For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (33 page)

White also interrogated Nathan Leopold that week, seeing him for the first time on Wednesday, 2 July. That afternoon, as White listened to Nathan talk about his studies at the University of Chicago, he came to appreciate the difference between the two boys. Richard had seemed diffident in talking about himself at first, revealing his thoughts only with reluctance. Nathan was garrulous from the outset, proclaiming his competence as a philologist, his aptitude for study, his intellectual brilliance—he was unique, he informed White, in his ability to learn languages. The more obscure a language, the better; he had learned Umbrian, for example, not because he might need to speak it or read it—it was an extinct language, originally spoken in a region of central Italy—but because it emphasized his status as an individual elevated above the rest of humanity.
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White noticed that there was nothing altruistic in Nathan’s attitude toward others. He had no regard for his companions, for his classmates, or even for members of his own family except as their existence contributed to his own welfare. He lived only for his own advantage, Nathan admitted, and he considered others only insofar as their actions worked to promote his pleasure. He was a Nietzschean who stood above the law, above morality, someone whose actions were uninhibited by conventional behavior; he did not recognize any obligation to society—he could do whatever he wished.

Nor did Nathan have any qualms about killing Bobby Franks. He regretted only that they had failed to carry the killing off successfully; what tremendous satisfaction it would have given him to have collected the ransom and evaded capture! But regrets? No, he had no regrets—murder was a small thing to weigh in the balance against the pleasure that he might gain from the act. Would he do it again, White asked, if he knew that he could escape detection? Yes, Nathan replied, without hesitation—why not?

Nathan talked knowingly of sex—he claimed to have had many sexual experiences—but he admitted that sex was truly pleasurable only if he experienced it as a violent, forceful, sadistic act. Nothing was more enjoyable than compelling another person to submit to his desire. Nathan had often imagined himself as a German officer in the Great War raping a girl. Sex with Richard Loeb had always been enjoyable, of course, especially when Richard pretended to be drunk and incapable of resisting; Nathan would then forcibly remove his clothes and rape him.
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As Nathan continued to talk, White realized that the intensity of each boy’s fantasies and Nathan’s overwhelming desire for Richard had created a potent combination between the two boys that seemed to ensure some violent catastrophe. Richard imagined himself as a master criminal; Nathan was Richard’s obsequious companion, eager to do anything the other boy desired. Their relationship was pathological, based on fantasies that, in both boys, had supplanted reality; and the murder of Bobby Franks had been the consequence. White, in his final report, emphasized the boys’ detachment from reality, writing that Richard, especially, had never developed the sense of social awareness that characterized the passage from childhood to adulthood: “normally the child, from being a purely instinctive, selfish individual, controlled solely by the desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain, develops into a social individual with a desire to make his conduct conform to socially acceptable standards…. To the extent that this knowledge of right and wrong is deficient, to the extent that it is only on the surface and has not become a part of a well-integrated personality, [Richard Loeb] is lacking in those standards of character and conduct which we think of the normal person as possessing.” Nathan, also, lacked the capacity to transcend an immediate need for gratification; he, too, had never developed the ability as a social individual of adjusting his own desires in accordance with the wishes of others.
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O
N
F
RIDAY,
4 J
ULY,
the prisoners in the Cook County jail could hear the firecrackers exploding in the street outside in celebration of the holiday. The warden had arranged a chicken dinner to mark the occasion, but otherwise there was a subdued atmosphere inside the county jail. No visitors were allowed that day; Nathan and Richard spent the holiday reading in their cells, emerging occasionally to chat briefly with each other and to watch a baseball game in the yard.
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The following day, William Healy, a tall, slender, soft-spoken man with thinning auburn hair and a deferential manner, arrived at the Cook County jail to begin his examination of Nathan and Richard. Healy now lived in Boston—he was the director of the Judge Baker Foundation, a research agency for the study of adolescent crime—but he knew Chicago well, having graduated from Rush Medical College in 1900 and having served until 1917 as the director of the psychiatric clinic attached to the Cook County Juvenile Court. Healy had first made his mark with
The Individual Delinquent
, a monograph, based on his work for the Juvenile Court and published in 1915, that emphasized the unique character of each individual criminal and the importance of early childhood influences in determining adult behavior. It was an innovative and original work—the first by an American author to contest the notion of a criminal archetype. There was no pattern to criminality, Healy believed, and it was idle to imagine that criminals displayed characteristic features or behavior. There was an endless diversity to criminality: the motives and causes of crime varied according to individual circumstances.
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Few criminologists had as extensive experience as Healy in the treatment of adolescents, yet even he was surprised by the emotional detachment of Nathan and Richard. They could discuss the murder casually, in a matter-of-fact way, without any apparent emotion or feeling. The details of the crime, its planning, and its execution were plainly spoken by both boys; there was neither any hint of remorse in their words nor any regard for the grief that they had caused the Franks family.

