The Perfect Crime

by Fergus Mason

  After picking up Leopold they drove back to the same spot on Drexel and watched the boys through the glasses for a while. John Levinson and a couple of others headed up an alley towards the school. They waited for him to come back, but he didn’t. Wondering where he’d gone, Loeb looked for him in the alley. There was no sign of him. He wasn’t playing outside his house when they drove past there, either. In fact Levinson had been collected by the family chauffeur and taken to a dental appointment. As much as everyone hates dentists, this visit had probably saved his life.

  Loeb returned to the car and they drove off down Drexel, turned left then left again and headed back up Ellis. As they approached 48th Street they saw a boy walking down the west side of the road. It was Bobby Franks.

  Leopold pulled left onto 48th then turned the car around and drove back down Ellis. By the time that was done Franks was nearly at 49th Street. Loeb knew exactly where the boy lived - it was nearly opposite his own house. Franks was only two blocks from home and walking fast. There wasn’t much time to get him. On the other hand, he explained to Leopold, he was the perfect victim. Small enough to be easily snatched, his father Jacob Franks doted on the boy and had made a fortune from his business activities. Starting as a pawnbroker, he’d made a clever investment in the Chicago gas company then gone on to be president of a watchmakers and a successful real estate broker. Nicknamed “Honest Jake” for his fairness, he was believed to be worth at least $4 million and maybe much more.[13] He’d happily pay to get Bobby back.

  There was a potential problem. Another boy was walking in the same direction not far behind Franks. They idled down the street, letting Franks open the gap, until they judged that the boys were far enough apart. Then they closed in.

  Leopold pulled up close to Franks; Loeb opened the door and called, “Hey, Bob!” Franks stopped, and Loeb offered him a ride home. The boy declined, but Loeb then asked him to get in so they could talk about a tennis racket. Franks climbed into the car and Leopold set off along Ellis. Just over a block later he turned left onto 50th Street. Franks still suspected nothing, because Loeb had said they would drive round the block, but almost as soon as the car turned off Ellis the trap was sprung. Loeb grabbed him, clapped a hand across his mouth to silence him and hit him four times on the head with the handle of the chisel.[14]

  Stunned, Franks slumped on his seat. The blows hadn’t knocked him completely out, though, and he was moaning in pain. Frightened of being seen, Loeb hauled him into the back seat. To silence the boy’s cries he stuffed a rag into his mouth then pushed him to the floor and covered him with the car cloak. Semi-conscious and choking on the gag, the boy asphyxiated to death within minutes.

  This hadn’t been in the plan; rather than being strangled in a perverse bonding ritual Franks was now dead on the floor of the car. Worse, blood from the gashes in his scalp was leaking onto the carpet. The seats were already smeared. Even in the time before forensics really took off the danger was obvious. Leopold, confronted with the mess, started to panic and Loeb had to spend several minutes calming him down. “This is terrible. This is terrible,” he said, only regaining equilibrium slowly. When his composure came back, though, it came back all the way. It was only quarter past five and the sun wouldn’t set for nearly three hours; having killed Robert Franks they now had to kill time, so they would have darkness to dispose of the body. Driving out towards the Indiana state line Loeb began stripping Franks’ corpse. Leopold turned off onto a dead end road and pulled over. The dead boy’s shoes were hidden in a bush, and his belt concealed nearby. His pants and socks were also removed but kept in the car for later disposal. The pair then retraced their tracks back to the main road and drove around a while longer, waiting for dusk.[15] They stopped once at a drug store and Leopold called his girlfriend, Susan Lourie, to cancel their date for that evening. At Calumet Boulevard and 132nd Street they stopped again at a sandwich stall and Leopold bought hot dogs and root beer, which they ate in the car. Another hour of cruising aimlessly and finally it was dark enough for their purposes.

