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.
Dallas, 1951–1966 In 1951, after a year in Santo, Speck moved with his mother, Lindberg, and sister Carolyn to East Dallas. Over the next 12 years, the family moved frequently, living at 10 different addresses, usually in poor neighborhoods. Speck loathed his stepfather who was often drunk, abusive, and frequently absent.
Speck struggled in school, refusing to wear the glasses that he needed for reading. He repeated the eighth grade at J. L. Long Jr. High School, in part because of his refusal to speak in class, motivated by a fear of people staring at him. 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.
From 1960 to 1963, Speck worked as a laborer for the 7-Up bottling company in Dallas. In October 1961, Speck met 15-year-old Shirley Annette Malone at the Texas State Fair. She became pregnant after three weeks of dating. The couple married on January 19, 1962, and initially moved in with his sister Carolyn and her husband. Speck's mother lived there as well having separated from Lindberg who was now living in California. Speck stopped using the name Richard Benjamin Lindberg when he got married and went back to using Richard Benjamin Speck. His daughter, Robbie Lynn Speck was born on July 5, 1962, while Speck was serving a 22-day jail sentence for disturbing the peace after a drunken melee in McKinney, Texas.
In July 1963, at the age of 21, Speck was sentenced to serve three years in prison after being convicted of forgery and burglary. Speck had forged and cashed a co-worker's $44 paycheck () and also robbed a grocery store for cigarettes, beer, and $3 in cash (). He was paroled in 1965 after serving 16 months at Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. His release lasted a week. Speck was arrested again on January 9, 1965. Speck attacked a woman in the parking lot of her apartment building, wielding a carving knife, but fled when the woman screamed. The police arrived within minutes and apprehended Speck a few blocks away. Speck was convicted of aggravated assault, given a 16-month sentence to run concurrently with a parole violation sentence, and returned to prison in Huntsville. However, due to an error, he was released just six months later upon the completion of his parole violation sentence on July 2, 1965. After his release, Speck worked for three months as a driver for the Patterson Meat Company. Although he had six accidents in the company's truck, he was only fired for failing to show up for work.
In December 1965, upon the recommendation of his mother, Speck moved in with a 29-year-old divorced woman, an ex-professional wrestler and now a bartender at his favorite bar, Ginny's Lounge, to babysit her three children. In January 1966, Malone, who had been separated from Speck, filed for divorce. That same month, Speck stabbed a man in a knife fight at Ginny's Lounge. He was charged with aggravated assault, but a defense attorney hired by his mother got the charge reduced to disturbing the peace. Speck was fined $10 () and jailed for three days after he failed to pay the fine. This was the last time Speck was in police custody in Dallas.
On March 5, 1966, Speck bought a 12-year-old car then robbed a grocery store the following evening, stealing 70 cartons of cigarettes, which he then sold out of the trunk of his car in the grocery store's parking lot. The police traced the car (which Speck had abandoned) and issued a warrant for his arrest for burglary on March 8. Had he been apprehended under that warrant, it would have been his 42nd arrest in Dallas and would have surely resulted in another prison term. On March 9, 1966, Speck's sister Carolyn drove him to the Dallas bus depot, where he took a bus to Chicago, Illinois.
Monmouth, March–April 1966 Speck stayed with his sister Martha Thornton and her family in Chicago for a few days, and then returned to his boyhood hometown of Monmouth, Illinois, where he initially stayed with some old family friends. Speck's brother Howard was a carpenter in Monmouth and found a job for him sanding plasterboard for another Monmouth carpenter. Speck became angry when he learned his ex-wife had remarried two days after she was granted a divorce on March 16, 1966. He moved to the Christy Hotel in downtown Monmouth on March 25 and spent most of his time in the downtown taverns. At the end of March, while Speck and some acquaintances were on a bar-hopping trip to Gulfport, Illinois they were detained overnight by police there after Speck reportedly threatened a man in a tavern restroom with his knife.
