Terrifying & True | Born to Raise Hell: Richard Speck and the 1966 Chicago Nurse Massacre - Weekly Spooky: Scary Stories for Halloween — Horror, Ghosts & Urban Legends

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
In the summer of nineteen sixty six, Chicago awoke to
a nightmare, eight young nurses murdered in their own home,
and a city paralyzed with fear. The killer a drifter
with a tattoo that read born to Raise Hell. This

(00:24):
is the story of Richard Speck.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
What you were about to be is burid to be you.
Based on witness accounts, testimonies, and public record, this is
terrifying and treat.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
July fourteenth, nineteen sixty six, a quiet neighborhood on Chicago's
South Side becomes the setting for one of the most
brutal mass murders in American history. Eight young women bound
and slaughter in their own home. One survivor escapes to

(01:15):
raise the alarm. The man responsible Richard Speck, a drifter
whose name would soon be etched into infamy. Tonight we
revisit the night Chicago was held hostage by terror, and
the chilling legacy of the man who called himself born

(01:38):
to raise Hell. Make sure you're subscribed. We'll start this
story after this. It was just past dawn on July fourteenth,

(02:00):
nineteen sixty six, A scream pierced the humid Chicago air
as twenty three year old Corazon Amoreo climbed out onto
a second floor ledge of a brick town house, trembling
and desperate for help. Inside, the scene was beyond horrifying.

(02:23):
The bodies of eight young nurses lay strewn throughout the house,
evidence of a night of unimaginable terror. Neighbors awakened by
Amoreo's cries, stood aghast on the sidewalk as police arrived
to confront what one newspaper would call the crime scene

(02:48):
of the century. In a single night, an ex convict
drifter named Richard Speck had tortured, raped, and methodically murdered
eight student nurses in their own residence on Chicago's South Side,
a crime so brutal and senseless that it shocked the

(03:10):
world and left a city paralyzed with fear. This is
the story of that night of horror and the twisted
life and dark psychology of the man responsible, from his
troubled beginnings to the chilling prison confession that would come
to light decades later. We will journey through Richard Speck's

(03:35):
life and crimes in vivid detail, tracing his path from
a turbulent childhood to the bloody events of July nineteen
sixty six, the frantic manhunt that followed, and the dramatic
trial that captivated a nation, and the disturbing legacy that

(03:56):
endures to this day. A story that shines a light
on how an ordinary summer night turned into a nightmare,
and how one man's evil left an indelible mark on
American history. Richard Benjamin Speck entered the world on December sixth,

(04:19):
nineteen forty one, just one day before the Pearl Harbor attack,
and he later quipped with grim humor that quote, the
day I was born, all hell broke loose the next day.
It was an eerie foreshadowing of the chaos he himself

(04:40):
would one day unleash. Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois,
the seventh of eight children in a struggling, lower income family.
His early childhood was marred by instability and loss. When
Richard was only six years old, his father, whom he adored,

(05:02):
died of a heart attack, leaving his devout teetotaler mother
a young widow. Three years later, his mother remarried and
Richard acquired a stepfather, Carl Lindbergh, whose influence would prove
toxic Lindbergh was a hard drinking ex khan with a

(05:26):
twenty five year trail of arrests for crimes like forgery
and drunk driving. He moved the family to rural Texas
in nineteen fifty, transplanting young Richard from the Midwest to
the hard scrabble outskirts of Dallas. Speck's new home life

(05:47):
in Texas was anything but happy. He hated his stepfather,
who was often absent and abusive when present. The family
shuffled from from one poor Dallas neighborhood to another ten
different addresses in a dozen years, never once finding stability.

(06:12):
A shy boy with poor eyesight, Richard refused to wear
the glasses he needed and struggled in school, repeating eighth
grade and developing a deep seated fear of being stared at.
Fellow students remember him as nearly mute in class, a

(06:32):
boy who shrank from attention. But outside the classroom, a
very different Richard Speck emerged. By age twelve, he had
begun sneaking drinks of alcohol, and by fifteen he was
getting drunk almost every day. The quiet boy had a rebellious,

(06:55):
self destructive streak that was rapidly coming to the four
petty crime followed closely on the heels of Speck's teenage drinking.
He was first arrested at thirteen for trespassing, the start
of a juvenile criminal record that would expand to dozens

(07:17):
of arrests over the next several years, fighting public intoxication
minor thefts. Richard was in constant trouble. His home life
deteriorated further as Lindbergh's drinking and temper grew worse. By
the time Speck dropped out of high school at sixteen,

(07:40):
he was already well acquainted with police stations and courtrooms.
In November of nineteen sixty one, at the Texas State Fair,
twenty year old Richard met a fifteen year old girl
named Shirley Malone. Despite the age difference, a whirlwind row
romans ensued. Within weeks, Shirley was pregnant, and Richard did

(08:06):
what seemed the honorable thing. He married her in January
of nineteen sixty two. For a moment, it looked as
if domestic life might calm his demons. The newlyweds moved
in with Richard's older sister in Dallas, and that summer
Shirley gave birth to a daughter, Robbie Lynn Speck, but

(08:31):
Speck's attempts at normal family life crumbled almost as quickly
as they began. Unable to stay out of trouble, he
was jailed for a twenty two day stint that July
for disturbing the peace in a drunken brawl, missing his
own daughter's birth from being behind bars. It was a

(08:54):
pattern Shirley knew too well. Richard would be in an
out of jail frequently. By nineteen sixty three, at just
twenty one, he committed his first major crime. His first

(09:15):
major prison sentence was a three year term for forging
a coworker's check and burglarizing a grocery store. He served
sixteen months in the Texas State Penitentiary before being paroled
in nineteen sixty five. Upon release, he lasted barely a

(09:36):
week on the outside before being arrested yet again, this
time for attacking a woman with a knife in a
parking lot. Convicted of aggravated assault and parole violation, Speck
was sent back to prison. Incredibly, a bureaucratic error resulted

(09:59):
in his relation after just six months of that sentence. Luck,
it seemed, was often on Richard Speck's side in those years,
allowing him to slip through the cracks in the justice system.
It was during one of these early prison stints that

(10:19):
Speck marked himself literally for the infamy to come. He
had the words born to raise hell tattooed in blue
ink on his forearm, a bold proclamation of the chaos
he carried within. Certainly, his young wife had already experienced

(10:43):
first hand that hell raising tendency. By January nineteen sixty six,
surely had endured enough. She filed for divorce, cutting ties
with the volatile man who couldn't stay out of jail. Speck,
now a twenty four year old divorced ex convict with

(11:05):
a tattoo flaunting his nihilism, drifted aimlessly. He bounced between
menial jobs truck driver, meat packer, often getting fired for
accidents or absenteeism. He spent his nights in taverns, drinking

(11:26):
heavily and erupting into the occasional bar fight. Behind his
brooding blue eyes and sullen, quiet demeanor lurked a well
of anger and resentment, especially toward women. Later psychiatric evaluation
would conclude that Speck had an obsessive compulsive personality and

