Cook County Circuit Judge Louis B. Garippo dead at 84 - had his hands in the John Wayne gacy Serial Killer Murder Trial and the Richard Speck Mass Murderer Case

Former Cook County Circuit Judge Louis B. Garippo had a hand in two of the most notorious murder cases in Chicago history.

He presided over the 1980 trial of John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of killing 33 men and boys and burying 26 of them in the crawlspace of his home on Summerdale Avenue.

And he was a supervisor in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office during the murder trial of Richard Speck, an itinerant seaman convicted in the 1966 stabbing and strangling of eight student nurses in a town home at 2319 E. 100th.

Judge Garippo, 84, died Tuesday at the Vi at The Glen, an assisted-living facility in Glenview, said his daughter, Ellen.

He once said he and lawyers on both sides of the Gacy case marveled at how normal the serial killer had seemed in his public life. “Everyone sort of agreed if Gacy came through the jury box, both sides probably would have picked him, and he probably would have been foreman,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1994, when he was in private practice.

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