Serial Killers Patr.2: Richard Speck

Richard Speck brutalized and killed eight student nurses living on Chicago’s South Side in 1966, committing one of the most horrific mass murders in American history.

Richard Speck: Who Was He?

Richard Speck made national headlines in the summer of 1966 when he murdered eight female students who shared an apartment on Chicago’s South Side. He had previously been involved in numerous acts of violence against his family and others, but he had a flair for eluding the authorities. A manhunt started after his 1966 murdering spree, and he was apprehended two days later. He spent the remainder of his life in jail, dying of a heart attack at the age of 49 in 1991.

The Beginning

Richard Benjamin Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois, on December 6, 1941, into a big, devout family. He was the seventh of eight children. When Speck’s father died when he was six years old, his mother remarried and relocated the family to Dallas, Texas. The children were abused by their alcoholic stepfather, and Speck’s youth was defined by juvenile delinquency and alcohol consumption, which eventually led to petty criminality.

Speck married Shirley Malone in November 1962, and the couple soon had a daughter, Bobby Lynn. Speck’s retreat to type placed him in jail for theft and check fraud in 1963, and their marital joy was short-lived. He was released on parole in January 1965, but only lasted four weeks before being caught for serious assault and sentenced to another 16 months in prison, of which he spent six months.

During this time, he got the words “Born to Raise Hell” tattooed on his bicep, a feeling shared by his wife Shirley: In January 1966, she filed for divorce. Following his arrest for burglary and violence, Speck escaped to Chicago, where he found refuge with his sister, Martha, a few months later. He stayed there for a few days before heading to Monmouth, Illinois, where he stayed with some boyhood friends.

Terrible Crimes

He worked as a carpenter for a brief time before getting into problems again: on April 2, 1966, 65-year-old Virgil Harris was cruelly raped and robbed in her own house, and on April 13, a barmaid in his local pub, Mary Kay Pierce, was brutally beaten to death. He eluded police questioning and managed to flee once more, but investigators uncovered some of Harris’ personal belongings in his empty hotel room, firmly linking him to her attack.

Speck got a job aboard a ship, and it seemed like bodies were turning up everywhere he went. Authorities in Indiana wanted to question Speck about the disappearance of three girls on July 2, 1966, and their corpses were never located. Because his ship was in the area at the time, Michigan officials wanted to ask him about his location during the murders of four additional ladies ages 7 to 60. Speck, on the other hand, seemed to have a flair for eluding capture and keeping cops guessing.

On July 13, 1966, however, when Speck appeared on the doorway of a townhouse in South Chicago that functioned as a shared home for a group of eight young student nurses from adjacent South Chicago Community Hospital, these attacks faded into insignificance.

When Corazon Amurao, 23, answered the front door to Speck’s knock, he pushed his way in with a revolver. The nurses were then rounded up and told to empty their purses before being tied up. Over the next three hours, he brutalized them in the most horrible way possible. Those who were lucky enough to be out at the time of his arrival were subjected to vicious attacks when they came home later that evening.

During Speck’s rampage, eight women aged 19 to 24 were systematically chained, robbed, assaulted, strangled, and stabbed. At least one victim was raped, according to the New York Times. He was so preoccupied with the corpse count that he neglected to see that Amurao, who had greeted him at the door, had hidden herself behind one of the mattresses. She cowered in her hiding place for hours, scared, after he went with the money he had taken. Concerned neighbors called the cops when she went out on a window ledge and yelled for assistance.

The Detention

The police came at the site of the devastation and arrested Amurao, interrogating her and constructing an Identikit picture of her. Fortunately, Amurao recalled the “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo, which, coupled with the photograph, let police identify their suspect as Richard Speck. Other incidences in which Speck was implicated, as well as his criminal record, were mentioned in subsequent countrywide investigations. It took almost a week to authenticate the prints found in the townhouse as his in the days before automatic fingerprint recognition.

Speck’s image was plastered across the front pages of newspapers, and in a frantic attempt to flee, he slashed his wrists at the squalid motel where he was staying on July 19, 1966. He summoned assistance and was transported to Cook County Hospital, where his tattoo once again gave him away, and he was arrested and taken into custody. He needed surgery to mend a damaged artery, and he was being monitored by a dozen cops who were desperate to put an end to his streak of miraculous escapes.

Aftermath

When the United States Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in 1972, Speck’s death sentence was converted to 50 to 100 years in prison. Prior to the events in the South Chicago townhouse, Speck was never officially charged with the killings for which he was suspected, and those crimes remain unsolved.

A TV journalist made public a prison video in 1996, five years after Speck’s death, showing Speck taking drugs and having sex with another inmate while he was an inmate at Statesville Correctional Institute in the 1980s; Speck appears to have breasts in the video, presumably as a result of hormone treatment received while in prison, and is wearing women’s underwear.

In the video, Speck also casually admits to the nurses’ murders, detailing the strangulations and gloating about the power necessary to carry out such a murder.

The revelation of the film sparked a significant controversy inside the Illinois Department of Corrections, and it was extensively used to justify the reinstatement of the death sentence. Speck died of a heart attack while still in jail in 1991.