For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (14 page)

T
HE POLICE FIRST KNOCKED AT
the door of the Leopold house on Sunday, 25 May. Thomas Wolf, a captain from the Eighth Police District, explained that he wished to talk to Nathan about the ornithology classes he conducted by the lakes near the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. It was routine, the captain explained; in the hope of turning up clues to the murder, the police were questioning anyone who frequented the area.

Nathan spent two hours that Sunday at the Ewing Avenue station answering questions. Yes, he had often been out at Wolf Lake; only the previous weekend, he had spent the day with a friend, Sidney Stein, hunting birds. And he also took groups of schoolchildren out to the area to look for birds; he had frequently taken boys from the Harvard School to the lake, and occasionally he had classes of boys and girls from the University High School.
²⁵

It was reassuring, he realized, that the detectives had no inkling that he had any connection with the murder; it quickly became apparent that their questions were indeed routine. Nathan was not a suspect and, he calculated, if the police had not yet, four days after the discovery of the eyeglasses, connected him, through the eyeglasses, to the murder, then it seemed that he was safe. Nathan reported back to Richard—neither of them was under suspicion!

Nathan had no need for any more distractions; he had decided to apply to Harvard University law school, and that week he was taking the entrance examinations. He needed to concentrate—it would be inconvenient if there were any more questions from the police.

One week after the murder, on Wednesday, 28 May, Nathan took his law exams. On his way from the examination hall, he passed the office of Ernst Puttkammer, the popular thirty-four-year-old law professor. Puttkammer, despite his thinning blond hair and his steel-rimmed glasses, had a youthful appearance; students found him approachable and helpful, always willing to discuss the complexities of the law and to lend a sympathetic ear to any student struggling with his class work.

The door was ajar, and inside, Puttkammer was sitting at his desk, poring over a law journal. He glanced up as Nathan knocked and entered the room. Nathan was one of the brightest students in his class—a little eccentric, certainly, with his Nietzschean philosophy and his avowals that a superman need not regard the law; but, Puttkammer reflected as Nathan sat down, it was better to have an engaged student who talked too much than a student who talked not at all.

Nathan explained that he had wanted to discuss the legal ramifications of the murder of Bobby Franks; would the sentencing guidelines in Illinois necessarily mandate the death penalty for the kidnappers?

Suppose that the kidnappers had abducted Franks solely for the purpose of the ransom and suppose also that the murder had occurred accidentally, say, as the boy was being kidnapped. If there had been no intent to kill, would the kidnappers nevertheless receive the death penalty?

Puttkammer twirled his pencil in his hand, looking at Nathan from across the desk.

“Isn’t kidnapping,” Puttkammer replied, “a felony here in Illinois?”

“Yes,” answered Nathan.

Puttkammer laid the pencil on his desk and leaned back in his chair. “Supposing a man causes somebody’s death while he is intending to commit a felony? Is that murder or manslaughter?”

Nathan hesitated. Perhaps the kidnappers had intended only to rape Bobby. What then? “Suppose that the intent were simply to take improper liberties with this boy?” he replied. “I understand that that is a misdemeanor here in Illinois.”

“Well…you still are talking about someone who had an intent to kidnap at the time, so that it is none the less a case where the intent is to commit a felony, even though other crimes might enter into it which are simply misdemeanors.”

Puttkammer was pleased that Nathan was taking such an interest in the case. The majority of students seemed interested in the law only as a way to make a living; Nathan was one of those rare students with genuine intellectual curiosity.

Puttkammer confessed his ignorance of the case; he had been too preoccupied with keeping up with the decisions of the Illinois supreme court to spend much time reading the newspapers. But he had attended the Harvard School himself as a young boy, so, to that degree at least, the case was very interesting.

“I went to the school myself,” Nathan interrupted.

“Well, then, your interest perhaps is even greater than mine, because you went there so much more recently and must know many more of the people.”

Puttkammer had read in yesterday’s papers that the police had arrested Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher, as the leading suspect. That was unexpected—he had always thought of Mitchell as an outstanding teacher and a considerate and thoughtful person.

“Well, I don’t know—” Nathan interrupted again. “I am not so sure about that.”

All the boys knew, Nathan continued, that Mitchell was a homosexual; he was notorious for soliciting sex with the older boys at the Harvard School.

