In 1982 Dolores Kennedy’s father, an attorney, told her he had met William Heirens while visiting a client at the Vienna prison and was deeply impressed with the man. He suggested she go see him sometime. “It seemed kind of strange that he would tell me that,” says Kennedy, 52, an Oak Park realtor and former legal secretary. “He hadn’t talked much about his business activities or made requests of me before.”
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A peppy, articulate, highly organized woman, Kennedy is cofounder and chair of the Parole for Heirens Committee, a loose aggregation of people concerned about criminal justice, including Bryant Feather, chairman of the criminal justice department at Chicago State University; James Doherty, an assistant Cook County public defender; and Norval Morris, professor of criminology at the University of Chicago and a nationally recognized expert on sentencing and parole. The committee’s aim is to assist Heirens’s legal efforts and counteract his longstanding image as a demon incarnate.
“We make no judgment about Bill’s guilt or innocence,” says Kennedy, “although I think there’s every possibility he was not guilty. If he was responsible, he was a very sick 17-year-old. But that’s not what he is now.”
In 1959 William Witherspoon shot and killed a Chicago policeman, was sentenced to capital punishment, and spent 20 years on the Illinois death row. In 1979 a federal court reduced that sentence and he was granted a parole. An outspoken member of the Parole for Heirens Committee, Witherspoon has vivid recollections of the man he knew at Stateville. “This is a guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps,” he says. “And he responded to everybody’s need. An inmate would come to him with some insignificant question on his court case, and he’d always take it seriously. He wasn’t out in the yard playing baseball or lifting weights. He was hitting the law books or talking to some guy.”
