Richard Benjamin Speck (December 6, 1941 - December 5, 1991) was an American mass murderer who killed eight student nurses in their South Deering, Chicago, residence via stabbing, strangling, slashing their throats, or a combination of the three on the night of July 13-14, 1966. In their tightknit neighborhood, Pat and her friends stood on corners during the fall to help her dad sell peanuts for the Kiwanis Club. She was home on the night of July 13, when her brother Phil stopped by. After the death of his father when Speck was six, his mother remarried, moving the family to Dallas, Texas. For many years she worked as a nurse at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. Now 73, she has two children and several grandchildren. Through the end of spring and on into summer, Tina and her Filipina friends were sometimes spotted walking to a nearby shopping center, and they took occasional field trips, but they spent a lot of their nonworking time in the townhouse, frequently writing letters home. Dr. John Schmale found a box of old slides in his waterlogged basement and opened a flood of memories. He told Greene one of his pleasures in prison was "getting high." So eight people got killed. Half an hour later, she heard four knocks at the bedroom door. In those postwar years, most residents of Chicago's Far South Side were white and working-class, still close to their immigrant roots. Kubasek recalled one day not long ago, sitting with her old friend Arlene Baskys. He had no doubt. I give their addresses to my cellmates. Ate an early supper with Merlita and Tina. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. Many of those people have never spoken at length about what happened, not even to close family members. Her family her father, John, a pipe fitter; her mother, Lena, a homemaker born in Germany; and her only sibling, Jack lived in a small, one-story brick Cape Cod on Commercial Avenue. On many of those days she walked home crying, yet it was her afternoons with Tommy that made her think she could be a nurse. Next door was a funeral home, run by Arlene Baskys' dad. "It was him," she said. Richard Benjamin Speck (December 6, 1941 - December 5, 1991) was an American mass murderer who systematically tortured, raped, and murdered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on July 13, 1966. Lori Davy, center, accepts a nursing school diploma on behalf of her slain sister, Gloria Davy, at a ceremony at McCormick Place in 1966. Atienza became friends and learned to play penny-ante poker with the policemen and bodyguards who watched over her for an entire year while she was in protective custody. His sister and seven of her fellow student nurses and nurseswere murdered 50years ago in one of Chicagos darkest crimes. Unlike several of her housemates, she wasn't likely to be caught on camera dressing up in a cat costume, joking around in the kitchen, dancing. He hates knowing that anyone who Googles the name "Nina Schmale" lands on the name "Richard Speck.". Student nurses Suzanne Farris, left, and Mary Ann Jordan are shown in their townhouse,circa 1966. Betty Jo had one more request. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. Site contains certain content that is owned A&E Television Networks, LLC. But life wasn't all play. He has made sure that his niece, who is the keeper of the old family cookie jar, knows why she can't get rid of it. She appreciates every day of life and wants to be happy all the time, because life is not long, Martin said she told him recently. (Schmale family ). They could talk about the wedding. We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. He killed more than eight people., Lori Davy Sivek remembers her sister Gloria Davy, one of eight student nurses and nurses murdered together 50years ago on Chicago'sSouth Side. That was a good time that we had," she told Martin in a recent email. Not long afterward, Arline Davy, sitting on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, made an announcement to her daughters. When he recalls the terrible summer of 1966, much of what he remembers is conspicuously small. Marriage was prohibited for student nurses. Who Is Suspected Pentagon Leaker Jack Teixeira? News item: Richard Speck sentenced. Pat was 20 on the hot evening of Wednesday, July 13, 1966, when Arlene Kubasek dropped her off at the townhouse, well before curfew, which was 10:30 p.m. except for the two nights a week the women were allowed to stay out until 12:30 a.m. Do you want to come in for coffee? Chicago Tribune's Mary Schmich contributed. Her father, who had become a familiar figure on TV, with his cane or in his wheelchair as he protested the possibility of Richard Speck's parole, died in 1990 on Pat's birthday. I asked him if he wasn`t afraid of getting in trouble for talking about the contraband he kept in his cell. But whatever the veracity of his account of that murderous night (''It was just one of them weird coincidences. Merlita was considered quiet, shy, hardworking, efficient, pretty and blessed with a rich singing voice. According to news accounts published at the time, Merlita, 23, was quiet, shy, hardworking, efficient, pretty and blessed with a rich singing voice. According to a news account at the time, she thought it was a safer place to raise a family. