'Born to Raise Hell': Prosecutor Revisits Richard Speck Mass Murders on 50th Anniversary

Chicago, IL — Fifty years ago this week, a young, bespectacled Cook County assistant state’s attorney had shown up to his office on a Saturday to finish some last-minute paperwork before taking off for a week’s vacation to paint his parents' house.

Just a few days before — on July 14, 1966 — a young woman’s cries on the ledge of a Jeffery Manor town house drew attention to a blood-soaked crime scene that would change Chicago and the nation forever.

Eight young women, all of them student nurses at South Chicago Community Hospital, were found slain — some strangled, some stabbed, some both — in the upstairs bedrooms of the town home at 2319 E. 100th St., Chicago.

Only one survivor, a 23-year-old exchange nurse from the Philippines named Corazon Amurao, escaped death by hiding under a bed. She would later provide police with a composite description of the blank-faced stranger who murdered her roommates.

“Speck’s crime was the most horrific crime in the history of Cook County in any century, and certainly in the 20th century,” said former prosecutor William J. Martin, who co-authored a book, "The Crime of the Century," with Dennis Breo. The book has been revised with a new introduction by attorney William Kunkle, famous for prosecuting serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

“It was the nation’s first mass murder. He picked his victims at random. He didn’t know them, they never did anything to harm him or showed any animosity,” said Martin. “While we have a whole different spectrum of society factors at play in today’s mass shootings, Speck’s crimes are still unique."

‘We Know Who Killed the Nurses’

At 29 years old, William J. Martin was already a seasoned Cook County prosecutor, which included a year learning the ropes in misdemeanor branch court, two years of nonstop jury trials, and a year in appellate court when he argued 30 cases before the Illinois Supreme Court.

The young prosecutor was surprised to see his boss, Lou Garippo, then chief of the state’s attorney’s criminal division, in the office on a Saturday. Garippo told Martin to stick around “because police know who killed the nurses.”

“It wasn’t until very early Saturday morning that police were able to make a positive ID of the killer,” Martin said. “Three fingerprints were found on the second-floor bathroom door that were eventually identified as belonging to Richard Speck.”

Unprecedented for the era, Speck’s mugshots from his time spent in a Texas prison were being broadcast on Chicago’s local TV stations to a fear-gripped city. Viewers were told to call police immediately if they spotted the pock-marked killer with a “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo wandering the streets.

“Daily bulletins picturing the most wanted criminal of the day were commonplace among police but didn’t always make it to radio or TV,” Martin said. “What made Speck different was that his picture and description were given the widest possible circulation so he could be apprehended."

Chicago police chased Speck around the clock, but he managed to stay a few steps ahead of them. Garippo and Martin both agreed that when Speck was apprehended, Martin would go to wherever the 24-year-old killer was to try to get a confession.

“I didn’t feel anything would happen because I felt Speck would either escape or he wasn’t going to be taken alive,” Martin recalled. “So I didn’t expect a phone call at 12:30 in the morning that he was at Cook County Hospital.”

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‘Water, Water’

After spending several days drinking and drifting, Speck had left the South Side’s Shipyard Inn, where the heat was on, for a flophouse on the city’s North Side. Speck spent the next Friday evening drinking on the fire escape with other guests at the Starr Hotel at 617 W. Madison St., who weren’t impressed by his bragging and crazy stories.

On Saturday, another hotel guest, Claude Lunsford, recognized Speck from the composite sketch in the evening paper. He called police after he found Speck in his room, who did not respond to Lunsford’s call.

Later that evening, Speck tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists in his wire mesh room. He was taken to Cook County Hospital. A doctor recognized Speck when he began cleaning the blood off his arm and saw the “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo.

A police squad car brought Martin to Cook County Hospital, where Speck was in surgery. Martin said that Speck’s self-inflicted wounds on his wrists were minor; a cut on his elbow was deeper.

“The doctors thought he cut an artery,” the 79-year-old Martin recalled. “He had been bleeding a lot and was given Demerol and morphine before they sutured him. I didn’t want to take a statement from him while he was under the influence of drugs and risk compromising the case, so I left.”

