by Steve Lehto
Capote found the men fascinating, particularly Perry Smith. Smith’s tragic life seemed a foregone conclusion, as if he had been destined from childhood to be a criminal and to hang for his misdeeds. He had spent time in orphanages and street gangs. The life of crime seemed to Capote to be inevitable for Smith. Yet on death row, Smith wrote poetry and painted. Using watercolors and bedsheets, he painted seascapes and religious images and gave them to the prison chaplain. In Capote’s hands, the stories of the two men seemed Shakespearean and the killers became human, not just monsters from newspaper headlines.
The men were hanged in the early morning hours of April 14, 1965, in Lansing, Kansas. Capote had originally planned to watch the executions as sort of the last chapter of his personal journey, but he couldn’t bring himself to attend the event. He had grown too fond of the men to watch them die. However, the deaths allowed Capote to finally end his book. Up until the Supreme Court denied the killers’ final appeal, Capote wasn’t sure himself how his nonfiction novel was going to end.
Capote finished his book and submitted it to his publisher. The work was considered a masterpiece and was almost universally applauded. The story was serialized in the New Yorker over four issues in 1965 and was a huge hit. Random House published the complete book in January 1966 and it became an instant bestseller. The book was eventually turned into two films, one of which was partially filmed on location in the Clutter house. That version, the first of the two, was nominated for four Academy Awards. Films have also been made about Capote’s life, which included depictions of his travels to Holcomb and the writing of In Cold Blood. Still, not everyone was happy with Capote’s telling of the story. The two surviving Clutter daughters complained that Capote had not spoken with the family and friends of the Clutters, who could have given him a clearer picture and allowed him to portray the victims in a more favorable light. They issued a statement that was widely publicized. “The result was his sensational novel, which profited him and grossly misrepresented our family.” Many people were also unhappy with Capote’s sympathetic portraits of the killers. By focusing so much on them and their lives, some readers thought Capote was trying to downplay the crimes they had committed.
Meanwhile, Hickock and Smith would not rest in peace. In 2012, law enforcement officials obtained permission to exhume their bodies as part of a murder investigation in Florida. In December 1959, the Walker family of Osprey, Florida, had been murdered. The seemingly random murders had baffled investigators. The four members of the family were all shot, and one of them was raped. Hickock and Smith were on the run after the Clutter murders, and some people believed they may have traveled to Florida during that time. The police gathered evidence but the testing techniques in 1959 did not reveal anything useful. But more recent advances in DNA analysis may allow for it. So the exhumation was ordered, to see if the case could be finally closed. Authorities opened the graves and recovered bone fragments and then reinterred the two in the cemetery near Lansing, Kansas. To date, the results of the DNA testing have not been released.
The Clutter house is approximately 3,600 square feet, not counting its large basement. It is two stories and has five bedrooms and three baths; it currently sits on only seven acres of the original 1,000-acre farm. When Herb Clutter built it in 1948, he said it had cost him $40,000 to construct. It has hardwood floors on both stories and fireplaces in the living room and basement. The basement added another 1,700 square feet.
Bob Byrd bought the house after the Clutter murders and sold the house to the Mader family in 1990. So many people were still making the trek to look at the house that the Maders began giving tours of the house and charging visitors $5. In 2006 they put the house up for auction, but the bids never reached their minimum and they took the house off the market. They were hoping for $200,000—it appraised in the range of $200,000 to $300,000—but the highest bid received was reportedly in the range of $100,000. In 2006, the county appraised the house for tax purposes at $160,390. As with many murder houses, there are stories that the house is haunted. Particularly enduring is the story that Nancy, the daughter who was sixteen years old at the time of the murders, still haunts the house. Currently, the house is privately owned and not open to the public.
*Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966).
*Ralph F. Voss, Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood (2011).
*“Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain,” New York Times, November 16, 1959.
