Richard Benjamin Speck was born on December 6, 1941, in Kirkwood, Illinois, the seventh of eight children. His early years were marked by instability. His father, a devout and hard-working man whom Speck reportedly admired, died of a heart attack when Speck was six. Afterward, his mother remarried Carl Lindberg, a traveling insurance salesman with a long criminal record, whom Speck reportedly despised.

Speck's adolescence spiraled into delinquency. By age 15, he had already developed a record for petty crimes, alcohol abuse, and truancy. He dropped out of school in the 8th grade and developed a long-standing drinking problem. Over the next decade, Speck was arrested dozens of times for burglary, assault, fraud, and public intoxication, spending much of his young adult life drifting between jobs and jail cells across Texas and Illinois.

In March 1966, after a failed marriage and several minor arrests, Speck boarded a freighter as a merchant seaman. When he was laid off, he traveled to Chicago, staying briefly with his sister and her husband. He had recently been released on bond after assaulting a woman in a parking lot.

On the night of July 13, 1966, Richard Speck broke into a townhouse located at 2319 East 100th Street in the South Deering neighborhood of Chicago. The home housed nine student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital, most of them Filipino and newly arrived in the United States.

Armed with only a knife, Speck forced his way into the home. Over the course of several hours, he bound and subdued the young women. At times calm and controlling, at others manic and violent, he killed eight of the nine student nurses including Gloria Davy, Suzanne Farris, Merlita Gargullo, Valentina Pasion, Patricia Matusek, Pamela Wilkening, Nina Jo Schmale, and Mary Ann Jordan, one by one, using a combination of strangulation, stabbing, and throat-slashing. He raped one of the victims before murdering her.

Miraculously, one nurse, Corazon Amurao, managed to escape detection by hiding beneath a bed for hours, listening in terror as her colleagues were brutalized and murdered. When Speck left the house in the early morning hours of July 14, Amurao waited until it was safe and then climbed out the window to seek help. Her eyewitness testimony became the foundation for the case against Speck.

After the attack, Speck fled and attempted suicide by slashing his own wrists. He was captured on July 17, 1966, after a physician at the hospital where he sought treatment recognized his “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo, which matched the description circulating in the news.

Speck was tried and convicted on April 15, 1967, and originally sentenced to death. However, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in its existing form, and Speck’s sentence was commuted to 400 to 1,200 years in prison.

He served the rest of his life at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. During his imprisonment, Speck gained notoriety once again in the 1990s when smuggled video footage emerged showing him using drugs, participating in sex acts, and boasting about the murders, reinforcing public revulsion.

Richard Speck died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991, just one day before his 50th birthday. His body was cremated, and no public memorial was held.