On April 3, Virgil Harris, a 65-year-old resident of Monmouth, returned home at 1:00 a.m. to find a burglar in her house brandishing a knife. He was a white man who was "very polite" and spoke "very softly with a Southern drawl." The man blindfolded her, tied her up, raped her, ransacked her house, and stole the $2.50 she had earned babysitting that evening.
A week later, Mary Kathryn Pierce, a 32-year-old barmaid who worked at her brother-in-law's tavern, Frank's Place, in downtown Monmouth, was last seen leaving the tavern at 12:20 a.m. on April 9. She was reported missing on April 13, and her body was found that day in an empty hog house behind the tavern. She had died from a blow to her abdomen that ruptured her liver.
Speck had frequented Frank's Place, and the empty hog house was one of several he had helped build in the preceding month, so Monmouth police briefly questioned him about Pierce's death when he showed up to collect his final carpentry paycheck on April 15 and asked him to stay in town for further questioning. When police showed up at the Christy Hotel on April 19 to continue questioning Speck, they discovered he had left the hotel a few hours earlier, carrying his suitcases and saying he was just going to the laundromat. He had instead left town. A search of his room turned up a radio and costume jewelry Mrs. Virgil Harris had reported missing from her house, as well as items reported missing in two other local burglaries in the previous month.
Chicago, April–June 1966 On April 19, 1966, Speck returned to stay at his sister Martha's second-floor apartment at 3966 N. Avondale Ave., in the Old Irving Park neighborhood on the Northwest side of Chicago, where she lived with her husband, Gene Thornton, and their two teenage daughters. Martha had worked as a registered nurse in pediatrics before she was married, and her husband Gene worked nights as a railroad switchman. Speck told them an unbelievable story about having to leave Monmouth after refusing to sell narcotics for a "crime syndicate" there. Gene Thornton, who had served in the U.S. Navy, thought that the U.S. Merchant Marine might provide a suitable occupation for his unemployed brother-in-law, so on April 25 he took Speck to the U.S. Coast Guard office to apply for a letter of authority to work as an apprentice seaman. The application required being fingerprinted and photographed, and having a physical examination by a doctor.
Speck found work immediately after obtaining the letter of authority, joining the 33-member crew of Inland Steel's Clarence B. Randall, an L6-S-B1 class bulk ore lake freighter, on April 30. Speck's first voyage on the Clarence B. Randall was brief, since he was stricken with appendicitis on May 3, and was evacuated by U.S. Coast Guard helicopter to St. Joseph's Hospital in Hancock, Michigan, on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan's Upper Peninsula where he had an emergency appendectomy.
After he was discharged from the hospital, Speck returned to stay with his sister Martha and her family in Chicago to recuperate. On May 20, he rejoined the crew of the Clarence B. Randall on which he served until June 14, when he got drunk and quarreled with one of the boat's officers and was put ashore on June 15. For the following week, Speck stayed at the St. Elmo, an East Side, Chicago flophouse at E. 99th St. & S. Ewing Ave. Speck then traveled by train to Houghton, Michigan, staying at the Douglas House, to visit Judy Laakaniemi, a 28-year-old nurse's aide going through a divorce, whom he had befriended at St. Joseph's Hospital. On June 27, after Judy gave him $80 to help him until he found work, Speck left to again stay with his sister Martha and her family in Chicago for the next two weeks.
On June 30, Speck's brother-in-law Gene drove him to the National Maritime Union (NMU) hiring hall at 2335 E. 100th St. in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood of South Deering, Chicago to file his paperwork for a seaman's card. The NMU hiring hall was one block east of five attached two-story brick townhouses, three of which were occupied by South Chicago Community Hospital senior student nurses and Filipino exchange registered nurses. Eight of these nurses lived in the easternmost townhouse at 2319 E. 100th St., just from the NMU hiring hall.
Chicago, July 1966 On Friday, July 8, 1966, Speck's brother-in-law Gene drove him to the NMU hiring hall to pick up his seaman's card and register for a berth on a ship. Speck lost out that day to a seaman with more seniority for a berth on the SS Flying Spray, a C1-A cargo ship bound for South Vietnam, and returned to his sister Martha's apartment for the weekend.