Nothing But the Night:
The Leopold & Loeb Case
The year is 1924. The city of Chicago has just been rocked by its most controversial crime yet: the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks, son of one of the city’s wealthiest men. Even more shocking than the crime itself is the fact that it was committed by two teenagers, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, who were also products of great wealth and both highly intelligent. Before the trial is over, the people of Chicago will be treated to some of the sordid details of Leopold and Loeb’s friendship, be spared other, "unprintable" aspects of it, and fill a courtroom to overflowing to hear Clarence Darrow’s defense of the boys.
Before
"The superman is not liable for anything he may do, except for the one crime that it is possible for him to commit – to make a mistake."
Nathan Leopold Jr., in a letter to Richard Loeb
Nathan Leopold Jr., the son of shipping magnate Nathan F. Leopold, was born and raised in Chicago’s Kenwood district, one of the city’s most fashionable addresses in the early 1900s. He was the youngest member of his family, and though plagued by various glandular conditions, if you believe the stories of his earliest childhood he was quite the child prodigy; Leopold reportedly began learning to walk at three months and spoke his first words between four and five months. Much later, he would master 27 languages and become an expert ornithologist, with an estimated IQ of 200.
Leopold and his older brothers were raised by a succession of governesses, the third of which abused young Leopold and warped his psyche. He was four years old when Mathilda Wantz was hired and proceeded to undermine the elder Leopolds’ authority. Wantz became abnormally close to the Leopold boys, encouraging them to love and respect her more than they did their own mother. She also subjected them to her strange sexual proclivities, exposing herself indecently to them and encouraging them (especially Nathan) to perform unspecified sexual perversions on her, which she reciprocated.
When Leopold was turning six years old, his parents noticed their son’s odd discomfort around and aversion to girls. In a stunningly misguided attempt to help him overcome it, they enrolled him in a private all-girls school, which he endured until transferring to public school at age eight. Needless to say, this did not promote normal development in young Leopold, either socially or sexually. Unable to function socially as one of only two boys in the entire school, he focused on academics to the exclusion of all else, skipping so many grades that he entered the Harvard Prep School at age 11 and graduated by age 14. The sexual deviance begun by his early abuse was increased with the death of his mother during his adolescence; this deviance eventually led him to Richard Loeb.
Loeb, like Leopold, was born to wealthy parents (his father, Albert H. Loeb, was the vice president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company) and grew up in the Kenwood district. A year younger than Loeb, he was sickly and effeminate as a child. Though he fully recovered by the age of nine, he suffered from stuttering and other tics as well as fainting spells (possibly petit mal epilepsy) throughout his life. Loeb also had governesses, one of whom encouraged him intellectually by tutoring and reading to him but also tried to isolate him from what she perceived as inappropriate influences, such as other boys and the crime stories that Loeb loved.
Loeb was fascinated by crime. From the time he was nine years old, he dreamed of being a master criminal and committing the perfect crime; based on the stories he had read and his natural intelligence, he was certain he could succeed where others had failed. He began to act on this delusion at age 11, committing such crimes as petty theft, false alarms, vandalism, and arson. By the time he met Nathan Leopold at the University of Michigan, he was well on his way to what would eventually be described as "the crime of the century."
Loeb and Leopold were roommates their first year at Michigan. The following spring, a disgruntled Leopold, who was much less charming and harder to get along with, transferred to the University of Chicago after Loeb was accepted into the Phi chapter of the Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau on the condition that his antisocial, conceited roommate was not allowed to pledge. Both graduated from their respective universities as the youngest recorded students to do so and were accepted to the University of Chicago law school. It was during the summer of their career as law students, when Leopold was 19 and Loeb 18, that they began the venture which ended in Bobby Franks’ death.