(11:51):
harbored a Madonna prostitute complex. Placing women on pedestals until
they betrayed made him in some way, at which point
they became targets for his rage. In Speck's warped mind,
women were either saintly virgins like his mother and sisters,

(12:15):
or prostitutes deserving of punishment. This dark psychological fault line
would soon split open with catastrophic consequences. In March nineteen
sixty six, with his life in shambles in Texas and

(12:36):
a warrant out for yet another arrest, Richard Speck fled north,
facing what would have been his forty second arrest in Dallas.
He boarded a bus for Chicago on March ninth, seeking
refuge with his older sister, Martha Thornton. Chicago offered the

(12:59):
promise of a fresh start and anonymity a place to
lie low. At first, it seemed like a stroke of
good fortune. Martha's husband, Jeane, was a former navyman who
suggested that Richard try working as a merchant seaman on
the Great Lakes freighters. Perhaps the discipline of ship life

(13:23):
could straighten him out. On April twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six,
Spec dutifully applied for a seaman's card at the Coastguard Office,
completing the fingerprints and physical exam needed for union work papers.
By the end of April, he landed a spot as

(13:43):
an apprentice seaman on an ore freighter. For a moment,
it appeared as if Speck might truly turn a corner
fate or Speck's own self sabotaging behavior intervene. Just days
into his first voyage on the ore boat Clarence B. Randall,

(14:06):
Speck was stricken with acute appendicitis and had to be
airlifted off the ship for emergency surgery. After recuperating from
his appendectomy, he returned to the Randall in May nineteen
sixty six and sailed as a deckhand until mid June,

(14:27):
but SPEC's old habits resurfaced. He fell into heavy drinking
on board and clashed with an officer on June fourteenth.
After a drunken quarrel, He was kicked off the ship
at its port of call. By June fifteenth, Richard Speck

(14:47):
was once again unemployed and adrift in Chicago. Over the
next weeks, Speck drifted through cheap flophouses and bars on
Chicago's far south Side. Growing increasingly despondent and angry, he

(15:08):
briefly left the city to visit a nurse's aid he
had befriended during his hospital stay, a twenty eight year
old woman in Michigan, who even lent him eighty dollars
out of pity. But by early July he was back
in Chicago, jobless and quickly burning through what little money

(15:31):
he had. Each morning, he haunted the National Maritime Union
hiring Hall on East one hundredth Street, hoping to snag
a berth on a ship. Each day, other seamen with
more seniority were chosen over him. On July eleventh, Speck's

(15:53):
sister and brother in law informed him he could no
longer stay at their home his welcome had run out.
Carrying his meager belongings in a couple of suitcases, Speck
rented a room for two dollars and fifty cents a
meager twenty four dollars eighty one cents even in today's money,

(16:18):
at a nearby boarding house, and continued his fruitless weight
at the hiring hall. By Wednesday, July thirteenth, nineteen sixty six,
Richard Speck was nearing a breaking point. That afternoon, he
lost out on yet another ship assignment due to an

(16:39):
administrative mix up. Frustrated, broke, and fueled by alcohol and
seething resentment, he wandered the neighborhood around the hiring hall.
The summer sun beat down as he carried his suitcases
through South Deering, eventually stashing them at a gas station

(17:01):
for the day. At five foot eight with a lanky build,
the twenty four year old ex sailor cut an unremarkable figure,
dressed entirely in black and brooding under a mop of
dark hair. But inside his thoughts were anything but ordinary.

(17:31):
He had a knife in his pocket, desperation in his heart,
and no plan for what to do next. That evening,
Speck did what he often did. He went to drink
at a local tavern. As he downed cheap whiskey at
a bar called Kay's Pilot House, he crossed paths with

(17:55):
a fifty three year old woman named Ella May Hooper.
Ella May was a regular in the local bars, and
the two spent part of the evening drinking in the
same watering holes. Some time that night, Speck decided to
turn his simmering anger on this unsuspecting stranger. At knife point,

(18:20):
he forced Ella May back to his rented room at
the Shipyard Inn. There, in a squalid little room, he
raped her and stole her handgun, a small black twenty
two caliber pistol she had bought through a mail order catalog.

(18:42):
Speck left the terrified woman alive but traumatized, taking her
revolver as loot. It was around ten twenty p m.
When he walked out of the Shipyard Inn tavern, armed
now with both a olen gun and his switchblade, his

(19:04):
mind clouded by liquor and rage. What happened next would
make Ella May's ordeal seem, by comparison, like the lucky
escape that it was in the back of his mind.
Richard Speck may have only intended to commit a routine

(19:27):
burglary that night. Perhaps he thought to break into a home,
steal some quick cash, and move on. But the line
between petty criminal and mass murderer was about to be crossed.
Just a block and a half from the hiring hall
stood a cluster of brick townhouses that served as a

(19:50):
dormitory for young student nurses from the South Chicago Community Hospital.
Speck knew the area from his daily Union Hall visits.
Under the cover of darkness. Shortly before eleven PM on
July thirteen, nineteen sixty six, he made his way toward

(20:13):
twenty three nineteen East one hundredth Street, one of the
nurse residences. Inside that townhouse, nine women were winding down
their day studying, chatting, sleeping, unaware that evil was heading

(20:36):
for their doorstep. The modest town home at twenty three
nineteen East one hundredth Street in Chicago's Jeffrey Manor neighbourhood
became the scene of one of the grimmest crimes in
US history. On a sweltering Wednesday night, the brick building's

(20:58):
quiet was shattered when Richard Speck broke in through the
back door around eleven p m. Speck had slipped a
knife blade under a window screen and pried it open
to unlatch the door. Armed with his knife and Ella
May's stolen pistol, he stepped into the living room of

(21:21):
the nurse's residence. Inside, a nightmare was about to unfold.
In the living room, spec confronted three young women who
had been chatting there. Brandishing the gun, he forced Corazon Amoreo,
Merlita Gargoula and Valentina passion into a bedroom where three

(21:46):
more of their roommates lay asleep. The sudden intrusion sent
a wave of terror throughout the townhouse. Speck discovered a
total of six women now gathered in one room, some
in nightclothes, eyes wide with fear. Switching on a bedside lamp,

(22:10):
the intruder revealed himself, a scowling man dressed in black,
reeking of alcohol, with a pock marked face and the
aforementioned inciting phrase tattooed on his forearm. In a frighteningly
calm voice, Speck assured the trembling nurses that he only

(22:34):
wanted to rob them. He ordered them to empty their
purses of money in hopes of surviving. The women complied,
handing over cash and valuables. In order to keep his
hostages under control, Speck tore bedsheets into strips and tied

(22:54):
up his victims, binding their wrists and ankles with expert
knots that suggested his seamen's training. The nurses could only
exchange terrified glances as Speck methodically secured them. He gagged
some of them to muffle any screams. Six captives now

(23:18):
sat or lay huddled together. In that sweltering bedroom, hearts
pounding as the armed stranger paced and rifled through their belongings.
For a brief moment, the nightmare seemed to stabilize into
a tense waiting game. Perhaps the burglar would just take

(23:41):
the money and leave as he promised, but any hope
of a relatively safe outcome soon evaporated. Around midnight, the
front door of the town house opened and three more
nursing Stocke students returned home, one after another. Pamela Wilkinning

(24:06):
twenty years old, was coming off her evening shift. Suzanne
Ferris twenty one years old, and mary Anne Jordan twenty
years old, had been out on a casual double date
and had just been dropped off home, unaware of the
danger inside. As each of these women entered the residence,

(24:30):
they were startled to find a strange man with a
gun and a house full of bound and frightened roommates.
Speck quickly seized each newcomer and tied her up as well,
adding Pam, Suzanne, and mary Anne to the group of hostages.

