P
ATRICK WRIGHT’S “pathetic”
and “wretched” life never got out
of first gear. His IQ was “borderline
mental deficiency” and, by his own
admission, he had suffered from a
women’s shoe fetish since he was seven.
His adoptive mother beat him because
of his mental impairment and he had
been institutionalised in various mental
hospitals since the age of 13. Since he
was 15 he had spent most of his days
in custody – and had wreaked mayhem
when free. “Wretched” just about
summed up his young life.
In the summer of 1983 the one-man
crime wave took his night-time prowling
up a few notches. He broke into an
apartment looking for women’s shoes to
indicated she had died quickly, with no
chance to fight back.
Detectives spoke to Connie who
described how she had been awakened
by a man with a knife coming into her
room. He asked her who she was and she
told him.
She had gone to bed about 11.30 p.m.,
leaving her mother asleep on a couch in
the living-room. A little later there was a
pounding noise and that was when the
stranger came into her bedroom. The
man was white and about six feet tall.
He held the knife to her throat and told
her to go into her mother’s bedroom.
Once there, he forced her to remove her
nightgown and knickers. Her mother was
lying naked on the bed, with her hands
and feet bound.
He told the daughter to take off her
rings. “He put the rings in his pocket.
Then he leaned over Mother and turned
and cut my throat,” she said.
As soon as the assailant had left theCase report by
Leslie Chance
and Harold Heyssatisfy his sexual fantasies, but things got
out of hand.
He was quickly hauled in and admitted
in court a string of offences including the
killing of Carol Specht, 44, and an attack
on her 20-year-old daughter Connie
at their home on South Sixth Street in
Mattoon in central Illinois. He had also
tried – unsuccessfully – to rape them
both. He didn’t have a lot going for him.
Coles County Circuit Judge Paul
Komada observed: “I don’t think any
reasonable person who has heard all of
the evidence in this case can feel anything
but sympathy for the pathetic creature,
Patrick Wright.”
However, crucially, the judge made it
clear that he would not allow sympathy
nor outrage nor the mitigation of Wright’s
pathetic early life to affect his sentencing.
He said he simply disregarded them in
making his decision, which was the death
penalty.
Sentencing in US courts is seldom
the end of a case. More often than not it
is merely the start of a long, drawn-out
procedure which drags on for years
through a string of appeals. It’s especially
the case when a defendant is facing the
death penalty. At about this time there
were some 150 inmates waiting to be
killed by lethal injection. No one had
been put to death in Illinois State prisons
since 1962.
Patrick Wright’s appeals dragged on
for 20 years while he kicked his heels
in prison. During that time, in the early
1990s, there was a renewed interest in
speeding prisoners to their deaths in
Illinois. Several were executed and Wright
and his pals must have had some queasy
moments till all the death sentences in the
State were controversially commuted in
early 2004 by Governor George H. Ryan.
C
arol’s murder was a particularly nasty
piece of work. She had been stripped
naked and stabbed repeatedly after being
tied up and had no chance to defend
herself against Wright who would have
been a few years younger.
52 Murder Most Foul Shoe Fetish led To Murder Frenzy
The killer said
he’d gone looking
for women’s
shoes to steal
but had ended
up butchering a
mother to death
and cutting the
throat of her
daughter...
SHOE FETISH LED TO
MURDER FRENZY
SHOE FETISH LED TO
MURDER FRENZY
The first inkling that something was
wrong came when the Mattoon Police
got a frantic telephone call which told of
trouble at an apartment. Police found the
body of a woman lying on the bed. She
was tied with stockings and knife wounds
were visible in her back. Another woman
was fighting for breath, but alive.
The dead woman was identified as
office worker Carol Specht. Her badly
injured daughter Connie was taken to
the Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center.
Police, Deputy Coroner Mike Nichols
and lab technicians arrived and began
a preliminary examination. Meanwhile,
other officers questioned neighbours.
Detectives believed that the killer had
entered the apartment through sliding
doors.
Dr. Grant Johnson’s autopsy found six
knife wounds to Carol’s back. She had
died of perforation of both lungs and had
suffocated because of internal bleeding.
There were no defensive wounds which