Serial Killer and Mass Murderer Richard Speck

Speck Audio Text

1

On July thirteenth, 1966, this creepy looking monster, Richard Speck, committed one of the most notorious crimes in American history when he brutally took the lives of 8 young nursing students in Chicago. This Massacre was the culmination of a long criminal career spanning multiple states. There were multiple opportunities to stop the escalating violence but each time, his charges were either reduced, he was released early, or both. A common theme among these monsters. They are not held accountable and so they escalate their activities until lives are lost. Born in 1941 in Kirkwood, Illinois, Speck was the seventh of eight children. After his father had a fatal heart attack when he was six, his mother got remarried. His stepfather was an alcoholic insurance salesman with a criminal record named Carl Lindbergh which resulted in a chaotic and abusive home environment. This was a major shift from the life he had with his religious mom and dad. It's not clear why Richard's mother married her second husband seeing as she had held his father to a high standard and had a hard stance against alcohol and tobacco use. The family relocated to a home in rural Texas, but they would live there only a year before they began bouncing from place to place likely due Lindberghs’s drinking problems.

2

Speck’s academic performance was poor due to the troubles at home, and he began drinking at just 12 years old making things even worse. He started by stealing liquor from his stepdad out of spite, but soon developed a habit. Richard was already struggling when his brother lost his life in a car accident in 1952 which compounded everything. From here things went downhill fast, leading him to drop out of school at sixteen. By this time, he had cultivated a greaser persona, slicking back his hair, carrying a switchblade, drinking daily and committing petty crimes with a group of other troubled kids who introduced him to harder substances. Speck's criminal record began early. At thirteen, he was arrested for the first time on trespassing charges but this was just the first of many. Along with his life of crime, Speck would also develop a very binary attitude towards women, either they were saints or the worst sort of garbage in his eyes and this attitude certainly fueled his later acts of evil. Despite this he would get married in 1961 after getting a young woman pregnant. The couple had a daughter, but Speck was absent from his child's birth and most of her life, preferring to taunt his wife with extramarital affairs over actually participating in his young family. After countless arrests, Speck was finally sentenced to some real time in 1963, after he was convicted of forgery and sent to state prison, though he was released early after serving just over a year. Around this time, Richard started bragging that someday he would be a notorious criminal that the papers wrote about. This was also when his crimes began to get violent and he was soon back in jail for an aggravated assault on January ninth 1965. Speck attacked a young woman in a parking lot with a massive knife, but fled when she began screaming. Luckily police were in the area and he was arrested almost immediately. Shockingly, his charges were reduced from attempted homicide and rape after he claimed to have no recollection of the events due to alcohol. Speck spent just 5 months in prison for this offense due to a clerical error making the horror that was to come possible. Over the following months leading up to the massacre, Richard's wife filed for divorce and he would rack up arrest after arrest. After a warrant was issued in March of 1966, he took a bus to Illinois to avoid being taken into custody for a grocery store robbery.

3

Even while he was trying to hide out, Speck did not stop committing crimes. Though at first he did make an effort to clean up his act with the help of his family in Monmouth Illinois, but he came apart when he got news that his ex wife had remarried. Once more he descended into alcohol and substance use. In addition to the relatively minor crimes during this time, Speck also committed a brutal assault and robbery against a 65 year old woman referred to as Miss Virgil Harris. She had come home as he was burglarizing it. Speck defiled her before tying her up using strips he cut from her pajamas, then took the money she had and fled. There is also the case of Mary Kathryn Pearce who worked at a bar that Speck drank at. On April thirteenth her body was found hidden behind the bar- she had been hit so hard that her liver ruptured. Speck had a bad reputation and soon fell under suspicion. When police went to question him at the room he was renting, Speck had already fled, though they did find the items he had stolen from Harris. Prior to the attack on the nurses, Speck would briefly work on a boat, getting the job through family connections. While at sea he was diagnosed with appendicitis and rushed to a hospital where he developed an eye for the nurses that cared for him. Upon his release, he became even more erratic and was fired from his job after pulling a knife on the boat captain. He stayed briefly at his sisters house in Chicago but after weeks of him lounging around reading comic books, she kicked him out. Richard spent the little money he had drinking in a park which is when he noticed a house nearby where a group of young nursing students lived who caught his attention. With nowhere to go, no job, and a rapidly escalating addiction, Speck was increasingly desperate and aggressive. On July 13th he got some money from his sister which he used to buy drinks. Speck then followed a woman as she went to multiple bars before accosting her with his switchblade and forcing her into the room he was renting. After assaulting her Richard went through her belongings where he found a 22 caliber pistol. Now armed and emboldened, he decided it was time to pay a visit to the nursing students that he had been monitoring.

