Richard Speck Biography

Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house in 1966. Speck was a mass murderer and a serial killer. The sensational crime for which Speck is known for was initially intended to be a burglary in order to obtain money. However,when twenty-three-year-old Corazon Amurao answered the door of the South Chicago apartment, Speck forced his way in wielding a knife and a pistol, maintaining he was only going to tie her and her five roommates up and rob them. In the subsequent hour, three more of Amurao's roommates returned from dates or from studying in the library only to be greeted by Speck who, after having all nine women in the apartment and under his control, decided to engage in a frenzy of violent stabbing and slashing. In addition, Speck raped one of the women prior to killing her. Only Amurao survived by huddling in a corner of the apartment and thus avoiding the head count of Speck who had already killed the eight other roommates. It was Amurao's description of a "Born to Raise Hell"tattoo on Speck's left forearm that led to his capture in a local hospital a week later where Speck had admitted himself after a botched suicide attempt.

Speculation surrounded Speck, most notably concerning his reputed extra Y chromosome (thought initially to be a cause of heightened aggressive behavior among violent criminals; known as the XYY chromosome disorder). In fact, Speck did not have such an abnormality, and even if he were to have had it, research had provided only minuscule evidence for the XYY theory. But possible precipitating factors for his rampage can be gleaned from his prior criminal record and early family life.

Speck indicated that he had a troubled early family life. By the time he was twenty, Speck had been arrested nearly forty times and had married a fifteen-year-old girl, with whom he had a child. He abandoned her five years later and told FBI researchers that he "just never got around to killing her." Furthermore, he was suspected in disappearances of other women, including the murder of a waitress who had spurned his sexual advances and the robbery and assault of a sixty-five-year-old woman months before he murdered the nurses. In addition, Speck was also known to engage in bar fights and had even been fired from his job in a Chicago boat yard because of a fight with a ship's officer. Speck's criminal record and early developmental history suggested that marked sexual deviation was evident early in his life and that he most likely harbored sadistic impulses. Speck was initially convicted and sentenced to die in 1967 but was then retried and sentenced to over 400 years in prison.