For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (38 page)

“Will you please state your name?”

“Dr. William A. White.”

“And your place of residence?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“What is your profession?”

“Physician.”

“What is your age, Doctor?”

“Fifty-four.”

“Will you please state your professional connections, both present and past.”

“Just a moment.” Robert Crowe was on his feet, waving a paper in his hand. “I object to that, if your Honor please.”

Caverly straightened his back and stiffened in his chair; he peered down from the bench at the state’s attorney. “Why?”

“It is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.”

“Why?”

“The only purpose of it,” Crowe explained, “would be to lay a foundation for him to testify as an expert on the question of the sanity or insanity of the defendants. On a plea of guilty your Honor has no right to go into that question. As soon as it appears in the trial, it is your Honor’s duty to call a jury.”
²⁶

Crowe had seen his chance, and now he was ready to take it. Clarence Darrow had decided not to offer a defense. Darrow’s clients had pleaded guilty. Yet here was a psychiatrist on the witness stand, about to argue that Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill. It was illegitimate, Crowe believed, for the defense to introduce insanity into the hearing. How could they plead guilty and simultaneously offer an insanity defense?

And, Crowe continued, the law contained no ambiguity on the matter. The Illinois supreme court had ruled that any decision on the sanity of a defendant must be heard before a jury—it could not be decided by a judge acting alone. Therefore, just as soon as the defense introduced psychiatric testimony, Crowe argued, the judge should dissolve the hearing and call a jury to determine the defendants’ sanity.

“I want to be heard on that, your Honor,” Crowe insisted, “because if there is any testimony introduced in this trial as to the mental condition of these boys, any act or any order that your Honor enters in the case is a nullity. In other words, if your Honor, at the conclusion of this trial, after having gone into the sanity proposition, should sentence these boys to hang, your judgment would not be worth the paper that it was written on. The Supreme court would set it aside.”

Suppose Caverly allowed the defense to present evidence on the boys’ mental condition without calling a jury. Then if Caverly subsequently sentenced them to death, Clarence Darrow would appeal the judgment to the Illinois supreme court, contending that the psychiatric evidence should have been presented to a jury.

Crowe stepped forward. He rapped the documents table angrily with his knuckles. “What is the purpose of entering a plea of guilty and then maintaining that you have a defense and you have a right to hear it, when the law says that that defense has got to be decided by twelve men? What is the defense trying to do here?”
²⁷

Crowe’s intent was clear. If he could persuade Caverly to call a jury, then the state would certainly be able to hang Leopold and Loeb.

Caverly listened patiently as the state’s attorney continued to argue his case. He was willing to hear Crowe out, he said, but where were Crowe’s authorities on the matter? Had the Illinois supreme court ruled, in fact, that psychiatric evidence should be heard before a jury and not before a judge? Were there any precedents?

“Have you,” Caverly inquired, “got any authorities sustaining your position?”

“I have got the Geary case, your Honor.”

“The Geary case isn’t in point,” Caverly replied. “I know the Geary case…. But that is not on all fours with this case. That was a trial for insanity, in which counsel waived the constitutional rights of the defendant to a trial by jury, and the Supreme Court said, ‘you must go back and try the insanity case with a jury.’ There was no question about that.”
²⁸

Robert Crowe had good reason to remember the trial of Eugene Geary. In July 1920, as a judge on the Criminal Court, Crowe had presided over the arraignment of Geary for murder. It had been a notorious case. The trial and subsequent appeals of Geary, one of Chicago’s most violent and dangerous gangsters, had scandalized the public and created important precedents under Illinois law regarding the insanity defense.

On Thursday, 27 May 1920
, at ten o’clock in the evening, Eugene (Gene) Geary, a gangland enforcer working for Maurice (Mossy) Enright, entered the Horn Palace Saloon at 4165 South Halsted Street. As he walked up to the bar, Geary almost collided with another man, Harry Reckas, who had been about to leave the saloon. Reckas had never seen Geary before, but as they passed each other, their eyes met and they stared each other down. Reckas caught the smell of whiskey on the other man’s breath—he was obviously drunk.

