Crime of the Century

A trial is both a war and a dramatic play. Martin had more than a touch of the playwright in him, and he knew that his opening statement would be the introduction of the plot, the witnesses his actors, their direct examination his script, the exhibits his theatrical props, the closing argument his soliloquy. At the same time, pulling together the witnesses who were now converging on Peoria required the logistical precision of a military campaign.

In preparing the State’s case, Martin was guided by the simple principle that had been hammered home to him as a young prosecutor: “Don’t gild the lily.” The advice comes from the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, who wrote in King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet … is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” In terms of a modern high-profile criminal trial, this meant trim the prosecution to its bare-bones essence so that the defense has a much smaller target at which to shoot.

The prosecution of Richard Speck required understatement. The facts, crisply told, were overwhelming, and Martin would have to resist the temptation to “overtry” the case. For more than eight months, he had lived day and night with the Speck case, and he needed little time to prepare his opening statement. Besides, he was too busy to worry about it. The final weekend before trial would be spent preparing witnesses to testify—conducting mock direct and cross-examinations and selecting and numbering the exhibits each witness would identify. To try to send Speck to the electric chair, the State would rely on a case structured into four parts: taut circumstantial evidence placing Speck near the town house during the three days before the murders; a positive eyewitness identification; definitive fingerprint evidence; and a classic case of postcrime flight culminating in Speck’s attempted suicide. The unknown was whether Getty would use an alibi or insanity for Speck’s defense.

In following his philosophy of understatement, Martin reluctantly decided to sacrifice much of the State’s significant evidence against the killer: Speck’s incriminating statements to Drs. Smith, Feinerman, and Norcross; the .22 caliber pistol seized from Speck in room 806 of the Raleigh Hotel; the knife that Speck used to kill and later threw into the Calumet River; the abandoned suitcase of clothes and T-shirts Speck left in room 806 of the Raleigh Hotel; and the clothes and personal grooming articles Speck left behind in room 584 of the Starr Hotel.

Only the gun had been seized illegally. However, each time Martin thought of the other physical evidence, he saw trouble. Though the knife was undoubtedly the murder weapon, no witness could positively identify it as belonging to Speck, and not enough blood had been recovered from it to prove a link to the victims. The “Improved Muskrat” knife was little more than junk dredged up from the sludge of the Calumet River. If Speck’s size 38–40 BVD T-shirt recovered from the Raleigh Hotel were introduced into evidence as being similar to the T-shirt found in the living room of the town house and the T-shirt removed from Speck at Cook County Hospital, then the blood on it from Sergeant Vrdolyak’s accident in opening the suitcase would have to be explained. This would provide Getty with a golden opportunity to characterize the incident as a police effort to frame Speck. The possessions Speck left behind in his cage in the Starr Hotel proved nothing other than his preference for Noxzema shave bombs.

Martin also struggled over the scientific proof that established Speck’s brutal rape of his final victim, Gloria Jean Davy. The crime lab had proven that the rectal swab taken from Gloria contained sperm, as did the cushion from the couch on which the body had been found. This undoubtedly was the sperm of Richard Speck. Placing it into evidence, however, would require the testimony of the police officers who had handled the swab and the cushion to establish an unbroken chain of possession ending with the crime lab chemist’s microscopic analysis. The chemist would have to testify to his analysis that the recovered substance was semen. Several hours of testimony, subject to cross-examination at every step, would be required to prove the gruesome fact of Speck’s rape. Martin decided that this proof was unnecessary. Corazon’s graphic account of having overheard Speck rape Gloria Jean Davy in the upstairs bedroom and the photo of her naked body, lying face-down on the living room sofa, would be more than enough evidence to show Speck had defiled her.

This same philosophy of presenting a streamlined case would keep Ella Mae Hooper off the witness stand. Though Hooper’s testimony would have demonstrated that Speck stole her Rohm .22 caliber six-shooter only hours before the murders, the illegal seizure of this same gun at the Raleigh Hotel precluded its introduction into evidence. This would leave Hooper’s testimony unsupported, and her drinking problem and prior inconsistent statements seriously devalued her credibility. Hooper’s account of having had sexual intercourse with Richard Speck, after he had subjected her to a depraved “Grand Inquisitor” interrogation, would prove Speck’s bizarre sexual practices, but did not relate to the murders in the town house. “Bad man” evidence is inadmissible not because it proves too little, but because it proves too much—Speck was not on trial for the separate crime he committed in raping and robbing Ella Mae Hooper.

