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found in another sewer, and the torso in a third. The arms were discovered—also in a sewer—some weeks later. The case shocked the nation, but the police seemed unable to develop any definite leads.
    Six months later, on 26 June 1946, a young man walked into an apartment building in Chicago, and entered the apartment of Mr and Mrs Pera through the open door. Mrs Pera was in the kitchen preparing dinner. A neighbour who had seen the young man enter called to Mrs Pera to ask if she knew a man had walked into her apartment. The young man immediately left, but the neighbour called him to stop. Instead, he ran down the stairs, pointing a gun at the neighbour before running out of the building. Minutes later, he knocked on the door of a nearby apartment and asked the woman who answered for a glass of water, explaining that he felt ill. She sensed something wrong and rang the police. In fact, an off-duty cop had already seen the fleeing youth, and ran after him. When cornered, the young man fired three shots at him; all missed. As the on-duty police answered the call, the burglar and the cop grappled on the floor. Then one of the other policemen hit him on the head—three times—with a flowerpot, and knocked him unconscious.
    Their prisoner turned out to be 17-year-old William George Heirens, who had spent some time in a correctional institution for burglary. When his fingerprints were taken, they were found to match one found on the Degnan ransom note, and another found in the apartment of Frances Brown. In the prison hospital, Heirens was given the ‘truth drug’ sodium pentothal, and asked: ‘Did you kill Suzanne Degnan?’ Heirens answered: ‘George cut her up.’ At first he insisted that George was a real person, a youth five years his senior whom he met at school. Later, he claimed that George was his own invisible alter ego. ‘He was just a realization of mine, but he seemed real to me.’ Heirens also admitted to a third murder, that of Josephine Ross. In addition to this, he had attacked a woman named Evelyn Peterson with an iron bar when she started to wake up during a burglary, and then tied her up with lamp cord; he had also fired shots through windows at two women who had been sitting in their rooms with the curtains undrawn.
    The story of William Heirens, as it emerged in his confessions, and in interviews with his parents, was almost predictably typical of a serial sex killer. Born on 15 November 1928, he had been a forceps delivery. He was an underweight baby, and cried and vomited a great deal. At the age of seven months he fell down 12 cement steps into the basement and landed on his head; after that he had nightmares about falling. He was three years old when a brother was born, and he was sent away to the home of his grandmother. He was frequently ill as a child, and broke his arm at the age of nine. The family background was far from happy; his mother had two nervous breakdowns accompanied by paralysis, and his father’s business failed several times.
    Heirens matured sexually very early—he had his first emission at the age of nine. Soon after this, he began stealing women’s panties from clotheslines and basement washrooms, and putting them on. (After his arrest, police found 40 pairs of pink and blue rayon panties in a box in his grandmother’s attic.)
    He came to think of sex as something ‘dirty’ and forbidden. This was confirmed when, at the age of 13, he walked into the school washroom and found two boys playing sexually with a mentally retarded boy; he refused to join in. Being a good-looking boy, he was attractive to girls; on eight occasions he attempted some form of sex play, touching their breasts or pressing their legs, but this had the effect of upsetting him so much that he cried. There was a deep conflict between his sexual obsession and his rigid Roman Catholic upbringing. He found normal sexual stimulation repellent.
    From the age of 13 he had been burgling apartments,