Inside the Mind of BTK

286 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
to pick the ugly, disturbed brain of mass murderer Richard Speck,
caused my mood to lighten.
As mass murderers go, Speck was at the top of the cesspool. One
hot July morning in 1966 in South Chicago, he butchered eight student
nurses, raping several of the women before beating and stabbing
them.
Speck had been sentenced to twelve hundred years in prison.
When I arrived on his cell block, he was in a foul mood. In the months
prior to my visit, he’d managed to capture one of the sparrows that
used to fly in and out of the broken windows of Stateville. He tied a
string around one of its legs and turned the bird into his pet. The
guards would watch him sitting in his cell for hours at a time talking
to it, feeding it scraps of bread.
Prison officials were mildly astonished to observe this coldblooded
killer’s kinder, gentler side. Over time, however, the novelty
wore off, and Speck, who was violating prison rules prohibiting
inmates from having pets, was informed that the bird would have to
go. So he untied the string from its tiny leg, held the animal in his
hand for a few brief seconds, and just when it appeared that he would
set it free, crushed the bird in his hands, tossing the bloodied carcass
into a large fan, sending feathers and bird guts throughout the cell
block.
“GO FUCK YOURSELF” were the first words out of Speck’s mouth
when I entered the chain-link holding pen where he sat on a filing cabinet,
waiting for me.
After a few more obscenity-laced descriptions of all the activities he
wanted to perform on my mother, I looked at him and said, “It’s OK,
Richard. I don’t have to be here. I’ve got plenty of other things to do.”
I stood up, preparing to leave, then glanced over at one of the
prison administrators who organized the interview. “Damn,” I said
with a wink. “I wanted to ask this son of a bitch how the hell he fucked
all those eight nurses. Because whatever Richard’s eating, I want some
of it.”
Speck shut his big dirty mouth and looked at me as though he
couldn’t believe what he’d just heard me say. He took the bait almost
as soon as I tossed it at him.
“I didn’t fuck all eight of them,” he said, alarmed that I didn’t have
my facts straight. “Who the hell fucks eight women in one sitting?”
By the time I finally walked out of that holding cell, Speck had
blabbed for nearly seven hours, walking me through all the wretched