Proving the “yellow dress” incident would involve a complicated batch of evidence from several sources. According to Cora’s account, as Speck was about to lead Patricia Matusek out of the south bedroom to kill her, he asked, “Are you the girl in the yellow dress?” This question proved that Speck had previously seen a girl near the town house wearing what looked to him like a yellow dress. On Tuesday night, July 12, 1966, at about five-thirty P.M., two separate events had briefly intersected: Speck, after being dropped off by another seaman at the union hiring hall, had been walking on 100th Street at the same time that Sherry Finnigan, her boyfriend, and “Mulehead” King—Pamela Wilkening’s blind date—were pulling their car into the alley behind the nurses’ town house to pick Pamela up to go to Riverview Amusement Park. Nina Schmale, who was wearing a mustard- or yellow-colored nightgown, briefly stepped out of the town house’s back door to get a look at Pamela’s blind date. Watching from a distance, Speck saw a “yellow dress” and, during the murders, confused Pat Matusek with Nina Schmale. Telling the story of the girl in the yellow dress would have required the State to use Sherry Finnigan, her married boyfriend, and “Mulehead” King as witnesses. The facts of Sherry Finnigan’s former residence at the town house and her subsequent expulsion, her sexual relationship with a married man with four children, and the Daily Calumet allegations that she had once “dated” Speck, would have been extremely dangerous and unnecessary distractions from the main event. Rather than give Getty a field day in cross-examining this trio, Martin decided, for now, to leave the yellow dress incident unexplored.

At the same time, however, he was holding the yellow dress incident in reserve for a rebuttal of an insanity defense. If Getty gambled with an insanity defense, he would have to tell the jury that Speck claimed he could remember nothing about the night of the murders; Speck had locked himself into this position by claiming amnesia for the night of the murders in all his statements to the six members of the expert psychiatric panel and to Dr. Ziporyn. By using the yellow dress story, Martin would be able to argue otherwise.

Martin thought of the description given by Leo Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, in which the Russian novelist recounts the story told on a train by a man who killed his wife. The murderer says, “When people tell you they don’t remember what they did when they were in a mad fit of rage, don’t believe a word of it—it’s all lies, nonsense. I remembered everything afterwards, and I’ve never ceased to remember it for one second. The more steam my rage got up, the more brilliantly the light of consciousness flared within me, making it impossible for me not to be aware of everything I was doing.”

Similarly, Richard Speck had come very close to a confession in his October 11, 1966, interview with psychiatrist Edward Kelleher in the Cook County jail.

Kelleher: “If people murder, should they be electrocuted?”

Speck: “If I was the father of one of those girls, I would want to see the guy who did it burn.” Abruptly, Kelleher changed his line of questioning.

Kelleher: “Which girl had the yellow dress?”

Speck: “Well, that was the one—”

Kelleher reported that Speck suddenly stopped talking, dropped his cigarette on the floor, picked it up quickly, sat back stiffly in his chair, stared hard at Kelleher for a few moments, and then asked, “What did you ask me?”

Kelleher: “I asked which girl had the yellow dress?”

Speck: “I don’t know nothing about any girl with a yellow dress.”

Later, in the same interview, Kelleher asked, “What do you want to tell me about the nurses being killed?”

Speck: “It all seems like a nightmare. I can’t tell you why it happened. I had no reason. I got nothing against them. I didn’t even know them. They were such nice girls and pretty girls.”

Kelleher: “How do you know about them?”

After stammering, “Ah, ah,” Speck finally replied, “Somebody showed me their pictures.”

Kelleher: “Who?”

Speck: “I don’t remember.”

Kelleher: “How do you know they were nice girls?”

Speck: “They seemed to be.”

Kelleher: “Were they nice to you?”

Speck: “I told you I never knew them. Other people said they were nice. Don’t you think all nurses are nice?”

At this point, Kelleher reported, Speck arose from his slouched seating position, stretched, walked around his chair in a wide circle, and sat back down. Kelleher observed that he now sat “upright rather stiffly.”

Kelleher’s account of this interview brilliantly pierced Speck’s false claim of amnesia, and Martin was prepared, if necessary, to call Kelleher as a witness to rebut any claim Getty might make that Speck was insane at the time he killed.

In the meantime, the State’s witnesses were now arriving in Peoria. Weddings, funerals, and trials are the social occasions that bring strangers together for a common purpose, and this applied to the bereaved parents, professional doctors and nurses, and transient residents of Chicago’s Southeast Side and Skid Row, all of whom were coming together for the single goal of bringing Richard Speck to justice. Most of the witnesses would be housed at the Ramada Inn, where the police could keep an eye on them and help them avoid certain risks—like getting arrested, drunk, or lost.

