Richard Speck
| Richard Speck | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Richard Benjamin Speck December 6, 1941 Kirkwood, Illinois, US |
| Died | December 5, 1991 (aged 49) Joliet, Illinois, US |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Other names | Richard Franklin Lindbergh |
| Criminal charge | Murder on 8 counts |
| Criminal penalty |
Death penalty (electric chair) later commuted to life imprisonment |
| Criminal status | Died in custody |
| Spouse(s) | Shirley Annette Malone Speck (m. 1962–1966) |
| Children | 1 |
| Parent(s) | Benjamin Franklin Speck Mary Margaret Carbaugh Speck |
Richard Benjamin Speck (December 6, 1941 – December 5, 1991) was an American mass murderer who systematically tortured, raped, and murdered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on July 14, 1966.
He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later overturned due to issues with jury selection at his trial. Speck died of a heart attack after 25 years in prison. In 1996, video tapes featuring Speck were shown before the Illinois State Legislature to highlight some of the illegal activity that took place in prisons.
Richard Benjamin Speck was born in the village of Kirkwood, Illinois, the seventh of eight children of Benjamin Franklin Speck and Mary Margaret Carbaugh Speck. The family moved to Monmouth, Illinois shortly after Speck's birth. Speck and his younger sister, Carolyn, born in 1943, were much younger than their four older sisters and two older brothers (Speck's oldest brother, Robert, died at the age of 23 in an automobile accident in 1952). Speck's father worked as a packer at Western Stoneware in Monmouth and had previously worked as a farmer and logger. Speck was very close to his father, who died in 1947 from a heart attack at the age of 53. Speck was six years old at the time.
A few years later, Speck's religious, teetotaler mother fell in love with a traveling insurance salesman from Texas, Carl August Rudolph Lindberg, whom she met on a train trip to Chicago. The hard-drinking, peg-legged Lindberg, with a 25-year criminal record that started with forgery and included several arrests for drunk driving, was the opposite of Speck's sober, hardworking father. Speck's mother married Lindberg on May 10, 1950 in Palo Pinto, Texas. Speck and his younger sister Carolyn stayed with their married sister Sara Thornton in Monmouth for a few months so Speck could finish second grade, before joining their mother and Lindberg in rural Santo, Texas, 40 miles west of Fort Worth, Texas, where Speck attended third grade.
After a year in Santo, Speck moved with his mother, his stepfather, and his sister Carolyn to the East Dallas section of Dallas, Texas, living at ten addresses in poor neighborhoods over the next dozen years. Speck loathed his often drunk and frequently absent stepfather, who psychologically abused him with insults and threats. Speck, a poor student who needed glasses for reading but refused to wear them, struggled through Dallas public schools from fourth through eighth grade, repeating eighth grade at J. L. Long Jr. High School, in part because he refused to recite in class because of a lifelong fear of people staring at him. In autumn 1957, Speck started ninth grade at Crozier Technical High School, but failed every subject and did not return for the second semester in January 1958, dropping out just after his 16th birthday.
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