Richard Speck
[4] On May 10, 1950, three years after the death of his father, his mother Mary married Carl August Rudolph Lindberg in Palo Pinto, Texas.
He repeated the eighth grade at J. L. Long Jr. High School, in part because of his refusal to speak in class, motivated by a fear of people staring at him.
In December 1965, upon the recommendation of his mother, Speck moved in with a 29-year-old divorced woman, an ex-professional wrestler and now a bartender at his favorite bar, Ginny's Lounge, to babysit her three children.
[4] On April 19, 1966, Speck returned to stay at his sister Martha's second-floor apartment at 3966 N. Avondale Ave., in the Old Irving Park neighborhood on the Northwest side of Chicago, where she lived with her husband, Gene Thornton, and their two teenage daughters.
Merchant Marine might provide a suitable occupation for his unemployed brother-in-law, so on April 25 he took Speck to the U.S. Coast Guard office to apply for a letter of authority to work as an apprentice seaman.
[4] Speck found work immediately after obtaining the letter of authority, joining the 33-member crew of Inland Steel's Clarence B. Randall, an L6-S-B1 class bulk ore lake freighter, on April 30.
On June 27, after Judy gave him $80 to help him until he found work, Speck left to again stay with his sister Martha and her family in Chicago for the next two weeks.
[4] On June 30, Speck's brother-in-law Gene drove him to the National Maritime Union (NMU) hiring hall at 2335 E. 100th St. in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood of South Deering, Chicago to file his paperwork for a seaman's card.
[4] On Friday, July 8, 1966, Speck's brother-in-law Gene drove him to the NMU hiring hall to pick up his seaman's card and register for a berth on a ship.
Speck lost out that day to a seaman with more seniority for a berth on the SS Flying Spray, a C1-A cargo ship bound for South Vietnam, and returned to his sister Martha's apartment for the weekend.
After packing his bags and again being driven by his brother-in-law to the NMU hiring hall to await a berth on a ship, Speck stayed the night at Pauline's rooming house, about 1 mile (1,600 m) away at 3028 E. 96th St., in the Vets Park neighborhood of South Deering, Chicago.
He entered and, using only a knife, killed Gloria Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo, and Valentina Pasion.
At the hospital, Speck was recognized by Dr. LeRoy Smith, a 25-year-old surgical resident physician, who had read about the "Born To Raise Hell" tattoo in a newspaper story.
[13] Concerns over the recent Miranda decision that had vacated the convictions of a number of criminals meant Speck was not even questioned for three weeks after his arrest.
[4] While awaiting trial, Speck participated in twice-weekly sessions with part-time Cook County Jail psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Ziporyn.
Ziporyn prepared a discharge summary with depression, anxiety, guilt, and shame among Speck's emotions, but also a deep love for his family.
Ziporyn also earned the ire of the Cook County Jail, which fired him as its part-time psychiatrist the week after Speck's trial ended.
[16] Speck's jury trial began April 3, 1967, in Peoria, Illinois, three hours southwest of Chicago, with a gag order on the press.
On June 5, Judge Herbert C. Paschen sentenced Speck to die in the electric chair, but granted an immediate stay pending automatic appeal.
[19] In December 1965 and March 1966, Nature and The Lancet published findings by British cytogeneticist Patricia Jacobs and colleagues of a chromosome survey of patients at Scotland's only security hospital for the developmentally disabled.
[20][21][22] Jacobs hypothesized that men with XYY syndrome are more prone to aggressive and violent behavior than males with the normal XY karyotype, but the idea was later shown to be incorrect.
[23][24][25] In August 1966, Eric Engel, a Swiss endocrinologist and geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote to Speck's attorney, Cook County Public Defender Gerald W. Getty, who was reportedly planning an insanity defense.
[27] One month later, a court-appointed panel of six physicians rejected Getty's insanity argument and concluded that Speck was mentally competent to stand trial.
[28] In 1968, biochemist Mary Telfer and associates published data from a genetic analysis, similar in design to Jacobs's, of subjects confined in psychiatric hospitals and penal institutions in Pennsylvania.
[31][32][33] In a three-part series on the XYY syndrome published in April 1968, The New York Times presented Jacobs's unsubstantiated theory associating the syndrome with violent behavior as an established fact, and noted that the karyotype had been cited as a mitigating factor by attorneys defending an XYY man charged with murder in Paris,[34][35] and another in Melbourne.
[47][48] In a review article published in the Journal of Medical Genetics in December 1968, Michael Court Brown found no overrepresentation of XYY males in chromosome surveys of Scottish prisons and hospitals for the developmentally and mentally disabled, and suggested that any conclusions drawn from study populations composed solely of institutionalized males were likely distorted by selection bias.
[57] In May 1996, Chicago television news anchor Bill Kurtis received video tapes made at Stateville Correctional Center in 1988 from an anonymous attorney.
Showing them publicly for the first time before the Illinois state legislature, Kurtis pointed out the explicit scenes of sex, drug use, and money being passed around by prisoners, who seemingly had no fear of being caught.
"[58] The Illinois legislature packed the auditorium to view the two-hour video,[58] but stopped the screening when the tape showed Speck performing oral sex on another man.
"[58] Shortly before December 5, 1991, Speck was transported from Stateville Correctional Center to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, Illinois after complaining of severe chest pains.
