For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (19 page)

“Mr. Darrow is asleep.” In an effort to save her Sunday for herself and her husband, Ruby lied to the interlopers. “He isn’t well—he should not be disturbed.” But Loeb had already pushed his way past her. He now stood in the hallway; his companions had advanced forward behind him.

Clarence Darrow had made his way along the corridor and now suddenly appeared in the vestibule. His presence electrified the men standing before him. Jacob Loeb rushed across to shake his hand in greeting, and the three others clustered around Darrow in eager anticipation.

“Thank heavens you are here!…You must save our two boys.”

Darrow had known that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were in police custody, but he had been away from Chicago the previous day, getting into the city late on Saturday night. He had not yet heard that both Nathan and Richard had confessed. Darrow, like everyone else in Chicago who knew the families, found it difficult to believe that they were the murderers.

“But they are not guilty…. Their innocence should not be difficult to prove.”

“No, no!” Loeb cried out in frustration. “Dickie and Babe confessed….”

“Then what can I do?”

“Save their lives! Get them a life sentence instead of a death sentence. That’s all we ask of you.” Jacob Loeb clutched at the attorney’s arm. “Money’s no object. We’ll pay you anything you ask. Only for God’s sake, don’t let them be hung.”
²⁴

W
HILE
J
ACOB
L
OEB WAS IMPLORING
Clarence Darrow to save them from the gallows, Richard and Nathan were having breakfast in Daly’s Restaurant on 63rd Street. Richard had had another restless night in the prison cell: his eyes were puffy and his face was pale and drawn. He sipped a cup of black coffee moodily—his food lay on his plate, untouched.

Richard stared glumly across the table at Nathan. It irritated him that the other boy was always so chipper; even now, Nathan was laughing and joking, bantering with the police escort, flirting with the blond waitress, and asking for a second plate of scrambled eggs. One would have thought Nathan had not a care in the world.

The chief of detectives, Michael Hughes, had finished his own breakfast, and now he was looking apprehensively at the crowd gathering outside the restaurant—news had obviously spread through the neighborhood that the police had brought Leopold and Loeb there. He looked at his watch—it was already nine-thirty, and Robert Crowe wanted the boys back at the Criminal Court Building by noon. It was time to go. Nathan was now munching a jelly doughnut and drinking a cup of coffee; as soon as he had finished, Hughes announced, they would be on their way.
²⁵

Crowe had asked Hughes to search for the two pieces of evidence that had eluded the police the previous day: the Underwood typewriter, thrown into the harbor at Jackson Park; and the belt belonging to Bobby Franks, hidden in grass near Hessville. It was only a short drive from the restaurant across to Jackson Park, and Hughes was optimistic that they would pick up the typewriter that morning. He had already directed police divers to the spot where Nathan had thrown it; the divers would be waiting for them at the harbor.

Three thousand spectators waited at the outer edge of the harbor. The crowd stirred when it saw the long cavalcade of black cars pull up; then, as Nathan Leopold stepped out of one car, followed by Richard Loeb from a second car, a roar of recognition flashed around the crowd, a deafening cheer as everyone pointed and waved and shouted at the two murderers.
²⁶

Nathan leaned over the parapet. He had thrown the typewriter as far as possible—he guessed that it had landed about fifteen feet from the bridge. He pointed to the spot. The diver disappeared into the water, and the crowd waited, but the thick mud at the bottom of the harbor was impenetrable.

Michael Hughes signaled to Walter Sullivan, a reporter for the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, and to Morrow Krum of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. The police cars would leave shortly for the drive to Hessville; would they like to ride in the cars with the two prisoners?

The relationship between the police and journalists in Chicago during the 1920s was one of mutual dependence. The reporters would write favorably of the police department in its war against crime, and in return the police would grant access to criminals, supply the newspapers with valuable information, and leak important tidbits about sensational trials. Hughes had known Sullivan and Krum, both veteran journalists, for many years. They were reliable allies who could be trusted to write well of his men.

