"William Heirens: His Day In Court" (Dolores Kennedy) 4

It has been the contention of Heirens for a long time now that he was innocent of the crimes he was convicted of in the mid 1940's, that his "confession" was coerced and brutalized out of him by the Chicago police, that his "defense" conspired with the prosecution, and that he should have been released long ago and hasn't been because of the political nature of our parole system.

Kennedy does present a plausible case. Certainly in that pre-Miranda era, I'm sure a great many suspects were brutalized into confessions. Also, handwriting analysis has shown that Heirens wasn't the man who wrote in lipstick on the wall of Frances Brown's apartment after she was murdered there, "For Heavens Sake Catch Me Before I Kill More I Cannot Control Myself." And in his "confessions", reprinted in the appendix, Heirens does appear confused and disoriented, almost as if he's being coached by the detectives questioning him.

Still, I'm left with doubts. Heirens was not Peter Reilly, the hapless Connecticut youth who was coerced and manipulated into a "confession" after his mother was found murdered in their Falls Village home in 1973, and was assuredly innocent of the crime (he was ultimately exonerated of the murder, no thanks to the Connecticut State Police). Even if he isn't a murderer, Heirens was a strange, strange youth. He burglarized numerous apartments and homes in the Chicago area not so much for the money but because it gave him a "sexual thrill" that often led to "an emission." This isn't to suggest that teenage burglars with sexual problems can't be manipulated by the police (and this is the Chicago police we're talking about) into confessions of murders they didn't actually commit, but it's harder "to buy" than it is in the case of someone like Reilly, who had no criminal record and simply seemed to be a shy, passive youth readily available to be taken advantage of by authorities more interested in a conviction than in seeing justice done or a brutal murder solved.

Sometimes the minutiae of the Heirens case, and all the legal complications that occurred over the years, proved tedious reading for me personally, but overall it's a compelling book, and certainly the most impressively researched chronicle of this notorious case that's ever been written. Also, thoughtful questions of rehabilitation and redemption are raised. Even if Heirens is guilty of the murders, is the concept of rehabilitation a reality within the American penal system, and in American society, or is it just a chimera that people like to pay lip service to without really ever considering? Certainly, if rehabilitation is possible, it would seem that Heirens has rehabilitated himself. Then again, if I were one of the relatives of those he was convicted of killing, I don't know that I could feel so charitably towards him, rehabilitated or not.

Heirens is still alive, although his health isn't good, and it doesn't seem reasonable to suppose, at this point in time, that he'll ever walk the streets of the Free World again.

Is he innocent? I still don't know, but the book did succeed in raising a lot of deeply troubling questions for me.