For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (34 page)

Such psychoanalytic interpretations as those advanced by the defense psychiatrists to explain the murder of Bobby Franks paid homage to the influence of Freudian ideas within the American psychiatric community. Experiences in childhood shaped and determined adult behavior; psychosis in the adult was rooted in infantile sexuality; and conflicts within the unconscious found expression in seemingly irrational behavior. Few American psychiatrists, however, accepted Freud’s ideas unreservedly; the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association, a group that included William Alanson White, Bernard Glueck, and William Healy, adopted an eclectic approach that borrowed as much from Jung and Adler as from Freud.
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Their group identity, however, relied less on a set of shared ideas and more on a common program of professional values developed in an attempt to broaden the cultural influence of the psychiatric movement. American psychiatry traced its nineteenth-century origins to the care of patients in the institutional setting provided by the mental asylum. The asylum superintendent—the forerunner of the twentieth-century psychiatrist—concerned himself with the administrative management of large numbers of patients. Therapeutic efficacy—the cure and treatment of mental illness—was a secondary concern. Psychiatry was a profession, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, that interacted only casually with medical science and research.
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After 1900, psychiatry moved away from the restrictive role imposed by the asylum setting and began to diffuse itself more generally within American society. Psychiatrists could still be found in their traditional administrative roles, but increasingly they established and organized alternative institutions: outpatient clinics, psychopathic hospitals, and private practice. As a corollary of the shift away from the asylum, psychiatry concerned itself less with the custodial care of acutely ill patients and more with the psychopathology of everyday life and its attendant problems: alcoholism, pauperism, prostitution, delinquency, and crime. In this novel manifestation, psychiatry could align itself effortlessly with the Progressive Era and its glorification of the scientific expert; psychiatrists, with their specialized knowledge, could assert the cultural authority to deal with a wide range of social problems.
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No one was more active in promulgating an enlarged role for psychiatry than William Alanson White. The psychiatric perspective necessarily assumed that deviant behavior was a medical phenomenon; from this standpoint, which was adopted by White and his colleagues, science had demonstrated that human agency was a fiction—actions were never freely chosen, and the concept of individual responsibility was meaningless. All behavior, according to White, was a result of antecedent circumstances, usually rooted in the patient’s childhood and adolescence. It was necessarily futile, therefore, to punish individuals for deeds for which they bore no responsibility; a more appropriate and more satisfactory response to criminal behavior, one that promised a permanent solution, would be found in psychiatric diagnosis and medical treatment in a psychopathic hospital.
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The denial of free will and evil intent and the rejection of punishment as a response to crime necessarily assumed a radical revision of courtroom procedure. All three of Darrow’s psychiatrists—White, Healy, and Glueck—subscribed to a medicalizing ideology; all three hoped to extend and expand the influence of psychiatry within the courtroom in a way that would challenge the authority of the legal profession. The legal framework that determined the judicial process in the American courtroom was, according to White, hopelessly outdated; it relied on nineteenth-century concepts and methods that, because they took no heed of modern science, were entirely unsuited to the present day.
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White’s animus toward contemporary legal procedure found its focus in the concept of insanity. The court customarily could find a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity; in the American courtroom, the accepted definition of a defendant’s insanity was the inability to distinguish right from wrong. But insanity, according to White, was solely a legal concept; it had no basis in medical science. Moreover, this legal concept took no account of the complex character of mental illness. According to medical science, the dichotomy between sanity and insanity simply did not exist; an individual might have any one of an infinite number of degrees of mental illness, all of which lay on a continuum.
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In a legal sense, neither Nathan Leopold nor Richard Loeb was insane. Both had been able to distinguish right from wrong when they murdered Bobby Franks; both had been aware, at the time of the murder, of the character of their act; both had known that it was wrong. Yet to admit their sanity was not to preclude the possibility that both Nathan and Richard were mentally diseased.

