This Day in History - July 13th, 1966: Richard Speck Murders Eight Student Nurses

Richard Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois. His early years were spent in Kirkwood, with his parents and seven other siblings. When he turned five, his father passed away. Later his mother Mary Sterner moved Speck and his sister Carolyn to Dallas, Texas. There, she met and married Carl Lindberg, a man Speck came to despise for his drunken abuse, and numerous absences from the home.

Speck did poorly in school, and by the time he turned 12, had begun his own experiments with alcohol. This soon became a habit, a way of easing the constant headaches he suffered. These were thought to have been caused as early as five years old when he played with a hammer and received an injury to the head. He then fell out of trees twice, and at the age of 15 ran into a steel girder head-first.

He began committing crimes around the same time as the alcohol abuse. He was arrested for trespassing, then burglary and stabbing. He was a serious suspect in the rape of a 65 year old woman, and the death of Mary Kay Pierce, but he was never charged. He also became a suspect in the disappearance of three Indiana women, and four murders in Michigan.

On July 13th, 1966, Speck broke into a townhouse in the Jeffry Manor neighborhood of Chicago. At the time, the townhouse was used as a dorm for student nurses. Eight nursing students lived in the house and that night a fellow student was staying over. Armed with a knife, he dragged Gloria Davey, Patricia Matusek, Nina Schmale, Suzanne Farris, Merlita Gargullo, Pamela Wilkening, Valentina Pasion and Mary Ann Jordan out of the room, one by one, and raped and strangled each woman. Only Cora (Corazon) Amurao escaped, by wiggling under a bed while he was out of the room. No one knows for sure whether Speck knew that eight women lived in the residence, or whether he had lost count during the attacks.

When Cora Amurao finally emerged at six a.m. the next morning, she climbed out her window and began screaming "They're all dead! All my friends are dead!"

When police arrived, they found Specks's smudged fingerprint inside the house, and another clear print on a door. This was compared to the FBI's database, which confirmed Specks's presence in the house.

Though he was now an official suspect, he could not be immediately located.

Cora Amurao gave a description to police artists, who then placed the sketch in the paper. A description was printed as well, including a tattoo on his shoulder that read "Born To Raise Hell".

A drifter named Claude Lunsford called the police two days later, stating that he had been drinking the night before with Speck, and he was in his room at a motel, but it wasn't followed up on.

That same night, a desk clerk called in an attempted suicide at the Starr Hotel. The man was transported to the hospital where Dr. LeRoy Smith recognized the tattoo and called the police. Speck was arrested.

He later said about the tattoo, "I couldn't think of nothing to have on my arm, so I asked the tattooer if he had any ideas. He suggested all kinds of things, slogans and stuff, and one of them was BORN TO RAISE HELL. That sounded kinda good, so I let him put that. Didn't mean anything special to me."

Richard Speck went to trial, after being declared mentally competent, on April 3rd, 1967, in Peoria, Illinois. Though he claimed he couldn't remember the incident, the evidence gathered and the eyewitness testimony led to his conviction on April 15th. The jury deliberated for only 49 minutes before delivering a guilty verdict.

On June 5th, Judge Herbert Paschen sentenced Speck to death in the electric chair, granting an immediate stay pending appeal.

June 28th, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction, but reversed his death sentence. By the time his new sentence hearing came to court, the death penalty had been outlawed in Illinois. Judge Richard Fitzgerald sentenced him to 400 to 1200 years in prison. 50 to 150 years for each life taken.

That sentence was reduced in 1973, to 30 years, leaving him eligible for parole in 1977. He was denied parole in 6 different hearings, the last being in 1990.

On December 5th, 1991, Speck was transported to Silver Cross Hospital where he died after having a massive heart attack. His body was cremated.

Throughout the years, pictures taken of his brain have been analyzed and found to be grossly abnormal, causing people in the medical field to believe the damages he had sustained growing up, along with his alcoholic stepfather's abuse, led to his behavior. Without proof, this has never made an impact on the view of his heinous crimes.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/speck/index_1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Speck