Richard Speck and I never met, though I spent an hour one morning in a townhouse at 2319 E. 100th St. that Speck had visited the night before. I promptly quit the job that sent me there.
I was a staff writer for Time Magazine, in the Chicago bureau, and I’d seen blood before. But nothing prepared me for the teddy bear with red ribbons, the pictures of smiling parents in silver frames and the postcard from a boyfriend, tucked in a mirror in an upstairs bedroom, that said, “It’s lonesome here without you. Really. Peter.”
Out of the crowd of 50 reporters on the lawn, the police let a dozen of us in just before noon, after they had done their work. The first thing I saw in that blood-splattered living room was the sofa, its lumpy brown cushions scattered all over and covered with stains.
Upstairs, the carpet was sticky under my feet. Walls were streaked red with sliding hand-marks. I turned off my emotions and mapped the place for the graphics artist in New York. He needed an “X” to mark the spot where each body fell, the bodies of young women much like those I was dating at the time.
Quickly, I noted the “scene-setting details,” those objects, awash in irony, that reporters need to build their stories, like the books on one student nurse’s night table: Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and Ruth Willock’s “The Night Visitor.” I sat on a bed with mussed covers and had a strong feeling that I shouldn’t be there.
It was the toughest assignment of my career, but by the time I turned in my story, I knew a lot about these eight student nurses. Which one was getting married. Who was joining the Peace Corps. Who had landed a job at Children’s Memorial Hospital. Which one had carried a pair of clacking poles from Manila and often did a dance at parties.
By late Saturday, in that July of 1966, Speck, 25, after slitting his wrists, was under arrest, nabbed by a doctor at Cook County Hospital who spotted his telltale blood-caked tattoo, “Born To Raise Hell.”
I was at home in Sandburg Village, on the phone to New York, dealing with a fact-checker. “That one getting married? Mary Ann?” she asked, in a droning, let’s-wrap-this-up tone. “Was that four, or five, times she was stabbed? Once in the eye, right?
“And, oh yeah, which one was the swimmer?”
I did it politely, but I quit the following day, stunned by the banality of dumbing down a truly horrible crime.
These days, as I watch flabby Richard Speck, in blue panties, snorting cocaine, ooze across WBBM-Ch. 2’s newscasts, I am amazed at his power to unsettle. Even now. But I also have a feeling that I missed out on an important aspect of the story.
Speck, an unknown drunken sailor until his one night of infamy, was the father, it now appears, of what has become a major new source of wealth creation in this country.
Call it Misadventure Capitalism.
There is, it appears, big money in massacres.
Bill Kurtis certainly understands this principle, as he taps into the deaths and suffering Speck, who died in 1991, caused 30 years ago, bolstering the ratings of his station’s flagship newscast during the May sweeps period.
Crime, of course, always has been a media staple. What is new, starting with Speck, is the way that man-made horrors, if they are big enough, awful enough, can become ongoing industries. Their central figures become, in a perverse way, the stuff of everyday conversation.
Killers have become media icons, recycled endlessly, for considerable profit. John Wayne Gacy. Ted Bundy. Charles Manson. Charles “Texas Tower” Whitman. David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. Jeffrey Dahmer.
Of course, the Simpson-Goldman murders stand as a textbook example of the modern massacre spinoff, bringing extra money to prosecutors, defense lawyers, jurors, witnesses, friends of the victims, T-shirt makers, book promoters, TV packagers, tabloid publishers and, of course, Dominick Dunne, who has emerged as the Charles Dickens of the art form.
The Dancing Itos would never have been hired for “The Tonight Show” if Nicole Brown Simpson’s throat had not been slit from ear to ear, her head nearly torn off.
Even O.J. has drawn a few bucks from a towering profit center created by someone–many believe it’s him–in just five slashing minutes. Simpson has been selling videotapes of “his side,” doing paid TV appearances and going to Oxford University where, under the tutelage of a London spin-doctor, he answered student questions about spouse abuse.
What made Speck the groundbreaking Adam of this new form of human industry was his timing.
In 1966, TV was on the rise and news magazines were in full flower, ready and able to take local crimes to a national audience. Speck, with his haunted pock-marked face, was the talk of the country, a fact not missed by Speck’s prison psychiatrist who wrote a best-selling book and later sold a chapter to the mass-circulation Saturday Evening Post.
Some of it was based, according to an author’s credit, on my Time files, which I lent to a colleague who helped the psychiatrist write it.
These days, those kind of notes are a big-bucks commodity. On Ted Bundy, one Seattle Times reporter parlayed his coverage into a book (“Stranger”) and an NBC mini-series (“Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger.”)
John Wayne Gacy also spawned a book (“Killer Clown”) and a movie (“To Catch a Killer.”) Anything about Son of Sam, even after years in jail, is still a big promotable for the New York Daily News.
So why should it be surprising when Kurtis announced last week that the full Speck tapes would be shown on the Arts & Entertainment channel, though it hardly fits either category, on a Saturday night–in prime time?
Some three decades after the launching of Speck Inc., it has become possible to identify certain ground rules that come into play when notable murder meets content-hungry media.
One is that, in a communications society based less on merit and more on fame, all celebrities are equal. All it takes is name recognition.
Two, that a nobody can be famous in a moment–with a knife, a gun or a bomb.
Then comes the trial, which serves much the same purpose as a movie trailer. It introduces the players, focuses the media coverage, suggests the themes and warms up the audience. Money is to be made on everything else–the “full story,” the insider details, the personal appearances, the fringe players. Enter Kato Kaelin.
Of course, not one of these modern profit centers would exist if somebody–a loner, a sociopath, a misfit–did not do something incredibly hurtful, deadly and, for many, unforgettable.
In Oklahoma City, a bomb shatters a building, impaling newlyweds with glass shards, knocking the heads off toddlers and burying senior citizens straightening out their Social Security, under concrete chunks.
First, the trial. Then the books. Then the movie.
To their credit, the mother and brother of the Unabomber suspect locked themselves in a house in Schenectady, N.Y., refusing to meet with entrepreneurs offering money.
But a movie production, closely following the Unabomber’s plot line, is scheduled to start up next month. They’re talking John Malkovich.
