For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (21 page)

It was, Crowe realized, a serious difficulty for the prosecution. The boys were rational and coherent—they displayed no signs of mental illness—yet they had committed an apparently irrational act. Indeed, the murder seemed to pass so far beyond the expected course of events as to force the conclusion that the perpetrators were insane. No matter how hard one looked, it was impossible to discover a rational motive for the killing of Bobby Franks.

N
EITHER
L
EOPOLD NOR
L
OEB COULD
adequately explain the murder; yet both willingly admitted their responsibility. There was no equivocation or ambiguity in this regard, at least: both had known, when they killed Bobby, that murder was wrong and both admitted that they could distinguish right from wrong.

Archibald Church had said little so far; now he turned to Nathan to ask him about his sense of criminal responsibility for the killing.

“Mr. Leopold, when you made this plan to do the killing, you understood perfectly your responsibilities in the matter?”

“My answer is, yes, sir.”

“The criminal act for which certain penalties were provided, and all that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Church returned briefly to the question of motive. Perhaps, he suggested, they had wanted to demonstrate their superiority over the Chicago police.

“Were you actuated by a motive to put over some such thing as this without being detected, as it were, to put one over on the detective forces?”

“That I am sure was a large part of Mr. Loeb’s attitude, and I think it was a small part of mine. Sort of egotism.”
⁴⁰

Robert Crowe brought the questioning back to the boys’ sense of responsibility; he turned, this time, to Richard Loeb.

“Mr. Loeb, do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You think you did the right thing in this particular matter?”

“In the Franks case?”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely not.”

“And you know it is wrong to kidnap a boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is your idea about right or wrong of getting a boy and kidnaping him?”

“It is wrong, sir.”

“You know the consequence of this act, don’t you?”

“Yes.”
⁴¹

The state’s attorney could not have hoped for a more satisfying answer. Crowe glanced across at the stenographer as if to assure himself that Loeb’s answers had been correctly recorded. Both prisoners had admitted their legal responsibility for the murder! No defense attorney in Chicago could get around that admission! How could they plead insanity now?

As Crowe reflected on his good fortune in having Leopold and Loeb in custody without interference from defense lawyers, William Krohn continued to interrogate Loeb. Krohn was well versed in legal procedure; he, too, could scarcely believe that Leopold and Loeb had so effectively sabotaged their last line of defense: by admitting legal responsibility, they had denied their lawyers any chance of saving them from the gallows.

“Had you,” Krohn asked Loeb, “any feeling of detracting or giving up the scheme?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so.”

15.
INSIDE THE STATE’S ATTORNEY’S OFFICE.
On Saturday, 31 May 1924, Robert Crowe and members of his staff posed with Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in the office of the state’s attorney on the third floor of the Criminal Court Building. Seated (from left): Richard Loeb, John Sbarbaro, Robert Crowe, Nathan Leopold, and Joseph Savage.

“You always felt as if you were going to go right through with it?”

“Yes, sir…. Yes, I really think I did.”

“Didn’t want to be called a quitter?”

“Yes, that’s just it. I have always hated anybody that was a coward.”

“You realize now, though, that you had the power to refrain from doing it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You could have refrained from doing a wrong thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You had the power of will and choice to decide whether you would do it or not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You had that all the time?”

“Yes, sir….”

“You had full control of doing it?”

“Yes, sir.”
⁴²

I
T WAS ALMOST SIX O’CLOCK—TIME,
Crowe decided, to conclude the examination. He had obtained everything that he might reasonably have expected. Both Leopold and Loeb had confessed their guilt, a second time, before reputable witnesses, and both had admitted their legal responsibility for the murder; neither had attempted to deny culpability.

The state’s psychiatrists had had ample opportunity to evaluate the two prisoners. All three psychiatrists agreed that neither Nathan nor Richard had shown even the slightest sign of mental illness. Quite the opposite: throughout the interview, the boys had been self-possessed, coherent, rational, and lucid. There was no evidence of insanity.

