One by One

The carefree clutter of books and clothes, the cherished mementos of lost childhood, beginning career and burgeoning romance marked it inimitably as a young women's dormitory. Around the two-story apartment on Chicago's far South Side, Teddy bears stood button-eyed vigil over dressers festooned with framed pictures of parents and boy friends. Among the souvenirs of tender evenings past was a long-empty champagne bottle. In the three upstairs bedrooms lined with bunks, the closets were crammed with party dresses. In one bedroom, a postcard was fondly pinned to a notice board: "Some day before you know it, school will be over with. It's pretty lonesome here without you. Really. Peter."

The coffee tables were littered with fashion magazines and paperbacks --Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Truman Capote's Other Voices', Other Rooms, Ruth Willock's The Night Visitor. Another note on a kitchen bulletin board reiterated a standing order: "Attention. Students are not to allow anyone into the townhouse without the house mother being there." An oversize poster on a bedroom wall proclaimed: "Sleep Well Tonight -- Your National Guard Is Awake."

It was a grimly pathetic reassurance in the face of what happened at 2319 East 100th Street last week. In an incredible, nearly soundless orgy of mutilation and murder that took place in the early hours, a single male intruder herded together and murdered, one by one, with packinghouse precision, eight pretty student nurses. The Windy City's greatest mass slaughter since the St. Valentine's Day tommy-gun massacre of seven gangland hoods in 1929, it was by any standard one of the most horrifying crimes in U.S. history. Even to Chicago police -- inured to every form of sadistic death -- the apartment presented a heartrending, stomach-turning spectacle. "In my six years as coroner, geon," and in as many years as police surgeon," said Coroner Andrew Toman, "I have never seen anything this bad. This is the crime of the century."

Sweethearts & Samaritans. Its poign ancy was accentuated by the youth and decency of the victims. All eight of the girls, as one observer noted, were "good people, the daughters, sisters and sweethearts of other good people." Neighbors volunteered that they were model tenants, quiet, serious and well-mannered.

Above all, the nurses seemed enthusiastically dedicated to their calling. Their natural leader was Gloria Jean Davy, 22, one of six children of a Dyer, Ind., steel-plant foreman, and a onetime national "Sweetheart of the Future Farmers of America," who had recent ly been elected president of the Illinois Student Nurses Association; Gloria planned to join the Peace Corps after finishing training in August. Athletic Suzanne Bridget Farris, 21, one of three children of a Chicago Transit Authority superintendent, hoped to specialize in pediatric nursing, was engaged to be married next spring to the brother of another nurse, Mary Ann Jordan, 20. Daughter of a Chicago municipal engineer, Mary Ann lived at home -- but, on the fatal night last week, had been discussing Suzanne's wedding plans with her and had sneaked into the residence to spend the night with her future sister-in-law.

"I Enjoy Helping." Nina Jo Schmale, 21, queen of the nurses' spring dance, was engaged to a high school sweetheart, proudly kept in her room a sign post for "Schmale Rd.," named for her Wheaton, Ill., family. A trim champion swimmer, member of her high school water-ballet team, and engaged to a male nursing student in Chicago, native Chicagoan Patricia Ann Matusek, 21, learned on the day of the murders that she had been accepted as a staff member at the city's Children's Memorial Hospital. In her application she had written: "Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be a nurse because I enjoy helping those in need. The joy one gets helping others cannot be taken away."

Blue-eyed Pamela Lee Wilkening, 20, a racing-car enthusiast, brought a touch of zany humor to the group, yet was described by a hospital friend as "the sweetest girl you'd ever want to know." When she applied for training she wrote: "I have always wanted to be a nurse. I never liked to see people suffer." There were, finally, three Philippine exchange student nurses who had moved in only two months earlier -- Merlita Gargullo, 22, who had brought with her from Manila a pair of native clacking poles with which she performed a "bamboo dance" at parties; Valentina Pasion, 23, who wrote home that she wished she could stay in America forever; and Corazon Amurao, 22. Like her two paisanas, Corazon (whose nickname was "Zony"), a shy, modest country girl from rural Batangas province some 60 miles from Manila, was still bewildered by the clatter and bustle of the strange American city.

The locale to which the girls--all brunettes--were bussed home daily from South Chicago Community Hospital appeared ideally suited for a dormitory. Known as Jeffery Manor, it is a pleasant, white-collar neighborhood of small apartments, neat homes, frolicking children and Dairy Queen stands, well removed from the city's roiling slums--and with one of its lowest crime rates. As one resident put it, "It's the kind of neighborhood where you can walk your dog after midnight."

Knock on the Door. So it seemed until last week, when a prowler, aching to kill, evidently unhinged a ground-floor kitchen screen, reached in, and unlocked a back door. Creeping upstairs to a front bedroom where Miss Amurao was sleeping, he knocked on her door. Politely, she opened it. "A man was standing there," she recalled. "The first thing I noticed about him was the strong odor of alcohol." He had a small black pistol in one hand, a butcher knife in the other. Then, continued Corazon, "he made me go down the hall to a middle bedroom. He stopped at this bedroom and awakened three girls there. He made the four of us go into the back bedroom, where two other girls were sleeping. He said he wouldn't hurt us, he just wanted money to go to New Orleans."

