by Ray Black
Starkweather found a payphone and called work to tell them that he was ill and would not be back for a few days. He then returned to the house to wait for Caril to come home from school. She argued with her parents on her return and, hearing the raised voices, Starkweather went back into the house. He claims that Velda began hitting him, screaming that he had got Caril pregnant. Starkweather went out and got his gun. When Marion threatened him with a clawhammer, Starkweather shot him in the head. Velda rushed him with a knife, he later claimed, and he shot her in the face. The baby was crying and when Velda, still alive, tried to reach it, he slammed the butt of the rifle into her head a couple of times. He went to the baby’s bedroom to try to quieten her, but, unable to do so, threw Velda’s knife at her, hitting her in the throat and killing her. He then returned to the room in which Marion was still moving around. Starkweather said later: ‘I tried to stab him in the throat, but the knife wouldn't go in, and I just hit the top part of it with my hand and it went in.’
He dragged Velda’s body to the outhouse and stuffed her down the open toilet. Meanwhile, the baby’s body was put in a box in the outhouse and Marion was left in the chicken coop. Then Charlie and Caril cleaned up the mess and spent the remainder of the evening drinking Pepsi and eating crisps. For almost a week they stayed there, the corpses rotting outside. Visitors were turned away by a note Caril had pinned to the door telling people to stay away as everyone inside had flu.
Eventually, people became suspicious and the police were called but Caril fobbed them off with the flu story. When Caril’s grandmother asked the police to visit again, they searched inside the house but found nothing untoward. Later that day, Bob van Busch and his brother made a search of the property and discovered the grisly remains of Velda, Marion and Betty. By this time, Charlie and Caril were long gone.
They headed for a farm, twenty miles from Lincoln, belonging to a Starkweather family friend, August Meyer, arriving there on January 27. The circumstances are unknown, but Starkweather shot Meyer in the head, claiming later, as he did for many of his killings, that it was in self-defence. They took his money and guns, had a meal and fell asleep.
The following day, their car having become stuck in the deep mud of a dirt track, they hitched a ride from seventeen-year-old Robert Jensen and sixteen-year-old Carol King. Before too long, Starkweather was holding them at gunpoint, demanding money. He made Jensen drive back to the Meyer farm where he fired six bullets into his head. Carol was shot once and then stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen and pubic area. When she was found, her jeans and panties were round her ankles, but she had not been raped. The couple disagreed later about Caril’s role in the killings. She claimed she was sitting in the car during the shootings and mutilation, while he said she actually shot the girl when he was absent from the scene and helped in the mutilation of her body as she was jealous of Starkweather’s attraction to her.
Bizarrely, the couple now drove back to Lincoln where everyone was looking for them. They even drove past Caril’s house to see whether the bodies had been found, but the police cars outside the house were enough to tell them. They then slept in the car in another, more affluent part of town. By the time they awoke on January 29, the other three bodies had been found and a huge manhunt was under way.
Forty-seven-year-old C. Lauer Ward, president of the Capital Bridge and Capital Steel companies, was a good friend of the governor of Nebraska. That morning, his wife Clara was at home with Lillian Fencl, their hard-of-hearing, fifty-one-year-old maid.
Lillian opened the door to Charlie holding a gun. He soon realised she could not hear very well and wrote notes to tell her what he wanted. When Clara came into the kitchen to see what had happened to breakfast, Charlie assured her that nothing bad was going to happen. He called Caril in and she had some coffee and fell asleep in the library while Charlie ate breakfast.
Later, when Clara went upstairs to change her shoes, Starkweather followed her. He claimed she had a gun which she fired, missing him. After throwing a knife at her which stuck in her back, he stabbed her repeatedly in the neck and chest.
He then called his father and told him to tell Bob van Busch that he was going to kill him because he had been interfering in his relationship with Caril, and followed this with a letter addressed to ‘the law only’, an attempt to justify his and Caril’s actions. ‘I and Caril are sorry for what has happen,’ he wrote. ‘Cause I have hurt every body cause of it and so has caril. But I’n saying one thing every body than cane out there was luckie there not dead even caril’s sister.’
