Nurses: The Speck Incident

On July 13-14, 1966, at around 11:00 pm, Speck approached a Chicago townhouse and broke in by way of a window. He searched the house for life and eventually came across the bedrooms of six young, female student nurses. These nurses, all in their low twenties, were slightly over a month from graduating and entering the medical workforce. Speck woke the girls and rounded them up. He led them into a single bedroom and informed them that he needed money for travel to New Orleans. As described by Corazon Amurao, the sole survivor of Speck’s massacre, Speck seemed completely and utterly calm during this. Because of that, the girls somewhat trusted Speck. Their trust could not have been more misplaced. Speck then tied up all of the girls’ arms using sheets from their beds and walked them out of the room one by one to their gruesome deaths.

She claims that the girls did not resist or scream when Speck pulled them from the bedroom indicating that they did not believe that Speck was going to hurt them. During Speck’s murderous frenzy, three other nurses returned to the townhome and were killed along with the other five nurses. Hours later (after Speck had already left), Amurao climbed from underneath the bed and searched the house for her schoolmates. The bodies of the innocent girls littered the home and were marked by Speck in the cruelest ways imaginable. The girls were tortured and gruesomely stabbed and/or suffocated to death. The stab wounds were primarily in vital locations: neck, eyes, chest, etc (Siemaszko). At least one of the girls had been raped by Speck (“Richard Speck Biography”). After only seeing a few of the bodies, Amurao was beyond horrified and escaped from the house (Siemaszko). She then screamed for help for twenty minutes until, finally, help arrived