Richard Speck: The Murder of Eight Student Nurses

On the night of July 13–14, 1966, Richard Speck broke into a Chicago townhouse dormitory housing student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital and methodically murdered eight young women over the course of several hours. He used a knife and strangled the victims one by one while holding the others bound and blindfolded in separate rooms, each unaware of what was happening to the others. A ninth nurse, Corazon Amurao, survived by rolling under a bed and remaining hidden until morning. Speck was a drifter and ex-convict with a long criminal record who had arrived in Chicago looking for work on the merchant marine docks. The words "Born to Raise Hell" were tattooed on his arm. Amurao's survival and her ability to provide a detailed description of the killer — including that tattoo — was decisive. A police sketch and the tattoo description led investigators directly to Speck within days. He was identified and apprehended in a Skid Row hotel after surviving a self-inflicted wound. At trial in 1967, Speck was convicted of all eight murders and sentenced to death. However, the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which struck down existing death penalty statutes, commuted his sentence to eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years each. The horror of the crime and the spectacle of his reprieve from death intensified public debate about capital punishment across the country. He was denied parole repeatedly and died of a heart attack in prison in 1991, one day before his 50th birthday. Controversy surrounded the case even after his death when a prison videotape surfaced in 1996 showing Speck in what appeared to be a comfortable and debauched prison life, prompting outrage. The murders remain one of the most shocking mass killings of the twentieth century and permanently changed how nursing students were housed and protected.