The Perfect Crime

by Fergus Mason

  This was a difficult trial for Darrow in many ways. He had made his reputation defending the poor and disadvantaged, but now his clients were two offspring of the elite. He was called a hypocrite; the Leopold and Loeb families were accused of using their wealth to shield their sons from the consequences of what they’d done. Whipped up by the press, people jeered that Darrow had sold out to the rich for a million dollars. To counter the accusations he helped the families prepare a statement that there would be no large sums spent on lawyers or medical experts.[26]

  Darrow later suggested $200,000 as a suitable fee and ended up with $65,000[27] - which came to $30,000 after taxes - but he really wasn’t in this for the money. What he wanted was a chance to get a hearing for his views on the death penalty, and with the attention this case was generating in the USA and worldwide it was the perfect opportunity. When Loeb’s uncle Jacob got him out of bed late on May 31 he didn’t hesitate to take the case. Between the grand jury and the start of the trial he had over six weeks to work out his strategy, and he used it well.

  # # #

  The trial opened in Chicago’s Criminal Court on July 21, 1924. Judge John R. Caverley was presiding and Darrow wanted him firmly in charge of the proceedings. At 63 years old and close to retirement, the scholarly Caverley wasn’t out to make a name for himself. Darrow felt that he could possibly be talked into sparing Leopold and Loeb’s lives, but a jury would want them hanged. The key, then, was keeping their fate out of the hands of a jury and Darrow knew how that could be done.

  In front of over 300 spectators - 200 of them members of the press - the elderly lawyer approached the bench. He quietly told the court that he would not try to have the trial moved, nor to stop the prosecution separating the kidnapping and murder charges. Crowe looked on suspiciously. Combining the charges was the obvious thing to do; that way, if Crowe failed to get a death sentence Darrow had won. On the other hand, with the charges separated Crowe had two chances. If the jury opted for life imprisonment on the murder indictments he could try to hang them for kidnapping. Then Darrow dropped his bombshell:

  “We want to state frankly here that no one in this case believes that these defendants should be released or are competent to be. We believe that they should be permanently isolated from society... After long reflection and thorough discussion, we have determined to make a motion in this court for each of the defendants in each of the cases to withdraw our pleas of not guilty and enter a plea of guilty.”[28]

  Darrow had planned this well in advance and discussed it with the Leopold and Loeb families. He hadn’t told the boys until that morning, though; he couldn’t risk word leaking out, and with their habit of boasting it was too likely that it would. Now they were pleading guilty to both charges and Crowe had no chance to withdraw one of them and keep it in reserve.

  Now Caverley called the defendants forward for questioning. He reminded them that as they had pled guilty he could now sentence them to death, and the minimum sentence would be at least 14 years in prison; with that in mind, did they still want to plead guilty? “Yes,” they both answered. The trial was now, technically, a sentencing hearing, because guilt did not need to be established. More importantly for Darrow, if the boys were to hang it wouldn’t be a decision shared between twelve men on a jury. Caverley would have to make it alone.

  The main point of the hearing now was to identify aggravating or mitigating factors that might affect the sentence. Crowe led off, stating that Leopold and Loeb were privileged young men who had everything they could want but had turned to crime anyway. He painted the ransom as an important element, implying that the boys wanted it to pay gambling debts. His statement lasted an hour and at the end of it he told the court that he was going to press for the death penalty. Darrow responded; he simply said that there was no precedent for hanging two boys of that age and it would achieve nothing.[29]

  Now Crowe started bringing forward the prosecution witnesses, to establish the brutality of the crime. As well as those who had seen the defendants as they put their plan into effect he also had testimony from three psychiatrists, then known as alienists, that they were sane and capable of understanding their actions. Darrow and his colleagues on the defense team, brothers Benjamin and Walter Bachrach, did almost no cross-examination; bringing out more details would only help Crowe’s case. The State’s Attorney kept stacking up the evidence for a week. There was plenty of it; by the end he had called 81 witnesses and proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that Leopold and Loeb were guilty. Of course that wasn’t in doubt; they had already entered guilty pleas and Darrow had said he wouldn’t contest any aspect of the case. Crowe insisted on his parade of witnesses, though. Later several commentators speculated that he’d harmed his case by doing so - certainly Judge Caverley had looked irritated more than once.

  Now it was Darrow’s turn. Walter Bacharach had gone to the American Psychiatry Association’s annual convention and hired its president - Dr. William A. White - and two other top members, Drs. William Healy and Bernard Glueck. Crowe’s alienists were traditionalists who mainly looked for external symptoms of mental illness; Bacharach’s followed the then-new teachings of Sigmund Freud and were more concerned with subconscious influences and motivations.[30] Two more psychiatrists, Drs. Harold Hurlbert and Carl Bowman, also joined the defense team. For the rest of the hearing most of the excitement came from watching rival teams of doctors bitterly attack each other’s competence, credibility and finally honesty.

