Could Convicted Serial Killer William Heirens Be Innocent?

I’ve written about more than my share of serial killers but William Heirens may be the first one who was actually innocent. Dubbed the Lipstick killer for a note he allegedly wrote at one of the crime scenes in 1945, he was the longest serving inmate in the U.S. prison system.

Bill Heirens confessed to three murders, including 43-year-old Josephine Ross and 32-year-old Francis Brown. But it was the kidnapping and killing of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan in early January 1946 that sent Chicago over the edge.

We may never know if William Heirens was guilty or innocent, but what has become crystal clear over the years is that his confession to three murders in 1946 tells us little about whether Heirens actually committed the crimes. Over the past 73 years, psychologists have learned a lot of truisms about human nature that fly in the face of common sense. One of them is that innocent people do confess to crimes they did not commit — a lot more often than we might think.

Who is Innocent?

According to the Innocence Project, about 1 out of 4 of their cases later proven innocent f alsely confessed at the time of the crime. In most cases, new DNA technology exonerated the false confessor. In others, authorities discovered the crime never happened (for example, when a missing…