Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Chicago, William Heirens, 17, in custody on burglary and assault charges since late June and indicted in latter July for the murders of Suzanne Degnan, 6, on January 7, Frances Brown, 33, on December 10, 1945, and Josephine Ross, 43, on June 3, 1945, had confessed to the Degnan murder and would confess to the other two murders as well.

He stated that he had strangled the little girl in her bed after selecting the house at random because of an open window in her bedroom. When he saw the little girl in bed, he killed her, though she had said nothing and remained asleep. He claimed to be in a daze and had been drinking. He then took her body down the ladder by which he had entered the dwelling, to a nearby apartment building basement where he dismembered it and then scattered the remains in sewer drains through the neighborhood. Next, he wrote the ransom note demanding $20,000 so that, he said, the parents would be able to hold out some hope that their daughter remained alive.

Mr. Heirens would subsequently recant his confession, saying that the only reason he had confessed was to avoid the death penalty, an undeniable fact. He would ultimately die in prison in March, 2012. The shoddy police work in the case, which included beating of one early suspect, a janitor, and public implication of a "known woman" as the probable "lipstick killer" in the other two murders, as well as other supposedly connected "lipstick murders" not tied to Mr. Heirens, undermines the physical evidence against Mr. Heirens, which consisted of handwriting samples of dubious value, and fingerprints and palm prints, supposedly on the ransom note and at the scene of the Brown murder.

Indeed, a careful reading of the excerpt on the page from the transcript of the confession by Mr. Heirens, including such phrases as "to my knowledge" regarding matters which he should have known without question as the killer, suggests that he may well have confessed to actions he did not commit. Mr. Heirens was highly intelligent, qualifying for early admission at age 16 to the University of Chicago, but whether he was clever enough as an adolescent to provide a confession which, on its face, lacks credibility, to spare himself the chair, is another issue.

It appears doubtful that a youngster who had been drinking could do the things he would have needed to do to dispose of the body without leaving in the process any clues as to his identity, all performed, as he claimed, in a daze, until a manhole cover fell on his finger and woke him up a little.

In Pell City, Ala., a crowd of 150 to 200 people gathered at the City Hall, demanding removal of the police chief and his two assistants, based on the alleged beating administered to a white prisoner. The police chief admitted that an officer had struck the prisoner twice with the back of his hand after he had resisted arrest and used abusive language. After a long meeting with the City Council by a representative committee from the crowd, the Council voted to suspend the police chief and his two assistants.

Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated that the American Legation in Beirut, Lebanon, had been heavily damaged by a hand grenade on Sunday night. The Lebanese Government had placed guards around the Legation.

Mr. Acheson also stated that the President had not yet made a decision on the British plan for partition of Palestine and that the special Cabinet Committee, which had met with the British counterpart regarding the plan, was scheduled to meet in Washington with an older American group before meeting with the President to discuss the issue.

In Paris, bickering took place between Secretary of State Byrnes and Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov regarding the rules of procedure for determining voting requirements, whether bringing the question before the Rules Committee required a simple majority or a two-thirds majority. The proposal had passed by a simple majority, to determine whether ultimately a two-thirds vote would be required to determine treaties and whether the Foreign Ministers Council would have veto power.

The Federal Government charged in an anti-trust suit that 37 insurance companies, savings banks, and commercial banks had conspired to keep New York City rents high and participate in other practices against the public interest. A special Grand Jury had recommended the action.

Voters in Missouri, Virginia, and Kansas went to the polls in primaries held in each of those states this date. Of interest was the race in Missouri pitting incumbent Congressman Roger Slaughter against Enos Axtell, backed by President Truman and the James Pendergast machine.

Civilian Production Administrator John Small contested the contention of Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace that the country was headed for a boom-to-bust cycle, and instead stated that if production could remain high without strikes, unprecedented prosperity lay in prospect. With 57 million people employed, he said, the country was scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel—which must have made the unemployed veterans of the war feel mighty good.

Mr. Wallace, remarking that though his goal of 60 million jobs had been achieved, it had only come about from inflationary pressures which were temporary, that full employment would not last long.

United, TWA, Braniff, and Northwest Airlines received commendations for safety for flying without a fatality during the previous year. United had not suffered a fatality since May 1, 1942. Fourteen other smaller airlines also had perfect safety records for the year.

Howard Hughes, however, had a near fatal accident on his own.

In London, a man pleaded innocent—or, more properly, not guilty—to charges of murdering two women. The first victim had been found on June 21, suffocated, struck on the jaw, lashed bloodily with a riding crop, bitten and mutilated. The second victim was found stripped, having been assaulted and dragged along the ground, left outside a resort of royalty and peerage, at Bournermouth.

Thirteen persons were overcome and nearly a hundred endangered in Kalamazoo, Mich., when a gas line ruptured at a plant, expelling deadly chlorine gas.

The gambling ship Bunker Hill, owned by Tony Cornero, was scheduled to begin operation several miles off Long Beach, California, this date. That, despite a warning by the District Attorney that the ship would be closed down by one means or another. Mr. Cornero contended that the State had no jurisdiction over his operation while outside the statutory limit. He stated that he would call the Coast Guard if California sought to interfere with his business. A previous gambling ship he had operated had been closed down in 1939 by then California Attorney General Earl Warren.