4


On that fateful night, a drunken Speck broke into the townhouse through a back window. He then began knocking on doors and forcing the occupants at gunpoint into the largest bedroom. Telling them that he was there just to rob them, Speck spent time chatting and joking with the young women, giving them no indication of what he was about to do. He bound them with bed sheets cut into long strips. All the while reassuring them that he would not hurt any of them and just wanted to take whatever cash and valuables they had. When one woman spat on him, he became enraged and took her into another room to punish her for this insult. But as he stood over her 2 others walked into the room and saw what he was about to do, so he lashed out stabbing both at least 20 times with his switchblade.
Now past the point of no return, Speck spent the next 4 hours leading the other captives one by one into another room, and taking their lives, either by stabbing or strangling. Once he thought there was only one left, Richard took extra time with Gloria Davy. Dragging her down to the living room he brutally assaulted her for an extended period of time then strangled her, unleashing all the hate he felt toward women in a disgusting act of evil. Once he was done, he searched the house for whatever he could steal before running out into the night. Speck threw his knife into the Calumet river thinking that without witnesses he couldn’t get caught. However, one nurse, Caroazon Amurao Atienza, had survived by hiding under a bed and she was able to give a detailed description to the authorities, including the distinctive Born to Raise Hell tattoo on his arm. The city was immediately on edge as news of the vicious massacre spread. Speck would check into a cheap hotel under an alias, but the noose was quickly tightening. He had left dozens of fingerprints behind which matched those that the Dallas police had on file and soon his name and image was printed in newspapers everywhere as the most wanted man in America. With no way to escape justice, Richard attempted to take his own life with a piece of a broken bottle. But, an employee of the hotel discovered him before he bled out and he was rushed to a hospital.

5


A doctor recognized Speck's tattoo, police were notified and he was was quickly apprehended. His trial began on trial in April of 1967 and the evidence was undeniable. So Richard tried a similar strategy to the defense he used when he had been on trial for attacking the woman in Texas, claiming he had no memory of the night beyond drinking at the bar earlier. Of course this did not mitigate what he had done in any way and after Atienza positively identified him as the attacker in court his fate was sealed. Speck was convicted on eight counts of homicide, and sentenced to the electric chair, but this was later commuted to 8 consecutive life sentences after the US supreme court found the death penalty to be unconstitutional in 1972. Somehow, Speck was able to apply for parole but he was almost instantly denied at his hearings which started as early as 1976. The monster had to find a way to survive behind bars and a disturbing videos would be made public of him with breasts performing sex acts on other inmates and showing off silk underwear. In the video he bragged about using illegal white powder, how he loved to be used by men, and how much fun he was having behind bars, though he comes across as subservient to the other men and it is my opinion that he was simply trying to survive any way he could. Considering the charges he had, Speck would have been a prime target for other inmates. Speck would spend the rest of his life in this way until he passed away from a heart attack in 1991, just a day before his 50th birthday. Fearing a grave would become a target for vandals, his family had him cremated and his ashes scattered in Joliet, Illinois. Crime, evil, serial killer, mass murder, monster, creepy, scary, true crime, Richard speck