Crowe had learned that the families of the boys had hired Clarence Darrow that morning as the defense attorney. Crowe had not forgotten how Darrow had humiliated him, the previous year, in the trial of Fred Lundin, a prominent Republican politician, on charges of corruption. Now he would exact his revenge; he had a hanging case here: both Leopold and Loeb were going to the gallows, and even that old scoundrel Clarence Darrow—one of Crowe’s most bitter enemies—would not be able to save them from the noose.

It would be an epic battle. Darrow and Crowe were polar opposites. Darrow was a determinist. One’s actions, Darrow believed, were a consequence of forces that compelled each individual to behave in a certain manner. The criminal did not freely choose wrongdoing; rather, factors outside his or her conscious control acted to determine criminal behavior. There was no such thing as individual responsibility. Imprisonment was futile and even counterproductive; it served no purpose either as a deterrent or as a punishment.

Such views were anathema to Robert Crowe. Could any philosophy be more destructive of social harmony than Darrow’s? The murder rate in Chicago was higher than it had ever been, yet Darrow would do away with punishment! Crime, Crowe believed, would decline only through the more rigorous application of the law. Criminals were fully responsible for their actions and should be treated accordingly—it was foolishness to absolve them of blame for their misdeeds.

The trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb would be a contest between two charismatic individuals—Darrow, who had built his reputation by defending unpopular causes; and Crowe, the most competent and energetic state’s attorney in a generation. And there would be a second contest, a contest between opposing philosophies of crime and punishment. Which one would triumph?

PART TWO

THE ATTORNEYS

8 CLARENCE DARROW

The distinguished gentleman whose profession it is to protect murder in Cook County, and concerning whose health thieves inquire before they go to commit crime, has seen fit to abuse the State’s Attorney’s office…. He has even objected to the State’s Attorney referring to two self-confessed murderers, who have pleaded guilty to two capital offenses, as criminals.
¹

Robert Crowe, 26 August 1924

I assume you are intending to practise law when you finish your college-course. It is a bum profession, as generally practised. It is utterly devoid of idealism, and almost poverty-stricken as to any real ideas. Of course, however, there is a lot of chance to do some good in this profession if you can get along without making money your ambition. If you enter the field of law with the idea of helping those who need it most you will have a very interesting life, full of hard work and misunderstandings and misrepresentations,—but you will be able to do something toward alleviating the miseries and sorrows of unfortunates.
²

Clarence Darrow, 4 November 1933

E
UGENE
P
RENDERGAST HAD PURCHASED
the gun earlier that day. Now, as he crossed Ogden Avenue and continued past the Third Presbyterian Church on his right, he touched it once again through the thin lining of his jacket pocket. It was, in 1893, one of the most reliable pistols that one could buy: a Harrington and Richardson top-break .38-caliber revolver. He had carefully oiled it just a few hours earlier. As he turned down Ashland Avenue, toward the mayor’s residence, Prendergast felt satisfied that very soon he would have won his revenge for the slights he had endured.
³

16.
CLARENCE DARROW.
In 1887 Darrow moved with his wife and infant son from his hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio, to Chicago. He won notoriety and fame as an attorney for the labor movement, successfully defending members of the American Railway Union and the Western Federation of Miners.

He had worked hard for the mayor’s reelection the previous April. The mayor, Carter Harrison, had promised to appoint him corporation counsel; but all his letters to the mayor’s office had gone unanswered. Prendergast had no legal training—indeed, he had no qualifications beyond high school—but that was surely irrelevant. He had never even met the mayor; but that too was inconsequential. His plans for the city—ambitious, clear-sighted plans that envisaged the construction of a new streetcar system—were ample qualification for the position of corporation counsel, and yet the mayor had continued to insult him by ignoring his many petitions.
⁴

The maid, Mary Hansen, answered the doorbell and ushered the visitor into the hallway. Prendergast waited ten minutes until, shortly after eight o’clock, Harrison, a large man with an affable manner and a distinctive white beard, appeared in the vestibule. Harrison was in a good mood; he had spoken earlier that day at a public meeting to mark the closing of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and his audience had responded enthusiastically, praising his administration for the success of the event.
⁵

The two men argued briefly. As Prendergast began to press his demands, Harrison realized that it may have been a mistake to have dispensed with his police bodyguard.

