(Harold Norman / Chicago Tribune). The book is a detailed account of the months before the crime and ends with the drama of the trial. It will be available May 10. 'Mindhunter': The True Stories Behind The Show's Killers And Profilers Pamela Wilkening, left, Mary Ann Jordan, right, and Suzanne Farris, second from right, are shown with other student nurses having fun with a South Chicago Community Hospital School of Nursing banner, circa 1966. Between their second-floor apartments stretched a low, flat roof, and Pat and Arlene often ran across it to tap on each other's windows, looking for a playmate. There she joined two other Filipina exchange nurses, Merlita Gargullo and Corazon Amurao, who had arrived a few days earlier. Childhood friends of Patricia Matusek share memories with Matuseks niece, who never met her. In the days before automated fingerprint identification, it took almost a week to identify the prints found in the townhouse as his. she reportedly told friends a few days after the murders. Shortly before she died, she wrote a friend about a trip to Wisconsin. Chicago was chilly, with a trace of snow, on May 9, 1966, when Tina's plane landed hardly the steamy weather she had known in Jones, a town 240 miles from Manila, where she grew up with five siblings. Lori has come to believe that Gloria's death prepared her to handle anything, and to see, in some useful ways, the possibility of death in everything. Martin talked recently in his Oak Park law office about Cora's bravery. He instantly recognized his mother's cursive handwriting. But whatever the veracity of his account of that murderous night (''It was just one of them weird coincidences. Guarded by detectives, Corazon Amurao arrives at the courthouse in Peoria to testify as the state's chief witness against Richard Speck on April 5, 1967. At Thornton Fractional South High School, she attended almost every basketball and football game with her closest girlfriends, but she didn't play sports. She loved swimming, ice skating and softball. After graduating from Far Eastern University in Manila, she worked for a couple of years as a staff nurse, then applied for work in the United States. On board was another exchange nurse, Corazon Amurao, whom she had met a month or so earlier. Jack Wilkening, brother of Pamela Wilkening, remembers his sister and the days surrounding her 1966 murder along with seven other student nurses and nurseson Chicago'sSouth Side. Speck then rounded the nurses up and ordered them to empty their purses, before tying them all up. Richard Speck was one of the most fiendish mass murderers in American history as his slayings of eight nursing students in a single evening captured the attention of the entire nation. They`re violent players. Their mother eventually forgave Richard Speck and urged her children to do the same. "The Nurse Killer" Richard Benjamin Speck - Happy Scribe "You know," he said, "older sisters take care of you and I always felt taken care of. Years later, when Nina moved into the townhouse where she died, she installed an old "Schmale Rd" street sign in her bedroom. "She was great with him," recalled their sister, Susan Jordan Morin. Richard Speck And The Grisly Story Of The Chicago Massacre "What she did that night, very few human beings would have the courage to do. Susan is 3. Who are the victims of the mass murderer? Losing his parking spot as he carted all that food here and there. The Details of Mass Murderer Richard Speck | Oxygen - YouTube One went into nursing. She wanted to do Pat's hair and makeup for the funeral. Dr. John Schmale found a box of old slides in his waterlogged basement and opened a flood of memories. During this period he had the words "Born to Raise Hell" tattooed on his arm, a sentiment that wife Shirley had experienced firsthand: She filed for divorce in January 1966. Media coverage splashed Speck's image all over the front pages and, in a desperate bid to escape, Speck tried to commit suicide on July 19, 1966, by slashing his wrists in the seedy hotel he was staying in. Kubasek said no. Unlike several of her housemates, she wasn't likely to be caught on camera dressing up in a cat costume, joking around in the kitchen, dancing. No one in her village had ever gone to America. Corazon Amurao, center, the nurse who survived the massacre of eight of her fellow student nurses, walks between another nurse and William Ruddel, Bridewell jail superintendent, from Bridewell's Cermak Memorial Hospital after a second visit to the building where Richard Speck was being held on July 19, 1966. At South Chicago Community Hospital she earned $350 a month, much of which she sent back to the Philippines, and, like the other exchange nurses, she wrote a lot of letters. Murder made Richard Speck famous. Among the mourners standing in the drizzle was an older, bareheaded man from Mindoro. How to Talk to Serial Killers: An Interview with 'Mindhunter' John Betty Jo, whose married name was Purvis, died in 2015. As the 50th anniversary of the murders approaches, that's what he wants for himself and the other families to reopen the lives of the women whose names have been overshadowed by their killer's. In the spring of 1966, she stepped into an airplane bound for Chicago. The last time John Farris saw Suzie, 21, he had just come home from a track meet, carrying his victory medals, and she was visiting with her boyfriend, Phil. Mary Ann was the fourth of the six kids of Philip and Mary Jordan. Richard Benjamin Speck (December 6, 1941 - December 5, 1991) was an American mass murderer who killed eight