Geary spoke first; his voice was coldly menacing. “Who are you looking for?”

“Nobody.” Reckas gestured toward a friend standing by his side:

“We are going home.”

The bartender, David Ruse, sensed trouble; he moved cautiously up behind Geary and spoke quietly into his ear: “Gene, these men are friends…. You’re not looking for them.”

It was too late. Geary’s hand reached for his weapon, the bartender ducked for cover, and the loud report of the gun echoed around the saloon as Reckas fell dead with a bullet through his left side.
²⁹

Geary had killed Reckas on behalf of Rex Bain, leader of a South Side whiskey ring. Geary had a notorious reputation as a hired gun: only six months earlier, he had killed a cabdriver, Leonard Tripple, in the Cadillac Cafe at 2134 South Wabash Avenue and had been charged with murder, but he had been acquitted.
³⁰

One week after the murder of Harry Reckas, detectives from the office of the state’s attorney captured Geary in an apartment on the South Side. At his trial, later that year, the plea was not guilty by reason of insanity and his lawyers, Thomas Nash and Michael Ahern, spoke of his paranoia. He was syphilitic—he had had syphilis for nineteen years—and was an alcoholic who consumed copious quantities of gin and whiskey. Geary suffered from hallucinations: he saw sand flies and bugs crawling on his food. He never allowed anyone to turn off the lights if he was in the room, and he believed that drivers of yellow cabs were out to kill him.
³¹

The jury was unmoved by his lawyers’ plea and sentenced Geary to hang.

But Illinois law gave particular consideration to the constitutional rights of the insane. The criminal code stipulated that if after conviction and a sentence of hanging, the prisoner were to become insane, the court should then postpone the punishment until the prisoner had regained his or her sanity.
³²

Since his conviction and sentencing, Geary had become ever more violent, fighting with other prisoners, threatening the guards, setting his mattress on fire, and attempting suicide.
³³

His lawyers petitioned for a sanity hearing. Geary had become insane, they argued, since his sentencing. He was entitled to a hearing to determine his mental condition. If he was indeed insane, the court should commit him to an asylum.
³⁴

Their petition for a hearing was successful. On 19 May 1921, Charles McDonald, chief justice of the Criminal Court, announced the appointment of a commission of three psychiatrists—Archibald Church, Hugh Patrick, and Douglas Singer—to examine Geary to decide if he had become insane. Ten days later, the psychiatrists returned their verdict: Geary was sane. He would face the hangman’s noose on 17 June.
³⁵

But now the Illinois supreme court intervened. It had not been legitimate, the court decided, for McDonald to have impaneled a commission of psychiatrists to decide on Geary’s sanity. The statute was unambiguous: only a jury could rule whether a prisoner was sane or insane. McDonald’s commission of three psychiatrists had no provision in law and therefore violated the prisoner’s constitutional right to appear before a jury: “he was entitled to a trial by a jury of the question whether or not he had become insane or lunatic after the original sentence of death…. A jury trial in such cases is imperative…. Such question, when so raised, cannot be legally tried otherwise.”
³⁶

Geary was fortunate to have such resourceful lawyers. On 23 September 1921, a jury deliberated for less than an hour and declared that he was insane. Amazingly, he had escaped the hangman. The court committed him to the Illinois Asylum for Insane Criminals at Chester.
³⁷

The decision provoked outrage. The Illinois criminal code, with its many safeguards against the punishment of the insane, seemed to favor the murderer.

The editor of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
denounced Geary as “one of the worst men who ever lived in Chicago and one of the most dangerous who possibly could be allowed at large.” It was, he continued, a travesty of justice that such a notorious, cold-blooded killer should escape punishment: “Geary is not a gibbering idiot or a raving maniac…. Gene Geary should be hanged.”
³⁸

The Geary case, Crowe explained
,
had established the precedent. Only a jury could decide the sanity or insanity of a defendant. If Caverly were to allow psychiatrists to testify to the mental condition of Leopold and Loeb, he would be usurping the role properly allotted to a jury.

