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Sophoclean Horror. First policeman on the scene was Patrolman Daniel Kelly, who, by tragic coincidence, had known Gloria Davy and used to date her sister Charlene. Said another officer: "The bodies were piled up like in a Nazi prison camp." It was indeed a scene of Sophoclean horror. A pool of blood glistened on the floor of one bedroom. In another, a torn, blood-soaked bed comforter lay under a two-piece yellow-and-white bathing suit that had been hung up to dry. The pages of a mimeographed lecture ("The Mental Mechanisms for Ego Defense") were strewn about the floor near a second puddle of blood. Bloodstains smeared the front of a record album on a bed. A calendar (Sept. 8: "Hallelujah. Training completed") lay crumpled on a night table. A blood-drenched sneaker remained where it had fallen. The upstairs bath was awash with blood. Downstairs, strips of bed sheet, clumsily tied with reef knots and granny knots, lay about the living-room floor, and the soft cushions bore ugly dark stains.
Gloria Davy lay nude and face down on a downstairs divan, strangled and mutilated. Sue Farris was stabbed nine times and strangled, her wrist-bound body left in a second-floor bathroom. Mary Ann Jordan's corpse was in a front bedroom, stabbed five times, including one thrust in the left eye and one in the heart. Next to her were Pat Matusek, strangled with wrists bound; and Pam Wilkening, also bound by the wrists, who had been stabbed in the heart. In the adjoining front bedroom sprawled Nina Schmale, bound at the wrists, gagged, knifed four times in the neck and strangled; Merlita Gargullo, wrists and ankles bound, dead of a 6-in.-deep thrust in the side of her neck, which pierced the trachea; and Valentina Pasion, wrists bound, knifed four times, strangled. In all, the killer inflicted 24 stab wounds. An initial examination revealed no evidence that any of the victims had been raped.
"Some Planning" Superintendent Orlando Wilson assigned 60 men to the case, and after sifting the scene for five hours, they came up with three main clues. One was a sweat-soaked man's T shirt, size 34-38, found on the floor of the living room outside the kitchen. Another was a set of "excellent" fingerprints revealed on a vanity mirror, a purse, a water glass, a door and a plate. The third, and not the least important, was Corazon's description of the killer: a white man, approximately 25 years old, 6 ft. tall, weighing 170 Ibs., with crew-cut brownish hair.
Within 48 hours of the slayings, a na tionwide manhunt was launched for a blue-eyed ex-convict charged by Chicago authorities with murder and by Federal agents with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. He was identified as Richard B. Speck, 25, of Dallas, a drifter who sports a tattooed slogan on his upper left arm: "Born to raise hell."
At week's end Speck was found in a Chicago West Side flophouse bleeding from slashes in his right wrist and left elbow which may have been self-in flicted. Police rushed him to a hospital where the alleged slayer was in serious condition.