The Atrocious Slaying of Eight Student Nurses | Richard Speck

On July 13th 1966, a townhouse acting as a dormitory for student nurses was broken into, and eight young women lost their lives in a night of terror.

Mary Carbaugh and Benjamin Speck had eight children; their seventh, Richard Speck, was born on December 6, 1941, and he would go on to commit the atrocities of this case.

The family were living a normal life in Monmouth, Illinois, up until 1947, when life began to rapidly change for Speck. Benjamin died from a heart attack at age 53, taking the closest parental figure away.

Three years later, Mary married Carl Lindberg of Palo Pinto, Texas, whom she had met on a train to Chicago. Carl was reportedly a heavy drinker, starkly contrasting Benjamin and Mary’s teetotal lifestyle, and he had a 25-year-long criminal history.

Speck and his younger sister stayed with one of their four older sisters in Monmouth while the school year ended before they joined their mother and new stepfather in Santo, Texas. Over the following twelve years, the family lived at ten different addresses, usually in poorer neighbourhoods. Speck reportedly loathed his stepfather as he was verbally abusive and frequently absent from the home.

Another tragedy hit the family when the eldest child, Robert Speck, died in an automobile accident in 1952 at age 23.

It is unknown if it stemmed from grief with his brother and father passing and his life being drastically changed, but Speck struggled heavily in school due to a fear of people staring at him. This fear led him to refuse to wear his needed reading glasses and never speaking up in class. In the autumn of 1957, Speck began the ninth grade a year above his peers after being held back to repeat the eighth grade. But Speck dropped out in January 1958 after his 16th rather than going on his second semester of the school year.

Speck had begun to drink at the age of twelve and was getting drunk almost daily, most likely another reason for his poor schooling. His first arrest came at age thirteen for trespassing, which would be followed by dozens of other misdemeanours over the following eight years.

In October 1961, when Speck was twenty, he met fifteen-year-old Shirley Annette Malone at the Texas State Fair. Shirley was pregnant within three weeks of the pair dating, and, per the times, they were married shortly after on January 19th.

They began to live with Speck’s older sister Carolyn and her husband; their mother, Mary, was also living at the home after separating from her husband Carl.

Shirley lived in fear of Speck and said that Speck would rape her at knifepoint often and demanded sex at least four times a day.

Robbie Lynn Speck was born on July 5th 1962, while Speck was serving a 22-day jail sentence for disturbing the peace after a drunken melee in McKinney, Texas.

In July 1963, Speck was sentenced to three years after being convicted of forgery and burglary. He had forged and cashed a co-worker’s $44 paycheck, which is around $450 now and robbed a grocery store of beer, cigarettes and $3, around $30 today.

He was released on parole in 1965 after serving 16 months of his sentence; the release lasted a week.

On January 9th, Speck was arrested after he attacked a woman in the parking lot of her apartment complex, wielding a 17-inch carving knife. He had fled when she screamed in terror but was caught blocks away minutes later.

For the attack, Speck was convicted of aggravated assault and given a 16-month sentence set to run concurrently with his 6-month parole violation sentence. Due to an error, Speck was released on July 12th after he completed the 6-month parole violation sentence.

After his release, Speck began working as a driver for the Patterson Meat Company. He had six accidents in the company truck and failed to show up to work multiple times, eventually leading to his sacking.

Upon his mother’s recommendation, Speck moved in with a 29-year-old divorcee who worked as a barmaid at his favourite bar, Ginny’s Lounge, in December 1965. He would act as a babysitter for her three children.

The following month, Shirley, who had been separated from Speck for some time, filed for divorce and sought full custody of their child.

Speck stabbed a man with his knife at Ginny’s Lounge that same month. He was charged with aggravated assault, but the defence attorney his mother hired managed to get the charge dropped to a lesser disturbing the peace charge. Speck was charged $10, around $100 today, and jailed for three days after paying the fine.

On March 5th, 1966, Speck bought a 12-year-old car and used it to rob a grocery store of 70 cigarette cartons the following evening; he then sold them in the parking lot from the car’s boot. The police traced the vehicle but found it abandoned nearby. A warrant was issued for Speck’s arrest; if he was caught, it would have been the 42nd time Dallas police would have arrested him.

On March 9th, Speck’s older sister Carolyn drove him to the Dallas bus depot, where he caught a bus to Chicago, Illinois.

In Chicago, he stayed with another of his four older sisters and her family for a few days before returning to his hometown of Monmouth. There, he stayed with a few family friends before his older brother managed to get him a job sanding plasterboard with a local carpenter.

Speck learnt that Shirley had remarried just two days after their divorce went through on March 16th, 1966. After living with family friends for almost a month, he moved into the Christy Hotel in downtown Monmouth, spending most of his time at the local taverns. By the end of the month, he would return to his old ways, getting arrested in Gulfport for threatening a man in a tavern’s restroom with a knife.

