Not such a perfect murder
Just after 5 p.m. on 21 May 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks was walking home down Ellis Avenue in the wealthy district of Kenwood, Chicago, when a large blue sedan pulled up beside him. To his surprise, his distant cousin and best friend’s elder brother, 18-year-old Richard Loeb, leaned out and called to him, offering him a lift home. Franks accepted, enthusiastic at the prospect of a free ride.
Since Loeb, curiously, was sitting in the back of the large car, the boy hopped in beside the driver, whom he recognised as Loeb’s inseparable companion, Nathan Leopold. Apparently safe in the company of a cousin he admired for cleverness, good looks and athleticism, and with noting to fear from his quiet, scholarly friend, Franks had not the least suspicion that he would shortly become the victim of one of this century’s strangest crimes.
Chatting away as they moved off into traffic, Franks did not notice Leopold glance anxiously into the rear-view mirror. Richard Loeb had leaned forward on the back seat, clenching a chisel. When the traffic thinned, Loeb raised his arm and drove the chisel with terrific force into the back of the unsuspecting boy’s skull. Bobby Franks slumped forward, his head gushing with blood.
Leopold shouted out: “Oh my God, I didn’t know it would be like this!” but held steadily enough to the road. As they drove south along Lake Michigan, Loeb stuffed his victim’s mouth with rags in case he was not quite dead and still able to shout out, and covered his body in a robe. Once in open country, they drove off the road and stripped the boy half naked. Then they felt hungry. In the next town, Hammond, Leopold went to get root beer and hotdogs, then they waited in the car for darkness and the chance to get rid of the body.
Murder preparations
Leopold and Loeb had been preparing for this day since the beginning of the year. Their plan was to kidnap and murder a rich man’s son, then demand a ransom. The money, unbeknown to the parents, would be paid for a dead child. However, this was to be no ordinary crime. It was to be perfect, a proof that they were morally and intellectually superior to the common herd of human beings. In fact, it did not really matter to them that the victim was Bobby Franks, for they had resolved that on that day they would choose the first likely candidate who came along. Nor did the ransom money matter: they, too, were the sons of rich men. The ransom was part of the adventure, and part of the proof. If they got away with it, it would be one more piece of evidence of the bumbling inadequacy of the average mind.
Once darkness fell they drove on to Wolf Lake. It was a desolate place Leopold knew well, having spent time there in his favourite occupation, bird-watching. Just above a railway culvert they stopped and removed the rest of the boy’s clothes. Hoping to obliterate the victim’s identity, they poured hydrochloric acid on his face. Then Leopold tugged on a pair of fisherman’s waders and carried the body down an embankment to the pipe opening. There, however, he made two crucial errors. In the struggle to shove the body into its hiding place, he removed his coat and a pair of glasses fell out of one of the pockets. And when he did manage to raise the body to the culvert, he failed to push it far enough inside: a foot was left dangling from the entrance. Nevertheless, Leopold and Loeb left Wolf Lake in the belief that everything was going smoothly.
Once back in Chicago at Leopold’s mansion home on Greenwood Avenue, they embarked on the second stage of their scheme. First they put an address to a ransom note they had already typed. Since at the time of writing they had not known the identity of their victim, nor consequently the name of his father, the letter began simply, ‘Dear Sir’. It went on to demand $10,000 in return for the safety of his son. The money was to be composed of old bills, wrapped in paper in a cigar box and was to be ready by 1 p.m. the following day, 22 May. The killers signed the letter George Johnson and sent it special delivery, times to arrive the next morning.
Then they drove over to a call box on East 47th Street. Egged on by the dominant Loeb, Leopold picked up the phone “Your son had been kidnapped,” he told Mrs Franks coldly. “He is all right. Tell the police and he will be murdered at once. There will be further news in the morning.” When Mrs Franks begged to be told who was calling, Leopold gave the name Johnson, and rang off.
Destroying the evidence
Finally, at Loeb’s house, they burned their victim’s bloodied clothes. The floor of the car – which they had hired that morning was scrubbed. The boys then returned to Leopold’s house. Before retiring exhausted to bed, they played cards.
However, if Leopold and Loeb woke the next morning feeling anything like satisfaction at the progress of their plot, it was misplaced. The ‘perfect crime’ began to unravel with extraordinary swiftness. For a start, Mr Franks had not heeded the warning given to his wife, and had contacted the police during the night. The police were now searching for the missing boy. To make matters worse for the killers, that morning, after they had send a second letter to Mr Franks containing instructions for the handover (the money was to be hurled at a certain point from a train bound for Michigan City), they were spotted dumping the typewriter in a lagoon in Chicago’s Jackson Park.