The first wave of witnesses arrived on Friday afternoon, March 31, and checked into the Ramada, followed by a second delegation on Saturday. As the witnesses arrived, Martin and Murtaugh reinterviewed them in the makeshift conference room.

On Sunday morning, detective Eddie Wielosinski boarded a Rock Island Railroad train in Chicago to escort a different group of witnesses to Peoria. With Wielosinski were the parents of Suzanne Farris, drawn and sad; a tight-lipped and serious Phil Jordan, who had lost both his sister, Mary Ann, and his fiancée, Suzanne Farris; Otha Hullinger, the desk clerk who had registered Speck at the Raleigh Hotel; and Fannie Jo Holland, the eleventh-floor resident of the Cabrini-Green Apartments who had spotted Speck’s arrival by taxi at her parking lot. Wielosinski told the railroad conductor that these passengers were all witnesses in the “Speck case,” and the conductor responded by preparing a private rail car for his “guests,” complete with coffee, snacks, and playing cards. Since he had begun working on the case the morning of the murders, Wielosinski found that the magic phrase “for the Speck case” prompted the spontaneous, total cooperation of whoever heard it. Once, Wielosinski was sent to Chicago on an urgent mission. Arriving late at the Peoria Airport, he was told that the last Ozark Airlines flight out was full. Wielosinski invoked the magic incantation “for the Speck case” and soon was sitting in the jumpseat of the cockpit with the pilots.

Upon their arrival in Peoria Sunday afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Farris and Phil Jordan were taken to the Holiday Inn, where they joined the other relatives who arrived by car that day—Mr. and Mrs. Wilkening and their son, Jack; Chuck Davy, father of Gloria Jean Davy; Joe Matusek, father of Pat Matusek, and his daughter, Mary Jo; and Dr. John Schmale, brother of Nina Schmale. Chuck Davy, an intelligent and forceful executive, emerged as the spokesman for the group. Previously, Joe Matusek’s grief had been more publicly displayed than that of the other relatives, and he alone had been willing to speak to reporters and go on TV. A contrast in styles, Davy and Matusek nevertheless turned to each other for comfort. Davy, the dapper, smooth sales executive, tended to keep his feelings bottled up and try to put on a good appearance. Matusek, the burly, rumpled saloon-keeper, was often emotional and teary-eyed. In the days ahead, though, they would frequently reverse their roles, and on any given day the two could be seen together, with Davy wrapping his arms around Matusek’s shoulders, or vice versa, depending upon what each had learned that day in court.

It had been almost nine months since the murders, and not one of the parents or relatives had asked Martin to tell them what had happened in the town house on the night of Speck’s savage crime. They would learn the horrifying facts for the first time when they listened to Martin’s opening statement the next morning. In the meantime, they were under the compassionate care of Detective Byron Carlile, who had comforted hundreds of relatives of murder victims in his long career as a homicide cop. Carlile reserved an entire floor at the Holiday Inn for the relatives and made certain that their privacy was not invaded.

Later Sunday afternoon, five more witnesses arrived, including Dr. Eugenio Tapia, a short, smiling coroner’s pathologist who reviewed his findings with Martin that night. Tapia spoke with a thick Spanish acent that gave Martin fits, pronouncing “leever” for liver, “woun” for wound. Tapia looked like the comical TV figure of the day, José Jimeñez, except Tapia was funnier. Martin found it fitting that a pathologist would be a happy-go-lucky prankster.

A more serious concern, though, was the painful decision that Martin had to make without delay, a decision with which he had been wrestling for days: Who should assist him at the State’s counsel table?

During jury selection, the allocation of manpower had been equal. Getty, Gramenos, and Doherty for the defense, against Martin, Murtaugh, and Glenville for the State. Having prepared the case nonstop for nine months, Martin decided that he could conduct the direct examination of virtually all of the State’s witnesses, and that he needed only one other prosecutor sitting at the counsel table with him. This, he believed, would undercut Getty’s expected argument that the State had thrown a vast array of talent against a poor defendant. The question, though, was who it should be—self-effacing, nervously energetic twenty-seven-year-old George Murtaugh, or pipe-smoking, gray-haired, fifty-four-year-old ex–FBI agent John Glenville?

