Thomas Speer, a 42-year-old White/Caucasian man, was a physician from Merrillville, Indiana, whose trip to Madison, Wisconsin, for a medical conference ended in an unsolved killing on July 28, 1971. Speer had built a career in medicine after attending medical school in Pittsburgh. His sons later recalled that he had worked with Dr. Jonas Salk during the period surrounding development of the polio vaccine. He subsequently became medical director for U.S.
Steel in Indiana, where part of his work involved workers’ compensation cases. His family remembered him as a devoted father, husband, physician and scientist.
On the evening of July 28, Speer was seen walking toward the Quality Courts Motel on Madison’s southeast side. What happened next unfolded quickly. Witnesses heard several gunshots, and a man believed to be in his 20s or 30s was seen speeding away from the area in a yellow sedan. Speer had been shot at the motel, turning what had been a professional trip to Madison into a homicide investigation that would remain unresolved for decades.
The crime scene showed that more than one shot had been fired. Decades later, Madison Police Detective Mark Hull reviewed original photographs and evidence from the investigation and disclosed that investigators had found one bullet lodged in a Coca-Cola machine and another in a stairwell. Police interviewed witnesses and motel employees and developed several people of interest. Investigators also spoke with Speer’s relatives and friends in an effort to determine who might have wanted him dead. According to Hull, those interviews did not reveal that Speer was known to have enemies or anyone openly seeking to harm him.
One possible avenue considered by the family concerned Speer’s professional work. Because his position with U.S. Steel included workers’ compensation matters, decisions or testimony connected with those cases could leave one side dissatisfied. His son Tod later suggested that such work might have created a point of contention with someone, but no publicly available information establishes that a workers’ compensation dispute was actually the motive for the killing. Police never publicly identified a definitive motive, and although several people were investigated, no one was charged. After approximately four years without a resolution, the investigation became a cold case.
The murder remained deeply damaging to the Speer family. His sons, Andy and Tod, were children when police arrived at their home in Indiana to tell their mother that their father had been killed. They continued to seek answers as adults, eventually prompting renewed attention to the investigation. In July 2017, after Tod Speer requested access to the old case file, Detective Hull undertook a new review and reopened the investigation. Hull organized the decades-old reports and evidence, examined original photographs and re-interviewed several people who had previously been considered persons of interest. Some of those individuals were reportedly still living in the Madison area at the time of the renewed investigation. Police withheld significant portions of what they knew so that undisclosed details could still be used to evaluate the reliability of anyone who might come forward claiming knowledge of the murder.
In December 2018, Madison Area Crime Stoppers announced a $15,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in Speer’s killing. Investigators specifically appealed to anyone who had been at or around the Quality Courts Motel on July 28, 1971, or who knew someone who had been there, to provide information. Despite the renewed investigation, witness interviews, people of interest and the reward, publicly available records do not identify any arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction for Speer’s murder. The case continues to be listed among Dane County’s unsolved homicides, leaving the identity of the person who shot Thomas Speer and the reason for the killing unresolved more than five decades later.
