Corazon Amurao lay under a bed for hours after the last sounds stopped. At about five in the morning of July 14, 1966, she climbed out onto a window ledge of the townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street, in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, and screamed. Inside were the bodies of eight of the young women she lived with, student nurses at South Chicago Community Hospital. She was twenty-three, an exchange nurse from the Philippines, and she had watched the man who killed them for most of the night.
He had come in late on July 13, drunk and on drugs, carrying a knife and a gun. He herded nine women into one bedroom as they came home, tied each of them with strips torn from a sheet, told them he only wanted money to get to New Orleans, and then over several hours took them out of the room one at a time and strangled or stabbed them. The dead were Gloria Jean Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion. Amurao rolled under a bed while he was out of the room, and he lost count.
She described him closely, including a tattoo on his forearm that read Born to Raise Hell. Fingerprints found in the townhouse were matched to him, and within a day police had a name. He was arrested on July 17, after a suicide attempt in a skid row hotel, when an emergency room doctor noticed the tattoo.
Richard Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois, on December 6, 1941. His father died when he was six, and his mother remarried a violent alcoholic who moved the family to Dallas. By his mid-twenties he had been arrested more than forty times, mostly for burglary and assault, in Texas and Illinois. Wikipedia and most biographies give his middle name as Benjamin; the Illinois Supreme Court's opinions give his name as Richard Franklin Speck.
A Cook County grand jury returned eight separate indictments, one for each woman. On the defense's motion the cases were moved to Peoria County and tried together, and Amurao identified him in the courtroom. His defense, led by the Cook County public defender, Gerald W. Getty, challenged the fingerprint evidence and asked the court to instruct the jury that a fingerprint identification was only opinion evidence; the court refused. On April 15, 1967 the jury found him guilty and returned a verdict of death on each indictment. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on November 22, 1968.
The death sentences did not survive. Jurors who had expressed general objections to capital punishment had been excluded from the jury, and the Supreme Court of the United States, citing its 1968 decision in Witherspoon v. Illinois, set aside the sentences while leaving the convictions standing. On September 20, 1972 the Illinois Supreme Court sent the cases back to Peoria for a new hearing, and he was resentenced to consecutive terms totaling 400 to 1,200 years. He came up for parole repeatedly and was refused every time.
He died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991, the day before his fiftieth birthday, at Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, while serving his sentence at Stateville. In 1996 a videotape made inside the prison in 1988 was broadcast, showing him with drugs, cash and hormone-induced breasts, boasting that if people knew how much fun he was having they would turn him loose. The scandal led to hearings in the Illinois legislature.
He killed eight people in one building on one night, which makes him a mass murderer, not a serial killer.