Crime of the Century

During the trial, the State had proven Speck’s guilt by introducing four classic principles of proof: circumstantial evidence—Speck was near the town house before the murders; Corazon’s eyewitness identification; the irrefutable physical evidence of Speck’s three fingerprints on the second-floor south-bedroom door; and his flight from the southeast side culminating in his attempted suicide, all evidence of a consciousness of guilt.

The only gap in the state’s proof, though not necessary to prove a criminal case, is that the prosecution lacked a valid, voluntary confession. A statement by the defendant that revealed evidence only the killer would know is the gold standard of proof. An uncoerced, voluntary confession, free from the medications administered to Speck at Cook County Hospital, would offer a dimension to the case that answered unresolved questions about the killer’s actions in perpetrating the crime.

Before the trial, Speck told his lawyer, Gerry Getty, and jail psychiatrist Marvin Ziporyn that he had taken drugs at the Shipyard Inn. He claimed he “blacked out” and had no recollection of going to the town house and murdering eight young women. His persistent account to Ziporyn was that he had no memory of the murders.

Everyone, including those closely involved in the case, knew Speck never confessed to the crimes. When his ashes were spread across the Joliet countryside during the Christmas season of 1991, all hope of a confession floated into the winter air.

At various times after the trial ended, acclaimed Chicago TV anchor Bill Kurtis interviewed Bill Martin about the case for news broadcasts and for the A&E cable network. In 1996, Kurtis called Martin and asked if he could film an interview with Martin in his law office. Although Speck had been dead for five years, he still was an object of public interest. Martin agreed. After the interview was filmed, Martin walked Kurtis to the elevator. Kurtis said casually, “When you have time, I’d like you to come to my office. I want to show you something.” Martin assumed Kurtis was being a nice guy and would treat Martin to spectacular footage Kurtis had filmed of an obscure part of the world he had visited during his exotic travels. Kurtis’s studios were at the north end of downtown, an area Martin had no professional reason to visit. He forgot the invitation. A week or two later, Mike Harvey, then Kurtis’s producer, called Martin. “Bill would like you to drop by our office. He would like to show you something.” Martin said he would try to visit the studio.

The demands of his practice distracted Martin from the Kurtis invitation until Mike Harvey called a second time. Martin realized that there must be more to the visit than an interesting display of Kurtis’ world travels. He and Harvey agreed on a date and Martin went to Kurtis’ office. It was well-appointed with striking artifacts from around the world. Martin did not have a chance to examine the memorabilia. Kurtis quickly stood up and said, “I want to show you something and then ask you a question. There is something we have to be sure about.” He walked Martin down a corridor to a door that opened into a large room as black as a coal mine. Martin glimpsed a series of chairs leading up to a projection booth in the dim light. He was in a movie theater. Kurtis and Harvey were in the room.

Immediately, the first image appeared on the large screen. There sat Richard Speck, much heavier than he was in 1966, dressed in paint-smeared clothes. His face was ugly, puffy, and pockmarked, his ragged blond hair disheveled, and his eyes, as always, revealed nothing. He was sitting in a chair, leaning forward, and seated next to him was a slender, younger black man wearing aviator sunglasses, his arms akimbo, slouched backward against a wall. His name was Ronzelle Larimore. The third person in the room was not visible and remained anonymous. He was operating a hand-held black-and-white video camera with audio capability.

In a sick parody of 60 Minutes, the off-stage cameraman asked questions that Speck and, occasionally Larimore, answered. The video was slightly grainy but clearly visible. The audio was very good. The angle of the camera made it impossible to determine what kind of room the three prisoners were in. It had no bunk beds and was too large to be a prison cell. For the prisoners to have a video camera, a “studio,” and all the time they wanted to produce a “show” suggested that the inmates were running the asylum. They displayed no fear of detection by guards. At Stateville, in December 1988, it was a case of “anything goes.”

Kurtis had prepared a summary transcript of the interview and, subsequently, gave Martin a copy. The “interview” is highly disorganized. Questions and answers jump from subject to subject, back and forth, up and down, without rhyme or reason.

This partial transcript of the video has been edited by Martin, insofar as possible, to group subjects together so that the interview is as easy to understand as possible. Under the best of circumstances, the failure of the interviewer (marked as “I”) to stick with a subject makes it difficult to follow the audio in a logical way. “I” is off camera, asking questions like a Stateville parody of Charlie Rose. “S” is Speck, and “L” is Ronzelle Larimore, another inmate and Speck’s gay lover, or, in prison vernacular, “main ride.” The off-camera interviewer, another black inmate, was also one of Speck’s “rides.” The dialogue began. All quotes in boldface were so typed in Kurtis’s original transcript.

