A tragedy of three young lost lives, a dead fourteen-year-old victim and the imprisonment of two teenage killers, unfolded in Chicago in 1924. The murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold that shocked the nation is best remembered decades later for the twelve-hour long plea of Clarence Darrow to save his young clients from the gallows. His summation, rambling and disorganized as it was at times, stands as one of the most eloquent attacks on the death penalty ever delivered in an American courtroom. Mixing poetry and prose, science and emotion, a world-weary cynicism and a dedication to his cause, hatred of bloodlust and love of man, Darrow takes his audience on an oratorical ride that would be unimaginable in a criminal trial today. Even without Darrow in his prime, the Leopold and Loeb trial has the elements to justify its billing as the first "trial of the century." It is not surprising that the public responded to a trial that involved the kidnapping and murder of a young boy from one of Chicago's most prominent families, a bizarre relationship between two promising scholars-turned-murderers, what the prosecutor called an "act of Providence" leading to the apprehension of the teenage defendants, dueling psychiatrists, and an experienced and sharp-tongued state's attorney bent on hanging the confessed killers in spite of their relative youth.
Richard Loeb as a child
The crime that captured national attention in 1924 began as a fantasy in the mind of eighteen-year old Richard Loeb, the handsome and privileged son of a retired Sears Roebuck vice president. (Interestingly, Barack Obama's home in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood (5046 S. Greenwood) is only one block from Loeb's former home.) Loeb was obsessed with crime. Despite his intelligence and standing as the youngest graduate ever of the University of Michigan, Loeb read mostly detective stories. He read about crime, he planned crimes, and he committed crimes, although none until 1924 were crimes involving physical harm to a person. ( Darrow and Leopold later saw Loeb's fascination with crime as form of rebellion against the well-meaning, but strict and controlling, governess who raised him.) For Loeb, crime became a sort of game; he wanted to commit the perfect crime just to prove that it could be done.
Nathan Leopold's booking sheet
Loeb's nineteen-year old partner in crime, Nathan Leopold, was interested in ornithology, philosophy, and especially, Richard Loeb. Like Loeb, Leopold was a child of wealth and opportunity, the son of a millionaire box manufacturer. At the time of their crime, Leopold was a law student at the University of Chicago and was planning to begin studies at Harvard Law School after a family trip to Europe in the summer. Leopold already had achieved recognition as the nation's leading authority on the Kirtland warbler, an endangered songbird, and frequently lectured on the subjects of his ornithological passion. As a student of philosophy, Leopold was attracted to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's influence on early twentieth century academics was powerful, and the merits of ideas contained in books like his Beyond Good and Evil were fiercely debated in centers of learning like the University of Chicago. Leopold agreed with Nietzsche's criticism of moral codes, and believed that legal obligations did not apply to those who approached "the superman." Leopold's idea of the superman was his friend and lover, Richard Loeb.
Loeb and Leopold had an intense and stormy relationship. At one time Leopold contemplated killing Loeb over a perceived breach of confidentiality. This relationship, described by Darrow as "weird and almost impossible," led the two boys to do together what they almost certainly would never have done apart: commit murder. Motives are often unclear, and they are in this trial. Neither the defense's theory that the murder was an effort by both to deepen their relationship nor the prosecution's theory that money to pay off gambling debts and a desire by Loeb to "have something" on Leopold in order to counter Leopold's unwanted demands for sex, are likely accurate. What is clearest about the motives is that Leopold's attraction to Loeb was his primary reason for participating in the crime. Leopold later wrote that "Loeb's friendship was necessary to me-- terribly necessary" and that his motive, "to the extent that I had one, was to please Dick." For Loeb, the crime was more an escape from the ordinary; an interesting intellectual exercise.
Murder was a necessary element in their plan to commit the perfect crime. The two teenagers spent months discussing and refining a plan that included kidnapping the child of a wealthy parents, demanding a ransom, and collecting the ransom after it was thrown off a moving train as it passed a designated point. Neither Loeb nor Leopold relished the idea of murdering their kidnap victim, but they thought it critical to minimizing their likelihood of being identified as the kidnappers. Their victim turned out to be an acquaintance of the two boys, Bobby Franks.
