Crime of the Century

The leading actor in the trial drama that was soon to unfold, Richard Franklin Speck, had adjusted well to life in the Cook County Jail. The “three square” diet of starchy jail food had pushed his weight twenty-five pounds to a paunchy 185, and he had a new hobby, painting, courtesy of Dr. Marvin Ziporyn. Although his first efforts were strictly paint-by-number basics, Speck would soon graduate to freehand renderings. By the start of the trial, Marvin Ziporyn had become the central character in Speck’s life. In return, Speck had scrawled a three-sentence written release authorizing Ziporyn to explain “what I am really like.” This turn of events, however, had been kept secret from Ziporyn’s jail employers and from the State and defense lawyers.

Speck and Ziporyn continued their conversations throughout the new year, and Ziporyn’s summaries continued to be made available to the jail warden and the trial attorneys. The record included these reports:

January 5: “Speck was quite talkative today. Enthused about his first efforts at painting and discussed techniques.”

January 8: “Speck displays a very fatalistic attitude today. Wishes Getty would not fight too hard for him, since he feels he cannot face a long prison term. Afraid other prisoners would harm him in the penitentiary.”

January 13: “Speck’s mood, always volatile, showed a sharp upward surge today. His painting is going well and he is proud. All in all, (I) have interrupted a strong movement toward (Speck’s) depression.”

January 16: “Speck told me that he is ‘simply no good, and should pay for what I did.’ I tried to allay this sense of guilt, but Speck would have none of it.”

January 30: “Speck extremely disturbed by the snowstorm and worried about the safety of his family.”

February 10: “Speck is extremely relieved today because his hearings have ended. He is still firmly convinced that Judge Paschen is prejudiced against him personally and against his lawyers. Discussed art and thanked me for introducing him to it.”

Ziporyn’s last visit to Speck was on February 13. Afterward, the psychiatrist prepared a four-page “discharge summary.” This document was a blueprint for the diagnosis of insanity that, if asked by the defense, he was prepared to place before a jury.

Discharge summary:

“Affect is basically depressed and he repeatedly expresses feelings of anxiety, shame, remorse, regret, and guilt. These are general attitudes concerning his total life. Speck has a deep loyalty for his family and a sincere love for them.”

Personality characteristics:

“Obsessive-compulsive personality showing many anal features. Meticulous, concerned with details, rigid, and ambivalent. He is very religious and has an extremely punitive moral code—he knows right from wrong and is concerned about righteous behavior.

“In dealing with women, he has a Madonna-Prostitute complex, and hostility develops in situations where he feels a Madonna has betrayed him and played the role of a prostitute. This is a cardinal problem related to his ambivalence and explains why he is both loving and antagonistic in dealing with females.

“Speck cannot be understood without reference to multiple cerebral injuries. He has had at least a half-dozen concussions, the two most important being in early adolescence when he fell from a tree and was unconscious for ninety minutes and again at age sixteen when he was clubbed into unconsciousness by a policeman.

“Speck steadfastly denies any recall of the events of July 13–14 after dusk on July 13. He recalls drinking heavily that day (July 13)—a good deal of whiskey and a pint of wine being specifically recalled. He says he had six capsules of sodium Seconal (a barbiturate), plus an injection of a drug into his left-arm vein. He does not know the name of the drug—its effects suggest an amphetamine, but this is conjecture on my part. He states that shortly after receiving the injection he blacked out. Such a reaction is common to him on a combination of alcohol and barbiturates.”

Diagnosis:

“Richard Speck has an organic brain defect—chronic brain syndrome associated with cerebral trauma. I reached this diagnosis because of the combination of history and mental-status findings. The differential diagnosis (or other possibility) involves chiefly sociopathic personality disorder. I rule this out because of the presence of depression, anxiety, remorse, guilt, shame, and the demonstration of adherence to religious belief in codes of conduct plus morality. In addition, he displays love, loyalty, and affection for specific individuals close to him.”

Dynamics:

“Speck is an obsessive-compulsive personality whose rigidity, ambivalence, and hostility have been accentuated by his organic cerebral pathology. This defect is characterized by intolerance to drugs and alcohol. These agents cause a much more intense response in these cases than in normal people. The basic effect is loss of control over impulsive behavior. The feelings that the person can ordinarily contain explode in a violent and destructive manner. At such times, a patient is not responsible for his conduct and may be completely unaware of what he is doing.”

By February 14, 1967, Ziporyn was Speck’s therapist, faithful companion, confidant—and biographer. He was also Gerry Getty’s best chance to get Speck off the hook on an insanity defense. Ziporyn, in effect, was prepared to tell a jury that since Speck said he had fallen out of a tree as a young boy and now claimed that he often “blacked out” from booze and barbiturates that, ergo, he could not be held responsible for cold-bloodedly murdering eight young nurses.

Getty had been reading Ziporyn’s jailhouse reports with growing interest. Also, the Public Defender had been his usual resourceful self in trying to find a biological explanation for the evil of Richard Speck. Back in August, he had sent samples of Speck’s blood to Eric Engel, M.D., a researcher at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. Getty had heard about studies by Dr. Engel and his associates that suggested a possible relationship between abnormalities in the number of chromosome and violent behavior, and he wondered if this might explain Speck. The answer came back quickly: no. The Vanderbilt analysis of Speck’s white blood cells concluded that Speck had the normal number of chromosomes. With this avenue closed, Ziporyn appeared to offer Getty his last and best opportunity to argue an insanity defense.

For their part, the prosecutors had a different perspective on Ziporyn. They thought that his diagnosis of chronic brain syndrome, a diagnosis that he had advanced in many previous crminal defenses, was little more than psychiatric gibberish. The State was armed with the overwhelming documentation of how Speck had developed his criminal cunning and skills over the years, how for years he had conveniently lied and copped a plea of amnesia when confronted with his crimes, how he had moved about immediately before and after the murders without any evidence of a “drug fix” or “blackout,” and how he had demonstrated consciousness of guilt and had attempted to escape after realizing to his horror that he had left an eyewitness.

The prosecutors were not impressed with the attempt by Ziporyn to explain away Speck’s murders with a diagnosis of “chronic brain syndrome.” Martin believed Ziporyn’s diagnosis was absolutely wrong. Nevertheless, he knew that Ziporyn might make a convincing case to twelve jurors who otherwise found it hard to fathom how one man could kill eight women.

At midnight on Valentine’s Day, Cook County sheriff’s deputies came to Speck’s basement cell to take him to Peoria. Speck was watching Machine-Gun Kelly on TV and was upset that the guards interrupted him in the middle of it. He had been looking forward to the violent gangster movie for days. As he was led away from the maximum-security corridor, he asked his buddy in the next cell to write him and tell him what had happened to Machine-Gun Kelly at the end.

It was exactly seven months after the murders. Speck was placed between two armed guards in the backseat of an unmarked squad car, one of three that slipped through the gates of the House of Correction complex into a heavy fog to make their way onto Interstate 55 for the 150-mile drive to Peoria. Among Speck’s sparse luggage were his radio, several Western paperbacks, his dark blue “court suit,” and his paint set, minus the palette knife. The lead and tail cars of the caravan were filled with more deputies armed with shotguns and machine guns. At three A.M., they dropped their famous prisoner off in a cell on the fourth floor of the Peoria County Jail, across Hamilton Boulevard from the newly built L-shaped five-story courthouse.