Leopold was wary of Loeb’s penchant for crime; Loeb was repulsed by Leopold’s deviant sexual leanings. This did not stop them from indulging each other’s proclivities, though; they actually signed a written contract that they would do so. Loeb was willing to submit to Leopold’s sexual preferences if it meant gaining an accomplice, and Leopold was able to justify his involvement in Loeb’s crimes by referring to Nietzsche’s theories. Leopold was obsessed with Nietzsche’s ideal of the superman, someone who was above all others in society and not bound by things as base as laws, but despaired of ever achieving it. Instead, he decided to become a superwoman, slave to a powerful king. He cast Loeb in the role of the king and idealized him in every way.
Planning
"We are told that they planned. Well, what does that mean? A maniac plans, an idiot plans, an animal plans, any brain that functions may plan; but their plans were the diseased plans of the diseased mind."
Clarence Darrow in his closing argument
They began planning the crime months before carrying it out; Leopold would later say that the planning had begun as early as the previous November, though Loeb denied that. The basic plan was a simple one: they would kidnap a boy, kill him right away, hide the body, and extort a ransom from the parents. The details of the plan, though, were anything but simple. It began with the theft of a typewriter from Loeb’s fraternity house, which they used to type the ransom note (addressed to "Dear Sir") and then destroyed, throwing the keys and case into two separate lakes. They used the aliases Morton D. Ballard (Leopold) and Louis Mason (Loeb) to open bank accounts, into which they planned to deposit the ransom money, and to rent a car, since Leopold’s red Willys-Knight was far too conspicuous to use in a kidnapping. Leopold chose the Champion Manufacturing Company factory near the I.C. Railroad tracks for the ransom drop spot, and they spent several afternoons practicing: one of them would board the 3 o’clock train to Michigan City, Indiana, with a box of the right size and weight and toss the box out for the other to collect at the designated spot. And on May 20th, 1924, they drove the rental car to a hardware store on 43rd Street to purchase rope, a chisel, and hydrochloric acid. So specific were their plans that they actually debated the merits of sulfuric acid over hydrochloric for disfiguring a corpse before settling on hydrochloric.
On May 21st, they made the final preparations; Leopold wrapped tape around the chisel’s handle for a better grip, and they gathered a lap robe and rags to bundle and gag the victim. Only one thing remained to be decided: the victim. It had to be a boy who was smaller and weaker than both of them, since they held no delusions about their own physical strength or ability to subdue a hysterical, struggling adolescent, and it had to be someone from a wealthy family, so that they would be assured of getting the demanded $10,000 ransom. Over the past few weeks, they had debated and rejected several potential victims. Loeb’s younger brother Tommy was one of the first suggestions, but attempting to collect the ransom from his own family seemed too dangerous. Another boy, William Deutsch, was rejected because his grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, was the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company; they didn’t want to cause trouble for Loeb’s father. They thought about a younger friend, Richard Rubel, who often ate lunch with them, but his father was something of a skinflint and couldn’t be counted on to pay the ransom. Eventually, they decided just to drive over to Leopold’s alma mater, the Harvard Prep School, and choose a boy at random from those playing in the schoolyard.
Their first choice, John Levison, was spared only because Leopold and Loeb had to look up his parents’ address to send the ransom note. When they returned from a nearby drugstore, Levison had left the schoolyard; they followed him home but lost him when he disappeared down an alley. Leopold and Loeb went back to the school and chose a second target: Bobby Franks, a distant relative of Loeb. When Franks left the schoolyard, they followed him and eventually pulled up alongside the sidewalk to offer him a ride home. Franks declined at first – he didn’t know Leopold and was wary of getting into the car – but Loeb eventually convinced him to do so by saying he had a new tennis racquet that he wanted to show Franks. Since the two often played tennis together, this seemed plausible enough, and Franks climbed into the back seat beside Loeb.
Originally, the plan for the murder was to knock the victim unconscious with the chisel and then strangle him with the rope. So that both Leopold and Loeb would share equal responsibility for the killing, they would put the rope around the victim’s neck and each pull one end. As it turned out, Loeb hit Franks in the head four times from behind, and the bleeding from these wounds was enough to kill him. Loeb stuffed rags in his mouth to keep him quiet and wrapped the body in the lap robe to deflect suspicion. While they were waiting for it to get dark so they could dispose of the body, they parked the car and had sandwiches at a restaurant. After Leopold called his father to tell him that he might be out late, they had a second dinner at a different restaurant before driving to a culvert near 118th Street to hide the corpse.