student nurses in their South Deering, Chicago, residence via stabbing, strangling, slashing their throats, or a combination of the three on the night of July 13-14, 1966. He's still searching for the words to explain to his three children who his sister was, what happened to her. The real-life Speck who tortured, raped, and murdered eight Chicago student nurses in a. Speck died of a heart attack after 25 years in prison. Her village was small (200 people) and her family was large (eight kids). She liked clothes, and since the family didn't have a lot of money, she made her own. The kitchen door opened onto a narrow alley where Nina parked her Bel Air and where a hospital shuttle picked up and delivered students. He'd turned on the TV news in Pennsylvania. "She gets out of the car, slams the door and found out from the guy where we are and how to get home from there.". Growing up, Nina pronounced "Nigh-nah" was a good student, well-liked, quiet but with a sense of humor. It was the kind of childhood that half a century later people look back on and call simpler, innocent, a time when city kids were raised to be independent and unafraid. She promptly planned a trip to the United States, but passport problems twice forced her to postpone. I was gonna get that tattoo removed. Speck is in jail for murdering and raping a group of women. To be reminded of his sister's kindness, to be able to speak with someone about her in that way, gave him rare comfort. She closed the box, surely hoping that one day it would be opened. Jewelry, makeup and nail polish were forbidden on duty. Pat was born in 1945, the year World War II ended, to Joe and Bessie Matusek, both of Czech descent. So did the fact that her brother, John, who was four years older, was studying to be a doctor. Criminal files Serial Killers - Richard Speck - video Dailymotion During their first two years, all the nursing students were required to live in dorms attached to the hospital, but in their third and final year, in the hot Chicago summer of 1965, Nina and five others moved into one of the three townhouses the hospital rented on East 100th Street. Through the end of spring and on into summer, Tina and her Filipina friends were sometimes spotted walking to a nearby shopping center, and they took occasional field trips, but they spent a lot of their nonworking time in the townhouse, frequently writing letters home. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. Site contains certain content that is owned A&E Television Networks, LLC. She also had a hard time believing he actually died of a heart attack in prison in 1991 and wonders why she was spared. Forty miles from home, when they spotted a gas station, they were reluctant to stop for directions because their curlers made them look like creatures from Mars. (Farris family). Best Known For: In 1966, Richard Speck committed one of the most horrifying mass murders in American history when he brutalized and killed eight student nurses living on Chicago's South Side. Would she still love water ballet? He was matter-of-fact about. He was referring to letters he received in his prison cell every week from women-female admirers who, he said, wanted to correspond with him. At her father's urging, Lori considered becoming a nurse, but she finally told him that she couldn't, she was just too emotional for the job. On a trip to Florida with her classmates not long before she died, she sent a postcard home to report that immediately after their plane landed, they had gone to Mass. "She did well with other people in situations that you're not necessarily in control of," Farris said, "which I think is a good skill for nursing.". For many years she worked as a nurse at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. Now 73, she has two children and several grandchildren. As you all know, in 1988 Richard Speck and Ronzelle Larimore made a video in prison that is half talkshow, half pornography. It was a world of hair curlers, hair spray cans, ashtrays, manual typewriters, textbooks, sheath dresses, corsages, cluttered rooms, a place where young women laughed, hugged, studied, ate, teased each other's hair. "Always very playful and very compassionate. Nursing students were under strict rules during the 1960s, but still they found time for fun. "For Filipinos and Filipino Americans who came of age during the 1960s," she said in a recent email, "I think Gargullo and Pasion are remembered as nurses who encountered American violence and tragedy, and Amurao is remembered as the nurse who used her wits to survive.". Speck found work on a ship, and it began to seem like bodies turned up wherever Speck had been. What a waste that Nina and her friends weren't able to give the world everything they had to give, or enjoy its pleasures. "It was just awful," Siouchoff said. Brownie. It sure gets way out. The knocking was done in a normal manner, she would later testify. