Bill & George

Chicago sweated as the woolly, wet heat topped 99DEG. But it was not too hot for lurid drama. For the first time since the Leopold-Loeb thrill murder of 1924, the home of sudden gunfire and anonymous funeral wreaths last week had a crime story juicy enough to appease its appetite. It seemed like old times.

The famed Front Page Chicago press came to life, chased its tail and bayed bulletins. It intimidated the police, tried the case on Page One, manufactured a confession and imported Murder Novelist Craig Rice from California to worry over the accused. Readers jumped aboard with letters full of theories, shudders, lectures on psychology, morals and English usage. While psychiatrists candled the accused's head, the city focused on its ugly old Cook County jail. There in cell No. 59, husky, sullen, 17-year-old William Heirens sat with his head in his hands.

Bill was the star. A smart, hard-working sophomore at the University of Chicago (where Leopold and Loeb were unusually bright scholastic lights), he was charged with 24 burglaries, four assaults with intent to murder, and one assault and robbery. He was also suspected of having shot and stabbed to death ex-WAVE Frances Brown; of having strangled and dissected six-year-old Suzanne Degnan; of having shot and stabbed Mrs. Josephine Ross, a Chicago widow, when she surprised him looting her apartment. The papers declared that he had made an oral confession of all three murders while lulled by a "truth serum" (sodium pentothal). Bill insisted that he could neither rob nor murder. He blamed it all on a fellow named George Murman.

Cornered Cobra. It was wonderful the way Bill and later on the reporters talked about Bill's fearless, shameless, icy-eyed alter ego, George Murman. Bill had been about 13 when he met George. Right away, George had tried to get Bill (who had a police record of his own) to go out prowling fire escapes in the night.

Even when he was talking under sodium pentothal, Bill said that George robbed for pleasure, and killed like a cobra when cornered. And besides, he was forever whispering terrible things in Bill's secret ear.

The psychiatrists, with yeoman help from the boys in the pressroom, explained George to Chicago by saying that Iris creator, Bill, was a duo-personality--that Bill Heirens had made George up the way children invent playmates. By such a device, they said, Bill Heirens could remain an average son and student, date nice girls and go to church, and at the same time carry on a one-man crime wave to make even Chicago's hair rise. Chicago's hair rose, but the back of its neck tingled pleasantly.

Meanwhile, Bill glowered and complained that he had always taken the rap for the diabolical George. First it was petty theft. Next it was assault, then murder. Bill swore he had bawled George out and written him notes begging him to straighten up, get out of town, get lost in the river. But George was utterly willful, and he was a little cracked too. Witness the note he scribbled in lipstick on Miss Brown's bathroom wall: "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more." He wrote that in Bill's hand, like an expert forger.

Swaggering Sneak. On the night of Jan. 6, with the murders of Miss Brown and Mrs. Ross behind him, George came swaggering into Bill's room and made him help plan the murder of little Suzanne Degnan. Then he made Bill give him the paper on which the ransom note was written. Bill sweated with anxiety all night, and the next morning there it was in the papers.

George had done a horrible thing. When he came sneaking back to Bill's room later on, Bill chased him off to Texas. But George kept writing him letters (always copying Bill's script) and then he came back to Chicago and promptly started on more burglary. When a cop knocked him cold with a flowerpot in an apartment foray one night, George turned out to be Bill.

At week's end, Chicago was beginning to get on to this business of Bill's split personality. The drugstore D.A.s declared that Bill Heirens was either nuts, or the coldest murderer in the city's murder-studded history--and the hell with this George routine.

In his cell Bill fumed and sweated for lack of a witness. But all the people who had actually seen George had died of the view.

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