Killer Richard Speck is shown confessing, having a ball on video in 1996 CBS Chicago reports

This series first aired on the Channel 2 News, during the 10 p.m. newscasts on May 5-10, 1996. The accompanying written story was originally published on cbs2chicago.com on Oct. 27, 2007. Minor edits have been made.

The video clips in this story contain graphic and disturbing material. Viewer discretion is advised.

CHICAGO (CBS) -- On the night of July 13, 1966, Richard Speck broke into a Southeast Side dormitory and killed eight student nurses, in a murder spree that is still considered one of the most heinous and horrible in Chicago history.

Three decades after the crime and even five years after his own death, Speck was still making headlines and drawing ire from prosecutors and victims' families who saw him mocking the justice system.

In May 1996, Bill Kurtis received an eight-year-old videotape from an attorney. The tape showed Speck and two other inmates in their cell at Stateville Prison. Not only did Speck remorselessly admit to the murders and describe how he carried them out in chilling detail, but he engaged in a hedonistic romp of sex and drug use right there in his cell at Stateville Prison.

This tape sparked outrage among lawmakers in Springfield who demanded change in the state prison system, holding hearings in the State House even as this series of reports, "Richard Speck Speaks," was still on the air.

The crime 

Video above

The Richard Speck Chicago came to know in July 1966 was the very face of evil. On videotape 22 years later, the face of evil had aged, and his hair was dyed blond.

The grainy video was made secretly inside prison walls and smuggled out in 1988, three years before Speck's death. It was never learned why the killer made the tape, but it did indicate one thing—the years behind bars taught him nothing. There was no remorse for the crime many believe started the modern era of mass murder.

On July 14, 1966, police detectives, prosecutors, and every arm of the law imaginable had gathered around a nondescript townhouse at 2319 E. 100th St. Inside, the house was a shambles. Bodies were strewn about, and blood congealed in the morning heat.

The victims were removed one at a time. There would be eight in total, all of them young women between 21 and 23 years old—student nurses one month away from graduation.

That afternoon, Chicago's newspapers told a story that would literally shock the world. In homes across the city, doors would now be locked. The horror would last forever.

Speck had pried open a screen to unlatch the back door to the 100th Street building, where nine student nurses lived. The young women's bloody clothes and the bed sheets used to bind and strangle them remained at the Cook County Evidence Warehouse 30 years later.

Speck was a third-rate burglar and was looking for an easy score. But how did a burglar turn into a ghastly mass murder? Speck answered that question himself on the videotape.

"I was on acid; drugs. One of them spit on me in the face, she said she was going to pick me out of a lineup," Speck said on the tape. "I went off and hit her in the chest with the knife."

The young woman Speck claimed spat in his face may very well have been Pam Wilkening, 22, his first victim. Once inside the townhouse, Speck had bound and gagged all the nurses, and then he picked out Wilkening and dragged her from the main bedroom. Robbery was about to turn into rape, or worse.

"Then there was two more there, so I offed them; wound up trying to kill off all the witnesses," Speck said on the videotape.

The two Speck referred to were Mary Ann Jordan and Suzanne Farris, both 22, who had come home late from a date that night. They surprised Speck, and in the ensuing struggle, Farris was stabbed 18 times and Jordan five times. Their bodies were found with that of Wilkening, who had been stabbed once in the heart.

With three nurses now dead, Speck returned to the main bedroom, where six women remained bound and gagged. It was at that moment that he decided to kill them all. They had all seen his face.

They were slain one by one in a procession of death – Gloria Davy, 23; Nina Schmale, 23; Valentina Pasion, 23; Merlita Gargullo, 21; and Patricia Ann Matusek, 21.

While Speck dragged eight nurses to their deaths, a ninth used her wits to survive. Bound hand and foot, Corazon Amurao, 23, crawled under a bunk bed and hid for three hours, watching and listening as her friends died. Around 3:30 a.m. July 14, Speck came in for a last look around the bedroom, and left without realizing Amurao was still alive.