The first known drastic escalation of his crimes came in the early hours of April 3rd. Virgil Harris, a 65-year-old woman, returned home at 1 a.m. to find a burglar brandishing a knife. He was described as a six-foot white male who was “very polite” and spoke “very softly with a Southern drawl”. The attacker, later discovered to be Speck, blindfolded Virgil and tied her up before raping her and ransacking her home. He stole some possessions and the $2.50 Virgil had earned babysitting that evening.

Just six days later, Mary Piece, a 32-year-old barmaid who worked at her brother-in-law’s tavern in downtown Monmouth, was last seen leaving work at 12:20 in the morning. She was found dead on April 13th in an empty hog house behind the tavern; Mary had been murdered from a blow to her abdomen that ruptured her liver.

Speck frequented Frank’s Place, the tavern where Mary worked, and he had helped build the hog house. The police were still in the area when Speck returned to the bar to collect his final paycheck for his work on the hog house on the 15th. They asked him to stay in town for further questioning, but Speck fled just four days later. He returned to his older sister’s home in Chicago, spinning a story of a “criminal syndicate” running him out of time for refusing to sell narcotics.

On the 19th, the same day that Speck fled, police went to his room at the Christy Hotel. They had missed him by a few hours; workers saw him leave with his suitcases, claiming he was going to a laundromat. A search of his room found a radio and costume jewellery stolen from Virgil Harris’ home, as well as items reported missing from two other local burglaries in the previous month.

Sadly, no one has been charged with Mary’s murder.

Speck lived in Chicago with Martha, her husband Gene, and their two teenage daughters in the family’s second-floor apartment in the Old Irving Park neighbourhood. Gene had served in the U.S. Navy and thought that the U.S. Merchant Marine might be able to provide more stable work for an unemployed Speck.

On April 25th, Gene drove Speck to the U.S. Coast Guard’s office to apply for a letter of authority to work as an apprentice seaman. To get the letter, it was required that Speck be fingerprinted, photographed and have a physical exam performed by a doctor. Five days later, Speck found work joining the 33-member crew of the Inland Steel’s Clarence B. Randall.

His first voyage was cut short and ended on May 3rd because Speck was ill and needed to be evacuated by the U.S. Coast Guard’s helicopter. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hancock, Michigan, where he had an emergency appendectomy. Speck returned to his sister’s home in Chicago to recuperate. By May 20th, he rejoined the crew until being kicked off on June 14th for a drunken quarrel with one of the boat’s officers. For a week, Speck stayed at St. Elmo, a flophouse, a cheap boarding home, in the East Side of Chicago before travelling via train to Houghton, Michigan.

While being treated at St. Joseph’s Hospital, he befriended a nurse aide named Judy Laakaniemi. Judy gave Speck $80, which is about $800 today. Afterwards, Speck returned to Chicago to stay with Martha and her family for the next couple of weeks.

On June 30th, three days after Speck returned to Chicago, Gene drove him to the National Maritime Union (NMU) hiring hall in South Deering, Chicago, to file his paperwork for a seaman’s card.

Friday, July 8th, Gene drove Speck back to the NMU hiring hall to collect his seaman’s card and register for a berth on a ship. Speck lost out on a position to a seaman with more seniority, and he returned to stay at Martha’s for the weekend.

Monday, July 11th, Speck outstayed his welcome with his sister’s family, and Gene took him back to the NMU hiring hall with his bags. Speck spent the night at Pauline’s rooming house about a mile away in the Vets Park neighbourhood.

Tuesday, July 12th, Speck returned to the NMU hiring hall. Mid-afternoon he received an assignment on Sinclair Oil’s tanker SS Sinclair Great Lakes, which is a thirty drive away in East Chicago, Indiana. When Speck arrived, he found that his spot was already taken and was driven back to the NMU hiring hall, which had since closed.

Speck had no more money for a room for the night and dropped his bags off at the manor Shell filling station before going to sleep in an unfinished house.

Wednesday, July 13th, Speck collected his bags and returned to the NMU hiring hall. He was still angry at being sent to a nonexistent assignment and spent thirty minutes with Martha and Gene in the couple’s car when they drove down to visit him at 9 a.m. They were parked on E. 100th Street next to the Luelle Elementary School across the street from the townhouses that would house the horrors of a massacre in the coming hours.

By 10:30 a.m., Speck was tired of hanging around the NMU hiring hall. With the $25 his sister had given him for a room, Speck walked 1.5 miles East to the Shipyard Inn, where he rented a room for the night. The rest of the day and the rest of the money was spent at nearby bars.

He accosted Ella Mae Hooper at knifepoint; the 53-year-old had spent her day at the same bars as Speck. Once, he got Ella into his room at the Shipyard Inn, where he raped her and stole her black $16, mail-order .22 calibre Röhm pistol. He left the room dressed entirely in black with a switchblade and the stolen handgun. Speck ate at the nearby Kay’s Pilot House before returning to the Shipyard Inn tavern, where he continued to drink until 10:20 p.m. before he began walking the 1.5 distance towards the townhouses on E. 100th Street.

