Richard Speck

Speck met 15-year old Shirley Malone during a Texas State Fair in October 1961, who became pregnant after dating him.

The couple married on January 19, 1962 and had a daughter, Bobby Lynn, born on July 5, 1962. The marriage was short-lived, as he spent much of the marriage in and out of prison. His wife filed for divorce in 1966.

Speck died of a heart attack on December 5, 1991 after spending 25 years in prison.

Richard Speck was born on December 6, 1941 in Kirkwood, Illinois, Chicago. His father Benjamin Franklin Speck worked as a packer while his mother Mary Margaret Carbaugh Speck was a housewife. The family moved to Monmouth, Illinois shortly after his birth.

He had seven siblings; four older sisters, two elder brothers and a younger sister, Carolyn.

Benjamin Speck died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1947, when Ricard was just a 6-year-old. Three years later, his mother remarried. His stepfather was Carl August Rudolph Lindberg a traveling insurance salesman from Texas.

Lindberg was a raging alcoholic and often beat Speck when drunk. Speckhad a minor childhood accident when he fell from a tree.

Speck was an average student and committed a string of juvenile crimes from an early age.

he was first arrested at the age of 13, in 1955, for trespassing. He dropped out of school when he was 16 and started doing odd jobs around 1960. He had become a compulsive drinker by then.

His second arrest was in 1963, when he was caught forging a co-worker's paycheck and was convicted for forgery and sentenced to three years in prison. However, he received parole after having done 16 months of jail time.

He returned to prison almost immediately this time for aggravated assault, having attacked a woman in a parking lot of her apartment building with a knife barely one week after his release.

In 1966, Speck bought a second-hand car and used it to rob a grocery store. To escape his 42nd arrest after this incident, he caught a bus to Illinois, aided by his sister Carolyn.

He had a lifelong fear of people staring at him.

He died a day before his 50th birthday.