On the night of July 13, 1966, Valentina Pasion, a 23-year-old female nursing student from the Philippines, was looking forward to a future dedicated to caring for others. Having graduated in the top ten of her class from Manila Central University School of Nursing in 1965, she had traveled to Chicago to participate in an exchange visitor program at South Chicago Community Hospital.
Valentina, known as Tina to her family, was a dedicated daughter who sent a significant portion of her earnings home to help her family in Jones, Isabela. She was also known among her friends for her cooking skills. That evening, she and her housemates, a group of American and fellow Filipina nursing students, were in their shared townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street, unaware of the horror that was about to unfold.
In the late hours of July 13th, a 24-year-old drifter with a criminal history named Richard Speck forced his way into the student nurses' dormitory. Armed with a knife and a gun, Speck systematically rounded up the nine women inside, binding them with strips torn from bedsheets. For hours, he terrorized the young women before leading them away one by one to be brutally murdered. Valentina Pasion was among the eight victims who lost their lives that night; she was stabbed and strangled. A ninth student nurse, Corazon Amurao, also from the Philippines, managed to survive by hiding under a bed. It was her harrowing screams of "They are all dead!" from a second-story window ledge the following morning that alerted the world to the massacre.
The lone survivor's detailed description of the killer, including a distinctive "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo on his arm, led to a massive manhunt for Richard Speck. He was arrested just a few days later, on July 17, 1966, after a physician at Cook County Hospital recognized the tattoo while treating Speck for self-inflicted wounds from a suicide attempt. Fingerprints left at the crime scene also matched Speck's. During the trial, Corazon Amurao bravely faced her attacker in court and identified him as the man who murdered her friends. On April 15, 1967, after only 49 minutes of deliberation, a jury found Richard Speck guilty of all eight murders. He was sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to a prison sentence of 400 to 1,200 years after the Supreme Court invalidated existing death penalty statutes. The sentence was subsequently reduced further. Richard Speck, the sole suspect arrested and convicted for the murder of Valentina Pasion and seven other young women, died of a heart attack in prison on December 5, 1991, the day before his 50th birthday. The case, often referred to as one of the most horrifying crimes in U.S. history, left a lasting scar on the city of Chicago and cut short the promising lives of eight dedicated nursing students.
