Wuxtry! Read All About It!

Chicago's raucous dailies have never outgrown their Front Page days; last week they romped through the Heirens story like street urchins frolicking at an open hydrant. Scuffling for scoops in a mad, midsummer rough-&-tumble, they whooped it up as the crime news of the century, unloaded extra after extra on willing Chicagoans.

Confessional Cliches. As a running news story, it was short on facts. Fingerprints seemed to tie 17-year-old Collegian William George Heirens to the brutal Suzanne Degnan murder, perhaps to a couple of others. When word got around that he had talked (after an injection of sodium pentothal), headline writers" decided it was a confession, dusted off their favorite cliches about "truth serums."

The News and Hearst's Herald-American hit the street together with front-page layouts showing Heirens as a Dr. Jekyll (hair combed) and Mr. Hyde (hair mussed). He had not yet been charged with murder, but the Tribune airily convicted him: HOW HEIRENS SLEW 3.

Loop newsstand sales jumped as much as 50%. Sweltering shoppers forgot the heat (99.9 degrees) and bought two and three editions of their favorite papers. City deskmen were hoarse from answering readers' tips. Haggard, red-eyed city editors, living on the brink of collapse and in constant fear of being scooped, deployed every available man, woman and copy boy on the story. Wherever the state's attorney or defense attorney went, squads of legmen went too.

Woman's Intuition. In such times of crisis, baby-faced City Editor Harry Reutlinger of the Herald-American (TIME, May 20) makes himself feel better by making spectacular long-distance calls. Now straining for an exclusive "angle," he picked up the phone, summoned Mystery Writer Craig Rice from her Santa Monica home.

Before the week was out, he regretted it: the paper had decided Heirens was guilty. Craig Rice decided he was innocent, and said so in her stories: "He's the kind of boy you could trust your teen-age daughter with. . . . I keep wanting to call him 'Bill.' . . ."

"She hit town," moaned Reutlinger, "read about 10,000 clips and immediately she was big enough to have an opinion. She's working like a sonofabitch to prove he didn't do it. Well, these detective writers have to manufacture so damn much that they start living their plots. But what the hell? She's getting good material for a novel and people know her name. They read her stuff. But I certainly don't agree with her."

Hearstpapers illustrated her "thrilling, analytical stories" with Burris Jenkins cartoons and pictures of plump, popeyed Craig Rice looking for clues--i) in the Herald-American morgue, 2) crouched over the washtub where Suzanne Degnan's body was dissected. "I've fought like hell with the American, and I got so mad at Reutlinger that I almost punched him in the puss," said she. "But they're going to go along with me. . . . Heirens didn't do this. Call it woman's intuition. But if he did, then I'll just pack my bags quietly and steal out of town."

Storm Center. At the heart of all the whoopdedoo was a dead calm: nobody was excited in the quiet, blue-walled pressroom of the Criminal Courts Building where Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur laid the scene of their famed newspaper play. Grey survivors of Front Pager Hildy Johnson's day were at work on the story. Said 63-year-old Albert Benziger of the Herald-American: "This is without doubt the damnedest story we've ever had. Hildy would be having a hell of a time with it."

When Craig Rice swept in, imperiously demanding an exclusive interview with State's Attorney William J. Tuohy, she got nowhere. Said Tuohy: "I don't give exclusive interviews and if I did, I wouldn't give it to some stranger." Craig Rice was having the time of her life covering the case. Said she: "God, how I'd love to be the one to crack it. And maybe I will." A few days later she made good her promise to steal out of town.

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