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune). He thinks of his sister every day. I was gonna get that tattoo removed. Later she learned that Speck, responding to the bell, had forced two of his hostages downstairs, a gun at their backs. He couldnt identify everyone he saw, but at the photo of the familiar woman in the familiar yellow two-piece bathing suit, he felt his heart clench. Schmale was a student nurse at South Chicago Community Hospital. The police arrived to scenes of carnage, and took Amurao into custody, interviewing her and proceeding with the construction of an Identikit image. It was the kind of childhood that half a century later people look back on and call simpler, innocent, a time when city kids were raised to be independent and unafraid. In the family's two-bedroom Cape Cod home, Suzie and her older sister, Marilyn, shared a bedroom. The time he spent unpacking the food. Episode #1.9: Directed by David Fincher. "If I send you money, you will be able to fix the house," she said in one. If you asked Mary Ann where she was from, she'd give a classic South Side answer, naming not her neighborhood but her parish, Our Lady of Peace. "Did I just see Grandpa on the television?" ''A lot of them women are pretty,'' Speck said. Susan is 3. He watched it once and hurled it into a corner. She was too hot. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune). There, next to his kitchen near the village of Mahomet, 140 miles south of Chicago, the lost women flickered back to life. It was Wednesday, July 13, shortly after 11 p.m. Richard Speck was already upstairs. He managed to deflect police questioning and escape once again, but police discovered some of Harris' personal effects in his vacant hotel room that conclusively tied him to her attack. Parts of the confession were almost certainly bogus; Speck said that he had not killed all eight nurses-that an accomplice, whom Speck later shot to death, had killed one of the nurses, while Speck killed the other seven. Her roommates and friends were killed by Speck on July 14, 1966, after he broke in armed with a gun and a knife. They laughed as they sunbathed on the roof between the tavern and the funeral home, watching the people and the cars down on Michigan Avenue, which they called "The Ave.". Her brother, John Farris, still carries the photo and prayer card in his wallet 50 years later. By the time he left, around 3:30 a.m., eight women were dead, some stabbed, some strangled, some both. A photo that appeared in Life magazine after the murders shows her sitting with three of her housemates. Merlita's father. Lori Davy Sivek remembers her sister Gloria Davy, one of eight student nurses and nurses murdered together 50years ago on Chicago'sSouth Side. Together they helped prepare Pat's body for burial, at the funeral home run by Arlene Baskys' dad, next door to Joe Matusek's bar. Law- enforcement officials familiar with the 1966 mass murder said there was no chance an accomplice existed. He spent the rest of his life in prison until he died of a heart attack in 1991 at age 49. On the way back, they got lost. That was almost true; the man whose crimes introduced the term ''mass murderer'' to the American lexicon did not like to talk. Cook County Assistant States Attorney William Martin, left, watches as witness Corazon Amurao uses a scale model of the townhouse crime scene to detail the murder of eight nurses by Richard Speck, center background, during Specks 1966 trial in Peoria, Ill. Pamela Wilkening, left, Mary Ann Jordan, right, and Suzanne Farris, second from right, are shown with other student nurses having fun with a South Chicago Community Hospital School of Nursing banner, circa 1966. Martin and Dennis Breo are co-authors of a 1993 book called "The Crime of the Century." During one of Pam's shifts, a patient slugged her. "Well," she wrote, "it was a fine, dizzying, exciting and wonderful weekend, but I still believe there is no place like home.". Washed clothes in the bathroom sink, hung them to dry in the basement. Richard Speck was a murderer notorious for killing eight student nurses in 1966. Despite fears that Cora, in one doctor's words, would "lapse into a psychosis" and never be able to discuss the murders, she testified boldly at Speck's trial. The American student nurses and the exchange nurses never grew close, but from the outset they were friendly. Her graduation from nursing school was less than a month away, exams were coming up and she needed to stay at her townhouse in the city to study. ''I know it keeps up their morale. Amurao had arrived the previous day to identify the killer in person, but Speck was not well enough. These days, Farris is retired from his job as an administrative services manager at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago. Nursing school exposed Pam and her classmates to life's wide range of joy and trouble. He has remained in contact with her all these years. In the early 1900s, Grace Jordan was a high-ranking surgical nurse at the University of Michigan, and the stories of her accomplishments made Mary Ann think she could be a nurse too. (Farris family). Her father, Charles, was a former Marine who expected as much from his five daughters as he did from his son. Where Is Acquitted Murderer Candy Montgomery Now? She also wrote about Chicago's weather, which she described in one letter as "really terrible. His little sister. "I think there was somebody up there who was hiding me from him. His mother filed them away neatly, along with the pictures and newspaper clippings. Mary Ann Jordanin