For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (4 page)

Whether or not cocaine addicts were behind the kidnapping, it certainly appeared that the desire to obtain a ransom was the least improbable motive for Bobby’s disappearance. Some detectives wondered why the kidnappers would choose a fourteen-year-old; if ransom was the motive, why not abduct a younger child, who would be less likely to recognize the kidnappers at a later date? But this reasoning failed to disturb the emerging consensus: the ransom provided the motive.
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O
N
M
ONDAY,
26 M
AY, FIVE
days after the murder of Bobby Franks, the police learned that another child, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, had also disappeared the previous Wednesday. Gertrude Barker had left St. Xavier’s Academy on Cottage Grove Avenue to walk north toward her home on Blackstone Avenue. She would have arrived at 49th Street and Ellis Avenue—the scene of Bobby’s abduction—at almost exactly the moment when Bobby had disappeared. Had she witnessed the kidnapping?

Had the kidnappers bundled Gertrude into the car to prevent her from informing the police? The girl’s aunt could not imagine that Gertrude had done anything foolish—she was not one to fall in with a bad crowd. “She preferred her home and her books to the school friends she had made. She loved to fish and ride, and expected to take up horseback riding as soon as the weather got warmer.” Her family was frantic with worry; Gertrude had been missing for almost a week. Perhaps, her aunt speculated, she also was lying dead in a ditch. “I feel sure something untoward has happened to her. She…would have been on 49th Street just about the time that poor little Franks boy was kidnaped…. I am afraid she saw those terrible kidnapers, and they abducted her also, fearing she might tell the police the license number of their automobile.”
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Gertrude was not so innocent as her aunt had imagined. Later that week, the police discovered her living with a twenty-seven-year-old stable boy, Bert Jeffery. Gertrude explained that she had met Bert in a local diner. “I flirted with a nice-looking boy in a drug store where I stopped to get a soda.” Bert declared his love for Gertrude and his intention to marry her, but the police had other ideas: they bundled Bert into a cell in the South Clark Street police station and returned Gertrude to her family.
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T
HEIR QUICK SUCCESS IN FINDING
Gertrude Barker was the only bright spot for the police in an otherwise grim week.

On Monday, 26 May, the Franks family held a funeral service for their son at their home on Ellis Avenue. It would have been impossible for the family to have held a funeral service in a public place; the crowds would be too large and the ceremony might turn into a circus. Every day since the kidnapping, hundreds of sightseers had milled outside the house, gawking at the drawn curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of Bobby’s father and mother.

Thus a select group—members of the family, twenty of Bobby’s classmates, and a few close friends—gathered around the white casket in the library for the service. Banks of flowers crowded the room; lilies of the valley, bouquets of peonies and mignonette, wreathes of roses, and baskets of orchids surrounded the small coffin.
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The Franks family had converted from Judaism to Christian Science. Elwood Emory, the first reader of the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist read the Lord’s Prayer, the Twenty-Third Psalm, and other passages from the scriptures. Glenn Drake, a choral singer from the church, sang two hymns, and then the mourners moved silently and slowly toward the front door, where black limousines waited to drive to Rosehill Cemetery. Eight boys carried the coffin to the hearse; the other boys from the Harvard School clustered in the hallway at the bottom of the large staircase. As Flora Franks passed them, she looked wistfully over their faces: her son had belonged to that group, and now he was gone—never again would Bobby talk to her excitedly about hitting a ball out of the baseball lot; never again would he tell his mother of his plans, his disappointments, and his victories.

There was now a crowd of 300 waiting in the street. The family slipped out of a side door with a police escort to escape the photographers. There were no disturbances: Morgan Collins had sent out a large detail of police to keep order. At Rosehill Cemetery, Elwood Emory offered prayers, and Bobby Franks was laid to rest in the family mausoleum.
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The police investigation seemed to be at a standstill. The detectives had been unable to connect anyone to the gray Winton car seen by Irving Hartman; they had no evidence linking the teachers at the Harvard School to the killing; they could not identify the author of the ransom note.