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later overturned due to issues with jury selection at his trial. By the time Nina entered nursing school, she was three or four years older than most of her classmates and worried that she was over the hill. It may be difficult for those who weren't alive half a century ago to understand how profoundly Speck's crime shook the city, how far the ripples ran through time and space. Speck was never officially charged with the murders of which he was suspected prior to the events that took place in the South Chicago townhouse and, officially, those cases remain unsolved. "Let people know who they were," she said. ''I`m in here for 1,200 years. Not only had they been allowed a slumber party with their mother, but their big sister who was about to graduate from nursing school was coming home for good the next day. Merlita was considered quiet, shy, hardworking, efficient, pretty and blessed with a rich singing voice. After several minutes, they heard a female voice urging them to come out. Baskys says that for a while she slept with a flashlight or a knife, but eventually, determined not to raise her children in fear, went through five years of therapy to retrain her thinking. What he had, in this mysterious box he had inherited when his father died, were four carousels of slides, many of them corroded, warped, moldy, ravaged by water and time. Lori Davy, center, accepts a nursing school diploma on behalf of her slain sister, Gloria Davy, at a ceremony at McCormick Place in 1966. `Parents ought to be careful about their kids,'' Richard Speck said. She displayed uncommon ease with the dying and never balked at the mess that came with tending to the human body. Richard Speck - Video, Tattoo & Daughter But she came with a coveted distinction: She had a car, and not just any car, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible in pale yellow "Colonial Cream," a gift from her father, who could barely afford it and who himself drove a run-down pickup truck. Life magazine cited her "pancit," made of noodles and vegetables with pork. Patricia Matusek was murdered along with five fellow nursing students and two visiting nurses in 1966 on Chicago'sSouth Side. Nursing school exposed Pam and her classmates to life's wide range of joy and trouble. Why he did what he did in the next few hours will never be known. In winter they went sledding. A camera caught the moment: a pretty girl in a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar, reaching, with white gloves, for the document her sister had worked so hard to earn. Sickeningly mesmerizing because, as much as we hate to admit it, it is possible to talk to a mass murderer as a human being. Richard Speck had a troubled past and a rap sheet a mile long. The time he spent unpacking the food. The eight nurses killed by Richard Speck on July 14, 1966, in Chicago were, top from left, Gloria Davy, Suzanne Farris, Merlita Gargullo and Mary Ann Jordan. "But I come from the place where they make balisong. On what occasion? Atienza became friends and learned to play penny-ante poker with the policemen and bodyguards who watched over her for an entire year while she was in protective custody. Her family her father, John, a pipe fitter; her mother, Lena, a homemaker born in Germany; and her only sibling, Jack lived in a small, one-story brick Cape Cod on Commercial Avenue. On this day, Amurao personally identified Speck as the killer. They're walking home from church, dressed in matching blue coats and hats and black patent leather shoes, each clutching an Easter basket. "She laughs a lot.". Wilkening has had a full life, but he doesn't pretend the pain is gone or that his life ever returned to a true version of normal. Nursing school, as one former student describes it, was like a cross between a convent and boot camp. Attorney William J. Martin, 79, talks about Corazon Amurao Atienza, the lone survivor of the Richard Speck murders. Subscribe. She married Alberto Atienza, and then, with her husband, a lawyer, moved back to the United States. 'Mindhunter': How the Real Serial Killers Compare to Show's - Insider (Curtis Thatcher & Assoc.). Opening the box at first meant to me that I was going to reopen her death. I like him. An average student at Aquinas High School, she was turned down by Loyola University, so after graduation she took a job as a file clerk for Peoples Gas. Pat and Arlene Kubasek could hardly stop laughing on the night, during their high school sophomore year, that they went to the drive-in with four other girls, then sat in the car eating popcorn and rolling their hair on giant curlers. "Time is moving on," he said one afternoon, sitting in his peaceful yard under the old, low-hanging trees. They laughed their way through Catholic elementary school and on through Fenger High, where Pat was on the Titanette pompom squad. The first floor consisted of a living room, a powder room and a kitchen. "This is the man," she said as pandemonium erupted. They were the last women to arrive at the townhouse that night. Editor's note: This story was first published on April 28, 2016, and is being republished to mark the 50th anniversary of the murders. She still gets a kick out of playing poker at casinos in Nevada with her husband. The kitchen was the townhouse social hub, a place where Nina and her roommates congregated to eat, study and listen to the record player from the nearby living room. Richard Speck - Life in Prison | Life Prison - LiquiSearch "When Merlita (Gargullo) cooked adobo filipino and pancit and they came home from the hospital and smelled the food and they say 'it's good' so we invited them to join us to eat, and they really like it. John and Nina walked together to the one-room Queen Bee schoolhouse, carrying tin lunch pails. In 1996, five years after Speck's death, a TV journalist made public a prison video, which showed Speck taking drugs and engaging in sex with another inmate during the 1980s, while he was an inmate at Statesville Correctional Institute; Speck appears to have breasts in the video, apparently as a result of hormone treatment received while in prison, and is wearing women's underwear. Merlita's father. We kind of lost her, Lori