Leopold and Loeb stripped the body, poured hydrochloric acid over it, and stuffed it in a drainage pipe, where they were sure it would never be found. They then drove back to Leopold’s house, burned the evidence, mailed the ransom note, drove to Indiana to bury the metal items (Franks’ buckle and class pin), and called Franks’ mother to tell her of the kidnapping. In their haste, they failed to notice that one foot was hanging out of the drainpipe, visible from the culvert. Neither did they notice a pair of glasses lying on the ground, which Leopold had worn for a few weeks the previous year before forgetting about them, and which had fallen from his coat pocket when he took the coat off to better deal with the body. These two items were not, however, overlooked by one of the railroad maintenance men, who spotted the body early the next morning and called the police. Before 24 hours had passed, Leopold and Loeb’s "perfect crime" was already under investigation.
Investigation
"If I were going to pick out a boy to kidnap or murder, that’s just the kind of cocky little son-of-a-bitch I would pick."
Richard Loeb commenting on Bobby Franks to investigators
Bobby Franks’ uncle identified the body on the afternoon of the 22nd, and the investigation took off. From the ransom note, the police decided that the kidnapper was educated, and turned their attention to the teaching staff of Harvard Prep. Loeb was thrilled by the manhunt and spent days hanging around the investigators offering his own theories, but Leopold, who had panicked as soon as he saw the blood gush from Franks’ head wounds, hid out in his room and avoided all human contact. Though suspects were brought in by the score, it wasn’t long before the glasses found at the crime scene were traced. Leopold panicked again when he realized his were missing, but he had been sure that they would never be traced to him, since they were a common, weak prescription and a nondescript frame. However, they had a distinctive hinge, and only three pairs of glasses with this hinge had been sold in the Chicago area: one to a lawyer who was abroad in Europe, one to a woman who was wearing them when the police went to question her, and one to Nathan Leopold, Jr.
When Leopold was brought in for questioning, he was calm and collected. Yes, the glasses seemed to be his, but his birding expeditions frequently took him near the culvert – why, he’d been there just days earlier – and he could have lost them without noticing on any number of occasions. He had been out with his friend Loeb the previous night, riding around in his car; they’d picked up a couple of girls, May and Edna. No, he didn’t know their last names. But why would he possibly want to kill Bobby Franks? Leopold didn’t know the boy well, but he had seemed nice enough, and there was certainly no motive for the kidnapping – Leopold’s father gave him money for the asking, and he himself was employed teaching ornithology, so why would he risk his neck for a $10,000 ransom?
Very smooth – but the police didn’t quite believe it, even (or especially) after Loeb was brought in and corroborated every detail of Leopold’s alibi. Eventually a couple of reporters, Al Goldstein and Jim Mulroy, connected the ransom note to Loeb’s typewriter. The ransom note was not the only thing Loeb had used it for; since stealing it the previous November, he had used it to type up notes for his study group, and the study sheets were a perfect match to the ransom note. Between that and the statement made by Leopold’s chauffeur that Leopold’s car had needed repairs and had never left the garage on the night of the murder, the police had more than enough to bring the two of them back in for questioning. This time, they cracked. Loeb told of his experiment in committing the perfect crime, condemned Leopold’s perversions, and claimed that he had been driving and Leopold had killed the boy. Leopold, being questioned simultaneously in another room, told a similar story but said that he had been driving and Loeb had killed Franks.