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes; he made that sort of a proposition to my brother; that is straight enough, isn’t it?”

The professor had picked up his pencil again and was drumming it lightly on the top of his desk, glancing at the clock, and starting to pick up a book. Nathan rose from his chair, saying, as he turned to leave the room, “I wouldn’t put it past that man, Mitchell; I would like to see them get that fellow….”

He stopped and turned back to Puttkammer as he reached the door; there was a slight smile on Nathan’s face. “But…I don’t say he did it.”
²⁶

T
HE NEXT DAY
—T
HURSDAY,
29 M
AY
—N
ATHAN
stayed home. The law exams were finished and that afternoon he was taking a group of schoolchildren from University High School on a bird-watching expedition to Wolf Lake.

He heard the bell at the front door but paid no attention; he was not expecting anyone to call. Two minutes later the maid was at his study door: three men, police officers, wished to speak with him.

How irritating! No doubt they wished to ask him more questions about his birding expeditions. But perhaps he could put them off; perhaps he could persuade them to come back at a more convenient time.

6 THE INTERROGATION

T
HURSDAY,
29 M
AY
1924–S
ATURDAY,
31 M
AY
1924

Since you have been in my custody have you been beaten by anybody?…Have any of the police or my assistants been rough, or anything of the kind?…You haven’t any bruises on your body, have you?
¹

Robert Crowe, state’s attorney for
Cook County, 1 June 1924

T
HE LARGE BLACK CAR MADE
its way slowly down Greenwood Avenue, halting occasionally and then again moving forward. Greenwood Avenue lay in the heart of Kenwood, one of Chicago’s most exclusive residential neighborhoods, and at that time of the day—two-thirty on a Thursday afternoon—the street was deserted; nobody observed the car as it slowly passed between the large mansions on either side.

The car finally stopped in front of 4754 Greenwood Avenue. Three men—evidently on an important mission—stepped out purposefully and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up at the house before them. It was, like all the houses on the street, a massive stone structure, three stories tall, set behind an imposing front gate.

Frank Johnson, a police sergeant with the Detective Bureau, led the way to the front door. A maid answered the bell. Yes, Nathan Leopold was at home; he would be down shortly.

Two minutes later the boy was at the door. They had been fortunate to find him at home: Nathan had been on his way out of the house; at three o’clock he was taking a class of schoolchildren on a birding expedition. As Johnson introduced himself, he noticed Nathan’s irritation at their presence. Nathan demanded to see their identification. The sergeant bristled at the arrogance in the boy’s voice.

“Let me see your credentials,” Nathan asked.

Johnson pulled his deputy’s star from his pocket: “I am a police officer,” he explained, “and they want you at the State’s Attorney’s office.” As the boy turned to get his jacket, Johnson dropped a hint about the purpose of his visit.

“By the way…do you wear glasses?”

“Yes.”

“Did you lose your glasses?”

“No.”

“Have you got them?”

“They are around here someplace.”

Johnson realized—too late—that it may have been a mistake to mention the eyeglasses to Nathan. He had thought to save time and have the boy bring along his glasses, but he could not allow Nathan to hunt through the house looking for them—the state’s attorney would be annoyed if they were delayed.

“Well, we have to go down to the State’s Attorney’s office.”

“I have got an appointment to teach a class about three o’clock.”

“Well, you will have to postpone that appointment.”

“Can’t you postpone this until some other time?”

“No, you have got to go down now.”
²

Nathan disappeared into the house, leaving Johnson waiting on the doorstep. He reappeared with his eldest brother, Michael, and they joined the three detectives—Frank Johnson, William Crot, and James Gortland—for the ride to the Loop.

In fact, Robert Crowe had requested that Nathan Leopold come to the Hotel LaSalle, a luxury hotel in the downtown business district. Crowe was being cautious; although his men had traced the eyeglasses found at the culvert back to Nathan, he had no reason to believe that the boy was involved in the murder of Bobby Franks and he had little desire to enmesh the Leopold family in the investigation. Media publicity had already confounded the detective work; if Nathan Leopold suddenly appeared at the Criminal Court Building, the newspapers might trumpet the boy as a suspect. Crowe merely wished to hear from Nathan Leopold an explanation for the presence of his eyeglasses near the corpse.

