Crime of the century, a half century later

Courtesy WIlliam Martin

WIlliam Martin Author

On an ordinary Wednesday evening in the summer of 1966, Americans went to bed, cloaked in innocence, many without locking their doors, all without fear. The next morning, July 14, 1966, the nation awoke to the shocking news that a heinous phenomenon had struck the land, which forever altered the landscape of crime. At 11 p.m. while most slept, a man dressed in black, armed with a knife and a gun, pried the screen off a kitchen window at 2319 E. 100th St. in Jeffrey Manor, a peaceful middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s Southeast Side. The man reached inside and opened the kitchen door silently. He walked into a small, two-story townhouse.

Six nurses were home that night when the intruder entered and later three more nurses would arrive at the townhouse. Ultimately, nine nurses from Southeast Chicago Community Hospital would be held captive inside three small bedrooms on the second floor. Six of the women were Americans who were to graduate from the School of Nursing in August. The other three were already nurses, Filipino women who had arrived through an exchange program two months earlier. Three of the six townhouses facing east 100th street were occupied by nursing students at the hospital because there was insufficient dormitory space.

Before dawn, eight nurses were dead — stabbed or strangled or both. Pools of innocent blood soaked parts of the second floor. The man had tied their ankles and wrists by slicing bed sheets with his knife. He took each nurse out of the largest bedroom after taking their money at gunpoint and telling them with a smile that he would not hurt them — he only wanted money “to go to New Orleans.” He was gone for 20-30 minutes with each. Then the water ran in an adjoining bathroom before the man returned for another nurse. 

Despite having her wrists and ankles bound with the strips the man had sliced from the bunk beds, a 24-year-old lithe and petite Filipino nurse, Corazon Amurao, wiggled underneath one bunk bed and, later in the night, moved across the room to hide underneath another bunk bed which had overhanging covers which hid her. When the man left an hour and a half before dawn, he did not see Corazon as he checked the big bedroom one last time. At dawn, she worked herself free of her bindings, ran to her bedroom, pushed out the screen window, climbed on the ledge and sobbed for help.

When two veteran Chicago homicide detectives searched the townhouse after Corazon had been taken to the safety of the middle townhouse, they discovered the most gruesome carnage they had ever seen. The coroner emerged from the scene and said, “This is the crime of the century.” 

The unknown killer was the object of a massive police manhunt. He eluded his heavily-armed pursuers Thursday, Friday and Saturday. By late Friday night, the man in black had been identified by the police who matched three fingerprints on the second-floor bedroom door with the inked impressions flown in from Washington during an airline strike. Corazon had earlier given a remarkably accurate description of the killer to a police artist. On Saturday morning, these two pieces of direct evidence established that the killer was an ex-convict named Richard Speck, a drifter who was born to a religious family in Monmouth, Illinois and moved to Dallas when he was 9 years old. 

The uneducated but cunning mass murderer fled the Southeast Side when he learned he had left a survivor. He was taken to Cook County Hospital early Sunday morning after a half-hearted attempt at cutting his wrists in a cubicle at a West Side flophouse where he was hiding under an assumed name. Dr. Leroy Smith, a young surgical resident, had seen a picture of Speck on the front page of the Tribune earlier that night and had read a description of his tattoos. Smith scrubbed away caked blood on the man’s arm until he saw the tattoo, “Born to Raise Hell.” 

Richard Speck was arrested and by virtue of a series of circumstances, I was assigned to be his chief prosecutor. I was given tremendous support by the entire State’s Attorney’s Office. After a two-month trial in Peoria, he was sentenced to death by a jury after 49 minutes of deliberation. He escaped the electric chair because the U.S. Supreme Court reversed 41 cases simultaneously on the basis that the juries had been unconstitutionally selected. Resentenced to 1,200 years, Speck served his time at Stateville near Joliet. He used hormones to grow breasts and assumed the grotesque parody of the anatomy of a woman. He shrewdly did this to become a sex object for prison gangbangers who protected him from being killed by any inmate who wanted to be a hero. They did not want to lose their “main ride.”

Speck died of a heart attack on Dec. 6, 1991, one day before his 50th birthday. I believed a wholly factual book should be written about all aspects of the case to create an accurate record of this innocence-shattering crime. Dennis Breo, an award winning AMA correspondent and I worked closely to write the first edition of the Crime of the Century in 1993. 

Several critical events have come to light since the book was published and we decided to update the text as the murders were reaching their 50th anniversary. We discovered much more valuable information than we expected. Among the compelling features of the updated edition is an analysis of the Speck and John Wayne Gacy trials written by Gacy’s chief prosecutor, William J. Kunkle. 

 Corazon, one of the bravest persons in the world, provided me with information and family pictures after 50 years of silence. Dr. Jan Leetsma, a renowned neuropathologist, answered my questions regarding his study of Speck’s brain and what became of the brain.

 Speck went to his death without confessing — or so we thought. His defense was he had blacked out after taking drugs that night and had no recollection of killing anyone. The prosecutors never believed his story. Later we learned that, before his death, Speck had participated in an inmate produced video interview containing a confession. Bill Kurtis obtained the video years later, after Speck’s death and produced it as an A&E feature which stunned and shocked a huge audience. I studied a transcript of the relevant portions of Speck’s prison video and compared my knowledge of the forensic evidence to Speck’s words and I was able to identify the few times he told the truth and the many times he spewed obscene lies insulting his victims.

By committing the first random mass murder in 20^th-century America, Richard Speck opened the floodgates to a tragic phenomenon that haunts us today. The objective of the updated Crime of the Century is to inform the reader with a totally accurate portrait of Speck, his crimes, his trial and its aftermath, 1966 to 2016.

The victims can never be forgotten. Eight young women who had dedicated their lives to helping others were murdered 50 years ago. They deserve a long overdue memorial. Their classmates and many others are working toward that end. We hope Crime of the Century furthers this exceptionally worthy cause. 

In her interview, the brave Corazon Amurao speaks lovingly of her colleagues. So should we all. 

Bill Martin lived in Oak Park, almost without interruption, from 1948 to 2008. A graduate of St. Giles and Fenwick High School, where he was editor of The Wick, he went to Loyola undergrad and law school, where he founded and was editor of the Loyola Law Times, a Journal of Opinion. In 2008 he moved to Riverside.

He will sign books and answer questions on the updated edition of “Crime of the Century” at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore on July 8 from 7 to 9 p.m.