Bobby Franks’ father, meanwhile had received the ransom demand at 9 a.m. that morning. He had prepared the money, and was waiting anxiously by the phone. He did not have to wait long for news. At midday, the police rang to tell him that a railway worker had found a body at Wolf Lake. The worker had spotted a foot dangling out of a culvert. In an agony of suspense, Franks send his brother-in-law Edwin Gresham to see if the body was his son, while he continued to wait for the kidnappers to get in touch. At 3 p.m. the phone rang again. It was his brother-in-law: the dead boy was young Bobby. Shortly afterwards, he received the letter containing instructions for the ransom handover.
Up to this point, police operations had been conducted in total secrecy for fear of endangering the life of Bobby Franks. Now the news of his kidnapping and murder was broken to the press, and an intensive manhunt was launched. Chicago had never seen anything quite like it. Teachers at Bobby Franks’ school were interrogated, while warehouses owned by mobsters such as Al Capone were turned over in the hope of finding clues.
Newspapers branded the crime one of the most vicious in the city’s history, and the police requested public help in the hunt for the perpetrators. Hundreds of people turned out in response to the police appeal. And among the crowds of outraged citizens who eagerly searched premises and the known haunts of criminals was a scion of one of Chicago’s wealthiest families – Richard Loeb. He was heard to say to a police officer: “This is the least any of us can do.”
Loeb’s help in the manhunt may have been an attempt to cover his tracks, to divert and possible suspicion from himself. But the more likely motivation was glee over the confusion he and Leopold had caused. Yet it was the clue that his less exhibitionistic partner had left at Wolf Lake that brought about their downfall.
Spectacles found
A railway signalman had found the pair of spectacles that Leopold had dropped. These were traced to an optician who had issued only three pairs like them: one to a woman who was wearing them when she opened the door to the police, and one to a lawyer who was on a trip to Europe. The third pair was traced to Leopold. On 29 May, seven days after the killing, he was called in for questioning by State Attorney Robert Crowe.
The son of a shipping magnate, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold seemed an unlikely murder suspect. With his poor-sightedness, slight build and gentle manner, police were not surprised to hear that his natural environment was the lecture room and the university library. Leopold was extremely intelligent and was the youngest-ever graduate from the University of Chicago, where he had made a special study of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He was now studying law.
But, outrageously talented though he was, Leopold made a bad liar. Questioned about the spectacles, he did not deny he owned a pair, but claimed that they were probably still in an old jacket of his at home. When the police rifled through the jacket and came up empty-handed, Leopold suggested that the spectacles had fallen from his breast pocket while he had been bird-watching at Wolf Lake. However, he was unable to explain exactly how they could have slipped out. Perhaps he had tripped. Detectives asked him to ‘act out’ stumbles in front of them, with the spectacles in the breast pocket of the jacket: each time, they refused to fall out.
Cover-up story
Throughout the questioning, Leopold poured scorn on the idea that he might be implicated in so sordid a crime. He hardly needed money, after all. And indeed, investigators were at a loss to account for his possible motive. But if he had not been abducting and murdering Bobby Franks on the afternoon of 21 May, what had he been doing? Leopold remembered his movements that day with suspicious exactitude: he had taken his car out and driven with a friend to pick up a couple of girls in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. They had told no one about this because the girls were not particularly ‘respectable’. Only after he was pressed would he reveal the identity of his friend – Richard Loeb Loeb was duly called in for questioning on 30 May.
In terms of background and academic achievement, Loeb seemed to have a lot in common with Leopold. Not only was he from a rich family (his father was retired Vice President of the giant mail order business Sears, Roebuck), but he had gleaned academic honours of a kind which, if they were not of the same magnitude as Leopold’s, were glittering enough to mark him out as a boy of unusual promise. However, police saw straight away that his character was very different. Where Leopold was withdrawn and cold, Loeb was talkative, even friendly. But he was clearly nervous. For if Leopold’s lies were transparent, he was at least composed when he told them. Loeb corroborated Leopold’s alibi, but he did so tensely, sometimes stammering. State Attorney Crowe realised that is a wedge could be driven between these two, the Lincoln Park alibi would collapse.