  Ten miles southeast of the murder scene, Wolf Lake straddles the Illinois-Indiana state line. A few hundred yards from its western shore is the Burnham Greenway, a paved recreational track popular with walkers and cyclists. The Greenway follows the line of an older track. In 1924 it was the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in stretches the modern road runs along the top of an old embankment. To stop this embankment causing flooding in the low, wet ground around the lake drainage culverts were built through it, and Leopold and Loeb had chosen one of these as the last resting place of their victim.

  Parking the car about 300 yards from the culvert, they dragged Franks from the back seat and turned the car cloak into an improvised stretcher. Loeb took the head and Leopold the feet, and they carried it over to the railway line. There they laid the body down and finished stripping it. The clothes were bundled into the cloak along with the short pants and socks they’d removed earlier. Now Leopold uncorked the bottle of hydrochloric acid.

  The killers had been concerned that the body might be found before they could collect the ransom money, which would obviously put an end to that part of their plan. Their fears were to prove justified, but instead of finding a more effective way of disposing of the victim they outsmarted themselves yet again. It would have been simple enough to tie the body in the cloak with a couple of large rocks and throw it in one of the area’s many rivers, but having chosen the culvert and scouted it out days earlier they didn’t want to change their plans. Instead they decided to disfigure the body enough to make it unrecognizable, and that was where the acid came in. A heavy splash of the caustic liquid started to eat away at Franks’ face. That wasn’t enough for Loeb, though. He had the idea that men could be identified by the shape of their penis - apparently he thought his brother Tommy had an unusually-shaped one - so more acid was poured on the body’s genitals. Franks had an appendectomy scar; more acid. Then Leopold pulled on the hip boots he’d taken from his house and waded into the drainage ditch. Dragging Franks in after him he pushed it head first into the culvert while Loeb washed blood from his hands. The body had splashed when it hit the water, though, and his cold wet shirt and the smell of the acid distracted Leopold. Eager to get the job done he didn’t push the corpse in far enough and one foot remained visible. That mistake was bad enough. What followed was worse.

  Leopold had taken off his coat and shoes before donning the boots and getting into the water. Now he climbed the embankment; it was darker down by the culvert and he was having trouble tying his shoelaces. “Hey, Dick, can you get my coat?” he called.

  “Sure, Babe.” Loeb shook the water from his hands and picked up the old coat. Something slipped from the pocket and hit the ground; the water flowing in the culvert masked any noise it made. Loeb bundled the rest of the boy’s clothing into the cloak and started up the embankment towards his friend. In the darkness a stocking slipped out of the bundle and fell unnoticed to the grass. That didn’t really matter, of course; it belonged to Franks, not one of the killers, and at that time the police wouldn’t have got any forensic data from it. They’d still made a fatal mistake though.

  Walking back towards the car, Leopold never thought to check his pockets. He and Loeb had set out to commit the “perfect crime,” but in fact they had bungled it. Before they even moved on to the next stage - the ransom demand - their detection was already almost inevitable.

  [5]

  Cleaning Up

  On November 19, 1904 Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Junior was born in Chicago to a wealthy family of German immigrants. As was normal among the children of the very rich at the time his parents played a small part in his childhood, and much of his upbringing was left to a series of nurses and governesses. The traditionalist Leopold family favored European girls for these positions, and the young Leopold and his brothers Samuel and Foreman were raised in an environment where German was routinely spoken. Leopold’s first words, spoken at the age of only four months, were
“Nein, nein. Mama.” His nurse at the time, and for the first five years of his life, was Marie Giessler, known as Mimie.

  Leopold and Loeb had carefully worked out how to get rid of the physical evidence. Thanks to the blood there was a lot more than they’d bargained on, but they went ahead with the cleanup anyway. On the way back to the city they stopped so Leopold could call home. He told his father that he’d be slightly late and that his aunt, who he’d arranged to drive home, should wait for him. He didn’t go directly home, though. First they headed for Loeb’s house. Bobby Franks’ clothes went into the furnace. They wanted to burn the cloak, too, but decided not to. It was too large and they were worried it would create a smell throughout the house. They stashed it under some bushes in the garden for later disposal. Next they got a bucket of water and some cloths and tried to clean up the blood in the car. It was dark and they were in a hurry, so they didn’t make a very good job, but they planned to finish it next day. Only then did they drive to Leopold’s house, dump the hire car just up the street and go inside.

