There is a remarkable photograph on Page 160 of historian Simon Baatz’s meticulously researched new book, “For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago.” It was taken Saturday, May 31, 1924, just 10 days after Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb abducted 14-year-old Bobby Franks in the upscale Kenwood neighborhood, bludgeoned and choked him to death and dumped his body in a culvert near the Indiana state line. Over the prior two days, Leopold and Loeb had confessed to every aspect of the sensational crime, describing how it had been conceived, where it was executed and even their stopping at a lunch stand for hot dogs and root beer with Bobby’s lifeless body in the back seat. In the photo, which was printed in newspapers of the day, 19-year-old Leopold and 18-year-old Loeb, each dressed in a suit, are surrounded by more than 15 staff members from the Chicago state’s attorney’s office. The killers seem unemotional. Indifferent. The prosecutors are gathered around the soon-to-be defendants like hunters showing off two trophy elk.
As they posed in that third-floor office in the Criminal Court Building at what is now the corner of Hubbard and Dearborn, the city all around remained stunned by the crime. Leopold and Loeb were intelligent, highly educated young men from prominent, wealthy families. Loeb’s father was vice president of Sears & Roebuck. The murder was reported to have been a random one, serving no purpose other than the killing itself.
More than 80 years later it still has the power to daze us, one of those benchmark crimes that is burned into our consciousness, even as an increasingly violent world desensitizes us to the most horrific atrocities.
“It’s interesting this case has persisted in our memory when there have been other crimes that were more violent, more perverse, and more notorious,” Baatz said in a phone interview.
Indeed, two similar and more recent Chicago homicide cases — the murders of John and Anton Schuessler and Bobby Peterson in 1955, and those of Patricia and Barbara Grimes a little more than a year later, seem even more brutal and terrifying than the killing of Bobby Franks.
“People who grew up in Chicago in the fifties frequently mention the Schuessler-Peterson murders as an experience that marked a loss of innocence,” mystery writer Sam Reaves, whose “Homicide ’69” is a historical novel set in the city, said in an e-mail exchange. “The idea that three boys could be randomly abducted and murdered shook people’s confidence in the society they lived in.”
Yet that crime has nothing like the notoriety of the Leopold and Loeb case, one of those peculiar and infamous homicides known by the perpetrators rather than the victim. Of course, it took 40 years before Kenneth Hansen would be convicted for the Schuessler-Peterson crime, and the killer of the Grimes sisters has never been found. But in some respect those killings, while horrifying, can be understood. The motive in those cases appears to have been sexual. Leopold and Loeb, on the other hand, seem to have murdered Bobby Franks just to see what it would be like to kill someone. To see if they could get away with it. The murder of Bobby Franks was not a means to an end, or an effort to cover up some other crime. The point of Leopold and Loeb’s murder was murder itself.
“I think it’s that the murder was purely random, purely done for the sensation of committing the crime and in pursuing that sensation they committed an act beyond any moral code,” Baatz said. “The enduring puzzle of the case is that you have two amazingly educated individuals, who were wealthy, who could have had anything they wanted just for the asking. They were not mentally defective. And yet they did something that goes far beyond the pale of sound behavior.”
Certainly, Leopold and Loeb landed right in the sweet spot of the 1920s zeitgeist. It was a story about celebrity, gross self-indulgence, Freudian theory, determinism versus free will, college culture and class elitism. Part of the reason it endures is that the case has been a recurring inspiration for fiction in the 80 years since the murder and trial (really a lengthy sentencing hearing as Leopold and Loeb’s attorney, the famous Clarence Darrow, directed them to plead guilty). In the 1950s, at least three novels were published based on the case, including “Compulsion,” which was made into a movie starring Orson Welles as Darrow. A British stage play, “Rope,” about two educated and philosophical young men committing a similar murder, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. An afterword in Baatz’s book notes other productions, including the 1992 indie film “Swoon,” the 2002 Sandra Bullock vehicle “Murder by Numbers,” the stage play “Never the Sinner” and even a 2003 stage musical, “Thrill Me.” In fact, Baatz decided to write this book when he realized there had been numerous fictional accounts of the story but never a good, historical, non-fiction one.
Perhaps that’s not so surprising. Leopold and Loeb — at least the figures that have survived in the legend — are really fictional characters created by the young men themselves. Nathan Leopold imagined himself as a Nietzschean superman whose intellect made him unaccountable to the laws and mores of normal men. Richard Loeb fantasized about being a criminal mastermind, an archvillain like the ones he read about in the pulps, who planned brilliant crimes and used his wits to elude capture. But the famous prewar supervillains, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantomas, and even the exaggerated antagonists in the pulp magazines Loeb so dearly loved, used murder as a tool of their criminal enterprises. In modeling themselves on the fictional villains and anti-heroes of the day, Leopold and Loeb created something new for 20th Century fiction: the murderous sociopath who kills for the art of it. In many ways the fantasies of Leopold and Loeb were the direct but distant ancestors of Hannibal Lecter.
But as Baatz’s book shows, the real Leopold and Loeb were incompetent philosophers and lazy, bungling criminals, choosing out of convenience to abduct a child from their own neighborhood — Bobby Franks was Loeb’s second cousin, and they all lived within three blocks of each other on Ellis Avenue. When they disposed of the body, Leopold’s expensive and unusual eyeglasses were carelessly dropped at the scene, a piece of evidence that quickly became their undoing.
Sensational rumors about the two persisted nevertheless. An enduring one, often perpetuated by Leopold, was that he was an intellectual prodigy who spoke 15 languages at age 18 (in later years he told the Tribune he could read 27). The truth — he spoke four — would be impressive enough for most people, but a superintellect, a supervillain, required a number that strained credulity. Leopold was constantly revising the Nathan Leopold character he had created in the years leading up to the murder. In his autobiography he presented himself as a humanitarian, a nurturer, a teacher — “as a wonderful guy,” Baatz said — and many people believed it. Loeb met a violent death in prison, but Leopold was paroled in 1958, moved to Puerto Rico and found a woman who wanted to marry him. He died of a heart attack in 1971.
Leopold and Loeb left us with a vivid description of their crime, but never an apology. Never an explanation.
” ‘I couldn’t give a motive which makes sense to me,’ ” the 48-year-old Leopold said at his first parole hearing, in 1953. ” ‘It was the act of a child — a simpleton kid. A very bizarre act. I don’t know why I did it.’ “
Perspective and objectivity don’t provide clearer answers. As Baatz said, “After all I’ve read and studied about the case I still couldn’t tell you why they did it.”
Perhaps that’s the reason novelists and playwrights and screenwriters keep coming back to Leopold and Loeb. Because the story is still ambiguous, open-ended. It isn’t finished. We write and read fiction to entertain and to be entertained, but also to better understand our humanity. Maybe after 80-plus years of contemplating and scribbling, after 80-plus years of philosophizing and dramatizing, we still haven’t figured out what it means for the rest of us that Leopold and Loeb were capable of such a casual, monstrous act.
“Leopold and Loeb cropped up in the middle of the booming decade of the 1920s when the U.S. was full of self-confidence, much as it was” at the time of the Schuessler-Peterson murders, Reaves said. “Maybe these things make a splash precisely when we most need a reminder that evil never goes away.”
———-
Kevin Guilfoile is the author of the thriller “Cast of Shadows.” He writes about Chicago and crime at theoutfitcollective.com.
