The Crime of the 20th Century
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: True Crime, Psychology, Society, History, Philosophy

“A superman … is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.” — Nathan Leopold in a letter to Richard Loeb.

It was characterized at the time as “the crime of the century,” one that inspired multiple movies, plays, and novels, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The crime involved one of the most famous lawyers of all time in Clarence Darrow. It involved a philosopher’s influence in Nietzsche, and the killing of a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks.

The crime

Bobby Franks — From NFLJ on Wikipedia Commons

On May 21, 1924, Bobby Franks was clubbed to death with a chisel by two young men who rented a Willy-Knight automobile. The two men were named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both of whom hailed from very wealthy Jewish families in Chicago. Leopold, 19, and Loeb, 18, were very intelligent and had “remarkable academic records,” according to Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen in Crimes of the Century.

According to Geis and Bienen, after they killed Franks, they wrapped his body in a blanket and put it on the floor of the back seat of the car. They drove to a restaurant in Hammond, Indiana, named the Dew Drop Inn, and had a hot dog and a beer. They started to ride around until it got dark and then carried the body two hundred feet to put him near a railroad in Wolf Lake, an obscure area 20 miles south of Chicago.

At some point, the two of them argued about whether to use sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid to cover up their murder. Wolf Lake was a marshy and remote area where the two of them thought no one would find the body. Water would run over the body constantly, and so the two of them thought that the body would decompose. Leopold and Loeb decided to used hydrochloric acid to burn his face, penis, and a scar on his body.

To make matters worse, they addressed a ransom letter titled “Dear Sir” about the futility of calling the police, that demanded money from the Franks family lest they kill Bobby. The letter would be signed “George Johnson,” and would be evidently written by someone very literate.

They thought it was an elaborate plan. They would call Jacob Franks, Bobby Franks’s father, and a multimillionaire, and inform him that Bobby was safe, but would be killed if he informed the police about the boy being missing. They would later send a delivery letter that demanded a cash ransom of ten thousand dollars in twenty and fifty dollar bills.

Further instructions dictated for Jacob Franks to go to a payphone, enter a taxi, and board a train headed for Michigan City, Indiana. He would then have to find a message in a train car that would tell him to go to a rear platform of the train. At a specific location the train where he saw a “CHAMPION” factory, he was supposed to to throw the ransom money off the train.

Ransom Note — From the Chicago Daily News, Public Domain

It was an elaborate scheme, but it fell apart when Bobby Franks’s body was discovered by a work crew member. Jacob Franks initially didn’t believe that it was his son, but an uncle of Bobby went to the morgue, identified Bobby’s body, and called Jacob Franks just before he left the house to give the ransom.

Early suspects were the teachers at Bobby Franks’s private school. One of the teachers later won a lawsuit against the city when his fingers were crushed during the interrogation. Loeb, as a matter of fact, helped the detectives try to find the killers and supplied them with several leads.

Next to Bobby Franks’s body, however, was a frame spring of glasses that had been patented by a Chicago eyeglass store: Almer and Coe. They had only sold three glasses with the type of frame, and one of the people they sold it to was Leopold, who bought them to relieve his headaches.

“Psychiatrists, amateur and professional, later would claim that the dropped glasses were a giveaway sign of Leopold’s desire to be caught,” Geis and Bienen wrote.

When Leopold was interrogated, he denied being the culprit, insisting that he dropped the glasses when he was leading a bird-watching group, as an expert ornithologist who had published multiple papers on bird-watching. Leopold, however, would not get so lucky when Loeb was taken to the station. Loeb told the police everything, with the important detail that he drove the car, while Leopold killed Franks. He claimed that the initial plan was to knock Bobby Franks unconscious and for both of them to strangle him together so they could share the blame. But Leopold did not follow the plan.

Leopold would later confess that Loeb was the killer and Leopold was the driver. Their two confessions would corroborate most of the details of the killing, with the exception of who actually killed Franks.

The motive

Six months before the murder, in fact, Leopold and Loeb had robbed Loeb’s fraternity house, carrying two revolvers and chisels wrapped in tape. They stole $75 in cash, several watches, and a typewriter, but found the crime too tame.

As to why Franks himself was selected as the victim, Leopold and Loeb said that it was a “pure accident” because another boy had been selected for the murder. That boy was 11-year-old Armand Deutsch, the grandson of one of the richest people in Chicago. But Deutsch was not killed because Leopold and Loeb could not locate him — he had been picked up from school by a chauffeur to go to a dentist’s appointment.

