Leopold and Loeb

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. was born on November 19, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois, the third son of Florence (née Foreman) and Nathan Leopold Sr., a wealthy German-Jewish immigrant family.[4][5] A child prodigy, Leopold's baby book recorded him as speaking his first words at the age of four months and three weeks old.[4] At the time of the murder, he had completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago with Phi Beta Kappa honors and planned to begin studies at Harvard Law School after a trip to Europe.[6]

Unlike the handsome, athletic Loeb, Leopold was undersized, with rather bulging eyes. By many accounts, he was sensitive about his appearance.[7] He threw himself into intellectual pursuits where he met with remarkable success. Leopold had studied fifteen languages and claimed to speak five fluently.[8] He had achieved a measure of national recognition as an ornithologist.[6] Leopold and several other ornithologists identified nesting sites of Kirtland's warblers and made astute observations about the parasitic nesting behavior of brown-headed cowbirds, which threatened the warblers.[9] He maintained his interest in birds after his crime, raising birds in prison and working to help with the struggling Puerto Rican Parrot population after his release on parole.[10] While interested in intellectual pursuits, Leopold also enjoyed fishing, hunting, reading fiction and poetry and watching college football games.

Richard Albert Loeb was born on June 11, 1905, in Chicago, the third of four sons of Anna Henrietta (née Bohnen) and Albert Henry Loeb, a wealthy lawyer and retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company.[11] His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic.[12] Like Leopold, Loeb was exceptionally intelligent. He was an avid reader, with a passion for history and crime stories. At age 12, he entered the innovative University High School. With the encouragement of his governess, he completed his high school education in two years. He would later go on to become the University of Michigan's youngest graduate at age 18.[13] Following graduation from Michigan, Loeb enrolled in a few history classes at the University of Chicago.[14]

Loeb was not as strictly intellectual as Leopold. He often socialized, played tennis, and read detective novels.[6][15]

Loeb was the first to confess.[15] He asserted that Leopold had planned everything and had killed Franks in the back seat of the car while he (Loeb) drove. Leopold's confession followed swiftly thereafter.[36] He insisted that he was the driver and Loeb the murderer. Their confessions otherwise corroborated most of the evidence in the case.[20][24] Both confessions were announced by the state's attorney on May 31.[37]

Leopold later claimed, long after Loeb was dead, that he pleaded in vain with Loeb to admit to killing Franks. "Mompsie feels less terrible than she might, thinking you did it", he quotes Loeb as saying, "and I'm not going to take that shred of comfort away from her."[38] Most observers believed that Loeb did strike the fatal blows.[17] Some circumstantial evidence – including testimony from eyewitness Carl Ulvigh, who claimed that he saw Loeb driving and Leopold in the back seat minutes before the kidnapping – suggested that Leopold could have been the killer.[39]

Both Leopold and Loeb admitted that they were driven by their thrill-seeking, Übermenschen (supermen) delusions, and their aspiration to commit a "perfect crime".[6] Neither claimed to have looked forward to the killing, but Leopold admitted interest in learning what it would feel like to be a murderer. He was disappointed to note that he felt the same as ever.[40]

Darrow's impassioned, eight-hour-long "masterful plea"[46] at the conclusion of the hearing has been called the finest speech of his career.[47] Its principal arguments were that the methods and punishments of the American justice system were inhumane, and the youth and immaturity of the accused:[15][48][49]

This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor. Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.

We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day [during World War I]. We read about it and we rejoiced in it – if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it.

It will take fifty years to wipe it out of the human heart, if ever. I know this, that after the Civil War in 1865, crimes of this sort increased, marvelously. No one needs to tell me that crime has no cause. It has as definite a cause as any other disease, and I know that out of the hatred and bitterness of the Civil War crime increased as America had never seen before. I know that Europe is going through the same experience today; I know it has followed every war; and I know it has influenced these boys so that life was not the same to them as it would have been if the world had not made red with blood.

Your Honor knows that in this very court crimes of violence have increased growing out of the war. Not necessarily by those who fought but by those that learned that blood was cheap, and human life was cheap, and if the State could take it lightly why not the boy?

Has the court any right to consider anything but these two boys? The State says that your Honor has a right to consider the welfare of the community, as you have. If the welfare of the community would be benefited by taking these lives, well and good. I think it would work evil that no one could measure. Has your Honor a right to consider the families of these defendants? I have been sorry, and I am sorry for the bereavement of Mr. and Mrs. Franks, for those broken ties that cannot be healed. All I can hope and wish is that some good may come from it all. But as compared with the families of Leopold and Loeb, the Franks are to be envied – and everyone knows it.

Here is Leopold's father – and this boy was the pride of his life. He watched him and he cared for him, he worked for him; the boy was brilliant and accomplished. He educated him, and he thought that fame and position awaited him, as it should have awaited. It is a hard thing for a father to see his life's hopes crumble into dust.

