This week, Gina covers the case of Richard Speck. A crime that defined the century and shocked the country. When Richard Speck arrived in Chicago in 1966 no one would have imagined he would systimatically rape, torture, and kill 8 innocent victims. What drove him to commit his crimes and how would he pay?
Richard Benjamin Speck was born on December 6th, 1941 in Kirkwood, Illinois. He was the seventh child born to Benjamin & Mary Speck. Throughout his childhood he had a very close bond with his father and the two spent a lot of time together. Sadly, in 1947 when Speck was six years old, his father died at the age of 53 from a heart attack. A few short years later, Speck's mother remarried insurance salesman Carl Lindberg. Carl was a Texas native so, Speck and his younger sister Carolyn moved with their mother to Santo, Texas. After a little over a year of living in Santo, the family moved to Dallas. Carl drank excessively and had 25 year long criminal history, which included multiple drunk driving arrests. At the age of 12, Speck began drinking alcohol, and also began getting into more and more trouble, leading to his first arrest at age 13 for trespassing.
Speck attended Dallas public schools from 4th-8th grade, where he really struggled academically, so much so that he had to repeat the eighth grade, reportedly because he refused to speak in front of the class because he feared people staring at him. At 15 years old he was getting drunk nearly every single day, and continued to rack up a criminal record. In 1957, he started his freshman year at Crozier Technical High School, unfortunately he failed every single subject in his first semester, and then did not go back for the second semester, and by 16 he officially dropped out of school. Over the next few years he worked various odd jobs and racked up about a dozen arrests.
In August of 1960 he began working at the 7-Up bottling company in Dallas. He did pretty well in this position and would end up working there until the summer of 1963. In 1961 he attended the Texas State fair where at 19, he met 15 year old Shirley Malone and the two quickly began dating. After a whirlwind three week long romance, Shirley beame pregnant, she moved into the home Speck shared with his mother, r, and sister and brother-in-law. On January 19th, 1962, Richard and Shirley married. They welcomed their daughter Robbie Lynn Speck on July 5th, 1962, however, Speck was not present at the birth because he was serving a 22-day long jail sentence for disturbing the peace after a drunken arrest.
A year later, at 21 years old Speck was sentenced to three years in prison after he was convicted for forging and cashing in a co-workers paycheck and burglarizing a grocery store. He served 16 months at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, before he was released on parole on January 2nd of 1965. Exactly one week later on January 9th, at 2:00 in the morning he attacked a woman in a parking lot with a 17 inch knife. A few minutes before police arrived at the scene he fled, however they quickly found him and arrested him for aggravated assault and a parole violation, and he was sentenced to 16 months in prison which he again served at the prison in Huntsville. He was paroled after six months and released in July of 1965. After his release he was hired by the Patterson Meat Company as a delivery driver. Within three months had gotten into six accidents and was finally terminated after he didn’t show up for a shift.
Around this time, Speck and Shirley separated, so Speck then moved in with a 29 year old single mother of three. And basically she let me live there under the condition that he babysit her kids while she worked her bartending job at one of his favorite bars, Ginny’s Lounge. A month or so later, while at Ginny’s Lounge he got into a knife fight and stabbed a man. He was again arrested and charged with aggravated assault. His mother paid for his defense attorney, who was then able to get the assault charge reduced to disturbing the peace. Speck was found guilty, fined $10, which he failed to pay, so he spent three days in jail for that. In March of 1966, things seemed to be looking up for Speck, and he had managed to gather enough money to purchase a used car. The night after he purchased the car, he drove to a grocery store where he stole 70 cartons of cigarettes, proceeded to then sell the cigarettes from his trunk in said store's parking lot and then abandoned his car. The police obviously were called and were able to trace the car back to Speck, they then issued a warrant for his arrest on the charge of burglary. At 24 years old, this arrest would be his 42nd arrest in Dallas, which most likely meant he wouldn’t be able to wriggle his way out of this charge like he had the last and would probably get sent to prison again. So, his sister and mother helped come up with a plan. On March 9th, 1966 his family drove him to a bus station in Dallas, where he boarded a bus headed for Chicago.