They took Ward’s black 1956 Packard, loaded it with food and got ready to leave, but not before shooting dead C. Lauer Ward when he came home from work that evening. Lillian Fencl was then tied to a bed and stabbed to death. Charlie later said Caril killed her but Caril blamed him. The bodies were discovered the next day and Ward’s friend, Governor Anderson, called out the National Guard. Jeeps, armed with mounted machine guns, began to patrol the streets and parents taking their children to school carried guns. Meanwhile, in the sky, spotter planes scrutinised the roads below for the black Packard.
Starkweather and Caril now headed for Washington State, crossing into Wyoming on the morning of the 30th. They wanted to change cars and came upon a travelling shoe salesman from Montana, Merle Collison, asleep in his Buick at the side of the highway. He was shot in the head, neck, arm and leg. Charlie, gallant as ever, later blamed Caril for it.
But he was unable to work out how to release the car’s emergency break and when a young geologist innocently stopped to offer help, Charlie thanked him by pulling his gun on him and telling him if he did not find out how to release the break, he would be killed. The geologist realised that the man seated next to Starkweather was in fact dead and tried to wrestle the weapon away from Starkweather. By some strange coincidence, just then a young Wyoming deputy sheriff, William Romer, pulled up in his car to see what was going on. Caril jumped out of the back seat of the car, shouting that she wanted him to take her to the police, that it was Starkweather in the car and he was a killer. Charlie, by this time, had jumped back into the Packard and gunned it in the direction of the nearby town of Douglas. The deputy set off in hot pursuit, radioing in that he was chasing a black Packard and ordering that a roadblock be set up. Douglas police chief, Robert Ainslie, and Sheriff Earl Heflin of Converse County happened to see Starkweather’s car fly past them at speed and also set off in pursuit. Heflin took careful aim and shot out the back windscreen of the Packard. To their surprise, however, Starkweather came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the highway.
They pulled up behind him, cautiously waiting for him to get out. When he did, they told him to lie on the ground. It turned out that he had stopped because he thought he had been shot. But the blood was merely from a cut around his ear made by the broken glass of the windscreen. Heflin was appalled: ‘He thought he was bleeding to death. That’s why he stopped. That’s the kind of yellow sonofabitch he is.’
He did look the part, though, when photographed later. Shaggy, swept back hair, cigarette dangling, Dean-like, from his lips, black leather motorcycle jerkin, tight black denims, cowboy boots – the very image of teenage rebellion.
Under arrest, their choice was stark. The gas chamber in Wyoming or the electric chair in Nebraska. They chose Nebraska and he and Caril were extradited in January 1958 where they were both charged with first-degree murder and murder while committing a robbery.
Starkweather’s lawyers entered a plea of ‘innocent by reason of insanity’, but Starkweather maintained that he was sane. He also said initially that Caril was innocent. Shortly after he was arrested, he told police officers: ‘Don’t be rough on the girl. She didn’t have a thing to do with it.’ He changed his tune, however, when he learned that Caril was saying that she had actually been held hostage by him and he began to implicate her, claiming she was responsible for some of the murders and all the mutilations.
Caril was found guilty but, being only fou
rteen, she was spared the electric chair and sentenced, instead, to life imprisonment. She was paroled in 1976, still claiming her innocence.
In Starkweather’s case, it took the jury only twenty-four hours to reach a verdict of guilty and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair, a sentence carried out on June 25, 1959. His father raised money for his appeal by selling locks of his hair, but the appeal failed.
On the eve of his execution Charles Starkweather was asked if he would like to donate his eyes. He refused, saying: ‘Why should I? Nobody ever gave me anything.’
Richard Speck
It was unmistakably a man, but he had women’s breasts and was wearing blue silk panties. He paraded around, took a bit of cocaine, had sex with another inmate of the prison and said: ‘If they only knew how much fun I’m having, they’d turn me loose.’
