by Simon Baatz
Richard died later that day. The prison doctors worked furiously to save him, suturing the cuts, but Richard had lost too much blood. Nathan rushed from his cell to the prison hospital and watched helplessly as his friend, his companion, his lover, lay dying on the operating table. And when it was over, after the surgeons and doctors and prison guards had all left the room, Nathan remained behind, to wash the body, to gently cradle Richard’s head in his arms, and to grieve silently over the loss of his companion.41
At the trial of James Day later that year, no one, not even Nathan, contradicted Day’s account. The state’s attorney had demanded the death penalty for the murder of Richard Loeb. Any convict who testified on the witness stand against Day would be responsible for sending him to the electric chair.42 Who among those prisoners who knew the truth would want to return to Stateville to face retribution for sending a fellow prisoner to his death? Richard Loeb had died; he could not be brought back to life. Better to allow Day to claim that Richard had demanded a homosexual encounter than to risk one’s own life. The jury found Day not guilty on all charges.
Few of the guards at Stateville believed Day’s claim that he had acted in self-defense. Why, for example, had it been necessary for Day to stab Richard fifty-six times? And how had Day managed to emerge from their encounter in the shower room without a scratch or even so much as a bruise?
Richard’s death had created an uproar outside the prison walls, and the revelation that Richard had corrupted the guards to obtain special privileges had deeply embarrassed the new warden, Joseph Ragen. Nothing, Ragen now realized, would be more humiliating for the institution than to have scandal touch Nathan Leopold also. As a consequence, Nathan found himself under severe scrutiny in case he, too, should step out of line. Ragen now decreed that Nathan should no longer have a cell mate; nor was he to walk around the prison without a guard to accompany him; and all his privileges were to be revoked.
The years following Richard’s death were lonely, bitter years for Nathan. He was surrounded by hundreds of men, yet he keenly felt his social isolation within the prison. “These years after Dick’s death,” Nathan wrote in his autobiography, “were not altogether pleasant. Officially there were a number of restrictions on me, and these galled me a lot. It is never easy to get along in a situation where you stick out like a sore thumb…. The fact that I had to cell alone, that I had to be accompanied by a keeper—these were widely misinterpreted. They made it much harder for me to get along. And the fact that I brought ‘heat’ wherever I went didn’t make it any easier.”43
Yet Nathan survived and even began to contemplate the possibility of parole. To dream that he might win his release from Stateville had always seemed an impossible flight of fancy. Yet memories would eventually dim; his antagonists—Crowe’s successors in the state’s attorney’s office—would eventually relax their grip, and perhaps Nathan could convince the parole board of his contrition for that terrible crime so long ago.
At the time of Richard’s death in 1936, Nathan had already served twelve years—he would be eligible for parole on the life sentence in 1944, after serving a total of twenty years. The parole board would require him to proclaim his regret for the killing of Bobby Franks, of course, but that would not be difficult. He needed also to demonstrate, by good works if possible, that he had undergone rehabilitation: that he had atoned for his deed and that there was no likelihood that he would commit some comparable act on his release.
In the early 1930s, several inmates had established a prison school at Stateville to teach the other prisoners. It had been an ambitious undertaking—in the first year, seventy convicts had enrolled in classes in English composition, algebra, geometry, bookkeeping, and history. The warden had endorsed their initiative and had provided money from the Inmates’ Amusement Fund for paper, pencils, textbooks, and mimeograph supplies. Both Nathan and Richard had been involved with the school from its inception, and in the years following Richard’s death, Nathan attempted to ease his pain and his loneliness by immersing himself in the management of the school. It was, by his account at least, a grand success—soon some 400 prisoners were taking classes. Nathan had intended the school as a memorial to Richard, but its rapid expansion proved its eventual downfall. The warden, Joseph Ragen, taking note of the popularity of the classes among the inmates, directed that each student’s academic record be reported to the central administration. Ragen intended that each prisoner’s academic accomplishments be presented to the parole board as tangible evidence of rehabilitation. But he had not foreseen the predictable outcome: prisoners with no previous interest in study and with no desire to learn now enrolled with the intention of forcing their teachers, by threats if necessary, to award superlative grades to present to the parole board in order to win early release.44
In 1941 the warden transferred Nathan to a position as an X-ray technician in the prison hospital. Later that year Nathan wheedled his way into a position as a nurse in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. He now had more responsibility—and less supervision—than before. The prison doctors relied on the nurses to look after the psychiatric patients, even occasionally allowing them to medicate those in their care. “The bug cells,” Nathan recalled in his autobiography, “were a new world, entirely different from the rest of the prison…. No more marching into the cell house every evening and out again next morning. Here we each had a nice clean cell, larger than the ones in the cell house. And we were on twenty-four-hour detail; that is, our cells were never locked…. There was very little routine or discipline as regards the nurses on the new assignment. There were no rules, and we were permitted to do pretty much as we pleased.”