The Cook County State's Attorney would hide Amurao for a year before Speck's trial began. At his trial, Speck told his attorney he remembered nothing about the crime. No one knew he ever said anything different until the videotape was released.

The jailhouse confession

If the men who fired the machine guns at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 had talked about how and why they did it, that would have been both news and history—a rare glimpse inside the criminal mind. The same goes with John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and other mass murderers, who never talked about their crimes. But Speck did.

The videotape contained mostly pornography that Speck made with other inmates in his prison cell, but also on the tape was the confession, made in a segment in which an inmate seemed to be interviewing Speck.

"What you locked up for?" an inmate out of view of the camera asked.

"Eight counts of murder," Speck replied.

"Did you kill them?" the inmate asked.

"Sure I did," Speck said.

"Why?" the inmate asked.

"It just wasn't their night," Speck said.

From the time of his arrest, Speck maintained he could remember nothing of the early morning hours of July 14, 1966. But the grainy jailhouse videotape very clearly indicated otherwise.

Speck explained that he had a gun on the night of the killing that was recovered by police, but decided to use a knife instead.

"Guns make too much noise. I was in no shape to run. The knife was quiet," Speck said on the videotape.

Speck used the gun to threaten, and the blade in his hands to kill.

"All I wanted to do is burglary. It started off as burglary," Speck said. "Then all hell broke loose."

Speck killed Wilkening then Jordan and Farris in sequence. Then he decided the other women must also be killed because they had witnessed the first three murders.

In a gruesome exchange on the videotape, Speck schooled his fellow inmate in the science of strangulation.

"Strangle a person? It's not like what you see on TV—about three seconds and they're dead," Speck said. "You've got to go at it for three and a half minutes. It takes a lot of strength."

During the killing, Speck's rage may have begun to build in a moment that may well have centered around Gloria Davy.

"What he had was what we call a Madonna-prostitute complex," Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, who had been the Cook County Jail chief psychiatrist in 1966, said in the 1996 report. "If she was a Madonna, then he'd be on his knees. If she was a prostitute, then he'd like to kill her."

Over the course of a year, Ziporyn would spend hundreds of hours with Speck, and he saw Gloria Davy as the key to understanding his crime.

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

Could Davy have somehow tapped into Speck's rage for his ex-wife? The evidence seems to suggest it may have.

Of the eight women killed, Davy was the only one who was sexually assaulted, and she was the last one killed. The bed sheet he used to strangle her was wound so tightly that police struggled to cut it off.

And on the videotape more than two decades later, Speck was still spitting venom for the young woman long at rest.

"She was the one that was flirting with me," Speck said. "She was the last one to go. I knew I had all the time in the world. She didn't have nothing I wanted, and I killed her."

"How'd you feel after killing all those ladies?" the other inmate asked Speck.

"Like I always felt; have no feeling," Speck said. "If you're asking if I felt sorry, no."

The manhunt

When Richard Speck was on the loose in 1966, people were afraid to go outside in fear of him. But it was police legwork that paid off, with the help of the Amurao, the one student nurse he missed.

"Did none of them get away?" the inmate asked off-camera.

"One did," Speck said. "That's why I'm sitting here now." He added later, "If none of them got away, I wouldn't be sitting here."

When Amurao emerged, she was shaken, but determined to help police find the killer.

In her interview with police, Amurao worried Speck might return to attack her, but she was determined to help, and provide a description that resulted in a composite sketch. But now they needed a break.

At 8:45 a.m. on July 14, 1966, burglary detective Eddie Wielosinski stopped to question Dennis Ryan, a gas station attendant who worked at 100th Street and Torrence Avenue.

"The attendant told us about some guy prior, coming in there with a couple suitcases and wanting to leave them there for the night," Wielosinski said in 1996, "a mentioning the fact that he said something about being a seaman."

That tip led Wielosinski to the hiring hall for seamen shipping out of Calumet Harbor, directly across the street from the townhouses. There, a steward recognized the composite sketch. Speck had been there looking for a job.

