For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (3 page)

Since the kidnappers were educated and literate, the murder was clearly not the work of the Black Hand kidnapping gangs linked to organized crime in Chicago. And the motive? The instructors at the Harvard School may have taught at one of the city’s most prestigious private schools, but they were paid startlingly low salaries: the typical teacher received less than $2,000 a year—the $10,000 ransom was thus equivalent to five years’ salary.
²⁹

As the police questioned the Harvard School staff throughout Friday, clues began to emerge to indicate the leading suspects. Walter Wilson, the mathematics teacher, had shown an unusual interest in the Franks children. Several months earlier, he had taken Bobby Franks and his younger brother, Jacob Jr., on an excursion to Riverside and had not returned with the boys until one o’clock in the morning. Was Wilson, the police wondered, a pedophile? He was single and had no girlfriend; he admitted to the police that he did not “know any young ladies around Chicago.” Wilson had visited the Franks home that Wednesday evening after Jacob Franks had phoned him with the news of Bobby’s disappearance; then, not long after Wilson had left the house, Flora Franks had received the first phone call from one of the kidnappers—had Wilson made that phone call?
³⁰

Both Richard Williams, the athletics coach, and Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher, were held in police cells for five hours that Friday; the police beat both men with a rubber hose to force them to confess. The detectives had searched Williams’s apartment and found four bottles of brown liquid. There had been copper-colored stains on Bobby’s face; could the liquid in Williams’s possession be the poison with which the murderer had killed the boy? Williams protested his innocence. The liquid, he explained, was merely a liniment which he used to rub on the boys’ muscles after strenuous exercises. But his explanation did him no good; the athletics instructor remained a leading suspect.
³¹

The revelation that Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher, had a semiannual mortgage payment due the day of the kidnapping hardened the suspicions of the police. When the detectives learned that the mortgage on Mitchell’s house was exactly $10,000—the kidnappers had demanded precisely that amount—they felt sure they had the murderer. Mitchell had taught at the Harvard School for fourteen years and was popular with the boys—perhaps, Charles Pence hinted, too popular. “He always impressed me as being a very fine man,” the principal informed the police. “He was interested in his work and his pupils. Why, whenever one of the boys was ill at home he always sent flowers.” The police dug up the sewers around Mitchell’s house in a search for Bobby’s clothes but found nothing; they questioned Mitchell again and again about the killing, but he was obdurate. He insisted on his innocence.
³²

Fortunately for the teachers, they all had alibis for the evening of Bobby’s disappearance. Mitchell’s neighbors could testify that he had been working in his garden at the time of the kidnapping; Richard Williams had had dinner at the Delphi Restaurant on 47th Street near Lake Park; and Walter Wilson’s landlady stated that her boarder had been home the entire evening. For friends, neighbors, and acquaintances it was impossible that any of the three should have killed the boy: the three teachers were conscientious, irreproachable, and considerate—perfect gentlemen.
³³

Robert Crowe, the state’s attorney for Cook County, was still suspicious. True, he had no evidence linking any of the teachers to the crime. The police held the suspects for four days and beat them regularly yet were unable to force a confession. The men’s lawyers, Charles Wharton and Otis Glenn, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on Monday, 26 May, alleging police brutality; Glenn pointed out that there was little justification for their clients’ continued detention. “The police have nothing on them and I don’t see why they should be held.” But Crowe insisted to the judge, Frederic Robert DeYoung, that he needed to keep them in the police cells: “We feel they can help us materially in solving the mystery surrounding this murder. It is true we have no warrants for these men, but we are very desirous of questioning them further and getting what aid we can from them.” Perhaps, Crowe slyly suggested to DeYoung, the judge would continue the case to enable the police to hold them for a few days more; but that, the judge replied, would run counter to the law. If Crowe did not have the evidence to charge the teachers with murder and kidnapping, then there was no basis for their continued detention. “Under the law,” DeYoung stated, “these men are entitled to their liberty. There is no escape from it.”
³⁴