Bobby Franks
Fourteen-year-old Franks was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time on May 21, 1924. Bobby was one of the most gifted students at the Harvard School for boys in the well-to-do South Side neighborhood of Kenwood. Just two weeks earlier, as a member of the school's debate team, Bobby had participated in a debate on the subject of capital punishment. He had argued against it.
At about five o'clock in the afternoon, after a baseball game wrapped up in the playground behind the school, Bobby Franks was walking when a green Willys-Knight automobile pulled up near him. Loeb asked Franks to come over to the car, asked him to get in the car to discuss a tennis racquet. Franks did as asked. Most evidence suggests that Loeb, sitting in the rear seat behind Franks, reached his hand around Bobby's mouth to stifle his cries, then struck the boy with several times on his head with a chisel. After a brief struggle, Loeb pulled Bobby into the back seat and suffocated him. (There is some dispute as to which of the boys was the actual killer, but according to the later testimony of defense psychiatrist Bernard Gluek, Loeb admitted to being the killer).
Leopold and Loeb drove their rented car to a marshland near the Indiana line, where they pulled the body of Franks from the back seat. They stripped of Franks's clothes and then poured hydrochloric acid over his naked body to make identification more difficult. They stuffed the body in a concrete drainage culvert. The boys returned to the Loeb home where they burned Franks' clothing in a basement fire. That evening Mrs. Franks received a phone call from Leopold, who identified himself as "George Johnson." Leopold told Franks that her boy had been kidnapped, but was unharmed, and that she should expect a ransom note soon. The next morning the Franks family received a special delivery letter asking that they immediately secure $10,000 in old, unmarked bills and telling them to expect further instructions that afternoon. Leopold ("George Johnson") called Jacob Franks, Bobby's father, shortly before three o'clock to tell him a taxi cab was about to arrive at his home and that he should take it to a specified drugstore in South Chicago.
Franks, however would not get into the Yellow Cab that pulled up in front of his home. He had just received another call, this one from the police, spoiling hope that the perfect crime would be executed. The body of Bobby Franks had been identified; a laborer happened to see a flash of what turned out to be a foot through the the shrubbery covering the open culvert where the body had been placed.
There would have been no arrests and no trial but for what the prosecutor called "the hand of God at work in this case." A pair of horn-rimmed tortoise shell glasses were discovered with the body of Bobby Franks. The glasses, belonging to Nathan Leopold, had slipped out of the jacket he removed as he struggled to hide the body. They had an unusual hinge and could be traced to a single Chicago optometrist, who had written only three such prescriptions, including the one to Leopold. When questioned about the glasses, Leopold said that he must have lost them on one of his frequent birding expeditions. He was asked by an investigator to demonstrate how the glasses might have fallen out of his pockets, but failed after a series of purposeful trips to dislodge the glasses from his coat. Questioning became more intense.
Nathan Leopold's glasses
Leopold said that he spent the twenty-first of May picking up girls in his car with Loeb and driving out to Lincoln Park. Loeb, when questioned separately, confirmed Leopold's alibi. State's attorney Robert Crowe, heading the investigation, was skeptical. Among the items found in a search of the Leopold home was a letter written by Nathan strongly suggesting that he and Loeb had a homosexual relationship. Still, prosecutor's were on the verge of releasing the two suspects when two additional pieces of evidence surfaced. First, typewritten notes taken from a member of Leopold's law school study group were found to match the the type from the ransom note, despite the fact that an earlier search of the Leopold home turned up a typewriter with unmatching type. Then came a statement from the Leopold family chauffeur, made in the hope of establishing Nathan's innocence, that spelled his doom. He said he was certain that the Leopold car, the one the boys claimed they had spent the night driving around with girls, had not left the garage on the day of the murder. Was he sure about that?, Crowe wanted to know. Yes, the chauffeur said, he had spent the evening repairing it.
