Richard Speck Research Paper

Richard Speck was one of America’s most daunting mass murderers. He was born in Kirkwood, Illinois in 1941 and moved to Monmouth, Illinois shortly after he was born. Speck was the seventh of eight children in his great religious family. Speck experienced the sadness of death very early in his life. He lost his father, whom he was very close to, at the age of six, and lost his oldest brother at the age of eleven. After the death of his father, his mother remarried a man with a criminal record, who seemed to be the opposite of Speck’s biological father. Her new relationship resulted in Speck and his younger sister moving to Dallas, Texas. There, the family struggled to maintain financially stable, and frequently relocated to different poor neighborhoods.

Within a couple months, he commited his most horrifying crime. Speck broke into a townhouse, which held young female nursing students. He held nine women in the house for hours, ordering them to empty their purses, before he stabbed, strangled, raped, and killed the victims. One woman, Cora Amurao, managed to come out alive because she remained hidden under a bed as Speck was torturing the other victims. Speck possibly lost count of how many women were living there. According to biography.com, Speck was known to target females ages 7-65. His criminal ways lasted for eleven years. Speck typically had a tendency of robbing women then harming them physically. Speck did not have a nickname in the media, but he was known for having the tattoo “ Born to Raise

Immediately after the crime, police took Amurao into questioning. She recalled the “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo and police knew that tattoo belonged to Richard Speck, and fingerprints taken from the scene confirmed their theory. They swarmed the media with his images, and in desperation to escape, Speck attempted suicide just four days after the murder had taken place. The hotel clerk dialed 9-1-1 and he was taken to a local hospital to get treatment. There, the doctor recognized him because of his tattoo and Speck was arrested just after his surgery. His trial began about a month after the unforgettable murders. According to the biography, The Crime of the Century written by Dennis L. Breo and William J. Martin, Corazon Amurao, the nurse the killer left behind, confronted Speck at trial and told jurors, "This is the man!" She persuaded jurors of his guiltiness with her testimony and after just twelve days the trial ended and Speck was found guilty of all eight murders. At first, Speck was sentenced to death. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional, which required Speck to be re-sentenced. Judge Richard Fitzgerald re-sentenced Speck from 400 to 1,200 years in prison without parole. Speck had an odd way of staying alive in prison. He smuggled in female hormones that he took to grow breasts for the