by Simon Baatz
He stopped and turned back to Puttkammer as he reached the door; there was a slight smile on Nathan's face. "But . . . I don't say he did it."26
The next day--Thursday, 29 May--Nathan stayed home. The law exams were finished and that afternoon he was taking a group of schoolchildren from University High School on a bird-watching expedition to Wolf Lake.
He heard the bell at the front door but paid no attention; he was not expecting anyone to call. Two minutes later the maid was at his study door: three men, police officers, wished to speak with him.
How irritating! No doubt they wished to ask him more questions about his birding expeditions. But perhaps he could put them off; perhaps he could persuade them to come back at a more convenient time.
6 THE INTERROGATION Thursday, 29 May 1924-Saturday, 31 May 1924
Since you have been in my custody have you been beaten by anybody? . . . Have any of the police or my assistants been rough, or anything of the kind? . . . You haven't any bruises on your body, have you?
1Robert Crowe, state's attorney for Cook County, 1 June 1924
The large black car made its way slowly down Greenwood Avenue, halting occasionally and then again moving forward. Greenwood Avenue lay in the heart of Kenwood, one of Chicago's most exclusive residential neighborhoods, and at that time of the day--two-thirty on a Thursday afternoon--the street was deserted; nobody observed the car as it slowly passed between the large mansions on either side.
The car finally stopped in front of 4754 Greenwood Avenue. Three men--evidently on an important mission--stepped out purposefully and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up at the house before them. It was, like all the houses on the street, a massive stone structure, three stories tall, set behind an imposing front gate.
Frank Johnson, a police sergeant with the Detective Bureau, led the way to the front door. A maid answered the bell. Yes, Nathan Leopold was at home; he would be down shortly.
Two minutes later the boy was at the door. They had been fortunate to find him at home: Nathan had been on his way out of the house; at three o'clock he was taking a class of schoolchildren on a birding expedition. As Johnson introduced himself, he noticed Nathan's irritation at their presence. Nathan demanded to see their identification. The sergeant bristled at the arrogance in the boy's voice.
"Let me see your credentials," Nathan asked.
Johnson pulled his deputy's star from his pocket: "I am a police officer," he explained, "and they want you at the State's Attorney's office." As the boy turned to get his jacket, Johnson dropped a hint about the purpose of his visit.
"By the way . . . do you wear glasses?"
"Yes."
"Did you lose your glasses?"
"No."
"Have you got them?"
"They are around here someplace."
Johnson realized--too late--that it may have been a mistake to
mention the eyeglasses to Nathan. He had thought to save time and have the boy bring along his glasses, but he could not allow Nathan to hunt through the house looking for them--the state's attorney would be annoyed if they were delayed.
"Well, we have to go down to the State's Attorney's office." "I have got an appointment to teach a class about three o'clock." "Well, you will have to postpone that appointment."
"Can't you postpone this until some other time?"
"No, you have got to go down now."2
Nathan disappeared into the house, leaving Johnson waiting on the
doorstep. He reappeared with his eldest brother, Michael, and they joined the three detectives--Frank Johnson, William Crot, and James Gortland--for the ride to the Loop.
In fact, Robert Crowe had requested that Nathan Leopold come to the Hotel LaSalle, a luxury hotel in the downtown business district. Crowe was being cautious; although his men had traced the eyeglasses found at the culvert back to Nathan, he had no reason to believe that the boy was involved in the murder of Bobby Franks and he had little desire to enmesh the Leopold family in the investigation. Media publicity had already confounded the detective work; if Nathan Leopold suddenly appeared at the Criminal Court Building, the newspapers might trumpet the boy as a suspect. Crowe merely wished to hear from Nathan Leopold an explanation for the presence of his eyeglasses near the corpse.
Nathan arrived at the Hotel LaSalle within the hour. Crowe was brisk; he was sure that this matter could be quickly cleared up. To a question about the eyeglasses, Nathan replied that he had possessed a pair of reading glasses for several months; they were, Nathan continued, at his home in the pocket of one of his suits. If it would give the state's attorney peace of mind, he would gladly drive back to Kenwood and retrieve them.