In Chicago, he stayed with one of his older sisters Martha and her family. After a few days he headed for his childhood town of Monmouth, where he stayed with a few family friends. His older brother Howard resided in Monmouth and worked as a carpenter, and managed to get Speck a job with him. A few weeks later, he received news that his ex-wife Shirley had remarried, and this essentially sent him into an angry drunken episode that lasted a few days before reaching its climax when he ended up threatening a man at knife point in a bathroom in a bar in GulfPort, Illinois. He was arrested and spent the night in jail until he sobered up. In the middle of the night on April 3rd, 1966, Speck broke into the home of 65-year-old Virgil Harris. He tied her up, blindfolded her, raped her, then tore through her home where he stole $2.50 that she had made from babysitting earlier that night. He then fled the scene. Virgil was able to contact authorities where she described her attacker as a 6 foot tall white man who “spoke very softly with a Southern drawl.”
On April 9th, Speck visited Frank’s Place, a bar he frequented, where near closing time he saw 32-year-old bartender Mary Kay Pierce leaving the bar for the night. Now not all details are entirely clear, what we do know is that Speck beat Mary Kay to death, Hitting her so hard in the abdomen that her liver ruptured, thus causing her death. He then placed her body in an empty hog house which he had helped build at his carpenter job that was located directly behind the bar. Mary Kay was reported missing on April 13th, with her body also being found that same day. Because of his connection to the hog house, police did question him regarding Mary Kay’s death. After he collected his paycheck on April 15th, he skipped town. After learning this, police investigated the boarding room he had been staying in where they discovered multiple personal items that had been taken from Virgil Harris’s home during her attack.
A week later he went back to Chicago where he again stayed with his older sister Martha and her husband Gene. However his sister and her family were not aware that Speck fled from Monmouth for killing someone, he instead made up this story where he was put in a situation where because it was so hard to find work and drug usage was so high, he essentially was being forced to sell drugs, which he said he didn’t want to get involved thus why he had to come stay with them in Chicago. Gene had served in the Navy and thought with his connections he would be able to get Speck a job with the Merchant Marines. Speck applied to the U.S. Coast guard, and after submitting an application that included fingerprints, photographs, and physical approval, he was offered an apprentice position on Inland Steel’s “Clarence B. Randall '' which operated as a bulk ore lake freighter. Speck left on his first voyage on April 30th, unfortunately he got appendicitis so by May 3 that transported him to a hospital in Hancock, Michigan where he underwent an emergency appendectomy. After some time to recover from the operation, on May 20th he rejoined his crew and headed off on his second voyage. He was kicked off the voyage on June 15th after he got drunk and got into a fight with one of the boat’s officers. So he traveled through Michigan for a few weeks and by the end of June he made it back to Chicago to once again stay with his sister and her family.
On June 30th, Gene accompanied Speck to the National Maritime Union building at 2335 E. 100th St on Chicago’s south side to apply for a Merchant Mariner's Card, which is basically just a kind of credential that says you have the training to work on a ship. About a week later, Richard returned to pick up his card and applied for crew position for an upcoming berth, but a seaman with more seniority was chosen over Speck. A few days later his sister told him, lhe had overstayed his welcome, so he found a room in a boarding house in close proximity to the NMU building where he awaited news of a crew placement. On July 12th, Speck was notified that he was chosen for an assignment on an oil tanker SS Sinclair Great Lakes, but something happened where he didn’t check in quickly enough so they gave his spot to someone else. So now he ran out of money so he spent the night in an unfinished house.
He met up with his sister Martha and Brother in Law Gene the next day at an elementary a block or so from the NMU building, which was across the street from a series of townhouses that were used by Chicago Community Hospital student nurses. Martha gave Speck $25 to help tie him over while he continued waiting for a placement on a crew. Speck took the money his sister gave him to get a boarding house room and then went day drinking. By the evening he approached fellow bar goer, 53-year-old Ella Mae Hooper by knife point,brought her back to his room at the boarding house, raped her, then stole a .22 caliber revolver she had been carrying. He then dressed in all black, armed himself with his pocket knife, a hunting, and the stolen revolver and headed back out to drink. At around 10:30 am he left the bar he was at and walked about a mile and a half until he made his way towards the elementary school he had met his sister and brother in law at earlier in the day.
