Directions!

Okay, you’ve got some navigating to do. Stay on the pavement and follow it to the right. In 250 yards you’ll reach an intersection that you should take to the left. Take the next intersection after that to the right. Then walk forward 70 paces. Got it? A right, a left, and a right, then walk forward 70 paces.

This will sound random, but it’s the kind of thing I would like to know so I’ll tell you about it anyway. On the other side of the tall cemetery wall to your right is a residential neighborhood. Just on the other side of the wall, under the ‘L,’ is an apartment building where an infamous Chicago serial killer murdered his first victim.

Some of you just got way too excited about something so horrible! Shame on you. And, no, it isn’t H.H. Holmes. It’s not John Wayne Gacy either. Both, regrettably, are Chicago killers. No this was the lesser-known but very sinister spree of the Lipstick Killer.

On the night of June 4th, 1945, 43-year-old Josephine Ross entered her apartment at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue, just over the wall, but soon discovered she was not alone. Police later found Josephine murdered with a dress wrapped around her head and dozens of stab wounds over her body. She would become the first of three victims for the Lipstick Killer in the mid-1940s, so named for the crudely written lipstick messages he’d leave on the walls after attacking his victims, “For Heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

Though a man, William Heirens, would be convicted for the crimes and spend his long lifetime in prison for them, most historians believe the Lipstick Killer was never captured.