  As soon as Darrow introduced his first witness, Dr. White, Crowe objected. The only reason to call a psychiatrist, he argued, was to prove a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity. Because Leopold and Loeb had already admitted their guilt White’s testimony would be “incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial.”[31] Judge Caverley disagreed and after several days of legal arguments White took the stand, followed by the others. Crowe objected constantly but the doctors went on. They all painted a dreadful picture.

  Loeb, the doctors said, had been handicapped by Emily Struthers’ strict upbringing. He had been placed under too much pressure and her constant punishments had taught him to lie. He was sexually repressed and believed himself less potent than his friends. All his life, said White, he had been heading for self-destruction.[32] The other Freudians had varying opinions of Loeb, but all found him shallow, manipulative and deficient in normal emotions. Glueck, to whom Loeb admitted killing Bobby Franks, said he showed no remorse or regrets.

  The doctors picked up on the fact that Leopold had trouble making friends, especially with women. He was traumatized by his mother’s death and had submerged his physical inferiority in fantasies. Healy was shocked by his callousness when talking about the murder and diagnosed a paranoid personality. Glueck was struck by how strongly Leopold identified with the Nietzschean superman.

  The testimony of these experts impressed Caverley. The crime had been dreadful but, the doctors said, it had happened because two abnormal personalities had been brought together. Finally Darrow himself took the stand to sum up for the defense. His two-day speech is reckoned to be the finest of his career and it drove home the points that had been made throughout the hearing. The packed courtroom and the hundreds of people outside clamoring to get in reinforced, as one reporter said, Darrow’s argument that “the court was the only thing standing between the boys and a bloodthirsty mob.”[33]

  In his marathon speech Darrow discussed the roots of the crime in society, in the carnage of the Great War and in the mental abnormalities of the defendants. He scorned Crowe’s claim that it was a robbery to pay off gambling debts; the debts in question amounted to $90 and were from one boy to the other - and they each had over $3,000 in the bank at the time. The boys, Darrow argued, were pawns of Nature and it would be wrong to kill such helpless creatures. The death penalty itself came under sustained fire; “If the state in which I live is not kinder, more humane, and more considerate than the mad act of these two boys, I am sorry I have lived so long.”

 
He turned to the question of the guilty pleas. In the last ten years, he said, 450 people had pleaded guilty to murder in the city of Chicago and only one of them had been hanged (the judge then had been Crowe.)[34] There had never been a case in Chicago where a boy under 21 (the age of majority at the time) had been hanged after a guilty plea.

  It might, Darrow suggested, be a mercy for Leopold and Loeb to hang them. It wouldn’t be a mercy for their innocent families, though, or the state of society. Finally he apologized for the time he had taken, and closed with a call for a more humane nation:

  “If I can succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that I have done something for the tens of thousands of other boys, for the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood that these boys have trod; that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.”

  He needn’t have apologized for the length of his speech. Crowe’s closing for the prosecution also took two days, much of which he spent attacking Darrow and the defense’s psychiatrists.

  Finally, on September 11, 1924, Judge Caverley brought the court to order for the last time. The boys couldn’t be shown to be insane, he said, but then they weren’t normal either; if they were the crime could not have happened. It would be easy to hang them. On the other hand they were young, and for that reason and because of their personalities life imprisonment might be a more severe punishment. For the good of society, though, neither of them could ever be free again. He had made his decision.

  For the murder of Bobby Franks, Caverley said, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb should be confined at Joliet Prison for the rest of their natural lives. For the kidnapping, 99 years in Joliet. Sentence passed, Caverley checked himself and his wife into hospital to recover from the strain. When he came out he arranged to deal with nothing but divorce cases for the rest of his career.

  [9]

  Prison

  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:

  After the trial Leopold and Loeb were incarcerated at Joliet Prison. In 1930 Loeb was transferred to the new prison at Statesville, and Leopold - who’d already been there for a spell in 1925 - managed a permanent transfer the next year. Prison staff initially tried to keep them separate but eventually relented and let them associate freely. They got involved in the prison school, where they taught classes to fellow inmates. When they arrived at Statesville the school only taught classes up to eighth grade, which was a big step up for many of the almost illiterate inmates but fell short of what the intellectual killers thought possible.

  There was a problem, though, thanks to the prison system. Inmates had jobs within the prison, and could earn extra privileges from them. To attend the school they had to give up their jobs and associated perks, and few were willing to do that. The promise of a high school certificate and better employability outside wasn’t enough to lure them away from longer yard periods. Leopold and Loeb found a solution. Both had taken correspondence courses, so now they approached the Bureau of Correspondence Studies at Iowa State University and asked for help. They got it, and Statesville gained an in-house correspondence school for its inmates.

