He was born in a family who knew what it meant to survive. When he was old, enough he then became a sailor. By the time he was twenty-five years old, his marriage was beginning to fall apart. He very often took part in getting drunk and fighting with people in bars. He was also very familiar with drugs, violence, and alcohol. People knew him to be obsessed with sex. At that time, he was working in a Chicago boatyard until July 13, 1996. He lost that job when he got into a fight with a ship's officer. After leaving work that day, he borrowed money to buy alcohol and drugs. Later that same evening, after injecting himself with an unknown drug, he walked to a townhouse that was rented by nine student nurses; he was armed with a gun and a knife. When he knocked on the door he told the woman that he badly needed money, he made her and five other residents lay on the floor of a bedroom. By tearing some of the sheets, he tied them up, after tying them up he told them that they would not be hurt. By the time, three other women came to the house he tied them up with the other captives. All the captive women were residents except one. After gathering, all the money he could find he still didn't leave, then becoming very agitated he led the captive women in singles and pairs to other rooms. He stabbed and strangled them; his last victim was raped before she was grossly murdered. Luckily before she was caught a women who fought her way to hide beneath a bed, where Speck could not find her, he left. A manhunt began after the women sought help. By trying to slit his wrists in a flophouse, he made his capture easy. Not many days later Richard Speck was tried in 1967 and he was sentenced to die. After winning the appeal of that trial, by his second trial he was re-sentenced to more than 400 hundred years in prison. Before that he was a suspect in the disappearances and deaths of five women that occurred from May to July 1966, but he was not charged.
