Leopold and Loeb

• 1. Introduction

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  Leopold and Loeb, two University of Chicago students, killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks on the 21st of May 1924. Nathan Leopold was 19, and Richard Loeb was 18. Afterward Leopold described his state of mind to a psychiatrist with a single comparison: "Making up my mind to commit murder was practically the same as making up my mind whether or not I should eat pie for supper, whether it would give me pleasure or not." At the time, the case was characterized as "the crime of the century." The two young men had come to believe that their intellects placed them beyond the consequences that bind ordinary people. How did two brilliant sons of wealthy Chicago families arrive at that belief? Why did a scheme prepared over months begin to fall apart almost at once? And what could one lawyer say to a judge that spared both men the death penalty? The answers begin with who they were.

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• 2. Gifted and Reckless

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  Nathan Leopold's baby book claims that he spoke his first words at four months and three weeks old. Born on the 19th of November 1904, he was the third son of Florence and Nathan Leopold Sr., a wealthy German-Jewish immigrant family in Chicago. He began college at the University of Chicago, spent a year at the University of Michigan, and then returned to Chicago. By the time of the murder he had graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and he planned to enter Harvard Law School after a trip to Europe.

  By many accounts, Leopold was sensitive about his small stature and bulging eyes. He answered that insecurity with intellectual achievement. He had studied 15 languages and said he spoke five of them fluently. He also earned national recognition as an ornithologist. With other bird experts he located nesting sites of Kirtland's warblers, and he made sharp observations about the parasitic nesting of brown-headed cowbirds, which threatened the warblers.

  Richard Loeb was born on the 11th of June 1905, also in Chicago, the third of four sons of Anna Henrietta and Albert Henry Loeb. His father was a wealthy lawyer and a retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. His father was Jewish, and his mother was Catholic. Loeb read avidly, with a special passion for history and crime stories. At 12 he entered the innovative University of Chicago High School, and with his governess's encouragement he finished in two years. In 1923, at 17, he reportedly became the youngest graduate in the University of Michigan's history. He then took a few history classes at Chicago. Unlike Leopold, he was athletic and considered handsome.

  Both families lived in the affluent Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, and the Loeb mansion stood two blocks from the Leopold home. The Loebs also kept a summer estate in Charlevoix, Michigan, whose farm section is now a popular wedding venue called Castle Farms. The two boys knew each other casually while growing up. In the spring of 1920 they began to see much more of each other, as part of a shared circle of friends at the University of Chicago.

  In February 1921 their friendship became a sexual relationship that lasted until their arrest. Loeb had been stealing small things from friends, family and shops since childhood, and he sometimes showed off his pickpocketing to impress schoolmates. Together the two stole more. They also worked out a system for cheating friends and relatives at bridge, with little success. They moved on to burglaries that netted trifles such as wine, piano benches and vacuum cleaners. They drove around smashing windows with bricks and set several fires, then mingled with the crowds watching firefighters at work.

  Loeb seems to have enjoyed these escapades for their own sake, but Leopold wanted a philosophy to justify them. He called himself an individual hedonist. He weighed the pleasure and pain of any action and chose whatever pleased him most. He applied the same method to every part of his life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the Übermensch, or superman, gave that attitude a lofty cover. Leopold read the supermen as transcendent individuals whose superior minds lifted them above the rules that bound ordinary people. He thought he and Loeb might be such people. In a letter to Loeb he wrote, "A superman... is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do."

  A burglary of Loeb's old fraternity house at the University of Michigan pushed the games further. The pair carried off penknives, a camera and a typewriter. Afterward Loeb proposed a "perfect crime" that would attract public attention and confirm their superiority over everyone else. The stolen typewriter would soon produce a ransom note.

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• 3. Seven Months of Planning

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  A car rented under the name Morton D. Ballard carried out a plan that had taken seven months to prepare. Leopold and Loeb had settled on abducting and killing a younger adolescent, and they planned everything from the abduction to the disposal of the body. A ransom demand was meant to disguise the true nature of the crime and the motive behind it. They also designed an intricate scheme for collecting the money, with a long series of instructions to be delivered one at a time.

