The carefree clutter of books and clothes, the cherished mementos of lost childhood, beginning career and burgeoning romance marked it inimitably as a young women's dormitory. Around the two-story apartment on Chicago's far South Side, Teddy bears stood button-eyed vigil over dressers festooned with framed pictures of parents and boy friends. Among the souvenirs of tender evenings past was a long-empty champagne bottle. In the three upstairs bedrooms lined with bunks, the closets were crammed with party dresses. In one bedroom, a postcard was fondly pinned to a notice board: "Some day before you know it, school will be over with. It's pretty lonesome here without you. Really. Peter."
The coffee tables were littered with fashion magazines and paperbacks —Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Truman Capote's Other Voices', Other Rooms, Ruth Willock's The Night Visitor. Another note on a kitchen bulletin board reiterated a standing order: "Attention. Students are not to allow anyone into the townhouse without the house mother being there." An oversize poster on a bedroom wall proclaimed: "Sleep Well Tonight — Your National Guard Is Awake."
It was a grimly pathetic reassurance in the face of what happened at 2319 East 100th Street last week. In an incredible, nearly soundless orgy of mutilation and murder that took place in the early hours, a single male intruder herded together and murdered, one by one, with packinghouse precision, eight pretty student nurses. The Windy City's greatest mass slaughter since the St. Valentine's Day tommy-gun massacre of seven gangland hoods in 1929, it was by any standard one of the most horrifying crimes in U.S. history. Even to Chicago police — inured to every form of sadistic death — the apartment presented a heartrending, stomach-turning spectacle. "In my six years as coroner, geon," and in as many years as police surgeon," said Coroner Andrew Toman, "I have never seen anything this bad. This is the crime of the century."
Sweethearts & Samaritans. Its poign ancy was accentuated by the youth and decency of the victims. All eight of the girls, as one observer noted, were "good people, the daughters, sisters and sweethearts of other good people." Neighbors volunteered that they were model tenants, quiet, serious and well-mannered.
Above all, the nurses seemed enthusiastically dedicated to their calling. Their natural leader was Gloria Jean Davy, 22, one of six children of a Dyer, Ind., steel-plant foreman, and a onetime national "Sweetheart of the Future Farmers of America," who had recent ly been elected president of the Illinois Student Nurses Association; Gloria planned to join the Peace Corps after finishing training in August. Athletic Suzanne Bridget Farris, 21, one of three children of a Chicago Transit Authority superintendent, hoped to specialize in pediatric nursing, was engaged to be married next spring to the brother of another nurse, Mary Ann Jordan, 20. Daughter of a Chicago municipal engineer, Mary Ann lived at home — but, on the fatal night last week, had been discussing Suzanne's wedding plans with her and had sneaked into the residence to spend the night with her future sister-in-law.