Michael Hughes knew also that in allowing the reporters access to Nathan and Richard, he might help the two prisoners convict themselves in the court of public opinion. Nathan and Richard had confessed, but those confessions might yet be repudiated. However, if they were to talk of the murder to the reporters, and if their remarks were to be printed in the newspapers, how could their guilt be denied? Nathan and Richard had not yet expressed any remorse for the murder or any regret for the pain they had caused the Franks family. They seemed, rather, to have adopted a cynical, callous attitude toward the killing, as though it were morally inconsequential; all the better, therefore, if their comments about the murder were reported in the newspapers for public consumption.

On the ride to Hessville, a journey of approximately forty minutes, Walter Sullivan sat with Nathan in one car while Morrow Krum traveled with Richard in the other car. It was not long before both prisoners were gossiping about the crime, revealing details about themselves that blackened them irretrievably when Chicagoans opened their newspapers the following day.

A
S THE CAR MADE ITS
way out of the park, the bell clanging to clear a path through the crowd of onlookers trying to peer into the car window, Walter Sullivan asked Nathan about the murder. Whose idea had it been? And who had wielded the chisel to strike the deathblows? Had Nathan initiated the plan, or had it been Richard’s idea?

The mere mention of Richard Loeb was sufficient to send Nathan into a tantrum of anger and indignation. He was still furious that Richard had blamed him for the murder—Richard’s treason had been a cruel blow to Nathan’s love. “It was all Loeb’s idea,” Nathan replied, bitterly, “he planned the kidnaping.”

The car had now left Jackson Park and was threading its way through the streets of the South Side, out toward the Michigan City road.

“It was Loeb…who enticed the boy into the car and it was Loeb who struck him on the head the next instant.” Nathan played nervously with the unlit cigarette in his hand, turning it through his fingers. “I could not—it would have been physically impossible for me to have struck the blow that killed Robert Franks. Loeb knows this too…. My repugnance to violence is such that I could not have killed Robert…. He thinks that by proving me the actual slayer he will eventually go free.”

Nathan paused; he leaned his elbow against the car window and stared at the houses as they passed. It had been a bitter blow, he acknowledged, knowing that Richard was willing to sacrifice him to preserve his own skin.

But his mood lasted only a minute. They passed the South Shore Country Club and then a golf course—what a ridiculous game, Nathan remarked!—and Nathan was soon his old self again, joking and bantering with the reporter. He leaned over and touched Sullivan lightly on the knee and sat back in his seat with a grin on his face, “Now you’re contaminated,” he joked. “You’ve been touched by a murderer.”

Sullivan smiled politely. He wondered how Nathan felt about the killing. Granted that Richard had struck Bobby with the chisel, nevertheless, he asked, how had Nathan felt about the boy’s death?

It didn’t concern him, Nathan replied. He had no moral beliefs and religion meant nothing to him: he was an atheist. Whatever served an individual’s purpose—that was the best guide to conduct. In his case, well, he was an intellectual: his participation in the killing had been akin to the desire of the scientist to experiment. They had killed Bobby Franks as an experiment; Nathan had wanted to experience the sensation of murdering another human being. It was that simple.

“A thirst for knowledge,” he explained to Sullivan, providing a helpful analogy to the murder of Bobby Franks, “is highly commendable, no matter what extreme pain or injury it may inflict upon others. A 6-year-old-boy is justified in pulling the wings from a fly, if by so doing he learns that without wings the fly is helpless.”
²⁷

I
N THE OTHER CAR,
Richard Loeb, sitting in the rear seat beside Morrow Krum, talked of his plans after prison; he would serve some time, of course, but eventually he would get out, and then he would make a fresh start. “I’ll spend a few years in jail and I’ll be released. I’ll come out to a new life. I’ll go to work and I’ll work hard and I’ll amount to something—have a career.”

“But you have taken a life,” one of the detectives interrupted, in surprise. “You’ve killed a boy. The best you could possibly expect would be a life sentence to an insane asylum.”