On the one hand, Glenville had been on the Speck case from the very beginning, had diligently completed every task he had been given, had assisted Martin at Speck’s competency hearing, and had superbly handled the delicate task of interviewing Gerdena and Murrill Farmer. Glenville’s courtroom style was matter-of-fact, his emotions tightly under control, and he had a remarkable ability to see the significance of what appeared to others as minor details. Prosecuting Speck would be the highlight of his dedicated career in law enforcement.

On the other hand, Martin believed that any claims about the State’s “superior manpower” would be stopped if the vast resources of the State could produce only two “choirboys”—Martin and Murtaugh—to prosecute Speck. He thought that there would be a distinct tactical advantage to having the jury watch two seemingly inexperienced prosecutors battle the three mature defense veterans—Getty, Gramenos, and Doherty. News stories were repeatedly describing Martin as having limited trial experience in contrast to Getty, who was described by one gushing reporter as “a sly fox at the very height of his physical and mental powers.” Having Glenville at the table would even the sides and give the State a veteran appearance. Martin finally decided that the image of the prosecution as the underdog in the upcoming battle would be strengthened significantly if Glenville were omitted in favor of Murtaugh.

This bitter and lonely decision was personally abhorrent and painful to Martin, who knew that Glenville would be heartbroken. Chicago Daily News reporter John Justin Smith had described Martin in print as a man who “treats smiles like diamonds and is slow to give them away.” Although many casual observers found Martin to be cool and remote, he was underneath a very caring, emotional, warm man, and it devastated him to hurt Glenville. Martin realized that there was no way he could ever make up Glenville’s loss of prestige at being removed from the case on the eve of trial and he wished he could have taken himself off, instead. But convicting Speck had to come first.

Sunday night, Martin went to Glenville’s room and, without hesitating, gave him the bad news that he would not be at counsel table when the trial opened the next morning. Glenville tried to affect a stoic attitude. “Oh, I’ll just have more time to beat Wielosinski at handball,” he said, unconvincingly. He was crushed.

In the meantime, Officers Alexander and Wielosinski, acting like a pair of grizzly bears watching over their cubs, visited each hotel room to check on the State’s witnesses and to allot that day’s ration of goodies. Roommates Claude “One-Eyed Jack” Lunsford and Starr Hotel desk clerk Bill Vaughn, both removed from Skid Row and upgraded to plush king-size beds at the Ramada, were each rationed one six-pack of beer and one half-pint of whiskey each night. Fannie Jo Holland, who was used to a small apartment in her public-housing project, was rooming with Otha Hullinger, desk clerk and resident of the decrepit Raleigh Hotel. Fannie Jo requested a fifth of “good sippin’ whiskey,” by which she meant “Old Granddad, hundred proof—now don’t you bring me that eighty-proof stuff!” Fannie Jo had been so worried about her four children that she had refused to leave them with a babysitter while she journeyed to Peoria. Alexander had visited her husband’s employer, invoked the magic phrase, “for the Speck case,” and gotten him the week off—with pay—while he stayed home with his family. When Martin put Fannie Jo through the dry run of her direct examination, she became so nervous and intense that she absent-mindedly pulled at the pearls of her necklace until the entire strand snapped.

After completing their witness checks, Alexander and Wielosinski joined Jack Wallenda in the second-floor hallway. Their adrenaline level was so high that the three policemen spent the entire night talking about the case. “It was just such a relief that we knew it was going to finally start in the morning,” Wielosinski said. The policemen were not the only ones unable to sleep. Also spending the night quietly talking in their rooms were the victims’ classmates, Judy Dykton, Patricia McCarthy, and Tammy Sioukoff. Unconcerned about tomorrow, Richard Speck slept like a baby in his small cell in the courthouse basement.

Peorians awakened Monday morning to a crisp, sunny spring day, with the temperature eventually reaching a pleasant 50 degrees. Spectators had begun to gather outside the courthouse at six A.M., and by seven a long line had formed for the nine-thirty opening of the trial. Only thirty-six spectators, and no one under the age of eighteen, would be admitted to Courtroom A.

Arising early, Martin ordered his favorite breakfast from room service—cinnamon toast and a pot of coffee.

A chronic pacer, he circled the small hotel room, silently rehearsing his opening statement. At eight-thirty, Martin and Murtaugh went to their unmarked Ford in the Ramada’s basement parking lot for the short drive to the courthouse. Left behind, much to his disappointment, was Kenny Alexander. There was a good reason. Jack Altman, the accredited Time reporter at the trial and Ziporyn’s coauthor, had asked Alexander for directions during the New York surveillance of Marvin Ziporyn, and the prosecution could not risk the chance that Altman might now recognize the policeman. So, despite his extensive involvement in so much of the pretrial work, Alexander would be confined to the Ramada for the duration of the trial.

