Shoulders back, no crying.

On Aug. 7, 1966, when Lori Davy, 11, walked across the stage to accept her sister's diploma, her father's orders were fresh in her mind.

Everywhere she looked she saw starched white uniforms, starched white caps, the meticulously dressed 1966 graduating class of South Chicago Community Hospital School of Nursing.

Minus six.

A camera caught the moment: a pretty girl in a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar, reaching, with white gloves, for the document her sister had worked so hard to earn.

What the camera couldn't catch were the girl's thoughts, the confusion she felt at the spectacle of all these other graduates. Why were they here, and her sister wasn't?

The camera also catches the misery on those women's faces.

Lori didn't cry. She walked off the stage, shoulders back, carrying a diploma dated July 14, 1966. The day of her sister's death had been recorded as her graduation day.

Gloria Davy was the second of six siblings, born in the same hospital where she eventually studied nursing, raised not far from the townhouse where she died. Her father, Charles, was a former Marine who expected as much from his five daughters as he did from his son.

“It was almost like he had five boys,” said Lori Davy Sivek, who is now 61 and teaches eighth-grade science and technology in a Houston suburb.

In Lori's words, Gloria was driven, independent, intelligent, headstrong, poised, creative and snippy when she didn't like what you were doing.

She started college as an English major at Northern Illinois University, then switched to nursing. In 1965 she became president of the Student Nurses Association of Illinois.

The townhouse Gloria shared with the other student nurses was often a mess, so she sometimes paid her little sister a dollar or two to clean. Lori would ride her bike over, do the dishes, pick up the clothes scattered around the living room. Being in the world of the older girls felt cool.

One summer night in 1966, when her father, who worked for a steel company, was in Pittsburgh on business, Lori and her two younger sisters crowded into their parents' bed. They were excited. Not only had they been allowed a slumber party with their mother, but their big sister who was about to graduate from nursing school was coming home for good the next day.

As they snuggled, the phone rang in the nearby den. It was Gloria, 22, calling from the townhouse to say that her fiance had just dropped her off.

“I'm in,” said Gloria, who phoned her mother every night to say she was back and safe. “I'm home.”

It was Wednesday, July 13, shortly after 11 p.m. Richard Speck was already upstairs.

The next time Lori heard the phone ring, it was morning. Her dad was on the line. He'd turned on the TV news in Pennsylvania.

Not long afterward, Arline Davy, sitting on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, made an announcement to her daughters.

“Gloria's been murdered,” Lori remembers her saying. “A lot of people will be here shortly. Girls, we need to clean the house.”

Before long, the Davy home was packed with people, and every room, it seemed, was packed with roses, so many roses the scent made Lori sick.

After that day, Arline Davy was different. Always a quiet woman, she grew quieter.

“We kind of lost her,” Lori said. “She was not the same person. He killed more than eight people.”

At her father's urging, Lori considered becoming a nurse, but she finally told him that she couldn't, she was just too emotional for the job. After she married and had three children, she told her kids that Aunt Gloria had died in a car crash. She perpetuated the ruse until the day her daughter, then in high school, was watching a TV show about Speck, the women he murdered and the families left behind.

“Did I just see Grandpa on the television?” her daughter asked. Lori realized it was time to tell the truth.

In the Davy family, according to Lori, grieving openly for Gloria was considered weakness, especially by her father, the military man. Only recently, since John Schmale got in touch with her about a 50th anniversary commemoration for the women, has Lori let herself believe that it's OK to remember, OK to cry.

Like Schmale, she talks about opening the box of her sister's life, and now that it's open she thinks, “Wow, wow, this was my sister. Look at her. I want you to look at her eyes.”

Gloria's brother and three of her sisters are still alive. One went into nursing. Lori has come to believe that Gloria's death prepared her to handle anything, and to see, in some useful ways, the possibility of death in everything.

Their mother eventually forgave Richard Speck and urged her children to do the same.

“Don't hate,” she told them. If you live your life in hatred and anger, you'll lose more than Gloria.

Lori tries to live by her mother's words.

But she still can't stand the smell of roses.

Gloria Jean Davy