"All Hell Broke Loose": Richard Speck's Stateville Tape Confession (WBBM-TV, 1996)

Richard Speck had long claimed he remembered nothing of the night of the murders. On a videotape made secretly by inmates in 1988, he described it. Bill Kurtis's 1996 report.

Subject

Richard Speck

Recorded

about 1988

Runtime

7:28

Content warning: Speck describes the murders of eight young women, including stabbing and strangulation; the report refers to sexual assault.

The Interview

In 1988 Richard Speck, then serving his sentence at Stateville Correctional Center, was filmed by fellow inmates on a videotape later reported to run about two hours. An inmate behind the camera questions him. By 1996 an attorney, not named in published reports, had given the tape to WBBM-TV, and Bill Kurtis built a six-part series on it, "Richard Speck Speaks". This second part, first broadcast on May 6, 1996, uses short excerpts in which Speck talks about the night of the murders: why he used a knife rather than his gun, how one of the women resisted him, and how he killed. The report adds a 1966 police recording of a detective questioning the survivor and an interview with the psychiatrist who examined Speck in 1966 and 1967.

Historical Context

On the night of July 13 to 14, 1966, Speck entered a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street on Chicago's South Side, where student nurses of South Chicago Community Hospital lived. He held the women captive and killed eight of them: Gloria Jean Davy, Suzanne Farris, Merlita Gargullo, Mary Ann Jordan, Patricia Matusek, Valentina Pasion, Nina Jo Schmale and Pamela Wilkening. Corazon Amurao, 23, hid under a bed and survived; she testified at his trial. He was convicted at Peoria on April 15, 1967, and sentenced to death that June; after the death sentence was set aside, he was resentenced in November 1972 to 400 to 1,200 years. He died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991, the day before his fiftieth birthday.

Circumstances of the Interview

The tape was not a press interview: Speck was talking with other inmates, who also filmed him using drugs and handling cash. Kurtis says that from his arrest Speck had claimed to remember nothing of the early hours of July 14, 1966, and that the tape "proves Speck not only a killer but a liar". Why the tape was made has never been established; Kurtis suggests it may have been used to pay debts or obtain drugs. The station tried to interview Corazon Amurao for the series; Kurtis says she declined.

What the Interview Covers

Asked why he did not use his gun, Speck appears to say it would have made too much noise. He appears to say that one woman resisted him and that he struck her because she could pick him out of a lineup; Kurtis identifies her as probably Pamela Wilkening. He appears to refer to two more women coming in, whom Kurtis identifies as Mary Ann Jordan and Suzanne Farris, and he describes strangulation. Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, chief psychiatrist at the Cook County Jail in 1966, describes Speck's reaction to a photograph of Gloria Davy, who he said resembled Speck's former wife. Asked whether Speck ever expressed remorse, Ziporyn says he cannot truthfully say he did.

What Makes the Recording Significant

The tape records Speck describing the murders in his own voice, after years in which he had claimed to remember nothing of them. Its broadcast led the Illinois House to hold hearings in May 1996 on how such conduct had been possible inside Stateville, with Kurtis as the lead witness and the tape shown to legislators.

Archival Importance

The station republished the series on its own YouTube channel in 2024. This segment preserves the parts of the tape that bear on the crime itself, together with the account of the psychiatrist who knew Speck after his arrest.

Important Caveats

The tape audio is poor and much of what Speck says is unclear in the machine passes; the summary above follows Kurtis's narration where Speck's words cannot be read with confidence. Kurtis's links between Speck's remarks and particular victims are the reporter's interpretation. The 1988 date rests on an inmate's statement on the tape. Sources differ on when the tape reached the station (summer 1995 or May 1996). The report is an edited news segment, not the complete tape.

Anchor: It was a notorious chapter in Chicago history: the Richard Speck murders, eight young nursing students massacred in their apartment thirty years ago. Tonight, in part two of "Richard Speck Speaks", our Bill Kurtis reveals what's in the killer's mind, in the killer's own words: the jailhouse confession. Bill?

Bill Kurtis: Well, if the men who fired the machine guns at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre would have talked about how and why they did it, that would have been both news and history, a rare glimpse inside the criminal mind. Same goes for John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and other mass murderers. They didn't talk about their crimes. But tonight Richard Speck will. It will offend you. You don't have to watch. But a haunting video made by Speck and two inmates inside Stateville prison provides historic insight into one of the most heinous crimes in U.S. history.

Inmate: [unclear: "What you locked up for?" / "What's he like that's like?"]

Richard Speck: [unclear: "Murder." / "I just can't murder him."]

Inmate: Did you kill [unclear: "him" / "them"]?

Inmate: [unclear: "Why?" / "You're out there. What?"]

Richard Speck: [unclear: "there one there night" / "You're on their night"]. It just wasn't their night.

Bill Kurtis: The thoughts of Richard Speck, laid bare a quarter of a century after his crimes, just two years before his own death. From the time of his arrest, Speck maintained he could remember nothing of the early morning hours of July 14th, 1966. The grainy jailhouse video proves Speck not only a killer but a liar.

Inmate: Did you have a gun on the night of the killing?

Richard Speck: Yeah. Police got, police got the gun.

Inmate: Why you didn't use the gun? Why did you [unclear: captions "PR you T night"]?

Richard Speck: [unclear: captions "do make too much noise. There's in no shape to run. The ni quiet." The sense appears to be that a gun would make too much noise and the knife was quiet.]

Bill Kurtis: Speck used a gun to threaten, the blade in his hands to kill.

Richard Speck: All I want to do is just [unclear: captions "bur start off"]. [unclear: "All h-, bro-"] All hell broke loose.

