Leopold and Loeb

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. (November 19, 1904 – August 30, 1971) and Richard A. Loeb (June 11, 1905 – January 28, 1936), more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and received sentences of life plus 99 years.

Their crime was notable in being largely motivated by an apparent need to prove the duo's belief that their high intellects made them capable of committing a perfect crime, and also for its role in the history of American thought on capital punishment.

Motive

Leopold, who was 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a "perfect crime" (in this case a kidnapping and murder) without fear of being apprehended.

The friends were exceptionally intelligent: Leopold had already completed college and was attending law school. He spoke fifteen languages and was an expert ornithologist, while Loeb was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. The pair had worked themselves up to committing the crime for months, starting out with petty theft.

Timeline

On Wednesday, May 21, 1924, they put their plot in motion. The pair lured Franks, a neighbor of Loeb's, into a rented car. Loeb first struck Franks with a chisel. Leopold and Loeb then suffocated Franks. After concealing the body in a culvert under a railroad track outside of Chicago—the body was burned with acid to make identification more difficult—they did their best to make it seem that a kidnapping for ransom had taken place; the Franks family had enough money that a request for $10,000 in ransom was plausible.

Before the family could pay the ransom, though, Tony Minke, 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 Franks.

A pair of eyeglasses found with the body was eventually traced back to Nathan Leopold. The ransom note had been typed on a typewriter that Leopold had used with his law school study group. 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.

They 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 driven by the thrill. For that matter, they basked in the public attention they received while in jail; they regaled newspaper reporters with the crime's lurid details again and again.

Public reaction

Driven by the newspapers of the day, the public was outraged. In the Jewish community, no one had imagined that such shining examples of ideal success could have committed such a crime. Both of Leopold and Loeb's families were affluent, and each dapper young University of Chicago student surely had a fine future all but guaranteed for him—there was absolutely no reason to turn to crime.

The murder and subsequent trial received worldwide publicity, and part of this fascination was based on public perception of the crime as a Jewish crime, in which both the perpetrators and victim were perceived to be Jewish. In 1924, Chicago was consumately an ethnic city, a city where the majority of residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and a city in which politics, neighborhoods, and institutions often carried ethnic labels. Meyer Levin has been quoted as saying that it was "a relief that the victim, too, had been Jewish" (reducing the chances of bigots using this crime to justify anti-Semitic violence). Neither defendant was a practicing Jew. Loeb's mother was Catholic and his father was Jewish. Bobby Franks' parents, while ethnically Jewish, were converts to Christian Science.

Leopold and Loeb had both admitted to the press that they had a sexual relationship, and this increased the lurid (for that time period) aspects of the crime considerably.

Trial

The trial proved to be a media spectacle; it was one of the first cases in the USA to be dubbed the "Trial 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. While the media expected them to plead not guilty (by reason of insanity), Darrow surprised everyone by having them both plead guilty. In this way, Darrow avoided a jury trial which, due to the strong public sentiment against his clients, would most certainly have resulted in a conviction and perhaps even the death penalty. Instead, he was able to make his case for his clients' lives before a single person, Cook County Circuit Court Judge John R. Caverly.

Darrow gave a twelve-hour speech, which has been called the finest of his career. The speech included: "this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor … Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university."

It may be, in fact, that Darrow accepted the case because it offered a huge public platform for such a speech; he knew that his strong argument against capital punishment would be reprinted in newspapers around the world. And if he could successfully reason 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 life in prison (for the murder), plus 99 years each (for the kidnapping).

Prison and later life

In prison, Leopold and Loeb used their educations to good purpose, teaching classes in the prison school. In January of 1936, at age 30, Loeb was attacked by fellow prisoner James Day with a straight razor in the prison's shower room, and died from his wounds. Day claimed afterwards that Loeb had attempted to sexually assault him; an inquiry accepted Day's testimony, and the prison authorities ruled that Day's attack on Loeb was self-defense. That inspired the newsman Ed Lahey to write in the Chicago Daily News, "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition." [1]

Early in 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole. He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid media attention, and married a widowed florist. He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 66.

Impact on popular culture

• In 1956, Meyer Levin revisited the Leopold and Loeb case in his novel Compulsion, a fictionalized version of the actual events in which the names of the pair were changed to "Steiner and Strauss." Three years later, the novel was made into a film (also called Compulsion, directed by Richard Fleischer), in which the leads were played by Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman. The character based on Darrow was played by Orson Welles, whose speech at the film's end adapting Darrow's closing arguments was one of the longest monologues in film history.
• The crime was also inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948, based on the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton), and Tom Kalin's more openly gay-themed Swoon (1992) as well as the 1997 film Kiss the Girls, Barbet Schroeder's Murder by Numbers (2002), the 1985 play Never The Sinner by John Logan, and the off-Broadway musical "Thrill Me" by Stephen Dolginoff.
• Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes incorporated the case into his comic Eightball 22, released in 2001.
• The case is also mentioned in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, in which Allen's character falsely attributes a humorous quote to the killers ("I think there's too much burden placed on the orgasm, you know, to make up for empty areas in life"), as well as in the Seinfeld episode The Junior Mint, where Jerry Seinfeld likens himself and Kramer to the two killers.
• The Leopold and Loeb case was also mentioned in Richard Wright's novel Native Son, which also takes place in Chicago.
• The two were also mentioned on a couple of episodes of Law & Order.
• Leopold and Loeb's names were mentioned in an episode of the drama/comedy Gilmore Girls during a dream sequence in which Lorelai Gilmore, pregnant with twins, tells her "dream husband" that she has decided to name their unborn children "Leopold and Loeb".
• One of the plots in the BBC series Silent Witness episode(s) "The Meaning of Death" is about a pair of serial killers patterned after Leopold and Loeb.
• In the television series The Pretender, the main character, Jarod, becomes a Professor at a highly acclaimed University after the original professor is murdered. Jarod suspects it to the the work of brilliant students who wanted to commit "the perfect crime."

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Fleischer, Richard (director). Compulsion. Film, 1958.
• Higdon, Hal. Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century. University of Illinois Press, 1999. (originally published in 1975). ISBN 0-252-06829-7
• Kalin, Tom (director). Swoon. Film, 1990.
• Levin, Meyer. Compulsion. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1996. (originally published in 1956). ISBN 0-7867-0319-9
• Saul, John (Author), 'In the Dark of the Night', 2006 ISBN 034548701 Template:Please check ISBN

External links

• Leopoldandloeb.com
• Crime Library article
• Famous Trials article
• Bizarre magazine profile
• Thrill Me:The Leopold and Loeb Story Currently Playing at York Theatre Company
• Robert Franks
• Suspected in four other murders

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