Walter Hook and Associates of Charlotte was awarded the design contract for the new veterans hospital to be built in the city.

R. J. Reynolds II, recently divorced, had obtained a license to marry Marianne Byrne, an actress.

On the editorial page, "Opportunity for the GOP" comments on the unusual recommendation by New Orleans Mayor DeLesseps Morrison that the South adopt a two-party system. Mr. Morrison was a successful Democrat, his family having held offices for generations in Louisiana. But he believed that a strong two-party system in Louisiana would bring national attention to officeholders, as the state would no longer be considered in the party bag and would thus merit Federal patronage.

The News, as with the Mayor of New Orleans, was Democratic by birth and heritage, but welcomed a vibrant two-party system. It suggests to GOP chairman Carroll Reece that North Carolina might provide fertile ground to begin a drive to form a wedge through the Democratic Solid South.

"Higher Wages for Textile Workers" comments on the facts that nearly every textile worker in the South had received a wage hike of eight cents per hour, and that there was an ensuing debate as to who was responsible. The manufacturers associations contended that it was voluntary to meet the higher cost of living and in keeping with a tradition of sharing of higher profits in flush times. But the labor unions claimed that it was in direct response to AFL and CIO organizing efforts in the South, seeking to head off those efforts. It had come two days after the Textile Workers Union of America had prepared formal demands for a wage increase on mills under CIO contract.

"The Watchdogs from Tarheelia" comments on a piece by the Washington correspondent of The Chicago Sun, noting that North Carolina had replaced New York as the financial center of the country under the Truman Administration for the fact that Robert Doughton of North Carolina was chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, O. Max Gardner was Undersecretary of the Treasury, James E. Webb was new Director of the Budget, and Lindsay Warren was Comptroller General.

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Cool as a Cucumber", wonders at how Senator Clyde Hoey always managed to keep cool when the rest of humanity was sweltering in the summer heat. It concludes that he did not seem to have the same sort of glands as the rest of humanity, but ventures further that it was also a product of his equanimous temperament, being not temperamental.

Drew Pearson, reporting from Paris, again reviews the Paris Peace Conference, this time describing each of three closed sessions in brief. In one meeting, Secretary Byrnes learned that Russia was selling captured German arms to Sweden for resale to Argentina, violating U.S. policy of keeping arms away from the Fascist Peron Government. Mr. Byrnes was planning to file a protest with Russia.

In a second meeting, V.M. Molotov was placing pressure on Mr. Byrnes to provide formal and permanent recognition of Soviet control of the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, contending that FDR and Prime Minister Churchill had underwritten the cession at both Tehran, in November, 1943, and at Yalta in February, 1945. But Mr. Byrnes thus far was not yielding the point.

Marquis Childs states that Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia was more assured of re-election than any candidate in 1946, thanks to his efficient political machine. There was no room for an uncouth Talmadge in that gentlemanly environment. Yet, Senator Byrd appeared to resent the intrusion of the CIO PAC, though it had little influence in Virginia.

Peter Edson again looks at the difficulty of the President to attract good people to Government positions, this time focusing at the Council of Economic Advisers to administer the Full Employment Act. The President was still searching, though the act had been signed into law on February 20.

A letter finds understandable the reaction of the newspaper in "Operation McMinn Can't Be Justified", praising the ends sought in the violent revolt to retrieve the ballot boxes seized by the local Tennessee political machine, but not the means of achieving them. But the writer also finds the newspaper to be missing the practical point. He says that McMinn County was so corrupted by the political machine in power, that there was no resort to democracy to be had, even to challenge the election results, with the Sheriff's men controlling for a decade the entire county and all the processes by which votes were counted and determined. The only resort left, he finds, was revolution.

He suggests that there were two or three other counties in Tennessee with similar ruling cliques which would look eagerly for example to the results in McMinn.

The letter writer forgets that the people of the county could have, after exhausting state remedies, challenged the result in Federal Court as denying Equal Protection under the laws pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment. While time consuming, it would have made the point far more effectively than a military coup, which only serves to put one machine in place of another.

If everyone thought as the veterans in McMinn County, then we suppose there would have been a four-year civil war in the country, with a thousand points of McMinn-it Men, in the wake of the 2000 election.

A letter finds the battle in Athens, Tennessee, a taste of things to come, that the former G.I.'s were not going to tolerate being taken lightly. There were sixteen million veterans and if properly organized, "nothing can stop them."

Woh there, pardner. There are another 125 million people to be counted in the country. You begin to sound as a young fellow in a Munich Beer Hall in 1923. Suppose you just put your shooting iron on the table there, settle down, and wait for election day.

A letter also endorses the action of the G.I.'s in Athens, finding contest of election frauds, as in North Carolina, to be usually futile.

The editors respond that, while finding many faults with North Carolina's election machinery, it had never found a problem which could not be corrected by aroused public opinion. Things, it concedes, might be different in Tennessee, but if the people of Shelby County were to determine to oust Boss Ed Crump from his position of power, they could do so, and without guns.

"If our system of government has so degenerated that justice can be obtained only by armed revolution we might as well scrap the whole business and start over."

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