The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (52 page)

Record sleeve from “Heidnik’s House of Horrors”; art by Liz Pop
(Courtesy of Larry Kay and Paul Bearer)

In the realm of serial-killer-related pop music, mention must also be made of the now-defunct punk group Ed Gein’s Car; the 1991 album
Too Much Joy
by a group called Cereal Killers (get it?); and the limited edition single “Biter” by the Kansas City band Season to Risk, which features a jacket painting by John Wayne Gacy.

Album cover for
Joe Coleman’s Infernal Machine

(Courtesy of Joe Coleman)

S
OUVENIRS

See
Trophies
.

Richard Speck

Strictly speaking, Richard Speck was a
Mass Murderer
, not a serial killer, since the crimes that earned him everlasting infamy were all committed in a single night. Still, those crimes were so horrific that they place Speck squarely in the ranks of twentieth-century American monsters.

Richard Speck; from
52 Famous Murderers
trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

A hulking, acne-scarred thug addicted to booze and drugs, Speck had logged nearly forty arrests by the time he was twenty for offenses ranging from burglary to assault with a deadly weapon. Mass murderers are sometimes referred to as “human time bombs”—and the description certainly fits Speck, whose life had been one slow, inexorable buildup to a devastating explosion of violence.

That explosion occurred on the night of July 13, 1966. Speck—who worked as a merchant seaman—was in Chicago, waiting to ship out to New Orleans. He spent the day guzzling booze, popping downers, and ogling the women as they sunbathed in the park behind Jeffey Manor, a town house for student nurses working at a local hospital. At around 11
P.M.
, Speck returned to the town house and knocked on the door. It was opened by a twenty-three-year-old student nurse named Corazon Amurao, who found herself face-to-face with a pockmarked stranger brandishing a knife and a gun. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Speck said as he shoved his way inside. “I need your money to go to New Orleans.”

Speck led her upstairs, where he found five more student nurses. Herding them all into one bedroom, he ordered them to lie on the floor. Then, ripping a bedsheet into strips, he proceeded to truss his terrified victims. Over the next hour, three more young women arrived at the town house. They, too, ended up bound and helpless on the bedroom floor.

Toying with his gun, Speck sat on the floor with his nine captives, as
though debating what to do with them. Finally, he came to a ghastly decision. Untying twenty-year-old Pamela Wilkening, he led her into an adjoining bedroom, where he stabbed her in the breast and strangled her. Mary Ann Jordan and Suzanne Farris were next. Speck shoved them into another bedroom and savaged them with his knife.

Pausing to wash the blood from his hands, Speck returned to his grisly work. One by one the young women were led off into different bedrooms and brutally killed—some had their throats slashed, others were strangled. The last to die was twenty-two-year-old Gloria Davy. Speck took his time, raping her twice before sodomizing her with a foreign object and strangling her to death.

Having dispatched every one of the young women—or so he thought—Speck shuffled off into the night. But during his rampage, he had lost count of his victims. One of the student nurses—Corazon Amurao—had managed to hide herself under a bed. Waiting until five in the morning, she wriggled out from under the mattress, made her way to the balcony, and began screaming, “They are all dead! My friends are all dead!”

From Amurao’s description, along with other clues—primarily the fingerprints he had left all over the apartment and the telltale knots he had tied, which were characteristic of a seaman—police quickly identified Speck, who was arrested in Cook County Hospital after a failed suicide attempt. He was given the death sentence, but when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, he was resentenced to consecutive life terms amounting to four hundred years. He had served only nineteen of them when he died in prison of a heart attack.

The Speck Tape

In May 1995, the public got its first stunned look at a grainy VHS tape that gave new meaning to the term “pornographic video.” Shot in Stateville prison in 1988—three years before his death—the tape shows Richard Speck snorting cocaine, engaging in oral sex with another inmate, and flaunting his monstrously repulsive body.

Looking unspeakably grotesque in a blond, bobbed hairdo, Speck—lounging in a cell with his young African-American lover—jokes about his murders, talks about how much he loves to be anally penetrated by other
men, and brags about the good life he has been enjoying in prison. “If they only knew how much fun I was having in here,” he says, laughing, “they would turn me loose.”

In what is perhaps the most revolting moment in this thoroughly odious tape, Speck—at the behest of his lover—strips off his clothes to reveal that he is sporting blue silk panties and a floppy set of hormonally induced female breasts. He then proceeds to perform fellatio on the other man.

When this video was shown to Illinois lawmakers, it set off a storm of outrage. “This is the kind of thing that really shakes the public’s confidence in the criminal justice system,” remarked one state legislator. Indeed, this comment was a significant understatement. The tape was so abhorrent that—after portions of it were broadcast on news stations around the country—even some die-hard opponents of the death penalty found themselves regretting that Speck had escaped execution.