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This study of a particularly notorious series of crimes by an adolescent is a valuable addition to the case histories of sex murders. Heirens was a seventeen-year-old college student who killed two women and a six-year-old girl under very similar circumstances. Psychiatric studies showed that he had developed a fetishistic interest in women's clothes at the age of nine and began to steal them outside his home. He experienced sexual excitement when he put them on. At the age of twelve he entered houses through windows in order to secure clothes and soon found that he could obtain gratification in the act of making such entrances. If an emission occurred in this way, he would leave the house at once without taking anything with him. He struggled against the urge to commit burglaries and invented an imaginary character, George, who would instigate the forbidden acts. The murders were unplanned and occurred when he was disturbed while stealing.
Heirens felt no remorse for his murders but did feel guilty if an emission occurred during his burglaries. He denied masturbation or any intimacies with girls and was of the opinion that masturbation was more reprehensible than burglary. In his personal life, he was seclusive, read Kraff-Ebbing and Freud, and had a craving for power. Pictures of Nazi leaders adorned his sketch books and he was given to philosophic discussions in Nietzschean style in his notebooks. He sometimes contemplated suicide and made feeble and dramatic gestures in this direction after his arrest. He had a masochistic attitude toward pain, and neurological examinations showed profound hyposensitivity of a hysterical type.
Psychiatric and psychological studies convinced the examiners that there was no indication of a psychosis or of malingering, and that the disturbance was to be found in a hysterical personality.