true crime

Richard Benjamin Speck

Richard was born December 5, 1941 in Kirkwood, Illinois. Convected of 8 murders on April 1967.

------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 Mammoth, Illinois shot after Richards birth. Him and his sister Carolyn were much younger than their four older sisters and two sisters.

In 1947, when Richard was six years old, his father died from a heart attack at the age of 53. Speck was reported to be close with his father. Three year's later his mother married Carl August Rudolph Lindberg. Lindberg was a traveling insurance salesman from Texas, with a 25-year criminal record that ranged from forgery to several DUIs. In 1952, Speck's eldest brother, Robert, died in an automobile accident at the age of 23.

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 fear of people staring at him, and thus he refused to speak in class. 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.

Having started drinking alcohol at age 12, 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.

----Murder of 8 student nurses----

At 11 p.m. on July 13, 1966, Speck broke into the 2319 E. 100th St townhouse in Chicago's Jeffery Manor neighborhood; the townhouse was functioning as a dormitory for student nurses. He entered and, using only a knife, killed Gloria Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo, and Valentina Pasion. Speck, who later claimed he was both drunk and high on drugs, may have originally planned to commit a routine burglary. 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.

Two days after the murders, Speck was identified by a drifter named Claude Lunsford. Speck, Lunsford, and another man had been drinking the evening of July 15 on the fire escape of the Starr Hotel at 617 W. Madison. On July 16, Lunsford recognized a sketch of the murderer in the evening paper and phoned the police at 9:30 p.m. after finding Speck in his (Lunsford's) room at the Starr Hotel. The police, however, did not respond to the call although their records showed the call had been made. Speck then attempted suicide, and the Starr Hotel desk clerk phoned in the emergency around midnight. Speck was taken to Cook County Hospital at 12:30 a.m. on July 17. At the hospital, Speck was recognized by Dr. LeRoy Smith, a 25-year-old surgical resident physician, who had read about the "Born To Raise Hell" tattoo in a newspaper story. The police were called. Speck was arrested.

-----Pre trial-----

Felony Court Judge Herbert J. 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.