Crowe had now finished giving the court the details of the Geary case and had completed reading the decision of the Illinois supreme court.

“Can language be more explicit, more mandatory and more direct than the language that I have just read?”

Crowe turned slightly, to his left, to indicate the defendants seated behind their attorneys. “But here is a cold-blooded murder, without a defense in fact, and they attempt, on a plea of guilty, to introduce an insanity defense before your Honor, and the statute says that is a matter that must be tried by a jury.”

Caverly leaned forward to interrupt, gesturing toward the defense attorneys: “Has anybody said that they are going to introduce an insanity defense?”

“Well,” Crowe answered, “what is the purpose of putting an expert on the stand?”

“They have a right to, in my opinion.”

“Aren’t they going into his mental condition?”

“Well, suppose they do?”

The court had not yet heard the psychiatric testimony, Caverly explained. Were the psychiatrists on the stand to show that Leopold and Loeb were insane? The court had not yet heard a single word of White’s testimony, and until he heard the testimony, he could not determine what it would be. “The defense hasn’t said they are going to put on alienists to show that these men are insane, and I don’t think that they are going to attempt to show that they are insane.”

“Well then what is the evidence for, what are they going to show?”

“You will have to listen to it.”

Crowe remained obdurate. He intended to push his point as far as it would go. He repeated his contention: only a jury could hear testimony regarding mental illness.

“Will you cite one authority?” Caverly asked.

“I have cited, Your Honor, and I believe they are in point.”

“The Geary case?”

“The Geary case and the statute itself, your Honor.”

“If you are relying on the Geary case you might as well end the argument. The Court will overrule you….”

“Your Honor misses the real point. You have not the power to determine whether the evidence that has been introduced constitutes insanity or not. Just as soon as evidence of a mental condition is brought in the case, that is a question, as the Courts have stated, peculiarly for a Jury.”

“They never said it.”

“We just read it to you,” Crowe replied, exasperated that Caverly could be so obtuse.
³⁹

Caverly shrugged. He was not convinced, he answered. Clarence Darrow was not introducing psychiatric testimony in order to show that the defendants could not distinguish right from wrong and were thus insane; he was presenting the testimony to demonstrate that Leopold and Loeb suffered from a medical condition. The defense asked for mitigation on account of that medical condition.

And, in any case, Caverly asked, suppose he were to exclude the psychiatric testimony. Would the defense not then have grounds for appeal? The statutes mandated a judge to hear evidence from both sides, one in aggravation of the punishment, the other in mitigation.

Caverly indicated to the clerk of the court to pass him a copy of the Illinois statutes and began thumbing through the pages. He started reading from the criminal code.

“‘It shall be the duty of the Court to examine witnesses as to the aggravation or mitigation of the offense.’” Caverly paused in his reading; he looked up from the book to address the state’s attorney. “Now, then, under that wording of the statute…the Court permitted eighty witnesses to testify to every detail to show an aggravated murder; and after the State is through the defense come in and…they wish to put on certain evidence to show a mitigation of the crime. Now then, supposing I were to say no, and then should impose the extreme penalty. Would not the Supreme Court say that if the Court had listened to mitigating circumstances then he would not have imposed the death penalty?…Would not the Supreme Court say that I should have listened to what the defendants had to say rather than have made an arbitrary ruling and sentenced them to whatever it might be?”

Crowe had been hoist with his own petard. He had insisted on presenting testimony from eighty witnesses to persuade the judge to send the defendants to the gallows. How could he deny the defense the right to produce evidence that might reduce the punishment?

B
UT
, C
ROWE ASKED, WHAT SORT
of evidence did the defense intend to produce? The defendants, according to Darrow, were not insane, and there was no evidence that they were insane. But Darrow’s claim that they were mentally ill could be based only on the fact and the character of the crime. The nature of the crime, the boys’ callous disregard for Bobby’s life, the mutilation of the body, the random choice of the victim—all led the defense to argue backward from the crime to infer mental disease.