The wedge, in the event, came from an obvious source. Police simply asked the Leopold family chauffeur to verify that Leopold had taken the car out on the day of the murder. He could not. On the afternoon of the 21st, the chauffeur had used the car himself to take his wife to the doctor.
To add to the evidence mounting against Leopold and Loeb, a man came forward to say that he had witnessed them dumping a typewriter in the Jackson Park lagoon. Police now checked to see if the type on the ransom letters matched the type on some of Loeb’s student essays: it did.
The suspects confess
Attorney Crowe sensed that it was time to strike. On 31 May he informed Leopold that Loeb, faced with the shattered alibi, had confessed to the crime in another police station. This was not strictly true, but it worked: Leopold cracked, and recounted the events of 21 May. When he heard details of Leopold’s confession, Loeb confessed in turn.
The confessions, which the two were made to repeat in each other’s presence, chilled and mystified investigators in equal measure. The ransom money seemed to have been an irrelevance. But the notion of committing ‘the perfect murder’ for kicks, or to prove some kind of superiority to the rest of the human race – was incomprehensible to the police. Psychiatrists were therefore called in to shed some light upon the psychological conditions that had made this meaningless crime possible.
It emerged that Leopold and Loeb had been compelled by the nature of their relationship to perform some ultimate act of bonding. They were homosexuals, but Loeb was the adored, and Leopold the adorer. Loeb was perceived by his lover to be the incarnation of the ‘superman’ figure he had read about in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This figure was apparently above conventional morality; in his intellectual and spiritual superiority he was literally a law unto himself.
‘Superman’ figure
Loeb had proved he was a ‘superman’ to Leopold with a series of petty crimes – arson, burglary, hoaxes. Thrilled by this dashing outlaw, the embodiment of all he admired, Leopold began to take apart in Loeb’s acts of criminal mischief (together they had stolen the typewriter later used to write the ransom notes). As a kind of reward for his willingness to be dragged down into his personal underworld, Loeb submitted to Leopold’s sexual desires.
But eventually small crimes did not seem enough for either of them. Loeb, whose favourite reading was not Nietzsche but crime serials, had become obsessed by the notion of the perfect crime. Committing it would be a “lark” (his own word). More significantly, he perhaps wanted Leopold to take part in an act that would bring him down from his pedestal, and unite them forever in mutual degradation. Leopold, on the other hand, thought if murder as the final philosophical proof that they were above mortality of fools and weaklings – that they were, in fact, ‘supermen’. It was Loeb, however, who hatched the murder scheme itself, adding the ransom idea as a kind of flourish.
The confessions, and the manner in which they had been extracted, brought tremendous pressure to bear upon the killers’ relationship. Each tried to excuse himself of as much of the crime as possible, in particular by accusing the other of striking the blow that killed Bobby Franks. Police at first did not know whom to believe. But since Loeb managed to botch even his own accusations, admitting at one point that Leopold had been “sitting in the front seat” (the boy of course had been hit from behind), and since Leopold’s confession was in all other respects more detailed and trustworthy, opinion settled firmly upon the latter’s version of the events of 21 May.
In the eyes of the law, needless to say, it did not matter who had dealt the death blow. Both were guilty of premeditated murder. To the newspapers they were friends who deserved lynching. What with the evidence against them (police had recovered the typewriter from Jackson Park with this help of Richard Loeb), and the pubic demand for the harshest retribution to be exacted, the pair seemed bound for the hangman’s noose. Fortunately for them, their parents were able to engage Clarence Darrow for their defence.
Sixty-seven-year-old Clarence Darrow was a celebrated lawyer, known for taking on hard cases and for persuading juries with sheer force of eloquence. Equally well known was his abhorrence of capital punishment. However, in this instance he seemed to have bitten off more than he could chew. The evidence of both crimes – kidnapping and murder – was clear; and both charges carried the death sentence in Chicago. Nevertheless, he promised the parents of Leopold and Loeb that he would get the court to show mercy on the boys.
The trial
The trial opened at Cook County Criminal court on 21 July 1924, before Judge John Caverly, with State Attorney Crowe leading the prosecution. The courtroom was small, and packed with journalists. Forming the focus of their attention were the course of defendants, Leopold and Loeb. They sat expressionless before the judge, sprucely dressed in dark suits and with their hair slicked down. Outwardly they seemed calm. They were both convinced, however, that they would be hanged.
