I found my journal entry from the day of the Chicago Nurse Massacre!!! Here is the scan.

The worst things were happening in July 1966 and they were getting closer to home. The Vietnam War, the race riots in Chicago,and then violent incidents between blacks and Puerto Ricans and blacks and police in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district. But what affected my family the most was the Chicago Nurse Murders in Chicago. 

I was in summer camp and my mom and Henry came to visit me in camp. I was so relieved to see them - I hated camp! I was tinier than most 5-year old boys and I always got picked on. But my mom insisted I go because it was what little boys did. You could never argue with my mom - just nod your head in agreement or you got grounded. Anyway, I remember that my dad was really sick so they left my big sister, Sally at home with Henry's mom. Now, I hated my sister back then but I would never wish Henry's mom on her. She was really mean!!! When my mom called to check-in on Sally, her face grew pale. She sent me out to play, but I hid outside the door. I always knew they were going to talk about something important when she sent me away. That's when I first heard about the Chicago Nurse Murders. I don't think I really understood how horrendous it was until I was much older. I remember almost everything about those murders and the trial, even though it has been 46 years.
 
Around dawn on the morning of July 14, 1966, a young student nurse named Cora Amurao screamed out the window of a Chicago townhouse, "They're all dead!" and "I'm the only one alive." "They" were Cora's eight roommates. Also student nurses, the young women had been bound and then systematically strangled and stabbed by a 24-year-old drifter and thief named Richard Speck. Cora, who hid under a bed, may have survived because Speck lost count of his victims.


Cora was the key witness at Speck's trial. During his rampage, Amurao testified, Speck had asked one of his victims if she was "the one in the yellow dress," indicating that he'd cased the townhouse and that the crime was premeditated. After a 12-day trial, a jury convicted Speck of all the murders. The Supreme Court overturned his death sentence, but his conviction was upheld. 


I remember watching a video when I was in high school. It was a video made by Speck's fellow inmates in prison. Speck described feeling nothing while murdering the women and expressed no remorse. Speck laughed about the fun he was having and about granting sexual favors to other inmates. It was then that I had a conversation about it with Sally. When my mom got home the day after the murders, she found Sally asleep under the bed. I didn't make much of it until Sally told me that being under the bed was the only place she felt safe because that is where Cora, the only survivor hid and managed to escape Richard Speck. Henry's mom had a butcher knife out for self-defense.Oh and Sally was zonked out on Seconal so she could escape it all. I think that was when Sally's problems began but no one saw it. She kept a newspaper clipping of the report of Richard Speck's confession. 

Lakeland Ledger - Jan 20, 1977

                         Lakeland Ledger - Jan 20, 1977

 

My Dad and Harry Crane tried to get backstage at a Rolling Stones concert at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium early July, 1966. They were going to try and talk the Stones into doing a TV commercial for Heinz Beans. Sally and I couldn't stop laughing when Dad told us. The Stones doing a commercial jingle!!! But Dad told us that the Stones had done a cereal commercial three years before (1963). I never believed him until I actually found the commercial on YouTube a few years ago!!!

So anyway, they couldn't meet the Stone ofcourse. So Harry signed on The Trade Winds instead. I had never heard about them till my step-mom, Megan played their record for us. They were actually really good but sounded nothing like the Stones... wonder what Harry was thinking???? I found the record and played - 'New York's a Lonely Town' last night. Here is a video of it - -