Robert Crowe and his staff with Leopold and Loeb after their confessions
Loeb confessed first, then Leopold. Their confessions differed only on the point of who did the actual killing, with each pointing the finger at the other. Leopold later pleaded with Loeb to admit to killing Franks but, according to Leopold, Loeb said, "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."
The Loeb and Leopold families hired Clarence Darrow and Benjamin Bachrach to represent the two boys. Darrow took the case in large part because it gave him a platform to attack the death penalty, which he had called "an abomination."
Nathan said his first impression of Darrow was one of "horror", unimpressed as he was by Darrow's unruly hair, rumpled jacket, egg-splattered shirt, suspenders, and askew tie. His opinion of Darrow soon changed. He later described his attorney as a great, simple, unaffected man, with a "deep-seated, all-embracing kindliness." In his book Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years, Leopold wrote that if asked to name the two men who "came closest to preaching the pure essence of love" he would say Jesus and Clarence Darrow.
Robert Crowe and Clarence Darrow
It was Darrow's decision to change the boys' initial pleas to the charges of murder and kidnapping from "not guilty" (suggesting a traditional insanity defense) to "guilty." The decision was made primarily to prevent the state from getting two opportunities to get a death sentence. With "not guilty" pleas, the state had planned to try the boys first on one of the two charges, both of which carried the death penalty in Illinois, and if it failed to win a hanging on the first charge, try again on the second. The guilty plea also meant that the sentencing decision would be made by a judge, not by a jury. Darrow's decision to plead the boys guilty undoubtedly was based in part on his belief that the judge who would hear their case, John R. Caverly, was a "kindly and discerning" man. With the public seemingly unanimous in calling for death, Darrow did not want to face a jury. In his summation Darrow noted, "where responsibility is divided by twelve, it is easy to say ‘away with him'; but, your honor, if these boys are to hang, you must do it--...it must be by your cool, premeditated act, without a chance to shift responsibility."
Defense psychiatrists interview Nathan Leopold
The defense hoped to build its case against death around the testimony of four psychiatrists, called "alienists" at the time. The best talent psychiatric talent 1924 had to offer was sought out by both sides to examine the defendants. Even Sigmund Freud was asked to come to Chicago for the trial, but his poor health at the time prevented the visit. The prosecution argued that psychiatric testimony was only admissible if the defendants claimed insanity, while the defense argued strenuously that evidence of mental disease should be considered as a mitigating factor in consideration of the sentence. In the most critical ruling of the trial, Judge Caverly decided against the state's objection, and allowed the psychiatric evidence to be introduced.
The trial (technically a hearing, rather than a trial, because of the entry of guilty pleas) of Leopold and Loeb lasted just over one month. The defense presented extensive psychiatric evidence describing the defendants' emotional immaturity, obsessions with crime and Nietzschean philosophy, alcohol abuse, glandular abnormalities, and sexual longings and insecurities. Defense psychiatrist William White testified that Leopold's "pathology began in early childhood." Teased relentlessly, Leopold bcame "estranged from his peers, a lonely, unhappy child". . . who retreated into an inner world where emotion counted for nothing and intellect was all. Trapped "inside his world of fantasy, Nathan imagined himself a slave. . . who saved the life of his king [Richard Loeb] and thereby had earned the king's gratitude." Another defense pschiatrist, Bernard Gluek, testified Leopold "adhered to a purely hedonistic philosophy that all action was justified if it gave pleasure." Gluek said Nathan's "ambition has been to become a perfect Nietzschean and to follow Nietzsche's philosophy all the way through." According to Gluek, Leopold had told him "he was jealous of the food and drink that Loeb took, because he could not come as close to him as did the food and drink." Gluek concluded that Leopold has a "definitely paranoid personality" and was given to a "delusional way of thinking."