At 11 p.m., Speck climbed through a window of the home and made his way to the bedrooms. He knocked on the first door he approached, which happened to be the bedroom of Filipina exchange student Corazon Amurao (20). At gunpoint, he herded her and fellow Filipina students into the room next door. Corazon, Merlita Gargullo (23) and Valentina Pasion (23) entered the room where American students Patricia Matusek (20), Pamela Wilkening (20) and Nina Jo Schmale (24) were sleeping inside.

Speck woke the sleeping women and bound all the women’s wrists behind their backs with torn strips of bed sheets. Corazon, the lone survivor of the massacre, said: “the American girls told us we more or less had to trust him. Maybe if we were calm and quiet, he will be, too. He has been talking to us all and he seems calm enough and that is a good sign.”.

Speck began leading the women out of the room one by one and stabbing or strangling them to death; he would wait almost half an hour between each murder. Corazon said that none of her friends screamed as they walked out, but their muffled cries could be heard shortly after.

While Speck was gone, Corazon rolled underneath one of the beds in the room, which is how she would survive the attack.

During the attack, two other student nurses living in the townhouse returned home. Suzanne Farris (21) and Mary Ann Jordan (20) were stabbed upon their entry. Some time later, Gloria Jean Davy (22) was dropped off by her boyfriend, and Speck attacked her. Gloria was the only woman out of the eight to be raped and sexually brutalized before she was strangled to death.

It’s likely that Speck had forgotten or lost track of how many women he had held captive in their home and left while Corazon was still lying underneath the bed. She remained there for hours, only risking exiting after 6 a.m., seven hours after the attack had begun. She went to the nearest window and began screaming, “They are all dead. My friends are all dead. Oh God, I’m the only one alive,” and things of a similar nature. Corazon continued until the police arrived.

The descriptor she gave the police, which led to Speck’s capture, was a description of a tattoo she had seen on Speck’s arm. “BORN TO RAISE HELL” on his forearm.

A few days after the attack, Speck went to the hospital, and a doctor noticed the tattoo and remembered reading about the attack in the newspaper. Speck was arrested right away after the police were notified.

The trial began on April 3rd, 1967, after a panel of psychiatrists found Speck competent to stand trial. Speck was claiming to have no recollection of the murders, but it didn’t affect the prosecution’s argument, who had Corazon as an eye-witness prepared to identify him. Along with the witness, fingerprints at the scene were found, and they matched Speck’s prints.

After only forty-five minutes of deliberation, the jury came back with a guilty verdict. Speck was initially sentenced to death, but it was changed to 100 to 300 years imprisonment in 1971. The sentencing was altered because the Supreme Court ruled that people opposed to the death penalty were unconstitutionally excluded from the jury.

Speck served this sentence at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois; he would get caught with drugs and moonshine throughout his time there.

In 1996, a video taken of Speck and another inmate in 1988 was released to the public by an anonymous attorney. In the video, Speck was seen wearing silk panties with female-like breasts grown from the use of smuggled hormone treatments. He performed oral sex on the other inmate while they were both doing large amounts of cocaine. At one point, the cameraman, a third prisoner, asked why Speck did what he did, and he replied, “It just wasn’t their night”, with a sickening laugh.

Richard Speck died on Dec 5th 1991, from a heart attack.

That’s all for the heartbreaking story of eight women murdered while trying to learn how to save people’s lives.

Merlita Gargullo was born on September 1st 1942, making her 23 years old when she was murdered. She was returned to her homeland in the Philippines to be laid to rest after a mass memorial service was held.

Valentina P. Pasion was born on February 14th 1942, making her 24 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Jones Municipal Memorial Park in Isabela Province, Cagayan Valley, Philippines after a mass memorial service was held.

Patricia Ann Matusek was born on December 8th 1945, making her 20 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Saint Mary Catholic Cemetery and Mausoleum in Evergreen Park, Cook County, Illinois, after a mass memorial service was held.

Pamela Lee Wilkening was born on August 2nd 1945, making her 20 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, after a mass memorial service was held.

Nina Jo Schmale was born on December 27th 1941, making her 24 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Wheaton Cemetery in Wheaton, DuPage County, Illinois, after a mass memorial service was held.

Suzanne Bridget Farris was born on September 10th 1944, making her 21 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Hillside, Cook County, Illinois, after a mass memorial service was held.

Mary Ann Jordan was born on October 4th 1945, making her 20 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Riverside Cemetery in Three Oaks, Berrien County, Michigan, after a mass memorial service was held.

Gloria Jean Davy was born on July 13th 1944, making her 22 years old when she was murdered. She was laid to rest at the Holy Cross Cemetery and Mausoleums in Calumet City, Cook County, Illinois, after a mass memorial service was held.