Samuel Ettelson was furious that the killers might escape justice. The teachers were guilty—no doubt about it. In a rare display of anger, Ettelson was quoted by the Chicago newspapers as condemning their release—he asserted that at least two of the instructors had plotted to kidnap Bobby. “One instructor at the Harvard School,” Ettelson declared, “killed Robert Franks. Another wrote the polished letter demanding $10,000 from the family. The instructor who wrote the letter was a cultured man—a man with perverted tendencies—the man who committed the actual crime is a man who needed money and who had mercenary motives.”
³⁵

Ettelson’s outburst reflected the authorities’ frustration; one week after the murder, they had several clues, plenty of theories, dozens of leads, but no arrests. To their amazement, the police discovered that they even had a witness to the kidnapping: just after five o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, Irving Hartman, a ten-year-old pupil at the Harvard School, had been trailing thirty yards behind Bobby as the two boys walked south on Ellis Avenue. Irving’s attention had been momentarily distracted by some flowers in a yard; he stopped to look at them, and when he glanced up, Bobby had disappeared. At that moment, Irving reported, a gray Winton automobile moved away from the curb at the exact spot where he had last seen Bobby.
³⁶

Philip Van Devoorde, a chauffeur for the Fay family, had noticed a gray Winton, spattered with mud, outside the Harvard School on Tuesday, 20 May, the day before the kidnapping. Van Devoorde provided a detailed description of the car to the police: it was a 1919 model with a gray-black top; the driver had been between twenty-five and thirty years old; and in the front passenger seat there had been a second man, red-faced, with a pointed nose and wearing a tan cap. Equally significant, the same car was standing near the front entrance of the school on Wednesday at around five o’clock, almost exactly at the time of the kidnapping.
³⁷

Soon sightings of gray Wintons were pouring into police headquarters. One witness had seen a gray Winton at 113th Street and Michigan Avenue, not far from Wolf Lake, around eight o’clock on Wednesday evening. A man had been behind the steering wheel and a woman had sat in the front passenger seat, and in the back there had been a large bundle that might have been a huddled human form. William Lucht, a tax assessor, had seen a Winton, with two bundles in the rear seat, near Cottage Grove Avenue and 67th Street on Wednesday evening. Stanley Miner had reported a gray Winton on Lake Park Avenue and 48th Street. Frederick Eckstein, a watchman, had noticed a gray touring car—“old and decrepit looking”—on Railroad Avenue in the vicinity of Wolf Lake.
³⁸

Robert Crowe, the state’s attorney, attached especial significance to such accounts. Irving Hartman had no reason to deceive the police with his initial account of Bobby’s disappearance—Crowe could trust his veracity. And the Winton automobile was not a popular model; it would not be difficult to track down owners of Wintons in Chicago; moreover, it was a distinctive car: its boxy appearance, elongated hood, and capacious tonneau made the Winton instantly recognizable.
³⁹

Anyone with such a car was liable to be arrested on sight. Two days after the murder, the police took Adolph Papritz, a draftsman at Armour and Company who owned a gray Winton, to headquarters for questioning. Papritz was eventually cleared, but not before the newspapers had concluded that he was most probably the murderer. Nevertheless, he harbored no malice: “I expected it. Everybody with a gray car is being taken in.”
⁴⁰

Joe Klon had the misfortune to drive a gray Winton
and
to wear tortoiseshell glasses. Klon eventually decided to leave his car in his garage and walk to work—too many busybodies were turning him in to the police in hopes of winning the $5,000 reward offered by the family. “This has got to stop somewhere,” Klon protested. “I’m going to have that car painted black…. I’ve got to wear glasses to see, but I’m going to do away with those tortoise shell rims. This is the third time I’ve been arrested for murder in as many days.”
⁴¹

The state’s attorney, Robert Crowe, and the chief of police, Morgan Collins, had enlisted the aid of the press in advertising the clues as widely as possible. As a strategy, it was a double-edged sword: on the one hand it encouraged the public to report possible suspects to the police, but on the other hand it often involved the detectives in a fruitless pursuit of leads based on an entirely false premise. So it was with the gray Winton automobile. Collins’s men searched out gray Wintons in every corner of the city, hauled in their owners for questioning, and interviewed countless mechanics at car repair shops—but all for naught. Not a single gray Winton could be conclusively linked to the murder. Irving Hartman’s eyewitness account, Crowe wearily concluded, had been mistaken.

