100 Years Ago, Leopold and Loeb Killed for Thrills

Chicago had good reason to be worried about its homicide rate in 1924. In the past four years, the annual number of murders had grown from 220 to 415.

Then, in May of that year, the city learned of one particularly troubling killing. The murderers were two highly intelligent teenagers from privileged backgrounds. The victim was Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy on his way home from a baseball game, who was chosen at random. Most chilling of all were the motives the killers gave. They wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone. They wanted to prove to themselves that they were above moral concerns. And they wanted to commit the perfect crime.

The two teenagers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, had good reason to consider themselves above average. Both had grown up in privilege. Both had graduated from major universities at the age of 19. Loeb was in University of Chicago Law School. Leopold was heading for Harvard.

They believed that their intelligence raised them above concerns of morality; that they’d be able to commit a shocking crime — killing a child — and feel nothing.

They spent months devising a plan. They would grab a random victim, murder him, and disfigure his features so he would be hard to identify. Then they would bury him where no one could find him. Finally, they would send a ransom demand to the victim’s family, collect the money, and disappear. And they’d get away with it.

But they proved to be criminally inept.

Bobby Franks’s body was found and identified in one day. And Leopold had dropped his glasses near the body, which were soon traced back to him.

Chicagoans were understandably frightened and outraged when they read of the murder. The murder rate was already high — a product of the gang wars over controlling the city’s bootleg liquor. Now there was this new type of homicide: “thrill killing.”

The press called it the crime of the century. It certainly seemed like a crime of the times when Americans were hungry for the thrills of the jazz age.

For young adults, there were jazz bands, bootleg liquor, a steady stream of fads, and movies that pushed the limits of what was permissible in film. There were women who dressed provocatively, smoked publicly, bobbed their hair, and drank. Alcohol consumption was quickly rising back to its old pre-Prohibition levels. And there was a feeling of moral decline as the public saw the police unwilling or unable to stop bootleg booze.

Judge Benjamin Lindsey, an authority on underage crime, called Leopold and Loeb’s crime “a new kind of murder with a new kind of cause… found in the modern mentality and modern freedom of youth….It is the story of modern youth, the story of modern parents, the story of modern education.” It was all part of a new youth movement that that resulted “in stealing of automobiles, in joy rides, jazz parties, petting parties, freedom in sex relations and the mania for speed on every turn.”

Evangelical preacher Billy Sunday declared the killing was part of the “moral miasma.” It was now fashionable to sneer at God in college class rooms. “Precocious brains, salacious books, infidel minds” had all contributed to the murder.

The Cook County prosecutor promised to convict the boys and to get them sentenced to execution. “I have a hanging case,” he said.

He might have succeeded had the boys’ parents not retained the famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

He entered the courtroom on July 21 with limited options. He couldn’t plead not guilty; the boys had already made a confession without duress. He couldn’t plead insanity because Leopold and Loeb were both lucid and quite aware that their actions were illegal.

The public expected him to argue that Leopold and Loeb were temporarily insane. Instead, he counseled both boys to plead guilty. Instead of a trial, this would be an extended sentencing hearing. Darrow proposed to plead for life sentences instead of execution for the boys. For mitigation, he’d stress that the boys were still young, they’d admitted to the crime in their confession, and both show disturbed mental states.

Darrow’s expert witnesses examined the boys and produced a 300-page report on their findings. They noted their backgrounds of absent parents, sexual abuse, and petty crime.

They weren’t insane. They were seriously unbalanced. They’d been driven to crime by their experience, not their choice.

The boys’ dissociation is reflected in a statement by Loeb:

I know I should feel sorry I killed that young boy and all that, but I just don’t feel it. I didn’t have much feeling about this from the first. That’s why I could do it. There was nothing inside of me to stop me. Of course, I’m sorry about my family, but not as much as I ought to be.

Darrow’s closing argument speech was a plea to the judge to put aside the call for vengeance, and to find a civilized, enlightened approach to sentencing.

I have heard in the last six weeks nothing but the cry for blood,” he said. “Here are the officers of justice, so-called, with all of the power of the state, with all the influence of the press, to fan this community into a frenzy of hate

You may hang these boys… But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past.

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 judgement and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

At the end of Darrow’s long speech, the judge had tears in his eyes. He refused to execute the boys, but gave them life sentences plus 99 years.

Even amid a rising murder rate and public revulsion and anger over Leopold and Loeb’s crime, Judge John Caverly made the hard, unpopular decision.

The prosecutor was furious and believed the boys were getting off lightly. Darrow said, “Well, it’s just what we asked for but…it’s pretty rough.”

Leopold and Loeb went to Statesville Prison to serve their sentence. After seven years, Loeb was murdered in prison. Leopold became a model prisoner. He reorganized the prison’s library and school system. He taught prisoners and volunteered in the prison hospital. He agreed to be inoculated with malaria so several experimental drugs could be tested. Paroled in 1958, he moved to Puerto Rico where he worked as an assistant at a hospital and taught at the University. All his efforts, he later said, were an attempt to compensate for his crime.

Neither man ever admitted to being the one who actually committed the murder.