(24:53):
The situation grew even more chaotic. Nine young women now
fell under the contr troll of the armed intruder. SPEC's
demeanor shifted once the last of the roommates was caught.
The pretense of a simple robbery dropped away, revealing a

(25:16):
far more dangerous intent. Later investigators speculated that Speck's original
plan had indeed been a burglary, but the arrival of
additional witnesses pushed him into a deadly corner he could

(25:40):
not risk leaving anyone behind to identify him. The terrified
nurses now realized they weren't dealing with a mere thief.
They were hostages to a man capable of unspeakable violence.
What followed was an hour's long ordeal of pure horror,

(26:05):
as one by one, Speck began to slaughter the defenseless women.
At knife point, Speck grabbed Pamela Wilkening, one of the
newly arrived roommates. Pamela, a twenty year old student, had
the misfortune of attracting Speck's fury first. She may have resisted, or,

(26:32):
even as Speck later claimed, spit in his face. Enraging him.
Speck dragged pam out of the main bedroom and into
another room. The eight women left behind could only imagine
what was happening as they heard muffled struggles and a

(26:55):
scream cut short. In that back room room, Speck stabbed
Pamela once through the heart, killing her almost instantly. In
that moment, a routine burglary officially turned into a bloodbath

(27:18):
as Speck returned for more victims. Mary Anne Jordan and
Suzanne Ferris, the two friends who had come home together,
somehow freed themselves from their bonds and attempted to fight
back or flee. When they realized what was happening, they

(27:39):
burst out of the bedroom in a desperate bid for
their lives, catching Speck by surprise. What followed was a
frenzy of violence. Speck set upon them with his knife,
slashing and stabbing with uncontrollable ferocity. Suzanne Ferris, just twenty one,

(28:03):
was stabbed eighteen times, and twenty year old Mary Anne
Jordan was stabbed five times, their bodies left bloody on
the floor beside Pamela's. In a matter of minutes, three
of the nine nurses were dead. Speck's hands and arms

(28:26):
were slick with blood, and any last shred of restraint
had fallen away. Quote. I wound up trying to kill
off all the witnesses. He later admitted coolly. Having eliminated
the two who resisted, Speck returned to the bedroom, where

(28:48):
the remaining six women still lay bound and helpless. Inside
that sweltering room, the captive nurses could hear their friends
being butchered, one after the other, the thuds and muffled
cries echoing through the walls. They huddled together in terror,

(29:13):
some silently praying. When the bedroom door creaked open, Speck
stood there with a knife in his hand and an
unfathomable look in his eyes. He had crossed the point
of no return quote. It was at that moment that

(29:34):
he decided to kill them all. They had all seen
his face. One detective later observed of Speck's mindset. In
Speck's own blunt words, quote, all hell broke loose in
that townhouse. His homicidal rage was now in full, unrelenting motion.

(29:58):
What followed was a grim procession of death. Speck began
selecting the women one by one, yanking each from the
room to meet her fate, while the others waited, bound
and gagged in absolute dread. Twenty three year old Gloria Davy,

(30:21):
twenty four year old Nina Joe Schmail, twenty three year
old Valentina Passione, twenty three year old Merlita Gargulo, and
twenty year old Patricia Mattusk were led away in turn
and murdered. Some were strangled with strips of bedsheet, others

(30:42):
were stabbed or a combination of both. The unsuspecting house
was turned into a slaughter house. Between each killing, Speck
would return to the main bedroom to grab the next victim,
a bloodied butcher, calmly choosing the next lamb each time

(31:08):
he left the room with a captive. The minutes dragged
excruciatingly for those still waiting. Muffled screams or thuds would
eventually signal another friend gone, and the cycle would begin anew.

(31:29):
The killings were separated by agonizing intervals of twenty to
thirty minutes, ample time for the remaining women to fully
comprehend the fate that was approaching. One can only imagine
the psychological torture they endured in those intervals. The prayers,

(31:53):
the tears in the dark, the faint hope that perhaps
police would burst in at ens any moment and save them.
For Cora'son Cora and Moreo, That dwindling group of doomed
friends initially included her. Cora had been there from the beginning.

(32:17):
She was the one who answered the door to spec
that night, unwittingly letting the wolf into the fold. Now bound,
hand and foot on the floor amid the carnage, Cora
realized with clarity that unless she did something, she would

(32:40):
be next. Summoning every ounce of courage, Cora decided to
hide in plain sight. While Speck was out of the
room with another victim, Cora in her way, Still tied

(33:02):
towards a narrow gap beneath one of the bunk beds.
Inch by inch, the twenty three year old nursing exchange
student from the Philippines, wriggled on her belly into the
dark recess under the bed frame. There she lay, cramped

(33:23):
and barely breathing, trying to make no sound. Blankets hanging
off the bed provided a flimsy concealment. Cora's heart pounded
as she listened to Richard Speck drag yet another roommate
out of the room to her death. Would he notice

(33:45):
one fewer figure when he returned One after another, Speck
dispatched the remaining nurses. He showed a particular cruelty toward
Gloria Davy, the last victim who endured the worst of
his savagery. Unlike the others, Gloria was not simply stabbed

(34:09):
or strangled immediately. Spec sexually assaulted her before killing her.
Gloria's end was especially brutal. Speck strangled her with a
length of cloth so tightly that when police later found her,

(34:30):
the ligature was dug deeply into her neck, requiring significant
effort to cut free. Investigators would later theorize that SPEC's
rage peaked with Gloria. Chillingly, a Cook County jail psychiatrist
discovered that Gloria Davy was a dead ringer for SPEC's

(34:54):
ex wife. Surely, when presented with Gloria's photo after his arrest,
Speck jumped as if he had seen a snake. The psychiatrist,
doctor Marvin Zipporin, believed that something about Gloria, her resemblance
to the woman who had divorced him, tapped in to

(35:15):
SPEC's deepest hatred. On the secret tape he made years later,
Speck sneered about Gloria quote, she was the one that
was flirting with me. She didn't have nothing I wanted,
and I killed her. It was an appalling statement of