  Leopold took his aunt home while Loeb chatted to his father. Leopold was away slightly longer than his father might have expected, because he’d stopped to make a phone call telling the shocked Mrs Franks that her son had been kidnapped. When he returned he said goodnight to his father then played cards with Loeb for a while, “for fun” as he clarified later. Finally, just before 1:30, he drove Loeb the three blocks to his house. On the way Loeb realized the murder weapon was still in his coat pocket.

  # # #

  The Kenwood district of Chicago was wealthy, and sometimes attracted burglars. The Chicago police department patrolled it regularly enough, but some residents weren’t reassured and took extra precautions. That included hiring night watchmen. The watchman’s job suited Bernard Hunt. He lived in a small white clapboard house three miles away on South Aberdeen, and patrolling these elegant mansions paid his bills with enough to spare. It was quiet, too. Kenwood’s wealthy might worry about break-ins, but nothing really happened here. There had been a few minor fires and some vandalism last year, but nothing much since. Rich kids acting up, he supposed.

  That’s what he thought at 1:30 in the morning of May 22, when the flashy sports car came round the corner of 49th and Greenwood and something spun from the window. Whatever it was hit the street and bounced nearly to the sidewalk. As the car swept past Hunt got a good look at it. Yes, rich kids all right; he couldn’t tell the color so well under the orange streetlamps, but it had disk wheels, custom reflectors and a fancy light-colored top. Curious, he crossed the street and looked round for whatever had been thrown. Soon he found it; a chisel, with thick white tape wrapped round the blade. He picked it up. That was a strange thing to do to a good tool. And why had it been ditched? He examined it more closely, and saw the dark crusts on the handle and smeared into the tape. That looked like dried blood. Frowning, he pocketed it and returned to his beat.

  The chisel was still weighing on his mind an hour later, when a black Essex sedan came rattling its way up the street. The hand-cranked bell on the passenger door marked it as a police car even before he could make out the white star and lettering beside it, and he walked to the curb and stuck a hand out. The Essex juddered to a halt beside him and the side curtain, buttoned against the cool night, was pulled open. Inside he recognized Officers Enos and Milligan of the “flivver squad” - the new team set up to patrol the city in cars.[16] Kenwood was part of their regular beat and they’d stopped to chat with him several times.

  “Hey, Bernie, what’s up?” asked Enos. Hunt reached for his pocket.

  “This got thrown out a car about an hour ago,” he said, handing over the chisel. “Looks like blood on the handle there. Thought you better see it.”

  Enos turned the tool in his hands, thinking for a moment. “Reckon you’re right too. Did you get a look at the car?”

  Hunt nodded. “I saw it.”

  “OK then, jump in. We’ll head over to the station and get a statement. Best to have it on paper if it turns out somebody got smacked on the head with this.”

  # # #

  Tony Minke, an immigrant from Poland, worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad as a maintenance worker. His job took him along the company’s tracks, looking for anything that could be a problem. It wasn’t the best-paid job in the world, but it was an important one. It didn’t take much to cause a train wreck. Just last September 30 people had died in Wyoming on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincey Railroad when a bridge washed out after heavy rain. In this low, wet ground a lot of track was raised on embankments, and these relied on culverts for drainage. Flooding along the embankment could cause rapid erosion, and even slight settling of the tracks might be enough to send a train off the line. Tony Minke wanted to work his way up in this new country and he was determined to do his job well. No flood was going to happen on his stretch of line if he could do anything about it.

