Last word on infamous crime
Nina Barret offers a jaw-droppingly detailed examination of the ‘crime of the century’ in which two American university students killed a teenager for no apparent reason.
NEARLY 100 years ago – Wednesday, May 21, 1924, a bit after 5pm, to be precise – 14-year-old Bobby Franks was lured into a car as he walked toward his Hyde Park home in Chicago. He was beaten to death by two wealthy University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who dumped the boy’s body near Wolf Lake in nearby Indiana state, confessed to the murder and were brought to trial for what would remain for a long time America’s “Crime of the Century”.
Americans – and anyone anywhere in the world with an interest in true crime, arguably – would know of this tragedy and of other dark moments in Chicago’s history, such as the St Valentine’ Day Massacre, the evil doings of that “devil” H.H. Holmes who prowled the “White City”, and the slaughter of eight young nurses by Richard “Born to Raise Hell” Speck.
Consider: The Leopold and Loeb crime inspired the 1929 play Rope, the 1948 Hitchcock film of the same name, Meyer Levin’s 1956 novel Compulsion and its 1959 film version, and John Logan’s 1988 play Never The Sinner. And yet, even if you have seen or read all of these works you have not experienced this case with anything approaching the astonishing and compelling detail that you will in The Leopold And Loeb Files: An Intimate Look At One Of America’s Most Infamous Crimes.
Photos of Leopold and Loeb pepper the 296 pages of this remarkable book, and you will stare at their faces as if in a trance, desperately seeking clues or insights to their unspeakable evil, even in this age in which kids are killed with jarring frequency.
This book is a graphically stunning manifestation and expansion of a 2009 exhibition that took place at Illinois’s Northwestern University Library. That show, titled The Murder That Wouldn’t Die ,was curated by the author of this book, Nina Barrett.
Her introduction does a fine job of detailing how the exhibit and thus this book came to be, writing, “An exhibit can only display the documents as artefacts, not as texts. This book invites the reader inside their pages. Each of the book’s five sections dissects a different document or group of documents . ... Each chapter also includes a short taste of the coverage of the story as it was unfolding in daily newspapers, to give the readers a sense of how the media not only amplified but also very colorfully shaped the public narrative about the case.”
The book fully lives up to one of the words in its subtitle – “intimate” – in its array of pictures, artefacts, original documents and words.
From the transcript of Loeb’s confession:
Q: “Well, then you put the body right down into the culvert?”
A: “Yes.
Q: “And you poured your hydrochloric acid on it?
A: “Before we put it in the culvert. Q: “Then what did you do? A: “Then I went to the opposite side of the culvert, where the water runs out, and where you can get at the water very easily, where I washed my hands which had become bloody through carrying the body.”
The murder and murderers were front-page news across the United States as well as much of the rest of the Western world. Reporters fought for titbits, inside information, anything. Some likely resorted to their own imaginations. Of Maurine Watkins, who worked for the Tribune and would later become a successful playwright, Barrett writes, “Few reporters blurred the lines between fact and fiction with as much flair and abandon as (Watkins).”
Barrett’s book vividly reflects the many colourful characters who played roles in this drama: In addition to the ravenous reporters, we have alienists, cops, doctors, girlfriends, and the emotionally beaten and bruised families of the killers trying to, as was everyone else, answer “Why?”
Then, enter the renowned Clarence Darrow.
Barrett writes that Darrow “and his wife, Ruby, were asleep in their Chicago apartment in the wee hours of June 2 when Loeb’s uncle Jacob and Nathan Leopold Sr frantically rang the doorbell. They barged past Ruby to the bedroom, where they demanded that a very startled Clarence defend the boys. They would pay him any fee he asked for.”
What they wound up paying – an ever-debated number – was more than worth it, for Darrow would save the young men from execution. His closing argument, some of which is cited in the book (and all of which can be read online), took place over three days. It was, Barrett writes, “filled with masterful rhetoric, respinning the entire case so that it became not about the evil act of two murderers, but instead about the opportunity to the judge, the spectators, and to the world to throw off the lingering traces of barbarism in civilisation and become more human(e).”
He saved their lives and the “boys” went to prison, each sentenced to life plus 99 years.
Loeb lasted only 11, ending, Barrett writes, “slashed more than 50 times with a razor by a fellow inmate, James Day, who claimed to be defending himself from Loeb’s homosexual advances.”
This resulted in what Barrett calls “the cleverest newspaper lead ever written in Edwin A. Lahey’s story in the Chicago Daily News: “Despite his erudition, Richard Loeb today ended his sentence with a proposition”. Barrett details what she calls, rightly, a “legend about the case, gleefully repeated in journalism circles”, and does an estimable job poking holes in that journalistic legend, even though this writer chose to keep believing.
In any case, Loeb dies and Leopold goes on until the fascinating and admirable character Elmer Gertz is drawn into the case. A child of the eclectic Maxwell Street area of Chicago, Gertz tirelessly spearheaded efforts to get Leopold released on parole, even getting the revered poet Carl Sandburg to testify.
It worked. Leopold was released from prison in 1958 and moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked as an X-ray technician, married a woman and appeared, Barrett writes, “to be as much the model parolee as he had been the model prisoner”.
After five years, he was discharged from parole. He took a trip to Europe with his wife and they stopped in Chicago on their way back to Puerto Rico. He was last in the city in 1971. He met with Gertz and he went to the family plot at Rosehill Cemetery, where his parents were buried. He died some months later in Puerto Rico, his body donated to science.
At the end of her book, Barrett offers a page of “Resources”, noting other books that “were helpful to me in researching” this one. You might be able to find copies of them at the Bookends & Beginnings, the shop run by Barrett and her husband Jeff Garrett in Chicago. You certainly will find The Leopold And Loeb Files: An Intimate Look At One Of America’s Most Infamous Crimes and, frankly, that’s all you’ll really need. — Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service
The Leopold And Loeb Files:
An Intimate Look At One Of America’s Most Infamous Crimes Author: Nina Barrett
Publisher: Agate Midway, true crime