Richard Bacon

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Richard Benjamin Speck (born December 6, 1941 in Kirkwood , Illinois , † December 5, 1991 in Joliet , Illinois) was an American serial killer .

Life

Richard Speck, armed with a knife, attacked a nurses' home in South Deering, Chicago , on the night of July 13-14, 1966 . According to his own statement, he initially “only” wanted to commit a robbery . During the act, however, Speck decided to murder the nine student nurses present in the dormitory so that they could not identify him . Bacon tied up the women and dragged them to different rooms. There he killed her. The story that circulated after the crime, especially in the American media, that he raped all the victims, is not true. In a later conversation with American profiler John Douglas ( The Murderer's Soul , Hunter in Darkness ), Speck stated that he only raped the last victim. While he gradually dragged the women out of the room, he lost track of everything. One of them hid under a bed and was simply forgotten by the perpetrator.

After the bloody act, Speck left the dormitory. The surviving woman alerted the police and was able to give the officers a fairly precise description of the perpetrator. Among other things, she informed the officers that the perpetrator had a tattoo that read "Born to Raise Hell" on his left arm. After the notice was sent to the Chicago city hospitals, Speck was arrested a few days later. He wanted to have a wound treated in a hospital, and a doctor recognized the tattoo.

Speck had already committed numerous crimes in the dormitory before the crime. At the age of twenty, he had been arrested over forty times. He had also committed several murders. He killed a waitress who had not returned his advances, robbed a 65-year-old woman and murdered him.

In the following trial, Speck was sentenced to death. However, in 1972 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional prior to his execution, commuting all previous death sentences. Richard Speck received a total of eight imprisonment sentences between 50 and 150 years. In the following years, several requests for pardons were rejected.

For a while it was rumored that bacon had an extra Y chromosome in the sex-determining pair of chromosomes . The assumption that this genetic anomaly promoted crime is neither disproved nor proven. The diagnosis of XYY syndrome later turned out to be wrong.

On December 5, 1991, Speck died of a heart attack in his cell.

After his death, a video was discovered showing Speck at drug parties and sex games in prison, in which he jokingly talks about the murders of the student nurses. ( "It just wasn't her night!" ). Another statement was later used repeatedly as an argument in favor of reintroducing the death penalty : "If you knew how much fun I'm having here, you would release me immediately."

reception

In 1966 Gerhard Richter painted the picture cycle "Eight Learning Sisters" (VMS 130) based on a newspaper clipping showing the passport photos of the eight murdered young women. The newspaper clipping can be found in the artist's atlas on plate 8. In 1971, Gerhard Richter produced three more versions in the same format as black and white photographs (WVZ 130a / 130b / 130c).

In 1968 Robert F. Kennedy criticized the measure of the gross national product as a very one-sided quantity that only measures the turnover of goods, but not the really valuable things. Among the things the purchase of which had increased the gross national product, he named various weapons, including Speck's knife.

In the poem Apocryphal Story , published for the first time in 1970 and reprinted in 1989 in the volume Waving From Shore , the later Pulitzer Prize winner Lisel Mueller Speck reflected on the initial (false) statement that she had no memories of his actions.

The 1976 film The Execution ( Naked Massacre ) with Mathieu Carrière in the lead role, directed by Denis Héroux , traces Richard Speck's deeds in the nurses' home, but relocates the plot to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the 1970s.

In 2002 Keith Walley filmed his deeds under the title Speck (The Richard Speck Story) .

In 2007, Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck was another film adaptation of his life. Michael Feifer directed and Corin Nemec took on the role of Richard Speck .

In 2012, the trash film studio The Asylum released 100 Ghost Street - The Return of Richard Speck, a film loosely based on Speck's murders.

In the fifth season of the series Mad Men , Speck's actions were repeatedly referred to.

Episode 9 of the first season of the Netflix series Mindhunter is about Speck's murders, among other things.

He was also referred to in the 11th season of the series Criminal Minds.

literature

  • Murakami, Peter / Murakami, Julia: Lexicon of serial killers (9th edition). Munich: Ullstein 2003. ISBN 3-548-35935-3 .
  • Douglas, John / Olshaker, Mark: The Murderer's Soul. 25 years in the FBI's special unit for serial criminals . Munich: Orbis 2002. ISBN 3-572-01316-X .
  • Reinhard Haller : The completely normal evil. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 2011, ISBN 978-3-499-62721-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Welt online , accessed June 2, 2013
  2. ^ Robert F. Kennedy: Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968. In: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum> The Kennedy Family> Robert F. Kennedy> Robert F. Kennedy Speeches. March 18, 1968, accessed August 16, 2020 .
  3. ^ Mueller, Lisel : Waving From Shore. Poems , Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1989. p. 30
personal data
SURNAME Bacon, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bacon, Richard Benjamin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirkwood , Illinois , United States
DATE OF DEATH 5th December 1991
Place of death Joliet , Illinois , United States