In September 1944 scientists working for the federal government arrived at Stateville in connection with a project to test antimalarial drugs. In Europe the war was in its final stages, but troops fighting in the Pacific theater still faced an arduous challenge from the Japanese. Might the American troops be decimated by disease? Could the United States quickly produce drugs to combat malaria? Would the prisoners at Stateville be willing to volunteer as guinea pigs and allow the federal scientists to test the effectiveness of antimalarial drugs? The doctors would infect the volunteers with malaria and observe the course of the disease under treatment—it would necessarily be an unpleasant and even dangerous experience for those prisoners who volunteered. The scientists had already begun to test their drugs on patients at Manteno State Hospital for the Insane but they needed many more volunteers if the tests were to be reliable.45
Almost 500 prisoners volunteered. Nathan, one of the first to volunteer, caught malaria on 19 June 1945. Two weeks later, on Monday, 2 July, he experienced the first symptoms. His body began shaking uncontrollably, his teeth started chattering, his head felt as if it were about to split in two, and his temperature shot up to 104. Nathan had caught the Chesson strain of malaria. The first attack would last five days and would normally recur every two weeks. The doctors administered thirty milligrams of plasmochin and 0.6 gram of chloroquine to each volunteer with malaria, and at the first signs of relapse, they used sixty milligrams of pentaquine and two grams of quinine.
The combination of drugs was effective in preventing the appearance of symptoms, but it was too toxic as a cure for malaria. Nathan, at age forty, had previously been healthy, with no signs of illness or disease, yet, now, in the aftermath of the antimalarial experiments, he had symptoms of kidney disease and diabetes. But perhaps his participation as a volunteer would have at least one positive outcome—in 1946 a rumor started within the prison that the governor of Illinois would shorten the sentences of those prisoners who had volunteered. Would Nathan be a beneficiary of the governor’s consideration? Nathan had become eligible for parole on his life sentence in 1944, twenty years after he had been first imprisoned. But he would not become eligible for parole on the other sentence—ninety-nine years for the kidnapping—until 1957, after having served one-third of the sentence. If the governor were to reduce his term, Nathan mig
ht soon be eligible for parole on both sentences.
But was not Nathan in a class by himself? The murder of Bobby Franks had been sui generis in its wantonness and cruelty. Should not Nathan serve out the rest of his days in prison as the judge, John Caverly, had intended?
