Posted by On the night of 13-14 July 1966, in Chicago, Richard Speck broke into a townhouse used as a dormitory by student nurses and killed eight of them. The ninth, Corazon Amurao, survived by hiding under a bed and got him convicted. Sentenced to death in 1967, his sentence was later changed to prison, where he died in 1991.
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The air was thick with sweat and fear. Corazon Amurao, known as Cora, a 23-year-old student nurse, had slipped under a bed, while on the other side of the door she heard sounds she would never forget: her friends being killed one by one.
It was around 11 pm on 13 July 1966 when the blond man with a strong Southern accent entered their townhouse dormitory at 2319 East 100th Street, Chicago. He had a knife and a gun, though he would kill using only the knife, and he spoke with a frightening calm. “Nobody will get hurt if you do what I say”, he had said as he tied the girls up with strips of torn sheets.
The man, whose name she would later learn was Richard Speck, took her companions away one at a time. First Pamela, then Suzanne, then Mary Ann… Each time, after a few minutes, she heard a dull thud, sometimes a groan, then the tap running. Twenty to thirty minutes passed between one murder and the next.
Before the man separated the girls, locking them in different rooms, Cora decided to crawl under the bed. Her heart in her mouth, she tried not to make the slightest sound as she heard her friends die one by one. “When he took Valentina, the last one before me, I heard her say ‘Masakit!’, ‘It hurts!’ in Filipino”, Cora would recount years later. Then, silence. For five endless hours she lay still, convinced she would be next.
But the killer was drunk and high and had not noticed that when he entered the house there were nine girls. Having seen eight beds and having killed eight girls, he thought he had killed them all, not knowing that that very night a friend of the students had come to visit, unknowingly walking to her death. That is why Cora survived.
Only at dawn, when the sun began to filter through the windows, did Corazon find the courage to crawl out. The scene that greeted her was a nightmare: Gloria Davy, naked and lifeless on the sofa, raped and strangled. The other girls lay in the nearby rooms, each killed in a different way.
Leaning out of the window, Cora screamed what would become the most famous cry in Chicago: “Oh my God, they are all dead!” Her testimony would be crucial in nailing Speck. But for Cora, that night never really ended.
The man with the knife and the hypnotic voice
Speck didn’t burst in like a tornado of violence. He came in methodically, almost politely, using his deep voice and Texan accent as a psychological weapon. “Stay calm, I won’t hurt you if you do what I say”, he kept repeating as he tied the girls up with almost professional precision.
The nurses, at first paralysed with fear, tried to reason with the man who spoke so calmly as he tied them up. In conciliatory tones that hid their terror, one after another they offered him what they could, their savings or promises to help him find work. But every word fell into the void of that unreachable mind, as Speck carried on with methodical precision, as if those pleading voices were just background noise.
He cut the sheets with the same hunting knife with which he would soon kill Pamela Wilkening and the others. The victims were Gloria Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion. Gargullo and Pasion, like Cora, were exchange nurses from the Philippines. The girls were stabbed or strangled, some had their throats slashed.
Speck acted with a disturbing method that revealed a cruel, calculated technique. His hands, trained during his years at sea, tied knots as perfect as they were deadly. He isolated the victims in different rooms, a coldly effective strategy to prevent any attempt at collective resistance. His violence followed a ruthless rhythm: quick, fatal blows for most, but with terrible exceptions. Gloria Davy was made to suffer longest, kept alive as the last, tragic victim of that night of horror, before being raped and strangled.
Every gesture, every decision revealed a mind that had planned the horror with lucid determination. That night Speck never lost control. On the contrary, he seemed at ease, as if he had finally found his true purpose. Then he vanished into the dark, leaving behind the most brutal massacre in Chicago’s history.
The childhood that made a monster
Benjamin Franklin Speck, Richard’s father, was perhaps the only bright spot in the future killer’s life. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1947, when Richard was only six. An honest worker and loving father, Benjamin worked as a packer at Western Stoneware in Monmouth, Illinois. His early death left little Richard at the mercy of Carl Lindberg, his mother’s new husband, a violent alcoholic. When he was drunk, Lindberg took out his rage on Speck.
The boy did badly at school and always hung around with older boys, soon becoming a criminal. Before the infamous massacre, in fact, he already had a long list of crimes behind him. Perhaps, had Benjamin lived, he could have been a brake on his son’s criminal slide. Instead his absence left a void that nobody, certainly not his brutal stepfather, would ever fill. That gentle man, whom Richard remembered in rare moments of tenderness, became just a ghost of the past, while the boy slipped further into darkness.