Deutsch, 60 years after the murder, would reflect on the luck of not getting chosen on that day:

“When one measures the number of my dental appointments against the number of days in the school year, the odds against me were so formidable that no self-respecting Las Vegas gambler would have made a book on it. While not partial to dentists, since then I have always viewed the breed with an understandable tolerance.”

However, there was a lack of a sensible motive. All three families of Loeb, Leopold, and Franks were wealthy, of high social standing, and Jewish. According to Geis and Bienen, the local Jewish community found a small silver lining in the fact that the boys chose a Jewish victim since if they didn’t, one writer noted that “righteous public indignation, combined with Ku Klux Klan leadership, might have resulted in race riots.”

Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer who went toe to toe with William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, would represent Leopold and Loeb. He said that they killed Franks “as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience,” making sure to differentiate that there was no motive behind the murder.

Leopold and Loeb were both extremely intelligent young men — but Leopold especially is known as the most intelligent killer in history. While Loeb graduated from the University of Michigan at 17 years old, the youngest ever, Leopold obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and then anticipated transferring to Harvard Law School. Leopold, however, was smarter — with an IQ “so far above the regular scale that it was impossible to attach a precise figure to it” — estimated to be between 210 and 220. Loeb, by comparison, had an IQ of 160.

Despite his intelligence, Leopold had trouble socially. The two of them would make friends with a professor at Northwestern University, William Byron. Leopold dedicated his prison autobiography to Byron, but Byron would note that Loeb had the most charming personality of all the intelligent students he had ever taught, a claim that Leopold corroborated:

“He seemed to have an inborn knack of making friends, of winning everyone’s affection.”

Leopold, in particular, however, would be interested in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, in the concept of the Ubermensch. He believed that he and Loeb were transcendent supermen who possessed superior intelligence and aptitudes to the general population. Because Leopold believed himself and Loeb to be part of the Ubermensch, he told him that the two of them would not be liable for the crime and would be “exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men.”

The trial

Clarence Darrow — From the Library of Congress, Public Domain

The families of Loeb and Leopold would hire Clarence Darrow as their attorney, who was the most famous criminal defense lawyer in the country. The case was labeled by newspapers as a “million-dollar defense”. Darrow, who was 67, did not appear competent given the way he dressed and the unorganized manner in which he arranged his suitcase, but, according to Geis and Bienen, had a “razor-sharp mind”.

Darrow, to everyone’s surprise, had the two of them plead guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping for ransom, both of which had the maximum punishment of the death penalty. He believed that the jury would be “irretrievably hostile” to the defendants and chose instead to have an aggravation or mitigation hearing that dealt with the judge’s sentence. He chose to try to persuade the judge — instead of being given the death penalty, Leopold and Loeb should receive life in prison.

Numerous psychiatrists chose to testify that Leopold and Loeb were strange, immature, and not legally responsible because of their mental conditions. They demanded that the two of them were “not guilty by reason of insanity”, and these arguments soon drew the attention of William Randolph Hearst, editor of the New York Journal, who offered to pay Sigmund Freud to examine Leopold and Loeb. Freud declined with the excuse that he was too sick to travel.

One psychiatrist on the defense team, James Whitney Hall, would say:

“Within five years Leopold will go crazy…Loeb will follow, though his lack of reaction will buoy him up for a while.”

Hall was wrong, since the two of them would remain sane for the rest of their lives. Darrow would have 102 witnesses come to the stand, and only cross-examine two of them. He would speak for 12 hours over two days pleading for mercy for the killers — all in a courtroom that reached 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Darrow would later say that “I have exhausted all the strength I could summon.”

His speech in those twelve hours is commonly known as “masterful” and has been called the finest of his career. In it, he decried the inhumane punishments of capital punishment and the American justice system against two very young men. In the speech, he appealed the judge’s humanity:

“We placed our fate in the hands of a trained court, thinking that he would be more mindful and considerate than a jury…I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love. I know the future is on my side. Your Honor stands between the past and the future.”

He then went on to criticize the cruel nature of capital punishment in the case of Leopold and Loeb:

“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… 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.”

Darrow’s defense would be successful, noting that only one person was hanged in the previous ten years in Ilinois — and that person was 40 years old. He ended by reading a poem from Persian poet Omar Khayyam, as well as saying that “ to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.” Darrow’s long speech would be successful.

Two weeks later, the judge would give Leopold and Loeb life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, plus 99 years for kidnapping.