Vintage Chicago Tribune: 10 infamous people condemned to Stateville prison
By Kori Rumore, Marianne Mather, Chicago Tribune,
2 hours ago
Nathan Leopold Jr., left, and Richard Loeb at the time of their trial for the murder of Bobby Franks in 1924. The pair would both end up at Stateville Penitentiary. Chicago Tribune historical/Chicago Tribune/TNS
More than 2,000 people traveled to the outskirts of Joliet on Dec. 6, 1925, for the dedication of the new Illinois state penitentiary at Stateville.
Legislators were greeted with a luncheon at what was then known as the world’s most modern prison. Though not yet completed, construction costs were then estimated to top $10 million (or more than $180 million in today’s dollars).
Warden John L. Whitman told the crowd that the facility would become the model of reformation for men who had run afoul of the law, not merely a place of punishment.
“I believe in giving men a square deal, just reward for their accomplishments and prompt punishment for their misdeeds, teaching them that they can get that to which they are entitled only by giving in exchange that which they owe,” Whitman said.
Seven years later, amid criticism in one corner that inmates were being pampered, and in another that conditions were unfair, another warden reported that to fulfill Whitman’s lofty promise he had to steer a course between equally perilous ways of dealing with inmates.
“If we are too good to them, they could trample upon us. If we are too harsh with them, they might riot or mutiny, and we’d have to kill them,” Maj. Henry C. Hill told the Tribune.
A magnet for controversy from the start, the aging and decrepit almost century-old prison is set to be demolished and its inmates moved to other facilities.
Here’s a look back at some of the most infamous people to call Stateville Correctional Center home — be it merely a day or decades.
A caravan of vehicles transported the convicted murderers to Joliet prison on Sept. 11, 1924, where they would become convicts No. 9305 and No. 9306 in Illinois’ penal system.
Later they were both moved to Stateville, where Loeb was killed by a fellow inmate on June 4, 1936.
Chicago’s notorious “Lipstick Killer,” then a 17-year-old University of Chicago student, confessed to the strangulation and dismemberment of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan on Jan. 7, 1946, and the murders of Josephine Ross, 43, on June 5, 1945; and Frances Brown, 33, on Dec. 10, 1945, all on the North Side. He agreed to plead guilty and received three consecutive life sentences for the murders to save himself from the electric chair.
Heirens, who spent 65 years in custody and was one of Illinois’ longest-serving prisoners, died at age 83 in 2012, at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center.
Richard Speck
Though originally sentenced to die in the electric chair for the stabbing and strangulation murders of eight Chicago student nurses July 13-14, 1966, on the South Side, Speck was resentenced to eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years each after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the death penalty of Illinois and other states was unconstitutional.
Speck died of a heart attack at a Joliet hospital on Dec. 5, 1991 — the day before his 50th birthday.
Larry Hoover
Founder of the Gangster Disciples, Hoover was sentenced in 1973 to 200 years in prison for the kidnap and murder of William Young. Key evidence was a deposition from a witness who was slain before the trial began.
Though imprisoned, law enforcement officials said Hoover maintained control of the street gang. In a secretly recorded tape played in federal court in 1996, Hoover bragged about the freedom he enjoyed at Stateville, including conjugal visits and 30-pound shipments of marijuana. He was convicted the next year on wide-ranging narcotics charges and sentenced to six life terms, seven 20-year sentences and three four-year sentences.
Hoover is housed in a supermax prison compound in Florence, Colorado, where his first court appearance in decades was held via video in late September.
Edward Spreitzer
A member of the sadistic Ripper Crew , believed to be responsible for the cultlike mutilation sex slayings of as many as 20 women during the early 1980s, Spreitzer was convicted in 1986 of kidnapping and then killing Linda Sutton, 26, near Villa Park in 1981. He was sent to Stateville, but moved to Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg.
Spreitzer is ineligible for parole. Gov. George Ryan — in one of his final acts in office in 2003 — cleared out death row, commuting to life terms the sentences of all of the state’s condemned inmates.
James Degorski and Juan Luna
The duo killed seven people on Jan. 8, 1993, herding them into a walk-in cooler and shooting them at a Brown’s Chicken restaurant in Palatine after it had closed for the night. The victims included the two restaurant owners and five workers, two of whom were Palatine High School students.
The case went unsolved for nearly a decade until police arrested them in 2002.
Luna, who previously worked at the restaurant, was convicted of murder in 2007 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Degorski also was convicted of murder in 2009 and sentenced to life without parole.
Charles Walker
Seven years after he committed a double murder in downstate Mascoutah, and was captured, confessed and sentenced to death, Walker was executed at Stateville in 1990. He became the first Illinois inmate to die by lethal injection and the first in 28 years to be put to death.
John Wayne Gacy
Like Walker, Gacy spent a short period of time at Stateville. He was transferred to the facility about a day before his 1994 execution by lethal injection.
A former building contractor who sidelined as a clown at children’s parties, Gacy was the nation’s most notorious serial killer in the 1970s. He was convicted of killing 33 young men and boys.
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