The video tape had been sent anonymously to Chicago television news editor, Bill Kurtis in 1996. It had been made in Stateville Prison in 1988 and depicted scenes of sex and drug use. At the centre of it was the bizarre spectacle of nurse-killer Richard Speck who had died in 1991 and whose breasts were the result of hormone treatments that had been smuggled into the jail. Speck joked when asked why he had killed eight nurses on the night of July 14, 1966. ‘It just wasn’t their night,’ he said. Then asked how he has felt since then, he replied coldly: ‘Like I always feel. Had no feelings.’
Speck was born, the seventh of eight children, on December 6, 1941, in the small town of Kirkwood, Illinois. His parents, Benjamin and Mary, were religious people, but his father died when Richard was six years old and Mary, having moved the family to Fair Park, near Dallas, Texas, remarried. Her new husband, Carl Lindbergh, was the antithesis of Benjamin Speck. He drank, was abusive and was often gone from the family for long periods. He hated Richard and Richard hated him.
By the age of twelve, Richard Speck was already going off the rails. He was a poor student, eventually dropping out in ninth grade, and had discovered alcohol. In his defence, however, it has been suggested that the alcohol was used to counter the headaches from which he suffered. These were apparently a direct result of head injuries he suffered throughout childhood – aged five, he was injured while playing in a sandbox with a claw hammer; he twice fell out of trees, and at fifteen he ran into a steel girder, injuring his head yet again.
Aged nineteen, he had a tattoo done which would become significant in later life. It read: ‘Born to Raise Hell’ and that is just what he did. By his mid-twenties, a drug-dependent alcoholic, he had thirty-seven arrests to his name. Charges included public drunkenness, disorderly conduct and burglary
At twenty he had married fifteen-year-old Shirley Malone and fathered a child, but the marriage ended in 1966. According to Malone, Speck often raped her at knifepoint, claiming that he needed sex four to five times each day. He spent a large part of their marriage in prison. He told people he wanted to kill his ex-wife, but he never got round to it and, heading back to Illinois, in a three-month period, he seems to have vented his anger on other women.
The first to die was Mary Pierce, a divorcee who had rejected his advances. On April 13, her naked body was found, strangled, in a shed behind the bar where she worked. A few days earlier, a sixty-five-year-old woman had been grabbed from behind and raped by a man with a southern drawl whose description matched that of Speck.
The cops were on to him and, tracing him to the Christy Hotel, they found jewellery and a radio belonging to the rape victim. Other items from burglaries he had carried out, were also discovered. But Speck was gone.
He landed work on the iron-ore barges of the Great Lakes, but was dismissed for repeated drunkenness on the job as well as his violent behaviour. On July 2, he was in the area of Indiana Harbor. Not far from there, that day, three young girls disappeared and their bodies were never found. All that remained were their clothes, left in their car.
On July 13, Speck was drinking heavily in the Shipyard Inn in south Chicago. As ever, he was angry and depressed. He had tried to get work on a ship bound for New Orleans but had been unable to do so. Therefore, having consumed quantities of pills and booze, he decided that it was time to ‘raise some hell.’ He set off towards one of the nearby student dormitories of the South Chicago Community Hospital. In his possession were a hunting knife, a pocket-knife and a .22 calibre pistol.
For the past several weeks, Speck had been watching the women coming and going from the buildings, sunbathing in a nearby park and leaving the building to attend their classes. He knew their schedules well enough to know that at that time of night they would be home and in bed.
Twenty-three-year-old Cora Amurao, a nursing exchange student from the Philippines, opened the door at Jeffrey Manor, a two-storey townhouse occupied by student nurses. In front of her stood Speck, dressed in dark clothing, reeking of alcohol, high as a kite and brandishing the pistol and the knife. ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he told the terrified woman. ‘I’m only going to tie you up. I need your money to go to New Orleans.’
He went into the house and got the five other nurses there at the time out of bed. All six were herded into one room where he tied them up and sat them in a circle on the floor. In the next hour another three arrived home from evenings out. They, too, were tied up and sat on the floor.