As for Richard Loeb, William White described his "main outstanding feature" as "infantilism." White said Richard "is still a little child emotionally, still talking to his teddy bear." Lay witnesses, classmates and associates of Loeb, were offered to prove his belligerence, inappropriate laughter, lack of judgment, and childishness. Other lay witness testified as to Leopold's egocentricity and argumentative nature.
White offered his thoughts on the two boys' peculiar chemistry. He said, "Nathan and Richard complemented each other. Richard needed Nathan's applause and admiration in order to confir his sense of his own self. But Nathan also needed Richard to play a role; Richard took the role of a king who was simultaneously superior and inferior. . .It was a pecularily bizarre confluence of two personalities, each of which satisfied the needs of the other. Nathan would never on his own initiative have murdered Bobby Franks. . . And I don't believe Dickie would have ever functioned to this extent all by himself. So these two boys. . .come into this emotional compact with the Franks homicide as a result."
Not surprisingly, prosecution psychiatrists took a different view. William Krohn testified, "In my opinion, [Richard Loeb] was not suffering from any mental disease, either functional or structural on May 21st, 1924." Krohn said, "There was abundant evidence that the man was perfectly oriented as to time, as to place, and as to his social relations." Leopold, too, he concluded, was free of any significant mental disease. "There was no evidence of any organic disease of the brain," Krohn said. "He showed remarkably close attention, detailed attention." In addition to its expert testimony, the state presented over one hundred witnesses proving--needlessly, in the opinion of many--every element of the crime.
On August 22, 1924, Clarence Darrow began his summation for the defense in a "courtroom jammed to suffocation, with hundreds of men and women rioting in the corridors outside." As a newspaper reporter observed, the setting underscored Darrow's argument "that the court was the only thing standing between the boys and a bloodthirsty mob."
For over twelve hours, in a voice that rose and fell, Darrow argued that his clients should not bear full responsibility for their crime. Darrow reminded Judge Caverly of the defendants' youth, genetic inheritance, surging sexual impulses, and the many external influences that had led them to the commission of their crime. Never before or since the Leopold and Loeb trial has the deterministic universe, this life of "a series of infinite chances", been so clearly made the basis of a criminal defense. In pleading for Loeb's life Darrow argued, "Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in mysterious ways, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we only play our parts. . .We are only Impotent pieces in the game He plays Upon this checkerboard of nights and days, Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the closet lays. What had this boy had to do with it? He was not his own father; he was not his own mother....All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth. He did not make himself. And yet he is to be compelled to pay." In pleading that Leopold be spared , Darrow said, "Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen- year-old boy!"
Darrow attacked the death penalty as atavistic, saying it "roots back to the beast and the jungle." Time and time again Darrow challenged the notion of "an eye for an eye": "If the state in which I live is not kinder, more humane, and more considerate than the mad act of these two boys, I am sorry I have lived so long." Darrow told Judge Caverly that a life sentence was punishment severe enough for the crime. He reminded the judge how little Leopold and Loeb would have to look forward to in the long days, months, and years ahead: "In all the endless road you tread there's nothing but the night."
Darrow favored specificity and vivid images in his arguments. He took Judge Caverly to the day of execution, reminding him of the possible consequences of his decision:
"I can think, and only think, Your Honor, of taking two boys, one eighteen and the other nineteen, irresponsible, weak, diseased, penning them in a cell, checking off the days and hours and minutes, until they are taken out and hanged. Wouldn't it be a glorious day for Chicago? Wouldn't it be a glorious triumph for the State's Attorney? Wouldn't it be a glorious triumph for justice in this land? Wouldn't it be a glorious illustration of Christianity and kindness and charity? I can picture them, wakened in the gray light of morning, furnished a suit of clothes by the state, led to the scaffold, their feet tied, black caps drawn over their heads, stood on a trap door. The hangman, pressing a spring, so that it gives way under them; I can see them fall through space--and--stopped by the ropes around their necks."
