He was positively identified only 28 hours after the cruelly mutilated bodies were discovered in a South Side Chicago apartment. Only 67 hours after the crime, Richard Benjamin Speck, 24, was detained as the prime suspect in the mass murder of eight young nurses on July 14. In the brief interlude between the slayings and the arrest, Speck played out a drama almost as incredible as the killings of which he is accused.
Twice at the height of a fevered hunt for the killer, Speck was in the grasp of Chicago police. Twice in that time the cops walked away without a glimmering that the troubled young man on their hands was the nation's most wanted suspect. And though on one occasion he even told a policeman that his name was Richard Speck, in the end it was not a law officer but a young, unarmed doctor who recognized Speck and had him arrested.
"Man with a Gun." Less than three hours after the corpses were discovered, detectives fanning through the neighborhood learned from a service-station operator that a man matching a description given by the lone survivor, Philippine Exchange Nurse Corazon Amurao, had left two bags of clothing there. A National Maritime Union hiring hall is located only a few yards from the nurses town house, and detectives, surmising that the murderer might be a seaman, astutely checked the union office. There, William Neill, local N.M.U. secretary, sifted through the files and came up with a coin-machine photo of Speck—an ex-convict and sometime merchant mariner—pinned to a work application.
Twenty-six hours later, two patrolmen answered a call from a sleazy North Side hotel reporting that a Puerto Rican prostitute had told the manager: "There's a man up there with a gun." The roomer identified himself as Richard Speck, a name that did not yet ring a bell with the officers, though they had a tentative physical description of the suspect. As for the gun, he said that it belonged to the girl. Though most policemen would instinctively detain a man in such circumstances, the cops merely confiscated the weapon—a .22-cal. revolver (the murderer had carried a "small black pistol"). Hours later, police matched up the gun incident with the murder man hunt and rushed back to the hotel. Speck had left 30 minutes earlier.
"I Done Something Bad." The next night, after making the rounds of Skid Row bars, Speck holed up in a 90¢-a-night flophouse on the West Side's Madison Street under the name of B. Brian. Around 11 o'clock, he shouted to his next-door neighbor: "You got to come and see me. I done something bad." The neighbor replied: "You go to hell." Fellow occupants heard Speck stumbling about and peered at him. Said one: "Hey! This guy's bleeding to death." Sprawled on a scabrous mattress in the 5 x 9-ft. cubicle, Speck lay in a pool of blood from a slashed wrist and arm vein, apparently inflicted with a broken beer bottle. Called by the night clerk, two patrolmen arrived in a police van.