To claim that crime was a medical phenomenon, and then to replace punishment with diagnosis and treatment, would necessarily expand the authority of the psychiatrist within the courtroom. It was not possible, White argued, for a lay jury, possessing neither scientific nor medical expertise, to diagnose the medical causes of a crime. Only a psychiatrist, as an objective expert, could make such a diagnosis; and only the psychiatrist, moreover, was capable of recommending an appropriate course of treatment. The jury still had a role, albeit circumscribed, in determining that a criminal act had occurred, but in all other respects its place in the courtroom was no more than vestigial.
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Would the defense psychiatrists find an opportunity to publicize their agenda through their participation in the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb? Certainly, in one sense, the circumstances were about as auspicious as one could expect. Clarence Darrow had promised to provide the defense experts with unlimited access to the defendants, of course, and nothing would be spared in the effort to diagnose their mental condition. There would be ample opportunity for the psychiatrists to proselytize—to present their belief that criminal behavior was a medical phenomenon best interpreted by scientific experts. Newspapers across the country would send the psychiatrists’ courtroom testimony into every household in the land. It was an opportunity not to be missed—William Alanson White fully expected to be able to use the courtroom to broadcast his reforms of the judicial process; the defense psychiatrists would find an unprecedented audience for their program through the newspapers.

White’s expectations remained high as the trial date approached, but his ability to persuade a national audience that legal procedures in the American courtroom were outdated rested, in some measure, on the cooperation of the state’s attorney. White was anxious, for example, to avoid an adversarial contest in the courtroom between two rival sets of psychiatrists. Typically, in such cases, each set of psychiatrists flatly contradicted the other even when both sides agreed on the facts. It was an embarrassment to the psychiatric profession, White believed, that the psychiatrists rarely agreed to produce a joint report analyzing the mental condition of the defendant. Would Robert Crowe allow the state’s psychiatrists to participate in such an endeavor? Probably not, Darrow advised, though it would be possible, of course, to raise the issue in court.

