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Leopold and Loeb trial

Nathan Leopold, Jr. (1904-1971) and Richard Loeb (1905-1936), more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb, were two students of University of Chicago who murdered a 14-year old boy and received sentences of life plus 99 years.

Their crime was notable in being largely motivated by an apparent need to prove their belief that they were capable of committing a perfect crime, and for its role in the history of American thought on capital punishment. Leopold and Loeb came from highly privileged Chicago families.

At 19, Leopold was already a graduate of University of Chicago and spoke 14 languages. 18-year-old Richard was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. Leopold would describe the two as evil geniuses who were above ordinary standards of morality.

The plot

On Wednesday, May 21, 1924, they put their long-planned plot in motion. The pair lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks, a distant relative and neighbour of Loeb's into a rented car.

They drove him to within a few blocks of the Franks' residence in Hyde Park, and suddenly grabbed him, stuffed a gag in his mouth and smashed his skull four times with a chisel. He fell to the floor and bled to death in the car.

When their brief bit of excitement was over, Leopold and Loeb casually drove away, and ended up near a culvert along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. After dunking the boy's head underwater to make sure that he was dead, they poured acid on his face (so that he would be hard to identify) then stuffed his body into a drainpipe.

After this, they drove to Leopold's home, where they spent the afternoon and evening drinking and playing cards. Around midnight, they telephoned Franks' home and told Mr. Franks that he could soon expect a ransom demand for the return of his son. They typed out a letter on a stolen typewriter and mailed it to the Franks, intent on continuing their twisted "game".

Before the family could pay the ransom though, a Polish immigrant, found the body. Investigators saw at once that this could not be a mere kidnapping, since there would have been no reason for a kidnapper to kill Bobby Franks.

The investigators found just one clue: A pair of eyeglasses tangled in a bush near Franks' body. When the glasses were traced to the manufacturer, Police learned that only three of its kind had ever been produced. Within a few days, investigators managed to trace back the glasses to its owner - Leopold.

During Police questioning, Leopold's and Loeb's alibis broke down and each confessed. Although their confessions were in agreement about most major facts in the case, each blamed the other for the actual killing.

The typewriter used to type the ransom note and the chisel were recovered from a lake. The duo had spent months planning the crime, working out a way to get the ransom money without risking being caught.

They had thought that the body would not be discovered until long after the ransom delivery. Regardless, the ransom was not their primary motive; each one's family gave him all the money that he needed. In fact, they admitted that they were obsessed by the thrill of the "expedition".

The public, driven by the newspapers of the day, was outraged. In the community, no one had imagined that such shining examples of success could have committed such a crime.

The trial proved to be a media spectacle and was one of the first cases to be dubbed "The Crime of the Century". Loeb's family hired 67-year-old Clarence Darrow, who had fought against capital punishment for years, to defend the boys against the capital charges of murder and kidnapping.

When everyone expected them to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, Darrow surprised everyone by having them both plead guilty. In this way, he avoided a jury trial which, due to the strong public sentiment, would certainly have resulted in a pair of hangings. Instead, he was able to argue before a single judge, pleading for the lives of his clients.

The trial focused entirely on psychiatric and psychological testimony from the most famous doctors of the day. It was the first trial in which mental health experts testified at length, not as to the sanity of the accused, but on the mental development and psychological history of these two young defendants, both of whom, it was conceded by the defence, had the requisite criminal intent to commit capital murder.

Darrow gave a twelve-hour speech which has justifiably been called the finest of his career. It may be, in fact, that he took the case in order to be able to make such a speech, since he knew that his strong argument against capital punishment would be reprinted in newspapers around the world.

And if he could show that such heinous murderers should not be executed, perhaps he would make other capital punishment cases more difficult to prosecute. In the end, Darrow was successful in avoiding the sentence of execution. Instead, the judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb each to a sentence of life in prison for the murder and 99 years for the kidnapping.

In his statement of reasons, Judge Caverly said that it was not the expert witnesses, but the youth of the defendants which was the reason for sparing their lives. It was their youth and immaturity which Clarence Darrow had focused on in his arguments.

Statement of reasons

In prison, Leopold and Loeb used their education to good purpose, teaching classes in the prison school. But in January of 1936, at age 30, Loeb was attacked by a fellow prisoner with a straight razor in the prison's shower room, and died from his wounds.

Leopold became a model prisoner and worked on a number of projects within the prison. He published an autobiography, Life Plus Ninety- Nine Years.Early in 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole. He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid attention from the press. He married a widowed florist. In 1971, at age 66, he died of a heart attack.

In 1956, Meyer Levin wrote his book "Compulsion", a fictionalised version of the actual events. Three years later, the novel was made into film also called Compulsion. The character based on Darrow was played by Orson Wells. The crime was also inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948), and "Swoon" (1992) as well as "Murder by Numbers" (2002). Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes incorporated the Leopold and Loeb case into his book "Ice Haven," released in 2005.

The wide range of popular books, movies, and scholarly treatments of the case are testament to the public's continued fascination with the crime.

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