The notoriety of the crime had embedded the killing in the city’s collective memory. It had become woven into the tapestry of the history of Chicago. And for those few Chicagoans who might have forgotten the details of the murder, there was a grisly reminder in July 1946 in the arrest of William Heirens for the killing of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan. The police had claimed that Heirens, a good-looking, dark-haired seventeen-year-old sophomore at the University of Chicago, had abducted the little girl from her bedroom in the middle of the night, leaving behind a ransom note for the parents. He had allegedly strangled Suzanne with his hands, carried the body to the basement of a nearby apartment building, dismembered it with a butcher knife, and disposed of the body parts in the city sewers.46
Neither his professors nor his classmates at the University of Chicago could reconcile Heirens’s confession with their knowledge of him as a studious, mild-mannered, good-natured young man. Heirens, like Leopold and Loeb, was an intellectual prodigy who had skipped his senior year at high school to enroll at the university. He had belonged to the Calvert Club, a Catholic student group, and had been a member of the university wrestling team. He was, his shocked friends proclaimed, just about as normal an individual as one might expect to find on the campus.47
The Chicago newspapers, in recounting the murder of Suzanne Degnan, ceaselessly compared it with the murder of Bobby Franks twenty-two years earlier, dwelling on the uncanny similarities between the two killings. Yet when the governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, did eventually consider Nathan’s petition for clemency, he ignored the sensationalism of the newspaper reports and acted on a recommendation from the parole board to reduce Nathan’s sentence to eighty-five years. “The commutation in this case,” Stevenson announced, “was recommended and is being made pursuant to a program to reward prisoners who voluntarily risked their lives in malaria experiments for the armed services…. The parole board has given special consideration to prisoners who voluntarily participated in the malaria research program. It is the conclusion of the board, and I concur, that Nathan Leopold is also entitled to this consideration.”48
The difference might have seemed trivial. Eighty-five years or ninety-nine years—under either sentence, Nathan would spend the remainder of his days at Stateville. But in terms of his early release, there was a significant distinction. Nathan could not previously have hoped for parole until 1957; now he would be eligible for parole as soon as January 1953.
By 1952 Nathan had begun to believe that he might soon win his freedom. It might happen; it could happen…but Nathan, in an interview with the Chicago Daily Tribune, seemed intimidated, almost cowed, by the prospect. He had thought often of his release from Stateville but had given no consideration to the practical problems of emerging as a free man. Where would he go? What would he do? “I have no plans,” he confessed to the reporter. “I don’t know where I’ll go, except it won’t be Chicago.”
His two brothers, Mike and Sam, had changed their names not long after the murder of Bobby Franks. Would he also, the journalist asked, take on a new identity?
“I don’t know,” Leopold slowly replied, as though the question had never occurred to him.
Could he tell the readers of the Tribune about his years in prison? the reporter asked. How had he spent his days?
“I have studied. I have learned a lot,” Nathan boasted, suddenly eager to tell the world, once again, of his intellectual ability. “I read some 26 or 27 languages—Polish, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Russian, Egyptian—as well as the more common ones. I’ve studied mathematics, too. I went about as far in math as it was possible to go in prison.”49
THE FOLLOWING YEAR NATHAN APPEARED before members of the parole board. There was a sadness about him as he sat across a wooden table from the three members of the board. His cockiness was gone, worn down by the long years of incarceration, and in its place there was an air of quiet resignation. His paunch pressed against the belt of his trousers; his large, bulbous, heavy-lidded eyes looked out from a fleshy, pallid face; his hair, still black, was now receding away from the temples; and his nicotine-stained fingers revealed that he still smoked as compulsively as ever. Nathan Leopold, dressed in a denim shirt and blue jeans, his prison number—9306D—stenciled on the back of his shirt, now bore little resemblance to the teenager who had first entered Joliet Prison in 1924.50
“I would like to say,” Nathan began, “that I was only 19 when I committed the crime. Today I’m a man of 48. Over 60 per cent of my life has been spent in prison. My life has changed completely. My personality has changed. My outlook has changed. I assure you I never would be in trouble again if paroled.”
Why had he murdered Bobby Franks? one member of the board asked. How did he now explain the killing?
