Prosecutor Argues Against Speck Parole

Richard Speck belongs behind bars or in a grave for stabbing and strangling eight student nurses 21 years ago, a prosecutor argued Wednesday as a state panel considered whether to grant him parole.

Taunting Notes

“How ironic that on what should have been the 20th anniversary of his execution, he seeks a second chance for freedom. . . . He never gave those nurses a second chance,” said Gayle Shines, an assistant Cook County state’s attorney.

She said freeing Speck would be tantamount to “releasing a time bomb.”

Speck was not present as a three-member panel of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board heard 90 minutes of arguments on his possible parole. He appeared at his first parole hearing in 1976, but skipped the next four and instead sent contemptuous, taunting notes to the prisoner review board.

The panel will make a recommendation to the 10-member board, which will announce its decision next Wednesday.

Hid Under Bed

Speck is serving eight consecutive 50- to 150-year terms at Stateville Correctional Center for killing the eight nurses in a South Chicago townhouse in July, 1966. They were bound and gagged and taken one by one into a room where they were stabbed or strangled.

Speck was a 24-year-old drifter when he was arrested and later convicted on the testimony of an eyewitness, Corazon Amurao, who had managed to roll under a bed and hide.

More than a dozen relatives and seven former classmates of the slain nurses attended the hearing to oppose freeing Speck.

“We’re here to see that he never reaches the outside of these walls,” Joe Matusek, father of victim Patricia Matusek, told the board.

“I want to accuse him of five more murders--the parents of three of the girls who died of the stress and strain they had to go through,” said Matusek, of Calumet City.