Nathan arrived at the Hotel LaSalle within the hour. Crowe was brisk; he was sure that this matter could be quickly cleared up. To a question about the eyeglasses, Nathan replied that he had possessed a pair of reading glasses for several months; they were, Nathan continued, at his home in the pocket of one of his suits. If it would give the state’s attorney peace of mind, he would gladly drive back to Kenwood and retrieve them.
³

Back at the Leopold home, Nathan made a show of searching his bedroom for his eyeglasses, but he now knew that the state’s attorney had one piece of evidence linking him to the murder of Bobby Franks. He soon abandoned the search; his eyeglass case stood on top of the bureau next to his bed, but the eyeglasses were missing. Nathan slipped the case into his coat pocket and went downstairs.
⁴

Robert Crowe now had reason to hold Nathan Leopold; his questioning of the boy was no longer casual. Later that evening the police searched Nathan’s bedroom and study. They turned up two items; neither connected Nathan to the murder, but both the gun—a Remington .32-caliber automatic repeater—and a letter from Nathan to a second boy, Richard Loeb, were unusual and unexpected.

Nathan had already told the detectives that he carried a shotgun on his birding expeditions, but the Remington was a handgun; it could not easily be used to shoot small birds at long distances. It was, moreover, an illegal firearm—Nathan had never applied for a permit for it.
⁵

The letter to Richard Loeb was also a puzzle. As Crowe read it over in his office, he could discern that the two boys had quarreled: Nathan accused Richard of treachery and threatened to kill him but then wrote of his desire to continue their friendship. The letter was alternately haughty and pleading, aggressive and submissive; Nathan was angry with Richard yet desperate that they remain friends. If Richard were to break off their friendship, Nathan concluded, “extreme care must be used. The motif of a falling out of cocksuckers would be sure to be popular, which is patently undesirable, and forms an unknown but unavoidable bond between us.”
⁶

There was no clue in the letter as to why Nathan and Richard had squabbled; nevertheless it was evident that the boys were lovers who had had a tiff. Perhaps they were part of a homosexual set at the University of Chicago and Nathan was anxious that Richard not publicly abandon and humiliate him in front of their friends.

Robert Crowe decided to move Nathan from the Hotel LaSalle to the Criminal Court Building. And he now also wanted to talk to Richard Loeb. Most probably the second boy—also the son of a wealthy and influential Chicago businessman—knew nothing of the murder, but Crowe could use Richard to draw out information about Nathan. Crowe had experience with this form of blackmail: one hint that he would reveal Richard’s homosexual secrets, and the boy would sing like the proverbial canary.

I
T WAS NOW ONE O’CLOCK
in the morning on Friday, 30 May. Crowe had held Nathan Leopold through Thursday evening but he still had no firm evidence that Leopold was connected to the killing of Bobby Franks. Yet he couldn’t simply release the boy—the gun, the eyeglasses, and the homosexual relationship with Loeb all pointed an accusing finger.

Nathan Leopold sat in a chair before him in his office; the assistant state’s attorneys, Joseph Savage and Milton Smith, sat slightly to one side, also facing the boy; the stenographer, Elbert Allen, had already begun taking down their conversation in shorthand.

The English teacher at the Harvard School, Mott Kirk Mitchell, was still the most likely suspect. What could Nathan tell them about Mitchell? Nathan had been a pupil at the Harvard School—was there anything to suggest that his former teacher was a homosexual?

“Have you ever heard any stories about Mitchell being queer?”

“Not definitely, no,” Nathan replied.

“Well, rumors?”

“I have heard some wild rumors, yes.”

“By queer, you mean what?”

“I mean sexually perverted.”

“And for how long a time have these rumors been floating around, to your knowledge?”

“Ever since I can remember, almost.”

“You have no knowledge as to whether or not the rumors are true?”

“No, sir.”
⁷

Clearly there was not much mileage to be gained from this line of inquiry; Nathan could not tell Crowe anything he did not already know; and in any case, whatever the boy told him would be hearsay, inadmissible in a court of law.

C
ROWE TRIED A DIFFERENT TACK.
Nathan had failed to find his eyeglasses in his bedroom—he now accepted that the glasses Crowe held out before him were his own. How, Crowe asked, had they come to be found near the body of Bobby Franks?

