Leopold and Loeb

The case

The case broke on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. When police searched the marshy ground near Wolf Lake, on Chicago's far southern edge, where the body of 14-year-old Bobby Franks had been found in a railroad culvert on May 22, 1924, they picked up a pair of spectacles. The lenses and frames were ordinary, but the hinge was not: only three pairs fitted with it had been sold in Chicago. One belonged to Nathan Leopold Jr., a 19-year-old law student and amateur ornithologist who sometimes went bird-watching in the area.

Leopold and his friend Richard Loeb, 18, were sons of two of the wealthiest families in Kenwood, on Chicago's South Side. Leopold was a prodigy who had already graduated from the University of Chicago and was bound for Harvard Law School; Loeb had become the youngest graduate in the University of Michigan's history. They had been close since 1920, and their relationship was also a sexual one. Together they had graduated from cheating at cards to burglary and arson. Leopold, who read Nietzsche as a license, believed that superior men stood outside ordinary morality. The two spent months planning what they intended to be a perfect crime: the kidnapping and murder of a child, with a ransom demand to disguise the motive.

On the afternoon of May 21, 1924, driving a car Leopold had rented under a false name, they stopped Bobby Franks as he walked home from the Harvard School for Boys and persuaded him to get in. Bobby knew Loeb, a neighbor, and had played tennis at the Loeb house. He was killed in the car with blows from a chisel. The pair drove to Wolf Lake, hid the body in the culvert and returned to the city. That night Leopold telephoned Bobby's mother to say her son had been kidnapped; a typed ransom letter demanding $10,000 arrived the next morning. The ransom handover collapsed when news came that the body had been found.

The killers made little effort to stay out of the story. Loeb helped reporters search for the drugstore named in the ransom instructions and offered theories about the crime. Leopold talked freely about the case with friends. Once the glasses led detectives to him, the alibi the two had prepared, an evening driving around with two young women, fell apart when Leopold's chauffeur said the family car had been in the garage for repairs that day. Both confessed by May 31, each naming the other as the one who had struck the blows. The typewriter used for the ransom letter was later recovered from a lagoon in Jackson Park.

The families hired Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the country and a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. Expecting a jury to send both young men to the gallows, Darrow had them plead guilty on July 21, which left the sentence to a single judge, John R. Caverly. The hearing that followed lasted more than a month. The state's attorney, Robert E. Crowe, demanded death; the defense called psychiatrists to describe the young men's emotional abnormalities. Darrow's closing plea, delivered over two days in August, became one of the best-known speeches in American legal history, an argument against hanging the young and against retribution itself.

On September 10, 1924, Caverly sentenced both to life imprisonment for murder and 99 years for kidnapping. He said he was moved chiefly by their youth and by the precedent of Illinois courts in not executing defendants of their age.