A
ND THE KIDNAPPERS’ MOTIVE?
The authorities had as little certainty about motive as they had regarding the clues. Could the killing of Bobby Franks be an act of revenge against the father for a business deal gone sour? Jacob Franks had a good reputation as an honest businessman, but it was difficult to believe that in his long life as a pawnbroker and realtor, often dealing with gamblers and pimps, he had never crossed someone. Indeed, Bobby’s death had sparked an avalanche of hateful, vengeful letters to the Franks household. One anonymous writer promised “to strangle you to death…. You shall suffer minute by minute, you lowdown skunk”; and this writer concluded by threatening to kill Franks’s daughter, Josephine. The threats against the Franks family might be the work of cranks, but they could not be taken lightly. Might the other children be at risk? No one was prepared to ignore the possibility that someone was planning a second act of violence against the family; and so, on Saturday, 24 May, a police guard, consisting of eight sergeants, was set up around the Franks home.
⁴²

Had Bobby been the victim of a child molester? Publicly, at least, the coroner’s physician, Joseph Springer, claimed that “young Franks had not been the victim of a pervert”; yet in his final report, Springer hinted that someone may have raped the boy: “the rectum was dilated and would admit easily one middle finger.”
⁴³
Chicago had no shortage of pedophiles; and everyone could recall the rape and murder of six-year-old Janet Wilkinson in 1919. Perhaps the abductor had molested Bobby and, fearing identification by the boy, had decided also to kill him.

Morgan Collins detailed a police squad to arrest N. C. Starren, a notorious pedophile who had taught at Lindblom High School; and on the Monday following the murder, Collins issued a general order to arrest all “persons known to be perverts, those who have ever before been charged with or convicted of any unnatural act.” It was a comprehensive roundup of pedophiles and homosexuals that included anyone either fined or sentenced in the criminal and municipal courts and anyone who had served a term for sexual deviancy in the state penitentiary. John Caverly, the chief justice of the Cook County Criminal Court, endorsed Collins’s draconian measures. The kidnapper, Caverly believed, was most probably a mental defective who had taken Bobby Franks in order to sexually abuse him. There were other possible motives, of course; perhaps it was a straightforward kidnapping case with the ransom as the principal object, or perhaps the kidnapper bore a grudge against Jacob Franks. But Caverly had little doubt that the abduction was the work of a child molester. “All evidence so far,” he pronounced in support of Collins, “points to the moron theory as the most plausible.”
⁴⁴

But would a pedophile attempt to extort a ransom from the boy’s father? Would a kidnapper interested in sexually abusing the boy also phone the boy’s parents, arrange for a cab to arrive at the Franks home, and mail a letter asking for a ransom? That was possible, of course—anything was possible—but in the opinion of the state’s attorney, Robert Crowe, it was highly unlikely: “It is not to be considered tenable that the boy’s attackers were perverts. They would not have bothered about sending letters and chauffeurs to complicate the matter.”
⁴⁵

Crowe believed the murder was the consequence of a ransom demand gone awry. The kidnappers had lured Bobby into an automobile (but how? did the boy know his abductors?); perhaps one kidnapper had sequestered the boy in a remote location (near Wolf Lake?) while the second kidnapper had stayed in Chicago to phone the parents and mail the letter. Bobby had probably recognized the captor who had killed him not long after the kidnapping; the second man, unaware that their victim was dead, had proceeded with the plan.

Crowe hinted that cocaine addicts, in the pay of a criminal mastermind, had abducted Bobby Franks. Never mind that there was no evidence to support this assertion—Crowe knew that, by linking the use of illegal drugs to the murder, he could legitimately call on outside assistance without losing face. If the resources of the Chicago police department were inadequate, perhaps federal agents from the Bureau of Investigation could find the culprits: “We shall, by a process of elimination, try to find some one user of drugs who was sufficiently well acquainted with the habits and movements of the Franks family to have contrived a kidnapping plot…. Dope will be found at the bottom of it all.”
⁴⁶