Jeffrey Manor is a small residential area in the South Deering neighborhood on the city’s Southeast Side. It’s sandwiched between rail yards and the Calumet River, with curved streets that offset the traditional grid system of blocks. Most of its homes were built after World War II, primarily to serve employees of nearby industries such as Wisconsin Steel. The community has persevered through periods of economic downturn. But it has endlessly suffered from being the site of the most gruesome mass murder in Chicago history.
Overnight from July 13 to 14, 1966, terror visited the nine student nurses living in an unpretentious brick townhouse on East 100th Street just west of the intersection at South Crandon Avenue. In a burglary gone horribly wrong, 24-year-old drifter Richard Speck brutally murdered eight of the young women, sparking two days of paralyzing citywide fear, until he was apprehended at a West Madison Street shelter. It is considered the first true mass murder in Chicago history, and it revealed to many the uncomfortably thin veneer between normality and evil.
On that fateful evening of July 13, Speck was on an acid high, filled with bitterness over his latest unsuccessful effort to ship out on one of the Great Lakes freighters departing from nearby Calumet Harbor. Looking for an easy burglary target, he came across the little townhouse on East 100th Street, close to the union hiring hall. Once inside, he was surprised to find the young nurses but assured them he meant no harm. Then, realizing they were potential crime witnesses, he herded them into a single bedroom and tied their hands and legs with bedsheet strips. Then he took eight of them, one by one, to another room where he murdered them. The remaining nurse, Corazon Amurao, survived by hiding under the bed. Hours later, she courageously crawled out, went to the second-floor porch and screamed for help.
Speck was found guilty on April 15, 1967, after a 12-day trial held in Peoria and sentenced to death. That did not bring closure to the case, however. A 1972 Supreme Court decision that, at the time, outlawed capital punishment led to a reversal of the death sentence. Speck was resentenced twice, with a final penalty of 100 to 300 years in prison. While he died in prison in 1991 at age 49, his name and the murders resurfaced three times in later years — each time renewing the pain.
The first came in 1968, with the emergence of an ultimately discredited theory that sought to attribute Speck’s criminal personality to a chromosome abnormality. Second was a 1978 interview with Tribune columnist and book author Bob Greene, during which Speck confessed to the crime. Greene later characterized the interview in the Tribune as “sickeningly mesmerizing because, as much as we hate to admit it, it is possible to talk to a mass murderer as a human being.”
The third happened in 1996, when veteran reporter Bill Kurtis received a smuggled prison video showing Speck engaged in disturbing conduct with fellow inmates.
In retrospect, Speck’s predisposition for malevolence was foreseeable. As a young man, he had amassed a staggering record of displacement, truancy, substance use, unemployment, lawbreaking, imprisonment and violence. But he was not unique then in that regard and would not be so today. Which should make the anniversary of the murders so unsettling. And it’s uncertain whether we can find comfort in progress made toward the cause and prevention of violent criminality.
Because the ugly truth is that the high incidence of gun violence, such as the disquieting frequency of mass shootings, and society’s seeming inability to prevent them have combined to normalize the horror. We are no longer as shocked by school killings, drive-by shootings and murders at a house of worship. In many cases, their impact has the permanence of a 12-hour news story. As Chicagoans, we know that to be unacceptable; yet the source of the problem remains extraordinarily complex, and the solution maddeningly elusive.
The situation is exacerbated by understaffed police forces, the ready availability of assault-style weapons and the continued erosion of the social safety net.
Yet we are witness to fortitude, courage and conviction. Lawmakers and the courts confront the causes of horrific crimes, regardless of political cost. Police officers face the dangers of patrol each day. And ordinary people such as Amurao demonstrate conviction after being victimized. When asked in a Peoria courtroom in April 1967 to identify the killer of her eight roommates, Amurao left the witness stand, walked over to Richard Speck and pointed her finger at him, bravely proclaiming, “This is the man.”
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Michael Peregrine is a retired Chicago lawyer who still flinches at photos of Richard Speck.
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