Richard Speck

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Benjamin Speck entered a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street in Chicago on the night of the 13th of July 1966. By the next morning, eight young women who lived there were dead. The building stood in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood of South Deering and served as a dormitory for student nurses. Only one of its residents lived through the night. Speck was convicted of all eight murders and sentenced to death, though that was far from the end of his case. He was a man with dozens of arrests behind him, and he had spent only a few months in the Chicago area. Three questions run through this story. How did a restless drifter who had grown up mostly in Texas come to stand outside a nurses' dormitory? How did police find him when a telephone tip went unanswered? And why did American newspapers insist for years that his chromosomes explained his violence, when they did not?

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• 2. A Troubled Boyhood

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  Kirkwood, Illinois, is where Richard Speck was born in 1941, the seventh of eight children. His parents were Benjamin Franklin Speck and Mary Margaret Carbaugh. The family soon moved to Monmouth, Illinois. His mother was religious and never drank. His father worked as a packer at Western Stoneware in Monmouth, after earlier years as a farmer and a logger.

  In 1947, when Speck was six, his father died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Speck was reportedly very close to him. Three years later, on the 10th of May 1950, his mother married Carl August Rudolph Lindberg in Palo Pinto, Texas. The two had met on a train ride to Chicago. Lindberg was a traveling insurance salesman from Texas with a 25-year criminal record, running from forgery to several drunk driving offenses. Unlike Speck's father, he drank heavily.

  Speck and his sister Carolyn, born in 1943, stayed with their married sister Sara Thornton in Monmouth for a few months so he could finish second grade. They then joined their mother and Lindberg in rural Santo, Texas, about 40 miles west of Fort Worth, where Speck attended third grade. In 1952 his eldest brother, Robert, died in a car accident at the age of 23.

  The family settled in East Dallas in 1951 and kept moving. Over the next 12 years they lived at 10 different addresses, usually in poor neighborhoods. Speck loathed his stepfather, who was often drunk, abusive, and frequently absent.

  School went badly. Speck refused to wear the glasses he needed for reading. He repeated the eighth grade at J. L. Long Jr. High School, partly because he would not speak in class, afraid that people would stare at him. In autumn 1957 he started ninth grade at Crozier Technical High School and failed every subject. He dropped out in January 1958, soon after his 16th birthday.

  Drinking arrived early. Speck had his first alcohol at age 12, and by 15 he was getting drunk almost every day. In 1955, at age 13, he was arrested for trespassing. Dozens of arrests for misdemeanors followed over the next eight years.

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• 3. The Dallas Record

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  From 1960 to 1963, Speck worked as a laborer for the 7-Up bottling company in Dallas. In October 1961 he met 15-year-old Shirley Annette Malone at the Texas State Fair. She became pregnant after three weeks of dating, and the couple married on the 19th of January 1962. They first lived with his sister Carolyn and her husband, and his mother stayed there too after separating from Lindberg. Their daughter, Robbie Lynn Speck, was born on the 5th of July 1962. Speck was in jail that day, serving 22 days for disturbing the peace after a drunken brawl in McKinney, Texas.

  In July 1963, at 21, Speck was sentenced to three years in prison for forgery and burglary. He had forged and cashed a co-worker's $44 paycheck. He had also robbed a grocery store of cigarettes, beer, and $3 in cash. He served 16 months at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville and was paroled.

  The freedom lasted about a week. On the 9th of January 1965, Speck attacked a woman in the parking lot of her apartment building with a 17-inch carving knife. He ran when she screamed, and police caught him within minutes, a few blocks away. He received a 16-month sentence for aggravated assault, to run alongside a parole violation sentence. Because of an error, he walked out of Huntsville on the 2nd of July 1965, only about six months later.

  A job as a driver for the Patterson Meat Company lasted three months. Speck had six accidents in the company truck but was fired only for failing to show up. In December 1965, on his mother's advice, he moved in with a 29-year-old divorced woman, a former professional wrestler who tended bar at his favorite haunt, Ginny's Lounge. He was there to babysit her three children.

  In January 1966, Malone filed for divorce. That same month, Speck stabbed a man during a knife fight at Ginny's Lounge. A defense attorney hired by his mother got the aggravated assault charge reduced to disturbing the peace. Speck was fined $10 and jailed for three days when he could not pay. It was the last time he was in police custody in Dallas.