“I couldn’t give a motive which makes sense to me,” Nathan answered. “It was the act of a child—a simpleton kid. A very bizarre act. I don’t know why I did it. I’m a different man now. I was a smart aleck kid. I am not anymore…. I can only tell you that what happened in 1924 can’t happen again.” It had been, and it remained, an inexplicable act by two foolish boys, Nathan repeated. He was unable to account for the murder. “It seems absurd to me today, as it must to you and all other people. I am in no better position to give you a motive than I was then.”51
Nathan had known that the parole board would ask about his plans if he were to win his freedom, yet in that regard he had come unprepared. In response to a question from a member of the board, he replied that he had not given the matter much thought. Perhaps, he answered with a slight smile, in a misguided attempt to strike a humorous note, he would sell neckties or work behind a soda fountain. Anything would do, he concluded; he certainly had no grand ambition to make a career for himself.52
Nathan had intended to make a good impression, but to his listeners sitting across the table, his answers seemed too trite and too quick. There was still something about Nathan’s manner reminiscent of the arrogance of youth. His remarks seemed almost offhand. He was not sufficiently contrite.53
Robert Crowe, emerging from retirement to write a note of protest to the parole board, forcefully urged the members not to grant parole. Crowe pointed out that at the original hearing in 1924, the judge had extended mercy to Leopold by giving him a life sentence. There was no reason for the parole board to grant mercy to Leopold a second time. “I thought at the time,” Crowe explained, referring to both Leopold and Loeb, “they ought to hang. There were no extenuating circumstances; it was a brutal murder.”54
Victor Knowles, the chairman of the parole board, had no hesitation in denying parole. Leopold, Knowles explained to the press, was a liar and a fraud who had exaggerated his contributions to the malaria project and who continued to embellish his supposed achievements during his years in prison. Leopold’s absurd claim to be able to read twenty-seven languages was a case in point. Who could be so gullible as to believe something so preposterous? Leopold had not expressed sufficient contrition for the murder, Knowles continued, and his attempt to pass it off as merely an irresponsible act by two adolescents was tantamount to denying his culpability.55
Five years would pass before the parole board would again consider Nathan Leopold’s petition. Those years had given Nathan time to prepare and to consider the lessons he learned from his failure in 1953. He had hired a competent lawyer, Elmer Gertz, to present his case before the board, and he had reached out beyond the prison walls to enlist the support of prominent sympathizers. Former classmates at the University of Chicago—Abel Brown, Arnold Maremont, and others—had secured job offers for Nathan. Everyone agreed that it would be impossible for Nathan to return to Chicago: it was important for him to avoid the glare of newspaper publicity if he was to serve out his paro
le successfully. One job offer had come from Florida, a second from California, and a third from Hawaii—all at a sufficient distance from Chicago. Might Nathan be willing to work in Puerto Rico? The Church of the Brethren, a small Protestant group with its headquarters in Elgin, Illinois, had built a mission hospital in the village of Castaner, sixty-five miles southwest of the capital, San Juan. A representative of the church, Harold Row, had met Nathan’s younger brother, Sam, several years earlier and now offered to sponsor Nathan’s employment as a medical technician at the Castaner hospital.56
Elmer Gertz, speaking before the parole board on 5 February 1958, reminded his audience that Nathan presented no risk of violating parole. He had four job offers, and more to the point, he had proved himself rehabilitated by his good works in prison. Nathan had helped organize a school for inmates within Stateville; he had been a volunteer for the malaria project in the 1940s; and he had worked steadily and conscientiously as an X-ray technician and as a psychiatric nurse in the prison hospital. What more could the parole board require of Nathan Leopold? Should he remain in Stateville solely on account of his notoriety while other inmates obtained their freedom? In the years since 1950, Gertz continued, the board had paroled almost 200 murderers, yet it had continued to deny Nathan Leopold his freedom. Art Newman, a notorious gangland killer, had murdered seven people; the state’s attorney had demanded that he remain behind bars for the remainder of his life; and yet the parole board had released Newman after he had served twenty-six years. Nathan Leopold had now lived in prison for his entire adult life, a total of thirty-three years. Was it just that Nathan be denied his liberty? At Stateville, only one other inmate—Russell Pethick, the murderer of a young woman and her infant son—had been imprisoned longer than Nathan Leopold! “Few convicts have ever served as long as Nathan Leopold,” Gertz stated, “and some have been convicted of murders more brutal even than his. Some of them, unlike him, have previously been convicted of other heinous offenses or have violated probation or parole. Very few have had as fine prison records as Leopold.”57
