CHICAGO MANHUNT

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31113, 16 July 1966, Page 15

CHICAGO MANHUNT

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright) CHICAGO, July 15. More than one thousand policemen were engaged today in a manhunt for the killer of eight student nurses butchered in pre-dawn hours in one of the grisliest crimes in United States history.

A ninth nurse, a pretty > 23-year-old Filipino girl, I escaped the slaughter apI parently only because the > insatiable killer had lost j count of the number of girls he had at his mercy in the nurses’ house where they lived. Her description of the murderer, some fingerprints and the tyre print of what was possibly a getaway car, were the only clues the police had to help them. The quiet, middle-class section of Chicago was awakened to the horror a few minutes after 6 a.m. yesterday when the Filipino nurse, Miss Corazon Amurao climbed out on a ledge of a second window and began screaming. “They are all dead. They are all dead. My friends are all dead. Oh, my God, I’m the only one alive.” Forgot Her Shocked and hysterical. Miss Amurao told of the three-hour orgy of death and how, although bound and gagged, she escaped the killer by rolling under a bed un-

til he fled, apparently forgetting about her. One police chief said he believed the crime might have started out with robbery as the motive and then degenerated into a sex crime. There were also theories that the crime had been planned in advance—perhaps with only robbery as the motive. The killer worked with hor-

rifying deliberation, selecting his victims one at a time and leading them to their deaths, assuring each she would not be harmed. Through Window Miss Amurao said the killer was about 25 years old, 6ft tall and weighed about 1701 b. He had a dark complexion and dark hair and wore a dark coat. The night of terror began at midnight when he knocked on Miss Amurao’s bedroom door after apparently entering the house through a kitchen window. He carried a knife and a gun. He ordered Miss Amurao and another girl into another room and bound them, saying he needed money to go to New Orleans and would not harm them.

He met two girls as they returned from dates and tied them up and finally brought the remaining girls from two other bedrooms and bound them also. Five Questioned The eight young student nurses were strangled and knifed to death. Police, already harassed by an explosive racial situation in the city’s Negro area, picked up five suspects in Chicago and the surrounding area during the day. Each was questioned and later released. Besides Miss Amurao, two of the killer’s victims were from the Philippines. They were studying at a Chicago hospital under a student exchange programme.