"He was looking for the assignment slip, and he went into the wastebasket, and he pulled out this assignment slip, and there was the name of Richard Franklin Speck," Wielosinski said.

As Speck's name was being picked out of the trash, the killer was sleeping in at the Shipyard Inn, less than a mile from the crime scene. He awoke at 11 a.m. and drifted north and west to the Madison Street Skid Row—where Wielosinski said police never thought to look for a merchant seaman who presumably had money to live off of.

Carl Sandburg had dubbed Skid Row "the boulevard of forgotten men"—drunks, down-and-outers, people who needed to disappear. None more so than Speck.

Using an alias, he checked into the Starr Hotel at 617 W. Madison St., which Chicago Police Detective Jack Wallenda—who was also the first detective on the murder scene on East 100th Street—called a truly revolting place.

"I tell you, pig sties or farms would be a lot better than what the Starr Hotel was," Wallenda said in 1996. "You'd walk through human waste and urination and everything else."

On Friday night, Speck slept off a night of heavy drinking, as police scoured the city. He hoped to catch a freight train out of town the next day, but the police were closing in.

Amurao had picked up his snapshot. Fingerprints had been lifted from the door of the townhouse, and they matched Speck's prints, which were flown in Chicago for comparison. Afterward, then-police Commissioner O.W. Wilson announced in a news conference that Speck was wanted in the murders.

"That was broadcast throughout the world. Speck knew it. He couldn't get the freight. He had run, in every sense, from his identity," Speck prosecutor Bill Martin said in 1996. "Now he had nothing to run from but his life."

After reading about his crimes in newspapers at the Star Hotel, Speck walked into a bathroom and slashed his wrists. Around midnight, he was wheeled into Cook County Hospital, and a young resident, Dr. Leroy Smith, was called back from his dinner break.

He reported receiving a call from the trauma unit and hearing about the patient while reading a newspaper about Speck in which his tattoos, most notably one reading, "Born to Raise Hell," were visible. When he went back to work on the trauma patient, he discovered that Speck had the same tattoo.

"I went over to him and I asked him what his name was, and then he told me his name was Speck," Smith said in 1996.

Speck was arrested, and stood trial 10 months later. On April 5, 1967, the state's star witness, Amurao, took the stand to face her attacker. Prosecutor Martin asked if she could identify the killer, prompting her to step down and walk to within inches of Speck and point directly at his head, saying, "This is the man."

The jury convicted Speck within 45 minutes.

Hedonism behind bars

Speck's remorseless admission to the brutal murders of eight young women made the jailhouse videotape was shocking enough. But as for the rest of the tape, to call its contents outrageous was an understatement to many.

On the videotape, when he was not talking about the crime, Speck was seen having what amounted to a party with his friends among the inmate population at Joliet's Stateville Prison.

In the final years of his life, Speck appeared to be having the time of his life behind bars, and he was quite proud of it.

"If they only knew how much fun I was having," Speck said, "they would turn me loose."

The incredible video demanded answers to how it was ever allowed to happen.

Martin Shifflet was a guard at Stateville for more than 30 years. One of his duties was to keep a close eye on Speck.

"He was kind of a weak-minded person anyway; easily influenced," Shifflet said in 1996.

During his early years in Stateville, Speck was isolated in the prison segregation unit. Shifflet said Speck asked if he could paint his cell, and Shifflet gave him paint and a brush, which he said resulted in an "excellent" paint job.

In 1980, Shifflet retired, and a short time later, he began hearing disturbing rumors. Speck was now in the general population and had become the prison painter and sewer man—jobs that let the killer wander through Stateville at will.

"I understand that he was making brew—penitentiary brew—and peddling it through the penitentiary," Shifflet said.

But Shifflet's worse fears do not begin to approach the reality seen on the videotape. He sat with his lover, relaxed and confident that he would not get caught making a home video.