  Despite his crimes Loeb’s family did not entirely abandon him in prison. Every month he received an allowance of $50 and in the closed small-scale economy of a prison that went a long way. Loeb distributed much of the money among his fellow inmates, buying them tobacco and snacks and Loeb influence. Early in 1936, though, a new warden took over at Stateville and set out to tighten things up. Among the changes he made was to reduce the maximum allowance for convicts to $3 a week, a quarter of what Loeb had been getting. There was nothing he could do about it but violent criminals are not always the most rational of people, and one of them blamed Loeb. James E. Day, Loeb’s cellmate, resented the loss of income and lashed out furiously. On January 28, 1936 he ducked out of the lunch line and into the showers, and attacked Loeb with a straight razor.[35] Fifty wounds were delivered in a frenzied assault and Loeb was left bleeding copiously on the floor. Prison doctors fought a losing battle against shock and massive blood loss, and within hours of the attack the killer of Bobby Franks was himself dead. Day claimed that Loeb had made an aggressive proposition to him, and despite the fact that Loeb’s throat had been cut from behind his version of events was accepted. Day was found not guilty of murder and served out his sentence.

  Leopold, not so extrovert as his partner, attracted less attention inside Stateville. He escaped the violence that ended Loeb’s life, but afterwards helped wash his body. Then he went on with his sentence. While in prison he took every opportunity to learn, and added another twelve languages to the 15 he already spoke.[1] He also studied mathematics and kept on working in the prison school. He raised canaries. In 1944 he volunteered for the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, in which 441 inmate volunteers were deliberately infected with malaria then used to test new antimalarial drugs.[36]

  Leopold was getting by in prison, but he never accepted that he’d spend his whole life there. The press was still interested in him and carefully he began working to rehabilitate his image. In 1953 he earned a parole hearing. His application had some support, but also plenty of opposition. The State’s Attorney, John Gutknecht, was furious and threw his whole weight against Leopold. The application was turned down and the parole board ruled that he couldn’t apply again for twelve years.[37] They relented in 1958, though, and Leopold was finally released. He had been in prison for 33 years.

  [10]

  Later Life

  When Leopold walked out of Stateville Penitentiary he was 54 years old and had spent nearly two thirds of his life behind bars. Now he just wanted to live out his life quietly. That wouldn’t be possible in the center ring of a media circus, so he decided to abandon the USA and move to Puerto Rico. Once there he studied for a sociology degree at the University of Puerto Rico. He worked at various jobs, and also had royalty income; in 1958 he’d published his story, Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years.

  Leopold also returned to his old passion, ornithology. Puerto Rico has a rich collection of bird life, with a total of 349 species found there, and he wrote a paper on them. A couple of years after his release Leopold met Trudi Garcia de Quevedo, the widow of a doctor from Baltimore. They married in 1961.

  Leopold frequently returned to Chicago to see old friends. When there he would wander the neighborhoods near the university and visit the graves of his parents and two brothers. Most of those connected with the crime had died or left the city, but its notoriety lived on in books and cinema. Perhaps he dreamed of settling back in the old neighborhood, but some wounds healed only slowly. Every visit ended with his return to Puerto Rico.

  He never forgot Loeb. In an interview in 1960, a year before his marriage, he told a journalist that he was still deeply in love with him. Several visitors to his home in Puerto Rico commented on the photographs prominently on display. One was Clarence Darrow - “The man who saved my life.” The other was Richard Loeb.

  On August 20, 1971 Nathan Leopold was hospitalized due to diabetes. Ten days later he died of a heart attack with his wife at his side. After his death his corneas were removed and transplanted into two recipients.[38]

  Conclusion

  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:

  Nearly 90 years later Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, and the death of Bobby Franks, still exert a strange fascination. Th
ey had it all, but wanted more - the thrill of the forbidden. Their crime has lost its uniqueness and been joined by a depressing list of thrill killings. Jesse McAllister and Bradley Price murdered a couple on a New Jersey beach in 1997 to experience murder. Todd Rizzo, aged 18, killed a 13-year-old with a sledgehammer the same year. 1997 was a bad year, in fact, especially for New Jersey; Thomas Koskovitch and Jayson Vreeland ordered a pizza then ambushed and killed the deliverymen, just to see what killing felt like. There have been crimes when everyone involved was so young it defies belief; in 1993 two English ten-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, abducted toddler James Bulger, molested him then bludgeoned him to death. The catalogue is horrific and grows longer every year. There’s something about Leopold and Loeb, though. Maybe it’s their high social class, or their intelligence. Their atrocities contrast with the fact that they were also capable of enormous good when they wanted - Loeb once injured a woman in a car accident and persuaded her father to pay all her medical fees, the outstanding loan on her house and a vacation to restore her nerves, and the school system they set up gave hundreds of convicts a chance of turning their lives around. They had every advantage anyone could ask for in life, but faced with a choice opted for nihilistic violence.

  Perhaps it’s the combination of their personalities that interests us. It’s not unusual for nutcases to egg each other on to greater violence, but the Leopold and Loeb case goes beyond that. Both of them were psychologically flawed and disturbingly amoral, but individually it’s not likely either of them was capable of murder. Put them together, though, and they exactly cancelled out each other’s conscience. They were two halves of a bomb core that, put together, reached a critical mass of psychosis. Bobby Franks wasn’t singled out for any reason that would make sense to anyone; he was just standing too close when the bomb went off.