Hours later Speck was smuggled through the basement to avoid reporters and TV news cameras camped in front of Cook County Hospital. He was taken by ambulance to Cook County Jail’s Cermak Hospital where security would be tighter.

Meanwhile, after his first aborted attempt to get a statement from Speck, Martin went back to his office and worked through the night assembling notes for the case he already had in mind, of what would eventually become Speck’s “biography.”

“A team of district attorneys, a court reporter and policemen went to every place he’d ever been to interview anyone who had interaction with him, starting with the doctor who delivered him in Monmouth, Illinois, and his fellow inmates in Texas where he had done time, until we had the spectrum of his entire life,” Martin said.

Later Sunday morning, Martin received another call from a Chicago police detective, telling him that Speck was awake at Cermak Hospital and he should try to get a statement.

“We go to the room he was in at Cermak. He was in restraints, and it was quite apparent that he was still under the influence of pain medication and could not interview him,” Martin remembered. “I said, ‘Hi, Dick,’ and introduced myself. I asked how he was doing. All he said was ‘water, water.’”

'This is the man'

Several nights later, almost a week after the murders, Martin visited the crime scene with police at midnight — around the time Speck had shown up at the town home’s back door — to check the lighting conditions at the residence.

“Some of the women bled so much from having their throats slit that our feet were sticking to the coagulated blood on the floor,” Martin said. “We wanted to see the bedroom upstairs where he had tied up the woman. It was eerie. It was pitch black, and the only light coming in was from the streetlight outside.”

“We couldn’t take the chance that they might inadvertently let it slip out to the press before trial,” the former prosecutor said, “so we did not tell them anything specific how their daughters were murdered, and they didn’t press us. They respected us for it.”

Martin does not believe Speck was a psychopath.

“I don’t find that diagnosis to be anything but a description of behavior of anyone who acts in anti-social manner,” he sad. “Everyone in the penitentiary is a sociopath or potential sociopath.”

While preparing for Speck’s trial in 1967, which was moved to Peoria in order to get an impartial jury, Martin took great care in protecting his star witness, Corazon Amurao.

"I think there was somebody up there who was hiding me from him,” she remarked. “God was so nice."

Amurao (now Corazon Amurao Atienza) grew very close to the police detail assigned to protect her. A cousin and her mother were brought to the United States to provide the traumatized woman with comfort and continuity before she would be made to relive the nightmare for the trial.

When asked to identify the defendant in court, Cora stunned everyone when she left the witness stand and walked over to where Speck was sitting. Pointing a finger inches from his face, she stated: “This is the man.”

Martin described Speck as sitting like a “blob” during his trial.

“He was emotionless, he showed absolutely no reaction to any testimony,” he said. “His facial expression never changed, and he stared off in space when Cora walked up and pointed to him in court. He never wrote a note or whispered anything to his attorney.”

Surviving Memories

For years after he had won Speck’s conviction, Martin still thought he had the case by accident because he happened to be in the office on a Saturday.

“I later learned my bosses were going to give me the case anyway,” he said. “I had become deeply immersed so quickly it made sense to keep me on it. I was known in those days to have a good command of scientific evidence and the law. I was given plenty of help.”

Richard Speck died of a heart attack the day before his 50th birthday on Dec. 5, 1991, at Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, mere miles from the Stateville Correctional Center where he had been serving eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years each. He claimed to have no memory of the murders, blaming alcohol and drugs.

Martin still keeps in touch with Corazon Amurao Atienz, now 73 and a retired ICU nurse. She recently emailed Martin to say she would be very sad and lonely on the 50th anniversary “of when she lost her entire townhouse of roommates and friends,” he said.

“I think she’s felt some pressure from her children that her story should be told a little more fully,” he said of Amurao, who immigrated permanently to the United States four years after the Speck trial. “She’s always been very reluctant to be interviewed, and we don’t pressure her. She’s a happy woman who’s led an amazing life. She always laughs a lot.”

Fifty years after the “crime of the 20th century,” Martin said that while it’s impossible to ignore Speck, he shouldn’t be made the central point of the half-century anniversary.

“He was the personification of evil incarnate,” he said. “He doesn’t deserve a whole lot of attention, but the nurses certainly do.”