In 1946, Bill Heirens went to prison as Chicago's notorious Lipstick Killer. Born in 1928, Heirens was a troubled teen thief who continued to burgle homes even after enrolling at the University of Chicago. Police arrested him during one such crime on June 26, 1946.

At the time, Chicago police were under tremendous public and political pressure to find the so-called Lipstick Killer. A year earlier, a housewife had been stabbed in her North Side apartment, and in December of 1945 another woman was shot and stabbed in her Pine Grove Avenue apartment. On that occasion, the killer had left a scrawled note in the victim's lipstick: "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself." A month later, a six-year-old girl was kidnapped from her North Side home; her dismembered body parts were found in the sewers of her North Side neighborhood.

Heirens was subjected to six days of interrogation and injected with truth serum; he still denied committing any murder. Police told him they had evidence that tied him to the crimes, including matching handwriting and a bloody fingerprint. His lawyers believed he was guilty and urged him to accept a plea bargain in which he would be granted immunity from Death Row if he confessed. Later evidence linked a known child molester, who frequented the neighborhood where the little girl lived, more concretely to the slayings. Heirens became the first inmate in Illinois to earn a bachelor of arts degree while incarcerated. His next parole hearing was scheduled for 2001.