Richard Speck: The Woman-Murderer Self-Womanized and Women's Sexual Advantages

In 1966, a 24-year old sailor named Richard Speck committed one of the most shocking crimes in American history. Intruding into a dormitory of female student nurses, he tied up nine women, then systematically murdered eight of them, raping his last victim before killing her. The one survivor hid under a bed, and Speck missed her during his homicidal rampage. She described his appearance to police, including the eerily prescient tattoo on his arm that read Born To Raise Hell.

In the aftermath of the slayings, a widely publicized “fact” about Richard Speck appeared to many observers to explain, at least partially, his extraordinary aggressiveness. It was said that he was a “supermale,” that is, a man with an extra Y-chromosome.

A cursory look at Speck’s history seemed to support the conclusion that he was extremely masculine. He was a tall, lanky, heavily tattooed man given to drinking, fighting, and whoring. He had always worked at traditional men’s jobs like construction and seafaring — when he wasn’t getting his money through theft.

“Supermale’s” crimes were trumpeted as evidence for biological determinism. As Stephen Jay Gould writes of that position (which Gould does not hold) in Ever Since Darwin, “Males tend to be more aggressive than females; this may be genetic. If genetic, it must reside on the Y chromosome; anyone possessing two Y chromosomes has a double dose of aggressiveness and might incline to violence and criminality.”

Thus, Speck’s slayings of eight women seemed to be man’s “normal” or “natural” dominance over females carried to a destructive extreme.

As it turned out, the original finding of the murderer as a “supermale” was in error. Speck was a genetically normal XY male.

Richard Speck shocked the public yet again — three years after his own death in prison of a heart attack — when a videotape made by the imprisoned Speck and fellow inmates surfaced.

The video alternates between talk show and hard-core pornography (Speck being the receptive partner in anal intercourse). During the talk show segments, a cellmate plays interviewer to Speck’s celebrity guest. The general atmosphere is one of conviviality and camaraderie.

“Have you got the blue panties on?” his buddy asks.

Then, the ugly, pockmarked Speck unzips his paint-splattered uniform — his prison job had been painting walls — to display fully developed breasts along with the aforementioned women’s underpants.

The man who murdered women had turned himself into a fun-house mirror image of the sex he slaughtered. Speck’s appearance on film was so gender-ambiguous that TV stations seemed unsure of whether to treat his bare chest as they usually would that of a man or a woman. In part of the tape, his breasts are shown as the chest of a male normally would be on American television; in another, the camera distorts the chest area as it usually would for a topless female.

“Do you like getting f—- by men, Richard?” Speck is asked.

“Absolutely,” he replies.

“Have you always liked it?”

“Sure.”

When asked how many sexual partners he has had in prison, Speck replies, “I can’t count that high.”

In my opinion, Speck’s feminization, together with a more nuanced examination of his life history, gives us a fresh insight into the motives behind his gender-biased atrocities. It may also give us an important insight more generally into the feelings of men who commit violence specifically against female victims.

Women’s sexual disadvantages are frequently dwelt upon in popular commentary. Only women risk getting pregnant and, while pregnancy may be experienced as the most sublime of blessings, it may also be one of the worst human traumas. People frequently talk about the problems incurred by women because of the Double Standard, sexual harassment, and sexual molestation and rape.

However, there is an important sexual advantage that women possess that is at least as obvious as their special problems but which often goes unmentioned. That is the female advantage of sexual opportunity. With the exceptions of women who have been rendered actively repulsive through deformities, scarring, and of many female senior citizens, women have sexual opportunities comparable to those enjoyed only by men who are wealthy, celebrated, or for some other reason extraordinarily attractive. Plain and awkward women have their pick of sexual partners if they are seeking nothing in addition to the sex.

I believe that Speck’s evident enjoyment of taking on female characteristics in the all-male environment of prison and his bragging about the sexual partners he had there indicates a deep and longstanding envy of this female advantage of sexual opportunity.

Women’s sexual advantages don’t stop at opportunity. In the usual heterosexual procedure, the man approaches the woman rather than the other way around and, quite often, his overtures are rebuffed. If the man has been courteous, the woman is somewhat discomfited but also flattered. The rejected man, on the other hand, is left with feelings entirely negative. The special vulnerability of the person who initiates sexual relationships is obscured by our custom of referring to the initiator as the “aggressor” with the word’s connotations of power and conquest. However, the position of the person who makes overtures could also be seen as, and more importantly felt as, that of “supplicant.”

A man may pay for women’s company, as Speck often did but, especially if his income is low and uncertain, as Speck’s was, resents having to do so.

What’s more, he may feel disadvantaged in the sex act itself. According to an article by Dennis L. Breo published in the Chicago Tribune, Speck often gave up “his turn” during consensual “gang-bangs” of prostitutes because he was impotent. He probably felt incontrovertibly exposed by his limp penis and, in his humiliation, envied the ability of the female to engage in sex regardless of her arousal level as well as to feign sexual passion.

It is this writer’s opinion that Speck’s envy of women’s sexual opportunities, of their position as the courted sex and their capacity to “fake it,” deepened into murderous hatred. Of course, many decent men may envy the above-mentioned female advantages without that envy turning destructive.

However, I believe that a key to understanding why a small minority of men become dangerous to women is to understand that, in the area of sexual opportunity, women are the gender of wealth and plenty while men are the gender of poverty and want.

A previous, very different version of this essay was published in Mélange and appears online at karisable.com.