Around 11:00pm on July 13th, 1966, 24 year old Richard Speck approached a townhouse that served as a dormitory for nursing students located at 2319 E. 100th st. He broke in through a window and made his way up to the bedrooms. He knocked on the first door, and 23-year-old Filipina exchange student Corazon “Cora” Amurao opened her door to find Speck dressed in black with a gun in his hand. He then went room by room and hered up the other students which included Merlita Gargullo, 23, Valentina Pasion, 23, Patricia Matusek, 20, PAmela Wilkening, 20, and Nina Jo Schmale, 24. He forced all the girls into one room where he tore up a set of bedsheets and tied up the girls hands and feet. The girls believed that if they remained calm and quiet that he would too and hopefully everything would be fine. Then, Speck led each girl out of the room, one by one. The girls remained calm as they were let out but the girls could also hear muffled cries for help after each girl was taken into the other room. As Speck continued his brutal and vicious attacks, Cora Amurao managed to roll under one of the beds in the room they were being kept in.
Meanwhile, two other students returned home for the night. 21-year-old Suzanne Farris was heading towards her bedroom when Speck snuck upon her and stabbed her to death. A minute or two later, 20-year-old Mary Ann Jordan entered the home and Speck attacked her and stabbed her to death. A little while later, 22-year-old Gloria Jean Davy returned home after spending the night out with her boyfriend. Upon her arrival, Speck attacked her, raped her and sexually brutalized her before he strangled her to death. Because the last three victims arrive at separate times, Speck actually lost count of the number of the girls that were in the home. So he completely forgot about Cora Amurao. Cora stayed hidden under the bed until around 6 in the morning. When she finally summoned enough courage to get out from under the bed, she climbed out of a window and screamed “They’re all dead! All of my friends are dead.!”
A neighboring student nurse, Judy Dykton heard Cora’s tearful cries for help. She ran into the townhouse to help Cora out, she then ran to the town house of Mrs. Bisone, who was the housemother. Mrs. Bisone along with additional students ran to the scene, Cora pleaded with them not to go inside since at that point she still wasn’t certain that Speck had left the scene. A freshman officer Daniel Kelley, had been patrolling the area and was flagged down by neighbors. He immediately radioed for back up, and then entered the house. When additional officers arrived at the scene they found Daniel Kelley vomiting outside of the house. When the additional officers entered the house they too were shocked by the gruesome sight. The additional officers were so disgusted and distraught by the brutality at the scene and the amount of blood, that they too exited the house and vomited.
Gloria Davy was found naked face down on the couch on the first level. She had been bound by a ripped piece of fabric that was tied with double knots, and had semen between her legs. On the second level in one of the bedrooms, investigators found Pamela Wilkening's body, she had been gagged and had been stabbed in the heart. Close by they found the body of Suzanne Farris, she was found face down in a pool of blood, and had a stocking tied around her neck. She had 18 total stab wounds to her chest and neck. Next to her was the body of Mary Anne Jordan. She had been stabbed in the chest, neck, and eye.
In another bedroom, investigators found the body of Nine Schmale, she had been bound with double knots, She had been stabbed around her neck, and her neck appeared to have been broken. Under a sheet, they found the body of Valentina Paison, she was face down, and her throat had been slit, and had bisected her voice box. Next to her was Merlita Gargullo, she had been stabbed and strangled. In the upstairs bathroom, investigators found the body of Patricia Matusek, she had been bound with double knots, she had been strangled with a bed sheet. There was blood all over the bathroom, hallways, and bedrooms. The most experienced detectives on the scene felt this was the absolute worst crime scenes they had ever come across.
After the discovery of the crime scene, police officers immediately hit the streets to try to hunt down the perpetrator. Cora told officials the killer was a man, 6 feet tall, had blond hair, around 160lbs., and spoke with a southern drawl. Initially, since the victims were all student’s and the residence was not super well known, they believe the perpetrator had to have been someone familiar with the area. Detectives spoke to a gas station worker who said they had remembered a strange man coming in a few days before ranting about missing out on a job on a ship. This led investigators to the Merchant Marine Union Building, but the employee they questioned did not recognize anyone that fit the description. But when investigators returned later in the day to question employees, one agent remembered a guy who lost out on a job after it was double booked and he remembered the guy had a southern accent. He pulled out a log sheet, and they found the name Richard Speck. They immediately checked to see if he had a record, but it didn’t appear he had one since he hadn’t been arrested for anything locally.
