1924 BOBBY FRANKS MURDER Leopold and Loeb - On 21 May 1924, on a Wednesday, 14-year-old Bobby Franks did not come home from school in Chicago. Bobby’s wealthy father searched for his son – but a phone call confirmed his worst fears. ‘Your son has been kidnapped,’ a man identifying himself as ‘Johnson’ said. ‘He is all right. There will be further news in the morning.’ Mr Franks notified the police that night but pleaded with them not to do anything until that morning. At 9am the next day, the distraught father was sent a typed ransom note asking for money in ‘old bills’. Bobby Franks, it was said, would be returned safely within 6 hours of the ransom being paid. In reality, the boy was already dead.
Bobby Franks body was found later that day in a drainpipe at Wolf Lake, near the Indiana border. He had been bludgeoned, tied up and disfigured with acid. Having left a trail of clues, the killers were quickly identified as 2 local teenagers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Both were sons of wealthy Jewish families and highly intelligent. State’s attorney Robert Crowe described the crime at the time as ‘the most terrible criminal offence that has been perpetrated in this generation’. The killers motive was chilling – each was a deadly combination of sociopath and intellectual, and they wanted to show each other how easily they, with their superior intellect, could outwit the police and commit the crime. The pair had cold bloodedly selected Bobby Franks as their victim.
Aged 19, Nathan ‘Babe’ Leopold was one of the leading young ornithologists in the US, but his quiet, sickly demeanour had a killer’s heart. When he met Richard Loeb at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, they became good friends and academic rivals. They both came from large loving families. Leopold’s governess exposed him to a premature sexual initiation, including bondage and sadomasochism. Loeb was raised by a strict disciplinarian who had introduced him to a world of deciet and petty crime.
It was Loeb who came up with the plan to commit ‘the perfect crime’, and he found a willing partner in Leopold, who had studied German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Leopold was obsessed with Nietzsche’s superman concept and believed that a person of his intellect could operate outside the boundaries of morality. Their plan progressed to the murder of a stranger, despite careful preparation (opening bank accounts under false names and establishing a line of credit with a hire car company) they made major mistakes.
Leopold and Loeb left clues at almost every step of their crime. A pair of glasses (spectacles) was found at the crime scene. The lenses were common enough, but the hinges, which were patented by a local company, had only just come on to the market. Only 3 pairs had been sold – one of them to Nathan Leopold.
Local shop staff identified the pair as the men who had bought the chisel used to bludgeon the victim, the rope used to tie him up and the hydrochloric acid used to disfigure him – even the paper on which they had typed the ransom note.
A second ransom note, instructing Mr Franks as to how he was to deliver the money, was planted on a train bound for Michigan to throw police off their trail (Leopold and Loeb never intended to collec the ransom money). A rail employee at the local station identified Loeb as having bought a rail ticket to Michigan.
When captured, the teenage killers turned on one another, each accusing the other of bludgeoning Bobby Franks with the chisel. Loeb took the police to where they had dumped the Underwood typewriter in a local lagoon, further sealing the case against them.
After pleading guilty to their crime, the pair would certainly be hanged for kidnapping and murder were it not for the brilliant defence of lawyer Clarence S. Darrow. The trial lasted for months – because the men made a full confession in court, but on the sole question of whether the youths should be executed or imprisoned. ‘WHyd id they kill little Bobby Franks?’ Darrow asked the jury. ‘Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped….’ In his closing argument Darrow admitted that he loathed the case and his clients, but he presented a persuasive arguemnt – persuasive even to the members of the press who questioned his inscerity and speculated on the size of the fee paid to him by the families of the two boys – against the use of the death penalty of any crime. In 1924 the judge sentenced the two killers to life imprisonment for the murder of Bobby Franks and 99 years for his kidnapping, to be served in Chicago’s Joliet State Prison.
The young killers were reunited in 1931 when they were asked to develop educational courses for other prisoners, they wrote a maths textbook that became a standard text throughout the US prison system. Loeb died in 1936 after being attacked in prison, Leopold lived to write his autobiography in 1957 (Life + 99 Years) and was paroled the next year, after serving 33 years in prison. He moved to Puerto Rico, married and worked in the department of health until he died of a heart attack in 1971.
Crimes that changed the world
