CHAPTER 13

Matthew Hogan was a career bartender who just happened to be driving a cab between bartending jobs. A burly, strong man, Hogan was alert and streetwise. He noticed that Gerrald was dead drunk and an absolute mess. By contrast, Speck was clean and neat, with his hair combed and his face freshly shaven. He appeared sober. Nevertheless, Hogan thought Speck was acting fishy.

Speck told the driver, “Don’t worry about him,” gesturing toward Gerrald. “He’ll be OK.” Speck then asked Red where he wanted to go and was told, “Eddie and Cooney’s.” Speck directed Hogan to drive to this tavern, which was a few blocks north of the Shipyard Inn. On the way, Speck repeated his alibi to Gerrald: “I’ve got a job on the Sinclair Great Lakes and have to show up at the dock right at seven A.M. tomorrow. But, first, I need to get some money from my sister.” Gerrald got out of the cab with these words ringing in his ears.

Speck stretched out in the backseat, calmly smoking a cigarette, and told Hogan, “Take me to the North Side, the poor side of the North Side.” Hogan replied, “Where do you want to go? I need an address.”

“The worst place, the scummiest place. I hate to admit it, but that is where my sister lives.”

“That’s not good enough. I need a street.”

“Do you know where the beatniks hang out?”

“You mean Old Town?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

It was now midafternoon, and the sun was bouncing off Lake Michigan as Hogan drove his bright red-and-yellow Commercial Cab over to Route 41, where he turned left and proceeded to drive north on South Shore Drive to Lake Shore Drive. With the shimmering lake and sailboats on the right and the city’s parks and skyscrapers on the left, the route along which Hogan was taking Speck is one of the most beautiful drives in the world. Speck, however, was still in his own interior world, telling stories:

“I just got into town this morning at four,” Speck told Hogan, “and I went over to see my good buddy, Red. When I knocked on his hotel room door, I saw that he had a broad with him and they were both stinkin’ drunk. I drank some whiskey with them and got on a good buzz, and finally Red asked if I wanted a woman. I said, ‘You bet!’ He went next door, knocked, and came back with a broad for me. I shacked up with her.” The only description Speck provided of this mythical “broad” was that she “smelled bad.”

As Speck was winding down his alibi, Hogan turned west onto Randolph Street and bisected the city’s Loop before again turning north on LaSalle Street, a major thoroughfare that ran north into the Old Town district. Hogan next turned west on Division, and as the ride continued he looked back at Speck and said, “We’re about running out of Old Town.”

Speck, who didn’t have a clue as to his whereabouts, peered out the window and saw the Cabrini-Green housing projects, a grim, all-black concrete ghetto. “This is starting to look familiar,” replied Speck, who then directed Hogan to let him out at a parking lot at 1160 North Sedgwick, right in front of one of the Cabrini-Green residential towers. He added, “Yes, that is the building my sister lives in.”

The ride cost $5.90, and Speck handed six one-dollar bills to Hogan, who then drove out of the lot, observing in the rearview mirror that Speck was standing there in the bright sun, his two bags at his feet, stretching and nervously looking around. It was four-twenty P.M., and Speck was twenty miles from the Shipyard Inn. He figured that the trail of a white man would go dead in a black ghetto. However, another eyewitness had him in her sights.

Fannie Jo Holland, who lived on the 11th floor of the building, was staring out the window, watching her husband walk east on Division Street to go to work. Although she lived in a public housing development, Fannie Jo Holland was a classy lady. An attractive, bright, well-spoken black woman, she was a college graduate with a degree in English. A devoted wife and mother of four young children, she also kept a neat, homey apartment. She always watched her husband leave for work, to wave good-bye and to throw him his cigarettes or keys, in case he forgot them.

Now, she was astounded to see a white man with two bags get out of a cab in the middle of a parking lot for an all-black building. Noticing that the red-and-yellow markings were not those of a city cab, she stared long and hard. Speck, she noticed, waited until the cab had driven out of sight before he picked up his two bags and walked to the edge of the parking lot. Then he bent over, opened his suitcase, and removed something. Straightening up, he looked around in all directions and then walked about twenty steps north to Division Street, constantly looking around in all directions. He was wearing dark slacks and a white T-shirt. In the bright sun, she could see dark blue markings on his arms, which she realized looked like tattoos.

