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"I Enjoy Helping." Nina Jo Schmale, 21, queen of the nurses' spring dance, was engaged to a high school sweetheart, proudly kept in her room a sign post for "Schmale Rd.," named for her Wheaton, Ill., family. A trim champion swimmer, member of her high school water-ballet team, and engaged to a male nursing student in Chicago, native Chicagoan Patricia Ann Matusek, 21, learned on the day of the murders that she had been accepted as a staff member at the city's Children's Memorial Hospital. In her application she had written: "Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a nurse because I enjoy helping those in need. The joy one gets helping others cannot be taken away."
Blue-eyed Pamela Lee Wilkening, 20, a racing-car enthusiast, brought a touch of zany humor to the group, yet was described by a hospital friend as "the sweetest girl you'd ever want to know." When she applied for training she wrote: "I have always wanted to be a nurse. I never liked to see people suffer." There were, finally, three Philippine exchange student nurses who had moved in only two months earlier — Merlita Gargullo, 22, who had brought with her from Manila a pair of native clacking poles with which she performed a "bamboo dance" at parties; Valentina Pasion, 23, who wrote home that she wished she could stay in America forever; and Corazon Amurao, 22. Like her two paisanas, Corazon (whose nickname was "Zony"), a shy, modest country girl from rural Batangas province some 60 miles from Manila, was still bewildered by the clatter and bustle of the strange American city.
The locale to which the girls—all brunettes—were bussed home daily from South Chicago Community Hospital appeared ideally suited for a dormitory. Known as Jeffery Manor, it is a pleasant, white-collar neighborhood of small apartments, neat homes, frolicking children and Dairy Queen stands, well removed from the city's roiling slums—and with one of its lowest crime rates. As one resident put it, "It's the kind of neighborhood where you can walk your dog after midnight."
Knock on the Door. So it seemed until last week, when a prowler, aching to kill, evidently unhinged a ground-floor kitchen screen, reached in, and unlocked a back door. Creeping upstairs to a front bedroom where Miss Amurao was sleeping, he knocked on her door. Politely, she opened it. "A man was standing there," she recalled. "The first thing I noticed about him was the strong odor of alcohol." He had a small black pistol in one hand, a butcher knife in the other. Then, continued Corazon, "he made me go down the hall to a middle bedroom. He stopped at this bedroom and awakened three girls there. He made the four of us go into the back bedroom, where two other girls were sleeping. He said he wouldn't hurt us, he just wanted money to go to New Orleans."