Martin and Murtaugh emerged from their car carrying file folders and headed for the front door of the courthouse, walking quickly and silently past the TV cameramen and reporters who lined the sidewalk. Microphones were thrust at their faces, but they said nothing, not daring to risk even a whispered conversation between themselves. Photographers armed with telephoto lenses commandeered the rooftops of surrounding buildings.

In the meantime, Speck was being brought to the rear entrance of Courtroom A. As he was led by guards toward the courtroom door, he flicked his lit cigarette toward a large ashtray outside the door. Handcuffed as he was, Speck missed the tray and then flashed a smart-aleck grin as a deputy sheriff retrieved the burning cigarette. Throughout the trial, this routine would become a little game for Speck, a chance to annoy his guards before being led into court. Speck was wearing his dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. He was also affecting dark-rimmed glasses. Getty was doing his best to present Speck as being as harmless as the boy next door.

A palpable tension filled the air as Judge Paschen ascended the bench at nine-thirty. “You won’t be bored now,” the judge told the crowd. The number of spectators watching the jury selection had rapidly fallen off to only a few courtroom stragglers, as word got out that it was a tedious and sleep-inducing process. Today the courtroom was packed. Sitting in the front row nearest the jury box were the families of the American girls—the Wilkenings and their son, the Jordans, father and son, the Farrises, Dr. John Schmale, Joe Matusek and his daughter Betty Jo, and Chuck Davy. Detective Byron Carlile had spent the morning reminding the heartsick relatives that they could not risk disrupting the trial by displaying any emotion in the courtroom, and now they sat next to him, tight-lipped and tense. He prayed silently that they could maintain their composure.

With a kind smile, Paschen looked at Martin and said, “You may proceed.” Wearing his dark-rimmed glasses and a navy blue vested suit with red-and-white regimental striped tie, Martin faced the judge and spoke the ritualistic first words of any lawyer’s formal argument: “May it please the court….”

For the next seventy-five minutes, Martin commanded the rapt attention of every person in the packed courtroom. Standing at the center of the jury box, shifting his weight slightly from one foot to the other, Martin moved his eyes from juror to juror, as he told the world in graphic detail what he expected to prove that Speck had done. He spoke without notes, having lived with the evidence for so long that he knew it like he knew the names of his four children. However, when he reached the point in the narrative of Cora’s description of how each girl was led out of the south bedroom and taken down the hall like a lamb to the slaughter, his mouth began to go dry. He knew that the parents and relatives of the eight slain nurses were hanging on his every word, and that until now, not one of them knew how their daughters and sisters and loved ones had spent the last moments of their lives.

By the time Martin recited Cora’s account of how she heard Speck unzip his black trousers to rape Gloria Jean Davy, Martin’s throat was parched and he was almost speaking in a whisper. Looking quickly to his left, he glimpsed the horror frozen on Chuck Davy’s face. Joe Matusek and Chuck Davy were seated next to each other in the second row of the spectator benches. Matusek reached over and placed his meaty arm around the shoulders of Davy, who was hunched forward with disbelief. When Martin concluded his opening statement, the world finally knew the facts of the monstrous crime perpetrated by Richard Speck.

One man who was not surprised by anything Martin described was Public Defender Gerald Getty. He knew the State’s witnesses, had interviewed most of them, had examined both the demonstrative and scientific evidence, and knew every word of Cora’s remarkable account. Getty’s defense, however, remained a mystery. Martin was certain that Getty would attack Cora’s identification of Speck, but he was less sure of how the Public Defender would try to explain away the three fingerprints Speck left on the south bedroom door. He was even less sure if Getty would use an insanity defense keyed to the testimony of psychiatrists Marvin Ziporyn and Ner Littner. Martin and Murtaugh sat at their counsel table, pens poised, anxiously awaiting any clues in Getty’s opening statement.

Getty rose and walked to the lectern carrying a black three-ring notebook. His dark brown suit was buttoned and his reddish hair was neatly slicked back. Facing the jury and speaking in his trademark folksy style, Getty said that Speck had been charged for no better reason than that he had the “misfortune” of being at the union hiring hall around the time of the murders. This was the “shutoff point” of the police investigation, Getty argued. He added, “No one denies that eight beautiful young girls were killed. We all know that. The question is, is this man the killer?”