Twenty-year-old Pamela Wilkening was the first to die. He took her into another room and stabbed her in the chest before strangling her with a torn piece of bedsheet. Returning to the room, he selected twenty-year-old Mary Jordan and twenty-one-year-old Suzanne Farris. He took them into another bedroom and stabbed Jordan in the heart, neck and eye. Turning to Farris, he stabbed her eighteen times and then strangled her already dead body. He also raped her.
Nina Schmale, twenty-four years of age, was now taken to a room where he told her to lie on a bed. He cut her throat and strangled her. Valentine Pasion, twenty-three, was stabbed in the throat and Nerlita Gargullo was stabbed four times and then strangled. He washed his hands before returning to carry Patricia Matusek into the bathroom where he kicked her in the stomach and strangled her.
For the next twenty minutes he raped Gloria Davy upstairs and then took her down to the ground floor where he raped her anally with an unknown implement. Then he strangled her, before leaving the house, thinking everyone was dead.
Unknown to Speck, however, Cora Amurao, who had first opened the door to him, had slithered under one of the beds in the room and pressed herself up against the wall. She lay there, terrified, until 6.00 a.m. to be certain that he had gone. Then she clambered out on to the balcony shouting: ‘My friends are all dead! I’m the only one alive! Oh God, I’m the only one alive!’
When the police arrived on the scene, the property resembled a charnel house. The carpet squished underfoot from the amount of blood it had soaked up. Experienced policemen took one look and then ran outside to throw up. There was one strong clue, however, to the killer’s identity. The neatness of the square knots used to tie the girls up suggested that he was, most likely, a seaman.
The cops went to work and within hours knew their killer was Richard Speck. Cora, although heavily sedated, had managed to give a description of the killer and a gas station attendant recalled that one of his managers had been talking about a guy of the same description who complained about missing a ship and losing out on a job just a couple of days before. A police sketch artist drew an uncanny likeness of Speck, which was taken to the Maritime Union Hall. Someone there remembered an angry seaman who had lost out on a double booking – two men had been sent for one job – and he was able to retrieve the crumpled assignment sheet from the wastebasket. The sheet gave the name of Richard Speck.
Speck was on the loose for the next few days, drinking and crashing in cheap hotels in Chicago. The police were always close on his tail and at one point he was interviewed by a couple of them in his room because he had a gun. They did not realise who he was, however. Eventually, he stayed in a hotel in Skid Row, the Starr. He had drunk a pint of c
heap wine and, feeling suicidal, he smashed the bottle and dragged its jagged ends across his wrist and inner elbow, severing an artery. He then lay bleeding on the bed in his tiny cubicle in the hotel, surrounded by newspapers carrying his picture. He called out for water and help, but was ignored.
Eventually, one of the down-and-outs Speck had been drinking with in the last few days recognised Speck’s picture and, having returned to the hotel, discovered him, lying on the bed. He called the police anonymously to tell them where he was, but no patrol car was dispatched.
Instead, Speck was taken to Cook County Hospital, the very same hospital in which the nurses’ bodies lay. Leroy Smith, a first-year resident, examined Speck and thought there was something familiar about him. He washed the blood off his arm and there it was – the tattoo saying ‘Born to Raise Hell’. He found a newspaper and confirmed that it was Speck from the photo. When Speck asked for water, Smith held him tight by the neck and asked him: ‘Did you give water to the nurses?’
The trial began on April 3, 1967, in the Peoria County Courthouse, in Peoria, Illinois, three hours south of Chicago. Cora Amurao testified at the trial and a dramatic and defining moment came when she was asked if she could identify the killer of her fellow students. She rose from her seat in the witness box, walked across the courtroom to stand in front of Speck. She pointed at him, almost touching him, and said: ‘This is the man’.
On April 15, 1967, after forty-nine minutes of deliberation, the jury found Richard Benjamin Speck guilty of all eight murders. The court was cleared and Judge Paschen sentenced Speck to death in the electric chair. He avoided it, however, when the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional. Instead, Speck was sentenced to fifty to 100 years in prison for each count of murder – a total of 400 to 1,200 years.
