Richard Speck Victims

Case background and investigation

On the night of July 13-14, 1966, eight student nurses were murdered inside a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street in the South Deering neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. The victims were Gloria Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo, and Valentina Pasion. Most were students affiliated with South Chicago Community Hospital who shared the residence as living quarters. The killer, 24-year-old drifter Richard Benjamin Speck, entered the townhouse and, over the course of several hours, systematically stabbed, strangled, and slashed the young women to death.

A ninth resident, 23-year-old Filipino exchange student nurse Corazon Amurao, survived by rolling under a bunk bed and remaining hidden and silent for hours while her friends were killed one by one. After the attacker left, she climbed onto a window ledge and screamed for help, alerting neighbors. Amurao became the central witness for the prosecution. Her account allowed police to establish that a single intruder was responsible and provided a detailed physical description, including that the man had a tattoo reading 'Born to Raise Hell' on his forearm.

The investigation moved quickly. Fingerprints recovered from the crime scene were matched to Speck, who had a prior criminal record. Publicity around the tattoo proved decisive: after Speck attempted suicide by cutting his wrists at a Chicago hotel, an emergency room physician, Dr. LeRoy Smith, recognized the 'Born to Raise Hell' tattoo from news reports and alerted authorities. Speck was arrested and identified while hospitalized in mid-July 1966.

Because of the extraordinary pretrial publicity, the trial was moved to Peoria, Illinois. Proceedings began on April 3, 1967. The emotional high point came when Corazon Amurao stepped down from the witness stand, walked directly to Speck, pointed at him, and declared, 'This is the man.' On April 15, 1967, after the jury deliberated less than an hour, Richard Speck was convicted of all eight murders and sentenced to death. His conviction is a matter of legal record.

Speck's death sentence was never carried out. In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court set aside his death sentence, and after the Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia effectively invalidated existing capital-punishment statutes nationwide, Illinois courts resentenced him. He received a term of 400 to 1,200 years in prison and was held at the Stateville Correctional Center. Denied parole repeatedly, Speck remained incarcerated for the rest of his life.

On December 5, 1991, Richard Speck died of a heart attack at a hospital near the prison, one day before his 50th birthday. The case had a lasting impact on American life, widely cited as one of the mass murders that reshaped public perceptions of violent crime in the 1960s. Corazon Amurao completed her nursing career and largely avoided public attention in later decades. The case is closed: Speck was convicted and died in custody.