Richard Speck: The Chicago Nurse Murders and What Happened to Him in Prison
On the night of July 13, 1966, sixty years ago this summer, a man broke into a townhouse on Chicago's South Side where nine student nurses were sleeping. By morning, eight of them were dead. The ninth survived only because she rolled under a bed and stayed completely still for hours, counting the minutes until she was sure he was gone. The killer was Richard Speck, and his case didn't end with his 1967 conviction. Twenty-five years later, a secretly filmed prison tape would surface and turn him back into national news all over again, for reasons nobody expected.
Quick answers
• What did Richard Speck do? He broke into a Chicago townhouse used as nursing student housing on July 13 and 14, 1966, and killed eight of the nine women inside. One survived by hiding under a bed.
• Did Richard Speck get the death penalty? Yes, in 1967, but it was overturned on appeal in 1971 and then Illinois abolished capital punishment entirely in 1972, so his sentence became consecutive prison terms instead.
• What happened to him in prison? He spent 25 years at Stateville Correctional Center, and in 1996 a secretly filmed videotape surfaced showing him using drugs and bragging about the murders, which triggered a state investigation and prison reforms.
• How did Richard Speck die? He died of a heart attack in prison on December 5, 1991, the day before he would have turned 50.
Who Richard Speck was before Chicago
Speck was born December 6, 1941, in Kirkwood, Illinois, the seventh of eight children in a Baptist household. His father died when he was six, and his mother remarried a man most accounts describe as an alcoholic who was abusive toward the family. The move that followed, from small-town Illinois to Dallas, Texas, is where things started going wrong in a documented way. Speck dropped out of school in ninth grade at Crozier Technical High School and started racking up an arrest record that would eventually run into the dozens of incidents, first as a juvenile and then as an adult.
By his early twenties he'd already served time for a forged check and a grocery store burglary, and he violated parole within weeks of getting out on an aggravated assault charge. In November 1962 he married Shirley Malone, who was fifteen at the time, and they had a daughter together. Court records and later biographical research describe him as physically and sexually abusive toward her, and she filed for divorce in January 1966, just months before the Chicago murders.
A spring of violence nobody connected until it was too late
In the months before July 1966, Speck was already suspected in a string of Dallas-area crimes, though he was never formally charged in any of them. A 65-year-old woman was raped and robbed that April, with some of Speck's belongings turning up in his hotel room afterward, and a barmaid named Mary Kay Pierce was beaten to death around the same time with Speck named as a suspect. He was also loosely tied to unsolved disappearances further north, in Indiana and Michigan. None of it stuck, and none of it stopped him from moving on.
His defense team later raised the idea that he'd suffered head injuries that might explain violent, uncharacteristic behaviour, and seven physicians testified about his mental state before trial. After he was convicted, his lawyers asked for additional brain scans to test for organic damage, but the court denied the request as unnecessary, so the claim was never actually resolved one way or the other. A separate theory that circulated at the time, that Speck carried an extra Y chromosome supposedly linked to violent criminality, was reportedly being prepared for his appeal, but there's no confirmation he was ever tested for it, and the whole XYY theory was later discredited by geneticists anyway. It's worth knowing that detail exists mostly as a myth people still repeat, not a fact about Speck himself.
The night of July 13 and 14, 1966
The townhouse was at 2319 East 100th Street, in Chicago's Jeffery Manor neighbourhood, rented as dormitory housing for exchange student nurses training at South Chicago Community Hospital. Speck got in that night armed with a knife and a .22 calibre pistol. Over the hours that followed he moved through the house, rounding up the women who were home and tying them with strips of torn bedsheet using knots consistent with his years working as a merchant seaman.
The bloody crime scene and removal of one of the victims
Eight women were killed: Gloria Jean Davy, Mary Ann Jordan, Suzanne Farris, Valentina Pasion, Patricia Ann Matusek, Merlita Gargullo, Pamela Wilkening and Nina Jo Schmale, most of them in their early to mid-twenties. He led them out of the room where they'd been gathered one and two at a time over several hours, which is part of what makes Corazon Amurao's survival so remarkable. According to the Chicago History Museum, Speck had also sexually assaulted and robbed a woman at a bar earlier that same night, before he ever reached the townhouse, though that specific detail isn't as widely corroborated as the rest of the case.
A few of their stories stand out beyond the list of names. Davy, 22, was president-elect of the Illinois Student Nurse Association and had been planning to join the Peace Corps after graduating. Schmale, 24, had been crowned queen of the nurses' spring dance earlier that year and was engaged to her high school sweetheart. Wilkening, 22, had written on her original nursing school application that she "hated seeing people suffer," which was the reason she'd given for wanting to become a nurse in the first place.
