Richard Speck
You are required to write a research paper discussing some aspect of a serial or mass murder. Students should include an overview of the incident or a brief biography of the serial killer but should concentrate on the “why” behind the behavior. The paper can focus on a particular type of offender, e.g., Ted Bundy or relate to a specific incident, e.g., mass shootings or the Aurora, Colorado shooting.
You must include possible causal or contributing factors that could explain this particular type of violence. For example, if you choose a serial killer, are there factors in his or her life that would have led to this type of behavior? Was there evidence of mental problems, relationship issues with parents, or difficulties at school? If you choose a specific incident, were there identifiable precursors that would have predicted this behavior? Was the person purchasing weapons, relationship problems, identified/unidentified mental disorders, bullying or ostracized at work or school?
The paper must be between 5 and 7 pages in length (1250-1750 words), double-spaced using Arial 11-point, or Times New Roman 12-point font. Use Help write my thesis – APA (7th Ed.) style, including 1-inch margins all the way around. Your paper must have a minimum of 12 references and all references must be cited in the paper following Help write my thesis – APA formatting styles.
Your Final Paper is due at the end of this week, Module 7.
Richard Speck, a Mass Murderer
Richard speck was the seventh in a family of eight, who was born in Kirkwood, Illinois. After Speck was born, they later moved to Monmouth, Illinois, where his older brother passed on after his involvement in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-three (Breo, Martin & Kunkle, 2016). His father worked at Western Stoneware at Monmouth as a packer from being a farmer and a logger. The relationship between himself and his father was very close. His father got a heart attack and passed on at the age of fifty-three when Speck was at the age of six years.
Speck’s mother found love again with a man from Texas who was working as an insurance salesman. His name was Carl August Rudolph Lindberg, whom she met on the train trip to Chicago. Lindberg was a hand-drinker, with a criminal record of twenty-five years, which started with forgery and drunk driving arrests. Lindberg used to be completely different from Speck’s father, who was sober and very hardworking. Speck and his sibling used to live with their elder sister, who was also married in Monmouth. That arrangement was to help Speck finish his second grade. He attended his third grade in Texas after reuniting with his mother.
Speck hated how much his stepfather used to drink. He was always absent and psychologically abusive with threats and insults. Speck a below the average student who struggled from fourth grade, where he was forced to repeat the eighth grade. When he started the ninth grade, he used to fil every subject, which made him quit school in the second semester, just after his sixteenth birthday. He started indulging in drugs such as alcohol when he was only twelve, and by the time Speck got to fifteen years, he was already a drunkard (DeKeseredy & Dragiewicz, 2018). He was arrested at thirteen years old for the first for trespassing. A multiple of other arrests later followed that for the following several years.
Speck got a job at some company as a laborer in Dallas, where he worked for some years. He later met Malone at the Texas State Fair, who got pregnant a few weeks after seeing Speck. The two got married, and after a while, Speck’s mother separated from his then-husband. Speck’s wife gave birth to their daughter, and at that time, his wife was not aware that he had been serving a twenty-two-day jail sentence for causing a disturbance in McKinney, Texas (Seidel, 2019). Speck was caught cashing a co-worker’s cheque after forging it and broke into a grocery store where he stole beer, cigarettes and some money.
He was twenty-one years old when he was convicted of burglary and forgery, which made him get sentenced for three years. He was later paroled after being in custody for sixteen months. One week after his parole, he attacked a woman at a parking lot when he was wielding a carving knife (Jones, 2020). The woman screamed, which made him run away. The police apprehended him some blocks away, and he was convicted of assault. He was presented with a sixteen-month sentence, which ran together with the parole violation sentence. He was released six months later and started working as a driver for some meat Company.
He had several accidents while on duty before getting sucked for lack of attendance. He moved in with a twenty-nine-year-old woman who worked at Ginny’s lounge since he needed help babysitting his children. His wife filed a divorce, and the same year he stabbed a person using a knife at Ginny’s lounge. Speck was then charged with assault, although the charges were reduced to disturbing peace, where he was fined but was unable to pay and jailed for three years (Ostrosky & Ardila, 2017). After that, he bought a car that he used to rob a grocery store and stole cigarettes.
He sold the stolen items out from the car’s trunk then abandoned the car. He was given a warrant for burglary arrest, but his sister helped him escape to Chicago. In early April that year, Speck went to Chicago, and in the same year, a case of a sixty-five-year-old woman who was raped was reported (McKay, 2016). Another case of the murder of a barmaid was reported several days later. In both cases, Speck was suspected to be the person behind them, and when reprimanded, he pleaded that he was physically ill. He, therefore, promised to return for further interrogations.
The detectives later realized that Speck was trying to run away from them and began looking for him. Before running away, he had a tattoo that read “born to raise hell’. Speck went drinking on thirteenth July 1966 and later attacked a townhouse at a community hospital in South Chicago where the nursing students used to stay. During the first hour, Speck captured nine women and tied them up in one of the rooms (Kaminsky, 2019). He then used the next three hours, securing these women and taking each one of them into another room still within the townhouse. Speck managed to strangle the women, stab them several times and slit their throats, which led to their demise.
