Richard Benjamin Speck (December 6, 1941 – December 5, 1991) was an American mass murderer who killed eight student nurses in their South Deering, Chicago, residence by stabbing, strangling, slashing their throats, or a combination of the three on the night of July 13–14, 1966. Speck also raped one victim before killing her. A ninth potential victim, student nurse Corazon Amurao, survived by hiding beneath a bed.
Convicted of all eight murders on April 15, 1967, Speck was sentenced to death. His sentence was reduced to 400–1,200 years in 1972. This was later reduced to 100–300 years. Speck died of a heart attack while incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center on the eve of his 50th birthday.
Early life and crimes
Childhood
Richard Benjamin Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois, in 1941 and was the seventh of eight children of Benjamin Franklin Speck and Mary Margaret Carbaugh. The family moved to Monmouth, Illinois, shortly after Speck's birth. He and his sister Carolyn (b. 1943) were much younger than their four older sisters and two older brothers. His mother was religious and a teetotaler. His father worked as a packer at Western Stoneware in Monmouth, having previously worked as a farmer and logger.
In 1947, when Speck was six years old, his father died from a heart attack at the age of 53. Speck was reportedly very close to his father.
On May 10, 1950, three years after the death of his father, his mother Mary married Carl August Rudolph Lindberg in Palo Pinto, Texas. She and Lindberg had met during a train ride to Chicago. Lindberg was a traveling insurance salesman from Texas, with a 25-year criminal record that ranged from forgery to several DUIs. Lindberg was also a hard drinker, unlike Speck's father. Speck and his sister Carolyn stayed with their married sister Sara Thornton in Monmouth for a few months so Speck could finish second grade, before joining their mother and Lindberg in rural Santo, Texas, west of Fort Worth, Texas, where Speck attended third grade.
In 1952, Speck's eldest brother, Robert, died in an automobile accident at the age of 23. In autumn 1957, Speck started ninth grade at Crozier Technical High School, but failed every subject. Speck did not return for the second semester, dropping out of school in January 1958, after his 16th birthday.
Speck started drinking alcohol at age 12 and by age 15, he was getting drunk almost every day. His first arrest, in 1955 at age 13 for trespassing, was followed by dozens of other arrests for misdemeanors over the next eight years.
On Wednesday, July 13, Speck picked up his bags and checked in at the NMU hiring hall. He was angry for being sent to a non-existent assignment, and he talked for 30 minutes in the car with his sister Martha and her husband Gene, who had driven down to visit him at 9 a.m. They parked on E. 100th St. next to Luella Elementary School, across the street from the townhouses where the nurses lived. At 10:30 a.m., he was tired of waiting at the NMU hiring hall for a job. Speck had $25 that his sister had given him, and he left and walked about east on E. 100th St. to check in at the Shipyard Inn at E. 101st St. & S. Avenue N; the inn was an East Side, Chicago rooming house. He then left, dressed entirely in black, armed with a switchblade and Hooper's handgun. After dinner at the nearby Kay's Pilot House, Speck returned to drink at the Shipyard Inn's tavern until 10:20 p.m. and walked about west on E. 100th St. to the nurses' townhouse at 2319 E. 100th St. Speck held the women in a room for hours, leading them out one by one, stabbing or strangling each to death, then finally raping and strangling his last victim, 22-year-old Gloria Davy. Intervals of between twenty and thirty minutes elapsed between each murder.
One woman, Corazon Amurao, escaped death because she crawled and hid under a bed while Speck was out of the room. Speck possibly lost count or might have known eight women lived in the townhouse, but was unaware that a ninth woman was spending the night. Amurao stayed hidden until almost 6 a.m. Amurao and two of the murder victims, Gargullo and Pasion, were exchange nurses from the Philippines.
Fingerprints found at the scene were matched to Speck.
Concerns over the recent Miranda decision that had vacated the convictions of a number of criminals meant Speck was not even questioned for three weeks after his arrest.
Pre-trial
Circuit Court Judge Herbert C. Paschen appointed an impartial panel to report on Speck's competence to stand trial and his sanity at the time of the crime—a panel of three physicians suggested by the defense and three physicians selected by the prosecution, consisting of five psychiatrists and one general surgeon. The panel's confidential report deemed Speck competent to stand trial and concluded he had not been insane at the time of the murders. In a film that inmates made at the Stateville Correctional Center in 1988, Speck recounted the brutal murders in detail. He again stated he was high that night, but then he undercut the idea that the drugs were a mitigating factor, asserting he could just as well have "done it sober". In court, Speck was positively identified by the sole surviving student nurse, Corazon Amurao. When Amurao was asked if she could identify the killer of her fellow students, Amurao rose from her seat in the witness box, walked directly in front of Speck and pointed her finger at him, nearly touching him, and said, "This is the man."