  Their search for a victim centered on the grounds of the Harvard School for Boys in Kenwood. They chose Robert "Bobby" Franks, born on the 19th of September 1909, the son of a wealthy watch manufacturer named Jacob Franks. Bobby lived across the street from the Loebs and had played tennis at their home several times.

  Bobby was walking home from school that afternoon when the rented car stopped beside him and the two men offered a ride. He refused at first, since his destination was less than two blocks away. Loeb talked him into the car by raising the subject of a tennis racket Bobby had been using.

  Accounts of the exact sequence of events conflict. The prevailing view put Leopold at the wheel and Loeb in the back seat. Loeb struck Bobby several times on the head with the handle end of a chisel. He then dragged the boy into the back seat and gagged him, and the two men waited until Bobby died.

  The body lay on the floor, out of sight, as they drove to a spot chosen in advance near Wolf Lake, at the far southern edge of Chicago. After dark they removed his clothes and hid the body in a culvert beside the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks north of the lake. They poured hydrochloric acid on parts of the body to hide the fact that Bobby was circumcised, which was unusual among non-Jews in the United States at the time. By the time the pair drove back into Chicago, word that Bobby Franks was missing had already spread.

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• 4. Cracks in the Plan

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  Calling himself "George Johnson", Leopold telephoned Bobby's mother that evening and told her the boy had been kidnapped, with ransom instructions to follow. The two men mailed the typed ransom note and burned Bobby's clothes. They scrubbed the blood from the rented car's upholstery and then spent the rest of the evening playing cards.

  The note reached the Franks home the next morning, and Leopold phoned again to dictate the first instructions for paying the ransom. The elaborate scheme stalled almost at once, because Jacob Franks forgot the address of the store where the next directions waited. That same day word arrived that Bobby's body had been found, and the plan was dropped. Leopold and Loeb got rid of the typewriter and burned a blanket they had used to move the body. Then they returned to their normal lives.

  Both men enjoyed talking about the murder. Leopold discussed the case with a professor and with a female friend, joking that he would confess and give her the reward money. Loeb helped reporter friends find the drugstore to which he and Leopold had tried to send Jacob Franks. Asked to describe Bobby, he said, "If I were to murder anybody, it would be just such a cocky little son of a bitch as Bobby Franks."

  Police, meanwhile, held a pair of eyeglasses found near the body. The frames and prescription were ordinary, but the glasses carried an unusual hinge that had been sold to only three customers in Chicago. Leopold was one of them. He suggested that the glasses might have fallen from his pocket on a bird-watching trip the previous weekend.

  During formal questioning on the 29th of May, the pair claimed they had picked up two women in Leopold's car on the night of the murder and dropped them off without learning their last names. Leopold's chauffeur contradicted this by saying he had been repairing the car that afternoon, and his wife confirmed it.

  Loeb confessed first. He said Leopold had planned the crime and killed Bobby in the back seat while Loeb drove. Soon afterward Leopold gave a reversed account, with himself as the driver and Loeb as the killer. Otherwise their statements matched most of the evidence, and the state's attorney announced both confessions on the 31st of May. The typewriter was recovered from the Jackson Park Lagoon on the 7th of June.

  Long after Loeb was dead, Leopold claimed he had begged his friend to admit the killing. In Leopold's telling, Loeb refused, saying, "Mompsie feels less terrible than she might, thinking you did it," and "I'm not going to take that shred of comfort away from her." Most observers still believed that Loeb struck the fatal blows. One witness said he had seen Loeb driving and Leopold in the back seat minutes before the kidnapping.

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• 5. Darrow's Gamble

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  Rumor put the fee paid to Clarence Darrow at $1 million, but he was actually paid $65,000. The Leopold and Loeb families hired him to lead the defense. He accepted because he was a staunch opponent of capital punishment.

  Everyone assumed the defense would plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Darrow instead concluded that a jury trial would almost certainly end in conviction and a death sentence. He entered guilty pleas, hoping to persuade Cook County Circuit Court Judge John R. Caverly to impose life imprisonment.