Born to Raise Hell
RICHARD SPECK
1966
2319 East 100th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60617
One of America’s most infamous murderers from the latter half of the twentieth century was Richard Franklin Speck. Speck was an unemployed twenty-four-year-old drifter who spent some time working on ships in the Great Lakes. Around 11:00 P.M. on July 13, 1966, Speck walked up to the back door of a town house at 2319 E. 100th Street on the south side of Chicago. The town house was on the end of an apartment complex with six units, side by side. It was only a few hundred feet from the merchant marine union hall, and he probably noticed it from his time spent on the streets there recently. This particular town house was home to eight young women—nursing students from South Chicago Community Hospital—and they had another female friend staying with them that evening. Speck had a knife and a gun he had stolen from a woman he had raped earlier that evening. Unquestionably, Speck was a very bad man. He had Born to Raise Hell tattooed on his arm, with LOVE across one set of knuckles and HATE across the other.
Speck forced his way into the town house and herded the women into a bedroom at gunpoint. He then tied them up. Somewhere along the way, he missed one young woman. A nurse named Corazon Amurao crawled under the bottom mattress of a bunk bed and hid when she first heard the commotion at the back of the apartment. From her vantage point under the bed, she watched as Speck took the women out of the room one at a time. A while later, he would return and get another. She would later learn that Speck was raping the women and strangling and stabbing them to death. The victims who were strangled had distinctive knots tied in the material they were strangled with—which would make a lot of sense to investigators later when they discovered that their suspect was a sailor. He raped one of them in the same room where Amurao was hiding beneath the bunk bed. After he had killed the eight women—over a period of four and a half hours—Speck left the apartment. The entire time, Amurao hid beneath the bed, waiting for the ordeal to end. Around sunrise, Amurao emerged from under the bed and saw her dead roommates. She climbed out a window and started yelling for help. “They’re all dead! All my friends are dead!” Neighbors called the police.
A local radio reporter named Joe Cummings was out driving nearby when he heard the call over the police radio, and he raced to the location. Encountering just one police officer at the apartment, Cummings entered the town house and wandered around the crime scene, seeing the bodies of the victims and noting the large amount of blood on the floor—which he walked through. He then called in to WCFL with his mobile radio equipment and did some live broadcasts from the scene, announcing to Chicago that eight nursing students had been murdered at his location. More police soon arrived. Cummings continued his reporting, helping keep Chicago on high alert as the people of the city realized a crazed murderer was on the loose.
Police soon found the fingerprints of the killer at the scene. Detectives had also gotten a good description from Amurao: the killer was tall, had blond hair, and spoke with a heavy southern accent. Police fanned out and began questioning everyone they could find nearby. People in the neighborhood remembered seeing the man described by Amurao in the area recently. The nearby union hall appeared to be part of the puzzle. Might a sailor have spotted the boardinghouse filled with nurses when he came and went from the hall? Sure enough, someone at the hall remembered a sailor matching the description given by Amurao. The man had been upset about not getting a job and had made a scene. The event had stuck in the clerk’s mind
, and he could remember the angry man’s name. His name was Richard Speck. And Speck had previously given his fingerprints to try to get a job; it was just a matter of time before the police would catch him.
^ ^ ^
Richard Franklin Speck was born in 1941 and had an ugly upbringing in a large family with an alcoholic and violent stepfather. He also had a short-lived marriage that ended when his wife divorced him, saying he had regularly raped her. He spent time in prison in Texas and on another occasion paid a $10 fine after stabbing someone. In 1966, Speck headed north to see if a change of scenery might help. His sister Martha lived in Chicago and he would stay with her and her husband, Gene Thornton, until he wore out his welcome. Speck was the kind of guy who was always in, near, or causing trouble. It didn’t take long for his brother-in-law to figure that out.