Initially, no one outside of the police believed either of them. These were good boys who had obviously made up a story out of sleep deprivation to escape police custody. But Leopold and Loeb were more than willing to corroborate their story. The day after their confessions, they took the police along their path of the 22nd to prove it: the store where they’d purchased the murder weapons, how they had dismantled the typewriter and where they’d thrown the pieces, the drug store from which they’d called Mrs. Franks, where and how they had hidden the body, and the various places they’d disposed of the evidence. Loeb was immediately disowned by his father; Leopold’s father got down on his knees before Clarence Darrow, begging him to come out of retirement and defend the boys, offering a fee later rumored to be as high as $1 million. Darrow, never one to back down from a challenge, agreed, saying that "while the State is trying Loeb and Leopold I will try capital punishment." They had been arrested on May 31st; by June 6th, they were indicted before a grand jury, and by the 23rd, barely over a month since the crime, the trial began.
Arguments
"Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy. If you could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a fraud."
Clarence Darrow in his closing argument
Clarence Darrow had shocked Chicago once by coming out of retirement to defend Leopold and Loeb; he did so a second time on June 21st, when he had them change their plea of not guilty to guilty at the preliminary hearing. A guilty plea meant that his clients would not have a jury trial, but would rather present their case directly to Judge John R. Caverly, Chief Justice of the Criminal Court of Cook County. This greatly upset the prosecutor, State’s Attorney Robert E. Crowe, who pointed out that Darrow could not present an insanity defense (as virtually everyone with an opinion on the case – that is to say, most of Chicago – had expected him to do) if the case was not presented before a jury. Darrow agreed but said that he was not planning an insanity defense. He was planning one based on determinism and diseased mental states, but he himself said that while Leopold and Loeb should not be executed, they certainly should be isolated from society. Later, during his closing argument, he admitted that he also felt his clients had a better chance of avoiding the death penalty if the verdict depended on the "deliberate, cool, premeditated act" of a single man, the judge, rather than letting the responsibility be "divided by twelve" in a jury verdict.
Darrow’s hairline distinction between diseased mental states and insanity caused the first big argument of the trial: is there such a thing as degrees of mental responsibility short of insanity in the legal sense? According to Crowe, no, there was not; you were either entirely responsible for your actions or not at all. This defense was no different than an insanity defense, and Darrow was only attempting it because he knew a jury in this state would almost certainly hang his clients. Walter Bachrach, speaking for the defense, claimed that Leopold and Loeb had "a mental disease, functional in character," which in and of itself was insufficient to prove insanity but did affect their perceptions of right and wrong. They had been legally sane on the day of the crime, but their versions of right and wrong were so far removed from those held by society that they could only be the product of diseased minds.
Despite the guilty plea, the State still had to prove its case, and so Leopold and Loeb’s trial (technically an evidentiary hearing) began on July 23rd. It was a circus. One Chicago newspaper reported that "every day three thousand people tried to get into the space that would accommodate three hundred." Most of these people were not friends or even acquaintances of the families involved but rather total strangers who were simply intrigued by the case. The State presented the testimony of over one hundred witnesses, proving every element of the crime beyond a shadow of a doubt, and expert forensic psychiatrists (called "alienists" at the time) testified for both sides, warring over whether the defendants’ emotional responses and mental conditions were diseased enough to exculpate them. Even Sigmund Freud was requested to come over from Europe to testify, though his age and poor health led him to decline. The trial lasted just under a month, but the real excitement began on August 21st, when Crowe and Darrow began to present their closing arguments.
Crowe began by attacking Darrow, "the distinguished gentleman whose profession it is to protect murder in Cook County, and concerning whose health thieves inquire before they go out and commit a crime." He ridiculed Darrow’s determinism defense – the idea that somehow, based on their mental states and upbringing, Leopold and Loeb could not possibly have done anything else than commit this crime – as dishonest, "a defense built up to meet the needs of the case." The defendants were sane, they had been free to chose, "and they deliberately chose to adopt the wrong philosophy, and to make their conduct correspond with it." After tearing down the opinions of Darrow and his expert psychiatric witnesses (the "Three Wise Men from the East"), Crowe went on to assert that much of the testimony offered by defense witnesses had simply been wrong. A letter that Mathilda Wantz, Leopold’s childhood governess, had written upon hearing of the trial had been presented by the defense as evidence of her derangement, but Crowe himself found the letter to present just the opposite picture. Additionally, the testimony that the defense alienists had given on the stand was in direct opposition to written reports they had made before the trial which had not been admitted into evidence. Why Crowe did not introduce these reports into evidence himself is unclear, but his point was not: this crime had been premeditated and committed by two remorseless defendants, and the punishment required was obvious.
