In 1946, when I was six and my sister was four, a little girl named Suzanne Degnan was kidnapped from her parents’ home, not far from where we lived in Chicago.
Suddenly, I wasn’t walking to school by myself any longer. Our apartment building was only one block from the George B. Swift Elementary School. There was only one street to cross. And that corner was patrolled by an 8th grader, a large trustworthy boy who carried the flag into the assembly hall on special occasions.
But now my mother walked me to school, her face--like the faces of the other parents accompanying their children--tense and alert. No one said what had happened, But we all knew. We knew that a child like us had been murdered and cut into pieces. And those pieces had been distributed among the neighborhood sewers.
A friendly competition had begun among us, conducted out of our parents’ hearing. “There was a hand in Jerry’s sewer!”
“There was a foot in ours!”
One lucky kid had the head.
The man known as the Lipstick Killer had frightened our parents but not us.
We didn’t know that there had been other murders, nor that the Lipstick Killer had earned his name by using a lipstick to scrawl this plea next to one of his victims: “catch me before I kill more—I cannot control myself.”
I had nearly stopped thinking about Suzanne Degnan when, in the middle of one night, my sister Toby stood up in her crib and woke me by turning the light on. She could just reach the switch on the wall and was quite pleased with her new trick. So was I: this was clearly more fun than sleeping. We both giggled, as she flipped the light on and off, until a crash and a roar came from the other room. We weren’t afraid of the Lipstick Killer, but we were terrified of wolves.
“Wolves!” I hissed to Toby. “Get under your covers and lie very still. Don’t make a sound.”
We both held our breath as our parents burst into the room. “They’re gone!” my mother cried, “Oh, Ben, they’re gone.”
I had no name for what I heard in my mother’s voice, but I knew we had to tell her that we were OK. I threw off my blanket and sat up, alarmed by the tears on my mother’s face.
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Really well told
Evocative piece. That moment for you mother -- I can't imagine the horror she felt. What year did the Lipstick Killer appear? Where was your neighborhood? I grew up in Chicago and do recall a time when parents and neighbors escorted us the block and half to school. Every passing car felt like a threat, as the driver lurking at the wheel could be.....a killer. Then, we as a culture weren't awash in violence, making this time all the more frightening. Thank you for this piece.