Darrow pleaded for the judge to put kindness over cruelty and love over hate. He ended his marathon summation with a wish that all humans be inspired by the words of the poet Omar Khayyam, who wrote: "So I be written in the Book of Love/ I do not care about that Book above./ Erase my name or write it as you will,/ So I be written in the Book of Love." When Darrow finally ended his appeal, according to one newspaper account, tears were streaming down the face of Judge Caverly and many other courtroom spectators. The reporter wrote, "There was scarcely any telling where his voice had finished and where silence had begun. It lasted for a minute, two minutes."
State's Attorney Robert Crowe closed for the prosecution. Crowe was a Yale-educated up-and-comer in Illinois politics and quite a speaker in his own right. He sarcastically attacked the arguments of "the distinguished gentlemen whose profession it is to protect murder in Cook County, and concerning whose health thieves inquire before they go out and commit a crime." Addressing Leopold, Crowe said, "I wonder now, Nathan, whether you think there is a God or not. I wonder whether you think it is pure accident that this disciple of Nietzsche's philosophy dropped his glasses or whether it was an act of Divine Providence to visit upon your miserable carcasses the wrath of God." (Leopold, much later, said he wondered the same thing.) He heaped ridicule on Darrow's attempt to blame the crime on anyone and anything but the defendants: "My God, if one of them had a harelip I suppose Darrow would want me to apologize for having them indicted." Crowe called the defense psychiatrists "The Three Wise Men from the East" and accused one of them of being "in his second childhood" and "prostituting his profession."
Crowe reserved his strongest language for the two defendants, who he referred to as "cowardly perverts", "snakes", "atheists", "spoiled smart alecs", and "mad dogs." For Crowe, this was a premeditated crime committed by two remorseless defendants, and the appropriate punishment was obvious. The "real defense" in the case, according to Crowe, was "Clarence Darrow and his peculiar philosophy of life." It ought not be a defense, suggested Crowe, who closed by asking Judge Caverly to "execute justice and righteousness in the land."
Two weeks later Caverly announced his decision. He called the murder "a crime of singular atrocity." Caverly said that his "judgment cannot be affected" by the causes of crime and that it was "beyond the province of this court" to "predicate ultimate responsibility for human acts." Nonetheless, Caverly said that "the consideration of the age of the defendants" and the possible benefits to criminology that might come from future study of them persuaded him that life in prison, not death, was the better punishment. He said that he was doing them no favor: "To the offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation."
Leopold speaking to the press after his release in 1958
Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were moved to the Joliet penitentiary. In 1936, Loeb was slashed and killed with a razor in a showroom fight with James Day, another inmate. Leopold rushed to the prison hospital to be at his old friend's bedside as he died. Day claimed that he was resisting Loeb's sexual advances, while prison officials called it a deliberate and unprovoked attack. A story about the killing ran in the Chicago Daily News with this lead: "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition." Clever, but perhaps not accurate.
Day was acquitted by a jury. Leopold managed to keep intellectually active in prison. He taught in the prison school, mastered foreign languages, worked as an x-ray technician in the prison hospital, reorganized the prison library, volunteered to be tested with an experimental malaria vaccine, and designed a new system of prison education. In 1958, after thirty-four years of confinement, Leopold was released from prison. To escape the publicity accompanying the release of Compulsion, a movie based on the 1924 crime (and which Leopold and his lawyer, Elmer Gertz, challenged in a lawsuit as an invasion of privacy), Leopold migrated to Puerto Rico. He earned a master's degree, taught mathematics, and worked in hospitals and church missions. He wrote a book entitled The Birds of Puerto Rico. Despite saying in a 1960 interview that he was still deeply in love with Richard Loeb, he married. Leopold said he often found himself wondering during his years in Puerto Rico at what point the thirty-four dark years in prison became balanced by the subsequent sunshine of freedom. Leopold died following ten days of hospitalization on August 30, 1971. The next morning his corneas were removed. One was given to a man, the other to a woman.
A Reader's Contrary View
E-mail from a Reader Who Knew Leopold
E-mail from Reader Who Owns One of 3 Pairs of Glasses Like Leopold's