Only one promising clue remained: the tortoiseshell eyeglasses found by Paul Korff near the corpse. Gradually, during the first week after the murder, the police had come to realize that the eyeglasses constituted an extraordinarily valuable clue—perhaps their only way to track down the killer. Crucially, the lenses could have been obtained only with a prescription; they had not been purchased over the counter. Somewhere there must be an optician who had ground the glasses; that optician had doubtless kept a copy of the prescription in his files.
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But the prescription was a common one, given to “persons suffering from simple astigmatism or astigmatic farsightedness,” explained one Chicago optician. “The lenses are of a convex cylindrical type, also a common pattern.” Thus the prescription alone would not materially advance the search—there could be thousands of Chicagoans with such glasses—but what about the frames? Were they distinctive?
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Yes, they were unusual. Composed of Newport zylonite, an artificial composite, the frames had distinctive rivet hinges and square corners. No firm in Chicago, or even in the Midwest, manufactured Newport zylonite frames. They originated in Brooklyn, and only one optician in Chicago sold such frames: Almer Coe and Company. The owner of the firm recognized the glasses immediately. “We…identified them as of a type sold by us and not by any other Chicago dealer. The lenses had markings used by us, and as far as we know, not used by any other optician in Chicago. The lenses are not unusual; such prescriptions are filled often by us, possibly once a week. They are lenses for eye-strain or headache, and would not materially improve vision…. They might be used only for reading or for what is known as mild astigmatism. Their measurements are average in every way.”
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Average in every way. Perhaps the killer would slip away again. But for the first time in eight days, state’s attorney Robert Crowe sensed that the net was gradually closing. That Thursday, 29 May, the clerks at Almer Coe began the laborious task of checking the thousands of prescriptions in the company files: they were looking for a distinctive frame and a common lens prescription. How many would they find and to whom would these belong?
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T
HAT AFTERNOON, THE POLICE KNOCKED
at the door of Nathan Leopold Jr., a nineteen-year-old law student at the University of Chicago. The journalists following the Franks murder were mildly curious that the police had taken Leopold into custody—but this was certainly only a routine matter. Everyone knew Leopold’s father as one of the wealthiest Jewish businessmen in Chicago; the family was socially prominent, with influential connections. And Nathan Leopold? He was a brilliant student—Phi Beta Kappa at Chicago—who had recently applied to transfer to the law school at Harvard University that fall. The journalists shrugged their shoulders at the news. There was no copy to be filed with their editors about this—obviously Nathan Leopold had nothing to do with the murder of Bobby Franks.

2 THE RELATIONSHIP

Their criminal activities were the outgrowth of an unique coming-together of two peculiarly maladjusted adolescents, each of whom brought into relationship a long-standing background of abnormal life.
¹

Psychiatrists’ Report for the Defense
(Joint Summary) [July 1924]

[Nathan] was very egocentric. Practically all the time I was with him, in ordinary social conversation, he attempted by any sort of ruse possible to monopolize the conversation. It didn’t make any difference what was being said or what was being talked about, he always attempted to get the conversation revolving around him so he could do most of the talking…. He thought his mentality was a great deal superior to the ordinary person.
²

Arnold Maremont, student at the University
of Chicago, 7 August 1924

[Richard] smoked very much, constantly…. We were in the habit of seeing him drunk a good deal…. We would be sitting in the house playing a game of bridge and Dick would walk in and one or two of us would say he is drunk again and one or two of us would say no he is not. Half of the time it would work out he was drunk.
³

Theodore Schimberg, student at the University
of Chicago, 8 August 1924

N
ATHAN
L
EOPOLD WAS JUST FIFTEEN YEARS
old; but already he felt that he was passing into adulthood, gratefully slipping out of his adolescence, gladly discarding his high school years. That month—October 1920—he was to begin his freshman year at the University of Chicago.
⁴

The university had been in existence less than three decades, but to Nathan it seemed to have been around forever. He had grown up in its shadow—the Leopold house was just ten blocks from the campus. He had often walked past the imposing, monumental Gothic buildings, constructed of gray Bedford limestone, that stretched south from 57th Street to the Midway. There was much to admire about the campus: Mitchell Tower—reminiscent of the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford—with its august presence on 57th Street signaling the approach to the university; Cobb Gate, linking the anatomy and zoology buildings, the fantastic gargoyles on its inclines representing the upward progress of the classes; the student dormitories with their red-tiled roofs, ornamented doorways, and heavyset bay windows; and Harper Library, a massive, brooding building looking out over the green fields that stretched south of the Midway.

The architects had constructed the campus in the late Gothic style. It might have seemed anachronistic to build in Chicago—the most modern of American cities—a university that resembled the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, but there was a pleasing regularity about the campus. Everything was in proportion; nothing was too large or too small; and the Gothic style allowed for an astonishing diversity of embellishment and ornamentation. Innumerable gargoyles studded every building, peering down on the students making their way to class; crockets and finials—elaborate decorations shaped in the form of foliage—ran hither and thither over the buildings, stretching across the tops of doorways and around the arches of bay windows; and the generous use of stained and leaded glass in the windows provided an essential ingredient to the riot of medievalism that constituted the University of Chicago.
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Already—even before his matriculation—the university dazzled Nathan Leopold with its promises of future achievement: academic triumphs in the classroom, acclaim from the professors, scholastic awards and honors. His mother—his gentle, loving, affectionate mother, Florence—had extracted a promise from him, willingly given, that he would make Phi Beta Kappa before graduation. Nathan intended to keep his promise—and perhaps, also, he hoped, he would attain what had almost always eluded him in high school: companionship and friends.

For Nathan Leopold—fifteen years old, five feet three inches tall, weighing 110 pounds, with a sallow complexion, gray eyes, thick black hair, and a curiously asymmetrical face that gave him an evasive appearance—had always been a lonely and unhappy child.