  On the 5th of March 1966, Speck bought a 12-year-old car. The next evening he robbed a grocery store of 70 cartons of cigarettes and sold them from the trunk in the parking lot. Police traced the abandoned car, and a burglary warrant was issued on the 8th of March. It would have been his 42nd arrest in Dallas. On the 9th of March, his sister Carolyn drove him to the bus depot, and he left for Chicago.

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• 4. Drifting North

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  Martha Thornton, Speck's sister in Chicago, took him in for a few days in March 1966. He then went back to his boyhood town of Monmouth, where his brother Howard, a carpenter, found him work sanding plasterboard. On the 16th of March his ex-wife was granted her divorce, and she remarried two days later. Speck was furious. On the 25th of March he moved into the Christy Hotel and spent most of his time in the downtown taverns. At the end of the month, police in Gulfport, Illinois, held him overnight after he reportedly threatened a man with his knife in a tavern restroom.

  On the 3rd of April, 65-year-old Virgil Harris came home at 1:00 a.m. and found a burglar with a knife in her house. He bound and attacked her, ransacked the place, and took the $2.50 she had earned babysitting. She described a tall white man who was "very polite" and spoke "very softly with a Southern drawl."

  A week later, a 32-year-old barmaid named Mary Kathryn Pierce left Frank's Place, her brother-in-law's tavern in downtown Monmouth, at 12:20 a.m. on the 9th of April. She was reported missing on the 13th, and her body was found that day in an empty hog house behind the tavern. Speck had been a regular at Frank's Place and had helped build that very hog house. Police questioned him briefly on the 15th of April, when he came for his final carpentry paycheck, and asked him to stay in town. When officers came to the Christy Hotel on the 19th, he had slipped away with his suitcases, saying he was only going to the laundromat. In his room they found a radio and costume jewelry stolen from Harris, along with items from two other recent burglaries.

  Speck returned on the 19th of April to his sister Martha's second-floor apartment at 3966 North Avondale Avenue in Chicago. Her husband, Gene, a railroad switchman who had served in the Navy, thought the Merchant Marine might suit his unemployed brother-in-law. Speck explained his hurried exit from Monmouth with a tale about refusing to sell narcotics for a "crime syndicate." On the 25th of April, Gene took him to the Coast Guard office, where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and examined to apply for work as an apprentice seaman.

  The work came fast. On the 30th of April, Speck joined the 33-member crew of the Clarence B. Randall, an Inland Steel bulk ore freighter. On the 3rd of May he developed appendicitis, and a Coast Guard helicopter flew him to St. Joseph's Hospital in Hancock, Michigan, for an emergency appendectomy. He recovered at Martha's, rejoined the ship on the 20th of May, and was put ashore on the 15th of June after getting drunk and quarreling with an officer. He then traveled to Houghton, Michigan, to visit Judy Laakaniemi, a 28-year-old nurse's aide he had met at the hospital. She gave him $80 before he left on the 27th of June.

  On the 30th of June, Gene drove Speck to the National Maritime Union hiring hall at 2335 East 100th Street to file for a seaman's card. One block west stood five attached brick townhouses, housing student nurses and Filipino exchange nurses. The easternmost one, home to eight of them, was just 150 feet from the hall.

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• 5. The Townhouse

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  On Friday, the 8th of July 1966, Speck collected his seaman's card at the hiring hall and lost a berth on the cargo ship SS Flying Spray, bound for South Vietnam, to a man with more seniority. On the 11th of July he stayed at Pauline's rooming house. The next day he was assigned to the tanker SS Sinclair Great Lakes in East Chicago, Indiana, only to find his spot already taken. With too little money for a room, he slept that night in an unfinished house near East 103rd Street.

  On Wednesday, the 13th of July, Speck waited at the hall, angry about the failed assignment. His sister and brother-in-law drove down at 9 a.m. and parked beside Luella Elementary School, across from the nurses' townhouses. At 10:30 a.m., tired of waiting, he took $25 from his sister and walked about a mile and a half east to the Shipyard Inn, a rooming house. He spent the day drinking in nearby taverns. There he accosted Ella Mae Hooper, a 53-year-old woman, at knifepoint, took her to his room, and raped her. He also stole her $16 mail-order .22 caliber Röhm pistol.