(35:36):
utter remorselessness toward the young woman he had violated and strangled. Last.
By roughly three thirty a m. On July fourteenth, the
rampage was over the air inside twenty three nineteen East
one hundredth Street was stifling and thick with the coppery

(35:56):
smell of blood. The floors were slick. Eight women lay dead,
their youthful lives brutally snuffed out in a matter of hours.
In the sudden stillness, Richard Speck stood amidst the carnage
and surveyed the bedroom one final time. Incredibly, he failed

(36:23):
to notice that a ninth woman was no longer among
the bodies. Whether he miscounted in his drunken haze or
assumed only eight nurses lived there, Speck was unaware that
one potential witness still lived. Satisfied that no one was

(36:44):
left alive, he wiped his knife, pocketed the small amount
of money he had stolen from purses, and walked out
into the night. Under the bed in the front bedroom horizon,
Amorello did not dare move or make a sound. She

(37:06):
had heard everything, the thuds of bodies, the horrifying muffled cries,
of pain, the footsteps of her friends being led away
one by one, bound and gagged. She prayed that the
man would not return and discover her. Minutes passed, then

(37:30):
an hour. Finally, the only sounds were the ticking of
a clock and Cora's own heartbeat, thundering in her ears. Still,
she waited, paralyzed with fear that he might be lurking.

(37:51):
It was nearly six a m. Almost three hours after
Speck had left, when Cora dared to emerge. Dawn light
crept through the windows, illuminating a scene of utter devastation,

(38:12):
overturned furniture, blood spattered walls, and the lifeless forms of
her roommates. Cora somehow summoned the strength to untie herself
and climb out of a window onto a narrow ledge.
Then the enormity of what had happened crashing upon her.

(38:38):
She began screaming, Help, help, My friends are dead. All
my friends are dead. Her screams echoed down East one
hundredth Street as stunned neighbors emerged from their homes. Police
arrived swiftly, and what they found inside left even veteran

(39:03):
officers shaken. Quote inside the house was in shambles, bodies
were strewn about, and blood congealed in the morning heat.
One report described the first responders carefully carried out the
victims one by one, placing eight young women in body

(39:27):
bags and bringing them past crowds of horrified onlookers. Most
of the victims were between twenty and twenty three years old,
students just weeks away from completing their nursing training. In
the span of a few dark hours, a single depraved

(39:49):
killer had annihilated nearly an entire class of caregivers. The
crime was immediately recognized as one of the worl first
mass murders in American history up to that time. Chicago
newspapers blared the story that very afternoon, spreading shock and panic.

(40:13):
Doors that had long been left unlocked were bolted shut
all across the city as the realization sank in a
madman was on the loose. Cora Ameru, the lone survivor,

(40:36):
became the critical witness to this horror. At just twenty
three years old, far from her home in the Philippines,
she had lost eight dear friends in one night and
barely escaped with her own life. Yet, despite her trauma,
Cora would prove to be incredibly composed and determined. In

(41:02):
the aftermath, she provided the police with as much detail
as she could about the killer, his height, his face,
and crucially, that distinctive born to raise hell tattoo on
his forearm. Working quickly as possible, detectives had Cora help

(41:24):
them create a composite sketch of the suspect's face, a
sketch that by the next morning was front page news
on every Chicago paper. The biggest manhunt in Chicago's history
was officially underway. Chicago in July of nineteen sixty six

(41:52):
was a city under siege, not by an invading army,
but by the palpable fear of a killer roaming free.
In the days following the nurse murders, anxiety gripped the
Metropolis quote. When Richard Speck was on the loose in
nineteen sixty six, people were afraid to go outside, recalled

(42:17):
one account, residents double locked their doors and peered over
their shoulders. The newspapers christened the unknown assailant, the madman,
the monster, or simply the killer. For two days, Richard
Speck walked among this terrified public as an anonymous fugitive

(42:45):
while hundreds of police officers worked around the clock to
track him down. The breakthrough came from diligent police legwork
and a bit of luck. On the morning of July
by fourteenth, mere hours after the massacre, Detective Eddie wii

(43:05):
Lasinsky canvassed the neighborhood for any clues. At a gas
station six blocks from the murder scene, the attendant, Dennis
Ryan mentioned an unusual encounter from the previous night. A
disheveled man had come in with a couple of suitcases,

(43:28):
asking if he could leave that overnight. The man had
muttered something about being a seaman. This peaked the detective's interest.
The nurse's townhouse was only about one hundred and fifty
feet from the Maritime hiring hall after all. Following this lead,

(43:51):
Wiilasinski went to the NMU hiring hall across from the
murder site. Their union employee immediately recognized the police composite sketch.
It looked just like a seaman who had been lingering
around for work. They rummaged through the wastebasket and found

(44:14):
a crumpled registration slip with the name Richard Franklin Speck
written on it. Speck's identity was now known. The dragnet
tightened as investigators pulled his fingerprints from Coastguard records and
began matching them against prince lifted from the crime scene.

(44:39):
While police were zeroing in on his identity, Richard Speck
was busy trying to disappear. After leaving the massacre scene,
he had retrieved his suitcases and faded into Chicago's vast
skid row. He checked into the Star Hotel under an

(45:00):
alias in the city West Madison Street district. The Star
was the kind of flophouse where society's lost souls congregated,
a filthy, dilapidated warren crawling with drunks and drifters. One
detective described it as quote truly revolting. You'd walk through

(45:26):
human waste just to reach the rooms here. Amidst the
vomit stained corridors and flickering neon of West Madison, Speck
believed he could lay low in this boulevard of forgotten men.
He was just another anonymous drifter. He spent July fifteenth

(45:51):
on the Star's fire escape, drinking cheap wine with two
transient men, one of whom was named Claude Lunsford. Speck
likely saw the newspapers that day, his own eyes staring
back from crude sketches on front pages, but he said

(46:12):
nothing to his drinking buddies of his infamy. Lunsford later
recalled noticing SPEC's eerie calm and that prominent tattoo, but
it wasn't until he too saw the composite sketch in
the paper that he realized who his friend at the

(46:33):
hotel really was. On the evening of July fifteenth, Lunsford
actually phoned the police to report that Speck, the murder
suspect all over the news, was right there at the
Star Hotel. That call went unanswered due to a miscommunication

(47:00):
at police dispatch. Speck remained at large, oblivious to how
close he'd come to capture. By July sixteen, the pressure
on law enforcement was enormous. Luckily, the forensic work paid off.

(47:21):
SPEC's fingerprints from the crime scene, left on a door
and other surfaces were manually matched to those on file
from his naval application. Police Superintendent Orlando Wilson held a
press conference to announce Richard Speck as the prime suspect

(47:42):
in the massacre, releasing his photograph to the public. This
news was broadcast on radio, television and in papers worldwide.
The monster now had a face and a name. SPEC's

(48:02):
days of hiding under a fake identity wereover. Reading the papers,
on July sixteenth, he saw himself unmasked as the wonted man.
Panicked and with nowhere left to run, Speck decided to
take what he thought was the only escape route left, suicide.

