On the night of July 13, 1966, 25-year-old career criminal Richard Speck broke into the townhouse for student nurses at the South Chicago Community Hospital with the intention of committing a routine burglary.
Upon entering the residence, Speck encountered nine young women, all of whom he tied up at gunpoint using strips torn from bedsheets.
Speck assured the girls that he was only going to rob them; however, his initial plan soon took a dark turn.
After robbing the nurses, Speck took them into separate rooms, killing them one by one.
The remaining women had no choice but to listen to the muffled screams of their roommates being brutally murdered.
Fortunately, one of Speck’s intended victims, Corazon Amurao, managed to escape his clutches of madness by hiding under a bed.
Amurao, an exchange student nurse from the Philippines, waited until 6 a.m. the following day, crawled out onto a second-story ledge, and screamed, “All my friends are dead. Help! Help! I’m the only one alive.”
Fingerprints found at the scene were matched to Speck.
On July 17, Speck, who stayed at the Starr Hotel in Chicago’s Skid Row following the murders, attempted suicide and was taken to Cook County Hospital.
At the hospital, a 25-year-old surgical resident physician, Dr. LeRoy Smith, recognized the “Born To Raise Hell” tattoo mentioned in newspaper reports and called the police.
On June 5, 1967, Richard Speck was sentenced to death in the electric chair but was granted an immediate stay pending an automatic appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court subsequently upheld his conviction and the death sentence five months later.
When the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972, Speck’s sentence was changed to eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years.
Speck died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991, on the eve of his 50th birthday.
