40 Years Ago Today: Richard Speck, the Mass Murderer

Richard Speck, police mugshot in 1965.

A mass murderer, Richard Speck, in July of 1966, killed eight student nurses in a single night in their south Chicago townhouse. He was eventually caught and died in 1991 in prison.

Born in Monmouth, Illinois on December 6, 1941, Richard Speck was the youngest child in a large family. His father died while he was very young, and Speck's mother remarried. Speck's stepfather was a heavy drinker who despised Speck and often made him the target of his drunken belligerance.

Raised primarily in Dallas, Texas, Speck dropped out of school and became a father at the age of 19. He had started committing small crimes while in his early teens, and by the age of 20 had amassed a forminable criminal record. Eventually wanted by the authorities in Texas on suspicion of several others, Speck eventually fled the area, coming to the Chicago, Illinois area with the hope of finding work.

While in Chicago, he stayed with his sister and brother-in-law. He attempted to find work on the city's southeast side, which in 1966 was a major seaport. His efforts proved fruitless, and Speck spent much of his time hanging out at dingy taverns, drinking and passing the time. The union hall where he had registed for a job as a merchant seaman was directly across the street from a townhouse where several student nurses lived. They all worked at South Chicago Community Hospital, a facility that was about one mile away. During his stint in the area, Speck had seen them coming and going from the house.

On the night of July 13, 1966, Speck spent the early portion of the evening at a bar called The Shipyard Inn. He was staying in a rooming area above the bar. About ten-thirty, having consumed several drinks, he donned dark clothes and departed for the townhouse, about a 30 minute walk. Once there, he managed to open the screen door, walk upstairs, and began talking to several nurses that were home. He told them that he would not hurt them and merely wanted money to go to New Orleans, where he ostensibly had plans to catch a boat.

After approximately one hour, however, Speck began binding the nurses with bedsheet strips that he had torn with his switchblade knife. Frightened into submission by the knife and gun Speck carried, the nurses put up little resistance. Though there were only a few nurses when Speck first arrived, there were now seven, others having arrived home from work or dates.

Finally, two more nurses, Mary Ann Jordan and Suzanne Farris, arrived in the townhouse shortly before midnight. Speck was caught off guard and encounted resistance from them. In another room, he killed them violently with his knife, stabbing them repeatedly. He also killed another nurse who he had brought into the room.

The savage butchery never stopped. Speck took each nurse from the upper bedroom where they had been bound and brought them, one by one, into various rooms of the townhouse. He killed each of them, most by strangulation, some by stabbing. After each killing, he washed his hands in the bathroom on the upper level.

During times when Speck was out of the bedroom, however, a nurse named Corazon Amurao had managed to slither under a bunkbed and hide. Speck apparently forgot that Cora had done so, and he left the townhouse at about 3:30 a.m. on July 14, having murdered 8 of the nine nurses he had encountered that night.

Through a bizarre chain of events, Speck was captured after a massive manhunt. He was tried and convicted in 1967 of the murders and originally sentenced to die. The prosecution, led by Assistant State's Attorney William J. Martin, presented such a solid case that the jury took only 49 minutes of deliberating to find Speck guilty. However,with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to abolish the death penalty in 1972, Speck would not be executed. He was instead resentenced to 8 life terms. Though he would come up for parole several times, he was never released from prison. He died in December of 1991, a day short of his 50th birthday.

I remember this guy quite well. After the murders were over, Speck decided to hide out in a near north side hotel where he in his drunken stupor, attempted to commit suicide. Although police by this time had been tipped off to his identity -- if not his name -- and searched intensely for him they were unable to find him. When he unsuccessfully attempted his suicide, the hotel desk clerk called for an ambulance and Speck was taken to Cook County Hospital. It was in the hospital that one of the emergency medics on duty recognized the tatoo on his arm and told police. This was about a day or two following the mass murders.

About 1985, while Speck was in the Statesville Prison (a maximum security prison outside of Chicago, near Joliet, Illinois that a rather notorious videotape was sent anonymously to Channel 2, WBBM-TV, CBS in Chicago. A reporter at that time for Channel 2 -- Bill Kurtis, now of A&E fame, was assigned to review the videotape and report on it. The videotape showed a homosexual sex-orgy going on in the Statesville Prison and considerable drinking by several prisoners, including Richard Speck. Speck was both being sodomized by other prisoners and fellating some of them. Speck said "if they knew how much fun I would have when I was sent here, they probably would have figured out some way to give me the death penalty instead." . Everything was possible in Statesville in those days, and Speck had benefitted by hormone treatments which had given him a HUGE female breast, which he shook at the videocamera while making his brag about 'all the fun I am having while in here.'

That videotape was responsible for a major overhaul in the management of Statesville, with about half the staff either getting fired or resigning. Speck died in 1991 with full-blown HIV/AIDS, and a liver condition brought on by drinking all the time he was there in prison.