Could the dichotomy between their intellectual ability and their emotional retardation provide evidence for a psychological interpretation of the crime? Was the boys’ affective incapacity one of the factors that had provoked the killing? Would it be possible, perhaps, to measure their intellects through the use of standardized tests? Intelligence testing—the application of standard procedures to quantify mental ability—had grown to maturity during the previous decade in response to the widespread belief that delinquency and deviance were consequences of mental impairment. The feebleminded, the mental defectives, were predisposed to prostitution, alcoholism, pedophilia, antisocial behavior, and criminal activity; if scientists could measure an individual’s intelligence, it was argued, they could determine which individuals were subnormal and hence likely to break the law. During the 1910s, psychologists, on the basis of their training and expertise, had self-consciously claimed the authority to determine mental ability and thus to assert professional autonomy. As psychologists had expanded their reach to claim that intelligence testing could be used for pedagogical and vocational purposes, such testing had become ubiquitous in American society.
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William Healy regarded mental defect as one, among many, of the causes of crime. Healy had been a member of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded during the 1910s and was familiar with the psychological tests used to measure mental ability. What, Healy wondered, might such tests reveal about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb? Would they demonstrate that each boy did in fact have exceptional intelligence? Might the tests allow the scientists to show that each boy’s intellect was so far in advance of his emotional capacity as to constitute a type of derangement?

