For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (32 page)

Richard remained lying on the bed for an hour, breathing into the apparatus, staring up at the ceiling. The scientists waited expectantly and then measured his body temperature, pulse, respiration, and blood pressure. Richard’s metabolic rate—minus seventeen percent—was unusually low, so low that it could be explained, according to Bowman, only by the assumption of glandular dysfunction.
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Later that morning, Bowman and Hulbert repeated the procedure with Nathan. He too lay supine on the bed for one hour, while they waited for the result. But Nathan’s measurements fell within the expected range; his metabolic rate—minus five percent—was slightly lower than expected for a boy of his height and weight but not abnormally so.
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Other tests followed. On the following Monday, Bowman and Hulbert used a plethysmograph, an instrument for measuring variations in blood volume during emotional stimulation, to record the emotional capacity of Nathan and Richard. Both boys were intellectually precocious, far superior to their peers. Could the same be said for their emotional ability, or were they emotionally stunted? Had an inability to experience emotions contributed to their desire to murder another human being?
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On Tuesday, 17 June, technicians delivered a Victor X-ray machine to the jail. Edward Blaine, a researcher from the National Pathological Laboratory, and Carl Darnell and Edward Philleo, experts in X-ray photography at the Victor X-ray Corporation, were present, hired by the defense to witness the examinations.
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Might X-ray images reveal physical pathology in Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold? If so, they would constitute scientific evidence that the state’s attorney would find hard to dismiss. Ever since the turn of the twentieth century, judges had granted X-rays a privileged position as courtroom evidence: the Illinois supreme court, for example, had ruled in 1905 that X-rays were admissible. Other forms of visual representation—diagrams, maps, drawings, photographs—were deemed only illustrative of the testimony of a witness and, as such, had no independent evidentiary value. X-rays were different: they seemed to allow direct access to facts that might otherwise be disputed and, as a consequence, their status in the American courtroom went unchallenged.
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It was necessary, nevertheless, to demonstrate to the court that the X-rays had been produced faithfully and accurately. As the scientists took X-ray images of Nathan and Richard, therefore, Harold Hulbert carefully examined each structure directly through a fluoroscope, comparing the image on the fluorescent screen with the X-ray image, ensuring also that each image carried the appropriate identification marks.
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Nothing was amiss in Richard Loeb’s X-rays. His cranial bone structure—in density and thickness—was about as normal as it could be, as were his facial bones. X-rays of the thorax showed that his heart was slightly more centered that one might expect, but the difference had no pathological significance; and the bones of the forearms, wrists, hands, and fingers showed no symptoms of disease.
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Nathan Leopold also seemed healthy. X-rays of the thorax revealed nothing unusual. His forearms, wrists, hands, and fingers were normal, and his facial bones and the bones and joints of the upper spine showed no irregularity. But Hulbert could see that some of the suture lines in Nathan’s skull were obliterated, indicating osteosclerosis, or hardening of the cartilage. Osteosclerosis in the skull typically occurred in middle age, between ages thirty and forty-five—it rarely occurred in anyone nineteen years old. Hulbert also noticed, as he studied the X-ray more closely, that the pineal gland, an endocrine gland located at the base of the skull, had prematurely hardened and calcified. This, too, was unexpected. The calcification of the pineal gland customarily took place at thirty years. The pineal gland had several functions, including the inhibition, in Hulbert’s words, of “the mental phase of one’s sex life.” Its premature calcification in Nathan Leopold surely indicated glandular dysfunction, with implications for his sexual development.
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T
HE DISCOVERY OF PATHOLOGICAL INDICATIONS
in both Nathan and Richard was welcome news for the defense, but it did little to ease a growing concern that the scientific results would not easily translate into an argument sufficiently lucid to persuade a jury that the boys were mentally diseased. Richard Loeb had an abnormally low metabolism and Nathan Leopold had a pineal gland that had prematurely calcified, but so what? Even if the expert witnesses could prove that these pathologies did in fact exist, would a jury be sufficiently knowledgeable to understand the science? And how could the defense convince the jury that the physical abnormalities indicated glandular disorders, which had in turn caused mental illness in Richard and Nathan? And what was the nature of that mental illness? How had it contributed to the murder of Bobby Franks? The chain of cause and effect would be difficult to prove and, under withering cross-examination from the state’s attorney, difficult to maintain.
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Nor did it help matters that, one week into the examination, Nathan resented the scientists’ control over his body and detested the impression conveyed by the Chicago newspapers that he was mentally ill. On 18 June Nathan hinted to a reporter from the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
that he would repudiate his confession and thereby force the state’s attorney to prove that he had committed murder. He was not insane, Nathan protested to the reporter; if he were insane, how would he be able to discuss the details of his defense? “I’m not insane,” he remarked to the journalist, “and I’m not going to be made to appear insane. I’m sane—as sane as you are.” For someone who imagined himself a genius, it was doubly humiliating: the examinations in the Cook County jail, the subject of much speculation in the newspaper columns, had given the impression both that he was mentally ill and that he was merely an experimental object, a plaything of the scientists. “From reading the newspapers,” he complained, “I would infer that Loeb and I are being trained like fleas to jump through hoops just to entertain the curious.”
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Nathan had encouraged the public perception that he was a precocious intellectual, far in advance of his years. Yet he had failed to foresee that his claim to be a genius would, in the public mind, at least, confer on him the role of mastermind in the murder of Bobby Franks. Nathan had frequently claimed to be extraordinarily clever and astute—surely, therefore, he was responsible for inveigling Richard Loeb into a complex scheme that had ended in the death of their victim. “I’ve been pictured in the public mind as the Svengali, the man with the hypnotic eye, the master mind and the brains,” Nathan protested bitterly to a reporter from the
Chicago Evening Post
. “I’ve been made out the man who schemed, planned and executed this thing. I’ve been described as the devil incarnate. But Dicky Loeb, on the other hand, seems to have won the sympathy of the public.”
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Toward the end of June the atmosphere within the jail tightened; it seemed as if all Chicago had focused its gaze on the dilapidated, shabby gray stucco building on Dearborn Street. The warden, Wesley Westbrook, resented the attention paid to his two celebrity prisoners and grumbled at the demands that their care placed on his staff. Westbrook had learned that a small group of prisoners planned a jailbreak—the scheme relied on guns smuggled into the prison and the theft of keys from one of the guards. The ringleaders planned to escape from their cells, release all the prisoners in the jail, and, in the ensuing commotion, escape unseen. Nothing ever came of it; it appeared to be no more than a rumor. But Westbrook acted anyway, revoking visiting privileges and transferring seven prisoners (including Nathan’s cell mate, Ed Donkar) to the Boys’ Reformatory at Pontiac.
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K
ARL
B
OWMAN AND
H
AROLD
H
ULBERT
completed their examination of the defendants on 30 June. Each report—one on Nathan, a second on Richard—included a physiological and endocrinological analysis, along with a detailed life history, including sections on each boy’s childhood and adolescence. Both Nathan and Richard had volunteered information on the kidnapping of Bobby Franks, limning their individual contributions to the planning and execution of the murder. Both had talked of their fantasies, Nathan saying that he imagined himself as a powerful slave and Richard saying that he envisaged himself as a master criminal.

