Home Sweet Homicide: Was Your House or Apartment Once the Site of a Crime?

By Mark Saxenmeyer, FOX Chicago News

You've found the home of your dreams at a bargain basement price. Original hardwood floors, a brand new roof, and you even like the neighbors. There's got to be a catch!

There's a little-known loophole in Illinois real estate law. It turns out, no one ever has to tell you about the cold-blooded gunman or the vengeful psychopath who once committed an unthinkable crime on those original hardwood floors.

They may look like perfectly fine houses, places anyone might enjoy calling home, but something very bad once happened inside so-called ‘stigmatized’ homes. So bad, in fact, that some say there is no way anyone would ever, or should ever, live in stigmatized homes again. They're haunted, they claim, or ruined. They say the homes should be torn down and destroyed.

"It's something to talk about," said John Testa, who lives in the Pine Crest Apartment building at 3941 North Pine Grove Avenue.

Sixty five years ago, inside Testa's apartment, police and press called the vicious murder that occurred there "the crime of the century." The victim’s name was Frances Brown, one of three Chicagoans killed by William Heirens.

In December 1945, Heirens somehow snuck into apartment 611 and attacked Brown, who lived there. The two did not know each other; to this today the motive is unclear.

Today, Testa lives in the exact same studio. Aside from some bathroom and kitchen upgrades, the apartment looks very much like it did in 1945.

Heirens shot Brown twice, went to the kitchen and got a knife, and then stabbed her in the neck.
"She was in there," Testa said, pointing to the bathtub. "He bathed her after he killed her and cleaned her up."

Heirens became infamously known as The Lipstick Killer for what he wrote on the wall in apartment 611.

"For heavens sake", he scrawled with Frances Brown's lipstick, "catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself."

"I started like getting myself freaked out," Testa said. He now knows every detail about the lipstick killer, but only because he received a letter from FOX Chicago asking to discuss the violent incident.

Testa said his landlords never once mentioned the horrific history of the place he calls home.

"If they'd told me about what happened here, I don't think I would have rented this place," Testa said.

Ursula Bielski knows about apartment 611 at Pine Crest because she takes thousands of people past the building every year as part of a Chicago Hauntings tour she owns and runs. She's certain that building management would prefer everyone forget about the property's past.

"The owners really need to make sure they keep tenants, so probably the less said the better," Bielski said while touring Testa's apartment recently.

Mabel Guzman, the president-elect of Chicago Association of Realtors, says real estate agents, sellers and landlords in Illinois aren't required to disclose a history of violent crime to clients, buyers or potential tenants.

"If I know the answer and you ask me that question, I am going to answer it. I'll tell you everything," Guzman said, though she won't necessarily initiate the conversation out of fear a property or a neighborhood could be ‘red-lined’. Real estate agents need to be very careful about the nations' fair housing laws, she added.

Interestingly, the law does require disclosure about structural defects like cracks in the foundation, or environmental hazards like mold, lead-based paint and even previous production of methamphetamine in a home. But not murder.

Fox Chicago requested interviews with the current residents of a dozen so-called stigmatized homes in the Chicago. We reached out to property owners everywhere -- everything from the townhouse where Richard Speck strangled and stabbed eight student nurses in 1966 to the Oak Park home where mobster Sam Giancana was shot seven times in his basement in 1975. Most of the current residents never answered us, and some asked us -- even begged us -- not to not put their homes on the news again, and we've complied.

Other properties, like the historic Naperville mansion where Marilyn Lemak notoriously drugged and suffocated her three young children in 1999, have been given new life. North Central College took over the home two years ago and hopes to make it the official residence of its next president.

Still others, like the childhood home of singer/actress Jennifer Hudson remain in limbo. Representatives for Hudson would not comment on what she plans to do with the now-abandoned house, site of the murders of her family members in 2008.

"We do know that 25 to 30 percent of the population believes in ghosts, believes that they have seen ghosts, and I would suspect that being in a house in which someone was subjected to a violent death leaves behind some kind of aura,” said Dr. Arthur Lurigio, professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University. “I think people believe that if you don't leave the earth naturally, if it's a suicide, a homicide, an

accidental death, that spirit isn't resting and therefore, it still has a presence on your property and its going to affect your life adversely."

Bielski says the spirit of Louisa Luetgert definitely isn't resting. Bielski is scouring the bowels of a former sausage factory on West Diversey for signs that Luetgart's ghost might be hovering. Luetgert was murdered by her husband Adolph at the factory in 1897.

"Police found her skull and part of other parts of her body in the furnace here in the basement and also a ring of hers with her initials on it," said Bielski.

113 years later, this building has been converted into trendy condos and, according to Bielski, some residents have reported seeing a woman in a long dress from the late 1800s. Could it be Luisa? Well, who else could it be, right?

The former mansion of Marshall Field Jr., who was found shot to death in his bedroom in 1905, has also been divided up into condos. The people who live there now, like Kim Horowitz, say he's still living with them.

"Upstairs, water turns on by itself," Horowitz says. "And sometimes it smells like cologne from olden days."

Horowitz believes it's one thing to live in a place where the crime is nearly a century old, another if the crime had happened in her lifetime.

"If a murder had happened here five years ago, as opposed to a hundred, it would freak me out," she said.

At the Pine Crest Apartments, Testa now says he's tempted to demand a decrease in his $600-per-month rent.

"If I came in here when they first showed me the place and they said, 'here is the apartment, by the way the lipstick killer once killed here,' I would be like 'I don't need this place, there's 100 other apartments to look at," Testa said.

Full disclosure, he says, would be the right thing to do.

"I get why they don't disclose, but I think they should," he said.

A recent study of more than 100 known stigmatized houses for sale found that they sat on the market about 45 percent longer than other properties. Still, they eventually sold for only about three percent less than similarly priced and marketed homes.

In Chicago, though, there are some huge exceptions to that rule. One North Side home, in which a nationally publicized double-murder occurred about five years ago, sold for about $150,000 below the original asking price.

About half the states in the United States require sellers to disclose a home's so-called traumatic history, but some of those regulations mandate disclosure for only a certain amount of time after a crime has occurred.