Speck had taken the pistol from his suitcase and put it in his waistband. Then he walked four blocks east on Division to its intersection with Dearborn. At this point he was standing near Rush Street, the “Street of Dreams,” a one-block strip cluttered with singles bars. Only a few steps away was Butch McGuire’s, America’s original singles bar. It was now late afternoon, prime time for other Chicago men the same age as Speck to hit the street of dreams in search of business and romantic opportunities. Instinctively, Speck turned away and headed south on Dearborn. He walked six long city blocks, constantly looking left, right, up, and back, before finally breathing a sigh of relief. Rising above him at 648 North Dearborn was a flophouse—the Raleigh Hotel.

The Raleigh had been built with a high sense of promise back in 1882. It was constructed only eleven years after the famous Chicago fire had gutted much of the downtown area, and Swedish-born architect Lawrence Gustav Hallberg designed the Mentone Apartments, as they were originally called, to be one of the city’s first luxury high-rise apartment buildings. The original eight-story building was designed in striking red and green terra-cotta stones, and contained only twelve large apartments, each of which included eight or nine rooms and offered handsome views of Lake Michigan, one mile to the east. Every convenience was provided, and the residences included a library, parlor, walnut woodwork, flocked wallpaper, and separate kitchen and service entrances.

As the decades slipped by, however, the apartments were broken down into smaller units and converted into a transient hotel, initially catering to the theatrical profession. In 1952, a fire swept through the building, uprooting 125 residents, many of whom were displaced people from Europe who spoke no English and were left homeless. By 1966, the Raleigh was a full-fledged flophouse, located midway between the city’s bustling downtown Loop and the fashionable near North Side. It was only a few blocks from the fortresslike Merchandise Mart and the block-long prim granite headquarters of the American Medical Association, but it was also only a short walk removed from the seamy street life of North Clark Street, one block to the west. It was now Richard Speck’s kind of place.

At four forty-five P.M., Speck walked in the Raleigh’s front door and went to the registration office run by Otha Hullinger. She was a heavyset loquacious woman in her midfifties whose entire body and jowls shook as she talked. Her short, wispy gray hair was combed tightly back, and she wore thick black-rimmed glasses. She lived in the hotel, and much of her time was spent tinkering with various cooking utensils designed to keep her on a special diet. She was smart in the way of most hotel clerks and was not easily fooled.

Speck was very calm and polite and asked to register for one week, handing her a ten-dollar bill to cover the rent (nine dollars) and key deposit (one dollar). He registered under an alias, David Stayton, using the name of one of his Dallas friends. Hullinger asked him where he was from.

Speck replied, “I’m from the North Side, but I had a big argument with my brother-in-law, who threw me out of his house because I drink too much.” Asked if he was working, Speck said, “No, but I will be.” Asked how he was going to get by in the meantime, he said “Don’t worry, my sister will see me through.” Mrs. Hullinger inquired further about the sister, and Speck provided her correct name and address—“Mrs. Martha Thornton, 3966 N. Avondale.”

Speck was wearing black shoes, tight-fitting black pants, and a white sport shirt under a white jacket. Before entering the hotel, he had changed into the new shirt, and a jacket to mask his tattoos. Speck took the elevator up to room 806, on the hotel’s highest floor. For his nine dollars he got a small room with bed and mattress, sink with hot and cold water, nightstand, and small refrigerator. Speck dumped his two bags on the floor; he was settled in.

At about eight that evening, he returned to the lobby, told Hullinger he was going out to eat, and politely asked if he might buy her something, perhaps a hamburger. Hullinger replied, “Why, thank you, but I’m on a diet and I can’t eat hamburgers and I don’t care for any coffee.” Speck walked out the door, cut west a few steps to one of the many greasy spoons on Clark Street, and returned shortly with a little brown paper bag with two cups of coffee, one of which he insisted on giving to Hullinger. He also handed her a few packets of sugar. He called his sister, Martha Thornton, so she wouldn’t worry about him. “I have a room down here on Clark Street,” he lied to her, “and I’m going out drinking with Red.”