In discussing the State’s fingerprint evidence, Getty referred to the prints on the bedroom door as “smudges without detail, without ridges, without cores, without deltas, and without all this they cannot be classified. The police knew, and I suspect that the evidence will show, that with the identification [of Speck] as it was … they needed more evidence. And that is why I expect the evidence to show that fingerprints were developed.”

With this one word, Getty gave away the secret of his attack on the State’s fingerprint evidence. The defense would attempt to confuse the jurors about the two totally separate concepts of identification and classification to support a charge that the prints had been “developed” by the police in an attempt to frame Speck with phony fingerprints found elsewhere. As Getty spoke, Martin’s pen flew across his legal pad. Based on Getty’s opening, Martin knew that he would have to radically alter how he presented his evidence. In this first skirmish of war, the enemy had unwittingly tipped its hand on where it would strike. But that was all Getty would give away.

Shrewd warrior that he was, Getty had confined his opening to an assault on the State’s case. He had not mentioned one word about what Speck’s defense would be. Getty still had all his options open. In the meantime, the State had to build its case—one witness at a time.

The two opening statements took all morning, and the jury was recessed until two P.M. Before the trial resumed in front of the jury, Getty and his assistants pleaded several arguments in the judge’s private chambers. When the lawyers went in chambers, the reporters stayed out. Judge Paschen, after sitting through six weeks of jury selection, did not want any news stories to accidentally reach the jurors and tell them about evidence that he decided should not be heard or seen by them. If jurors were exposed to media reports of inadmissible evidence and events, the entire process would abort and have to start over.

The defense railed against the introduction into evidence of the FBI-built scale model of the town house, which Getty derisively termed a “dollhouse,” arguing that it was inflammatory and prejudicial. After hearing Martin’s argument that the neutral-gray scale model was needed to illustrate the testimony of his witnesses, especially one for whom English was not a native language, Paschen allowed the State to use the exhibit. Getty then chided Martin for not giving him the reports and transcripts of prosecution interviews of all the witnesses the State intended to have testify. Martin responded that this information would be supplied six witnesses in advance, so that the Public Defender would have ample time to prepare his cross-examination.

When the trial resumed at two o’clock, Martin put his first brick in place by calling to the witness stand Chicago cartographer Sam Mazzone, who provided the evidentiary basis for two hugely enlarged maps mounted on art board—one depicting Chicago’s Southeast Side and the other the city’s near North Side. The two blowups were admitted into evidence and placed on easels at one end of the jury box. Martin had decided to give the relevant State’s exhibits to the jury at the end of each witness’s testimony, rather than follow the prosecution tradition of offering all the exhibits at once at the end of the State’s case. By doing this, he let the jurors see the real evidence at the same time they heard the witness’s testimony. Bright red stickers on the map of the Southeast Side showed the relative locations of the National Maritime Union, the nurses’ town house at 2319 East 100th Street, the Manor Shell Station east of the town house, the Shipyard Inn, the South Chicago Community Hospital, Pauline’s rooming house, the Ebb Tide tavern, and Eddie and Cooney’s Tap. Similarly, the map of the near North accurately portrayed the locations of the Cabrini-Green housing project at 1160 North Sedgwick, the Raleigh Hotel at 648 North Dearborn, and the Starr Hotel at 617 West Madison.

Martin’s second witness began forging links in the chain of eyewitness proof that Speck had been in the vicinity of the town house immediately before the murders. After being shown enlarged mounted photos of 100th Street and Luella Park, a thickly accented Italian seaman marked an X near both the Tastee-Freeze, where he had dropped Speck off on Tuesday night, July 12, at about five-thirty, and the drinking fountain in Luella Park, directly behind the large window of the upstairs south bedroom of the slain nurses’ town house.

Day one of the trial concluded with the testimony of a marine engineer who testified that Speck, after being refused a berth on the Sinclair Great Lakes on July 12, made the remark, “Oh, hell, I’m going to New Orleans and ship out.” The jury didn’t yet know it, but this casual remark foreshadowed Cora’s testimony of the words Speck spoke to his captives in the town house.

That night, after devouring a well-done cheeseburger and a glass of milk in the Ramada coffee shop, Martin left with Detective Jack Wallenda to meet with Byron Carlile and the relatives of the victims. Judge Paschen had ruled that one member of each family could testify to the fact of life and the fact of death for each nurse—the elemental proof that a homicide had occurred—and Martin had to decide who that family member would be. Choosing the right witness was crucial. Each family member had to endure his or her brief court appearance without breaking down. An overly emotional display could cause the judge to declare a mistrial because the display of a hysterically bereaved parent would prejudice the jury. Martin’s burden was to select witnesses who could maintain their composure.