The comments in italics interspersed throughout the interview are Martin’s critique of the Speck interview, sorting out the truth from the lies, the true confession from the macho boasting. Martin also cites the evidence that proves when Speck is untruthful and the evidence that corroborates the truthfulness of his full confession. The parts of the interview not included here are, in Martin’s informed opinion, either excessively pornographic or irrelevant to Speck’s account of the crime and his confession. The sections of the interview that have been omitted are marked in the following transcript with a series of xxxxxxxxxxxxx which indicate that an unnecessary portion of the Kurtis summary transcript has not been reproduced.

I: What is your name?

S: Richard Speck.

Speck’s slow southern drawl was unmistakable. Martin had not heard it often, but he had heard it before the trial and it was unforgettable.

L: Ronzelle Larimore.

I: You all in love with each other?

L: Yeah.

I: Are you, Rich?

S: Absolutely.

I: Where were you born at?

S: Kirkwood, Illinois.

I: When was you born?

S: December 6, 1941.

I: How old are you now?

S: Forty-seven.

I: How long have you been locked up?

S: In July (1989), it will be twenty-three years.

What followed was a discussion of why Speck and Ronzelle loved each other. The interview contains several colloquies in which Speck brags about how many homosexual encounters he has had in Stateville. Speck frequently boasted about how much he enjoys having sex with black men and how he wants to have sex every day.

I: About how many people have you had sex with since you have been locked up?

S: Oh God, I can’t count that high. (Laughter)

I: If you were going to kill yourself, what would you do?

S: Get (expletive deleted) to death. (Laughter) It would take him two weeks to get the smile off my face …

I: Someone said you have real titties. Do you?

S: Yeah.

I: Let me see them.

A grotesque visual spectacle followed. Speck stood up and removed the layers of his house painter clothes, stripping down to blue silk women’s panties. His naked chest revealed that he had grown nearly full-size women’s breasts. They were saggy and unnatural. The cold-blooded killer had found a way to turn his flabby body into a monstrosity, a sickening ersatz imitation of a woman.

Why would a white man from Dallas transform himself into a constantly available sex object for prison-hardened black gangbangers? Some who have seen the video feel that Speck was punished in prison by being constantly degraded as a sex object. Martin disagrees.

Speck was as shrewd as an alley rat. He knew that he was the most likely target in the prison to be shivved, or stabbed to death with a prison-made knife. Richard Loeb, of the infamous murdering duo of Leopold and Loeb, who killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 for the thrill of it, had been shivved in Joliet in 1936. His killer became a hero and was found not guilty in less than an hour. Speck cleverly morphed himself into a corruption of a female body so he could trade sex for protection. Speck’s primitive instincts paid off. The black brothers protected him every day as “the drunken painter of Stateville” ambled about the prison, painting walls. No one harmed him.

How did he change his flaccid male body into a freakish “woman” whom the gangbangers who ran Stateville would want to have sex with?

How was Speck able to pervert nature? In 1988 Stateville, contraband of every kind was not hard to sneak into the institution by visitors and bribed guards. If the interviewer could get a hand-held video/audio camera into the joint and find a room to film a video without fear of interruption, how difficult would it have been for Speck to get the hormones that would enable him to sprout female breasts? The video also showed Speck snorting large amounts of cocaine. Cocaine and pot and ingredients for making prison hooch were regularly smuggled into Stateville.

I: Can’t stand them titties.

S: No, I love them. I pet them every night before I go to sleep. I got nothing I’m ashamed of.

I: Do you use drugs?

S: No.

L: You lying (expletive deleted). He uses all types of drugs. He’d snort up a root. He even snorted up some Sudafed one time trying to get high. But when you stop bullshitting, he’s the best wine-maker around.

I: Do you like your step-father?

S: No.

I: Why?

S: I hated him.

I: Do you enjoy sex with blacks or whites?

S: I haven’t had sex with too many whites. I think about three whites in my lifetime. That should answer your question.

I: What year was you locked up?

S: July 1966.

I: What that date today?

S: 19 of December 1988.

I: About how many people have you had sex with since you’ve been locked up?

S: Oh God, I can’t count that high. (Laughter)

I: What’s you locked up for?

S: Eight counts of murder.

I: Did you kill them?

S: Sure I did.

I: Why?

S: It just wasn’t their night.

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Speck’s heartless and spiteful blood-curdling words betray the monstrosity of his evil. It is beyond comprehension that a human being could be absolutely devoid of contrition or remorse. For once, he has told the truth and unequivocally admitted that he killed the eight nurses. He jettisoned his phony blackout excuse so that the truth would make money for his rides and protectors in prison.

