Hey everybody welcome back to cold case murder mysteries. I'm your host Ryan Kraus back at you once again to pry open the hatch on the rabbit hole and descend to the depths of madness.

In this episode, we'll be taking a fascinating peek into the disturbed mind of one of the 20th century's more notorious mass murder. an criminal who savagely raped, tortured, strangled, and stabbed eight student nurses to death in a town

home near South Chicago Community Hospital on the night of July 13th 1966 and leading into the early morning hours of the next day.

Yet, while the brutality of the crime speaks for itself, the reasons for its genesis remained somewhat of a mystery.

In the words of Speck himself in a prison video dated 1988, he says, quote,

it just wasn't their night, end quote.

Of course, these young women weren't sitting at a casino or a bingo hall.

They got senselessly murdered. And I'm guessing their families believed it wasn't bad luck to kill them

So the reason for Speck shielding the truth is what I want to examine

Why did he enter the town home that night and show no mercy?

Well, there's obviously going to be a connection to the relationship he had with his mother growing up.

Yet, as opposed to other cases I've examined,

we're going to see Richard's emotional issues

ultimately explode onto a physical canvas

and paint a colorful portrait of a sad, damaged, and broken man desperate for love.

At the base of his mental illness is a serious issue that still afflicts a significant percentage of men in modern society today,

which is something called the Madonna horror complex.

There are a number of ways to interpret this all the way from Sigmund Freud's theoretical writings on the psychology of the subject to the modern feminist perspective of bringing to light how it plagues us even today.

So it's probably fair to say that the middle ground on the Madonna-Hore complex

basically suggests that it's an inclination for men to place the collective identity of the female gender into two very distinct categories, which are of course, Madonna's and whores.

A man who indulges this ideology essentially feels that he's

unable to be sexually attracted to someone who fits his ideal of being

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