This is a Glass Box Media Podcast. Why do you seem so scared? All I wanted to do is play with you. Please come and play with me.

I am so lonely. You're not afraid of the doll, are you?

Don't be afraid, Fraid.

Come with me.

I will show you where I play hide and seek.

Do you want to play hide and seek? You hide and I'll going to. It just wasn't their night. That was how serial killer Richard Speck summed up the

incident that would mark him indelibly in the annals of crime in the United States.

It would come to be known as the townhouse murders.

Eight women would die that night.

How and why Speck would be driven to carry out such a brutal act of misogyny as its seeds in his upbringing.

He would come to regard women as nothing but whores, whether they walked the streets as sex workers or not.

To spec, they were all tainted, disposable, and worth little.

He saw them as human garbage that he was more than happy to dispense with.

The eight women who died at his hand did not doubt for a moment that they were dealt a fatal blow by a human monster.

Richard Benjamin Speck was born on the 6th of December 1941.

He was the youngest of eight children, and born several years after the eldest.

His father, Benjamin, was a warehouse packer, consistent with his long career in manual labor.

Richard was often socially isolated due to the significant

generational gap between him and his next oldest sibling. He had only his mother

for company until his sister Carolyn was born two years later.

Richard's mother, Mary Margaret Speck, was a devoutly religious woman and lived the typically

ascetic lifestyle that is common among religious

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