As Speck did favors for Mrs. Hullinger and courteously reassured his sister, the Area 2 burglary detectives were huddling on the other side of town, wondering what to do now that Speck had failed to show up for the stakeout at the union hall. At seven P.M., Sergeants Clancy and Vrdolyak met with Homicide Commander Flannagan and Deputy Chief of Detectives Spiotto, and were told to keep their men on the case.

The burglary cops split into three three-man teams and fanned out to make a thorough search of all taverns, hotels, and rooming houses on the Southeast Side known to cater to merchant seamen. They put special effort into trying to find the “Ruth’s Place” that Speck had mentioned when calling the union hall for his assignment. At midnight, they gave up. There was no “Ruth’s Place.”

Speck was back in the bars, only this time it was on the North Side. Only a few feet west of the Raleigh Hotel was North Clark Street. Its one-mile strip between 500 North Clark (Grand Street) and 1200 North Clark (Division) was a highway of sin and lost souls. It was only five blocks west of fashionable Michigan Avenue, but its denizens were living light years away. The Clark Street strip offered a variety of choices: The Pink Twist Inn, the 661 Club, otherwise known as the Liberty Inn, the Club Erin, the Queen’s Paradise, and the Shamrock. All were on the order of Pete’s Tap in physicial amenities: a carpet of beer foam, a fog of stale cigarette smoke, and a background stench of puke. The clientele, many of them ex-cons, was even worse: alcoholics, drug addicts, panderers, pimps, and prostitutes, all of a rich multiracial mix—black, Hispanic, American Indian, and white. Speck was at home.

He spent most of the night of July 14 at the Pink Twist Inn on North Clark Street. Bartender Jerry Bohne recalls that Speck came in at about ten P.M. and remained until three A.M., drinking at least five or six Jim Beam and Cokes served by Bohne, who was not the only bartender. Speck spent most of his time by the jukebox, standing all alone and drinking.

Elsewhere in the city, racial riots were in full fury. On the night of July 14, six policemen were shot and wounded, along with an uncounted number of civilians, as the city police fought rioters. By midnight, at least 118 persons had been arrested, and the police began carrying machine guns, shotguns, rifles, and tear gas, in addition to pistols and nightsticks, to combat roving gangs of vandals, looters, and snipers.

The Chicago Transit Authority shut down bus and elevated lines, and police blocked off main streets. In one violent incident, more than a hundred policemen exchanged shots in an hour-long encounter with snipers in two high-rise buildings at Lake and Wood streets, only a few miles from the Pink Twist Inn. Chicago police, now working twelve-hour double shifts with all leaves canceled, had more on their minds than Richard Speck. Throughout the city, there was an unspoken tension between blacks and whites. To the all-white middle-class neighborhood of Jeffery Manor and to much of the rest of the city, it seemed that the world was going to hell. And now, there was a mad killer on the loose, a killer who was assuming mythic proportions.

This mythical monster remained slouched against a saloon jukebox until closing time. Then, he struck up a deal with a hovering prostitute. Speck and the hooker walked the short block from the dive to the flophouse.

Friday, July 15

At about three-fifteen A.M., Speck used his key to unlock the front door of the Raleigh Hotel. He entered the lobby in the company of a black prostitute. Sitting inside the Raleigh’s front door was an elderly night clerk, Algy Lemhart. Lemhart lived in the hotel in room 209 and was on night duty in case anyone tried to rent a room very late at night, in which case he would push a button to release the locked front door. Now, he was face to face with Richard Speck and a companion whom Lemhart later described as “a colored girl, about age thirty and five feet six inches tall and a hundred twenty or thirty pounds. She had medium-brown skin, big dark eyes, kind of high cheekbones. She was wearing blue shorts about six inches above the knees and white tennis shoes. She had a scarf on her head.”

