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.
While awaiting trial, Speck participated in twice-weekly sessions with part-time Cook County Jail psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Ziporyn. These continued after Speck's transfer from Cermak Memorial Hospital (inside Chicago's House of Corrections) on July 29, 1966, until February 13, 1967, the day before Speck was transferred to Peoria to stand trial. Ziporyn prepared a discharge summary with depression, anxiety, guilt, and shame among Speck's emotions, but also a deep love for his family. It went on to note an obsessive-compulsive personality and a "Madonna-prostitute" attitude towards women. Ziporyn maintained Speck viewed women as saintly until he felt betrayed by them for some reason, after which hostility developed. Speck was also diagnosed with organic brain syndrome, resulting from the cerebral injuries he suffered earlier in his life, and stated he was competent to stand trial but was insane at the time of the crime due to the effects of alcohol and drug use on his organic brain syndrome.
---Confession---
Speck later claimed he had no recollection of the murders, but he had confessed the crime to Dr. LeRoy Smith at the Cook County Hospital. Smith did not testify, because the confession was made while Speck was sedated. Illinois Supreme Court Justice John J. Stamos, Cook County's state attorney when Speck was tried, who knew of the hospital confession, stated, "...we didn't need it. We had an eyewitness. "Speck confessed to the murders for the first time in public when he spoke to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene in 1978.
In a film that inmates made at the Stateville Correctional Center in 1988, Speck recounted the brutal murders in detail. He again stated he was high that night, but then he undercut the idea that the drugs were a mitigating factor, asserting he could just as well have "done it sober".
---Trial---
Speck's jury trial began April 3, 1967, in Peoria, Illinois, three hours southwest of Chicago, with a gag order on the press. In court, Speck was positively identified by the sole surviving student nurse, Corazon Amurao. When Amurao was asked if she could identify the killer of her fellow students, Amurao rose from her seat in the witness box, walked directly in front of Speck and pointed her finger at him, nearly touching him, and said, "This is the man."
On April 15, after 49 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Speck guilty and recommended the death penalty. On June 5, Judge Herbert J. Paschen sentenced Speck to die in the electric chair, but granted an immediate stay pending automatic appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court subsequently upheld his conviction and death sentence on November 22, 1968.
--Life in prison--
While incarcerated at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, Speck was given the nickname "Birdman" after the film Birdman of Alcatraz, because he kept a pair of sparrows that flew into his cell. He was described as a loner who kept a stamp collection and enjoyed listening to music. His contacts with the warden included requests for new shirts, a radio, and other mundane items. The warden merely described him as "a big nothing doing time." Speck was not a model prisoner; he was often caught with drugs or distilled moonshine. Punishment for such infractions never stopped him. "How am I going to get in trouble? I'm here for 1,200 years!"
Speck loathed reporters, and granted only one press interview, in 1978, to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene. During that interview, he publicly confessed to the murders for the first time, and said he thought he would get out of prison "between now and the year 2000," at which time he hoped to run his own grocery store business. When Greene asked him if he compared himself to celebrity killers like John Dillinger, he replied, "Me, I'm not like Dillinger or anybody else. I'm freakish."
Speck stated that at the time of the killings, he "had no feelings," but things had changed: "I had no feelings at all that night. They said there was blood all over the place. I can't remember. It felt like nothing ... I'm sorry as hell. For those girls, and for their families, and for me. If I had to do it over again, it would be a simple house burglary." Speck's "final thought for the American people" was, "Just tell 'em to keep up their hatred for me. I know it keeps up their morale. And I don't know what I'd do without it."
In his book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, John E. Douglas of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit refers to a telling prison incident Speck revealed to him in an interview: "he found an injured sparrow that had flown in through one of the broken windows and nursed it back to health. When it was healthy enough to stand, he tied a string around its leg and had it perch on his shoulder. At one point, a guard told him pets weren't allowed. 'I can't have it?' Speck challenged, then walked over to a spinning fan and threw the small bird in. Horrified, the guard said, 'I thought you liked that bird.' 'I did,' Speck replied. 'But if I can't have it, no one can.'"
--Death--
Shortly before December 5, 1991, Speck was transported from Stateville Correctional Center to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, Illinois after complaining of severe chest pains. Speck later died in the early morning hours of December 5, of what was believed to be a heart attack, one day shy of what would have been his 50th birthday. The coroner stated that Speck had an "enlarged heart, emphysema and clogged arteries" which most likely contributed to his fatal heart attack.
Speck's sister feared that his grave would be desecrated, so he does not have an identified physical resting place. Speck was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in a secret location in the Joliet area.