  Speck left dressed entirely in black, armed with a switchblade and Hooper's pistol. After dinner at Kay's Pilot House he drank at the Shipyard Inn's tavern until 10:20 p.m. Then he walked about a mile and a half west to 2319 East 100th Street.

  At 11 p.m. he broke in. Speck later claimed he was drunk and high on drugs and may have planned a routine burglary. Instead he held the women in one room for hours and led them out one at a time. Using only a knife, he killed Gloria Davy, 22, Patricia Matusek, 20, Nina Jo Schmale, 24, Pamela Wilkening, 20, Suzanne Farris, 21, Mary Ann Jordan, 20, Merlita Gargullo, 23, and Valentina Pasion, 24. Between twenty and thirty minutes passed between each killing. Davy, the last, was also raped.

  Corazon Amurao escaped by crawling under a bed while Speck was out of the room. He either lost count or knew that eight women lived in the house, and he never learned that a ninth was staying the night. Amurao stayed hidden until almost 6 a.m. She was one of three Philippine exchange nurses in the house, and Gargullo and Pasion were the other two.

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• 6. Capture and Trial

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  Fingerprints left in the townhouse were matched to Speck. His identification came, however, from a drifter named Claude Lunsford, who had been drinking with Speck and a third man on the fire escape of the Starr Hotel at 617 West Madison on the evening of the 15th of July. The next evening, Lunsford recognized a sketch of the killer in the newspaper. At 9:30 p.m. he found Speck in his own room at the hotel and phoned the police. Police records show the call was logged, but no one came. Speck then attempted suicide, and the desk clerk called in the emergency around midnight.

  Speck reached Cook County Hospital at 12:30 a.m. on the 17th of July. LeRoy Smith, a 25-year-old surgical resident, recognized him from a newspaper story that mentioned his "Born To Raise Hell" tattoo. Smith called police, and Speck was finally arrested. Worries over the recent Miranda decision, which had overturned a number of convictions, meant no one questioned him for three weeks.

  Before trial, Circuit Court Judge Herbert C. Paschen appointed a panel to judge Speck's competence and his sanity at the time of the crime. Three physicians came from the defense and three from the prosecution, five of them psychiatrists and one a general surgeon. Their confidential report found him competent and not insane at the time of the murders.

  Marvin Ziporyn, a part-time psychiatrist at Cook County Jail, met Speck twice a week from his transfer on the 29th of July 1966 until the 13th of February 1967. His summary described depression, anxiety, guilt, and shame, alongside a deep love for his family. He also noted an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and a "Madonna-prostitute" attitude toward women, whom Speck saw as saintly until he felt betrayed. Ziporyn diagnosed organic brain syndrome from earlier head injuries and judged Speck insane during the crime. Neither side called him to testify, because both learned he was writing a book about Speck for money. He had obtained a three-sentence consent from Speck to tell "what I am really like." The jail fired him the week after the trial, and his book appeared in the summer of 1967.

  Speck's jury trial opened on the 3rd of April 1967 in Peoria, Illinois, under a gag order on the press. When Corazon Amurao was asked whether she could identify the killer, she stepped out of the witness box, walked up to Speck, and pointed at him, nearly touching his face. "This is the man," she said. Lieutenant Emil Giese testified that the fingerprints at the scene belonged to Speck.

  On the 15th of April, after 49 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Speck guilty and recommended death. On the 5th of June, Judge Paschen sentenced him to the electric chair but granted a stay pending appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the verdict and sentence on the 22nd of November 1968.

  The hospital confession to LeRoy Smith never reached the jury, because Speck had been sedated when he made it. John J. Stamos, then Cook County's state attorney and later an Illinois Supreme Court Justice, knew about it. His verdict on its value was blunt: "we didn't need it. We had an eyewitness."

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• 7. The XYY Myth

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  In December 1965 and March 1966, the journals Nature and The Lancet published a chromosome survey by British cytogeneticist Patricia Jacobs and colleagues. It covered patients at Scotland's only security hospital for the developmentally disabled. Nine of them carried an extra Y chromosome, a condition known as XYY syndrome. Jacobs proposed that such men were more prone to aggression and violence than men with the usual XY pattern. The idea was later shown to be wrong.

  In August 1966, Eric Engel, a Swiss endocrinologist and geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, wrote to Gerald W. Getty, the Cook County Public Defender, who was reportedly planning an insanity defense. Engel noted Speck's height and suggested he might have XYY syndrome. His own chromosome analysis the following month showed a normal XY karyotype. A month after that, the court-appointed panel rejected Getty's insanity argument.