Richard’s hands fluttered nervously; he searched his pockets for his cigarette case. The loss of his liberty was an unpleasant thought, and confinement in an asylum seemed especially grim. Krum asked him a question about Nathan Leopold; Richard answered with a sense of relief at the change of subject.

“Of course he is smart. He is one of the smartest and best educated men I know.”

Had Nathan influenced Richard? Had Nathan controlled Richard and led him into the crime?

“Well, I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Richard paused to reflect on the question. “Perhaps he did dominate me…. Leopold suggested the whole thing…. I went along with him…. Well it was sort of that way after all…. I guess I yessed Babe a lot.”

What was their relationship? The reporter pressed Richard, fishing for a headline for tomorrow’s paper. How close was Richard to Nathan? Did Richard have many girlfriends at the university?

“Girls? Sure I like girls. I was out with a girl on Friday night after the affair….”

“Was Babe a pervert?” Krum interrupted suddenly, using the family nickname for Nathan Leopold.

Richard shook his head indecisively, suddenly cautious about saying too much. “I don’t know anything about that.”
²⁸

Twenty minutes later, the cars had reached the village of Hessville. It was only another mile before they came to the spot where the police anticipated finding Bobby Franks’s belt. Richard eventually found it, buried under some dirt, in the field adjacent to the copse. It still seemed almost new, a blue belt, with thin red and yellow stripes running down the center and a gold-plated buckle.
²⁹

T
HAT
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON, AROUND TWO-THIRTY,
Nathan Leopold Sr. met with Robert Crowe at the Criminal Court Building. He was concerned, he told the state’s attorney, that his son had confessed under duress. He accepted Crowe’s assurances that there had been no beatings, but perhaps the detectives had intimidated Nathan in some other way. Nathan had been in custody since Thursday afternon—three full days—without access to a lawyer; how could the family be certain that he had received fair treatment?

Crowe could see the agitation on the old man’s face. His visitor seemed nervous and confused, and considerably more deferential than Crowe had anticipated. He observed the old man closely. Nathan Leopold Sr.—with his thick salt-and-pepper mustache, his jowly neck and large ears, his watery eyes behind large rimless eyeglasses—bore little resemblance to his son. There was, Crowe decided, scarcely the faintest similarity between father and son.

“Just sit down, Mr. Leopold; I will have the boy brought in.”

Nathan seemed in good health; he entered the room confidently and shook his father’s hand.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Hello, my son.” The old man turned to the state’s attorney. “Could I talk to this boy myself, privately?…”

“Just at this particular time I cannot do it.”

“Is that true, Mr. Crowe, that a parent may not have the opportunity to talk to his child?”

“I want to give you an opportunity to…ease your mind as to the boy’s well-being…. He is not being abused…but at this particular time I do not think it is proper for me to permit [the] two of you to talk together.”

“Mr. Crowe, he may tell me things in my presence that he might be diffident about telling when others are present. In other words, if I ask him of the treatment he got, he might hesitate to answer when these people around here have been working on him, and he might tell me things that might be private in that respect…. Of course, you realize, I suppose…it is the duty of a parent to stand by his child.”

“Absolutely; and it would not be natural that you did not.”

“I want him to get every opportunity that everybody else would get under similar circumstances. If he is entitled to counsel, he should have it. If it is not proper for him to talk without counsel, then my advice to him would be not to talk. Is that correct? That is what you would tell a son, isn’t it?…In other words, if you have constitutional rights, they should be accorded you.”

But the state’s attorney would not be moved. There was no legal requirement that he allow father and son to converse in private. He would release Nathan only after a writ of habeas corpus had been filed, and that would not happen until tomorrow morning, when the courts opened.

The interview was over, Crowe announced. The old man would have to leave his office. Nathan Leopold Sr. squeezed his son’s hand for a brief moment, retrieved his coat and hat from an adjacent chair, and without a word to Crowe, left the room.
³⁰

C
ROWE WAS IMPATIENT TO BEGIN
the examination. That morning he had found three psychiatrists willing to join the prosecution. He had asked them to come to the Criminal Court Building to examine Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.