Clad in women's underwear, the killer disrobed to reveal his body had perhaps been chemically or hormonally altered in prison. It seemed that Speck had tried mightily to make himself into a woman.

Next on the tape, Speck and his cellmate engaged in explicit acts of sex, then the party continued when the off-camera inmate asked him what kind of drugs he liked.

"Now? Coke, reefer, whiskey, wine," Speck said, adding that when he couldn't get them, he would, "like the rest of them, wait."

But Speck did not have to wait for long. On the videotape, he is seen with another inmate cutting up and snorting what they claimed was a mountain of cocaine. Piles of what looked like marijuana were rolled for toking. Then, Speck pulled out what looked like a roll of $100 bills and counted them off for his prison pals. All of this happened at Stateville prison, a maximum-security facility.

How can this happen? The good life Richard Speck enjoyed was merely a symptom of a far larger problem.

"It shocks me that they were able to perform those activities, which we all know, unfortunately, go on in prison, for the time that it took, and then to actually capture that tape and get it out of there is shocking," Michael J. Mahoney of the John Howard Association, a prison reform advocacy group, said in 1996. "It's really an indictment of our prison system, of how we have really lost control."

At the time, the state had been jamming more and more inmates into fewer and fewer cells.

At the end of the 20th century, Stateville Prison—which is set to close in September 2024—was perhaps one of the most dangerous and overcrowded places on earth. Two inmates were jammed into cells built for one, and on average, just one guard was on duty for every 20 prisoners. That would have made it easy for Speck to hide, but contraband is another story.

"How does the money and the drugs get into the prison?" Mahoney said. "The majority of the contraband that comes into prison, unfortunately, comes in through the staff."

The men and women who are hired to guard Illinois prisons were coming under attack as the prison gangs' suppliers. Shifflet explained that some guards were former gang members and still owed allegiance to gangs.

Mahoney had another explanation, saying some guards were co-opted for money, others were intimidated.

Before the "Richard Speck Speaks" series of reports was finished airing in 1996, the Illinois House of Representatives' Judicial Criminal Committee began hearings on the Speck tape and how it was possible that it could have been made in a maximum-security prison. Kurtis was the lead witness, and the tape was shown, including the parts that were not appropriate for television. 

Inside Speck's mind

Speck had no shame about killing eight young women, and apparently had free reign to do whatever he wanted in prison. In addition to showing a shameless confession and a sybaritic orgy of self-indulgence, the tape also shed some light onto what lay inside Speck's mind.

Speck was born in the western Illinois town of Kirkwood, on Dec. 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor.

"The day I was born, all hell broke loose the next day," Speck said, "and it hasn't stopped since."

All hell broke loose—it was the story of Richard Speck's life. Even etched on his arm was the "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo that Dr. Smith used to identify him for police. In the rambling two-hour video, Speck touches on many topics. Foremost among them is his twisted view of women.

"Do you like women?" the inmate off camera said.

"Yeah, I like them in their place," Speck replied.

It was a growing hatred that resulted in the gruesome slaughter of eight young nurses. Probe deeper into Speck's past, and his feelings toward women center on his mother.

"Every two weeks she was down here," Speck said on the tape. "When my mother died I stopped all my visits. I cried one time since I've been locked up on this case, when I found out my mother died."

Dr. Ziporyn, the jail psychiatrist, said this again reflected the madonna-prostitute complex.

"He divided all women into either pure madonnas like his mother or like his sisters, or if they weren't like that, then they were prostitutes," Ziporyn said.

It was this twisted view, combined with drugs and alcohol, transformed Speck from a third-rate burglar into a stone-cold killer. Ziporyn recalled one memorable interview in the killer's cell.

"He was describing what happened that night. The guard who was outside couldn't suppress a start of surprise and he said, 'You took a quart of whiskey and eight redbirds (barbiturates) and a shot of speed?' He said, 'What did all that lead to?'" Ziporyn said. "And Speck looked at him deadpan and says, 'Eight murders and the electric chair.'"