Darrow’s first move took the prosecution and the journalists by surprise. Both defendants would plead guilty to both charges in this trial, he said; there need not be a second trial for kidnapping, for example. This brought an objection from the prosecution. They wanted the indictments separated so that if the death penalty could not be secured for murder, another trial would take place and a capital sentence be secured for kidnapping. By pleading guilty to both charges now, however, Darrow’s clients were not only being assured of a trial without jury (public feeling was running high against them), they were attempting to avoid a second trial. Darrow emphasised that the facts were not in dispute; the only decision for the court would be the severity of the sentence. The judge saw things Darrow’s way, and allowed the double plea.
Darrow’s second initial victory came when he proposed to present evidence about the state of mind of his client’s in mitigation of sentence. The prosecution again objected, saying that if Darrow meant that his clients were insane, he had better say so. It was not a question of insanity, Darrow stressed. His clients were, however, dangerously abnormal. The judge was again sympathetic to Darrow, and allowed his evidence.
Pointless crime
Technically, Leopold and Loeb were minors. The prosecution, however, reminded the judge that the State of Illinois allowed the death sentence to be passed on borderline minors such as these, given special circumstances. And to show just how special these circumstances were, they called over 80 witnesses – railway men, policemen, relatives of Bobby Franks. The overall impression these witnesses gave was of the pointlessness of the crime, and of a young life callously cut short. Darrow cross-examined only once.
Opening the defence on 30 July, Darrow made it plain that it was not only Leopold and Loeb, but the issue of capital punishment that was on trial. “If I could ever bring my mind to ask for the death penalty,” he said pointedly to the prosecution, “I would do it not boastfully nor exultantly not in anger nor in hate, but I would do it with the deepest regret that it must be done.” He questioned whether the prosecution was out for justice or revenge, adding: “I have never seen a more deliberate effort to turn the human beings of a community into ravening wolves, and take advantage of everything that was offered to create an unreasoned hatred against these two boys.”
To bolster the other main plank of his defence – his contention that the boys were ‘abnormal’ – Darrow called three of the most eminent psychiatrists in America to stand – Doctor White, Glueck and Healy. They were familiar with the psychological profiles of the defendants drawn up by other doctors, and had interviewed the boys themselves. They had come to the conclusion that the relationship between Leopold and Loeb had indeed made murder possible, even probable. During their testimony, Darrow encouraged them to depict the boys as emotional cripples, and had them dwell on the unsavoury aspects of their upbringings – that Leopold had got notions of superiority not only from philosophy but from his arrogant father, for example, or that he had been seduced by a nurse at the age of 14, and that this had twisted his sexuality. Loeb, on the other hand, was shown to be a criminal fantasist whose childhood had been overshadowed by his own nurse, a strict authoritarian who punished him cruelly for small misdeeds. Neither boy had been permitted normal development in the company of his peers. Neither had been instilled with anything resembling a normal moral code. The combination was explosive.
The prosecution’s experts
The riposte of the prosecution was to call up their own psychiatrists. They swore that Leopold and Loeb were perfectly sane and normal. Darrow, however, cut them to ribbons in cross-examination. Some, it transpired, had not even interviewed the defendants. Those who had, had done so only for a short period. One had actually been paid massively by the prosecution to give evidence.
The last evidence in the case was given on 19 August 1924. The floor was now cleared for the two leading attorneys, Crowe and Darrow, to make their final speeches before the judge. Whether or not Leopold and Loeb would be hanged depended upon the impression these speeches made.
Passionate performance
Clarence Darrow spoke for 11 hours. It was a passionate performance, in which Darrow brought all his eloquence to bear upon the arguments he had used in the trial up to this point. First he attacked the very concept of capital punishment, speaking of it as no better then mob justice. “When the public is interested,” he said bitterly, “and demands a punishment, it thinks of only one punishment, and that is death. When the public speaks as one man it thinks only of killing … I have seen a court urged almost to the point of threats to hang the two boys, in the face of science, in the face of experience, and all the better and more humane thought of the age.” He did not excuse the crime, but he added, “Poor Bobby Franks suffered very little … If to hang these two boys would bring him back to life, I would say let them go, and I believe their parents would say so, too.”
