The Perfect Crime

by Fergus Mason

  The cab arrived at the Franks house as arranged, but Leopold hadn’t told the driver where to go and Jacob Franks couldn’t remember. That didn’t matter though. Franks hadn’t just been stalling after all; something had come up. A lucky journalist had heard rumors of a child kidnapping involving the Franks. Then he heard a boy’s body had been found out by Wolf Lake. He put the two together and called Jacob Franks, who dispatched his brother-in-law to check it out. When Leopold called Franks had just been told that his brother-in-law had positively identified the body as his younger son. There would be no attempt to pay the ransom, and the police were already searching for the killer of Bobby Franks.

  To pass the time as they waited to call they bought a paper from a newsstand. On the front page was a story about the corpse of an unidentified boy found near 121st and Railroad Avenue, out near Wolf Lake. Seeing this, Loeb wanted to ditch the plan and start covering their tracks. Leopold argued, though. Sure, the corpse was found. It couldn’t be identified, though, because they’d stripped off the clothing with its identifying marks and burned away the face with acid. There was still time to get the money from the Franks before they knew it was their son in the culvert. What drove Leopold on at this point isn’t known. It wasn’t for need of the money; he got enough from his family already. Maybe he feared that if they backed out Loeb would again deny him the sex he needed. Maybe he wanted to show how clever his ransom plan was, by getting the cash even when so much had gone wrong. Either way he talked Loeb round.

  Leopold called the Bogart de Ross store from Walgreens, but the clerk told him there was no Mr. Franks in the building. They moved up the street to another drug store and waited ten minutes,[17] then called again. Still no Mr. Franks. That did it. Now suspecting that the body had already been identified they abandoned the ransom plan and returned the hire car. Most of the evidence had already been disposed of - they thought - and now they just had to get rid of the cloak and typewriter then wait for the fuss to die down. They’d worked out a story for their movements the day before and if either was questioned they could name the other and get them to back it up. They didn’t have anyone else who could confirm it for them but it should be enough. They agreed that this alibi would be used for the next week; if anything happened after that they would simply say they couldn’t remember what they’d done that day.

  # # #

  On the evening of Saturday May 24 Leopold and Loeb went on a double date with Susan Lurie and Lorraine Nathan. At about ten they dropped the girls home then returned to their own houses. At two in the morning they sneaked out and met up at a restaurant on 51st Street. With them they had the Underwood typewriter and the bloodstained car cloak. Leaving the restaurant, they drove southeast in Leopold’s car while Loeb went to work on the typewriter. He snapped off the key tips that made each typewriter unique. Leopold drove to Jackson Park Lagoon, where Loeb threw the keys from one bridge and the typewriter off another. He lugged a can of gasoline from the trunk, dumped the cloak on the shore and saturated it with fuel. A match took care of the rest.[18]

  With the last evidence disposed of they returned home. Tired by the long night, Leopold was still in bed next morning when his father shook him awake with some bad news. There were two police officers downstairs and they wanted to speak to him.

  In fact they wanted more than that. Leopold was taken to the State Attorney’s office and asked to make a statement. He did, explaining that he was familiar with Hegewisch Swamp through his well-known bird watching activities. The police asked him who else in his class went out to the swamp and he obliged, giving them a list of names. Leopold was confident the police were satisfied with his explanations. At this point he was barely a suspect anyway; the police had only wanted to speak to him because the game warden had named him as someone who often travelled to the area where the body was found, and they hoped he would be able to name others who frequented the area.

  There were suspects, of course. The ransom note received by the Franks had clearly been written by an educated man - quite unusual in criminals - and three teachers at the school had quickly been arrested. One was held only briefly then released, but two more were still in custody when Leopold was first interviewed. One reason for the interview was that the police were hoping Leopold would name one of the teachers as someone who went to the swamps. More pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place, though, and gradually Leopold began to stand out more clearly from the sea of potential killers.