Darrow’s defense, though very different, was equally impassioned. He pleaded with the judge not to invoke the death penalty, which he felt "roots back to the beast and the jungle," saying that "never has there been a case where a human being under the age of twenty-three been sentenced to death." No one could dispute that they should be locked up and shut away from society, but were the State to convict them of murder and hang them, "that act will be infinitely more cold-blooded, whether justified or not, than any act that these boys have committed or can commit." Their deficient reasoning processes meant that while the murder of Bobby Franks, this "distressing and weird homicide", had been planned and premeditated by both defendants, they were incapable of doing anything else, and "had it not been for the wealth and the weirdness and the notoriety," the State’s Attorney would have accepted a guilty plea and life imprisonment or committed the boys to a psychiatric hospital for examination without question. Darrow constantly referred to his defendants as "the boys" or used their nicknames, Babe and Dickie, though he nearly always stopped after doing so and reminded the judge (and the spectators) aloud that the prosecutors didn’t like him doing that, as it would be much easier to hang remorseless young men named Nathan and Richard than two boys whose demented reason had led them to commit a terrible act.
Late in his argument, which lasted a total of 12 hours over two days, Darrow quoted a stanza by A.E. Housman:
"Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are fluttering low.
Square your shoulders, lift your pack
And leave your friends and go.
O never fear, lads, naught’s to dread,
Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There’s nothing but the night."
Regardless of what sentence Leopold and Loeb received, death or life in prison, there would be nothing ahead of them but the night. Though Judge Caverly was overall unimpressed with Darrow’s deterministic defense, he did agree with this point, and on September 10th he sentenced each defendant to life in prison for murder plus 99 years for kidnapping, to be served consecutively. In explanation, he said that his decision was based on Leopold and Loeb’s ages and possible benefits that the field of criminology might derive from studying them; he also noted that "to the offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation." The judge also ordered the two defendants – now convicts – to be kept isolated from each other in prison and to be denied parole.
Aftermath
"He is better off dead… for him death is an easier sentence."
Clarence Darrow on the death of Richard Loeb
"I am a broken old man. I want a chance to find redemption for myself and to help others."
Nathan Leopold Jr. on his parole
"I think I’m going to make it."
Richard Loeb’s last words
Despite Judge Caverly’s best intentions, his orders were no match for Leopold and Loeb’s money, and were ignored almost from the moment that they entered the Northern Illinois Penitentiary at Stateville. They bribed everybody from the guards on up, and as a result they ate their meals in the officers’ lounge, could have special visitors or phone calls nearly anytime, were smuggled in liquor or drugs at a dollar a shot, and most importantly were allowed open cells and unlimited contact with each other. The two convicted murderers lived in luxury, almost as though they had never left their homes in Kenwood.
Loeb lasted nearly 12 years at Stateville before being killed by fellow inmate James Day in January of 1936. The circumstances surrounding Loeb’s death are hazy, depending, as they must, on the accounts of prisoners and corrupt prison officials, but Day’s defense was something as follows: Although Loeb had been repulsed by Leopold’s sexual predilections before the trial and had gone so far as to denounce Leopold’s deviance in his confession, once at Stateville he flaunted his own homosexuality, probably seeing it as one more way to assert his power and superiority. He allegedly attacked whomever he liked while the guards feigned oblivion, and eventually set his sights on Day. Day was disgusted by his propositions, but Loeb continued to pursue him, and eventually asked to talk to him alone. They agreed, for reasons unknown, to meet in the bathroom after dinner that night. Loeb was already there when Day arrived; he immediately stripped off his clothes and, pulling a razor on Day, ordered him to do the same. Day managed to knee Loeb in the groin, and the two struggled over the razor, which Day later said changed hands several times before ending up with him. He slashed out at Loeb until he stopped moving and fled. Loeb, bleeding profusely from 56 separate wounds, tried to run himself but collapsed in the hallway, where guards found him. They rushed him to the prison hospital, and Loeb’s mother and Leopold hurried to his side, but Loeb had lost too much blood from too many cuts to be saved. He drifted in and out of consciousness, and had one brief moment of coherence which he used to reassure his mother and Leopold that he would pull through. His eyes closed after that statement and did not open again. Despite prison officials’ contention that Day’s attack on Loeb had been deliberate and unprovoked, he was acquitted of murder in a jury trial.