her nursing uniform in an undated photo. After Speck was arrested for burglary and assault, he fled to Chicago to seek shelter with his sister, Martha, a couple of months later. On what occasion? (Curtis Thatcher & Assoc.). Nursing students were under strict rules during the 1960s, but still they found time for fun. For the past few years, Schmale, a friendly, white-haired man of 78, has searched for a way to honor exactly those aspects of his sister and her friends, a way that would emphasize not how they died but how they lived, that would focus on them more than on their killer. "I'm home.". Growing up, Nina pronounced "Nigh-nah" was a good student, well-liked, quiet but with a sense of humor. She has looked at the Facebook page Schmale started as part of the commemoration for the nurses, a place for trading stories and photos, though she doesn't linger. In 1978, though, I spent two hours with him at Stateville Prison, having a conversation he later said he wished he hadn`t agreed to. Often after a day of classes at Fenger High School, Pat Matusek walked to Roseland Community Hospital to see her cousin Tommy. To this day, Siouchoff is convinced that Amurao recognized the difference between the front doorbell and the back one, and deliberately led Speck to the wrong door. For years, whenever July 14 comes around, John Farris has found himself depressed for a week before and after. 1. '', Even when he attempted to express remorse for the murders, he still came off as a conscienceless criminal: ''I`m sorry as hell. Pam had been quiet, studious and decisive since she was a girl in south suburban Lansing. Before then, he had been responsible for other acts of violence against his family and others but had a knack for escaping the police. Speck admitted he committed the killings _ breaking for the first time his claim of drug-induced amnesia. So did the fact that her brother, John, who was four years older, was studying to be a doctor. A photo shows four of the eight slain student nurses at South Chicago Community Hospital, circa 1966. By the time Pat was 5, she had another best friend, also named Arlene Arlene Kubasek and through the years the three girls laughed a lot together. When their bodies were flown back to Manila, however, more than 100 people relatives and friends waited in the rain to watch their caskets unloaded from an airliner and hefted into funeral coaches. Their mother, of English and Czech stock, stayed at home to take care of her children. She did, however, like her volunteer job at an elder-care facility known as the poor farm, and she made friends with her patients, even brought them Christmas presents. So much youth and beauty, so much wit and fun. Asked if she recognized the killer, she stepped off the stand and pointed: Since then she has rarely spoken to the media, though in a 1970 court hearing she described her fear of the night, of being alone, of a knock on a door. He told me that he drank moonshine and took barbiturates in his prison cell. In March of 1978, during an interview I had with him inside the walls of Stateville, Speck confessed for the first time to murdering the eight young women in 1966. After graduating from Glenbard Township High School in Glen Ellyn in 1959, she worked as a secretary but didnt like it. Media coverage splashed Speck's image all over the front pages and, in a desperate bid to escape, Speck tried to commit suicide on July 19, 1966, by slashing his wrists in the seedy hotel he was staying in. The trial lasted just 12 days and, on April 15, 1967, the jury found Speck guilty of all eight murders, after less than an hour's deliberation. She teaches her students about them and what they meant in both countries. Wilkening has had a full life, but he doesn't pretend the pain is gone or that his life ever returned to a true version of normal. Finding those carousels of slides, in September 2015, may have been a fluke, but it felt like a providential sign. Speck found work on a ship, and it began to seem like bodies turned up wherever Speck had been. By July of 1966, however, Mary Ann, 20, had moved out of the townhouse and back into the family bungalow. On that Monday, she was taken to a townhouse on East 100th Street rented by her new employer, South Chicago Community Hospital. On a June day in 1966, when she was 20, she went to one of his races, and afterward waved goodbye. We kind of lost her, Lori said. She loved swimming, ice skating and softball. He keeps the photo in a plastic pouch, tucked next to the prayer card from her funeral. When he left, hours later, taking the money he had stolen, she cowered in her hiding place, terrified, for hours, before finally summoning the courage to seek help. Richard Speck once remarked that the day after he was born, all hell broke loose. I stabbed them and I choked them. Phil taught public school, had a sailboat and was nice to him, the kid brother. Dr. John Schmale found a box of old slides in his waterlogged basement and opened a flood of memories. In May 1966, Valentina Pasion boarded an airplane in the Philippines, headed for Chicago. (Schmale family ). Atienza was the states key witness when Martin prosecuted Speck in the 1967 trial. A few days before she died, Pam called her mother to say she couldn't come visit that weekend. As they snuggled, the phone rang in the nearby den. ''Because any kid can end up to be like me. He instantly recognized his mother's cursive handwriting. Mary Ann Jordan grew up hearing her father's tales of her Irish grandmother, Grace. One of her sisters would later say the delay may have been a sign that "God didn't want her to leave.". "What she did that night, very few human beings would have the courage to do. Elmhurst Blotter: Man charged with battery for allegedly punching a security guard at a bar, Hinsdale police blotter: multiple thefts reported by patients at Hinsdale Hospital, Glenview police blotter: Harwood Heights woman charged with possession of a stolen vehicle, Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. He was the man Nina planned to marry but only after graduation. Be married, divorced, retired? But she still can't stand the smell of roses. If that one girl wouldn`t have spit in my face, they`d all be alive today.''