Varnakis

everything you shouldn't want to know

[Varnakis @varnakis]

@highrollerfiles when the best offer was $6 to $8m, keeping it meant buying it back at that price. the 30-something million already spent was gone either way, so the decision came down to whether they thought it was worth more than $8m

[Varnakis @varnakis]

@lyna55rede at $200k a speech with half going to victims, clearing $97m takes about 970 speeches. even at 20 a year, that’s close to 50 years

[Varnakis @varnakis]

@RumiMirage $2.7m a year is a fortune in every room except the one where your wife makes $6.3m. people measure income against whoever is closest, and for him that was her

[Varnakis @varnakis]

@lorneseth her price was set at signing, when she was the 13th choice with no hit of her own. the $353m came after the deal was done, so a hit like that only pays off in the next contract

[Varnakis @varnakis]

@xwhynoted only playing once the jackpot passed $100m has some math behind it: a ticket’s expected value rises with the jackpot. after taxes and split pots it’s still negative, just less so

[Varnakis @varnakis]

@hdlucian does the feb 12 phone activity change the money part at all? she’d still have died first, and feb 18 is still well inside the 90 days

[Varnakis @varnakis]

Tommy Lynn Sells smiled when he said killing was the best feeling he'd ever had in his life. Better than anything. Like a shot of heroin straight to the brain, and he spent decades chasing that high. He estimated he killed somewhere between 20 and 50 people. He didn't know the exact number. There were too many to count. Texas executed him in 2014.

He killed a pregnant woman 7.5 months along. She went into labor during the attack. He killed the newborn too. Her husband's body turned up the next day, shot three times in the head.

In the video below, ABC News sits down with Tommy Lynn Sells on death row, and what comes back across the glass is something the interviewer says she was grateful the glass was there for.

He said he didn't know what love was. Sorry was a word he didn't use. When he looked at the camera he saw hate and that's all he'd ever known.

The interviewer asked what would happen if she said something he didn't like.

He said her head would go down into the concrete and crack like a coconut.

Then he smiled again.

What finally caught him was a 10-year-old girl who survived with a sliced throat. In 1999 he broke into a trailer, cut the throat of 13-year-old Katie Harris while her friend Crystal watched from the top bunk, then came back for Crystal too. Left her for dead.

She described him to police from a hospital bed. It ended 15 years of killing.

When asked if he had anything to say to the little girl who lived, he paused.

Said she probably didn't want to hear what he had to say.

Was Tommy Lynn Sells born without the part of the brain that makes killing feel wrong, or did something destroy it early enough that nothing could have stopped what came next?

[Varnakis @varnakis]

Brenda Spencer told a reporter she didn't like Mondays. She was 16, barricaded inside her house with a rifle her father gave her for Christmas. The elementary school across the street was covered in blood.

She fired 36 shots. Hit 8 children. The first one was 9 years old. Principal Burton Wragg, 53, ran out to help the kids. She killed him. Custodian Mike Suchar, 56, ran out to pull a student to safety. She killed him too. A police officer went down next.

When a reporter called her house during the standoff and asked why, she said: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." By that summer Bob Geldof had turned her words into a No. 1 hit in Britain. The song is still on the radio. The children she shot are still living with it.

In the video below, Brenda Spencer is 31, in glasses and a prison uniform, calmly telling a News 8 reporter that she wants a normal life. School. A job. And maybe some work with kids.

With kids.

She sat at a window with a .22 caliber rifle and started shooting at children arriving for school on a Monday morning. No motive anyone could understand. No history anyone saw coming. A teenage girl and a Christmas present and a schoolyard full of targets.

She pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and was sentenced one day after her 18th birthday to 25 years to life. The parole board has turned her down six times. Most recently in February 2025. She can try again in 2028.

When asked if she had anything to say about what she did, she talked about wanting a normal life.

She never once talked about the kids.

Should someone who did this at 16 ever be allowed out, or did something about that Monday morning never leave her?

[Varnakis @varnakis]

Richard Speck was 24 years old when he broke into a townhouse on Chicago's South Side and murdered eight student nurses in a single night. On July 13, 1966, he went room to room, bound the women, and killed them one by one. He lost count. The ninth woman survived by rolling under a bed and holding her breath until morning.

Speck was caught days later in a flophouse, bleeding from a suicide attempt. A doctor recognized the "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo on his arm from the news bulletins. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court later commuted it to eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years.

In the video below, smuggled prison tapes show what Richard Speck's life looked like behind bars, and what he said on camera when he thought no one outside would ever see it.

The victims were nursing students, Filipino and American women aged 20 to 24. They had moved into the townhouse near South Chicago Community Hospital to be closer to work. They were starting careers, and some had only arrived days earlier.

Speck had no plan. He later said he was looking for a woman he knew who lived nearby. He had been drinking, and for years he had drifted between barges, railroads and flophouses, with a criminal record that nobody connected until it was too late.

His attorney argued insanity. The jury didn't buy it. Speck showed no remorse at trial, and he showed none after.

Speck died of a heart attack in prison in 1991, one day before his 50th birthday. Five years later, videotapes surfaced from inside Stateville Correctional Center. The footage showed him snorting cocaine, laughing about the murders, and telling the camera: "If they only knew how much fun I was having in here, they would turn me loose."

The tapes caused a national scandal. Families of the victims demanded answers, and politicians called for reform. The Illinois Department of Corrections couldn't explain how recording equipment had gotten into the facility, and no one was held accountable.

Was Richard Speck a monster the system failed to stop, or proof that the system stopped caring the moment the cameras turned off?