Since two of the Filipino families, the Pasions and Gargullos, were not able to come to Peoria, the life and death of Valentina Pasion and Merlita Gargullo would be established by the testimony of William Moore, personnel director of South Chicago Community Hospital. Although Moore grieved for the nurses, he was not likely to display his feelings when he testified. Carlile, Wallenda, and Martin believed that all of the other life-and-death witnesses would retain their composure, with two possible exceptions—Joe Matusek and Chuck Davy.

Emotionally devastated by his daughter’s murder, Joe Matusek could not mention Patricia’s name without breaking into deep, wracking sobs. Martin asked Patricia’s younger sister, Betty Jo, a soft-spoken and petite interior designer, to testify instead of her father. Chuck Davy was the witness who concerned the prosecution the most. Disturbingly calm on the outside, Davy was seething inside. To enter the witness box, each witness had to pass within a few feet of Richard Speck. Carlile pulled Martin aside in the Holiday Inn lobby and said quietly, “I’m afraid that Chuck might go for Speck. I don’t blame him if he wants to kill the son of a bitch.” Martin, however, had no alternative. Since Mrs. Davy was too distraught even to come to Peoria, Chuck Davy would have to be his witness. Martin went to a pay phone and called Peoria County Sheriff Willard Koeppel to ask him to alert his deputies to the possibility that Davy might take a lunge at Speck.

Exhausted from meeting with the bereaved and tearful families, Martin left for the Ramada Inn at about ten P.M. On the way, he stopped at a convenience store and bought a quart of skim milk and a box of chocolate chip cookies. Seven weeks at the Ramada had made it his second home; he stored his snack in the coffee shop refrigerator. Then, he went to the conference room, where for the next two hours he and Murtaugh put witnesses through a final dry run. Returning to his room but too keyed up to sleep, Martin reclaimed his snack, nibbling on cookies and milk until he felt drowsy. When his head finally hit the pillow, he was dead to the world.

As spectators began another early-morning vigil in front of the courthouse in Peoria, Chicagoans were lining up at the polling precincts to overwhelmingly reelect sixty-four-year-old Mayor Richard J. Daley to his fourth term as Chicago’s mayor. Hizzoner clobbered Republican challenger John Waner, carrying all fifty of the city’s wards.

Meanwhile, the State’s first witness on Tuesday was an elderly ship’s porter who described how, in the early morning of July 13, Speck had asked him to watch his two bags while he walked from the front door of the still unopened union hall to the drinking fountain behind the nurses’ town house. A Manor Shell gas station attendant testified next that Speck had apparently slept in or near Luella Park on the night of Tuesday, July 12, before arriving at the station early on the morning of July 13 to claim the two bags he had left overnight. During his cross-examination of these two witnesses, Getty predictably zeroed in on their recollection of Speck having pockmarks and long hair, in apparent contrast to the police sketch of Speck made on the basis of Corazon Amurao’s early description to investigators.

The State then called the recently married Agnes Budak Goze, the owner of the Shipyard Inn, who said that on Wednesday, July 13, Speck rented room 7 from her for one week and that he was in the Shipyard Inn bar early Wednesday night, July 13. Folksy as ever, Getty began his cross-examination by congratulating Agnes on her recent marriage. He also brought out her long career in the hotel business, noting with pleasure that she had once run a hotel in New York and had been head housekeeper at Chicago’s famed Edgewater Beach Hotel before drifting to the Southeast Side. Then, he extracted from her the admission that Speck’s pockmarks were very noticeable and that, clearly, he did not wear his hair in a crew cut.

Construction worker Patrick Walsh told the jury how Speck had pulled a gun on him in the Shipyard Inn only hours before the murders. Walsh was as tough on cross-examination as he was on the Southeast Side, and Getty dropped him quickly. After the noon recess, Patrick Walsh’s new bride told how she had joined her fiancé at the Shipyard Inn shortly after Speck pulled the gun on him. Dressed in a cream-colored jacket and green skirt to accentuate her flaming red hair, which was piled high in a trendy 1960’s beehive, she described for the jurors Speck’s Jekyll-and-Hyde act at the Shipyard Inn only hours before he left to kill. Speck, she said, had been alternately embittered and polite, as he talked about his ex-wife and young daughter and profusely apologized for pulling a gun on her street-tough boyfriend.