  The proceeding at Chicago's Cook County Criminal Court ran for 32 days. Technically it was an extended sentencing hearing, because the guilty pleas had already been accepted. It became a media spectacle and the third case labeled "the trial of the century," after those of Harry Thaw and Sacco and Vanzetti. State's attorney Robert E. Crowe called 88 witnesses to document the crime. The defense answered with extensive psychiatric testimony meant to establish mitigating circumstances. It pointed to physical abnormalities, an overabundance of money and, in Leopold's case, sexual abuse by a governess. One expert witness described dysfunctional endocrine glands, and another described the delusions that had led to the crime.

  A letter written by Leopold that mentioned his homosexual affair with Loeb became evidence that both sides used. The prosecution called the pair "perverts" and offered their relationship as a motive. Darrow presented it as evidence of insanity, and so of a lack of responsibility for their actions.

  Darrow closed with an impassioned speech that lasted eight hours and is often called the finest of his career. He argued that American methods of punishment were inhumane and that the defendants were young and immature. He also argued that a world bathed in the blood of war had taught the young that human life was cheap. "The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients," he told the judge. He ended with a plea: "I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men."

  Some critics have faulted Darrow's handling of the law. They say he hid psychiatric testimony that clashed with his argument. They also say he relied on an absolute denial of free will, a principle that underpins the legitimacy of all criminal punishment.

  The judge was persuaded, though his ruling said he relied mainly on precedent and on the youth of the accused. On the 10th of September 1924 he sentenced both men to life imprisonment for the murder, plus 99 years for the kidnapping. A little over a month later, Loeb's father died of heart failure.

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• 6. Life Behind Bars

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  Joliet Prison first put Leopold to work in its rattan factory and Loeb in its chair factory. Guards kept the two apart as much as possible, yet they managed to keep their friendship alive. In 1925 Leopold was moved to Stateville Penitentiary for an appendectomy. There he worked in the shoe factory and then in the library as a clerk for the prison's Protestant chaplain. He was caught breaking rules and sent to solitary confinement many times. At one point he was possibly involved in the escape of seven prisoners.

  At Joliet, Loeb carried messages in the yard before being promoted to clerk for the deputy warden. In 1930 he was transferred to Stateville, where he worked in the greenhouse and landscaped the prison yard. Once the two were under the same roof, they spent much of their time together. They did sociological research and expanded the prison school with a high school and junior college curriculum.

  On the 28th of January 1936, a fellow inmate named James Day attacked Loeb with a straight razor in a shower room. Loeb died soon afterward in the prison hospital. Day claimed that Loeb had tried to assault him. Yet Day was unharmed, while Loeb had more than fifty wounds, including defensive wounds on his arms and hands. Several prison officials, including the warden, believed that Loeb had been murdered. Even so, a jury found Day not guilty after a short trial in June 1936.

  Leopold ridiculed Day's claim in his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years. The prison's Catholic chaplain, a confidant of Loeb, said it was more likely that Day attacked Loeb after Loeb rebuffed his advances. There is no evidence that Loeb was a sexual predator in prison.

  In 1944 Leopold volunteered for the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study. Researchers deliberately infected him with malaria and gave him several experimental treatments. He kept expanding the school and teaching after Loeb's death. He later wrote that all his good work in prison and after his release was an effort to compensate for his crime.

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• 7. Parole and Puerto Rico

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  Life Plus 99 Years appeared in 1958 as part of Leopold's campaign for parole, and it spent 14 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. Reviews were generally positive. Some critics, however, accused him of writing it only to rehabilitate his public image while ignoring the dark side of his past.

  On the 13th of March 1958, after 33 years and numerous unsuccessful petitions, Leopold was released on parole. The Brethren Service Commission, a program affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, hired him as a medical technician at its hospital in Puerto Rico. He wrote that it had offered "the job, the home, and the sponsorship" a paroled man needs. He added that it had given him "the companionship, the acceptance, the love" that made violating parole almost impossible.