He also managed to rape one of them before killing her. At that moment, he was drunk, and so he lost the count of the number of nursing students he was able to capture. One of those women was able to roll under the bed unnoticeably where luckily she survived, and by thirty minutes past three in the morning, Speck had already left (Brooks, 2020). The woman who managed to escape was Corazon Amurao stayed under the bed until six o’clock in the morning. She was able to seek help from outside by climbing through the window. Speck was traced and arrested, then found guilty after only forty-nine minutes of his trial. Finally, Speck was sentenced to death and later died on fifth December 1991.
There is a correlation between feeble-mindedness and criminality, which is mostly the main cause of a crime. For example, Speck was feebly minded in that he was a shy boy, which made him a poor performer in class. He also avoided wearing spectacles despite having eye problems to avoid attention. We see him later in life, becoming a criminal in very many aspects like robbery and murder (Stevens & Cloete, 2019). Some of the solutions to some criminal cases are psychiatry and psychology. A behavior that can be observed in a criminal is best explained through childhood externalizing behavior, antisocial behavior, aggression, and delinquency (Chen, Gao, Glenn, Niv, Portnoy, Schug & Raine, 2016).
The internal psychological environment might be affected by internalizing behavior issues like anxiety, depression and withdrawal, maybe from drugs. That could also be referred to as neurotic behavior or over-controlled behavior. It could be harmful to anyone around a child who suffers from it since it is uncontrolled (Hagan & Daigle, 2018). Speck was aggressive and could have suffered depression from the death of his biological father. His abusive stepfather could have also contributed to his behavior. He acquired the mind of a serial killer, and he could not see anything wrong in committing such a crime. Having seen his stepfather drink also made him start drinking.
Children who suffer from externalizing behavior problems of conduct disorder in most cases, grow up to become delinquent as an adult then become violent, which leads to criminal behaviors as adults (Jung, Herrenkohl, Lee, Hemphill, Heerde & Skinner, 2017). Speck was in this kind of situation since he used to be abused by his stepfather then later became a criminal. The hyperactive children also, in most cases, grow up to become criminals. In most cases, the case does not affect all hyperactive children. Children with internalizing behavior problems, however, have the highest probability of suffering from depression and anxiety later in life.
The second component is psychological risk factors, which include psychological and social factors (Curt & Anne, 2016). Some of these examples include stress, poverty, drug abuse, and a negative attitude. Speck had all these factors surrounding him. He began indulging in drugs at the age of twelve, and his family was not that well off. Another example of the risks is psychiatric factors, which include drug abuse. Children of mothers who experience psychological risk factors like social adversity and the biological risk factors, which include complications during birth, develop externalizing problems in behavior such as hyperactivity and aggression.
Generally, Speck lost his father at six years old, which was a very young age. The mother then remarried a drunkard who used to abuse them. Speck’s performance in school dropped, and he also became a drunkard. This kind of behavior is caused by certain factors, such as biological and psychological factors. These two factors make a child hyperactive and aggressive, and that is why we see Speck becoming a criminal. He murdered eight women in a single night at a townhouse and raped one of them before murdering her.
References
Breo, D. L., Martin, W. J., & Kunkle, B. (2016). The crime of the century: Richard Speck and the murders that shocked a nation. Simon and Schuster.
Jones, K. (2020). Revisiting Wounds: Seriality and the Serial Killer in Mindhunter (2017-).
Seidel, J. (2019). Second City Sinners: True Crime from Historic Chicago’s Deadly Streets. Rowman & Kaminsky, M. (2019). Serial Killer Trivia: Fascinating Facts and Disturbing Details That Will Freak You the F* ck Out. Simon and Schuster.Littlefield.
Ostrosky, F., & Ardila, A. (2017). Mass Murderers. In Neuropsychology of Criminal Behavior (pp. 86-95). Routledge.
Brooks, N. (2020). Conceptualising Psychopathy: Empirical, Clinical and Case Interpretations. In Corporate Psychopathy (pp. 47-78). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
McKay, K. (2016). Educating a Jury on Eyewitness Testimony: Using Jury Instructions is a Better Approach than Expert Testimony. N. Ill. UL Rev., 37, 175.
Jung, H., Herrenkohl, T. I., Lee, J. O., Hemphill, S. A., Heerde, J. A., & Skinner, M. L. (2017). Gendered pathways from child abuse to adult crime through internalizing and externalizing behaviors in childhood and adolescence. Journal of interpersonal violence, 32(18), 2724- 2750.
Chen, F. R., Gao, Y., Glenn, A. L., Niv, S., Portnoy, J., Schug, R., … & Raine, A. (2016). Biosocial bases of antisocial and criminal behavior. The handbook of criminological theory, 356-379.
Bartol Curt, R., & Batrol Anne, M. (2016). Criminal Behavior. A Psychological Approach 11th Global edition.
Hagan, F. E., & Daigle, L. E. (2018). Introduction to criminology: Theories, methods, and criminal behavior. Sage Publications.
Stevens, J., & Cloete, M. G. T. (2019). Introduction to criminology. Criminology, 2761, 001.
DeKeseredy, W. S., & Dragiewicz, M. (2018). Introduction: Critical criminology: Past, present, and future. In Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology [2nd edition] (pp. 1-12). Routledge.
