Eric Grommon

In 1996, a Chicago news anchor got a videotape in the mail that nobody was supposed to see. It had been filmed in secret inside a maximum security prison eight years earlier. The man on the tape was Richard Speck. In July 1966 he broke into a townhouse on Chicago's South Side and killed eight student nurses in one night. A ninth woman, Corazon Amurao, survived by hiding under a bunk bed and later pointed at him in court. The jury took about 45 minutes to convict him. He was sentenced to death. In 1972 that became life, and he spent the next two decades at Stateville. In the video below, you see what that life looked like. Speck is snorting what looks like cocaine with other inmates and counting a roll of hundred dollar bills. He's wearing women's underwear, and his body looks like he had been taking hormones. Someone off camera asks him if he killed those nurses. "Sure I did," he says. "It just wasn't their night." He calls himself God, and the devil. He says he wants to live forever. Then he laughs and says that if people only knew how much fun he was having in there, they would turn him loose. He had already been dead for five years when the tape came out. He died of a heart attack in 1991, the day before his 50th birthday, after doctors spent four hours trying to save him. Illinois lawmakers held hearings on how a tape like that could be made in a maximum security prison. The families of the nurses had sat through parole hearing after parole hearing, and now they watched him laugh about it. Is life in prison a punishment, if this is what it looks like on the inside?