How Corazon Amurao survived by staying still
Amurao, a 23-year-old exchange nursing student from the Philippines, rolled under a bunk bed while Speck was occupied elsewhere in the house and stayed there, motionless and silent, for roughly five hours while he came and went. She lost count of exactly how many of her roommates had been taken from the room, but she never moved and never made a sound until she was certain he'd finally left the building. When she finally climbed out, she went to a window ledge and screamed for help to anyone passing on the street below.
What most retellings of this case leave out is that Amurao wasn't the only Filipino nurse in that house. Two of the eight women killed, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion, were also exchange students from the Philippines. Pasion had graduated near the top of her class at Manila Central University and was reportedly saving money to help fix up her family's house back home. Their bodies were flown back to Manila after the murders, a detail that gets lost when the case is told as a purely American story.
The manhunt, the flophouse and the tattoo that gave him away
Investigators moved fast. Amurao's description of the man she'd glimpsed was turned into a composite sketch that ran on front pages the next morning, and fingerprints recovered at the scene were checked against records from Speck's earlier arrests. Within about a day of the murders, police had a name. That same arrest record also gave them his known distinguishing marks, including a distinctive tattoo on his forearm, which went into the public description of the wanted man that ran in newspapers during the manhunt. Within roughly three days, they had him in custody, though not before a near miss: officers responding to an unrelated call about a man with a gun actually encountered Speck at a North Side hotel, took his weapon, and let him go without realising who he was.
Speck checked into a cheap flophouse on the West Side under a fake name and, cornered and out of options, slashed his own wrist and elbow with a broken bottle. He was taken to Cook County Hospital, where a 26-year-old resident physician named Dr. LeRoy Smith noticed something familiar about the patient in front of him. Smith moistened and rubbed away some of the dried blood on the man's forearm to reveal a tattoo reading "Born to raise hell," matched it to the newspaper coverage of the wanted man, and had a nurse alert police. Speck was arrested there on July 17, 1966, four days after the murders.
That tattoo ended up with a life of its own well beyond the case itself. While Speck sat in Cook County Jail awaiting trial, psychiatrist Marvin Ziporyn was granted extensive access to interview him, later telling radio host Studs Terkel, "I spent hour after hour after hour alone with him behind closed, locked cell doors." Ziporyn and journalist Jack Altman turned those sessions into a 1967 book titled Born to Raise Hell, lifting the title straight off the words inked on Speck's arm.
Sixteen days later, a name from Texas joined his in the headlines
On August 1, 1966, sixteen days after Speck's arrest, Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas tower in Austin and shot dozens of people below, killing fourteen. The two cases landed in the news within weeks of each other, and a contemporary Christianity Today piece that same August ran them side by side under the headline "Whitman and Speck: Their Contrasting Histories." William Martin, the prosecutor who tried Speck, has said in later interviews that he's wondered whether the sheer scale of coverage around the Speck case played some part in pushing Whitman toward his own attack, though he's careful to frame that as speculation rather than anything he could prove. Whatever the connection, that same summer is often pointed to as the moment mass murder turned into a fixture of American news coverage rather than a rare, isolated shock.
A trial moved 150 miles over publicity
Cook County Public Defender Gerald Getty argued, successfully, that pretrial coverage had made a fair trial impossible in Chicago, and the case was moved roughly 150 miles to Peoria, reportedly the first time an Illinois criminal case had ever been relocated for that reason. Getty's strategy leaned on mistaken identity rather than insanity, since an insanity defense would have required Speck to admit to the killings, and Speck's own position was that he hadn't done it or didn't remember doing it. The defense called alibi witnesses, but it didn't hold up.
The trial's most dramatic moment came from Amurao herself. According to prosecutor William Martin's own account, when she was asked in court to identify the man who'd attacked her and her roommates, she pointed straight at Speck and said, "This is the man." The courtroom reportedly fell silent for a moment before breaking into an uproar.
The trial opened in the spring of 1967, and the jury took less than an hour to convict him. Judge Herbert Paschen sentenced him to death in June 1967. It looked, at the time, like the end of the story.
Sentenced to die, then a legal shift changed everything
It wasn't the end. In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court summarily reversed Speck's death sentence, citing Witherspoon v. Illinois, a separate 1968 case that found it unconstitutional to exclude potential jurors simply for expressing reservations about capital punishment. Speck's case was sent back for a new sentencing hearing, but before Illinois courts could act on it, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia effectively struck down every death penalty statute in the country, including Illinois's. There was no longer a death sentence to reimpose.
What he actually got instead is harder to pin to one clean number than most retellings suggest. Contemporary reporting from a 1987 wire story describes his sentence as 1,200 years, and the Chicago History Museum cites a range of 400 to 1,200 years across eight consecutive terms, one for each victim. Later secondary accounts sometimes cite a reduced 100 to 300 years, which may reflect a technical recalculation somewhere along the way. Whatever the precise figure, the practical result was the same: he was never getting out. He came up for parole six times over the years, was denied every time, and by his 1987 hearing more than 9,000 people had written to the parole board specifically to oppose his release.