Leopold, on the other hand, was a model prisoner. He taught in the prison school, continued his linguistic studies (eventually mastering a total of 27 languages), worked as an X-ray technician in the prison hospital, reorganized the library, volunteered to be tested with an experimental malaria vaccine, and designed a new prison education system. By 1950, State’s Attorney Crowe himself had written the Illinois Parole Board urging them to release Leopold, and later that decade poet Carl Sandburg offered to testify as a character witness. Leopold was finally released on March 13th, 1958, at the same time as the movie Compulsion, based on Meyer Levin’s fictionalized account of the trial. In order to escape what he felt was undue publicity caused by an inaccurate representation of the facts, Leopold moved to Puerto Rico, where he became a hospital lab technician making $10 a month – a far cry from the wealth of his childhood. He earned a master’s degree, taught mathematics, worked in several hospitals and church missions, and wrote two books, one (The Birds of Puerto Rico) reflecting his lifelong passion for ornithology and one (Life Plus 99 Years) examining his experiences from immediately after the crime through his parole. Additionally, despite lifelong avowals of his love for Loeb, Leopold married Trudi Feldman Garcia de Quevedo in 1961. He died of heart failure on August 30th, 1971, and was seen by many at that time as a near-perfect example of rehabilitation and redemption.
The Crime of the Century
Leopold and Loeb’s trial coincided with a national debate over capital punishment. Between 1897 and 1917, ten states abolished the death penalty, but during the following two decades eight of those states reinstated it. As Darrow correctly pointed out in his closing argument, historically the death penalty has not served as an effective deterrent; rather, "as the penal code was made less terrible, crimes grew less frequent." But the penal code was easily influenced by things like economic trends or the demographic makeup of a jurisdiction, and was traditionally racist in its application; capital crimes led to death rather than life imprisonment much more frequently in states with high minority populations. Darrow’s acceptance of the case was based less on personal estimation of the boys or their families than a shrewd recognition that the timing of it, right in the midst of this national upheaval, was perfect for an object lesson on the futility of capital punishment.
The people of Chicago were somewhat interested in Darrow’s lesson, but mostly they were fascinated by the details of the crime itself. Criminal activity was hardly unknown in the Chicago of the 1920s, but the furor surrounding this particular case allowed them to witness or experience illicit activities vicariously and, with such an extreme example as a base, further delineate what were acceptable and unacceptable behaviors of modern urban life. Some workers – judges, lawyers, reporters, photographers, police – used the investigation to advance their professional reputations, and people citywide used it to facilitate meaningful interpersonal conversations, finally having something more substantial to discuss than inane small talk.
This pattern is hardly unknown; high-profile investigations, from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, become that way because something about the crime galvanizes the community surrounding it. Leopold and Loeb’s trial was the "crime of the century" for the 1920s, reflecting in part the social structure of its time; middle-class youth were rejecting their parents’ more orderly, conservative lives, and the middle class as a whole was becoming restless and unstable. The audacious act of these two boys destroyed the guiding premise that hard work and moral behavior were their own rewards, though the newspapers tried hard to uphold this premise by drawing a distinction between Leopold and Loeb and the "real criminals" with whom they were incarcerated. The unspeakable horrors, impassioned arguments, and widespread public intrigue of this trial set a precedent for high-profile cases to follow and forever changed the way that the American public viewed their legal system. |
