ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605200090
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHICAGO
SOURCE: JAMES WEBB ASSOCIATED PRESS
HE IS DRESSED in women's panties, appears to be snorting cocaine and has sex with a fellow inmate. Now, many want to know how the tape of mass murderer Richard Speck was made behind bars.
Richard Speck horrified the public with his savage killings of eight student nurses in 1966. Now, four years after his death, he's shocking people again as the grotesque star of a drug-and-sex videotape that suggests a prison system run amok.
``It's a documentary that takes us inside a prison that prison officials would never let us see and would like us to think doesn't exist,'' said William Martin, who prosecuted Speck.
Martin and others say it's a chance to wake up a naive public and reform a troubled system. But they fear election-minded politicians will ignore what they see as the underlying problems in favor of tough rhetoric.
The grainy, two-hour tape was excerpted in a weeklong series on Chicago's WBBM-TV earlier this month by anchorman Bill Kurtis, who also planned to show it on his national A&E cable series ``Investigative Reports.'' Kurtis' production company obtained the tape from a lawyer who remains anonymous.
The tape apparently was made with prison video equipment in 1988 somewhere in the sprawling Stateville Correctional Center, one of Illinois' four maximum-security prisons.
Speck, who died of a heart attack in 1991 while serving a life sentence, details his killings, along with a lesson on strangling: ``It ain't like you see on TV ... You have to go at it for about 31/2 minutes.''
Later, the fleshy, middle-aged murderer strips off his prison coveralls to reveal blue women's panties and heavy breasts. He has sex with a fellow inmate, and the two snort what appears to be cocaine and flash what looks like a wad of cash.
Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan said he would investigate whether any inmates or guards could be charged in the events on tape or its creation.
State lawmakers, most of them up for re-election, called a special hearing and were shown the tape Wednesday.
Lawmakers said the tape gives shocking substance to longstanding rumors of gross misconduct in Illinois' prison system. There have been recent allegations that male guards had sex with female inmates at Dwight Correctional Center, and federal court testimony that imprisoned members of Chicago's Gangster Disciples gang had free rein inside state prisons.
``This is not anecdotal anymore, this is not a prisoner writing a letter to a legislator,'' said state Rep. Peter Roskam. ``This is videotape and we've got to deal with it.''
How Speck and two other inmates at Stateville Correctional Center got into an area with video equipment reserved for staff training is something that corrections spokesman Nic Howell called the ``$60 million question.''
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Speck.by CNB