by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Tuesday PBS did an American Experience program on what they called “The Perfect Crime,”
which in practice turned out to be anything but: the 1924 murder of 14-year-old
Bobby Franks in Chicago by two 19-year-old boys from well-to-do and prominent
Jewish families, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The case became a sensation
because Loeb and Leopold were Gay lovers (though Loeb was apparently Bisexual
and had agreed to have sex with Leopold if in turn Leopold would join him in
his crime schemes), precociously intelligent students at the University of
Chicago, and devotees of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, they
supposedly considered themselves Nietzschean “supermen,” “beyond good and evil”
(as the title of one of Nietzsche’s books had it), and though the show didn’t
mention this, their attorney, the legendary Clarence Darrow, declared as part
of his closing argument in the case that Nietzsche’s philosophy had driven
crazy everyone who believed in
it, starting with Nietzsche himself. They had planned the crime for months but
had left the choice of a victim to sheer happenstance (though Franks was
Leopold’s second cousin and — especially in a more trusting age generally in
which people did not feel
compelled to lock their doors behind them when they went out — that probably
made it easier for Leopold and Loeb to lure Franks into their car in order to
kill him). They hoped that they could collect a ransom from Franks’ family
before the Frankses learned their son was dead, and they also believed they
were so intellectually brilliant they could commit the “perfect crime” and the
police would never suspect them.
As things turned out, the crime they did commit was so inept the police were onto them
literally within hours — Leopold dropped his glasses at the dump site where
they left Franks’ body, the police showed the glasses to Franks’ parents, the
parents assured the cops that those were not their son’s glasses, and since the glasses had an
unusual hinge and only three pair like them had been sold in the Chicago area,
the trail led them straight to Leopold and then to Loeb. The cops arrested and
interrogated both of them — and of course each tried to rat out the other, just
like less intellectually pretentious and decidedly non-super criminals would have.
The case fell to state’s attorney Robert Crowe, who had been elected by
pledging to rid Chicago of the Prohibition-era gangsters that were famously
turning the city into a virtually law-free zone (the original gangster movies
of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s were written by former Chicago newspaper
reporters — Bartlett Cormack, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht — who had gained
their knowledge covering the real-life gangsters for the Chicago papers) but
who saw the Leopold and Loeb case as a career-maker that would get his name
before Illinois voters and win him the state governorship. The Leopold and Loeb
families hired Clarence Darrow, promising him a big fee (which they stiffed him
on, an aspect of the case not mentioned in this show) and also a chance to have
a public forum with which to plead his opposition to capital punishment. At the
time that wasn’t as far-out an opinion as it became later — in the 1920’s
several states, including Nebraska, had already abolished the death penalty,
and Darrow was hoping a successful defense of Leopold and Loeb (“successful” in
terms of getting them life imprisonment instead of the death penalty) would
enable him to lead a movement to abolish capital punishment nationwide.
The
prosecution anticipated that Darrow would plead Leopold and Loeb “not guilty by
reason of insanity,” so they hired their own “alienists” (as psychiatrists and
psychologists were called in 1924) to examine Leopold and Loeb and determine
that they were sane within the literal meaning of the law, which in most states
was governed by a 19th century case called M’Naghten that held that you were legally sane if you knew the
difference between right and wrong — and even if your verbal statements seemed
like you didn’t, taking normal steps to avoid being caught (like fleeing or
hiding out) could be used as proof that you were conscious that you had
committed a crime and therefore you knew what you had done was wrong. Darrow
stunned them on the eve of the trial by changing the boys’ plea to guilty, mainly
because while in most states today the sentence in a capital crime is decided
by a jury (usually the same one that decided the defendant’s guilt — they
actually call it the “guilt phase” and the “penalty phase” of the trial), but
in Illinois in 1924 meant that the case’s judge, John Caverly, would alone make
the decision whether Leopold and Loeb hanged or survived in prison. Darrow put
the boys through a battery of tests ranging from physical function to mental
state, trying to argue that even if they met the M’Naghten definition of legal sanity, there was enough doubt
about their mental state that they should not be executed. (The show included a
marvelous cartoon from the front page of an Illinois newspaper in 1924
ridiculing the examinations and the arguments Darrow was making based on them,
suggesting that if the science he was presenting in court were true, everyone was at least a little crazy — little did whoever
drew that cartoon know that within two or three decades the theories of Sigmund
Freud, on which Darrow was basing much of his case, would become a national
craze and people would take seriously the arguments the cartoonist was
ridiculing!) Fortunately for his case, Darrow also pointed out that the
defendants were only 19 years old and therefore their brains hadn’t quite
finished forming — and that the youngest person who’d been executed on a guilty
plea in Illinois before that was 23. That was the argument that swayed Judge Caverly; he threw out all the
scientific testimony on both sides but wrote in his decision that he was not
inclined to put two teenagers to death no matter how heinous their actions. It wasn’t the big win against
the whole concept of capital punishment Darrow was hoping for — and, as I noted
above, it wasn’t the big payday Darrow was hoping for either (he was still
squabbling with the Leopold and Loeb families for months afterwards, and gave
up on collecting the fee they’d promised him only in 1925, when he got his next
big case — the Scopes “monkey trial” over a Tennessee state law forbidding the
teaching of evolution) — but it was a win.
Of course, the show also mentioned
the all-too-typical comments from many defenders of old-time morality that the
looser social ethics of the 1920’s had made the crime possible — one writer even
said that it was all the fault of the Jazz Age: we’d had jazz music, we’d had
jazz flowers (just what are “jazz
flowers,” anyway?) and now there was a “jazz murder.” The show was only an
hour, which offered the filmmakers little chance for any insights into What
Made Richard and Nathan Run — though in some ways the photos of them from the
time said it all: Loeb was drop-dead gorgeous (if he’d gone out to Hollywood
he’d have had an excellent chance at silent-movie stardom) while Leopold (whose
glasses, after all, were the crucial clue that got them caught!), with his
hooked nose, staring glance and pop eyes, was what today would be called a
“nerd.” There’s also chilling footage of a press conference Nathan Leopold gave
when he was finally released from prison on parole in 1958; a good deal older
and weighted down both by his crime and the 34 years he’d spent in custody for
it, he nonetheless came off looking like a 1950’s intellectual as he pleaded
with the media people covering the event to be left alone for the rest of his
life (he pretty much was; he died quietly in 1971, 13 years later), while Loeb
had long since died — killed in 1936 by a fellow prisoner who claimed Loeb had
made unwanted sexual advances to him. At the time the whole idea that people who
had grown up with all the advantages Leopold and Loeb had would turn into
stone-cold killers was a relative novelty; today the upper-class psychopath is
such a staple of crime fiction (from the Hannibal Lecter stories and American
Psycho to a large number of the scripts on
shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) it’s become as much a cliché as the street kid who
grows up to be a bigshot gangster only to be eliminated by his rivals, the sort
of crime fiction all those ex-reporters from Chicago who’d gone to Hollywood to
be screenwriters ran into the ground over the next decade and a half!