In addition, Lieutenant Emil Giese testified that fingerprints at the scene had been matched to Richard Speck.
XYY syndrome myth
In December 1965 and March 1966, Nature and The Lancet published findings by British cytogeneticist Patricia Jacobs and colleagues of a chromosome survey of patients at Scotland's only security hospital for the developmentally disabled. Nine of the patients, ranging from to height, were found to have an extra Y chromosome, the XYY syndrome. Jacobs hypothesized that men with XYY syndrome are more prone to aggressive and violent behavior than males with the normal XY karyotype, but the idea was later shown to be incorrect.
In August 1966, Eric Engel, a Swiss endocrinologist and geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote to Speck's attorney, Cook County Public Defender Gerald W. Getty, who was reportedly planning an insanity defense. He suggested, based on Jacobs's unsubstantiated theory and Speck's height of , that Speck might have XYY syndrome. A chromosome analysis performed the following month by Engel revealed that Speck had a normal XY karyotype.
In 1968, biochemist Mary Telfer and associates published data from a genetic analysis, similar in design to Jacobs's, of subjects confined in psychiatric hospitals and penal institutions in Pennsylvania. Of the five XYY patients identified, four exhibited moderate to severe facial acne, leading the group to suggest that acne be added to the list of defining XYY characteristics. Subsequent research failed to substantiate this observation as well.
After Getty contacted Telfer to discuss her findings and their possible relevance to his client, Telfer wrote a speculative piece for the British journal Think in which she mistakenly reported that Speck had an XYY karyotype. That, combined with his extensive acne scarring, led her to describe Speck as "the archetypal XYY male".
In a three-part series on the XYY syndrome published in April 1968, The New York Times presented Jacobs's unsubstantiated theory associating the syndrome with violent behavior as an established fact, and noted that the karyotype had been cited as a mitigating factor by attorneys defending an XYY man charged with murder in Paris, and another in Melbourne. It also identified Speck as a "classic example" of an "XYY criminal" and citing Telfer and Getty as sources, predicted that XYY syndrome would form the crux of his insanity defense. Similar articles followed, again citing Telfer, in Time and Newsweek, and six months later in The New York Times Magazine.
In May 1968, Speck's chromosomes were karyotyped a second time by Engel, with the same result: a normal 46,XY genome. and the appeals process moved to the Federal court system, articles continued to appear in the lay press reporting (or implying) that Speck's supposed XYY genotype would be invoked as a mitigating factor.
In a review article published in the Journal of Medical Genetics in December 1968, Michael Court Brown found no overrepresentation of XYY males in chromosome surveys of Scottish prisons and hospitals for the developmentally and mentally disabled, and suggested that any conclusions drawn from study populations composed solely of institutionalized males were likely distorted by selection bias.
In May 1969, at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Telfer et al. reported that they had found no evidence of significant behavior differences, on average, between men with XYY karyotypes and those with normal genomes, and that XYY males had been unfairly stigmatized by earlier unsupported speculation. The case was remanded back to the Illinois Supreme Court for re-sentencing.
On June 29, 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively declared the death penalty unconstitutional, so the Illinois Supreme Court's only option was to order Speck re-sentenced to prison by the original Cook County court.
On November 21, 1972, in Peoria, Judge Richard Fitzgerald re-sentenced Speck to from 400 to 1,200 years in prison (eight consecutive sentences of 50 to 150 years), which was then reduced to 100 to 300 years. He was denied parole in seven minutes at his first parole hearing on September 15, 1976, and at six subsequent hearings in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1990.
Imprisonment
While incarcerated at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, Speck was given the nickname "Birdman" after the film Birdman of Alcatraz, because he kept a pair of sparrows that flew into his cell. He was described as a loner who kept a stamp collection and enjoyed listening to music. His contacts with the warden included requests for new shirts, a radio, and other mundane items. The warden merely described him as "a big nothing doing time." Speck was not a model prisoner; he was often caught with drugs or distilled moonshine. Punishment for such infractions never stopped him. "How am I going to get in trouble? I'm here for 1,200 years!"
Prison video
In May 1996, Chicago television news anchor Bill Kurtis received video tapes made at Stateville Correctional Center in 1988 from an anonymous attorney. Showing them publicly for the first time before the Illinois state legislature, Kurtis pointed out the explicit scenes of sex, drug use, and money being passed around by prisoners, who seemingly had no fear of being caught. In the center was Speck, performing oral sex on an inmate, sharing cocaine with another inmate, and boasting: "If they only knew how much fun I was having, they'd turn me loose." Speck later died in the early morning hours of December 5, of what was believed to be a heart attack, one day shy of what would have been his 50th birthday. The coroner stated that Speck had an "enlarged heart, emphysema and clogged arteries" which most likely contributed to his fatal heart attack.
Speck's sister feared that his grave would be desecrated, so he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location in the Joliet area.