(48:33):
Alone in his cheap hotel room, stewing an alcohol and despair,
he picked up a broken wine bottle and slashed his
left wrist and in her elbow, attempting to end his
life in a gory mess of blood. But even in

(48:55):
this Richard SPEC's luck played a cruel trick. After a
few moments of bleeding, he apparently lost his nerve and
staggered into the hotel hallway seeking help, or perhaps an
employee simply heard his cries. Around midnight, an ambulance was

(49:19):
called to the Star Hotel for a bleeding man with
self inflicted wounds. Unconscious and drenched in blood, Speck was
rushed to Cook County Hospital in the early minutes of
July seventeen, nineteen sixty six. At the hospital, the hand

(49:40):
of fate intervened decisively a young surgical resident, doctor Leroy Smith,
had read the newspapers describing the wonted killer and his
identifying tattoo. When doctor Smith was summoned to attend to
an attempted so suicide case. Arriving in the emergency room,

(50:03):
something clicked in his mind. As he began treating the pale,
bleeding man on the gurney, he noticed under the smeared blood,
faint blue letters on the patient's forearm. Born to raise Hell,

(50:24):
Smith's pulse quickened. Quote I asked him what his name was,
and he told me his name was Speck, the doctor
later recounted. In that instant, the monster was unmasked. Doctor
Smith stepped back and notified security and the police. The

(50:46):
mass murderer that all of Chicago was hunting was lying
right there on the operating table. Police rushed in and
finally placed Richard Speck under a wrectest in the early
hours of July seventeenth, nineteen sixty six. He was so

(51:07):
physically weak from blood loss that he needed surgery to
repair a severed artery. Officers stood guard in the operating room,
ensuring the man who had so narrowly cheated justice before
would not slip away, this time outside the hospital. A

(51:28):
crowd gathered despite the late hour, eager for confirmation that
the nightmare was over. When words spread that Speck had
been caught, a collective sigh of relief was felt in
Chicago and across the nation. The city could sleep a

(51:49):
little easier knowing the madman of one hundredth Street was
behind bars, heavily sedated, and handcuffed to a hospital bed.
But for the families of the victims and for the
one lone survivor, Corazon Amorello, the ordeal was not over.

(52:14):
They now faced the emotional turmoil of trials and the
harsh glare of public attention. SPEC's capture raised immediate questions
could such an explosive, violent individual possibly be sane? In

(52:35):
the wake of the Miranda vi Arizona ruling just weeks earlier,
police were exceedingly cautious. Spec was not even interrogated for
weeks in order to avoid jeopardizing the case on a technicality.
Miranda vi Arizona is what established what has become known

(52:56):
as Miranda rights. Law enforcement's response ability to inform those
they have arrested of their right to remain silent of
the possibility that anything they say can be used against
them and their right to an attorney. In the meantime,

(53:17):
investigators built an ironclad case. They had fingerprints matching Speck
at the crime scene. They had stolen items from earlier
crimes in SPEC's possession. Most importantly, though, they had an
eye witness who had looked the killer in the eyes.

(53:40):
Cora Amoreo's brave testimony would become the lynchpin to ensuring
Richard Speck face justice, and so less than ten months
after that awful July night, the stage was set in
a Peoria courthouse for one of the most dramatic criminal

(54:03):
trials of the nineteen sixties. The trial of Richard Speck
opened in early April nineteen sixty seven, and it unfolded
like a gripping courtroom drama that held the entire country
in thrall. Due to massive pre trial publicity and public

(54:26):
anger in Chicago, the venue had been moved to Peoria, Illinois,
about one hundred and sixty miles away. There, in the
Peoria County Courthouse, twenty five year old Speck faced murder
charges for the eight nurses. He appeared in court, clean shaven,

(54:48):
wearing horn rimmed glasses and a suit, a far cry
from the drunken predator of the year before. Yet the
veneer of normalcy did not nothing to mitigate the atmosphere
of dread and fascination in the courtroom. A gag order

(55:08):
had been imposed on press coverage, but words still trickled
out about each day's dramatic proceedings. On the prosecution side
were an avalanche of evidence and one star witness whose
testimony would prove unforgettable. Before the trial, the defense had

(55:31):
little to work with beyond questions of specksanity and memory.
A panel of doctors had examined him and found him
competent to stand trial, and they rejected any insanity defense,
concluding he understood the nature of his heinous acts. Speck

(55:54):
himself claimed to have no recollection of the killings, a
convenient blanks spot he maintained since arrest. In private, while
hospitalized after capture, he had actually confessed to doctor Leroy Smith,
blurting out quote, I'm the one who killed those nurses

(56:15):
while sedated, But that hospital bed confession was not admissible
in court. Thus, when Speck's trial began on April third,
nineteen sixty seven, he pleaded not guilty and sat impassively
as prosecutors presented the harrowing narrative of the massacre. On

(56:46):
April fifth, Corazon Amoreo took the stand and a hush
fell over the courtroom. Everyone knew that this poised young
woman had lived through hell and come to speak on
behalf of the dead. There had been doubts about asking

(57:07):
Cora to relive that trauma in open court. Would she
be too fragile, too frightened. Those doubts vanished as soon
as she began to speak in clear, precise detail. Corazon
recounted the nightmare of July thirteenth and fourteenth, the sudden

(57:29):
break in the tying up, the terror as her friends
were led away one by one. The courtroom sat riveted
some jurors and tears as Cora described hiding under the
bed and hearing the muffled screams of her roommates being murdered.

(57:54):
Then came the moment of identification, a scene as dramatic
as a Hollywood script. When asked if she saw the
man who committed these crimes, Cora did not stay seated
and simply point. She left the witness stand and walked
directly up to the defense table, stopping just inches from

(58:20):
Richard Speck and extending her arm to point at his face.
This is the man, she declared firmly. Her voice did
not waver. Speck stared straight ahead, emotionless, as the woman
he had failed to kill sealed his fate. Evidence against

(58:45):
Speck was indeed damning, as the Chicago History Museum later
put it, beyond Cora's eyewitness testimony. Fingerprints found on the
doorframe of the nurse's townhouse matched those of Spex perfectly.
Stolen items from the town home were also linked directly

(59:07):
to him. The born to raise Hell tattoo had been
the crucial clue leading to his capture. The defense, led
by public defender Gerald Getty, could do little but try
to spare Speck the death penalty. They subtly emphasized Speck's intoxication,

(59:30):
hinting he had been in a drunken blackout. At one point.
Gety even floated a story that SPEC's suicidal gesture after
the crime indicated remorse or mental breakdown. Speck himself would
later scoff that this was propaganda that Gety used in

(59:53):
an attempt to garner jury sympathy. But the jury was
simply unmoved. Trial lasted only twelve days, and after just
forty nine minutes of deliberation, on April fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven,
the jury returned with a verdict guilty on all eight

(01:00:17):
counts of murder. As the verdict was read, Speck reportedly
showed no emotion, his face a mask. The families of
the victims, who had endured every day of testimony about
their daughter's last moments, quietly rejoiced at the swift justice.