Army Sergeant Richard Oliva took the stand in his full-dress green military uniform, fresh from a tour of duty in Vietnam. He told the jurors that he had seen Speck brandishing both a pocketknife and a hunting knife as he strutted about the Shipyard Inn bar. The combined testimony of Patrick Walsh and Sergeant Richard Oliva proved that Speck was carrying his tools of murder in a public place only hours before he entered the town house. Martin’s direct examination of these pivotal witnesses was crisp and pointed, a rifle shot in contrast to the shotgun like queries put forth by Getty upon cross-examination.

The next witness was FBI agent John Dunphy, who was also in uniform—sharply pressed gray suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, and highly polished black wing-tip shoes. Dunphy described the scale model that was being introduced into evidence to help the jurors understand the scene of the crime. Meticulously built on a scale of one and a half inches to the foot, the model featured a removable second floor. Getty had hoped to make points in his cross-examination by pointing out how much money the State had spent on this expensive exhibit, but then quickly dropped Dunphy when the agent stated emphatically that the FBI had donated the model to the prosecution. The replica of the town house sat in front of the jurors throughout the trial, an unforgettable reminder of the scene of the crime.

The next witnesses were the parents and relatives who would testify to the life and death of the eight nurses. These were the witnesses who would let the jury know that the victims who had lived in the town house were not just names on indictments but young women who had been loved as flesh-and-blood human beings. To foreshadow Cora’s testimony, Martin decided to call these witnesses in the order in which the girls had been killed: Lena Wilkening, mother of Pam Wilkening; John Farris, father of Suzanne Farris; Philip Jordan, brother of Mary Ann Jordan and fiancé of Suzanne Farris; Dr. John Schmale, brother of Nina Schmale; William Moore, representing the families of Valentina Pasion and Merlita Gargullo; Betty Jo Matusek, sister of Pat Matusek; and Charles Davy, father of Gloria Jean Davy.

Their testimony took only a few minutes, but it would stay with the jurors and every person in the courtroom for a lifetime. Ironically, it was this life-and-death testimony that, more than anything else, made the victims come alive. The testimony of Pamela Wilkening’s mother, Lena, captured the understated emotion of all the life-and-death witnesses. Before beginning his questioning, Martin paused and looked back and forth from Mrs. Wilkening to the jurors, silently calling the jurors’ attention to the fact that they were about to hear for the first time from one of the many indirect victims of Richard Speck’s crime. Although she was controlled and stoical and spoke in a firm, strong voice, the suffering etched on Mrs. Wilkening’s face was not lost on the jury.

“She was a student nurse at the South Chicago Community Hospital, Chicago, Illinois.”

“When is the last time you saw your daughter, Pamela Wilkening, before July fourteen, 1966?”

Wisely, Getty declined to cross-examine any of the life-and-death testimony about the American nurses. However, he wanted to make a point with William Moore, the hospital administrator, namely that, in his opinion, Moore could have testified to the life and death of all eight nurses. Getty’s strategy was to make Martin appear heart-less and cruel for needlessly subjecting the relatives of the American nurses to the ordeal of testifying. Getty first established that Moore was acquainted with both Pamela Wilkening and Suzanne Farris. He then asked, “Was your relationship any different with these girls [Wilkening and Farris] than with the girls you just testified about?” He didn’t expect Moore’s answer: “Yes, it was. The two Filipino girls were employees of the hospital, so to speak, and the other six were student nurses, whom I did not come in contact with, except by sight.” Abruptly, Getty concluded his cross-examination. He had inadvertently proven that Moore was not a competent witness to the life and death of the American nurses and that Martin had no alternative to calling the parents and other relatives to the stand.

The next witness was a handsome, sad Robert Stern, who quietly testified to bringing Gloria Jean Davy back to the town house at eleven thirty-five P.M. Martin had considered gilding the lily by having Stern name the song—“You’ll Never Walk Alone”—they listened to before parting, and by calling Jay Andres, the Chicago disc jockey who had played the tune that night, to establish the exact time Davy entered the town house. He felt, however, that the flinty Peorians would find this proof both unnecessary and melodramatic. The final witness of the day was nurse Pat McCarthy, who described the final carefree hours she had spent shopping and visiting with Suzanne Farris and Mary Ann Jordan before her two friends left her room and the back door of her 2311 town house at one end of the alley to make their fatal trip back to 2319.

The defense didn’t yet know it, but the State’s next witness, due up early the next morning, was going to be one big surprise. Although he knew she was scheduled among the next several witnesses, Gerry Getty did not expect to see this early in the trial the next person Martin would call to the stand: