Richard Speck FBI Files

Richard Speck FBI Files

191 pages of FBI files covering mass murderer Richard Speck, who killed 8 student nurses in 1966.

In 1966, Speck at the age of 25-years-old, on July 13 was fired from his job in a boat yard after a fight with a ship's officer. Before leaving work, he borrowed money to buy alcohol and drugs. After injecting himself with an unknown drug and while armed with a gun and knife, he approached a Chicago south-side townhouse rented by nine student nurses. Telling the woman who answered the door that he needed money, he forced his way inside and tied up the six people in the house. He added to the captives when three other women came to the house.

Speck became increasingly agitated and led the women singly and in pairs to different rooms in the house where he stabbed and strangled them. He raped the final victim before murdering her. One woman managed to hide under a bed where Speck did not see her, and after he left, she called the police and gave them a partial description, including that he had a distinctive tattoo that said, “Born to Raise Hell.”

A massive manhunt was instituted, but a few days later Speck slashed his wrists and was subsequently arrested when a doctor treating him at Cook County Hospital recognized the tattoo. Speck was convicted and sentenced to death; he was later resentenced to 400 years in prison. He was suspected in the death or disappearance of five other women between May and June 1966, but he was never formally charged with these crimes. 

In late 1995, Bill Kurtis, a news anchor for WBBM Channel 2 in Chicago and host and producer of documentaries for the A&E cable network and PBS, was given a video tape made by an Illinois prison inmate at Statesville Correctional Center in 1988. The video shows Speck and two other unidentified inmates. On the tape Speck acknowledged that he killed the nurses. At his trial Speck claimed to have no memory of the events because he had blacked out from the drugs.  

In the video Speck flashed money before the camera, he and the other inmates appear to inhale drugs, in the video Speck is shown having sex with another inmate while wearing women's underwear and appearing to have enlarged breast from taking female hormones.

In the video Speck is heard to say, "If they only knew how much fun I was having they would turn me loose."

Speck died in 1991 at the age of 48 of a heart attack while still incarcerated.