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: both the lipstick message and the ransom note. In the
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: decades since, other examiners looked at the same writing and
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: found the opposite, including a retired FBI document analyst named
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: David Grimes, who concluded in the 1990s that Aaron's handwriting
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: matched neither the note nor the wall. Two errors of experts,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: same ink, opposite conclusions. Whatever that is, it is not
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, and this may be
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: the most uncomfortable part of the whole case, the press.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: From the day of his arrest, the Chicago Tribune covered
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: William Irons continuously for 37 straight days. Across 68 days,
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: he was absent from the paper exactly three. And on
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: July 16, 1946, the Tribune published a detailed front-page confession story.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Before Irons had confessed to anything, the confession on the
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: front page was invented, fabricated, and here is the loop
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: that should genuinely unsettle you. Irons later said that when
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: he finally did have to produce a confession, that Tribune
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: article was his template. He told an interviewer decades later
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: that the article provided him with details he did not know,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: and that when his story conflicted with the printed version,
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: he changed his story to match the newspaper. That is
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: his claim, never adjudicated, and prosecutors rejected it. But notice
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the shape of the machine. A newspaper invents a confession,
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: and the legal system then extracts a confession that mirrors it,
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: which was the echo of which. So why did he
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: confess at all? Because of the deal. In the summer
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: of 1946, Illinois had the electric chair and, as a
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: practical matter, no meaningful appeals process for a case like this.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: While Hirons recovered from his injuries, his own defense lawyers
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: were called into the state's attorney's office and told, in substance,
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: if the boy confesses to all three murders, Degnan, Brown,
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: and Ross, he lives. If not, the state would seek death.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: The state's attorney, William Toohey, later concede in a remarkable
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: admission how thin the file really was, saying all the
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: prosecution had in the Degnan case was a partial fingerprint
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: on the ransom note. Read that again. By the prosecutor's
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: own account, the case that terrorized Chicago rested on one
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: partial print. Ahrens took the deal. Even then it nearly collapsed.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: At his first formal confession session in August, he reverted
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: to denying everything, and the bargain had to be re-cut
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: on harsher terms, consecutive life sentences instead of concurrent. On
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: September 4, 1946, He pleaded guilty to three murders and
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: 26 other counts, and a judge sentenced him to three
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: consecutive life terms. There was no trial. Not before a jury.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Not before a judge. The fingerprints were never cross-examined. The
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: handwriting was never fought over in open court. The evidence
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: in the most famous murder case in Chicago's history was
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: never tested at all, because a plea bargain made the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: testing unnecessary. Every disputed fact you have heard tonight stayed
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: disputed forever for one reason. 1946 chose certainty over scrutiny.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Now let me give you the other side with the
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: same honesty, because this is not a fairy tale about
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: an innocent man, and serious people spend 60 years unconvinced
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: by everything I just laid out. Ahrens was not a
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: random boy plucked off the street. He was a prolific,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: armed burglar operating in exactly the neighborhoods where the victims lived,
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: and stolen property connected to the victims' buildings was found
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: among his things. He pleaded guilty in open court, was
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: warned by the judge of the consequences, and persisted. In 1952,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: nearly 40 witnesses testified across a nine-day post-conviction hearing, and
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: the court found his pleas voluntary and his lawyers competent.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed in 1954, unanimously. The United
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: States Supreme Court declined to hear him. A federal appeals
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: court in 1969 reviewed the coercion claims again and again
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: denied relief, even while noting that Dr. Grinker had believed
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: the boy was schizophrenic at the time of the drug session.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: One appellate panel put the state's view bluntly. Within a
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: month of arrest, knowing the case against him, Irons chose
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: to plead guilty to escape the electric chair, and he
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: achieved exactly that. In their reading, the confession was not
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: a tragedy. It was a strategy, and the Degnan family
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: never wavered. Suzanne's brother and sister appeared at parole hearings
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: deep into their own old age to argue against release,
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: and prosecutors called his innocence claims ludicrous. Roughly 30 times,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: William Irons asked for parole. Roughly 30 times, Illinois said no,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: the last time in 2007, by a board vote of
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: 14 to nothing. And yet the doubt never died, and
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: it was not kept alive by cranks. Dolores Kennedy, a
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: legal assistant and author, spent more than three decades on
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: his case. Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, the institution
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: whose work helped empty Illinois' death row, took him on
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: as a client and filed a clemency petition in 2002,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: arguing that his confessions contradicted basic facts of the crimes,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: with advocates cataloging 29 inconsistencies, and that the physical evidence
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: did not hold. The clemency was never granted. In prison,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Irons became the first Illinois inmate to earn a four-year
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: college degree. He grew old behind walls. He went blind
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: in one eye, then diabetic, then wheelchair-bound. And on March 5, 2012,
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: at age 83, William Irons died at a Chicago hospital,
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: still a prisoner, 65 years after the flowerpots came down
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: on his head. He was the longest-serving inmate in the
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: history of Illinois, and he maintained to the end that
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: he had confessed only to save his life. So where
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: does that leave us, and where does it leave Josephine Ross?
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: Francis Brown, and Suzanne Degnan. Here is the operative close,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: the part I want you to carry out of this episode.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Legally the case is finished, the conviction was upheld at
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: every level, no exoneration ever came, and with Aaron's dead
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: there is no appeal left to file. Historically it is
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: anything but finished, because the confession at its center was
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: produced by methods, the six counsel-free days, the drug, the
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: spinal tap, the press-fed narrative, that modern American law has
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: specifically rejected, largely because of what cases like this one
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: taught us. That is the real legacy. False confession science,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: juvenile interrogation protections, the requirement of counsel, the skepticism toward
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: drug-assisted questioning, the rules that exist today are, in part,
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: scar tissue from 1946. And the cruelest fact of the
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: whole affair may be this. If William Herons was guilty,
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: the coercion handed him a lifetime of plausible martyrdom. And
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: if he was innocent, then the man who confessed to
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: killing Suzanne Degnan and walked free was left standing at
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a bus station in history, never seriously examined again, and
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: a six-year-old girl's true killer was never named. Either way,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: because there was no trial, the Degnan family was denied
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: the one thing a courtroom exists to provide, certainty earned
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: in the open, under oath, against challenge. That is what
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: a confession extracted in a closed room can never give anyone.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Next time, we leave Chicago for a case that is
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: this one's mirror image, a killer nobody confessed for, a
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: paper trail everybody ignored, and a piece of evidence that
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: sat in a file cabinet for decades. while the wrong
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: theory hardened into fact, waiting for one investigator stubborn enough
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: to reopen the drawer. Thank you for listening.