Meanwhile, in the time since the murders Speck had been out at the bars, drinking as he always did. Hw knew that the cops were on his trail, he packed his bags, got a taxi and then told the driver just to go to the “slummy part of town.” The driver dropped him off at a random building on the North side of Chicago. He found another boarding house and got a room under the name John Stayton. The next morning he awoke to two officers standing over him. They were questioning him about the gun he had stolen. He showed them his i.d. told them his name was Richard Speck, and after 15 minutes of questioning they let him go, because not all officers in Chicago were aware of the manhunt for him because the officers that were aware were still hunting him down on the south side.
After that, he hit the bars again. Meanwhile, the FBI had been contacted to run Speck’s fingerprints through their records, while police started getting hot on his trail and tracing him to the boarding house he rented a room in. Somehow, he got the inclination that they were after him again so he once again packed his bags and fled. He went to another boarding house and got a bed. He then went out again to go do more drinking. The next morning police received confirmation from the FBI that fingerprints taken from the scene matched Speck’s fingerprints they had on file, and they officially put out an arrest warrant for Richard Speck, and the news hit the papers. Speck had gotten up early and pawned off some of his belongings and then started drinking again. He then saw a newspaper with his photo on the front page. He ran back to the boarding house, downed a bottle of wine in the bathroom, then slipped and fell, smashed the bottle and gashed his wrist and elbow, and tried to commit suicide by severing an artery. He was found by a friend and was taken by ambulance to Cook County Hospital. Speck had a tattoo that said, “born to raise hell” which was a detail included in the warrant for his arrest. While tending to his wounds a nurse Kathy O’Connor noticed the tattoo. He asked her for water, and she grabbed him by the neck and asked, “Did you give water to the nurses?” She then called the police and after he was out of surgery a dozen officers guarded his room.
The crimes shocked and horrified the entire nation, and Specks face was plastered on almost every newspaper across the country. With Speck in custody, the judge ordered an official impartial rest be performed to look into Speck’s sanity and competency to stand trial. The panel consisted of three psychiatrists selected by the defense and three psychiatrists selected by the prosecution. The panel were all in agreement and declared that Speck was competent to stand trial and also ruled that Speck was sane at the time of the murders.
The trial began on April 3rd, 1967 in Peoria, Illinois. Peoria was three hours south of Chicago, the trial had been moved there due to public knowledge and bias about the case. The courtroom was packed by the victims' friends and families, as well as spectators. At the trial sole survivor Cora Amurao, bravely took to the witness stand and identified Speck as the murderer in front of the court. When she was asked to identify the killer, she got up from the witness stand, walked towards Speck and pointed her finger at him, so close she almost touched him, and told the courts, “This is the man.” The prosecution detailed how Speck systematically murdered the girls one by one, and presented the fingerprint evidence, and noted Speck’s lack of an alibi. The defense argued that the fingerprint evidence were just “smudges” and suggested that the police planted them.
On April 15th, 1967, after 49 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Speck guilty on all eight counts of murder and recommended he face the death penalty. At sentencing on June 5th, 1967, Judge Herbert J. Parchen sentenced Richard Speck to the electric chair. Appeals were immediately filed to the Illinois Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction and officially sentenced Richard Speck to death on November 22nd, 1968. However, on June 28th, 1971, The United States Supreme Court upheld Specks’ conviction, but because over 250 potential jurors were unconstitutionally excluded from the jury for his trial, mainly due to their religious beliefs regarding the death penalty, the supreme overturned his death sentence. On June 29th, 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional, so there was no way Speck would be put to death for his crimes. On November 21, 1972, Judge Richard Fitzgerald re-sentenced Speck, he received 400 to 1,2000 years in prison. While he was somehow eligible for parole hearings he was denied every single time.
