Richard Franklin Speck was an American serial rapist who then killed eight nurses in a mass murder.
Speck was born in rural Kirkwood, Illinois the seventh of eight children and later moved to Monmouth, Illinois. While his mother was strictly religious and fundamentally against alcohol and smoking, Speck was very close to his father and would sometimes go fishing with him alone. When Mr. Speck died of a heart attack in 1947, aged 53, Richard was devastated. Things became worse when Mrs. Speck married an insurance salesman, Carl Lindbergh, in 1950. Lindbergh was a drinker with a criminal record for drunk driving and fraud and often abused Speck emotionally and verbally. The family kept moving around between poor neighborhoods in Texas. He took to drinking, being an alcoholic by the age of 13, and started spending time with other delinquents.
In October 1961, he met 15-year-old Shirley Annette Malone at the Texas State Fair, impregnating her three weeks into their relationship. When they married on January 19, 1962, Speck changed his surname back to that of his biological father. When Malone gave birth to their daughter, Robbie Lynn, on July 5, 1962, Speck was serving a 22-day sentence for disturbing the peace after a drunken brawl. He was also in jail for many more petty offenses during the marriage, including theft, check fraud and aggravated assault. He often believed his wife to be cheating on him and would, as punishment, pick up prostitutes, stop in front of their home and fondle the women while Shirley watched from the house before driving away. In January 1966, she decided that she had enough and filed for divorce, claiming he had raped her at least once at knifepoint. During the same month, he was arrested for aggravated assault again, but his mother's lawyer got the sentence reduced to a $10 fine, which he had failed to pay.
Speck returned to his old hometown Monmouth in an attempt to recapture some of his childhood. His brother got him a job as a carpenter, but Speck shortly afterward found out that his ex-wife had remarried just a few days after their divorce went through. From that point, things went downhill for him; he burglarized a grocery store, stole 70 cartons of cigarettes, and started selling them from the trunk of an old car he bought. In order to keep him out of jail, his sister Carolyn helped him get to Chicago, where his brother Gene got him a job as a carpenter. After burglarizing and raping the elderly Mrs. Virgil Harris on April 2 and being suspected of the murder of Mary Kay Pierce, a barmaid at a bar he frequented, Speck fled and got a job on a ship on the Great Lakes. Along the way, he was wanted for questioning in the disappearances of three women and the murders of four others.
Bouncing between National Maritime Union naval jobs, he was eventually fired after threatening a superior with a gun.