(01:00:41):
The jury recommended the death penalty, and Judge Herbert Passion concurred,
formally sentencing Richard Speck to die in the electric chair.
In Illinois, at that time, executions were by electrocution at
Stateville Penitentiary, and Speck was scheduled to meet that very

(01:01:05):
fate in January nineteen sixty eight. For the press, the
trial confirmed Speck's place in criminal infamy. They often referred
to him now as a mass murderer, a term that,
as historians note, was not commonly used in the nineteen sixties.

(01:01:28):
The specter of eight innocent women slaughtered at once had
introduced Americans to a new kind of horror, and Richard
Speck became one of the first widely recognized mass murderers
of the modern era. In the aftermath of the trial,

(01:01:49):
the public's hunger for understanding this atrocity remained. A Cook
County jail psychiatrist, doctor Marvin Zipporar, who had interviewed Spec
extensively before the trial, controversially published a book about Spec
soon after the verdict. Zipporin painted Speck as a deeply

(01:02:13):
disturbed man with a severe personality disorder and brain damage
from old injuries, and he echoed the observation of SPEC's
Madonna horror complex regarding women. But none of these analyzes
swayed the court or the public. Insane or not, brain

(01:02:36):
damaged or not, Richard Speck was going to pay with
his life, or so it seemed. Just as SPEC's execution
date approached, legal fate intervened once again on his behalf.

(01:03:03):
In June nineteen seventy two, the United States Supreme Court
issued its decision in Furman v. Georgia, which effectively struck
down existing death penalty statutes nationwide. SPEC's death sentence was
automatically vacated that same year. In November nineteen seventy two,

(01:03:27):
he was re sentenced by an Illinois court to an
astounding four hundred to one thousand, two hundred years in prison,
essentially a symbolic way of ensuring he would never walk free.
This massive sentence was later formally reduced to a still

(01:03:50):
mind boggling one hundred to three hundred years on paper.
In practical terms, Richard Speck's punishment became life life in prison,
with no realistic hope of release. Yet, to the dismay
of the victim's families, even the notion of no release

(01:04:12):
proved fraud. Starting in the mid nineteen seventies, Speck technically
became eligible for periodic parole hearings, a quirk of Illinois
sentencing laws that did not anticipate one thousand, two hundred
year terms. Only a decade after the murders, Speck had

(01:04:33):
his first parole hearing in nineteen seventy six, which stunned
the families of his victims. Quote. When they commuted the
death penalty, I thought it meant life in prison, said
John Schmel, brother of victim Mina Schmel. I had no
idea that, despite the fact he murdered eight nurses, he

(01:04:57):
was up for parole within seven years. It was indeed
a cruel ordeal. Each time Speck came up for parole,
and he did so seven times in total, the bereaved
families had to relive the nightmare, writing letters and often
appearing in person to urge the parole board to keep

(01:05:20):
this killer behind bars. Every one of SPEC's parole petitions
was denied, but not before reopening old wounds. As the
years wore on, many of the victim's parents passed away,
some not living long enough to see the final closure

(01:05:42):
of SPEC's saga quote. Even in jail, it seems Richard
Speck had found a way to kill. One commentator grimly noted,
referring to how stress and grief wore down those left
the hindh Through it all, Spec remained largely silent publicly.

(01:06:06):
He granted no interviews in the decade after the trial,
except one brief conversation with a Chicago Tribune columnist in
nineteen seventy eight. In that interview, Spec for the first
time admitted, perhaps trying to shift blame, that he had

(01:06:26):
been high on drugs and alcohol the night of the murders,
and he even floated a sensational claim that he had
an accomplice who helped him and whom he had later
killed in fear of being betrayed. This claim of a
mystery accomplice was met with skepticism. No evidence of any

(01:06:50):
second perpetrator has ever surfaced. It seemed to be yet
another one of SPEC's manipulations, an attention seeking ploy from
behind bars. Officially, Richard Speck bore sole responsibility for the crime,
and that is how history remembers it. With his appeals

(01:07:14):
exhausted and parole continually denied, Richard Spec settled in to
the oblivion of life in prison. But, as we would
come to know, even behind bars, his capacity for shocking
the public was not yet over. Richard Speck's new home

(01:07:36):
was Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Illinois,
where he was sent to serve his staggeringly long sentence. Initially,
Speck was treated as the infamous criminal. He was kept
in isolation for his own safety and the prison security.

(01:07:58):
In those early years, he was a slight, brooding figure
and a cell block full of hardened convicts. A guard
later recalled that Speck was quote weak minded and easily influenced.
In other words, he wasn't a predatory alpha. Behind bars,

(01:08:19):
he was malleable, someone who might adapt to survive over time.
That's exactly what Richard Speck did. He adapted to prison
in ways that would defy society's expectations, indulging in a
life of leisure and vice that few would have imagined

(01:08:41):
possible for an eight time murderer locked away for centuries.
In the nineteen seventies and eighties, Illinois's prison system became
notoriously overcrowded and corrupt. At Stateville, two inmates were often
into cells meant for one, and the guard to prisoner

(01:09:04):
ratio was terribly low. This environment allowed enterprising inmates to
obtain all manner of contraband, usually with the aid of
bribed or coerced guards. Speck took full advantage. Once he
was moved into the general population. He found ways to

(01:09:25):
gain a measure of freedom and comfort. He secured prison
jobs as a painter and sewing machine repairman, roles that
let him roam around the facility more than most. He
learned to brew homemade alcohol, often referred to as pruno,
and became a supplier of it to other inmates, which

(01:09:49):
earned him favors and a form of power in the
inmate hierarchy. In effect spec the lowly weak inmate, ingratiated
himself and became a fixture in Stateville's underground economy. But
the most bizarre transformation was physical. Sometime in the early

(01:10:13):
nineteen eighties, fellow prisoners noticed that Speck was developing female
like breasts. Rumors ran wild. Was he intentionally taking hormone
pills smuggled into the prison. Had he effectively transitioned to
serve as another inmate's girlfriend. Photographs from later years show

(01:10:38):
Speck with noticeable breasts and often wearing women's underwear. It
appeared he had indeed been ingesting estrogen or other hormones
in order to feminize his appearance. Whether this was done voluntary,
in order to gain protection or favor from more dominant inmates,

(01:11:00):
or coerced by said dominant inmates, remains unclear. What was
clear is that Speck had become a far cry from
the tattooed, macho drifter who had terrorized nurses in nineteen
sixty six. Inside the twisted social ecosystem of Stateville, Richard

(01:11:23):
Speck was thriving in his own depraved way, getting high,
having sex, and flouting the system's rules. Right underneath the
noses of prison officials. For years, these excesses remained hidden
from the public, but that changed. In May of nineteen

(01:11:47):
ninety six, five years after SPEC's death, a shocking video
surface and exploded on television screens across America. Investigative journalist

(01:12:07):
Bill Curtis obtained an eight millimeter video tape that had
been recorded inside Stateville back in nineteen eighty eight. The tape, grainy,
raw and almost unbelievable, showed Richard Speck and two inmate
companions partying in a prison cell like it was a

(01:12:30):
frat house. On this contraband video, Speck appeared with bleach
blonde hair, wearing silky women's panties, his shirt pulled up
to reveal feminine breasts. He was snorting what looked like
lines of cocaine, chugging whisky, and rolling joints of marijuana.