  The glasses had continued to interest the police. Leopold had denied having lost his glasses and was confident they would be impossible to identify as his. The prescription for the lenses was a common one and there was nothing remarkable about the frames. The only unusual thing about the glasses were the hinges on the earpieces. These were manufactured in New York and there was only one optician in Chicago that sold them. Once the hinges had been identified the optician was swiftly tracked down, and police visited Almer Coe to ask him how many pairs of glasses with that hinge design he had sold. There were only three. One of the customers was a woman, named Marie; when the police visited her at work she didn’t have them with her, but was able to take the police to her home and show them the glasses.[19] Another was prominent local attorney Jerome Frank, who the police immediately ruled out because he was on a tour of Europe. The third was Nathan Leopold.

  On May 29 Leopold was picked up again and taken to the LaSalle Hotel, where State’s Attorney Robert Crowe had taken a room.[20] Confronted with the new evidence about the glasses, he said they must have fallen from his pocket when he tripped while trying to photograph a rare bird. Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Savage handed him the glasses and asked him to demonstrate. Leopold repeatedly tripped himself and fell to the floor, but the glasses stayed firmly in his pocket.

  Suspicion was now falling directly on Leopold. He stalled for as long as possible but eventually decided that, even though more than a week had passed, it was time to deploy the alibi. He told his interrogators that on May 21 he’d met Loeb and they had gone driving. They’d headed over to Marshall Fields and had lunch at a grill room. After that they’d gone to Lincoln Park for the afternoon. Finally they’d picked up two girls named Mae and Edna - they hadn’t learned their last names - and driven around with them for a while. When they couldn’t persuade the girls to “come across” they dropped them off near a golf course and went for dinner at the Coconut Grove. The alibi covered Leopold’s tracks for the whole day, but it didn’t have a lot of evidence to back it up. It also pointed the investigation at Loeb. He was soon picked up and brought in to confirm the alibi. To avoid collusion he was questioned separately from Leopold and things started going wrong immediately. Knowing that the time limit on their alibi had passed, Loeb said that he didn’t remember where he’d been that day. Leopold worked this out quickly; he believed that if the alibi had been confirmed he would have been released, so the fact he was still being held meant that Loeb wasn’t talking. The problem was he couldn’t communicate with Loeb - or not directly, at least. Watching for an opportunity he managed to get a journalist to unwittingly act as go-between. At Leopold’s urging the reporter asked Loeb to “tell the truth about the two girls. Tell the police what you did with them. You can’t get in any worse trouble than you are now. He said you’d understand.”[21] Realizing that Leopold had given the police the alibi, Loeb now “remembered” where he’d been eight days before and backed up Leopold’s story.

  It was too late, though. Evidence was piling up, and while the alibi might have been enough to deflect a casual inquiry it wasn’t solid enough to withstand closer scrutiny. There were no independent witnesses who could confirm where they’d been during the critical time. The Coconut Grove wouldn’t remember them eating there. Loeb had talked to people near the Harvard School during the afternoon, when they’d supposedly been at Lincoln Park. Instead of freeing them, as Leopold had expected, the police just noted the alibi and the questions kept coming.

  The ransom n
ote was also being analyzed, and the shape of the letters showed it had been typed on an Underwood portable. Detectives asked Leopold if he owned one; he said no. Next they searched his house but of course found nothing. At least they didn’t find a portable typewriter. They did find Elizabeth Sattler, the maid, and asked her if she’d seen one around. She said she had; it had been in the house for three or four months, but she hadn’t seen it the last couple of days.[22]

  Without the typewriter, Leopold thought the police would be unable to get a match to the characters in the ransom note. Yet again his flawed genius let him down, though. He’d led a study group, which had typed up notes. Two journalists from the Chicago Daily News, Al Goldstein and Jim Mulroy, were interviewing friends of the boys. They found out about the study group from Arnold Maremont. Maremont told them that the notes were usually typed on an office typewriter but one time Leopold had used a portable. Did he have any notes from that session? Sure he did. Goldstein and Mulroy took them to the Royal typewriter company’s local expert, H.P. Sutton, along with a copy of the ransom note. Sutton said they came from the same machine. That didn’t quite pin Leopold directly to the note, but it was getting very close. Then on May 30 Sven Englund, the chauffeur, turned up at the State’s Attorney’s office. He had some information for the police that he thought might prove the boys’ innocence. Instead he blew their alibis to pieces.

