Richard Speck

Richard Benjamin Speck (December 6, 1941 – December 5, 1991) was an American mass murderer who systematically tortured, raped, and murdered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on July 14, 1966.

He was sentenced to death, but that sentence was later overturned due to issues with jury selection at his trial. Speck died of a heart attack after 25 years in prison. In 1996, video tapes featuring Speck were shown before the Illinois State Legislature to highlight some of the illegal activity that took place in prisons.

Early life and crimes

Monmouth, 1941–1950

Richard Benjamin Speck was born in the village of Kirkwood, Illinois, the seventh of eight children of Benjamin Franklin Speck and Mary Margaret Carbaugh Speck. The family moved to Monmouth, Illinois shortly after Speck's birth. Speck and his younger sister, Carolyn, born in 1943, were much younger than their four older sisters and two older brothers (Speck's oldest brother, Robert, died at the age of 23 in an automobile accident in 1952). Speck's father worked as a packer at Western Stoneware in Monmouth and had previously worked as a farmer and logger. Speck was very close to his father, who died in 1947 from a heart attack at the age of 53. Speck was six years old at the time.

Charles Starkweather

Charles Raymond "Charlie" Starkweather (November 24, 1938 – June 25, 1959) was an American teenaged spree killer who murdered eleven people in the states of Nebraska and Wyoming in a two-month murder spree between December 1957 and January 1958. All but one of Starkweather's victims were killed between January 21 and January 29, 1958, the date of his arrest. During the murders committed in 1958, Starkweather was accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. Starkweather was executed 17 months after the events, and Fugate served 17 years in prison before her release in 1976. The Starkweather - Fugate spree has inspired several films including Badlands (1973), and Natural Born Killers.

Early life

Starkweather was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the third of seven children of Guy and Helen Starkweather. The Starkweathers were a poor but respectable family of working class background. Guy Starkweather was by all accounts a mild-mannered man; he was a carpenter who was often unemployed due to rheumatoid arthritis in his hands. During Guy's periods of unemployment, Helen Starkweather supplemented the family's income as a waitress.

Serial killer

A serial killer is a person who murders three or more people, usually due to abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant break (a "cooling off period") between them. Some sources, such as the FBI, disregard the "three or more" criterion and define serial killing as "a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone".

Although psychological gratification is the usual motive for serial killing, and most serial killings involve sexual contact with the victim, the FBI states that the motives of serial killers can include anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking. The murders may be attempted or completed in a similar fashion, and the victims may have something in common: age group, appearance, gender, or race, for example.

Serial killing is not the same as mass murdering, nor is it spree killing, in which murders are committed in two or more locations in a short time. However, cases of extended bouts of sequential killings over periods of weeks or months with no apparent "cooling off period" or "return to normalcy" have caused some experts to suggest a hybrid category of "spree-serial killer".

Green River

Green River may refer to:

Rivers

Canada

South Africa

United States

Gary Ridgway

Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949) is an American serial killer known as the Green River Killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders and later confessed to nearly twice that number. As part of his plea bargain, an additional conviction was added, bringing the total number of convictions to 49, making him the most prolific American serial killer in history according to confirmed murders. He murdered numerous women and girls in Washington State during the 1980s and 1990s. Most of his victims were alleged to be prostitutes and other women in vulnerable situations, including underage runaways. The press gave him his nickname after the first five victims were found in the Green River; his identity was not known. He strangled the women, usually by hand but sometimes using ligatures. After strangling them, he would dump their bodies in forested and overgrown areas in King County, often returning to the dead bodies to have sexual intercourse with them.

On November 30, 2001, as he was leaving the Kenworth truck factory where he worked in Renton, Washington, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose cases were linked to him through DNA evidence. As part of a plea bargain wherein he agreed to disclose the whereabouts of still-missing women, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.