(01:12:51):
At one point, he produced a thick roll of hundred
dollar bills and casually counted them on camera, boasting of
his illicit riches. In perhaps the most disturbing segment, Speck
engaged in explicit sexual acts with his fellow inmate, who

(01:13:13):
was referred to as his lover on camera, seeming utterly
unconcerned about being filmed. The sheer brazenness of it all
was mind numbing. Here was a convicted mass murderer, supposedly
serving hard time in a maximum security prison, yet on

(01:13:36):
video he appeared to be having the time of his
life behind bars. And then, in between these x rated
and drug fueled exploits, Richard Speck began to talk. The
tape unexpectedly became a confessional in a kind of interview segment.

(01:14:01):
Apparently one inmate quizzing Spec on camera, Speck nonchalantly admitted
to the nurse murders. The exchange went like this, what
are you in for? The off screen inmate asked eight murders.
Spec answered, did you really do it? Inquired the inmate. Yeah,

(01:14:27):
sure I did, Spec said casually. Why it just wasn't
their night, Spec said with a stomach churning smirk. The
man who had claimed amnesia during his trial now coolly
detailed his crime. He explained he used a knife instead

(01:14:52):
of his gun because quote, guns make too much noise,
the knife was quiet. He described how it began as
a burglary until quote all hell broke loose. He even
educated his listeners on the mechanics of murder quote. Strangling

(01:15:14):
somebody isn't like TV. You gotta go at it for
three minutes. It takes a lot of strength. Perhaps most
chilling of all was Speck's complete lack of remorse on
the tape. An inmate asked, how do you feel after
killing all those women? Speck replied with a shrug, like

(01:15:37):
I always felt. I had no feelings. If you're asking
if I felt sorry, No. In that one tape, Speck
managed to horrify the nation all over again, not with
new crimes, but with the evidence that he had never
been punished as harshly as everyone had a say assumed.

(01:16:01):
The video's public release in nineteen ninety six caused a
national scandal. People could not fathom how a man guilty
of such atrocities could be effectively enjoying a hedonistic romp
in prison. As one reporter put it, lawmakers in Illinois

(01:16:22):
were outraged. Hearings were convened in the state legislature even
as the videotaped excerpts were broadcast on the news. Quote
it's an indictment of our prison system. How we really
lost control, said one prison reform advocate upon seeing the

(01:16:42):
spect tape. Indeed, the tape forced an ugly reckoning. Guards
were complicit in smuggling contraband, drugs, money, cameras, etc. Two inmates,
and Stateville was revealed to be danger terously lax. For
the families of Speck's victims, the tape was like ripping

(01:17:06):
open an old wound. They had lived with the fact
that Speck escaped the electric chair, but they took some
solace in thinking he was languishing miserably in a cell.
Now they saw him laughing, partying, and gloating about the
murders of their loved ones. The outrage was enough that

(01:17:29):
many cited the spec tape as justification to bring back
the death penalty for heinous criminals. Illinois had reinstated capital
punishment in nineteen seventy four after the firmin pause, but
the broader debate on the death penalty's merits was reinvigorated
by this scandal. In the end, however, Richard Speck himself

(01:17:55):
never faced any direct consequences from the tape. He had
died quietly a few years before it emerged. On December fifth,
nineteen ninety one, the eve of his fiftieth birthday, Speck
collapsed in his prison cell after complaining of chest pains.

(01:18:17):
He was rushed to a hospital in Joliet, and doctors
worked furiously for over four hours to save his life.
Oddly determined to revive a man who had shown no
mercy to others, but Speck was beyond saving. He died

(01:18:37):
of what was officially recorded as a heart attack at
age forty nine. In a final footnote, befitting his ignominy,
none of Speck's family came forward to claim the body.
His remains were cremated, and his ashes were quietly scattered
at an undisclosed location, effectively thrown to the wind. Just

(01:19:03):
as he had once said, he didn't give a damn
what became of him after death. Richard Speck, the man
who declared himself the devil and boasted quote, if they
knew how much fun I was having, they'd turn me loose,
exited the world as anonymously as he had entered it.

(01:19:26):
Yet the shadow he cast on his victim's families, on
the city of Chicago, and on American society would not
disperse so easily. Even now, nearly six decades later, the

(01:19:48):
name Richard Speck sends a shiver through those old enough
to remember the summer of nineteen sixty six. This crime
stand as a gruesome benchmark in the history of American violence,
often referred to as the Chicago nurse murders or simply

(01:20:13):
the Chicago massacre. At the time, it captured the fear
and imagination of a generation. Ordinary people could not fathom
how one man could be so cruel as to bind
and systematically kill eight young women who had dedicated their

(01:20:35):
lives to healing others. The gruesomeness of SPEC's rampage forced
Americans to realize that the most horrific crimes were not
limited to gangsters or warfare. They could erupt without warning
in an ordinary urban townhouse. In many ways, the Speck

(01:20:59):
case marked a turning point. While in hindsight, the nineteen
sixties in America is seen as a nostalgic era, in reality,
it had been roiled by political assassinations, civil unrest, domestic terrorism,
and war abroad. But Richard Speck brought horror straight into

(01:21:26):
the domestic sphere, into a home where people should have
been safe. As one Chicago paper put it, after Speck,
people started locking their doors at night. The cultural impact
was profound. The media coverage of the Speck case was

(01:21:48):
unprecedented in scale for a crime of this kind. It
was one of the first times the term mass murderer
was applied to a killer of strangers. Previously, that phrase
conjured images of Prohibition era gangsters or wartime atrocities. SPEC's

(01:22:09):
one man massacre changed that, and sadly, the term would
find many more applications in the decades to follow. Some
criminologists and historians consider the Speck murders, along with a
certain Texas tower sniper attack that occurred just two weeks

(01:22:33):
later in nineteen sixty six, as the beginning of a
modern era of mass murders in America. It jolted law
enforcement into new approaches for manhunts and for understanding the
psychology of spree killers. Speck was not a serial killer

(01:22:55):
with a pattern across months or years. He was some
thing arguably more frightening at the time, an unpredictable man
whose anger exploded in one cataclysmic event. The victims of
Richard Speck were not forgotten their names. Gloria Davey, Patricia Metusk,

(01:23:21):
Nina Joe Schmael, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Ferris, Mary Anne Jordan,
Marlita Gargulo and Valentina passion became etched in Chicago's collective memory.
All were in their early twenties on the cusp of

(01:23:42):
graduating and launching careers in nursing. Gargulo and Pasione had
traveled from the Philippines full of hope to train in America,
only to meet a tragic end far from home. After
the the two Filipina nurses bodies were returned to their

(01:24:04):
homeland following a solemn memorial mass in Chicago. The loss
of these bright, carrying women resonated with the public. It
added a deeper layer of heartbreak that those who dedicated
themselves to saving lives had their own lives taken in

(01:24:25):
such a brutal manner. Hospitals and nursing programs in the
aftermath took a hard look at security. The nurse's townhouse, itself,
unguarded and accessible, became a cautionary example of vulnerability. Indeed,
the South Chicago Community Hospital reportedly began instituting tighter controls

(01:24:51):
on dormitories and escorting staff, a small but meaningful change
spur by the tragedy in Chicago. The sight of the
murders on East One hundredth Street bore a dark legacy.
For years, the townhouse remained a painful landmark of evil.

