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entering through the window, and experiencing sexual excitement—to the point of emission—as he did so. After this, he lost interest in underwear, and began to experience his sexual fulfilment by entering strange apartments through the window. He often urinated or defecated on the floor. He also began lighting small fires.
    He was arrested for the first time in the same year—1942—charged with 11 burglaries and suspected of 50; in many of them he had stolen guns and women’s dresses. He was sentenced to probation and sent to a semi-correctional Catholic institution. After a year there he transferred to a Catholic academy, where he proved to be a brilliant student—so much so that he was allowed to skip the freshman year at the University of Chicago.
    Back in Chicago, the sexual obsession remained as powerful as ever, and led to more burglaries. If he resisted the urge to burgle for long, he began to experience violent headaches. On one occasion, he put his clothes in the washroom and threw the key inside in order to make it impossible to go out; halfway through the night, the craving became too strong, and he crawled along the house gutter to retrieve his clothes.
    Once inside an apartment, he reached such a state of intense excitement that any interruption would provoke an explosion of violence. This is why he knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious with an iron bar when she stirred in her sleep. On another occasion he was preparing to enter what he thought was an empty apartment when a woman moved inside; he immediately fired his gun at her, but missed.
    He raped none of the victims—the thought of actual sexual intercourse still scared him. Sexual fulfilment came from the ‘forbiddenness’, the excitement of knowing he was committing a crime. After the ejaculation, he felt miserable; he believed that he was a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. He even invented a name for his Mr Hyde—‘George’. Although he later admitted that the invention of an alter ego was partly an attempt to fool the psychiatrists, there can be no doubt that he felt that he was periodically ‘possessed’ by a monster. This is why he scrawled the message in lipstick on the wall after killing Frances Brown. It may also explain why he eventually courted arrest by wandering into a crowded apartment building in the late afternoon and entering a flat in which a married woman was cooking dinner as she waited for her husband to return from work. Mr Hyde was turning into Dr Jekyll.
    In July 1946, Heirens was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment in Joliet Penitentiary.

    Ressler states that as a nine-year-old boy he used to fantasise about catching Suzanne Degnan’s killer—although he admits that the fantasy was a way of coping with his fear. But the detective fantasies lasted all that year of Heirens’s arrest.
    After a period in the army, Ressler took a course in criminology and police administration at Michigan State University. But when he applied for a job with the Chicago police force, he was passed over; they were not interested in recruits with too much schooling because they ‘might make trouble’. So he re-enlisted into the army.
    Posted to Germany, he became provost marshal of a platoon of MPs in the small town of Asschaffenburg, and, in effect, its chief of police. Back in the US, four years later, he opted to remain a soldier when offered a job as CID commander of a plainclothes investigation unit at Fort Sheridan, near Chicago. He was in charge of a complex operation to penetrate a narcotics ring, when a number of his undercover agents came close to being exposed and murdered. (They were posing as troublemakers awaiting dishonourable discharge.) Finally, in exchange for signing on for two more years, the army paid for him to compete his master’s degree in police administration, and he applied to join the FBI. It was 1970, he was 32, and his real career was about to commence.
    An irritating but oddly significant incident almost