For decades, this has been where the worst of the worst were often sent: murderers, rapists, sex offenders. Richard Speck, who one night in 1966 systematically stabbed and strangled seven student nurses in Chicago, then raped the eighth before killing her too, was a longtime resident of Stateville until his death in 1991. John Wayne Gacy, the notorious “clown killer” who entertained neighborhood children as Pogo the Clown and ended up killing thirty-three boys and young men, most of whom he buried in the crawl space under his house, was executed at Stateville in 1994. One of Illinois’ maximum security prisons and more recently the site of a receiving and classification center which male convicts from northern Illinois pass through before being assigned a regular prison home, Stateville presents an imposing image. Spreading over 2,264 acres, bordered by a thirty-three-foot concrete wall with ten towers, and inhabited by the ghosts of thousands of hardened felons, Stateville is a potent reminder that crime doesn’t pay.
