apartment the daughter staggered to a
telephone and called the police. “I went
back to Mother’s room. I thought she’d
only passed out.”
She told the officers she saw only a
little blood on her mother’s body and had
not actually seen the man stab her.
As investigators continued searching
the area they discovered a pair of
spectacles. Had the killer dropped
them? The glasses were shown to local
optometrists in the hope that one would
have a record of the sale.
They struck lucky. The spectacles had
been prescribed for Patrick Wright, a
local man, who was a recent parolee. He
had been arrested on March 30th and
charged with disorderly conduct after a
police officer had spotted him kneeling
down beneath a bedroom window.
Wright had pleaded guilty and was fined
50 dollars. Although the window-peeping
was a violation of his parole, it was not
deemed serious enough for him to besent back to prison. Wright paid his fine
and was given a reprimand by his parole
officer.
He had been freed from prison in
December after he had served a little
over three years for an armed-violence
conviction. He was released early
because State prisons were so full that
an early-release programme had been
started for the less violent cases.D
etectives found Patrick Wright early
one morning as he was wandering
around the streets of Mattoon. They
picked him up and took him in.
Policeman Joseph Plummer said
Wright told police he had taken three
rings from the younger woman. Later
he had thrown them into a storm drain.
Wright showed police where they could
also find tools which he’d thrown away as
he ran from the scene.
Plummer said that Wright had taken
the police to the back yard of a housewhere they found an identification card
for Carol Specht, her driver’s licence, and
several personal photos hidden under a
bush. They also found two screwdrivers,
a wire-cutter, a knife sheath and a pair of
gloves. The suspect had apparently had
the items with him when he went to the
apartment a little after midnight on the
fateful night.
Wright went with police to his
one-room apartment and officers found
a large box in a cupboard. It contained
several items of women’s footwear.
Detectives surmised that Wright had an
abnormal obsession with women’s shoes.
Possibly he used them for sexual fetishes
and was looking for more of them when
he arrived at the Specht apartment.
Wright said that he could not
remember killing Carol. He recalled
slashing her daughter’s neck with the
knife, but after that he didn’t remember a
thing until about half an hour later whenhe found himself running around town
with a knife in his hand. Wright said he’d
gone to the apartment to steal women’s
shoes instead of the money and the
jewels, as he had told police earlier. He
had done this, he said, because he was
ashamed and “didn’t want other people
to know my problem.”
Wright told officers he began to use
shoes with spiked heels as sexual objects
when he was about 12 or 13 years old.
When he was 13 he was placed in a
juvenile home for breaking into a shoe
store.
Because of his mental problem he
had been committed to Kankakee State
Hospital at the age of 15. Except for brief
times, he had been in and out of mental
institutions ever since. “All the jail terms
resulted from efforts to obtain women’s
shoes,” said Wright. “I never hurt or
harmed anybody.”
Wright said he didn’t know why he
stabbed Carol and injured her daughter.
How had he felt when he did the killing?
“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “It was
like I was standing outside of my mind
and myself, and like somebody else was
doing it, and at the same time I saw
myself doing it.”
Wright said that he had not planned
the attacks on Carol and Connie when he
went to the apartment.
“I wish they had never happened. I
didn’t want them to happen.” As his
voice broke with emotion, he said: “I’m
sorry for what I’ve done.”
Wright regained control and spoke in a
matter-of-fact manner. He told detectivesBelow, a pair of spike-heeled women’s shoes –
the killer had developed his fetish for them as a
child. Inset below, an artist’s impression of the
man police questioned about a pair of glasses
found near the murder scene. Below right, the
apartment block where ofice worker Carol
Specht was murdered