Did Richard Speck, the ‘Birdman’ Who Murdered 8 Nursing Students, Have a Connection to Ed Gein?

Richard Speck was many things throughout his life: troubled teen, pervasive burglar, “Birdman.” But he is most infamous for how, on one summer night, he stabbed, strangled and sexually assaulted eight Chicago nursing students.

The mass murders struck horror into a country that was still reeling from Ed Gein’s crimes a decade earlier. Even more unsettling was the idea that Speck exemplified a continuation of this upswell of violent crime–and perhaps had been inspired by Gein himself.

Born December 6, 1941 in Kirkwood, Ill., much of Speck’s early life was marred by tragedy and hardship. His beloved father passed away from a heart attack when Speck was 6 years old, and his mother remarried an abusive alcoholic from Texas less than three years later, a man whom Speck loathed. Speck spent his childhood moving around poor neighborhoods in East Dallas no less than 10 times.

Speck’s personal demons manifested early on. He took up heavy drinking at the age of 12. In 1955, Speck was caught trespassing, the first of dozens of arrests that occurred over the next eight years. Speck struggled in school and, at the age of 16, dropped out altogether. He worked at a bottling company and married 15-year-old Shirley Malone in early 1962. Speck’s only daughter was born soon after, while he was serving a 22-day jail sentence in McKinney, Texas.

From age 21 and onwards, Speck committed a spate of crimes, including forgery, burglary and aggravated assault. He was jailed, sentenced and paroled several times in Dallas between 1963 and 1965. By March 1966, Speck fled to Monmouth, Ill., to avoid facing burglary charges, which would have led to his 42nd arrest. Over the next several months, Speck grew infuriated with the odd jobs that never lasted long and the wife who’d divorced him from afar. During this time, Speck raped and burgled a 65-year-old woman. He is also believed to have beaten to death another woman who was last seen at a tavern he frequented. After being questioned by police, he fled to Chicago.

On July 13, 1966, a frustrated, jobless Speck spent the day drinking in Chicago taverns. Then, drunk from hours of alcohol consumption and armed with a gun and switchblade, he made his way to a student nursing dormitory in the nearby Jeffrey Manor neighborhood.

Speck broke into the building around 11:00 p.m. and, over the course of several hours, held captive eight nursing students: Gloria Davy, Suzanne Farris, Merlita Gargullo, Mary Ann Jordan, Patricia Matusek, Valentina Pasion, Nina Jo Schmale and Pamela Wilkening. He torturously led one woman out at a time and either stabbed or strangled her to death, sometimes raping her beforehand. One student, Corazon Amurao, managed to escape death by hiding under a bed until 6:00 a.m. the following morning. By then, Speck had fled, leaving bloodshed and an apparent lack of motive in his wake.

Only a few days later on July 17, after a suicide attempt landed him in a local hospital, Speck was arrested. A few drifters and even the attending doctor at the hospital recognized the man with the “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo, as described in the newspaper by the sole survivor, Amurao. By the time Speck was tried and sentenced to death in April 1967, at which time he said he had no recollection of the murders, his atrocities had been deemed “the crime of the century.”

Speck’s sentence was altered in 1972 from death to eight consecutive sentences of 50 to 150 years’ imprisonment. While incarcerated in Stateville Correctional Center, Speck continued to cause problems and took drugs, simply rationalizing, “How am I going to get in trouble? I'm here for 1,200 years!” He also reportedly underwent hormone treatments while behind bars that caused him to grow breasts, as evident in a prison video in which he was having sex with another inmate and wearing women’s underwear.

A loner who expressed little remorse for his crimes, Speck earned the nickname the “Birdman,” an allusion to the “Birdman of Alcatraz” Robert Stroud, on account of keeping sparrows in his cell. In John E. Douglas’ Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, he recounts how Speck nursed an injured sparrow back to health and perched it on his shoulder. Upon being told by a guard that pets weren’t allowed in the prison, Speck promptly threw the bird into a spinning fan. The guard, shocked, asked why Speck had killed the beloved sparrow, to which Speck replied, “If I can't have it, no one can.”

In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Speck is shown talking highly about his adoration for Ed Gein and even writes a letter to his “idol,” implying that the Butcher of Plainfield’s crimes inspired a generation of serial killers and mass murderers. In reality, there is little to no evidence that Speck corresponded with Gein, or even that he held admiration for the infamous killer. While there are certainly parallels between their heinous crimes and their impact on the American public’s “end of an age of innocence” (as one prosecutor put it), any connection between Speck and Gein is purely fiction.

However, like Gein, Speck spent his final days in a government facility. Speck was refused parole seven times while serving his reduced 100- to 300-year prison sentence, and he died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991, one day shy of his 50th birthday.