  To neighbors and co-workers at Castañer General Hospital in Adjuntas, he was simply "Nate." He worked there as a laboratory and X-ray assistant. Later in 1958 he tried to set up the Leopold Foundation, funded by royalties from his book, to help emotionally disturbed or delinquent youths. The State of Illinois voided its charter because it violated the terms of his parole.

  On the 5th of February 1961, Leopold married Gertrude Feldman García de Quevedo, a widowed florist. Judge Ángel M. Umpierre presided over a civil ceremony at the Brethren Service Project in Castañer. Despite the marriage, Leopold had many gay relationships in Puerto Rico, some continuing from ones begun in prison. He also kept committing crimes, including statutory rape and charity fraud, though he was never caught or prosecuted.

  Leopold earned a master's degree at the University of Puerto Rico. He became a researcher in the Social Service Program of Puerto Rico's Department of Health. He also worked for an urban renewal and housing agency and conducted studies on leprosy at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine.

  In 1963 Leopold published Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the fruit of travels across the island as an active member of the Natural History Society of Puerto Rico. Birds had stayed with him since prison, where he raised them. After his parole he worked to help the struggling Puerto Rican Parrot population. He died of a diabetes-related heart attack on the 29th of August 1971, at the age of 66. He never finished Reach for a Halo, the book about his life since release that he had spoken of writing.

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• 8. Compulsion and Beyond

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  In the early 1950s, the author Meyer Levin, a University of Chicago graduate, asked for Leopold's cooperation on a novel based on the murder. Leopold replied that he did not want his story told in fictionalized form. He offered Levin a chance to contribute to the memoir he was writing. The two men met, but Leopold rejected Levin's help, and Levin published Compulsion in 1956 despite Leopold's express objections.

  In Compulsion, Leopold appears under the name Judd Steiner. Levin portrays him as a brilliant but deeply disturbed teenager, driven to kill by abnormal sexuality, a troubled childhood and an obsession with Loeb. Leopold wrote that the book made him "physically sick." He felt, he said, like a man "exposed stark-naked under a strong spotlight before a large audience."

  In 1959 Leopold sought to block production of the film version of Compulsion. He argued that Levin's book invaded his privacy, defamed him and mixed fact and fiction until the two were indistinguishable. After 11 years and many appeals, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against him. It held that the confessed perpetrator of so notorious a crime could not reasonably argue that any book had injured his reputation.

  Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play Rope and Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film of the same name also drew on the case. So did two 1957 fictionalizations, Nothing but the Night by James Yaffe and Little Brother Fate by Mary-Carter Roberts. Many of these works hinted at the relationship between the two men without stating it outright. John Logan's 1985 play Never the Sinner was based on contemporary newspaper accounts and portrayed that relationship openly. In his 2014 book Murder Most Queer, the theater scholar Jordan Schildcrout examines how such portrayals changed attitudes toward homosexuality over time.

  Other works are said to be influenced by the case. They include Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son and the 1990 Columbo episode "Columbo Goes to College." Tom Kalin's 1992 film Swoon belongs on the list, as do Michael Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games and its 2008 remake. So do Barbet Schroeder's 2002 film Murder by Numbers and Daniel Clowes's 2005 graphic novel Ice Haven. Stephen Dolginoff's 2005 off-Broadway musical was titled Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story. Even the Ghostface killers in Scream, from 1996, appear among the works said to be influenced.

  In the WB series Riverdale, the character Archie is incarcerated in the "Leopold & Loeb Institute for Delinquent Youth." Before becoming Chief Creative Officer of Archie Comics, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa wrote an unauthorized play in which Archie Andrews had a homosexual relationship with Nathan Leopold. Archie Comics served him a cease and desist before it could open, and he had to stop the production. It eventually opened under the name Weird Comic Book Fantasy.

  Gregory J. Read's 2006 film Like Minds, also released as Murderous Intent, is believed to have been inspired by the case. It shows a photograph of Leopold and Loeb in a fictional textbook titled Principles of Criminal Psychology: Fifth Edition. The forensic psychologist Sally Rowe consults that book during her research into Gestalt psychology.

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