Richard Speck - Life in Prison

Life in Prison

While incarcerated at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, Speck was given the nickname "birdman", after the film Birdman of Alcatraz, because he kept a pair of sparrows that had flown into his cell. He was described as a loner who kept a stamp collection and listened to music, and whose work within the prison involved bars and walls. His contacts with the warden included requests for new shirts or a radio or other mundane items. The warden merely described him as "a big nothing doing time." Speck was not a model prisoner; he was often caught with drugs or distilled moonshine. Punishment for such infractions never stopped him. "How am I going to get in trouble? I'm here for 1,200 years!"

Speck customarily refused all media requests, but granted one prison interview to Bob Greene in 1978; Speck told Greene he read Greene's column in the Chicago Tribune. In this interview, Speck confessed to the murders for the first time publicly and said he thought he would get out of prison "between now and the year 2000", at which time he hoped to run his own grocery store business. He told Greene one of his pleasures in prison was "getting high." When Greene asked him if he compared himself to celebrity killers like John Dillinger, Speck replied, "Me, I'm not like Dillinger or anybody else. I'm freakish."

Speck said when he killed the nurses he "had no feelings", but things had changed: "I had no feelings at all that night. They said there was blood all over the place. I can't remember. It felt like nothing ... I'm sorry as hell. For those girls, and for their families, and for me. If I had to do it over again, it would be a simple house burglary."

Speck's "final thought for the American people" was: "Just tell 'em to keep up their hatred for me. I know it keeps up their morale. And I don't know what I'd do without it."