Speck was incarcerated at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois. Amongst the other inmates he was nicknamed “birdman” because of a pair of sparrows that had flown into his cell that he trapped. He was sort of seen as a loner, he really kept to himself for the most part. He would kind of just hang out in his cell and listen to music, he also apparently had a stamp collection that would keep him occupied for hours. However, he was by no means a model prisoner. They caught him with drugs and with homemade moonshine like all the time.
Unlike a lot of these notorious murderers, Speck was not someone who really wanted the limelight or a bunch of attention, at least it didn’t appear that way. He strongly refused any kind of interview requests he received. The only time he granted an interview was with Chicago Tribune reporter Bob Greene in 1978. In this interview Speck actually admitted to the murders, saying, “I had no feelings at all that night. They said there was blood all over the place. I can’t remember. It felt like nothing...I’m sorry as hell. For those girls, and for their families, and for me. If I had to do it over again, it would be a simple house burglary.” And then he was asked his final thoughts for the American people and he said, “Just tell ‘em to keep up their hatred for me. I know it keeps up their morale. And I don’t know what I’d do without it."
In the Spring of 1996, an anonymous attorney sent in a tape to Chicago news anchor Bill Kurtis. The tape was filmed at the Stateville prison in 1988. What was on the tape both shocked and infuriated state legislatures and the public. The footage showed money and drugs such as cocaine being passed amongst inmates, inmates engaging in sex, including Speck giving another inmate oral sex. Speck was seen wearing silk panties, and appeared to have breasts, reportedly due to hormone treatments that had been smuggled into the prison walls. Speck could be heard on tape saying, “If they only knew how much fun I was having, they’d turn me loose.” An inmate then asked Speck why he killed those girls, which Speck jokingly replied, “It just wasn’t their night.” Then when he was asked how he felt killing them he said, “Like I always felt...had no feeling. If you’re asking me if I felt sorry, no.” He then went on to talk in detail about how it feels to strangle someone.
This tape caused a huge uproar, it was not only upsetting to the public and to state officials and legislators, but it was also extremely upsetting for the victims' families. There was some debate regarding the hormones Speck was taking. Some investigators believed that Speck was not taking the hormones and wearing panties by his accord, people were essentially of the thought that other inmates were forcing him to do so, or he did so as a way to survive in prison.
On December 5th, 1991, Speck was taken to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet after complaining of chest pain and nausea. After suffering a heart attack, Richard Speck was pronounced dead at 49 years old, just one day shy of his 50th birthday.
After his death, neuropathologist Dr. Jan E. Leestma, performed an extensive autopsy of Specks’ brain. She found there two areas of the brain that showed gross abnormalities. She found the hippocampus which covers memory, and the amygdala, which involves rage and other strong emotions. And essentially these two parts of his brain overlapped one and other, which is fairly unusual. She made tissue sample slides, however they were either lost or stolen so her analysis was deemed as inconclusive. A few years later, neurologist and director of the Epilepsy Clinic at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Dr. John R. Hughes, examined photos that had been of the tissue samples and compared them to brain wave scans that had been performed on Speck in the 1960s. He was shocked by what he found. In his professional opinion he stated that Specks’ criminal acts were the results of the abuse inflicted by his alcoholic step-father, excessive alcohol consumption, and brain abnormalities that he said he, “have never heard of in the history of neurology. So any abnormality that exceptional has got to have an exceptional consequence.”
After his death, his body was not claimed. While the coroner had spoken to one of Speck’s sisters, Speck's family believed that if they were to bury him people would almost certainly desecrate his gravesite, and the family also avoided any mention of their relation to him. Therefore Speck was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in Joliet by coroner Duane Kriger, a deputy, and a pastor, and those three individuals are the only ones who know Speck’s final resting place.
Sources
All That's Interesting. “The Story of Richard Speck, the Man Who Killed Eight Women in One Night.” All That’s Interesting, All That’s Interesting, 17 Nov. 2017, allthatsinteresting.com/richard-speck.
History.com Editors. “A Mass Murderer Leaves Eight Women Dead.” HISTORY, 13 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-mass-murderer-leaves-eight-women-dead.
Juan Ignacio Blanco. “Richard Speck | Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers.” Murderpedia.org, 2019, murderpedia.org/male.S/s/speck-richard.htm.
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