“I tell you,” he declared to his visitor, with exasperation in his voice, “I won’t do it.”

He turned slightly, as though to end their conversation; but before Harrison could step away, Prendergast had pushed the barrel of his revolver against the mayor’s waistcoat. His first bullet struck Harrison in the abdomen; his second bullet tore through the mayor’s chest, passing slightly above his heart; and the third bullet, fired as Harrison lay bleeding on the ground, wounded him in the left hand.
⁶

At his trial later that year, Prendergast, a twenty-five-year-old Irishman with a nervous, agitated manner and no visible means of support, boasted that his action had saved Chicago from certain disaster. He had no regrets over Harrison’s death, he explained to the court; the killing had been justified and, just as soon as everyone realized the benefits that would accrue from the mayor’s demise, he, Prendergast, would be released from prison and lauded as a hero.
⁷

His lawyer’s plea was not guilty by reason of insanity. The psychiatrists for the defense explained the murder as a consequence of hereditary insanity—several of Prendergast’s relatives had suffered from mental illness. But on 29 December 1893 the jury, after deliberating for less than one hour, returned to the courtroom to declare the defendant guilty and to fix the punishment as death by hanging.
⁸

Clarence Darrow was one of several lawyers in Chicago convinced that Prendergast had suffered from a miscarriage of justice. The trial, Darrow believed, had been a travesty. At least one juror knew the mayor as a friend and had concealed that fact from the court. On one occasion, the bailiffs, escorting the jurors to a polling station to vote in the fall elections, had allowed the twelve jurymen to mingle with members of the public. And Prendergast, despite the guilty verdict, seemed, by his eccentric behavior during the trial, oblivious of the gravity of his situation and incapable of distinguishing right from wrong.
⁹

D
ARROW HAD MOVED FROM
A
SHTABULA,
Ohio, to Chicago with his first wife, Jessie, and their infant son, Paul, in 1887. He was twenty-nine years old when he made the move, broad-shouldered, taller than the average man, with a physical presence embodying a determination and ambition that would not be easily turned aside. Nothing in his expression betrayed any hint of self-doubt; nothing in his eyes—brown eyes flecked with green—ever revealed any hesitancy; nothing in his face, with its broad brow and cleft chin, showed anything other than certitude. Even as a young man, Darrow had a presence that commanded respect; and, as he grew into middle age, his ability in the courtroom endowed him with a reputation as an attorney sui generis; there was no one, among the lawyers of the Chicago bar, who could rival Darrow.
¹⁰

Few Chicagoans were as gregarious as Clarence Darrow, and not long after moving to the city Darrow joined the Sunset Club, a debating society for radicals and progressives. He quickly made his mark as a public speaker, participating in discussions on such topics as land taxation and political economy. Darrow had dabbled in Democratic Party politics back in Ohio—he had served as secretary of the Ashtabula County Democratic Convention and had been a delegate to the 1885 state convention at Columbus—and now, in Chicago, he became an active party member, speaking at election meetings, hobnobbing with local politicians, and gradually winning a reputation as an effective speaker and a capable organizer.

He was a disciple of Henry George—Darrow considered
Progress and Poverty
one of the most important and influential books of the time—and, in Chicago, he joined the Single Tax Club, a group of zealots dedicated to the proposition that a tax on the increase in the value of land would eliminate economic inequality. He opposed the tariff and first attracted public attention as a speaker for the Tariff Reform Convention, a group committed to the principles of free trade.
¹¹

But no single cause was as important to Darrow as the campaign to free the Haymarket prisoners. On 4 May 1886, during a meeting of anarchists in the Haymarket on West Randolph Street, a bomb had exploded, killing one policeman and injuring several others. The police had fired into the crowd gathered around the speakers’ platform; gunfire had been exchanged between the anarchists and the police; and by the end of the evening, eight more policemen lay dead. Several protesters also died that day, killed by police bullets, but in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, the Chicago newspapers pinned the blame for the violence on the leaders of Chicago’s anarchist movement.
¹²