Speck’s brother-in-law had been in the navy and thought Speck should get a job as an apprentice seaman onboard a ship. If nothing else, it would get Speck out of their lives for long periods of time. Who knows? Maybe Speck would find someplace far away that he liked better than Chicago. The two went into the Coast Guard office and Speck applied for a letter of authority, which would allow him to get an entry-level job on board a Great Lakes ship. The process required Speck to provide fingerprints and to have his picture taken. He then landed a job on an iron ore freighter working the Great Lakes. His first trip didn’t go smoothly; he developed appendicitis and had to be airlifted from the boat to Hancock, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He rejoined the ship but got in a drunken argument on board and was kicked off. He wound up back at his sister’s place.
His brother-in-law wasn’t going to give up on his dream of getting Speck out of the house. He took Speck to the National Maritime Union hiring hall so he could file the necessary paperwork to obtain his seaman’s card. Speck then tried getting aboard another ship but ran into a stretch of bad luck. Several positions were filled shortly before he heard of them, and at least once he was sent on a wild-goose chase after a job that had already been filled. After one of these fruitless attempts at getting a job he caused a ruckus, yelling at one of the agents for the union. The agent would remember the incident.
Meanwhile, Speck was staying with his sister and brother-in-law, but it was clear that they were getting tired of having him around. They finally told him he had to leave. Speck spent a night or two on the streets, sleeping in houses that were still under construction and drinking at local dive bars. The last time his sister saw him before the trouble was in the parking lot of the union hall, at 2335 E. 100th Street in Chicago.
On July 13, Speck spent the day drinking in a local bar and spotted a woman there named Ella Hooper who was also drinking. He lured her back to a cheap hotel room, where he raped and robbed her. One of the things he stole from her was a small pistol that she had been carrying in her purse. He then went back out, had dinner, and returned to the bar where he had encountered Hooper. He drank some more. It was at that point he went to the apartment filled with nursing students, armed with the gun he had stolen from Hooper.
Amazingly, after his killing spree, Speck didn’t run far. Even though he knew he was a wanted man, Speck didn’t leave Chicago and spent the next few days hanging around cheap hotels and drinking in local bars. The police found the address of Speck’s sister and brother-in-law on paperwork he had left with the union, and they asked the union to call to say that they had found a job for Speck. The brother-in-law managed to find Speck quickly and told him to call the union hall. When he called, they told him that a job was available on a ship that Speck knew had sailed a few days earlier. It was one of the ships he had been angry about when he wasn’t hired. Suspecting a trap, Speck told them he was out of town but he would see what he could do about getting to Chicago.
Still, he did not act like a fugitive. He brought a prostitute back to his room and even told her his name was Richard. When she left the room, she alerted the front desk to the fact that Speck had a gun. The police showed up and questioned him. They asked for identification, but the name did not mean anything to them yet. Amazingly, investigators at the scene of the murders had learned Speck’s identity, but they had not gotten word to all of their patrolmen yet. The police took his gun and left. Recognizing how lucky he had just been, Speck quickly changed hotels, moving to another—one that charged only eighty-five cents a night. Police finally got word out about their suspect to their patrol officers and the media. News reports soon included Speck’s name and a good description of his distinctive Born to Raise Hell tattoo. Chicago became a city on edge.
Speck realized now his time was limited; he had bought newspapers that prominently displayed his picture and name on the front page, saying he was wanted for murder. Speck went back to his eighty-five-cents-a-night hotel and attempted to commit suicide by slashing his wrists with a broken wine bottle. The desk clerk at the hotel was alerted by a fellow tenant who saw Speck bleeding and called an ambulance. At Cook County Hospital, one of the doctors attending to Speck noticed the Born to Raise Hell tattoo and remembered reading about it in the papers. The police were on the scene shortly. They talked Amurao into putting on her nurse’s uniform and going on rounds with another nurse from the hospital, to see if Speck was the right man. After seeing him again face-to-face, she confirmed it. Chicago police were overly cautious, not wanting to possibly make any mistakes with the arrest of such an infamous killer.