(01:25:16):
It has since been demolished, the lot either left empty
or rebuilt, but the memory lingers in the community. Each year,
on the July thirteenth anniversary, some Chicagoans still recall the
horror that took place there. The city's newspapers and historical

(01:25:39):
societies periodically recount the story, ensuring new generations learn about
the grim anniversary and the lessons it holds. Chicago wasn't
alone in never being the same after Richard Speck. The

(01:26:00):
criminal justice system would also never be the same. Illinois,
which had commuted SPEC's death sentence and essentially allowed him

(01:26:20):
to live out his natural life, later went through cycles
of abolishing and reinstating the death penalty. In debates, prosecutors
and politicians would invoke names like Spex, arguing that some
crimes were so heinous that execution was the only just punishment.

(01:26:45):
When the spectape surfaced in nineteen ninety six, as mentioned,
they added fuel to those arguments. Public sentiments swung towards
the view that society had failed by letting Speck live
and even thrive in prison. The scandal forced reforms in

(01:27:07):
Illinois prisons. There was a crackdown, at least temporarily on
contraband and corruption. Some guards faced investigation for how Spec
could obtain a video camera, let alone drugs so freely.
The Illinois legislature even held official hearings specifically on the

(01:27:31):
Spec tape incident. While one might cynically note these efforts
came years too late, after Spec was already dead, they
nonetheless show his actions continued to spark change long after
the fact. In the arena of popular culture, the Spec

(01:27:53):
murders have been retold countless times, reflecting and enduring morbid
Fast Nation films, TV movies, and episodes of true crime
series have dramatized the story, often focusing on the tension
of that night and the miracle of Cora Amoreo's survival.

(01:28:17):
True crime authors have poured over SPEC's psyche and books
examining how an unremarkable loser became a figure of nightmares.
SPEC's infamy even found its way into music and literature
as a symbol of pure evil and the banality of it. Yet,

(01:28:41):
unlike certain serial killers who spawn cult followings or copycats,
Spec remains more reviled than mythologized, a boogeyman that evokes
revulsion rather than dark charisma. Perhaps it's because there is

(01:29:02):
so little ambiguity or mystery in his crimes. It was brutality,
plain and simple, visited upon innocence. For the families of
those eight nurses, Richard Speck's death in nineteen ninety one
brought a measure of closure. Quote when he died for

(01:29:28):
me anyway, there was closure, said John Schmael, who lost
his sister Nina Joe to SPEC's knife. Quote. Finally it's over.
No more parole hearings. He doesn't have my sister's picture
in his cell anymore. Finally it's over. Schmael's words underscore

(01:29:52):
the painfully long shadow Speck cast. It stretched over twenty
five years, through the trial, the appeals, the parole hearings,
and the posthumous release of the tapes. Only with SPEC's
cremation and scattering did the families feel that chapter could

(01:30:15):
finally fully close. Even so, the grief never vanished. The
families carry the memory of their daughters and sisters forever,
young and frozen. In nineteen sixty six, robbed of promising futures,

(01:30:37):
memorial scholarships, and plaques were established in honor of the
slain nurses at their nursing school, preserving their legacy as
caregivers whose lives were cut short. In the final analysis,
Richard Speck's story is a cautionary tale on multiple levels.

(01:31:01):
It's a study in how a toxic mix of abuse, alcoholism,
and criminal impunity can incubate a ticking time bomb of violence.
It highlights the fragility of public safety, how one random
encounter with evil can shatter so many lives. It raises

(01:31:24):
uncomfortable questions about the purpose of incarceration. Was justice truly
served in his case? Or did the system fail to
uphold any meaningful punishment after the initial verdict, And it
forces a contemplation on evil itself. Was Speck borne a

(01:31:50):
monster or a product of environment? That debate may never
be resolved. What is certain is that one unhot summer
night in nineteen sixty six, a perfect storm of SPEC's
personal demons unleashed unspeakable horror on innocent women. Today, the

(01:32:17):
tale of Richard Speck is recounted not to glorify the killer,
but to remember the victims and to attempt to glean lessons.
It urges vigilance in protecting the vulnerable, compassion for survivors
like Cora, who displayed unimaginable bravery, and the importance of

(01:32:39):
a justice system that balances punishment with prevention. Spec once
infamously said on tape quote, if I die, I don't
give a damn if they throw me in the gutter.
In the end, he got his wish. He died ignominiously,

(01:33:02):
and his ashes were thrown to the winds unmourned. But
the legacy of his crimes, the reforms they spurred, the
nightmares they fueled, and the resolve they hardened in law
enforcement and the public, remains firmly etched in history. The

(01:33:23):
story of Richard Speck stands as a dark chronicle of
American crime, a reminder of how quickly a normal night
can descend into terror, and how the resilience of the
human spirit, exemplified by a young nurse hiding under a
bed and later standing face to face with her attacker

(01:33:49):
in court, standing up not only for herself but for
her slain friends, can ultimately shine a light height even
in the face of such darkness. Terrifying and true is
narrated by Enrique Kuto. It's executive produced by Rob Fields

(01:34:11):
and bobble Toopia dot com and produced by Dan Wilder
with original theme music by Ray Mattis. If you have
a story you think we should cover on Terrifying and True,
send us an email at Weekly Spooky at gmail dot com,
and if you want to support us for as little
as one dollar a month, go to Weeklyspooky dot com
slash join. Your support for as little as one dollar

(01:34:32):
a month keeps the show going. And speaking of I
want to say an extra special thank you to our
Patreon podcast boosters, folks who pay a little bit more
to hear their name at the end of the show,
and they are Johnny Nix, Kate and Lulu, Jessica Fuller,
Mike Escuey, Jenny Green, Amber Hansburg, karenwe Met, Jack Kerr,
and Craig Cohen. Thank you all so much and thank

(01:34:52):
you for listening. We'll see you all right here next
time on Terrifying and True

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Terrifying & True | Born to Raise Hell: Richard Speck and the 1966 Chicago Nurse Massacre

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Terrifying & True | Born to Raise Hell: Richard Speck and the 1966 Chicago Nurse Massacre