In 1961 he met Shirley Malone, who was only 15, at the Texas State Fair. She became pregnant after three weeks and they married in January 1962. Their life together was marked by alcohol, violence and arrests, and Shirley later said she too had suffered abuse from her husband. In 1963 Speck went to prison for forgery and burglary, and in 1965, just days after his release, he attacked a woman with a 43-centimetre knife in a car park. In January 1966 Shirley finally filed for divorce, just six months before the massacre of the student nurses.
That same month he stabbed a man in a bar fight, and in March he robbed a shop. Wanted for burglary, on 9 March 1966 his sister Carolyn drove him to the Dallas bus station, from where he left for Chicago. From there he went back to Monmouth, his childhood town. In April, in that town, a 65-year-old woman was raped in her home by a blond, “very polite” man with a Southern accent, and a few days later a barmaid, Mary Kathryn Pierce, was found dead, killed by a blow to the abdomen that ruptured her liver. Speck frequented her bar and was questioned, but managed to cut the interview short with an excuse, promising to come back. When he failed to return after several days, police went to the hotel where he was staying, but Speck had already gone.
On the day of the massacre Speck had spent hours drinking in taverns. He had raped and robbed a woman and then, drunk and armed, wandered the streets of Chicago before breaking into the house of the massacre at around 11 pm.
The manhunt and that cursed tattoo
After the murders, for two endless days Chicago lived in terror as police combed every corner of the city for the monster who had slaughtered eight nurses. Meanwhile Richard Speck moved like a shadow through the slums, unaware that his arrest was close.
The breakthrough came in the early hours of 17 July, when Claude Lunsford, a drifter Speck had spent an evening drinking with, recognised him from a sketch published in a newspaper. Lunsford called the police, but no one turned up at the hotel. Shortly afterwards, however, the killer was found bleeding after a clumsy suicide attempt. Rushed to Cook County Hospital, it was young doctor LeRoy Smith who noticed the detail that would change everything: on Speck’s left arm, barely visible under the blood, was a tattoo reading “Born to Raise Hell”, a detail noticed by Amurao and printed in every newspaper. His fingerprints had also been found at the scene.
That tattoo, which he had got as a boy to look tougher, turned out to be what sent him straight to a death sentence. Fate had it that the criminal pride that drove him to mark his skin became the signature that delivered him to justice.
The trial, 49 minutes for a death sentence
The trial opened on 3 April 1967 in Peoria, three hours from Chicago. The courtroom held its breath when Cora Amurao rose from the witness stand, stopped in front of Speck and pointed her finger at him, almost touching him: “This is the man”.
He didn’t bat an eyelid. With his dull blue eyes and a blue suit lent by his lawyer, he looked more like a bank clerk than a monster. Defence attorney Gerald Getty was a public defender, but there was little he could do: a panel of doctors had already found Speck fit to stand trial and not insane at the time of the crime, and his fingerprints had been found at the scene.
On 15 April the jury took 49 minutes to find him guilty, and on 5 June he was sentenced to death in the electric chair. However, in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty and Speck’s sentence was changed to 400 to 1,200 years in prison, later reduced to 100-300 years. He applied for parole seven times, and seven times he was refused. In 1978, in the only interview he ever gave, to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, he publicly confessed to the massacre for the first time. He died on 5 December 1991, one day before his 50th birthday, of a heart attack. His sister feared his grave would be desecrated, so he was cremated and his ashes scattered in a secret place near Joliet.
The shocking videos of Richard Speck in prison
In 1996 an explosive video surfaced. The grainy footage, apparently recorded secretly in 1988 at Stateville prison, showed a transformed Speck boasting about his life in prison and taking part in sex acts with another inmate. In the controversial film the killer snorted what looked like cocaine, flashed wads of cash and proudly showed off breasts developed from hormone treatments. Speaking to an off-camera interviewer, Speck talked with chilling nonchalance about the massacre and, asked why he killed the girls, replied with a chuckle: “What do you want me to say… it just wasn’t their night”.
The origin of the video remains a mystery. A Chicago TV anchor obtained it from an Illinois lawyer (who remained anonymous), who in turn had supposedly received it from an inmate. Its appearance in May 1996 reignited national outrage, especially among the victims’ families, who saw Speck not only escape execution but actually thrive in the prison system that was supposed to punish him. The footage was chilling proof that, for this remorseless killer, life imprisonment had become anything but a punishment.
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