Throughout the second week of July, Healy used a series of tests to measure each boy’s intelligence. Nathan demonstrated a remarkable ability to complete each test successfully within the allotted time; he effortlessly completed the Monroe Silent Reading Test, the Kelly-Trabus Test, the Thurston Syllogism Test, the Cryptogram Test, and the McAlly Cube Test. He did less well on the Judgment Test, and his answers to the Kent-Rosanoff Association Test revealed, according to Healy, that, contrary to appearances, Nathan did have some affective capacity.
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Richard Loeb was less conspicuously intelligent, demonstrating ability appropriate for an eighteen-year-old. He performed well in the Thurston Syllogism Test, answering almost all twenty questions correctly, but failed the Monroe Silent Reading Test. He successfully completed the Cryptogram Test within the allotted period but did only moderately well on the Kent-Rosanoff Association Test. Healy’s examination had produced no clear result except that Nathan was exceptionally intelligent. It was not evident, even to Healy, that the results of the intelligence tests might contribute to the defense case.
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A
THIRD PSYCHIATRIST
, B
ERNARD
G
LUECK,
arrived in Chicago on Tuesday, 8 July. After graduating from Georgetown University, Glueck had trained as an intern in psychiatry at St. Elizabeths Hospital under the tutelage of William Alanson White, and in 1910 he had secured an appointment as medical officer in charge of the criminal division at the hospital. In 1916 Glueck left St. Elizabeths to become director of the psychiatric clinic at Sing Sing prison in New York state. Crime, according to Glueck, was more a consequence of social maladjustment than a result of deliberate choice. At Sing Sing, in concert with the prison authorities, he initiated a regimen that emphasized rehabilitation and reform. Glueck’s research, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, demonstrated the pervasive character of mental illness among the prison population. Crime was a consequence, more often than not, of mental defect: sixty percent of the inmates at Sing Sing displayed symptoms of mental disease and almost twenty percent were dangerously psychopathic. The many forms of mental illness among the prison population, Glueck asserted, rendered the legal test of insanity applied in the courtroom entirely inadequate. Psychiatric causes lay behind criminal behavior, and only the psychiatrist, treating the individual delinquent, could satisfactorily solve the problem of crime. By the early 1920s, his research at Sing Sing on criminality and deviance had earned Glueck a national reputation in penology, and in 1921 he moved to New York City to take up a joint appointment as director of the Bureau of Children’s Guidance and professor of psychiatry at the New York Postgraduate Medical School and Hospital.
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Glueck’s research at St. Elizabeths and at Sing Sing had made him familiar with as diverse a range of criminal behavior as one might expect, yet like Healy he was surprised that both Richard and Nathan showed so little affect. It was as though, within each boy, an emotional deadening had extinguished all empathy and affection. There was a sad, melancholy air about Richard, Glueck thought, as he listened to Richard confess that he, not Nathan, had wielded the chisel on the afternoon of the murder. Nathan had been driving the automobile, Richard explained. Bobby Franks had climbed into the front passenger seat, next to Nathan, and Richard had first clubbed him from behind and then asphyxiated him by stuffing a rag down his throat.
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Richard suffered from an overwhelming sense of his own inferiority, Glueck decided. Everything in Richard’s life had conspired to multiply his feelings of impotence and inadequacy: the demands of his governess, his attendance at university at fourteen, his sexual immaturity—all contributed to reinforce in Richard’s mind that he was not capable of meeting the exigencies of everyday life. And to compensate for his feelings of inferiority, Richard had immersed himself in a fantasy universe in which he was a master criminal capable of planning devious and complex crimes. There was little doubt, Glueck concluded in his final report, that the murder of Bobby Franks was linked to Richard’s need to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy. “The impelling motive,” Glueck wrote, “in the defendant’s criminal career was the motive of compensating through criminal prowess for his feelings of inferiority.” The compensatory urge acted almost as a compulsion; Richard craved “to reach perfection, completeness, potency, and compensation for his sense of inferiority.”
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Nathan Leopold, also, had retreated into a fantasy life. Yet, Glueck decided, Nathan’s retreat was a consequence not so much of an inability to deal with everyday demands as of perverse sexuality. Nathan had constructed a cynical, aloof intellectualism that enabled him to turn aside his self-disgust at his sexual aberrancy. It had not been possible for Nathan to reconcile himself to his homosexuality, and he had been incapable of forming emotional connections on such a basis. He had, Glueck concluded, an “overwhelming desire to negate and repudiate whatever was part and parcel of his real nature beneath the crust of cold-blooded intellectualism.” Nathan could feel comfortable with his sexuality only within the relationship with Richard Loeb; the sexual connection had cemented the bond between the two and had compelled Nathan to go along with Richard’s criminal misdeeds. Nathan’s “complete self-realization as a homo-sexual was made possible only in connection with his association with Richard Loeb.”
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B
EFORE
1900,
NEUROLOGY—THE STUDY
of the brain and the nervous system—had dominated Americans’ intellectual understanding of mental illness. According to the neurologists, psychiatric illnesses were a consequence of such somatic disorders as, for example, lesions of the brain; psychiatry, at least in the United States, was synonymous with biological psychiatry. By the first decade of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis—the idea that neuroses were a consequence of unconscious conflicts over traumatic events—had made its initial bid to replace neurology as an alternative way of understanding mental illness. Neurology could (and did) offer a diagnosis of the causes of mental illness but was less effective in devising a cure. Psychoanalysis provided an alternative to neurology, an alternative, moreover, that would allow psychiatrists to break out of their professional role as asylum superintendents and enable them to assume greater social and cultural authority as experts on a wide range of social and cultural problems.
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