Working on the Railroad
Was this tale based on Heirens’s confession? So far as he knew, he hadn’t made one. Maybe he’d confessed without knowing it after being injected with sodium pentothal, though the transcript of that interrogation has never surfaced. At any rate, there was no arguing with the Tribune. That paper would later boast: “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 had been indicted. So great was public confidence in the Tribune that other newspapers in Chicago reprinted the story solely because the Tribune had said it was so.”
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Newspapers are no happier reflecting on old sins than prosecutors are. In 1983, when a federal magistrate ordered Heirens released from prison, the Chicago press glanced backward. Articles in the Sun-Times and the Tribune reminded the public that this was the guy who’d lipsticked “catch me before I kill more,” and then the General Assembly resolved that Heirens remained “a danger to society” who should remain behind bars. Finally the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the magistrate.
Back in those good old days, reporters were the pals of cops and had the run of crime scenes. Warden’s pal Jim Tuohy, who broke into journalism in 1963, says an old-timer talked about going out to cover a murder and discovering another reporter lying drunk on the floor next to the corpse.
Adrienne Drell, a former Sun-Times courts reporter who recently went to work for Drizin, contributed a ten-page memo, “Convicted by the Press,” to the effort. “Prior to 1966,” she wrote, “the American media held a virtual unbridled license to publish or broadcast whatever reporters could get their hands on. The 1934 case of carpenter Bruno Hauptmann, convicted of the kidnap-murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, is illustrative. The frenzy of stories, many woven from sheer invention, created a climate that could only have resulted in Hauptmann’s conviction (and eventual execution)…. The same lynchmob type of circus atmosphere prevailed in 1946 when Heirens was brought in for questioning…and in 1954 when Ohio osteopath Sam Sheppard was convicted of the bludgeoning death of his wife Marilyn….But Sam Sheppard was luckier than William Heirens. He eventually won his freedom, and [in 1966] he also managed to change the law.” The Supreme Court overturned Sheppard’s conviction, on grounds, Drell noted, that “the original trial was conducted in a ‘Roman Holiday’ atmosphere.”
Neither does the collective memory of Chicago, or the institutional memory of Chicago journalism for that matter. More than a half century after the tumult died, the evil of William Heirens is an article of faith.
The way America went to bat for those two nice kids from Canada should make us proud. Sports columnists, of course, are paid handsomely to go off half-cocked, but no less than the editorial page of the New York Times immediately stood up for Sale and Pelletier. In an editorial, “A Duo Deprived,” the Times explained that “this injustice…was a throwback to the days of the cold war, when judges from the Soviet Union and its allies would reflexively support Russian skaters while Western judges would line up behind contestants from the United States.” As for the Western vote that failed to toe this line, it was cast not by an individual but by a nation. “France provided the swing vote on Monday, following its own cold-war custom of infuriating its friends.”
