Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Casual Criminalist. I as always am your host, Simon. Welcome, welcome. This one, Richard Speck, the self-enointed devil. And it is a very, very, very, oh my gosh, it does not end. It is a very long one. Thank you to David for writing it. It's a long one. Who do you expect? David Baker, Dr. David Baker to use his proper title. Let's jump into it,

shall we? If you knew to the show, never read this before, we're going to read it together.

Let's, let's go.

It was May 16th, 1996 at the State Capitol Building in downtown Springfield, Illinois.

State representatives, who were part of the Illinois House Committee on Criminal Law and the

Judiciary, filed into an extremely ornate 19th-century conference room, its walls and ceilings

covered with highly detailed carvings and gilded

with gold. They were to watch a VHS tape. Oh, it's 1996. That makes sense.

Brought to them by a local CBS News report called Bill Curtis. The video had reportedly been taped

at Stateville Correctional Center some eight years earlier in 1988. It had been

made by prison inmates using prison video equipment, and the two hours of footage had set

of a scandal. The House Committee had been called in to assess the rampant culture of chaos

and debauchery in Illinois state penitentiaries, likely caused by prison

overcrowding and possible corruption among wardens and prison guards. Wait, debauchery,

doesn't that just mean like people like living their best lives? Isn't debauchery like,

what's the definition of debauchery? It's like, I don't know, in my mind it's like people

partying it up. What you do to prison?

In 1996, local reporter Bill Curtis had been sent the tape by a lawyer whose name Curtis

swore he would never divulge. The lawyer had in turn received the tape from an inmate at Stateville

Correctional Center as a form of payment for the lawyer's services. What's it? How's he going to make money out of this? Before going public, Bill Curtis had produced a full-length documentary on the tape that would soon, oh, I see, he sold it to the media. Of course, obviously, how did I not put that together? It's really obvious. On the Basic Caput Channel, A&E, and he also made a five-part special that he narrated nightly

on Chicago CBS News. Curtis now stood at the head of the table in the conference room, in front

of a white projector screen, ready to present the video to state representatives. As the politicians

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