Yesterday’s News: The Wrong Man in Jail?
Said a police lieutenant afterward, “He was obviously traumatized and confused by the entire incident.”
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Arrested six months later in a burglary attempt–clearly a very troubled teenager, Heirens was a habitual burglar–he was questioned by police for six days before being charged, no lawyer at his side much less a parent. To make him open up, the police illegally injected him with sodium pentothal. When he passed a lie detector test, police suppressed the results. The prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the press collaborated with each other, Heirens’s attorneys urging him to confess while the papers took his guilt for granted. As Heirens continued to insist he had killed nobody, a copyrighted exclusive under the byline of the Tribune’s George Wright began:
Heirens was shipped off to Joliet and he’s been in prison ever since. The Tribune patted itself on the back. “For the first time in newspaper history, the detailed story of how three murders were committed, naming the man who did them, was told before the murderer had confessed or was indicted. . . . For a while Heirens maintained his innocence, but the world believed his guilt. The Tribune had said he was guilty.”
So we called Ann Marie Lipinski, the new metro editor. She told us she’d been on her new job all of five hours and hadn’t given William Heirens a moment’s thought. We said she ought to, and added that there was a time when city editors would have jumped on a story like this. Is that some sort of insult? she wondered.
The man had written a book and Kart told him to send it in. But there have been any number of personal accounts of the Holocaust, and Kart feared that nothing would make this one exceptional. And nothing did.
We’d have added that any newspaper looking for a wrong to right should give William Heirens a long look. Kart is certainly correct about a mere review not being the most appropriate response. At the moment, the Parole for Heirens Committee, which Kennedy founded, is after the Chicago Police Department to turn over an old set of fingerprints that might either prove Heirens’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt or discredit the only significant physical evidence there was against him.
