INTRODUCTION

A SCREAM OF TERROR

The first alarm clock went off at five A.M. Corazon Amurao had been huddled under a bunk bed for two hours. Now she began to untie herself, working her hands back and forth to loosen the double knots of the bedsheet that bound her. Then she untied her ankles. Another alarm sounded. It was five-thirty.

Crawling slowly on her stomach, she emerged from her hiding place and with great effort moved under another bunk bed, from where she could peek out the open door. Nothing moved in the hallway. She stood up and began to walk to her own bedroom. She saw the body of one of her roommates lying on the bathroom floor. As she walked across her own bedroom, she stepped over the bodies of three more, covered with blood. She closed her door, fearing the killer might still be in the house.

She climbed onto her top bunk, opened the window, and screamed almost continuously for five minutes. There was no reply. Dressed in pajama shorts and top, she crawled out the window and jumped down to a ledge of the town house facing 100th Street on the far southeast side of Chicago. She stood there screaming for twenty more minutes before anyone came, a scream that shook terror into the very heart of Chicago:

“They are all dead! They are all dead! My friends are all dead. Oh, God, I’m the only one alive!”

It was July 14, 1966, and Chicago awoke on that hot and sticky morning to reports that eight young nurses had been brutally stabbed, strangled, and sexually assaulted. The killings took place as the victims were settling in for the evening in the safety of their own beds. This murder of innocents shocked the conscience of the nation. It seemed that a monster was on the loose, that a crazed killer who walked on ten-foot stilts bestrode a terrified city. Doors were locked, strangers were scrutinized, parents checked on their children.

The monster, who was flesh and blood, was little more than a mile due east of the murder scene, toward the lake, in the rough Calumet Harbor area of the Southeast Side. Richard Franklin Speck, twenty-four, a heavily pockmarked, tattooed drifter from Dallas, was sound asleep in a small upstairs room at the Shipyard Inn, a tavern-rooming house catering to seamen and steelworkers. A small black pistol was tucked under his pillow. A stale can of beer sat on his nightstand, next to a crumpled pile of dollar bills. What had started out as a twenty-five-dollar robbery had turned into a crime that will never be forgotten.

Speck had swept through the nurses’ town house like a summer tornado, and his savage murders had changed the landscape of crime. Within a few weeks, Charles Whitman would take a rifle to the top of a tower at Texas University and kill sixteen; within a few years, Charles Manson would mastermind the “helter-skelter” killings in southern California. Speck’s legacy to us is the banality of today’s mass murders and serial killings.

This is how it all began.