Darrow vividly described the events of 21 May, the car journey to Wolf Lake, the risks Leopold and Loeb had run. “For what?” he asked, gesturing to his clients in despair. “For nothing.” The court waited to see what answer Darrow could supply to the central riddle of the case: Why had they killed Bobby Franks? And here Darrow developed the second theme of his case, that Leopold and Loeb were blighted, even diseased youths. They killed Franks, he thought, “not for money, not for spite, not for hate”, but because “somewhere in the infinite process that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped’. And went on: “There is not a sane thing in all of this from beginning to end. There was not a normal act in any of it. From its inception to a diseased brain, until today, when they sit here awaiting their doom.”
Leopold and Loeb were unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, Darrow concluded. Their crime was made possible by half-digested philosophy and pulp fiction, but above all by their strange, perverse relationship which seemed to lead them on to commit greater and greater evil. Even if they were spared, he suggested as to be irredeemable. “I hate to say it in their presence,” he went on sorrowfully, “but what is there to look forward to? I do not know but that your honour would be merciful if you tied a rope around their necks and let them die …”
Throughout the trial, Leopold and Loeb had remained largely unmoved, by either the details of the crime or the analysis of their characters. But Darrow’s description of the wasteland of their life ahead, should they be spared hanging, shook them. Loeb broke down and wept; Leopold paled, and bowed his head.
Boys without a future
With his clients at last revealed for that they were – boys without a future – Darrow launched into his final speech, an emotional plea for mercy. “The easy and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients ... Men and women who do not think will applaud. The cruel and the thoughtless will approve. It will be easy today, but in Chicago and, reaching across the length and breadth of the land, more and more fathers, the humane, the kind and the hopeful, who are gaining an understanding and asking questions not only about these poor boys, but to their own, will join in no acclaim at the death of my clients. I am pleading life, understanding, charity the infinite mercy that considers all. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness, and hatred with love. I know the future is on my side …” Silence followed his last words. It was broken only by the sound of the judge weeping.
The State Attorney had a difficult act to follow. Even so, his was a poor performance. He dismissed the psychological side of the defence case as nonsense, despite ample evidence to the contrary. The killers’ motive, he said, was money. They were “as little entitled to sympathy and mercy as a couple of rattlesnakes, flushed with venom, and ready to strike”. In desperation he attacked Clarence Darrow personally, calling him an atheist. Darrow would say anything to get his clients off the hook; he was being paid millions to do so by their fathers. But the haranguing, embittered tone of the speech seemed inappropriate in the now solemn courtroom.
The court was adjourned until 10 September, while Judge Caverly deliberated on the sentence. Darrow, it was true, had made the defence of a lifetime, while State Attorney Crowe had floundered. Yet general opinion in Chicago considered that the crime was so vile that it must, nevertheless, require the death sentence.
On the day of sentence, the court – which comprised only counsel, the defendants and their families, and certain journalists – sat tensely as Judge Caverly recapped the case for the defence. He admitted that he thought the defendants, in order to kill Bobby Franks, must have been “abnormal”. But he did not think mere abnormality was sufficient to mitigate the crime. “The testimony in this case,” he said, “reveals a crime of singular atrocity. It is in a sense inexplicable, but it is not thereby rendered less repulsive and inhumane. It was deliberately planned and prepared for during a considerable period of time. It was executed with every feature of callousness and cruelty.” To the visible despair of Darrow and the defendants, he concluded that there were in fact no mitigating factors. They waited for the worst.
Weighing every word, the judge said: “It would have been the path of least resistance to impose the extreme penalty of the law. In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the court is moved chiefly by consideration of the age of the defendants.” There was an instant of silence while the court took this in, then a rising murmur of astonishment. The State Attorney was aghast. Judge Caverly sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment for murder plus 99 years for kidnapping. He added that the sentence was in accordance with the “dictates of enlightened humanity” – a phrase that Clarence Darrow might have been proud of.
The end of the story
Leopold and Loeb did not serve out full life sentences. Although for the first five or six years Loeb kept himself busy – even collaborating with Leopold to write a maths textbook for the US prison system – after 1931 his mental state deteriorated. He cruised the prison for homosexual lovers. In 1936 another inmate called John Day violently resisted his advances, slashing his throat with a razor. Loeb bled to death.
Leopold, however, continued to occupy his mind, studying languages and writing a book on bird-watching. He also wrote an autobiography which scrupulously avoided the subject of Bobby Franks. In 1958 he was released on parole, and went to live in Puerto Rico. At a press conference he said: “I am a broken old man. I want the chance to find redemption and to help others.” He married and settled down to being a productive member of society, becoming an official in the health department, and later setting up a foundation for delinquent youths. In August 1971 he died of a heart attack.
End
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