  Crowe brought Loeb in for another interview and went over the alibi again. Point by point he talked through their movements on the fatal day. Had they gone out around eleven? Yes. Had they had lunch at the grill in Marshall’s Field? Yes. Had they gone to Lincoln Park? Yes. Then he set up the killer blow. Had all their driving been done in Leopold’s red Willys-Knight? Yes.

  Crowe pounced. Englund had told him that he’d been fixing the coupe’s brakes that day and the boys had driven off in a greenish or gray car. They’d lied about the red one. From one of them that might just about have been an honest mistake, but from both it showed deliberate deception. What else were they lying about? Loeb denied it, insisting that Englund was either lying or mistaken, but the game was up.

  In fact there was far more evidence against them than Loeb could even begin to imagine and the police were getting their hands on it fast. The Morrison Hotel’s house detective had opened the suitcase left there by “Morton D. Ballard” and found four books from the University of Chicago library. Tucked inside one of them was a library card in the name of Richard Loeb.

  The alibi was collapsing and Loeb could see the writing on the wall. He quickly worked out that his only chance of leniency was to confess all and blame as much on Leopold as he could. Stunned investigators listened as he calmly went through the planning of the crime and how it had been executed. They were getting a carefully edited version, though; some of the details were different from what they’d hear later. The plan had been Leopold’s, he told them, and the aim had been excitement and money. Planning had started about two months ago. During the actual abduction and killing Loeb had been driving, and Leopold had struck the blows against Franks then gagged him. He also said that the plan had been to kill Franks with ether, and Leopold had suggested this because he had experience at etherizing birds for his collection.

  There were holes in Loeb’s story, though. He claimed to have been the driver right up to the point where they’d stopped for hot dogs, but couldn’t remember the route they’d taken. He’d been following Leopold’s directions, he said. He also told the interviewers that through the trip he’d kept checking Franks to see if he was moving, but that would have been difficult from the driver’s seat. It didn’t matter. Everything was going to come out soon enough.

  [7]

  Overwhelmed By Evidence

  Even without the confessions the case against Leopold and Loeb was now solid. They’d thought their plan would put them beyond suspicion; instead all it had done was create dozens of chances for the police to confirm pieces of the jigsaw. The list of people who recognized them was growing by the day. The state had no shortage of witnesses to choose from:

  Charles E. Ward at the Hyde Park State Bank recognized Leopold as the customer calling himself “Morton D. Ballard.”

  Arthur J. Doherty at the same bank recognized Loeb as having cashed a check for $100 signed by “Ballard.”

  David Barish and Max Tucherman of Barish’s Delicatessen recognized Loeb as having been there on May 9 and answering the phone when it rang; this was when Loeb, as “Louis Mason,” vouched for “Ballard.”

  William Herndon and Margaret Fitzpatrick of the Rent-A-Car Company recognized Leopold as “Morton D. Ballard.”

  Lucille Smith and her daughter had been walking up 118th, not far from the culvert, at about 9:30 p.m. on May 21 when a car passed them. From photos they identified it as similar to a Willys-Knight tourer.

  Bernard Hunt, the night watchman, identified Leopold’s Willys-Knight coupé as similar to the car the chisel was thrown from.