Darrow proclaimed himself satisfied with the report: Bowman and Hulbert had done everything he had asked—he had no complaints on that score. But their report constituted only one part of the defense that Darrow expected to present in court—a second part would be provided by the psychiatrists who, only now, at the beginning of July, were arriving in Chicago to meet with Darrow and Benjamin Bachrach.

William Alanson White arrived in Chicago on Tuesday, 1 July. He was an imposing man whose physical presence matched his status as the leading American psychiatrist of his generation. His jet-black eyebrows formed a striking contrast with a shock of gray-white hair that swept back toward one side of his head to reveal an expansive forehead. Pale blue eyes peered through gold-rimmed glasses balanced on an aquiline nose; his large mouth turned downward in an ungenerous grimace. His very presence seemed to demand acquiescence; his bearing exuded authority; his attitude—imperious, impatient, and urgent—indicated a man who brooked no equivocation or hesitation.
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White, at age fifty-four, had reached the height of his profession. After attending Cornell University on a scholarship, he had obtained his medical degree in 1891 from Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His first appointment, as a physician at Binghamton State Hospital, gave him an opportunity for clinical research in psychiatry; he spent twelve years at Binghamton before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1903 to become the superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane.
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The hospital, established in 1855 by Dorothea Dix, had never been anything other than a custodial institution that provided psychiatric care for employees of the federal government, members of the armed forces, and residents of the District of Columbia. White, during his tenure at St. Elizabeths Hospital (as it was subsequently called), transformed the institution into a leading center of medical research. Under White’s leadership, the hospital expanded, caring for some 6,000 patients at any one time. White also recruited a cadre of ambitious young physician-psychiatrists to the sprawling campus east of the Anacostia River with the promise that the hospital would focus as much on scientific research as on therapeutic care. White himself was a prolific author, publishing twelve research monographs by 1924, editing the
Psychoanalytic Review
, translating classic works from French and German, and writing scores of articles and reviews. By the early 1920s, he was the best-known psychiatrist in the United States, and in June 1924 the psychiatric profession acknowledged his leadership by electing him president of the American Psychiatric Association.
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W
HITE FIRST MET WITH
R
ICHARD
L
OEB
on 1 July. Richard spoke hesitantly at first, telling White of his plans, necessarily in abeyance, to write his graduate thesis on John C. Calhoun and the question of states’ rights. Richard also talked of his studies at the University of Michigan, mentioning the zoology course taught by the geneticist Aaron Franklin Shull. Richard confessed his agnosticism; he had read Richard Swann Lull’s
Organic Evolution
in college and felt certain that Darwinism could account for the origins of mankind.
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Walter Bachrach sat silently listening as White, scribbling notes on a pad, continued to ask questions. As the morning wore on, White probed more intently, interrogating Richard about his childhood, inquiring about Richard’s governess, questioning him about his teachers at University High School, searching for clues that might explain the murder of Bobby Franks. Richard began to relax and, as he talked, more details emerged to offer a glimpse into his psyche. He had always desired to be famous, he confessed; he had imagined himself as a football player, handsome, athletic, strong; on other occasions, he had thought of himself as an explorer, brave and adventurous, tracing out new paths in the West; and most frequently he had pictured himself as a master criminal capable of carrying out the perfect crime. He had a recurrent fantasy of himself in a jail cell, half-naked, being whipped and abused by prison guards, as a crowd of spectators, young girls for the most part, looked on with a mixture of admiration and pity.

Had he ever imagined, White suddenly asked, that he might rape a girl? Richard shook his head. No, that was not something he would do—Nathan Leopold had demanded that they kidnap and rape a young girl but Richard had vetoed the suggestion; it had never been part of his plan. He had always been gentle with his girlfriends, Richard insisted, kissing them only if they consented. What about sexual fantasies? Did Richard imagine, White asked, himself having sex? He could picture himself with a girl, Richard replied, undressing and caressing her, but nothing further usually happened. His sexual imagination went only so far and never reached the point where he might have sexual intercourse. But what, Richard countered, did sex have to do with the murder of Bobby Franks? He had kidnapped Franks in order to show that he could commit the perfect crime—there had been nothing sexual about it.
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