Ordering the first six girls to lie on the floor, the intruder used his knife to rip strips from a bunk-bed sheet and from a cotton dress, then tied the girls up. Meanwhile, three other nurses who had been out late--Sue Farris, Mary Jordan and Gloria Davy--returned home before their 12:30 a.m. curfew, were surprised by the intruder, and were forced to join his bedroom captives. "There were some light outcries by the girls who came in late, but it wasn't much," said Miss Amurao. "He made them lie on the floor with the rest of us." Before binding and gagging each girl, the tormenter asked where she kept her money--but took pains to put his prisoners at ease. "He sat on the floor with them," said Corazon. "He indicated he was in need of money. They gave him money and thought that would satisfy him. They obviously had no idea what was in his mind."

"A Little Scream." Then, Miss Amurao related, "he took one of the girls out of the room. After a few minutes he came back alone and took another of the girls. He kept this up." One by one, the nurses went like lambs to the slaughter. None uttered more than "a little scream," said Corazon. The windows were open, but a second group of nurses who lived next door was on vacation; the victims' muffled cries were not loud enough to awaken other neighbors.

Despite his systematic savagery, the slayer either miscounted or forgot the one victim--possibly because he had learned that eight girls lived in the house and did not realize that a ninth, Mary Ann Jordan, was spending the night. "While he was out of the room on one trip," Corazon recounted, "I rolled under the bunk bed clear against the wall. I stayed under the bed for hours and hours." Throughout the terror-filled night she lay frozen with fear, not knowing whether the murderer was still in the house or gone. At 5 a.m., an alarm clock went off (a hospital Jeep was due to pick the girls up at 6:30 to take them to work), and slowly ran down. After summoning her courage, the lone survivor wriggled free of her bonds. Stumbling over her classmates' corpses, too afraid to venture downstairs, she beat out a front bedroom screen, crawled onto a balcony ledge, shrieking hysterically: "All my friends are dead! Oh, God! I'm the only one alive!"

Sophoclean Horror. First policeman on the scene was Patrolman Daniel Kelly, who, by tragic coincidence, had known Gloria Davy and used to date her sister Charlene. Said another officer: "The bodies were piled up like in a Nazi prison camp." It was indeed a scene of Sophoclean horror. A pool of blood glistened on the floor of one bedroom. In another, a torn, blood-soaked bed comforter lay under a two-piece yellow-and-white bathing suit that had been hung up to dry. The pages of a mimeographed lecture ("The Mental Mechanisms for Ego Defense") were strewn about the floor near a second puddle of blood. Bloodstains smeared the front of a record album on a bed. A calendar (Sept. 8: "Hallelujah. Training completed") lay crumpled on a night table. A blood-drenched sneaker remained where it had fallen. The upstairs bath was awash with blood. Downstairs, strips of bed sheet, clumsily tied with reef knots and granny knots, lay about the living-room floor, and the soft cushions bore ugly dark stains.

Gloria Davy lay nude and face down on a downstairs divan, strangled and mutilated. Sue Farris was stabbed nine times and strangled, her wrist-bound body left in a second-floor bathroom. Mary Ann Jordan's corpse was in a front bedroom, stabbed five times, including one thrust in the left eye and one in the heart. Next to her were Pat Matusek, strangled with wrists bound; and Pam Wilkening, also bound by the wrists, who had been stabbed in the heart. In the adjoining front bedroom sprawled Nina Schmale, bound at the wrists, gagged, knifed four times in the neck and strangled; Merlita Gargullo, wrists and ankles bound, dead of a 6-in.-deep thrust in the side of her neck, which pierced the trachea; and Valentina Pasion, wrists bound, knifed four times, strangled. In all, the killer inflicted 24 stab wounds. An initial examination revealed no evidence that any of the victims had been raped.

"Some Planning" Superintendent Orlando Wilson assigned 60 men to the case, and after sifting the scene for five hours, they came up with three main clues. One was a sweat-soaked man's T shirt, size 34-38, found on the floor of the living room outside the kitchen. Another was a set of "excellent" fingerprints revealed on a vanity mirror, a purse, a water glass, a door and a plate. The third, and not the least important, was Corazon's description of the killer: a white man, approximately 25 years old, 6 ft. tall, weighing 170 Ibs., with crew-cut brownish hair.

Within 48 hours of the slayings, a na tionwide manhunt was launched for a blue-eyed ex-convict charged by Chicago authorities with murder and by Federal agents with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. He was identified as Richard B. Speck, 25, of Dallas, a drifter who sports a tattooed slogan on his upper left arm: "Born to raise hell."

At week's end Speck was found in a Chicago West Side flophouse bleeding from slashes in his right wrist and left elbow which may have been self-in flicted. Police rushed him to a hospital where the alleged slayer was in serious condition.

Though Miss Amurao could not recall having seen the intruder before, he appeared to have some familiarity with the apartment and the girls' movements --possibly by observing them from a playground behind the apartment where men often sat at night and watched curiously as the nurses came and went. Such a mass murder, contended Dr. Edward Kelleher, head of Chicago's Psychiatric Institute, "must have taken some planning. It was not an impulse thing. He was a sexual psychopath, a deep-down woman hater who was completely gratified by what he did."

Power of Paralysis. How could it all have happened? Why did none of the girls scream for help or break away while their captor was out of the room? The answer probably lies in the power of a gun; the helpless victims were evidently paralyzed by the thought that the assailant might shoot them before any move could succeed.

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