Crime: 24 Years to Page One

He was positively identified only 28 hours after the cruelly mutilated bodies were discovered in a South Side Chicago apartment. Only 67 hours after the crime, Richard Benjamin Speck, 24, was detained as the prime suspect in the mass murder of eight young nurses on July 14. In the brief interlude between the slayings and the arrest, Speck played out a drama almost as incredible as the killings of which he is accused.

Twice at the height of a fevered hunt for the killer, Speck was in the grasp of Chicago police. Twice in that time the cops walked away without a glimmering that the troubled young man on their hands was the nation’s most wanted suspect. And though on one occasion he even told a policeman that his name was Richard Speck, in the end it was not a law officer but a young, unarmed doctor who recognized Speck and had him arrested.

“Man with a Gun.” Less than three hours after the corpses were discovered, detectives fanning through the neighborhood learned from a service-station operator that a man matching a description given by the lone survivor, Philippine Exchange Nurse Corazon Amurao, had left two bags of clothing there. A National Maritime Union hiring hall is located only a few yards from the nurses town house, and detectives, surmising that the murderer might be a seaman, astutely checked the union office. There, William Neill, local N.M.U. secretary, sifted through the files and came up with a coin-machine photo of Speck—an ex-convict and sometime merchant mariner—pinned to a work application.

Twenty-six hours later, two patrolmen answered a call from a sleazy North Side hotel reporting that a Puerto Rican prostitute had told the manager: “There’s a man up there with a gun.” The roomer identified himself as Richard Speck, a name that did not yet ring a bell with the officers, though they had a tentative physical description of the suspect. As for the gun, he said that it belonged to the girl. Though most policemen would instinctively detain a man in such circumstances, the cops merely confiscated the weapon—a .22-cal. revolver (the murderer had carried a “small black pistol”). Hours later, police matched up the gun incident with the murder man hunt and rushed back to the hotel. Speck had left 30 minutes earlier.

“I Done Something Bad.” The next night, after making the rounds of Skid Row bars, Speck holed up in a 90¢-a-night flophouse on the West Side’s Madison Street under the name of B. Brian. Around 11 o’clock, he shouted to his next-door neighbor: “You got to come and see me. I done something bad.” The neighbor replied: “You go to hell.” Fellow occupants heard Speck stumbling about and peered at him. Said one: “Hey! This guy’s bleeding to death.” Sprawled on a scabrous mattress in the 5 x 9-ft. cubicle, Speck lay in a pool of blood from a slashed wrist and arm vein, apparently inflicted with a broken beer bottle. Called by the night clerk, two patrolmen arrived in a police van.

Death comes routinely in the dingy warren of Chicago’s Madison Street, “the street of forgotten men.” The cops did not recognize Speck or even take the trouble to identify him correctly. Leaving the stretcher case in an emergency ward with a young nurse and a resident surgeon, the patrolmen departed and called the station to file a “sick-removal” report.

“Get the Paper.” Fortunately for headquarters, the resident, Dr. LeRoy Smith, 26, was more alert. “I picked up his head and looked at the nurse to see if she had noticed,” Smith recalled. “I said to her, ‘Get the paper.’ ” The doctor moistened his fingertips, rubbed Speck’s blood-caked arm. “I saw the letter B. Then I rubbed some more and saw O-R-N.” Recalling news accounts that Speck sported a tattoo, “Born to raise hell,” Dr. Smith turned to the nurse, Sandra Hrtanek, 23, and said: “This is the fellow the police are looking for. Get hold of the police right now.”

Patrolman Alan Schuman, 42, who had been guarding another prisoner, responded to the nurse’s call. “This,” he marveled, “is the biggest pinch I’ve made in my 19 years on the force.”

Thereafter, police took no chances. With five stitches in his arm and a transfusion of a quart of blood, Speck was transferred under heavy guard the same night to Bridewell Prison Hospital. In the first confrontation between Miss Amurao and Speck in the latter’s hospital room, she pointed a finger at him and exclaimed: “That is the man.” Shortly before, Speck had suffered chest pains, which were diagnosed as pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart sac, and his arraignment was postponed.

In fact, though notorious for their rough handling of prisoners in the past, Chicago police treated Speck with a solicitude extended to no other prisoner in their memory. Bowing to the U.S. Supreme Court’s dictum—handed down in the historic Escobedo case, which involved the Chicago cops themselves—that a suspect may not be questioned without a lawyer’s advice, police let more than a week elapse without attempting to interrogate Speck. Such new-found deference evoked caustic comment from several sources, among them Author Truman Capote, whose bestseller In Cold Blood is an exhaustive anatomy of the two men convicted of murdering the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, Capote reasoned that had the Supreme Court’s recent rulings banning forced confessions been in effect at the time of the Clutter killings, the offenders would have gone scot-free.

