A note on classification, because this entry sits in a serial killer archive and he was not one. Speck killed eight people in one house on one night. That is mass murder. He is included because the case is one of the defining American crimes of the 1960s and because he is asked about constantly.
Richard Benjamin Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois, on December 6, 1941. His father died when he was six, his mother remarried a violent alcoholic, and he was arrested more than forty times by his mid-twenties, mostly for burglary and assault, in Texas and Illinois. He had a tattoo on his forearm reading Born to Raise Hell.
On the night of July 13, 1966, drunk and on drugs, he broke into a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street in the Jeffery Manor district of Chicago, a residence for student nurses attending South Chicago Community Hospital. He gathered nine women into one bedroom at knifepoint, tied each of them with strips torn from a sheet, told them he only wanted money for New Orleans, and then took them out of the room one at a time over several hours and strangled or stabbed each one.
Corazon Amurao, a twenty-three-year-old exchange student from the Philippines, rolled under a bed and stayed there. She lay still for hours after the last sounds stopped, then got out onto a window ledge at about five in the morning and screamed. She had counted him, she had watched him, and she gave a description including the tattoo. He was identified within a day and was arrested on July 17 after a suicide attempt in a skid row hotel.
He was tried in Peoria and convicted on April 15, 1967, on eight counts. The death sentence was set aside in 1972 with every other in the United States, and he was resentenced to a term of 400 to 1,200 years. He died of a heart attack at Silver Cross Hospital on December 5, 1991, the day before his fiftieth birthday. In 1996 a videotape made in the prison in 1988 was broadcast, showing Speck with contraband drugs, money and hormone-induced breasts, saying that if anyone knew how much fun he was having they would let him out. It caused a scandal in Illinois that outlasted him.