. Life, though not idyllic, felt safe. The kitchen was also home to the family cookie jar, a white canister that said "Cooky" on the front, a detail he retains because "Cooky" was his father's nickname for Suzie. ''What`s that dude who played in `Shaft`? "She showed the indomitability of her spirit by continuing her path as a nurse and dedicating her life to helping others and raising a family, but you can never get something like this out of your life," Martin said. She was homesick. Subsequent nationwide enquiries also raised the other incidents in which Speck was suspected, as well as his criminal record. When 23-year-old Corazon Amurao opened the front door to Speck's knock, he forced his way in at gunpoint. "You didn't think you'd ever stop crying.". She went home, not knowing that a little more than an hour earlier, a drifter with a knife, a gun and a history of violence had broken in and was holding her friends hostage upstairs. News item: Another Speck parole hearing at Stateville Correctional Center. And Carol Burnett. After it was aired on TV, Wilkening obtained a copy of the video. Speck was never officially charged with the murders of which he was suspected prior to the events that took place in the South Chicago townhouse and, officially, those cases remain unsolved. Lori Davy, center, accepts a nursing school diploma on behalf of her slain sister, Gloria Davy, at a ceremony at McCormick Place in 1966. He could be seen doing what appeared to be cocaine and in an interview-like discussion he answered questions about the murders of the nurses . But any kid can end up just like me.'' When. John Farris liked his sister's boyfriend. Then I screamed for help. Her dad was on the line. "A lot of people will be here shortly. A camera caught the moment: a pretty girl in a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar, reaching, with white gloves, for the document her sister had worked so hard to earn. Life in the new country must have brought surprises, but it was hardly dramatic. A. The student nurses' white and pale-gray uniforms had to be strictly starched, their crisp white caps perfectly placed a tough trick on bouffant hair. The knocking was done in a normal manner, she would later testify. ''I like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson. ''Here,'' he said. She wanted to do Pat's hair and makeup for the funeral. Their father was a cement finisher descended from Germans. "But I come from the place where they make balisong. The image suggests who she was, serious and slightly removed from the fun. What's more, Douglas was aware that any. She rang the bell. With her salary, she paid tuition for college night classes downtown, after which she commuted home to 111th Street and Avenue E. Eventually she enrolled in nursing school, and though it wasn't a field she had dreamed of as a girl, she had a knack. ''Dillinger and them guys, that was the Depression, they were robbing banks because that was their only way to survive. From the transcript of Speck's trial: Q: How long did you scream, in a sitting position, with the window open? She had the guts to move (under the bed), which saved her life," Martin said. It hurt to see Nina in her yellow swimsuit he thought back to the Life magazine photo after the murders that showed it hanging on a rod in her bedroom but it also made him glad, glad to be reminded of who his sister was before death defined her. Speck, asked how many lovers he has had in prison, responded that he can't count that high. Corazon Amurao, center, the nurse who survived the massacre of eight of her fellow student nurses, walks between another nurse and William Ruddel, Bridewell jail superintendent, from Bridewell's Cermak Memorial Hospital after a second visit to the building where Richard Speck was being held on July 19, 1966. No scuffs were allowed on their white saddle shoes. Among Pam's favorite pleasures was watching Jack, who was seven years older, race cars. They're walking home from church, dressed in matching blue coats and hats and black patent leather shoes, each clutching an Easter basket. But she came with a coveted distinction: She had a car, and not just any car, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible in pale yellow "Colonial Cream," a gift from her father, who could barely afford it and who himself drove a run-down pickup truck. Peter McNamee washes the 1957 Chevrolet owned by his girlfriend, Nina Jo Schmale, whom he planned to marry after graducation, circa 1966. On July 15, 1966, the Chicago Tribune's front page reported the news with the headline "Search for Mass Slayer."
John Mccarthy And Anna Ottewill,
Articles R