Richard Speck
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. One victim was also raped prior to her murder. A ninth potential victim, student nurse Corazon Amurao, survived by hiding beneath a bed.
Richard Speck
December 5, 1991 (aged 49)
Richard Franklin Lindbergh
1
- Sadism
- Eyewitness elimination
- Rape (Gloria Davy)[1]
Murder (8 counts)
Death; commuted to 100 to 300 years imprisonment
8
July 17, 1966
Convicted of all eight murders on April 15, 1967, Speck was sentenced to death. His sentence was reduced to 400–1,200 years in 1972. This was later reduced to 100–300 years. Speck died of a heart attack while incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center on the eve of his 50th birthday.
Trial[edit]
Speck's jury trial began April 3, 1967, in Peoria, Illinois, three hours southwest of Chicago, with a gag order on the press.[17] In court, Speck was positively identified by the sole surviving student nurse, Corazon Amurao. When Amurao was asked if she could identify the killer of her fellow students, Amurao rose from her seat in the witness box, walked directly in front of Speck and pointed her finger at him, nearly touching him, and said, "This is the man."[18]
In addition, Lieutenant Emil Giese testified that fingerprints at the scene had been matched to Richard Speck.[13]
On April 15, after 49 minutes of deliberation, the jury found Speck guilty and recommended the death penalty. On June 5, Judge Herbert J. Paschen sentenced Speck to die in the electric chair, but granted an immediate stay pending automatic appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court subsequently upheld his conviction and death sentence on November 22, 1968.[19]
XYY syndrome myth[edit]
In December 1965 and March 1966, Nature and The Lancet published findings by British cytogeneticist Patricia Jacobs and colleagues of a chromosome survey of patients at Scotland's only security hospital for the developmentally disabled. Nine of the patients, ranging from 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) to 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) height, were found to have an extra Y chromosome, the XYY syndrome.[20][21][22] Jacobs hypothesized that men with XYY syndrome are more prone to aggressive and violent behavior than males with the normal XY karyotype, but the idea was later shown to be incorrect.[23][24][25]
In August 1966, Eric Engel, a Swiss endocrinologist and geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote to Speck's attorney, Cook County Public Defender Gerald W. Getty, who was reportedly planning an insanity defense. He suggested, based on Jacobs's unsubstantiated theory and Speck's height of 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m), that Speck might have XYY syndrome.[26][27] A chromosome analysis performed the following month by Engel revealed that Speck had a normal XY karyotype.[27] One month later, a court-appointed panel of six physicians rejected Getty's insanity argument and concluded that Speck was mentally competent to stand trial.[28]
In 1968, biochemist Mary Telfer and associates published data from a genetic analysis, similar in design to Jacobs's, of subjects confined in psychiatric hospitals and penal institutions in Pennsylvania. Of the five XYY patients identified, four exhibited moderate to severe facial acne, leading the group to suggest that acne be added to the list of defining XYY characteristics. Subsequent research failed to substantiate this observation as well.[29][30]
After Getty contacted Telfer to discuss her findings and their possible relevance to his client, Telfer wrote a speculative piece for the British journal Think in which she mistakenly reported that Speck had an XYY karyotype. That, combined with his extensive acne scarring, led her to describe Speck as "the archetypal XYY male".[31][32][33]
In a three-part series on the XYY syndrome published in April 1968, The New York Times presented Jacobs's unsubstantiated theory associating the syndrome with violent behavior as an established fact, and noted that the karyotype had been cited as a mitigating factor by attorneys defending an XYY man charged with murder in Paris,[34][35] and another in Melbourne.[36][37][38] It also identified Speck as a "classic example" of an "XYY criminal" and citing Telfer and Getty as sources, predicted that XYY syndrome would form the crux of his insanity defense.[24][39][40][41] Similar articles followed, again citing Telfer, in Time[42] and Newsweek,[43] and six months later in The New York Times Magazine.[44]
In May 1968, Speck's chromosomes were karyotyped a second time by Engel, with the same result: a normal 46,XY genome.[27] After Speck's conviction and death sentence were upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court later that year[45] and the appeals process moved to the Federal court system,[46] articles continued to appear in the lay press reporting (or implying) that Speck's supposed XYY genotype would be invoked as a mitigating factor.[47][48]
In a review article published in the Journal of Medical Genetics in December 1968, Michael Court Brown found no overrepresentation of XYY males in chromosome surveys of Scottish prisons and hospitals for the developmentally and mentally disabled, and suggested that any conclusions drawn from study populations composed solely of institutionalized males were likely distorted by selection bias.[49]
In May 1969, at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Telfer et al. reported that they had found no evidence of significant behavior differences, on average, between men with XYY karyotypes and those with normal genomes, and that XYY males had been unfairly stigmatized by earlier unsupported speculation.[50][32][51]
Death penalty reversal[edit]
On June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court (citing their June 3, 1968 Witherspoon v. Illinois decision) upheld Speck's conviction but reversed his death sentence, because more than 250 potential jurors were unconstitutionally excluded from his jury because of their conscientious or religious beliefs against capital punishment.[6][52] The case was remanded back to the Illinois Supreme Court for re-sentencing.
On June 29, 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional, so the Illinois Supreme Court's only option was to order Speck re-sentenced to prison by the original Cook County court.[53]
On November 21, 1972, in Peoria, Judge Richard Fitzgerald re-sentenced Speck to from 400 to 1,200 years in prison (eight consecutive sentences of 50 to 150 years),[54] which was then reduced to 100 to 300 years.[55] He was denied parole in seven minutes at his first parole hearing on September 15, 1976, and at six subsequent hearings in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1990.[56]
Death[edit]
Shortly before December 5, 1991, Speck was transported from Stateville Correctional Center to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, Illinois after complaining of severe chest pains.[60][61] Speck later died in the early morning hours of December 5, of what was believed to be a heart attack, one day shy of what would have been his 50th birthday.[62] The coroner stated that Speck had an "enlarged heart, emphysema and clogged arteries" which most likely contributed to his fatal heart attack.[63]
Speck's sister feared that his grave would be desecrated, so he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location in the Joliet area.[62]