Life at Stateville and the nickname "Birdman"
Speck served his sentence at Stateville Correctional Center outside Joliet, Illinois, where he reportedly worked as a painter and produced oil paintings during his incarceration. According to FBI profiler John Douglas's own book, Speck picked up the prison nickname "Birdman," a nod to the real Birdman of Alcatraz, because he kept pet sparrows in his cell, and the story goes that when a guard told him pets weren't allowed, Speck threw the bird into a spinning fan rather than give it up.
The secretly filmed tape that shocked Illinois in 1996
Five years after Speck's death, in May 1996, Chicago viewers got an entirely different picture of what his life behind bars had actually looked like. A two-hour videotape, secretly recorded inside Stateville back in 1988, had been obtained by journalist Bill Kurtis through his production company, reportedly bought from an anonymous Illinois attorney for around $5,000 with the money earmarked for a victim assistance fund. WBBM-TV, Chicago's CBS affiliate, aired excerpts across a week of ten o'clock newscasts under the title "Richard Speck Speaks."
The footage showed Speck with two fellow inmates, using drugs and alcohol that had clearly been smuggled in, and at one point he was asked outright whether he'd committed the murders. "Sure I did," he answered on camera. Elsewhere on the tape he echoes a line he'd reportedly used at the time of the killings, "it just wasn't their night," the same phrase resurfacing on tape almost thirty years later like nothing had changed. He also appears visibly to have developed breast tissue, which some accounts attribute to smuggled hormone pills obtained through the prison's black market rather than any medical procedure, though that specific detail is less firmly sourced than the rest of the tape's contents.
The public reaction was immediate. Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan announced an investigation days after the broadcast, and the state legislature held hearings over the following summer. The fallout produced real changes to how Illinois ran its maximum-security prisons: a dedicated segregation facility, new contraband screening equipment, tighter restrictions on contact visits, more drug-detection dogs, and the end of a longstanding practice that had allowed inmates and outside visitors to hold picnics together on prison grounds. A single tape, filmed years earlier and sold for a few thousand dollars, ended up reshaping prison policy across an entire state.
How Richard Speck died
Speck was admitted to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet on the evening of December 4, 1991, complaining of chest pain. He died there at around 6:05 the next morning of a massive heart attack, one day before what would have been his 50th birthday. An autopsy found his left anterior coronary artery completely blocked by calcified plaque, along with advanced emphysema from years of heavy smoking. His family declined to take custody of his body but agreed to have him cremated.
What happened to Corazon Amurao
Amurao went home to the Philippines after the trial, married a lawyer named Alberto Atienza, and eventually settled with her family near Washington, D.C., where she worked for years as a nurse at Georgetown University Hospital before retiring. She's given only a small number of interviews over the decades, largely avoiding the spotlight, including a 2020 StoryCorps oral history recording that reportedly focused more on her life before and after that night than on the crime itself. As of recent interviews she's described as a grandmother, still in touch with the families of the women she survived alongside.
The legal fallout that outlived him
Beyond the prison reforms triggered by the 1996 tape, the case left a mark on how American courts handle pretrial publicity. Legal historians point to the Peoria venue change as one of the earliest and most influential examples of a court relocating a criminal trial specifically because local media coverage had made an unbiased jury impossible to seat, a principle that's been cited in high-profile cases ever since. And because his own death sentence was overturned on Witherspoon grounds before Furman made the question moot altogether, his case sits right at the intersection of two of the most significant capital punishment rulings of the twentieth century, even though neither one was actually about him to begin with.
Why the case still gets retold
The case has never really left popular culture. A&E's Biography series covered Speck in a 1999 episode called "Richard Speck: Natural Born Killer," and the podcast Serial Killers dedicated an episode to him in 2020 titled "The Nurse Killer: Richard Benjamin Speck." Newer shows have kept coming back to it too, including a two-part 2025 series from the podcast Morbid. Sixty years on, it's still one of the cases true crime podcasts and documentaries keep returning to.
Further reading on the site
Chicago has an uncomfortable habit of producing crimes that changed the rules everyone else has to follow after. Sixteen years after Speck, the city went through it again with The Chicago Tylenol Murders, a case that rewrote how medicine gets packaged everywhere. For another spree that shocked the country around the same era, there's The Starkweather-Fugate Crime Spree, and for a case that changed how a whole country thought about capital punishment altogether, The Murders at 10 Rillington Place and the Demise of the Death Penalty covers the British side of that same story.
Sources
18. Richard Speck: The 'Birdman' Who Murdered 8 Nursing Students, and His Connection to Ed Gein – A&E
19. Three Filipina Nurses and Chicago's 'Crime of the Century' – Philippine Daily Inquirer/Global Nation
