As the afternoon wound down, Luisa remembered she had a stack of letters from her then-boyfriend, waiting for her to attend to at home. She had been putting off writing a reply for the longest time, and planned to do so before gathering her things and returning to apartment to spend the night.
Those letters ended up saving her life. While I was there, the hospital called to ask if I can clock in for substitute duty the following day — which was my day off. Unaware of this fact, she went over to apartment and rang the front doorbell. Speck, disturbed by the sudden visitor, slowly deliberated whether to answer the door. He eventually did.
Luisa had waited for a while at the front door, before trying the back, and then the front bell, one last time. Exasperated, Speck went back upstairs, hoping the unknown visitor would eventually leave. Luisa inadvertently courted death three times and escaped unscathed. At the time, the case shook the country to its foundations. The notion of a mass murderer, described using that term, was still relatively unknown. After only 49 minutes of jury deliberation following a two-week trial in , Speck was found guilty and sentenced to death by the electric chair.
He eventually evaded that execution in , when it was deemed unconstitutional and abolished by the US Supreme Court. He died in from a heart attack in custody, serving a year sentence. Luisa has kept quiet about her part of the story for 54 years. Since then, she had moved on, but not forgotten that evening. Besides navigating a debilitating language barrier, she was scared to tarnish her own American dream.
He later confessed that his state made him lose count of how many of the women he had killed, allowing Amurao to remain undiscovered in her hiding spot under a bed. After Speck left the building, Amurao remained in place until 6 am before attempting to get help. Speck ended his spree about hours after it began, then left the house. Amurao remained under the bed until around 6 am - just to make sure the attacker was really gone from the house for good.
During those hours, she managed to gradually loosen the fabric that bound her hands and feet together. After emerging from her hiding spot, she walked through the townhouse dorms and saw seven of the eight fallen nurses on her way to get help.
After remaining hidden for the duration of Speck's attack - and allowing for a sufficient amount of time to pass after his exit - Amurao finally escaped from her hiding spot to get help. She testified at Speck's trial that she made her way to a window and began screaming for assistance :. She had been screaming for help for 20 minutes when a man walking his dog happened by. Soon after, the Chicago Police Department arrived and the investigation of the murders began.
On July 17, a few days after his attack on the nurses, Speck attempted to take his own life. The attempt failed, and he instead found himself in the emergency room at Cook County Hospital. Leroy Smith noticed Speck's "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo while cleaning him up, and took the initiative to ask his patient if he was the focus of the current manhunt for the killer of the eight nurses. Speck answered in the affirmative, and police allowed Amurao to visit the hospital in hopes of getting a positive identification.
Dressed in her nursing uniform, Amurao took a look at Speck in his hospital bed and named him as the man that broke into her home on the night of July After alerting police to the brutal events in her shared townhouse, Amurao pledged to assist authorities in whatever manner they required. She gave a detailed description of the killer, including his "Born To Raise Hell" tattoo , which helped Dr.
She also visited Speck's bedside to positively identify him. As the case moved forward, she spent nine months waiting to testify against Speck at his trial. During her testimony, Amurao never wavered in her affirmation that Speck was the man who slaughtered her fellow nurses. In one particularly cinematic moment, Amurao walked from her perch in the witness box to point at Speck and proclaim , "This is the man. After successfully putting Speck behind bars for the rest of his life, Amurao moved back home to the Philippines.
She worked as a nurse in her home country for a couple of years while also serving on her town's council. She also got married to Alberto Atienza, a lawyer.
Together, she and her husband had two children - who gave them multiple grandchildren. The famed survivor kept her distance from the media in the years following the Speck case, but she stayed in touch with the relatives of many of Speck's victims. Speck died in prison in It was this very weapon that Amurai herself referenced when asked about her unlikely survival: You are surprised I survived? Amurao recalled her two months of living with the other women in an email to William Martin, the former state attorney in the Speck case: When Merlita Gargullo cooked adobo filipino and pancit and they came home from the hospital and smelled the food and they say "it's good" so we invited them to join us to eat, and they really like it.
She testified at Speck's trial that she made her way to a window and began screaming for assistance : Q: How long did you scream, in a sitting position, with the window open? Atienza visits the Philippines every three years to see relatives. After Speck's trial she moved back to the Philippines and married in , but she returned to the U.
But to this day Atienza suffers nightmares that Speck will come back and kill her. She also had a hard time believing he actually died — of a heart attack in prison in — and wonders why she was spared. God was so nice," she said in an email to Martin. It is being republished for the anniversary with updated sections, including one about Atienza.
It will be available May She was petrified of Speck but had the courage to step down from the witness stand, walk up to him and point her finger 2 inches from his forehead. Atienza became friends and learned to play penny-ante poker with the policemen and bodyguards who watched over her for an entire year while she was in protective custody.
She still gets a kick out of playing poker at casinos in Nevada with her husband. She appreciates every day of life and wants to be happy all the time, because life is not long, Martin said she told him recently.
The murders continue to have a profound impact on American crime and American society, Martin said. Many people are unaware of the case, which was the first random mass murder of the 20th century. Skip to content.
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