Mary Ann Jordan and Suzanne Bridget Farris, who had been out shopping and then looking at bridal books in the town house down the alley, walked into the northeast bedroom of the townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street at 12:30 a.m. Speck was preparing to rape Pamela Wilkening, whose hands were tied behind her back and whose mouth was plugged by strips of bed sheet to prevent her from screaming during the sexual assault. Unless there is physical corroboration, it’s impossible to tell whether Speck is lying or telling the truth throughout the video. The physical evidence showed that Suzanne Farris had eighteen stab wounds in her chest and back and was strangled with a nurse’s stocking. Lying next to her was Mary Ann Jordan, who was on her back and had been stabbed three times in the chest, once in the left eye, and once in the neck. The manner in which the two nurses were murdered strongly indicates that Speck suddenly and viciously killed them without first tying them up. He had begun his murderous frenzy to eliminate witnesses.

I: Did you carry a gun on the street?

S: Yeah, a .25 automatic.

I: Did you have a gun on the night of the killing?

S: Yeah, the police got it.

I: Why didn’t you use the gun? Why did you use the knife?

S: Cause it makes too much noise. I was in no shape to run and the knife was quiet.

I: Did you go into the door with the gun?

S: Yeah, I went to the door with the gun and the knife.

L: He was going to steal some shit.

S: All I wanted to do is just a burglary. It started off as a burglary. Then all hell broke loose.

Speck’s claim that all he wanted to do was a burglary is contradicted by several facts. After he herded all the nurses who were home at the time of his entry into the back bedroom, he ushered each one at gun point to go to their purses and give him what money they had. Were it his intention to steal their money, Speck had already completed that crime and could easily have left the townhouse. Instead, he tied up the six nurses in the south bedroom and then tied up Gloria Davy when she entered the second-floor bedroom where the six nurses were being tied. Speck now had what his sex-crazed mind desired: a group of women whom he could rape.

Speck is lying when he claimed that he was only going to commit a burglary. He knew there were young women in the townhouse from watching it when he was outside of the union hiring hall earlier in the week. If all he wanted to do was commit a burglary, he could have done it a lot closer to the Shipyard Inn. Speck was lazy and it would have taken him much effort to walk over a mile and back to and from the crime scene. He deliberately made this trip because he knew there were unprotected women in the town house. He took the gun, the knife and the extra T-shirts because he had sexual assault as his ultimate objective.

Speck said he wasn’t drunk yet claimed he was high on acid and drugs. Speck’s modus operandi throughout his prison confession was to intersperse the truth with lies. When he tied up Corazon, a trained nurse, she looked at his eyes. She was familiar with the appearance of the eyes of people under the influence of drugs. Speck’s eyes were normal. He had walked over a mile to get to the townhouse. He had pried off the screen to get in the kitchen door. He was able to calm the nurses with his steady demeanor. He handily tied up all the nurses in the back bedroom. He was able to cut bed sheets into strips and carefully tie each one while keeping his gun and his knife close to him. His behavior was consistent with a person who was not high on drugs. His actions were purposeful and consistent with sobriety. Speck cunningly chose what parts of his jailhouse interview would be truthful and what would be lies. Many of his lies occurred when he indulged in his trademark macho boasting. He wanted to impress his audience on how tough he was. Take away his gun and his knife and he was a quivering coward.

I: How far did you go in school?

S: Tenth grade.

I: Is it true you were born the day before Pearl Harbor?

S: Yeah.

I: Now you know Pearl Harbor is when the Japs bombed. You think that affected you in any way as far as the bombing is concerned. Make you insane or something?

S: I was born up here in Illinois and they blew the hell out of Hawaii. The day I was born all hell broke loose the next day. Hasn’t stopped since.

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I: Do you have panties and a bra in prison?

S: Yeah.

L: You got lots of that shit.

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I: Do you believe in God?

S: I’m God.

I: Do you believe in the devil?

S: I’m the devil. I believe in myself.

I: What’s your religion then?

S : Mine. Hypocrite, Baptist, all that bullshit that people’s in. All church is something people afraid of dying think they are going to heaven.

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I: How do you feel after killing those ladies?

S: Like I always felt. Had no feelings. If you’re asking if I felt sorry … no.

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I: How you made ’em strip.

S: How I made them strip! I stuck the (expletive deleted) pistol underneath her jaw and cocked it and said, “Get naked, bitch.” (Laughter)

L: Did nine (sic) of them get away?

S: One did, that’s why I’m sitting here.

L: That’s the one you didn’t see, huh.

S: Yeah. If none of them got away, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I mean it’s a hell of a thing. Goddamnit, I ain’t going to cry or feel ashamed, sorry, or all that crazy shit. What’s done is done.

L: I can understand that shit.

S: Life goes on.

L: According to society they gonna put you in for life. They figured you gonna pay, huh?