  Having confessed, Leopold and Loeb were now willing to help turn up more vital evidence. The police took them to Jackson Park Lagoon, and Loeb showed them where he’d sunk the typewriter and pointed out the partly burned robe. Then they went out to the Indiana state line, where Loeb found the belt he’d hidden. The stores where the rope, chisel and acid had been bought were visited, and the proprietors remembered selling them to customers answering the boys’ descriptions. The Pullman car where Loeb had hidden the note to Jacob Franks was traced to a yard in New York City and the letter retrieved. A diver salvaged the typewriter from the lagoon and its serial number was traced; it was the one stolen in the Zeta Beta Tau burglary.

  They’d told their story and, while they disagreed about who had struck the fatal blows, the rest of it could be solidly confirmed by physical evidence and witnesses. They had also been chatting freely with the press, not seeming to care that they were trashing any possible defense. “Why, we even rehearsed the kidnapping at least three times, carrying it through in all details, lacking only the boy we were to kidnap and kill,” said Leopold, “It was just an experiment. It was as easy for us to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.” Loeb was even more arrogant: “This thing will be the making of me. I’ll spend a few years in jail and I’ll be released. I’ll come out to a new life.”[23] There was no going back now.

  On June 5, 1924 a grand jury indicted them both for murder and kidnapping. State’s Attorney Crowe was already anticipating the likely defense, because he knew who had been hired to defend the killers and didn’t underestimate the challenge that posed. Lawyers, psychiatrists and journalists were assembling for the case and Crowe wanted to nail it down firmly. He was confident, though. “We have the most conclusive evidence I’ve ever seen in a criminal case,” he announced the day after the confessions were signed.[24] The defense knew that too.

  [8]

  The Trial of the Century

  The verdict of the trial was already a foregone conclusion; even without the confessions there was plenty of physical evidence to link Leopold and Loeb to Franks’ death. The best they could hope for was to escape the rope, and it was obvious that even this would require a defense verging on genius. With two wealthy families involved, though, there were few limits to the legal representation they could afford. They were looking for a popular lawyer with a talent for defending seemingly hopeless cases. They chose Clarence Darrow.

  The 67-year-old Darrow had an impressive but sometimes controversial reputation. Although he was born in Ohio his family had New England roots, and his father Amirus was an outspoken abolitionist before the Civil War. He was also a well-known religious freethinker, who was nicknamed “the village infidel.” Darrow’s mother Emily was also politically aware, one of the earliest supporters of women’s rights and female suffrage. Darrow himself attended Allegheny College, a private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, and then moved to the law school at the University of Michigan. He didn’t graduate from either school, but was still admitted to the Ohio bar in
1878. He soon got involved in Democratic Party politics, which suited his radical family traditions. In 1887 he moved to Chicago, where he worked for city hall and became a frequent speaker at Democratic rallies and other political events. In 1893 he helped persuade the governor of Illinois to pardon three anarchists who had been jailed for the 1886 Haymarket bombing.

  Darrow next tried corporate law, working for the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company. This didn’t suit him, though, and in 1894 he resigned to represent rail union leader Eugene V. Debs, who was on trial for leading the Pullman strike. Debs was acquitted in his first trial but later jailed in a second. This didn’t stop Darrow developing a taste for defense work and later that year he represented Patrick Prendergast, an Irish political activist who had shot and killed Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Sr.[25] Prendergast’s first attorney had tried and failed to have him found insane - which he probably was - and Darrow managed to get a hearing to appeal this ruling. He failed too, and Prendergast was hanged on July 14, 1894.

  Whether or not Prendergast’s fate influenced his views or not is unknown, but by 1924 Darrow was known as a staunch opponent of the death penalty. Given the disgust their crime had caused Leopold and Loeb were ideal candidates for the rope. Darrow knew that an acquittal was unrealistic. Most people would expect him to try for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, but he knew the risks of that approach. As soon as he tried to argue that his clients were insane the prosecution would produce a string of experts to testify that they were not. He also wanted to avoid a trial by jury; given public opinion that would almost certainly result in the death penalty.