The Crime of the Century: Richard Speck and the Murders That Shocked a Nation by Dennis L. Breo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has one major flaw, and I'm going to talk about it right up front. It is co-written by a journalist and the lead prosecutor at Richard Speck's trial. The prosecutor is obviously a main character in the book, and they talk about him always in the third person and in a weirdly adulatory way, e.g.: "Although many casual observers found Martin to be cool and remote, he was underneath a very caring, emotional, warm man" (379). It's jarring and uncomfortable, and it makes me cringe. The book also exhibits a rather simplistic pro-cop, anti-media stance, and as I said in my review of The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder by England's Most Hated Criminal, Expanded Edition, you knew it was a snake. Richard Speck was a sociopath. Don't be surprised when he behaves like one.

(I admit this is hard to do. Sexually sadistic sociopaths like Brady and Speck by their nature are abhorrent to non-sociopaths, and part of us is always going to be surprised and shocked by their crimes. We use emotionally charged words like "vile" and "horrific" and "evil" and all those things are accurate in our moral system, and I don't want for a moment to imply that that judgment is wrong. But I think it's also important to remember, although not to condone, that to sociopaths our moral system is meaningless. There is nothing inside them that tells them not to do evil. So seriously. It's a snake. Don't be surprised when it bites you.)

Aside from that, this is an excellent book, a blow by blow account of the incredibly complicated process of prosecuting Richard Speck. I learned a great deal about how lawyers approach criminal trials, the octopus-like contingency planning that has to act as flying buttresses to every move they make in court. (That metaphor got away from me a little bit. Sorry.) Breo and Martin do an excellent job of contextualizing what Speck did on July 14 with the rest of what was going on in America in 1966 (race riots and the Vietnam War and Charles Whitman) and also paint a vivid picture of Chicago itself. Not surprisingly for a man with Martin's particular talents, the narrative is well-organized and coherent--or as coherent as a narrative of an inherently chaotic enterprise (remember the octopus) can be.

Not being a sociopath, I do consider Richard Speck vile. He contributed nothing to the world except the rape-murder of eight young women in one night. And he couldn't even do that competently, because he forgot about the ninth woman and left her alive to testify against him. This book balances the horror of his crime against the genuinely heroic efforts of the police and Cook County prosecutors and the Public Defender's office to catch Speck, keep him safe from vigilante justice, respect all of his civil rights, give him a fair trial (oh the desperate, agonizing scrupulousness as the prosecutors try to block every possible grounds for an appeal), and prevent him from ever harming anyone else. Even though he escaped the death penalty (because the system, grinding slow, couldn't get him executed before the Supreme Court decision in 1971), he died of a heart attack in 1991 before a parole board got stupid enough to let him out. It's not, as Martin said after Speck's conviction, a victory that gives us any cause to rejoice or celebrate, but the officers of the law and the court did their duty, and Speck was not left free to continue raping and murdering the innocent. Justice is cold comfort.




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