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Death comes routinely in the dingy warren of Chicago's Madison Street, "the street of forgotten men." The cops did not recognize Speck or even take the trouble to identify him correctly. Leaving the stretcher case in an emergency ward with a young nurse and a resident surgeon, the patrolmen departed and called the station to file a "sick-removal" report.
"Get the Paper." Fortunately for headquarters, the resident, Dr. LeRoy Smith, 26, was more alert. "I picked up his head and looked at the nurse to see if she had noticed," Smith recalled. "I said to her, 'Get the paper.' " The doctor moistened his fingertips, rubbed Speck's blood-caked arm. "I saw the letter B. Then I rubbed some more and saw O-R-N." Recalling news accounts that Speck sported a tattoo, "Born to raise hell," Dr. Smith turned to the nurse, Sandra Hrtanek, 23, and said: "This is the fellow the police are looking for. Get hold of the police right now."
Patrolman Alan Schuman, 42, who had been guarding another prisoner, responded to the nurse's call. "This," he marveled, "is the biggest pinch I've made in my 19 years on the force."
Thereafter, police took no chances. With five stitches in his arm and a transfusion of a quart of blood, Speck was transferred under heavy guard the same night to Bridewell Prison Hospital. In the first confrontation between Miss Amurao and Speck in the latter's hospital room, she pointed a finger at him and exclaimed: "That is the man." Shortly before, Speck had suffered chest pains, which were diagnosed as pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart sac, and his arraignment was postponed.
In fact, though notorious for their rough handling of prisoners in the past, Chicago police treated Speck with a solicitude extended to no other prisoner in their memory. Bowing to the U.S. Supreme Court's dictum—handed down in the historic Escobedo case, which involved the Chicago cops themselves—that a suspect may not be questioned without a lawyer's advice, police let more than a week elapse without attempting to interrogate Speck. Such new-found deference evoked caustic comment from several sources, among them Author Truman Capote, whose bestseller In Cold Blood is an exhaustive anatomy of the two men convicted of murdering the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, Capote reasoned that had the Supreme Court's recent rulings banning forced confessions been in effect at the time of the Clutter killings, the offenders would have gone scot-free.
As for Speck, he was speedily visited and informed of his rights by Cook County Public Defender Gerald Getty, 53, whose office represents 9,600 indigent defendants a year and who has defended 402 murder suspects since 1947—not one of whom has been sent to the electric chair. Declaring that Speck would plead innocent, probably on grounds of insanity, Getty served notice that he would need "several months" to prepare his case.