Masakit in Peoria

"Now," said the prosecutor, "if you see that same man in the courtroom to day who came to your bedroom door on Wednesday night, July 13, 1966, would you please step down and point him out?"

It was a classic courtroom line. Yet when Assistant State's Attorney William Martin from Chicago put the question last week in Peoria, 111., the words cast a galvanic spell over the room. In response to the prosecutor's question, Corazon Pieza Amurao, 24, stepped down from the witness stand. The pretty petite (4 ft. 10 in.) Philippine girl, who alone survived the massacre last summer in which eight fellow student nurses were stabbed or strangled to death in a South Side Chicago apartment, walked toward Defendant Richard F. Speck, 25, and raised her hand toward his head. "This," she said firmly, "is the man."

That confrontation, carried out with a minimum of emotion and a maximum of drama, climaxed the first week of the trial. Speck, who has received more careful legal and physical protection than any other murder suspect in recent history (his trial was shifted from Chicago for fear of adverse publicity), is represented by Public Defender Gerald Getty, 53, none of whose 80 odd murder defendants has ever received a death sentence. The accused, sometime merchant seaman and ex-convict, seemed to have been crossed up only by the one event of July 13 that the killer had overlooked. By rolling under a bunk while the murderer led her roommates to the slaughter, Miss Amurao had escaped his attention while watching his movements.

Momentary Tears. During three hours of direct examination by Prosecutor Martin and 1 i hours of cross-examination by Getty, Corazon remained unshaken and--except for a few momentary tears--unsentimental. She accounted in cool syllables for each of the wood blocks, labeled with her former roommates' names, that Martin removed from a scale model of the five-room apartment where the girls were killed. As Martin lifted the block labeled Merlita Gargullo (another Filipina who had moved into the apartment two months before the killings), she offered the recollection that the murderer had asked Merlita: "Do you know karate?"

The killer took 20 to 40 minutes between slayings, as he led his victims from the back upstairs bedroom to the street-front rooms where the slaughter took place. At one point, a neighbor--blonde Tammy Sioukoff, 20, another student nurse who lived near by--rang the doorbell, hoping to borrow a couple of slices of bread to make a sandwich for her boy friend; the killer kept the girls quiet by advising them: "Don't be afraid! I'm not going to kill you." Miss Sioukoff went away.

Final Victim. Corazon said that the killer later asked Patricia Matusek, 21, who was wearing a yellow nightgown: "Are you the girl with the yellow dress?" It was a possible confirmation that he had watched the girls enter and leave the apartment from a park near by. Apparently none of the victims put up a violent struggle, according to the survivor, though three of the girls had cried "ah!" in muffled voices. One of the Philippine nurses cried "masakit!"Tagalog for "it hurts."

When the killer came to his eighth and final victim, pretty, blonde Gloria Davy, 22, he flattened her on the bed across from the one under which Miss Amurao was hiding. In agonizing detail, the witness described a rape that lasted 20 or 25 minutes. None of the other girls had apparently been sexually assaulted and, curiously enough, even the coroner's inquest on Gloria Davy had not revealed any clinical evidence of rape. That one fact seemed to indicate the motive and the madness of the killer, a man who may have been impotent, yet so desperate to prove his virility that he would murder eight girls to do so.

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