3
Back at the Leopold home, Nathan made a show of searching his bedroom for his eyeglasses, but he now knew that the state's attorney had one piece of evidence linking him to the murder of Bobby Franks. He soon abandoned the search; his eyeglass case stood on top of the bureau next to his bed, but the eyeglasses were missing. Nathan slipped the case into his coat pocket and went downstairs.
4
Robert Crowe now had reason to hold Nathan Leopold; his questioning of the boy was no longer casual. Later that evening the police searched Nathan's bedroom and study. They turned up two items; neither connected Nathan to the murder, but both the gun--a Remington .32-caliber automatic repeater--and a letter from Nathan to a second boy, Richard Loeb, were unusual and unexpected.
Nathan had already told the detectives that he carried a shotgun on his birding expeditions, but the Remington was a handgun; it could not easily be used to shoot small birds at long distances. It was, moreover, an illegal firearm--Nathan had never applied for a permit for it.
5
The letter to Richard Loeb was also a puzzle. As Crowe read it over in his office, he could discern that the two boys had quarreled: Nathan accused Richard of treachery and threatened to kill him but then wrote of his desire to continue their friendship. The letter was alternately haughty and pleading, aggressive and submissive; Nathan was angry with Richard yet desperate that they remain friends. If Richard were to break off their friendship, Nathan concluded, "extreme care must be used. The motif of a falling out of cocksuckers would be sure to be popular, which is patently undesirable, and forms an unknown but unavoidable bond between us."
6
There was no clue in the letter as to why Nathan and Richard had squabbled; nevertheless it was evident that the boys were lovers who had had a tiff. Perhaps they were part of a homosexual set at the University of Chicago and Nathan was anxious that Richard not publicly abandon and humiliate him in front of their friends.
Robert Crowe decided to move Nathan from the Hotel LaSalle to the Criminal Court Building. And he now also wanted to talk to Richard Loeb. Most probably the second boy--also the son of a wealthy and inf luential Chicago businessman--knew nothing of the murder, but Crowe could use Richard to draw out information about Nathan. Crowe had experience with this form of blackmail: one hint that he would reveal Richard's homosexual secrets, and the boy would sing like the proverbial canary.
It was now one o'clock in the morning on Friday, 30 May. Crowe had held Nathan Leopold through Thursday evening but he still had no firm evidence that Leopold was connected to the killing of Bobby Franks. Yet he couldn't simply release the boy--the gun, the eyeglasses, and the homosexual relationship with Loeb all pointed an accusing finger.
Nathan Leopold sat in a chair before him in his office; the assistant state's attorneys, Joseph Savage and Milton Smith, sat slightly to one side, also facing the boy; the stenographer, Elbert Allen, had already begun taking down their conversation in shorthand.
The English teacher at the Harvard School, Mott Kirk Mitchell, was still the most likely suspect. What could Nathan tell them about Mitchell? Nathan had been a pupil at the Harvard School--was there anything to suggest that his former teacher was a homosexual?
"Have you ever heard any stories about Mitchell being queer?" "Not definitely
, no," Nathan replied.
"Well, rumors?"
"I have heard some wild rumors, yes."
"By queer, you mean what?"
"I mean sexually perverted."
"And for how long a time have these rumors been f loating around,
to your knowledge?"
"Ever since I can remember, almost."
"You have no knowledge as to whether or not the rumors are
true?"
"No, sir."7
Clearly there was not much mileage to be gained from this line
of inquiry; Nathan could not tell Crowe anything he did not already know; and in any case, whatever the boy told him would be hearsay, inadmissible in a court of law.
Crowe tried a different tack. Nathan had failed to find his eyeglasses in his bedroom--he now accepted that the glasses Crowe held out before him were his own. How, Crowe asked, had they come to be found near the body of Bobby Franks?