That was not difficult to explain. Nathan had been birding the weekend before the murder—that would be Saturday, 17 May—and his eyeglasses had probably fallen out of his pocket during the day. Nathan had driven out to Wolf Lake with his friend George Lewis around midday, and almost immediately they had spotted some unusual shorebirds resembling sandpipers. The birds flew west over the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and alighted in the swamps: “so we both ran over the railroad track into Hyde Lake, crossed on a little log which crosses the little channel there; and after searching around for some time in the swamp, caught up to the birds again; and I fired three shots at them…. The fourth shell jammed on me, and the birds flew away.”
⁸

No wonder his eyeglasses were found near the culvert. Only four days before the murder, he had been near that very spot in the chase after the birds. Crowe was impressed—it seemed an obvious explanation. And Nathan even had a witness who could corroborate his story: George Lewis would back up his account. But, Crowe asked, how close had he been to the culvert?

“How near did you come to the particular spot in this drain where the body was found? How near did you come to that particular spot Saturday?”

“I should say that I passed right over it, probably, about on a level with it. It was as near as…I could not exactly say; I should say probably within ten or twenty feet of it, anyhow.”
⁹

There was no reason not to believe the boy; he told his story in a breezily confident manner, calmly smoking a cigarette as he spoke, occasionally glancing at Crowe’s assistants at his side but otherwise looking steadily at the state’s attorney. But Crowe was persistent; for his own peace of mind, he wanted to be sure that Nathan was telling the truth. And Crowe had noticed that Nathan had never, in his account of the day out at Wolf Lake, explicitly said he had stumbled; nor, indeed, had he ever given any indication how the eyeglasses had fallen from his pocket.

Crowe held the glasses out before him, just eighteen inches from Nathan’s face.

“If you would put your glasses in your pocket, you would put them in what pocket?”

“My left breast pocket.”

“Left breast coat pocket?”

“Left breast coat pocket, or possibly left vest pocket.”

“Which, generally, would you do?”

“Generally I would put them in my coat.”

“Did you stumble or fall at this particular spot at any time?”

“I do not remember.”

“You do not remember that?”

“No, sir.”

Crowe wondered if Nathan’s account was accurate; the boy had been carrying a shotgun that Saturday afternoon out at Wolf Lake. Surely he would recall if he had stumbled while holding a gun? And if Nathan had dropped his eyeglasses by the culvert the previous Saturday—four days before Paul Korff had discovered them—they would have been spattered with mud after lying so long on the ground. But the eyeglasses had been conspicuously free of dirt, as though they had fallen to the ground just a few hours before their discovery. Was Nathan telling the truth when he said that he had lost his eyeglasses on the weekend? The state’s attorney motioned to Nathan to take hold of the eyeglasses: “Will you put those in your left breast coat pocket and run and bend, and see whether they will drop out?”

Nathan took a quick drag on his cigarette. He put it carefully in an ashtray on Crowe’s desk and reached out for the eyeglasses. He was now a little self-conscious: Crowe and the assistants were watching him intently. The stenographer had stopped scribbling in his notebook; he, too, looked at Nathan, watching the boy as Nathan stepped into the center of the room.

Nathan stepped out, took two paces, and fell forward to the ground, putting out his hands before him. The glasses remained in place, tucked securely in his breast pocket. He repeated the motion—still they remained there; they had barely moved.

“Now, you have fallen to the floor twice?”

“Yes.”

“The glasses are still in your pocket?”

“Yes, sir…. May I add that Saturday you must remember that I had a pair of large rubber boots that did not fit me, and therefore the probability of my stumbling was greater than if I had been just normal.”

“You had a gun in your hand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t remember falling?”

“No, sir.”
¹⁰

I
T WAS DISCONCERTING FOR
N
ATHAN
that the glasses had failed to behave as he had hoped. But no matter—he had an alibi for the day of the murder. He had gone, as usual, to his classes at the university that Wednesday morning, and around eleven o’clock he had picked up Richard Loeb to drive to the Loop to have lunch at the grill at Marshall Field’s department store. Nathan was eager to spend part of the afternoon in Lincoln Park; he had heard from a friend that a heron had been seen there. He had brought his field glasses—would Richard like to come along?

Richard Loeb could not care less about the heron—but although he himself had no interest in ornithology, he tolerated his friend’s hobby. Richard was more interested in drinking; there was a pint bottle of gin in Nathan’s car. And who knows? Perhaps they could pick up some girls in the park and have a good time.