said. Suzanne Farris appears as a young girl with a prayer card from her funeral on July 18, 1966. She was homesick. (Schmale family ). It's where Suzie taught him, as a 10-year-old, to play solitaire. Until he was six-years-old, he lived a fairly normal life in a small town in Illinois. "Gloria's been murdered," Lori remembers her saying. Speck's jury trial began April 3, 1967, in Peoria, Illinois, three hours southwest of Chicago, with a gag order on the press. The image suggests who she was, serious and slightly removed from the fun. According to news accounts published at the time, Merlita, 23, was quiet, shy, hardworking, efficient, pretty and blessed with a rich singing voice. Fifty years ago she managed to crawl under a bed and hide while Richard Speck methodically stabbed and strangled eight young nurses after telling them he would not hurt them, that he just needed money to get to New Orleans. `60 Minutes,` the news, keep up on the outside world. "Well," she wrote, "it was a fine, dizzying, exciting and wonderful weekend, but I still believe there is no place like home.". She wrote her daughter's name, Nina, on a piece of pink paper. The close quarters helped turn most of the women into close friends, and for all their dedication and discipline, they loved pranks. She appreciates every day of life and wants to be happy all the time, because life is not long, Martin said she told him recently. Finding those carousels of slides, in September 2015, may have been a fluke, but it felt like a providential sign. She roller-skated in the basement of the family's three-bedroom bungalow. She had the guts to move (under the bed), which saved her life," Martin said. He was in need of surgery to repair his severed artery, and was watched over by a dozen policemen who were determined to ensure that his days of making lucky escapes were over. Speck's father, to whom he had been deeply attached . She accepted an assignment at South Chicago Community Hospital and landed at O'Hare airport on May 1, 1966. Speck is the character who, while being interviewed by Ford and Tench, tosses a pet bird into a fan. So do their lives. Her father, Charles, was a former Marine who expected as much from his five daughters as he did from his son. The next time Lori heard the phone ring, it was morning. Richard Speck has been described as a drifter, a loner, a high school dropout, a sociopath, a heavy drinker, a violent man who could be charming. Mary Ann Jordanin her nursing uniform in an undated photo. Richard Speck was born on December 6, 1941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indiana authorities wanted to interview Speck regarding the murder of three girls who had vanished on July 2, 1966, and whose bodies were never found. In the bedroom she shared with Cora Amurao, Merlita slept on the bottom bunk. You climbed down to the ledge on 100th Street? Parts of the confession were almost certainly bogus; Speck said that he had not killed all eight nurses-that an accomplice, whom Speck later shot to death, had killed one of the nurses, while Speck killed the other seven. Some bunk beds, some singles. Kubasek hurried to her car and drove to the townhouse. Many fans can agree that the interview with Richard Speck was high in terms of tension. He told Greene one of his pleasures in prison was "getting high." One of eight young nurses killed in a Chicago townhouse on July 14, 1966, by a man who became notorious: Richard Speck. Subsequent nationwide enquiries also raised the other incidents in which Speck was suspected, as well as his criminal record. She was too hot. Mindhunter: 10 Most Chilling Quotes From The Netflix Show - Screen Rant Thats why he and his wife established the Nina Jo Schmale Scholarship Fund at Wheaton College; Ninas name, and hers alone, is now attached to something good. In 1972, Speck's death sentence was commuted to 50 to 100 years in prison, when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished capital punishment. A native Tagalog speaker, she began learning English in first grade. In 1965 she became president of the Student Nurses Association of Illinois. I screamed for about 20 minutes. The two Arlenes still laugh easily when they think of Pat, but the memory of her death brings them quickly to tears. Heroin and whiskey. ''You`re talking about two different categories of people,'' Speck said. Another time, according to a different news account, Tina wrote her sister saying she wished she could live in Chicago forever. Lori realized it was time to tell the truth. (Chicago Tribune historical photo / Chicago Tribune). ''How am I gonna get in trouble?'' Richard Speck - Born to Raise Hell | Crime Scene Database Lori tries to live by her mother's words. Life, though not idyllic, felt safe. According to a news account at the time, she thought it was a safer place to raise a family. Serial Killer: Richard Speck - Full Documentary - YouTube It's a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible painted in Colonial Cream. The children suffered considerable abuse at the hands of their drunken stepfather, and Speck's childhood was marked by juvenile delinquency and alcohol abuse, which soon led to petty crime. Outrage Over Explicit Prison Video of Richard Speck | AP News His sister and seven of her fellow student nurses and nurseswere murdered 50years ago in one of Chicagos darkest crimes. It's the psychological kind, full of memories and emotions, the kind Schmale means when he says: "Opening the box at first meant to me that I was going to reopen her death.
East Point Oysters, Articles R