  The rumor survived the lab result. In 1968, biochemist Mary Telfer and colleagues published a genetic study of men in Pennsylvania psychiatric hospitals and prisons. Four of the five XYY men they found had severe facial acne, and later research failed to confirm any link. After Getty contacted her, Telfer wrote a speculative piece for the British journal Think. She mistakenly reported that Speck had an XYY karyotype, and, citing his acne scarring, called him "the archetypal XYY male."

  The New York Times then ran a three-part series on XYY syndrome in April 1968. It presented Jacobs's theory as established fact and called Speck a "classic example" of an "XYY criminal." It predicted that the syndrome would be the crux of his insanity defense. Time and Newsweek followed with similar articles, and so did The New York Times Magazine six months later. In May 1968, Engel karyotyped Speck a second time and again found a normal 46,XY genome. Even as the appeals moved into federal court, popular articles kept implying that the supposed XYY genotype would be argued in his favor.

  Corrections came slowly. In December 1968, Michael Court Brown reviewed chromosome surveys of Scottish prisons and hospitals in the Journal of Medical Genetics. He found no excess of XYY men and warned that studies of institutionalized males alone were skewed by selection bias. In May 1969, at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting, Telfer and her colleagues reported no meaningful behavioral difference between XYY men and men with normal genomes. They added that XYY men had been unfairly stigmatized by earlier speculation.

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• 8. Sentences and Sparrows

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  On the 28th of June 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Speck's conviction but reversed his death sentence. Citing its 1968 decision in Witherspoon v. Illinois, the court found that more than 250 potential jurors had been unconstitutionally excluded for their scruples about capital punishment. The case went back to the Illinois Supreme Court for re-sentencing. On the 29th of June 1972, Furman v. Georgia effectively struck down the death penalty, leaving Illinois no option but prison. On the 21st of November 1972, in Peoria, Judge Richard Fitzgerald sentenced Speck to 400 to 1,200 years, eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years. That was later reduced to 100 to 300 years.

  The parole board took seven minutes to deny his first request on the 15th of September 1976. It refused him again in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1990.

  At Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, fellow inmates nicknamed Speck "Birdman," after the film Birdman of Alcatraz, because a pair of sparrows flew into his cell. He was a loner who kept a stamp collection and liked music. His requests to the warden covered new shirts and a radio. The warden called him "a big nothing doing time." Speck was no model prisoner, and guards often caught him with drugs or homemade liquor. He shrugged off the risk: "How am I going to get in trouble? I'm here for 1,200 years!"

  FBI agent John E. Douglas, in his book Mindhunter, recounted another sparrow story that Speck told him. Speck said he nursed an injured sparrow back to health and kept it on a string at his shoulder. When a guard objected to the pet, Speck threw the bird into a spinning fan. His explanation was, "But if I can't have it, no one can."

  Speck despised reporters and granted only one interview, in 1978, to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene. There he confessed to the murders publicly for the first time. He said he hoped to be out "between now and the year 2000" and to run his own grocery store. Asked whether he saw himself alongside celebrity killers like John Dillinger, he said, "Me, I'm not like Dillinger or anybody else. I'm freakish." He claimed he had felt nothing that night and now was "sorry as hell." His parting message to the public was, "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 May 1996, Chicago news anchor Bill Kurtis received videotapes made at Stateville in 1988 from an anonymous attorney. He screened them for the Illinois legislature, pointing to prisoners openly using drugs and passing money with no fear of being caught. At the center sat Speck, boasting, "If they only knew how much fun I was having, they'd turn me loose." Lawmakers filled the auditorium for the two-hour tape but halted the showing partway through. On the tape Speck again described the murders. He said he could just as well have "done it sober," which undercut his own claim that drugs had clouded his judgment.

  Shortly before the 5th of December 1991, Speck was taken from Stateville to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet with severe chest pains. He died in the early hours of the 5th, believed to be a heart attack, one day before his 50th birthday. The coroner cited an enlarged heart, emphysema, and clogged arteries. His sister feared his grave would be desecrated, so he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed place near Joliet.

  Filmmakers kept returning to the crime. The 1967 film Violated Angels moved it to Japan, and the 1976 film Naked Massacre moved it to Northern Ireland. The 2002 film Speck told the story from the killer's own point of view.

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