Richard Speck
Netflix/YouTubeLeft: Jack Erdie as Richard Speck. Right: Richard Speck.
When Corazon Amurao answered a knock on the door of the townhouse she shared with several other nursing student on Chicago’s South Side on July 13, 1966, she opened to find Richard Speck pointing a gun at her.
What happened next over the next several hours would become one of the most notorious mass murders in American history. The complete unbridled rage that Richard Speck unleased on his victims, which left eight of them dead, has been an openly debated topic in criminological and psychological circles.
Was his brain so badly damaged from his stepfather’s drunken abuse that Speck had no control over it, or was he simply an evil-hearted man who committed the horrific mass murder because he wanted to do it?
There’s no question that Richard Speck lived a very troubled life from an early age. After his father died, his mother married an abusive alcoholic who savagely abused Speck and his seven siblings.
He committed several violent crimes against his family as a teenager and young man before he became a mass murderer at the age of 25.
During the attack, Speck was apparently so lost in his rage that he completely forgot about Amurao who opened the door to him that night. Busy brutalizing the other young women in the house, Speck didn’t see Amurao slip under her bed, where she would hide throughout the horrific ordeal.
Having completely forgotten about her, after he had beaten or strangled to death Amurao’s eight other housemates, he left the townhouse with what he had robbed from the dead women.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesMugshot of Richard Speck taken when he was 20.
It would be several hours before Amurao worked up the courage to come out of hiding, but when she did, she quickly called to her neighbors for help.
When the police arrived and interviewed Amurao, she remembered enough details that soon police had been able to identify Speck as the murderer and launched a nationwide manhunt to capture him alive.
With his picture everywhere on the news and an outraged public willing to take matters into their own hands should they be the ones to dins him, Speck attempted to kill himself a few days after the attack, but after slashing his wrists he lost his nerve and called an ambulance for help.
Identified by hospital staff, Speck was immediately arrested and tried on eight counts of murder. The key witness, Amurao, did not flinch in identifying Speck as the murderer. It took the jury less than an hour to find Speck guilt of all eight counts. The Judge sentence Speck to death.
Speck would avoid execution though. After an anomaly with the jury got Speck’s execution commuted, he would the remaining 25 years of his life in prison before finally dying of a heart attack.
After an autopsy of his brain, a doctor would go on to state that his violent actions were more than likely caused by a number of issues including brain abnormalities and abuse at the hands of his alcoholic stepfather.
Speck’s violent tendencies come out in Mindhunter as a violent unpredictability. In one scene, you witness Speck lovingly care for a bird while in prison before chucking the creature into a fan that rips the bird to shreds.
The beauty of the Mindhunter is that the showrunners take the time to make realistic portrayals of real-life people. Because there are no weekly deadlines to hit or rushed scripts, Netflix can take its time to make this show a top-notch property that relies on true-to-life characters that were actually real, even though it seems as if these horrible serial killers couldn’t possibly exist.