And Loeb's the same. Here are the faithful uncle and brother, who have watched here day by day, while Dickie's father and his mother are too ill to stand this terrific strain, and shall be waiting for a message which means more to them than it can mean to you or me. Shall these be taken into account in this general bereavement?

The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. I know it. Men and women who do not think will applaud. The cruel and thoughtless will approve. It will be easy today; but in Chicago, and reaching out over the length and breadth of the land, more and more fathers and mothers, the humane, the kind and the hopeful, who are gaining an understanding and asking questions not only about these poor boys, but about their own – these will join in no acclaim at the death of my clients.

These would ask that the shedding of blood be stopped, and that the normal feelings of man resume their sway. Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows. In doing it you will make it harder for unborn children. You may save them and make it easier for every child that sometime may stand where these boys stand. You will make it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

The judge was persuaded, but he explained in his ruling that his decision was based primarily on precedent and the youth of the accused. On September 10, 1924, he sentenced both Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment for the murder, and an additional 99 years for the kidnapping.[15][42] A little over a month later, Loeb's father died of heart failure.[50]

Darrow's handling of the law as defense counsel has been criticized for hiding psychiatric expert testimony that conflicted with his polemical goals and for relying on an absolute denial of free will, one of the principles legitimizing all criminal punishment.[51]

On January 28, 1936, Loeb was attacked by fellow inmate James Day with a straight razor in a shower room; he died soon after in the prison hospital. Day claimed that Loeb had attempted to sexually assault him, but he was unharmed while Loeb sustained more than fifty wounds, including defensive wounds on his arms and hands. His throat had been slashed from behind. News accounts suggested Loeb had propositioned Day, and though several prison officials including the Warden believed Loeb had been murdered, Day was found not guilty by a jury after a short trial in June, 1936.[6][52]

A sexual motive for the killing was suggested. While some sources state that newsman Ed Lahey began his story in the Chicago Daily News with the lead, "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition"[53][54] – no evidence has been found that this lead was ever published, and actual copy from that date reads otherwise.[55]

On February 19, 1936, in a column printed in the Syracuse Journal, Mark Hellinger wrote, "I must tell you of the line that came to me from an unknown correspondent in Chicago. This anonymous contributor said he had the absolute low-down on the recent slaying of Dickie Loeb. Seems that Loeb made a slight mistake in grammar. He ended a sentence in a proposition..." Other newspapers at the time appeared to praise Day, who was later tried and acquitted of Loeb's murder.[56]

There is no evidence that Loeb was a sexual predator while in prison, but Day was later caught at least once in a sexual act with a fellow inmate.[57] In his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, Leopold ridiculed Day's claim that Loeb had attempted to sexually assault him. This was echoed by the prison's Catholic chaplain, a confidant of Loeb's, who said that it was more likely that Day attacked Loeb after Loeb rebuffed his advances.[58]

King and Wilson in their book suggest that Leopold himself may have been involved in Loeb's killing, asserting that Leopold masterminded the child's murder (and possibly others by the duo for which there was no evidence) and that it was Loeb who was capable of empathy and was the inspiration behind the academics in the prison, while Leopold may have wished to control the narrative of their crimes for history, in which he was a misunderstood genius led astray. There is no evidence for this theory, and as Leopold did not begin to push the blame onto Loeb until 1957 after nearly a decade of failed parole attempts and 21 years after Loeb's death, this seems unlikely.

Leopold in Stateville Penitentiary, 1931

Leopold continued with his work after Loeb's death. Despite suffering from depression, he became a model prisoner and made many significant contributions to improving conditions at Stateville Penitentiary. These included reorganizing the prison library, revamping the schooling system and teaching its students, and volunteer work in the prison hospital. In 1944, Leopold volunteered for the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study. He was deliberately inoculated with malaria pathogens and then subjected to several experimental malaria treatments.[59] He later wrote that all his good work in prison and after his release was an effort to compensate for his crime.[52]

In the early 1950s, author Meyer Levin, a classmate at the University of Chicago, requested Leopold's cooperation in writing a novel based on the Franks murder. Leopold responded that he did not wish his story told in fictionalized form, but offered Levin a chance to contribute to his own memoir, which was in progress. Levin, unhappy with that suggestion, went ahead with his book alone, despite Leopold's express objections. The novel, titled Compulsion,[60] was published in 1956.

Levin portrayed Leopold, under the pseudonym Judd Steiner, as a brilliant but deeply disturbed teenager, psychologically driven to kill because of his troubled childhood and an obsession with Loeb. Leopold later wrote that reading Levin's book made him "physically sick... More than once I had to lay the book down and wait for the nausea to subside. I felt as I suppose a man would feel if he were exposed stark-naked under a strong spotlight before a large audience."[61]

Leopold's autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, was published in 1958[62] as part of his campaign to win parole.[16] His book was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 14 weeks[63] and received mostly positive reviews, though some accused him of writing the book solely as a means of rehabilitating his public image by ignoring the dark side of his past.[64]