The woman was not drunk, but Richard Speck was. He talked “cracky,” Lemhart thought. A belligerent Speck said that he had rented room 709. As the elderly Lemhart left to check the registration book, Speck and the prostitute stepped onto the elevator. Before the door closed, Lemhart heard the woman say, “Richard ….” Lemhart discovered that 709 was empty, but decided it was not worth the bother of awakening the temperamental Mrs. Hullinger to find out which room Speck had actually rented. About thirty minutes later, the prostitute stepped off the elevator and told Lemhart, “He is asleep now. I left him. He seemed nice, but when I got up to the room I saw that he had a gun.”

Lemhart asked the man’s name and was told, “Richard … I don’t know the last name.” Adding that she had not taken anything, the prostitute walked into the night. When Mrs. Hullinger arrived at her desk that morning, Lemhart told her about the man with the gun and provided a description. Hullinger believed the description matched that of the man she knew as David Stayton, and she called the police.

At eight-thirty, Officer Robert Ratledge, a tall, quiet, balding man, arrived at the Raleigh with his partner, Clarence Shuey. Both were from the 18th District Police Station, which was located only a few blocks away on Chicago and Clark, within spitting distance of all the joints. The two officers were told that there was a man with a gun and were escorted to room 806 by the Raleigh porter, who carried a passkey.

Officer Ratledge knocked three times, and, getting no response, put his head next to the door and listened for sounds. Nothing. The porter unlocked the door and stepped back into the hall. The two policemen entered to confront Speck, who was dead drunk and sound asleep, a black pistol protruding from the left side of his pillow. Speck was fully dressed in slacks, shirt, and socks.

Ratledge took the gun and put it in his right pocket. He then awakened Speck. “Why have you got a gun?” Ratledge asked.

Opening his eyes wide, Speck replied, “Where is the girl?”

Told that the girl was gone and had reported to the night clerk that he had a gun, Speck said, “I don’t have a gun or a knife or a weapon of any kind. The girl had a gun and she must have left it.” He then gave an entirely false description of the girl: “Puerto Rican, about five feet three inches, kind of short and dumpy. Wore glasses.”

Asked where he met the woman, Speck stood up and walked over to his small window. Looking out at Clark Street, he pointed to the Liberty Inn, a few buildings away from the Pink Twist Inn, on North Clark, and said, “I think it was that place. I like hillbilly music and they have a little hillbilly group there. That’s where I met her, then I brought her right over here.” The Liberty Inn had only a two A.M. license.

Reaching into his pockets, Speck pulled out two crumpled one-dollar bills. “That girl took about ten dollars from me, he added. “I must have really tied one on.” Ratledge asked his name, and Speck responded, “Richard Speck. My wallet is on the dresser.” Ratledge picked up the wallet and found a seaman’s card with the name Richard Speck” and a small passport photo. At the time the name meant nothing to Ratledge, or to most Chicago police officers.

“Why have you got one name up here and another down there?” Ratledge asked.

“The last ship I was on, well, I won a lot of money in a dice game and there were two guys from that ship who were pretty mad at me. They were after me, wanted to beat me up, so I changed my name.”

Ratledge pressed him about the gun, and Speck said repeatedly, “I never carry a gun. The girl had the gun. I’d seen it in the bar, and I guess she just left it here.”

The interrogation had now lasted fifteen minutes. There were six cans of beer on Speck’s dresser, two empty and four full. Speck asked the officers, “Would you two like a beer?” After the officers turned down a warm beer, Speck countered by offering to buy them some hot coffee. “I have enough money for us to get some coffee, if you want coffee.”

Ratledge noted that Speck “was very calm, very friendly, and very sure of himself. He spoke slowly, he never hesitated in his speech, and he never stumbled over any words. He understood everything that I asked, I never had to repeat any questions, and he always looked me directly in the eye. He never appeared upset by the questions.”

Asked how long he would be staying in the area, Speck said, “Well, I’m paid up for the week, and I’ll probably be leaving after that.” The policemen then said that they were leaving. Speck followed them to the door, saying politely, “Take it easy!”

During the elevator ride down, Ratledge told the porter, “He’s harmless.”