The authorities were quick to take their revenge. At the trial of eight anarchists for murder, the state’s attorney was unable to produce any evidence that directly connected the defendants to the Haymarket bombing. But the accused were prominent speakers and writers, and the prosecution, quoting liberally from the anarchist newspapers, was able to convince the jury of the defendants’ guilt. Four anarchists died on the scaffold in the Cook County jail; one committed suicide in his cell; and three others received long prison sentences.
¹³

Police repression fell heavily on the Chicago labor movement in the months after the Haymarket bombing, but by the end of 1886 the socialist societies and trade unions had regrouped around the campaign for a pardon for the three surviving Haymarket prisoners. Darrow joined the Amnesty Association in 1887, not long after he first arrived in Chicago, and he was quick to take the lead in the organization, traveling frequently to Springfield to petition the governor of Illinois for clemency for the prisoners. The authorities had rushed the anarchists to trial in an atmosphere of hysteria and paranoia, Darrow believed; the newspapers had stoked a vengeful campaign; and the judge and jury had been prejudiced against the defendants from the outset.

Darrow’s efforts were eventually successful—in 1893, the governor, citing irregularities in the trial, granted the three prisoners a pardon.
¹⁴

It was the first of many victories in Darrow’s lifelong campaign on behalf of the defenseless. The judicial system, Darrow believed, was an institution dedicated to the interests of the capitalist class; it acted in concert with the police and other authorities to deny the poor their constitutional rights. The courts were inherently prejudiced against the impoverished and the outcast, and radical lawyers, such as himself, had an obligation to contest all judgments, at least judgments against their clients, as illegitimate and unjust.

Darrow had an especial hatred of the death penalty as a barbaric anachronism that had no place in American society. Capital punishment, he believed, was a relic of a bygone era; the death penalty was a cruel, brutal, purposeless punishment that failed to deter criminals. It was legal murder by the state, Darrow claimed, and, more often than not, it caught innocent persons in its maw.
¹⁵

T
HE
C
OOK
C
OUNTY
C
RIMINAL
C
OURT
had scheduled the execution of Eugene Prendergast for Friday, 23 March 1894. But Clarence Darrow had taken an interest in the case, and he intended to save Prendergast from the scaffold. Prendergast was obviously insane; his legal counsel in the original trial had been woefully inadequate; and public feeling toward the defendant had been unremittingly hostile. It would not be right, it would not be just, to stand idly by and let the hangman fasten his noose around the neck of a man so clearly incapable of distinguishing right from wrong.

Prendergast was fortunate to have obtained such a capable lawyer. Darrow was not the most experienced lawyer in Cook County—he had had only limited practice before the Criminal Court in the years since he had moved to Chicago—but he was infinitely resourceful. Darrow knew the law in its intricacy and its complexity and, like every conscientious lawyer, he had no scruples in exploiting the law in the attempt to save his client’s life.

Darrow appealed first to the Illinois supreme court for a supersedeas; but the court rejected his petition—it would not stay the decision of the lower court.

Darrow next appealed to the United States District Court for a writ of habeas corpus. The Cook County Criminal Court, Darrow argued, had deprived Prendergast of due process, and the federal court should intervene to safeguard the defendant’s constitutional rights. But the District Court refused Darrow also; it was not a matter, the justices declared, that fell within the court’s jurisdiction.
¹⁶

Might the governor of Illinois grant executive clemency? John Altgeld, the governor, was traveling outside the state, and in his stead the lieutenant governor, John B. Gill, heard Darrow’s petition. But Gill, a politician known for his conservative views, was too canny to risk his career for an unpopular cause—he too rejected Darrow’s appeal.
¹⁷

Any other man might have given up hope; but Darrow was too tenacious, too persistent, to abandon Prendergast to the scaffold so easily. He had discovered an obscure clause, buried deep within the Illinois criminal code, that might yet save Prendergast’s life. It had lain unnoticed, unseen, and unremarked, for decades; only Darrow’s patient reading of the statutes had brought it to light. Now he intended to use it to his advantage.