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Shop nowThe Crime of the Century
Richard Speck and the Murders That Shocked a Nation
Narrator
Christina Delaine
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Length
18 hours 26 minutes
Language
English
On July 14th, 1966, Richard Franklin Speck swept through a quiet Chicago townhouse like a summer tornado and stabbed, strangled, and killed eight young nurses in a violent sexual rampage. By morning, only one nurse, Corazon Amurao, had miraculously survived, and her scream of terror was heard around the world. As the eight bodies were carried out of the small building, the coroner, who had seen the carnage up close, told a gathering crowd: "It is the crime of the century!"
Now, the prosecutor who put Speck in prison for life (William J. Martin) and the author and journalist who won an award for his coverage of the crime (Dennis L. Breo) have teamed up to recreate the blood-soaked night that opened a new chapter in the history of American crime: mass murder. Corazon Amurao, the nurse the killer left behind, confronted Speck at trial and told jurors, "This is the man!" Richard Speck was spared execution by Supreme Court rulings and here is the inside story of how he confessed to the murders in a sordid prison video made three years before his death of a heart attack in 1991. And here is the life today of the nurse who survived the crime that murdered American innocence.
Dennis L. Breo, a Florida author and journalist, is the former national correspondent of the Journal of the American Medical Association. His cover story on the Speck murders, published in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, won an award for exemplary journalism from the Chicago Headline Club. A graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, his work has also appeared in Parade, People, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Sun Times, Reader's Digest, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, News America Syndicate, and New York Times Syndicate.
William J. Martin was named Chief Prosecutor in the prosecution of Richard Speck and, with tremendous support from his Office, stayed with every aspect of the case from Speck's arrest through the error-free trial and the successful appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. William has twin loves: the law and writing. He was editor of all of his school newspapers and founded and was editor of the Loyola Law Times, a journal of opinion at his law school. He has had short stories published in the Chicago Bar Record and a Newberry Library anthology, all dealing with a life in the criminal law which he has practiced from 1970 to the present. He also defends lawyers and judges against disciplinary charges. William is a member of the Order of Coif, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and is regularly named in The Best Lawyers in America. He has lectured nationally on the Speck case and is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He collects first-hand sources from Prohibition-era Chicago murder cases and is writing stories about celebrated cases.
Christina Delaine is a SOVAS Voice Arts Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator who has recorded over 100 audiobooks. She is also an Audie Award nominee. An accomplished stage and voice actor, Delaine has appeared on stages across the country and has voiced scores of commercials and video games. She has a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from Brown University.