Speck claimed to not remember anything about the night of the murders. He said he had been drinking and on drugs and the entire night was blank in his memory. No one bought it. The state had Speck examined by a team of psychiatrists and doctors to make sure he was competent to stand trial, and they confirmed that he was mentally sound.
Speck had little chance of acquittal. Along with his fingerprints at the scene and his checkered past, there had been the one witness: Cora Amurao. It took the jury only forty-nine minutes to find him guilty. The court sentenced him to death. After a series of appeals, Speck’s death sentence was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that the court had improperly let the prosecution exclude people from the jury pool who had been opposed to the death penalty. Shortly after that, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional anyway. Speck was then resentenced: His term would be from four hundred to twelve hundred years in prison. He wouldn’t live that long. He died of a heart attack shortly before his fiftieth birthday, in 1991.
Before he died, however, Speck made some more headlines from behind bars. In 1978 he granted an interview to Chicago newspaper columnist Bob Greene. He no longer claimed to have had amnesia at the time of the killings. He openly admitted that he had killed the eight women and he remembered it quite well. He told Greene he passed his time in prison getting high on drugs and believed he would be out of prison before the year 2000. Readers were angered and wondered how prisoners were getting drugs while behind bars. That wouldn’t be the last time Speck made headlines.
Someone shot a video in 1988 of Speck in prison and passed the video along to a Chicago television reporter named Bill Kurtis in 1996. On camera, Speck spoke casually of how he had killed the women—“It just wasn’t their night”—but his behavior on camera was what shocked its viewers. Speck walked around in silk panties and had apparently grown breasts. People speculated that he had somehow gotten his hands on hormones while behind bars. He also ingested cocaine and performed oral sex on another inmate while on camera. The entire time, it was clear that Speck knew he was being videotaped and didn’t care. He appeared to believe he could do anything he wanted and get away with it. On camera he said, “If they only knew how much fun I was having, they’d turn me loose.” The video caused an even bigger uproar than the Greene column. Who was giving Speck cocaine while behind bars? How was he getting hormone treatments? Was anyone supervising the prisoners? Who gave them a video camera?
The apartment where Speck killed the nurses was eventually turned into a condominium along with the rest of the units in the compl
ex. The town house unit where Speck killed his victims is on the far left of a six-unit block of two-story town houses, as viewed from the street. The individual unit in question sold in 2005 for $89,000 and again in 2005 for $96,000. It is 1,464 square feet with one and a half baths. It was built in 1958. It is now privately owned and is nondescript compared to other murder houses around the country, blending in perfectly with the other units to which it is attached. If it were not pointed out to a passerby, there would be no way of knowing what atrocities had been committed there in 1966.
*Bob Sector, “The Richard Speck Case,” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1966.
Helter Skelter Houses
THE HINMAN HOUSE
THE TATE HOUSE
THE LABIANCA HOUSE
1969
964 Old Topanga Canyon Road
Topanga, California 90290
10066 Cielo Drive (formerly 10050 Cielo Drive)
Beverly Hills, California 90210
Demolished—new house built on location
3311 Waverly Drive (formerly 3301 Waverly Drive)
Los Angeles, California 90027
In the summer of 1969, a series of bizarre and bloody murders occurred in the Los Angeles area that confounded local authorities. At first, police didn’t even spot the links between the murders, which took place at three different locations. A music teacher named Gary Hinman was tortured and stabbed to death at a remote house in Topanga Canyon. His killer wrote Political Piggy on the wall in Hinman’s blood. Less than two weeks later, five people were shot and stabbed to death in a bizarre scene, with the word PIG written in one victim’s blood on the door of the house where the victims were murdered. Several of the victims were well known in show business, including actress Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, Hollywood’s best-known hairstylist. Despite valuables and cash being present, the killer or killers did not bother stealing anything. Another double murder took place the very next day in Los Angeles. Again, nothing connected these victims to the others, but someone had written a bloody message on the wall of this crime scene as well. The police would eventually realize that the victims had all run afoul of a bizarre character named Charles Manson and his followers, the Manson Family.