  On the morning of May 22 he was checking the track along the Wolf Lake section of the line, looking for debris that could block a culvert. Passing one culvert he glanced down the embankment and saw something white protruding from the narrow tunnel. At first thinking it might be a piece of trash stuck in the culvert mouth he scrambled down to look. As he came closer he realized, to his horror, that it was a human foot. A small human foot.

  Minke climbed down and looked inside. The small cadaver was stuffed grotesquely into the culvert, and even in the shadowed pipe he could see that the face and body were revoltingly burned. He looked along the track for his colleague. “Paul! Get over here, quick!”

  Paul Korff heard the urgency in Minke’s voice and ran along the line. “What ya got, Tony?”

  “There’s a dead child in here, a boy. I think he’s been murdered.”

  Korff looked into the pipe. “Think so too. Hell, we better get the cops out here.” He stood up and backed away, repelled by the sight. Then a tiny glint of light caught his eye. He looked down. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay in the rough grass.

  [6]

  Errors, Suspicions, and Arrests

  Despite the years of build-up and the intricate planning that had gone into the crime, the deception plan developed by Leopold and Loeb began to unravel within hours of Franks’ death. Perhaps rattled by the unexpected problems during the actual killing they made a series of errors from that point on. The complicated plan now started to work against them, as there were too many opportunities for people to remember them and too many things to go wrong. They hadn’t yet realized their mistakes, though, and kept on with their scheme.

  Next day Leopold picked Loeb up around 11:30 and they moved the rental car to Leopold’s garage. While they were scrubbing the rest of the blood from the seats and carpet Sven Englund, the chauffeur, came in and asked him what they were doing. Leopold told him that they had spilled some red wine in the car and he didn’t want his father to know. Englund offered to help them clean it, but they declined. They kept scrubbing until the stains were as faint as they could get them, then set out to get the money.

  Like everything else about the crime the system for collecting the ransom was carefully planned and complex. The main concerns were to avoid being seen at any stage, and to eliminate opportunities for the police to ambush them. This was the hardest part of the plan, and Loeb was delighted at the ingenious solution they came up with. The first stage had been the phone call to the Franks telling him that their son had been kidnapped. Next a special delivery letter was mailed, containing the ransom note. Another phone call was made to the Franks’ home the next day with further instructions; Franks was to get in a cab that would come to his house, and would be taken to a trash can on a street corner. Taped to the trash can would be a note directing him to go a drug store and wait. A phone call to the drug store would then tell him to get on a train leaving in a few minutes from a nearby station - the idea being that he wouldn’t have time to tell the police what was planned - and go to the telegraph message box in the last car. In the message
box would be a final note telling him to go out on the back platform and wait for the train to pass a distinctive brick factory. On passing this he was to count to five then throw the parcel of money as far from the track as he could. Leopold and Loeb would be waiting nearby in the hire car, watching for the parcel to be thrown. Because Franks wouldn’t know what to do with the money until he boarded the train it would be impossible for him to tell the police where the drop-off was; even if police had managed to board the train with him they wouldn’t be able to do anything. If the train slowed or stopped, on the other hand, they simply wouldn’t collect the money. The plan seemed foolproof.

  It wasn’t, though. They couldn’t get the envelope to stick to the trashcan, so that cutout was abandoned and they decided to send Franks directly to the drug store. Loeb, disguised in a pair of glasses and an overcoat and hat belonging to his father, bought a ticket to Michigan City from Illinois Central Station and boarded the train at 2:30, half an hour before it left. He concealed the final note in the Car 507 message box then got off the train. Outside he rejoined Leopold, who’d been making phone calls. First he called the Yellow Cab Company to order a car for Jacob Franks. Next he phoned Franks himself, and told him to go to the Bogart de Ross drug store on East 63rd and wait there for a call. Franks stalled. He said that something had come up and he needed more time. Leopold insisted; Franks needed to go right now. Then he hung up. When Loeb came out the station they drove to the Walgreens on 67th and Stony Island, and stationed themselves by the pay phone.