Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel Steve Hodel (Dutton)
This went on for six months, with every twist covered in breathless detail by the city’s five competing newspapers. Finally, in late June, police found the man they needed, or rather the boy: William Heirens, a 17-year-old University of Chicago student with a bad habit of committing petty burglaries. They held and grilled him for nearly a week before allowing him contact with the defense attorneys his parents had hired. They gave him Sodium Pentothal—”truth serum”—without his permission or the knowledge of his lawyers. They administered a lie detector test and dismissed the result as “futile”—though experts who examined the test years later said it showed Heirens answered truthfully that he didn’t kill Suzanne Degnan.
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The prosecutors openly admitted that they didn’t have enough admissible evidence to win a trial, so they pressed Heirens to accept a plea deal: no death penalty and concurrent rather than consecutive life sentences if he would confess to the Degnan killing and two others that had come to be associated with it, known collectively as the “Lipstick Murders” because of a note scrawled in red lipstick on one victim’s living room wall: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself.”
Now Heirens’s case is being revisited in a book by Steve Hodel, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective who has a new theory on who killed little Suzanne Degnan.
When Huston divorced his wife Dorothy, George took up with her. They wed and had four sons, including Steve, who remembers the mid-1940s as a glamorous time of parties and important people—Huston, Henry Miller, Man Ray.
Although Hodel cannot definitively place his father at the scene of every crime, he does establish that the doctor was quite capable of the necessary globe-hopping. He says George traveled east from LA multiple times between 1944 and ’46, trips that in those days were likely to include a stop in Chicago. In 1946, having taken a UN job in China (from which he was discharged after only seven months for unspecified “personal reasons”), he took a crash course in Chinese and traveled at least once to Washington, D.C. During the war years, Hodel says, the military’s top language school was headquartered at the University of Chicago. By the time of the Zodiac murders, George Hodel was an international businessman who traveled frequently to the U.S. from his base in Manila.
By all accounts, Heirens has been a perfect prisoner. He was the first person in Illinois to earn a four-year college degree from prison; he’s learned and taught TV repair, advised other inmates on their legal matters, and played an important role in improving and expanding prison education and library programs. Parole boards long ago conceded that he is completely rehabilitated. But every time he comes up for parole—more than 30 times to date—relatives of Suzanne Degnan come forward to protest, and the system defers to them.