That was not difficult to explain. Nathan had been birding the weekend before the murder--that would be Saturday, 17 May--and his eyeglasses had probably fallen out of his pocket during the day. Nathan had driven out to Wolf Lake with his friend George Lewis around midday, and almost immediately they had spotted some unusual shorebirds resembling sandpipers. The birds f lew west over the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and alighted in the swamps: "so we both ran over the railroad track into Hyde Lake, crossed on a little log which crosses the little channel there; and after searching around for some time in the swamp, caught up to the birds again; and I fired three shots at them. . . . The fourth shell jammed on me, and the birds f lew away."
8
No wonder his eyeglasses were found near the culvert. Only four days before the murder, he had been near that very spot in the chase after the birds. Crowe was impressed--it seemed an obvious explanation. And Nathan even had a witness who could corroborate his story: George Lewis would back up his account. But, Crowe asked, how close had he been to the culvert?
"How near did you come to the particular spot in this drain where the body was found? How near did you come to that particular spot Saturday?"
"I should say that I passed right over it, probably, about on a level with it. It was as near as . . . I could not exactly say; I should say probably within ten or twenty feet of it, anyhow."
9
There was no reason not to believe the boy; he told his story in a breezily confident manner, calmly smoking a cigarette as he spoke, occasionally glancing at Crowe's assistants at his side but otherwise looking steadily at the state's attorney. But Crowe was persistent; for his own peace of mind, he wanted to be sure that Nathan was telling the truth. And Crowe had noticed that Nathan had never, in his account of the day out at Wolf Lake, explicitly said he had stumbled; nor, indeed, had he ever given any indication how the eyeglasses had fallen from his pocket.
Crowe held the glasses out before him, just eighteen inches from Nathan's face.
"If you would put your glasses in your pocket, you would put them in what pocket?"
"My left breast pocket."
"Left breast coat pocket?"
"Left breast coat pocket, or possibly left vest pocket."
"Which, generally, would you do?"
"Generally I would put them in my coat."
"Did you stumble or fall at this particular spot at any time?"
"I do not remember."
"You do not remember that?"
"No, sir."
Crowe wondered if Nathan's account was accurate; the boy had been carrying a shotgun that Saturday afternoon out at Wolf Lake. Surely he would recall if he had stumbled while holding a gun? And if Nathan had dropped his eyeglasses by the culvert the previous Saturday--four days before Paul Korff had discovered them--they would have been spattered with mud after lying so long on the ground. But the eyeglasses had been conspicuously free of dirt, as though they had fallen to the ground just a few hours before their discovery. Was Nathan telling the truth when he said that he had lost his eyeglasses on the weekend? The state's attorney motioned to Nathan to take hold of the eyeglasses: "Will you put those in your left breast coat pocket and run and bend, and see whether they will drop out?"
Nathan took a quick drag on his cigarette. He put it carefully in an ashtray on Crowe's desk and reached out for the eyeglasses. He was now a little self-conscious: Crowe and the assistants were watching him intently. The stenographer had stopped scribbling in his notebook; he, too, looked at Nathan, watching the boy as Nathan stepped into the center of the room.
Nathan stepped out, took two paces, and fell forward to the ground, putting out his hands before him. The glasses remained in place, tucked securely in his breast pocket. He repeated the motion--still they remained there; they had barely moved.
"Now, you have fallen to the f loor twice?"
"Yes."
"The glasses are still in your pocket?"
"Yes, sir. . . . May I add that Saturday you must remember that I had a pair of large rubber boots that did not fit me, and therefore the probability of my stumbling was greater than if I had been just normal."
"You had a gun in your hand."
"Yes, sir."
"You don't remember falling?"
"No, sir."10
It was disconcerting for Nathan that the glasses had failed to behave as he had hoped. But no matter--he had an alibi for the day of the murder. He had gone, as usual, to his classes at the university that Wednesday morning, and around eleven o'clock he had picked up Richard Loeb to drive to the Loop to have lunch at the grill at Marshall Field's department store. Nathan was eager to spend part of the afternoon in Lincoln Park; he had heard from a friend that a heron had been seen there. He had brought his field glasses--would Richard like to come along?
