Leopold and Loeb

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr., and Richard Albert Loeb were infamous Chicago murderers of 1924, who confessed to the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Robert (Bobby) Franks for an “intellectual” thrill. Pleading guilty, the men were defended in a bench trial by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, who secured them life imprisonment rather than execution. Dubbed “the crime of the century,” by contemporaries and scholars, the trial dominated the news during the summer of 1924 and fascinated the public with its privileged teenaged defendants, chosen-at-random victim, and celebrated defense attorney.

The murderers and their victim

On the surface, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had a lot in common, and these commonalities allowed the public to think of them as a single unit—Leopold and Loeb—rather than as individuals. Both came from wealthy Jewish families who lived in Kenwood, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side concentrated with large single-family homes (behind its red brick walls, the grounds of the Loeb home included a greenhouse, a goldfish pond, and a tennis court). Richard Loeb’s father, Albert Loeb, was a lawyer and former vice president at Sears, Roebuck and Co., and Nathan Leopold, Sr., was a millionaire retired paper box manufacturer. Both young men were intellectually precocious. Leopold attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate at age 15, eventually transferring to the University of Chicago, where he graduated at 18. He then enrolled in the university’s law school. Loeb also attended the University of Michigan, and he graduated at 17, following with postgraduate work at the University of Chicago. Leopold was the more scholarly of the two—an amateur ornithologist and linguist who spoke multiple languages—while Loeb was considered more social. Having attended separate elementary schools, the two first met when they were 15 and in college. Together, they had a history of petty crime and had committed several acts of theft and arson before attempting the “perfect murder”—in the kidnap of Bobby Franks, who was also a Kenwood resident. Franks attended Chicago’s Harvard School—a school for the sons of Chicago’s elite—which Loeb and his brothers had also attended. Franks did not know Leopold, but he knew the Loeb family and had even played tennis on their tennis court.

Kidnapping and murder

On May 21, 1924, Leopold and Loeb kidnapped Franks as he was walking home from an after-school baseball game, pulling him into a rented automobile on the pretext that Loeb wanted to talk to him about a tennis racket. One of the teenagers hit the boy on the head with a chisel and stuffed a gag in his mouth; Franks most likely died of suffocation within minutes. They half-buried the body in a railway culvert and, by phone and notes, demanded $10,000 in ransom from the boy’s wealthy parents. The body, however, was unexpectedly found before the ransom could be delivered, and several clues, including the discovery of Leopold’s eyeglasses at the culvert, led the police to Leopold and Loeb. They quickly confessed and provided a chilling and emotionless tale of how they planned and administered the crime.

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Confession and trial

While some minor details differed between Leopold and Loeb’s confessions, the underlying story was the same: their plan was to execute a ransom with murder being incidental to the plot. In a comment to the Chicago Tribune, which he would later say was delivered with sarcasm, Leopold explained the indifference they had for their victim: “It was just an experiment. It is as easy for us to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.” The two began planning the crime in late 1923 (the thrill for them both was in the formulation of the crime), and the ransom note was written several days before the event, addressed generically to “Dear Sir.” The choice of victim was impersonal: he merely needed to be from a wealthy family from which Leopold and Loeb could extract a large ransom payment, and Bobby Franks was chosen as their victim just minutes before his abduction. The two confessions diverged on one critical point—each man claimed he was driving while the other bludgeoned and suffocated Franks.

Nearly as soon as the boys were arrested and the confessions made, Leopold’s father hired renowned defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Darrow was an established and persuasive labor and criminal lawyer and a staunch critic of capital punishment. He accepted the case with the goal not to exonerate the two confessed murderers but to save them from the death penalty. On July 21, 1924, Darrow’s clients pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder, thus avoiding a jury trial and putting the case before a single judge—Judge John R. Caverly.

For 33 days in July–August 1924, in a packed courtroom (200 of the court’s 300 seats were reserved for the press), the state’s attorney Robert E. Crow presented the defendants as calloused and privileged thrill-seekers and asked the judge to sentence them to death. For his part, Darrow defended the two as misguided and mentally ill youths who should be granted some mercy, offering an eloquent appeal against capital punishment.

Judge Caverly delivered his decision on September 10, sentencing Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment for murder and 99 years for kidnapping. Persuaded by Darrow’s plea for leniency, Caverly explained his verdict:

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In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants, boys of eighteen and nineteen years. It is not for the court to say that he will not in any case enforce capital punishment as an alternative, but the court believes that it is within his province to decline to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age.

Following sentencing, Leopold and Loeb were sent to Northern Illinois Penitentiary near Joliet. In May 1925 Leopold was transferred to the new correctional facility at Stateville, and Loeb joined him there in 1932.

Life in prison

In early 1933 Leopold and Loeb established a correspondence school for Stateville prisoners that allowed them some responsibility and autonomy to move about the prison. In January 1936, while in a private shower, Loeb was razor-slashed roughly 56 times by his former cellmate, James A. Day, who claimed he acted in self-defense after Loeb allegedly made homosexual advances (an unlikely story given Loeb’s throat was slashed from behind). Loeb’s old friend and accomplice Leopold stood at the foot of the operating table as prison surgeons failed to staunch the bleeding and save his life.

Leopold became something of a Renaissance man while in prison, taking language and college correspondence courses, reclassifying the prison library, participating in medical experiments, and becoming an X-ray technician. In September 1949 Leopold’s sentence was commuted from 99 years to 85, and he was paroled on March 13, 1958, after serving 33 years. Following his release, Leopold worked as a hospital technician in Puerto Rico, where he married a widow in 1961. He died of a heart attack 10 years later. He had written an autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years (1958), as well as a book on ornithology, Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (1963).

Leopold and Loeb in popular culture

The Leopold and Loeb story captured the public’s imagination in the summer of 1924 and for years afterward, resulting in numerous fictional accounts, including Alfred Hitchcock’s first color film, Rope (1953) and Chicago journalist and Leopold and Loeb’s former University of Chicago classmate Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1956). The novel was later adapted into a 1959 film starring Orson Welles as a Clarence Darrow-like figure. Leopold sued both Levin and the film’s producers. claiming a violation of his privacy rights; the Illinois Supreme Court rejected his claim in 1970, stating, in part:

The liberty of expression constitutionally assured in a matter of public interest, as the one here; the enduring public attention to the plaintiff’s crime and prosecution, which remain an American cause celebre; and the plaintiff’s consequent and continuing status as a public figure.