As for Speck, he was speedily visited and informed of his rights by Cook County Public Defender Gerald Getty, 53, whose office represents 9,600 indigent defendants a year and who has defended 402 murder suspects since 1947—not one of whom has been sent to the electric chair. Declaring that Speck would plead innocent, probably on grounds of insanity, Getty served notice that he would need “several months” to prepare his case.

“Sort of Lost.” Another intriguing, if coincidental, aspect of the case is the similarity in background and character between Speck and Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin. Like Oswald, Speck was brought up largely by his mother (his father died when the boy was six). Born in Kirkwood, Ill., on Dec. 6, 1941, Speck, like Oswald, moved to Dallas as a small boy. Speck’s mother, like Oswald’s, remarried and clung grimly to the lower-middle-class fringe of poverty.

Like Oswald, who, in the words of the Warren Commission, “was profoundly alienated from the world in which he lived,” Speck was from childhood a stranger to all, filled with strange hates. Recalled a Dallas teacher who taught Speck in the eighth grade: “He seemed sort of lost. I don’t think I ever saw him smile. Kids who sat near him often asked to be moved.” The next year Speck dropped out of the ninth grade (the same level at “which Oswald quit school).

Speck’s first arrest, at 13, was for trespassing; in all, he was picked up 36 times as a juvenile for offenses ranging from drunkenness to burglary. In 1962, Speck married a pretty, 15-year-old brunette named Shirley Annette Malone (now remarried), and they had a daughter who was, according to one of Speck’s sisters in Dallas, his “real love.” In the bloody Chicago flophouse cubicle where detectives retrieved Speck’s wallet, they found a color picture of a pert little girl, grinning up at the camera from the front steps of her house.

Two Victims. Speck’s mother, who lives in tawdry East Dallas, refused to talk with reporters. But Shirley’s mother told newsmen: “He’s crazy when he gets liquor in him.” In 1963, three days before Oswald killed Kennedy, Speck was sent from Dallas to the Texas Penitentiary at Huntsville to start a three-year term for forgery and burglary. Freed on parole, he was jailed a week later on charges of assaulting a woman with a knife, confessed that he had meant only to rob her but had fled when she screamed. Returned to Huntsville to serve out his term, he was released a year ago last month.

Last March, Speck showed up in Monmouth, Ill., where he had spent his early years. Soon afterward, a 33-year-old barmaid was found beaten to death in an abandoned hog house; then a 65-year-old widow was bound, robbed and raped. According to Police Chief Harold Tinder, Speck left town the night of the latter crime. In late April, he shipped out on an iron-ore boat but was sent ashore after one week to undergo an emergency appendectomy in Hancock, Mich. There, he made friends with a newly divorced nurse, Judy Laakaniemi, 28. Speck dated her several times, she told police, who said that he “treated her very nice.”

On June 27, during his third voyage, Speck returned to the boat drunk, quarreled with an officer and was fired. He showed up in Chicago, borrowed $25 from a married sister who lives there, and went to the N.M.U. hall to apply for a berth on a ship headed for New Orleans. None was available. After spending the night in a rooming house, he returned, only to be told that there had been a job but someone else had taken it. Discouraged, Speck took his two bags and, according to one version, went to sit in Luella Park, immediately behind the victims’ apartment. That night he left his bags at the service station, slept in another park. He spent most of his third job-hunting day drinking in a grubby nearby tavern, the Ship-Yard Inn.

“Remain Calm.” Late that night an intruder worked his way into the nurses’ residence, stabbed and strangled eight of them to death. It still seemed unbelievable that the girls had made no effort to scream or escape while they were being led away, one by one. However, Survivor Corazon Amurao confided one explanation to the Philippine consul general in Chicago: “Those of them who were not gagged tried to decide what to do. All the Filipino girls were for fighting for their honor and for their survival.” But the American women argued that “maybe if we are quiet and calm, he will remain quiet and calm “—possibly because they were more disciplined to the nurse’s creed of going to almost any length to calm a disturbed patient.

As for the slayer’s motivation, Dr. Edward Kelleher, director of Chicago’s Psychiatric Institute, noted that “sex maniacs strike out against women rather than men because of their hatred for all women. Very often it is the mother who is the real object of their intense abomination. In this case, it is conceivable that nurses were chosen as vic tims because they represent tender, loving care and thus are identified with motherhood.” There may have been another motive. Like Oswald, Speck apparently suffered from a distorted craving for recognition. Once, seeing a friend’s name in the papers, Speck reportedly remarked: “One of these days it won’t be just a little item with me. It will be the whole front page.”