B
UT COOPERATION WITH THE PROSECUTION
seemed unlikely. Even now the state’s attorneys were maligning the defense, portraying Darrow and his colleagues as dishonest. Joseph Savage, an assistant state’s attorney, publicly complained that the defense had recruited more than a dozen scientific experts. Was Darrow hoping to tie up the court in technicalities? Did he hope to delay the proceedings by introducing procedural questions that would lengthen the trial by months, perhaps years? And what had happened to the promise made by Albert Loeb and Nathan Leopold Sr. just a short time before, that they would not spend exorbitant amounts in defense of their sons? The experts were each receiving as much as $1,000 a day for their services; did the defense hope to purchase the boys’ acquittal?
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Savage, in his remarks to the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
, reminded the reporter that Harry Thaw, the murderer of the New York architect Stanford White, had used an insanity defense to evade punishment. Thaw had shot and killed White in 1906 before dozens of witnesses. But he was wealthy—the son of a Pittsburgh railroad baron—and his lawyers had hired psychiatrists to testify to his insanity. Their strategy had succeeded; after spending several years in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Thaw had eventually regained his freedom.
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But, Darrow countered, no one was advocating that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb be released from confinement. Harry Thaw had used the insanity defense to win acquittal, but no one wished to see either Nathan or Richard free. “Many persons compare the cases of Leopold, Jr., and Loeb to the Harry K. Thaw case,” Darrow stated. “In one vital respect the Franks murder case is different. Every possible means of securing Thaw’s acquittal or release was attempted while in this case there is no one who wants to see the boys freed…. The parents are not seeking the acquittal of the boys. They do not want this at all. Convinced now of the truth of their confessions, they are afraid to have them freed. They believe their sons should be committed to an asylum.” Nor was there any truth in the rumor, Darrow continued, that the families intended to use their wealth to purchase freedom for Nathan and Richard. No one on the defense team was receiving an exorbitant payment for his participation in the case. The Chicago Bar Association would set the remuneration for the lawyers, and the American Medical Association would determine the fees for the psychiatrists; how, under such circumstances, could the prosecution accuse the families of using their wealth to thwart justice? And, in any case, the defense psychiatrists stood at the top of their profession; they had no need to testify for financial gain. “There is not a doctor,” Darrow announced, “who has been called into this case who would think of charging an exorbitant fee in consideration of the wealth of the parents of the accused. They have ascended to such heights in their profession that matters of fee are beyond their consideration.”
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In his statements to the press, Darrow hinted that the plea would be not guilty by reason of insanity. On Saturday, 12 July, Darrow explained that the psychiatrists had discovered evidence of insanity in other members of the defendants’ families. “We have found insanity in both the families of Leopold, Jr., and Loeb,” he remarked. “I can not specify at this time how far back, or on which sides of the families the insanity has been traced. Neither may I assert just yet whether this evidence will be used in the trial.”
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Other members of the defense team also dropped hints that some form of insanity would be presented to the court. The psychiatrist James Whitney Hall, in an interview with a Canadian journalist, explained that in Illinois an insanity defense did not necessarily involve showing that the defendant was unable to distinguish between right and wrong. “We will not claim,” Hall stated, “that these boys did not, when the act was committed, know the difference between right and wrong.” It might be possible to show that Nathan and Richard acted under a compulsion to commit the murder; if so, then, according to the legal definition, they would be insane. “But when it comes to the point,” Hall concluded, “as to whether…these accused were possessed also of the power to choose between what was right and what was wrong, we will show that they did not possess such ability.”
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Would Darrow use the insanity defense? Despite his assertion, the psychiatrists had found no evidence of hereditary insanity, yet everyone nevertheless assumed that he would use insanity as a defense at the coming trial. It was difficult to imagine any jury finding the defendants insane—both Nathan and Richard seemed rational and coherent, fully capable of distinguishing, and choosing between, right and wrong—yet what alternative did Darrow have? He surely could not plead simply not guilty—both Nathan and Richard had voluntarily confessed to the murder and had provided the police with evidence to corroborate their confessions.

Any man other than Robert Crowe might have been complacent—surely the jury would sentence Leopold and Loeb to hang!—but Crowe was too experienced, too watchful, too cautious to imagine that he could defeat Clarence Darrow so easily. Crowe regretted now that the psychiatrists for the prosecution had not had more time to question Leopold and Loeb—already, even before the trial had begun, Darrow was sneering at the brevity of the state’s examination of the defendants and contrasting it unfavorably with the lengthy analysis undertaken by the defense psychiatrists. It was important, at least, that the prosecution anticipate the intricacies of an insanity defense, and so, during the hot summer days of early July, Crowe arranged for the state’s psychiatrists to educate his staff on the ramifications of an insanity plea.
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Also that summer, in preparation for the trial of Leopold and Loeb, three of Crowe’s assistants traveled to Geneva, forty miles west of Chicago, to attend the deliberations of Kane County Circuit Court on the sanity of Warren Lincoln, a confessed murderer. Lincoln, a lawyer practicing in Aurora, had surprised his wife, Lina, having sex with her brother, Byron Shoup. Enraged by the sight of his wife in an incestuous relationship, Lincoln had gotten his revolver from the greenhouse and, returning to the bedroom, had killed first his brother-in-law and then his wife.
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Nothing so bizarre as the double killing of Lina Lincoln and Byron Shoup had ever previously occurred in Kane County. Shortly after his arrest, Lincoln confessed that he had decapitated both victims and had encased their heads in a block of concrete, placing it underneath his back porch. Lincoln claimed that the murders constituted justifiable homicide, but his lawyers, less optimistic that a jury would agree, had petitioned the court to find him insane. Robert Crowe had decided that no better opportunity would present itself for learning about the insanity defense and had therefore sent three of his closest associates—Joseph Savage, Milton Smith, and John Sbarbaro—to attend the insanity hearing at Geneva.
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