S: Yeah, but if they only knew how much fun I was having. They’d a turn me loose.

Among the depraved combination of truth and lies, Speck, always the macho and unrepentant murderer, told the interviewer that it takes three minutes and much strength to strangle a person. This was more bragging by Speck’s about his supposed strength and revealed his complete lack of conscience, recorded forever on the video. His persistent previous claims of amnesia were false, as the prosecutors always believed. He knew everything he did in the townhouse and he had absolutely no sorrow for the lives he had ruined.

At one point during the viewing of the video, Kurtis asked Martin. “Is that Speck?” Without hesitation, Martin replied, “Yes, that’s Speck. No one else on earth looks like him.” Martin now knew why Bill Kurtis was anxious to have him come to the studio. Kurtis had to be certain Speck was the man in the video. Martin had no doubts in confirming Speck’s identity.

The video did not surface publicly until 1996, when Kurtis came into possession of it, eight years after it was made and five years after Speck’s death. It has never been revealed how he acquired it. A logical inference is that the anonymous lawyer who got the tape from an inmate as a fee was never able to sell it. For eight years, no one knew about the prison confession except the participants in the money-making scheme.

After the validation of the prison video by Speck’s chief prosecutor, Bill Martin, things moved rapidly. Kurtis’s production company repackaged the prison-made video into a polished presentation. Parts of it were broadcast on Chicago’s WBBM-TV over six nights during sweeps week of May 1996, followed by a longer version of the video on A&E’s Investigative Reports. All these broadcasts were heavily hyped to millions of stunned viewers.

The Chicago Tribune described the jailhouse confession tape as a “bizarre mixture of talk show, freak show, and hard-core pornography.” Having been made unmistakably aware of the sordid culture of Stateville, the Illinois State Legislature promptly invited Kurtis to show the tape before both houses in Springfield.

Kurtis came prepared to screen the full two-hour prison video before a packed audience. The legislature stopped the show when Speck began to have oral sex with his lover, “Honey Bun” Larimore. The lawmakers had seen enough.

Subsequently, the legislature ordered a severe crackdown on the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC). The pressure put on the DOC by the state legislature led to major reforms which, when implemented, ended the years of allowing an inmate-run prison system.

So, beyond the hoopla over the prison video, two meaningful things were clear. Finally, Speck had made an absolute, unequivocal confession to his evil murders. And, ironically, the mass murderer had contributed to a much-needed and long-overdue reform of the Illinois prison system.

Bill Kurtis’s typed note at the end of the first page of his summary transcript states that the prison video was clandestinely removed from Stateville in an attempt to raise money for a lawyer for a gangbanger’s legal fees. Kurtis further wrote, “A book was contemplated and the video was created to prove Speck’s total cooperation in the venture.”

The entire venture was too horrific to lead to a book. If such trash had been written, it would have been comprised of Speck’s confession, his lies and complete fabrications, his perpetual boasting, and his cold-blooded lack of remorse. Despite his lies, Speck had said enough to make a full confession to the murders. The final chapter of the evil story had been completed by Speck’s voluntary confession. The magnitude of his total lack of a conscience showed the world the full reality of the evil man who slaughtered eight nurses, eight young women who had dedicated their lives to helping others. The Speck case had come to its terrifying close.

Martin’s reaction to Speck from the first time he saw him at County Hospital on July 17, 1966, and throughout the investigation and trial, had been one of professional detachment. He could not have done his job if he allowed himself to react to Speck emotionally. He could not afford to hate the killer. He had to take a neutral position to avoid having his feelings interfere with the job of trying the case. Not until his closing argument could he release his feelings about the twentieth century’s first mass murderer.

After he watched the prison video twenty-nine years after the end of the trial, Martin was appalled by Speck’s total lack of contrition and his inhuman braggadocio, spoken without one word of regret. Indeed, Speck was pleased with himself for his consummately evil murders.

Previously, Martin had never had an emotional reaction to Speck. He couldn’t afford to. Martin had prosecuted and defended hundreds of criminals. He never encountered one who didn’t have at least a single socially redeeming trait, no matter how slight. Speck’s heartless confession sickened him. This was the first time he had reacted to the killer viscerally, the first time he encountered a murderer who lacked a single ounce of humanity.

He dreaded the realization that the families of the nurses would have to watch this revolting pornography. And pornography it was. Bill Kurtis thanked Martin and was grateful because Kurtis, for the first time, was able to obtain a positive identification of Speck on the screen. Martin quickly left the studio, shaking like he had never shaken before. His hands were shaking, his legs were wobbling, and his insides were churning. He couldn’t wait to get away from the chamber of horrors he had witnessed, and to step outside and breathe the fresh air.