Alcohol and drugs seemed to be a trigger for Speck's rage. Even the hardened criminals around him were wary of his reputation.

On the tape, Speck's lover recalled a day in Stateville when a drunken Speck was ready to kill over a piece of chicken.

"I ain't going to call him a mad killer, but he's mad," Speck's lover said. "He might have killed me about a piece of chicken one day. (He was) drunk, and he got home, and somebody ate up the chicken, and he come looking for me. I thought I was a goner. The way you were looking, it was probably good my door was locked."

Speck laughed about it. "You ain't eaten no chicken since, have you?" he said.

Ultimately, Speck lived for no one but himself, reduced at the end of his life to a puffed-up jailhouse braggart, perhaps realizing the end was close at hand.

"Do you believe in God?" the off-camera inmate asked.

"I'm God," Speck replied.

"Do you believe in the devil?" the inmate asked.

"I'm the devil," Speck said.

Asked what his religion was, "Hypocrite, Baptist, all that bulls**t that people is in. All church is, is something people afraid of dying and think they go to heaven."

In the final analysis, Speck believed in little and lived for less.

"What's your morals in life?" the off-camera inmate said.

"I want to live forever," Speck said.

But when asked how he wanted to be buried and if he wanted a big funeral, Speck said, "If I die, I don't give a damn if they throw me in the gutter."

Speck was cremated, and his ashes were scattered to the wind.

Victims' families speak

Over the years that Speck spent at Stateville, he kept on killing.

John Schmale lost his sister, Nina, at the hands of Richard Speck.

"My dad and I drove into Chicago, and went to the county morgue," Schmale said in 1996. "I can still picture the weather, and where I parked the car, and there were all these TV cameras and photographers, and it was a zoo."

Thirty years later, the memories still bit.

"They put all the family into a separate room, and then one by one they took the family members out into a viewing room to identify the body, and then we just went home," Schmale said.

Eight families came to a Peoria courthouse looking for some measure of justice; a salve for their campaign. Speck was easily convicted, but Speck's attorney, Gerald Getty, had never had a client sentenced to die. Speck said on the tape that Getty tried every measure in the legal book to keep that record intact.

When the off-camera inmate asked Speck on the tape whether he had ever tried to die by suicide, Speck replied, "No, that's bulls**t; that's propaganda stuff that Gerald Getty used in the courtroom to try to get sympathy from the jurors so they wouldn't give me the death penalty."

Like much of what the killer said, this was a lie. Speck did attempt suicide while on skid row. At his sentencing hearing, that attempt was ignored by his defense, but seized upon by the prosecution as overwhelming evidence of guilt. On June 5, 1967, Judge Herbert Paschen agreed, and sent him to the electric chair.

But that was far from the end for Speck. In 1972, he escaped execution, his sentence commuted to life. And in September 1976, a decade after the murders, Speck had his first parole hearing.

"When they commuted the death penalty, I thought that it meant that he would have life in prison," Schmale said. "I had no idea that despite the fact he murdered eight nurses that he was up for parole within seven years."

While Speck enjoyed a life of drugs, sex and good times behind bars, Schmale got to relive the nightmare of his sister's murder. There were seven parole hearings in all, and seven chances for the families to cut their wounds fresh.

"It's so traumatic to have to go to Joliet and to have to go through a shakedown," Schmale said. "It makes you so angry that the State of Illinois could even be considering – why are we even talking about this man should go on parole?"

As the years rolled on, the parole hearings continued, but fewer and fewer family members showed up to protest. Within five years of the murders, at least four parents would die, and a decade later nearly all had passed away. Even in jail, it seems, Richard Speck had found a way to kill.

On Dec. 5, 1991, Richard Speck died of a heart attack. Ironically, a medical crew worked for more than four hours to try to save his life.

"When he died, for me anyway, there was a closure," Schmale said. "I mean, it wasn't a happy event or anything like that, it was just finally, there's no more parole hearings, he doesn't have my sister's picture in his jail cell anymore. Finally it's over with."