Joliet Prisons

Joliet Prisons

Legislators to conduct hearing on Stateville videotape

Answers wanted: Goal is to remove gang influence, drugs

By Emily Wilkerson, COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
Springfield -- A handful of Illinois lawmakers filed into a Statehouse committee room to see first-hand the videotape they had been hearing about. It appeared to show two men having sex, snorting cocaine and flashing $100 bills.

What caused lawmakers' jaws to drop were the circumstances surrounding the home movie. The star of the show was one of the state's most notorious criminals, Richard Speck. The setting was the maximum-security Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet. And the producers seemed to be prison inmates who had remarkably gained access to a video camera and tape to film the show. The tape -- first shown on WBBM-Channel 2 -- has caught the attention of legislators, who plan to conduct a hearing next week to find out how, when and where the videotape was made.

But during a series of hearings that could stretch into the summer, legislators say they want answers to some broader questions about what is going on behind prison walls in Illinois. "The big picture of where I hope we will end up is that we will establish whatever legislative remedies we can to remove the influence of gangs, drugs, sexual contact and the spread of communicable diseases ... in state prisons," said Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Wheaton, who is organizing the hearings. Roskam said the House Judiciary Committee plans to exercise its rarely used power to subpoena witnesses and interview people under oath to accomplish its goals.

The first hearing on Wednesday will focus on testimony from Bill Kurtis, the Chicago anchorman who obtained the Speck videotape. During a portion of the prison-made video, Speck, who was convicted of the 1966 murders of eight Chicago nursing students, answers the questions of an off-camera interviewer. At one point he brags about prison life, saying, "If they knew how much fun I was having in here, they would turn me loose." Speck died of a heart attack in 1991 while at Stateville. He was serving eight, 50-100 year terms for the murders.

Getting answers to how the videotape was made could be nearly impossible since Speck has been dead nearly five years and the video was filmed eight years ago, said Nic Howell, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections. "This is an unusual-type occurrence," Howell said. "I have never heard of anything like this happening before." Although the fact that inmates had access to equipment to make the video is startling, the tape is not clear enough to determine whether the alleged cocaine, marijuana and money in the prison movie were real, Howell said. The prisoners could have been using props and following a script in an effort "to shock people," he said. According to the Chicago television reports, the inmates apparently made the videotape to get money. Kurtis obtained the tape from a lawyer who received it as payment from a Stateville inmate.