Richard Loeb could not care less about the heron--but although he himself had no interest in ornithology, he tolerated his friend's hobby. Richard was more interested in drinking; there was a pint bottle of gin in Nathan's car. And who knows? Perhaps they could pick up some girls in the park and have a good time.
As the afternoon wore on, both boys, Nathan told the state's attorney, had become "a little bit happy; neither of us was drunk." Nathan knew, however, that he couldn't take Richard home so long as his breath smelled of alcohol; Richard's father was a teetotaler and a supporter of prohibition: he would not be happy that his son had been drinking. They had dinner at the Cocoanut Grove Restaurant and then "drove up and down 63rd Street several times . . . to find a couple of girls with nothing to do."
"And you found them?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then what happened?"
"Then we drove down Garfield Boulevard, almost to Western Avenue, and back up to Jackson Park; parked the car just north and east of the Wooded Island. . . . We sat around in the car and had a few drinks, and couldn't come to an agreement with the girls; so we asked them to leave, and went to go home."
"In other words, the girls . . ."
". . . wouldn't come across."
"And they walked home?"
"That is right, yes."11
As Nathan told the alibi to Crowe, Richard Loeb also was now in an
office in the Criminal Court Building, telling the same alibi to one of Crowe's assistants. On Wednesday, 21 May, Loeb explained, "between 10 and 11 o'clock . . . Leopold and I started down town. We stopped at Marshall Field's and had luncheon. Then we . . . started for Lincoln Park. . . . Leopold wanted to spot a migratory bird . . . a heron. . . . We hung around the park for five or six hours, then ducked for Cocoanut Grove. We had something to eat. Got there about 6 o'clock and stayed to have a few drinks. Then we had a few more and beat it."
12
The alibis presented by the two boys corroborated each other exactly. Richard Loeb also told the tale of the two girls--he remembered their names as May and Edna--and, like Nathan, recounted how he and his companion had made them walk home after the girls had refused to have sex.
Yet the alibi served only to heighten Crowe's suspicio
ns. Crowe had not yet told Nathan that one of his detectives had found the letter from Nathan to Richard indicating that both boys were homosexuals. Why would they want to spend an evening trying to have sex with two girls if they were homosexuals? Richard Loeb might vouch for Leopold's alibi, but Loeb's corroboration now had little value for the state's attorney. Of course, if they could find the two girls, then the alibi was genuine and they would go free. But would they find the girls?
It was now almost seven o'clock in the morning, Friday, 30 May. The state's attorney had questioned Nathan Leopold throughout the night and into the early morning hours, and still the boy had shown no sign of guilt. Richard Loeb was in an adjacent room, also in the Criminal Court Building. The state's attorney decided to keep both boys in custody. They needed to get some sleep; the detectives placed Nathan in a cell in the central police station and took Richard to the 48th Street station.
While the boys slept in their cells that Friday, the press woke up to the realization that Robert Crowe might have caught the murderers. Reporters from the newspapers descended on the Kenwood neighborhood to interview the parents of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.
Both families ridiculed the idea that either boy could be guilty of murder; they had a granite certitude that their sons would soon be released. It was all a terrible mistake--an unfortunate coincidence of circumstances that would soon right itself.
At the Leopold home, Nathan Leopold Sr. invited a small group of journalists into his house to discuss his son's plight. He knew the Franks family personally and was horrified at the kidnapping and murder of Bobby, but he assured the reporters that his son had nothing to do with it: "It is ridiculous. Of course my boy is not involved. I shall do all I can to dispel this notion of the police. . . . We are ready to aid the authorities in every way to solve this murder. . . . But it is ridiculous to suppose Nathan had anything to do with it. . . . I probably could get my boy out on a writ of habeas corpus, but there is no need for that sort of technical trickery. The suggestion that he had anything to do with this case is too absurd to merit comment."