Bill Kurtis: A killer's shorthand for the slaughter of eight young women. His mistake? Leaving one alive to tell her story. Twenty-three-year-old Corazon Amurao hid under a bunk bed as Speck dragged her friends one by one to their deaths. Just hours after the killings, Cora was taken to a hospital, where she was interviewed by police.

Police Interviewer: This knife that he had, what kind of a knife was it, you know?

Bill Kurtis: For the first time tonight, we hear her description of the killings.

Police Interviewer: Was it a big knife or a little knife? [Her answer is inaudible.]

Bill Kurtis: From Cora's accounts, physical evidence and the new detail Speck provides, we can now pinpoint at least two critical moments during the night. First, the moment when Speck cut Pamela Wilkening's bindings and led her from the room.

Inmate: What happened with Wilkening?

Richard Speck: [unclear: "Well, you talking Wilkening?"]

Inmate: And did he bring her back in again?

Richard Speck: No.

Bill Kurtis: Robbery is about to turn into rape, but two things happen. First, Speck encounters resistance from his intended victim.

Richard Speck: [unclear: "on one of them on me in" / "My pilot, Patrick, was one of them, you know"], [unclear: "sit on me in the face" / "but still in the face"; probably "spit on me in the face"]. She['s] going to [unclear: "kick" / "suck"; the sense is "pick"] me out of a lineup, and I went off, hit her, and shit.

Bill Kurtis: The evidence shows that Pam Wilkening died from a single knife wound to the chest. Resisting her attacker, she may very well have been the one who spit in Speck's face, sending him into a rage.

Richard Speck: There's two more [unclear: "Americans out there" / "there off there"], [unclear: "one of them" / "W up"] trying to kill off all the [unclear: "women" / "W"].

Bill Kurtis: The two Speck refers to are Mary Ann Jordan and Suzanne Farris, surprising Speck as he attacked Wilkening.

Inmate: When Jordan and Farris come in, they were already tied?

Richard Speck: Yeah, I know.

Second Inmate: And he had done something to Wilkening already?

Inmate: Oh, he had already done something to Wilkening. They screamed, these two, and they [unclear: "laughed" / "R"]. And, uh, the [unclear: "assailant" / "assignment"] went and got them, huh?

Bill Kurtis: Jordan and Farris died violent deaths, suffering multiple stab wounds as they struggled with Speck over their friend's body. It was probably over in moments. Now Speck felt he had no choice but to kill the rest of the women, still tied up in the main bedroom. In a gruesome exchange, Speck schools his fellow inmate on the science of strangulation.

Richard Speck: [unclear: "Strangulation first" / "Strang person"], it's not like what you see on TV. [unclear: "It's got three seconds in the air" / "Got three seconds in the did"], where you got to go out about three and a half minutes. [Music.] [unclear: captions "lot"]

Bill Kurtis: But there is a second key moment earlier in the evening, when perhaps Speck's rage began to build. That moment may very well have centered around Gloria Davy.

Dr. Marvin Ziporyn: What he had was what we call a Madonna-prostitute complex. If she was a Madonna, then he'd be on his knees. If she was a prostitute, then he'd [unclear: "wait the floor with" (captions); the sense is "wipe the floor with"] [her].

Bill Kurtis: In 1966, Dr. Marvin Ziporyn was the chief psychiatrist at the Cook County Jail. Over the course of a year he would spend hundreds of hours with Speck. For Ziporyn, Gloria Davy was the key to understanding Speck's crimes.

Dr. Marvin Ziporyn: While I was working with him, I had pictures of all the girls. When I handed him Gloria Davy's picture, he jumped as if I'd put a rattlesnake in his hand. It turned out that this Gloria Davy was, as he put it, a dead ringer for his divorced wife, whom he hated.

Bill Kurtis: Could Gloria Davy have somehow tapped into Speck's rage for his ex-wife?

Unidentified Voice On The Tape: [unclear: captions only, "I think he abused..."]

Inmate: When you say abused, don't be embarrassed. Tell us what he did.

Bill Kurtis: The physical evidence supports this theory. Of the eight women killed, Davy was the only one that was sexually assaulted. She was also the last one killed. And then there is the bed sheet used to strangle Davy, bound so tight police struggled to cut it off. Finally, there are the words of the killer himself, still spitting venom for a young woman long at rest.

Inmate: She was [unclear: "more than a tourist, wasn't she?" / "one"]

Richard Speck: [unclear: "She's the last one to go" / "She was laughing, sure"]. I [unclear: "knew" / "mean"], I had all the time in the world.

Inmate: [unclear: "Yeah, was" / "You had her now, why didn't I do it?"]

Bill Kurtis: Did he ever express remorse?

Dr. Marvin Ziporyn: Not in those words. Not, not that I can remember. I couldn't truthfully say yes, he did express remorse.

Inmate: How you feel [unclear: "know"]? [inaudible; Whisper's readings here ("I just feel like a good old lady"; "I know it's fair", three times) are probably not reliable] [unclear: "Sorry?"]

Richard Speck: No.

Bill Kurtis: There it is: no remorse. Final evidence of true evil, in Richard Speck's own words. This video has been around for seven years, used to pay off debts, perhaps, or to get more drugs. We don't know why it was made, but we can tell you that they obviously weren't afraid of getting caught making it.

Anchor: Tomorrow at 10, a look at the massive manhunt which put Richard Speck behind bars. Where's the survivor now, Cora?

Bill Kurtis: She's in Washington, D.C., actually, and we asked her, uh, to be interviewed for this program. She declined.

Anchor: We look forward to more tomorrow. [unclear: captions only, "That's good."] ---