H
IS GRANDFATHER
S
AMUEL
F. L
EOPOLD
had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1846, eventually settling in northern Michigan. Samuel had opened several small retail stores, each one close to the copper mines, first in Eagle River, a second in Eagle Harbor, a third in the town of Cliff Mines, and a fourth in Hancock. Business was good, and within a few years he had been able to open several more stores, so that his reach extended along the Upper Peninsula. But obtaining supplies to sell on to the miners and laborers had become a constant struggle: there was no railroad connecting Chicago to the copper mines, and shipping facilities were rudimentary.
⁶

In 1867, Samuel Leopold bought his first steamship to carry grain and other provisions to the mining towns; then came his second, the SS
Ontonagon
; and in 1872, he added the SS
Peerless
to his fleet. He moved to Chicago with his wife, Babette, and their six children; invested wisely; and gradually built up his shipping business so that, at his death from septicemia in 1898, the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior Transportation Company was the largest shipping line plying the Great Lakes.
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His first son, Nathan F. Leopold, born in Eagle River in 1860, proved as astute a businessman as his father. Nathan inherited the family business; married his childhood sweetheart, Florence Foreman; purchased a large house at 3223 Michigan Avenue; and made a second fortune manufacturing aluminum cans and paper boxes. Through his marriage to Florence, a daughter of the financier Gerhart Foreman, Nathan F. Leopold Sr. was now connected to some of Chicago’s most prosperous and prominent bankers. Within a single generation, the Leopolds had won a place among the wealthiest families in Chicago.
⁸

In 1915, Nathan and Florence moved their family—three sons: Michael, Samuel, and Nathan Jr.—from Michigan Avenue to the residential neighborhood of Kenwood, eight miles south of the Loop. Their new home, 4754 Greenwood Avenue, a three-story mansion set back from the street, was one of the more unusual homes in a neighborhood distinguished by architectural diversity: the Leopold house included, on the first floor, an enormous rectangular living room built in the modernist style, facing the garden on three sides, around which the architect had attached the remainder of the mansion built in traditional nineteenth-century style complete with gabled roofs.

The youngest son, Nathan Jr., had reason to welcome the family’s move to Kenwood. For two years Nathan had attended the local public school, the Douglas School, just a few blocks from their home on Michigan Avenue. It had been an unhappy experience. Nathan was one of those unfortunate children who attract the relentless, unforgiving attention of schoolboy bullies, and during his time at the Douglas School his classmates taunted and teased him remorselessly. He was different from the other boys, Nathan realized: he was naturally shy and more studious than his peers; he had little interest in baseball and no athletic ability; his parents were affluent; and, each afternoon, at the end of the school day, his governess would embarrass him by appearing at the school gate to escort him home. And when his classmates discovered that Nathan had, as a six-year-old, briefly attended a girls’ school—the Spaides School on Buena Avenue—his humiliation was complete. Nathan’s acknowledgment that he was different—“I realized I was not like other children, that I had wealthy parents, that I lived on Michigan Avenue and had a nurse who accompanied me to and from school”—did nothing to ease the pain and distress that accompanied the daily torture inflicted by his classmates.
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To whom could he turn for help? His father was aloof and remote, preoccupied with his business ventures; his two brothers, Michael and Samuel, older than he by several years, had never taken him seriously; and his mother, Florence, was an invalid, bedridden after contracting some mysterious illness during her pregnancy with Nathan.

There was only one person in whom he could confide. His governess, Mathilda (Sweetie) Wantz, had joined the Leopold household in 1911. She was an attractive, strong-willed woman, around thirty years old, with a heavy German accent and a flirtatious manner. Mathilda quickly established herself as a presence in the Leopold household, less as a governess to the two younger boys, Samuel and Nathan, than as a substitute for their invalid mother. Florence Leopold loved her three sons, and had a special regard for Nathan, a weak, frail boy; but because of her illness, she had gradually given up control of the household to the governess.
¹⁰

It was not long before the maids were exchanging gossip about Mathilda’s increasingly eccentric, even outrageous behavior. Everyone remarked on her obvious familiarity with the two younger boys, and soon it had become common knowledge among the household staff that Mathilda was having sex with seventeen-year-old Samuel; even more scandalously, she had become sexually intimate with twelve-year-old Nathan.
¹¹

The youngest boy, especially, was smitten with his governess. Nathan recognized that Mathilda had taken the place of his mother—“She had a very great influence over my brother and myself. She displaced my mother”—but any regret that his mother’s illness had reduced her importance was overwhelmed by the affection and love that he now felt for his governess: “I was thoroughly devoted to her.”
¹²

3.
THE HARVARD SCHOOL.
The Harvard School for Boys, founded in 1865, moved in 1917 to a new location at 4731 Ellis Avenue. This illustration first appeared as the frontispiece to the school catalog.

His home life was in turmoil; Nathan, nevertheless, excelled at his studies at his new school. After the family had moved to Greenwood Avenue, his father had enrolled him at the Harvard School for Boys. The school building, located at 47th Street and Ellis Avenue, was unremarkable—a single three-story redbrick building facing onto Ellis Avenue with chemistry laboratories at the rear and an asphalt playground at the side—but the teachers were, without exception, conscientious and hardworking, devoted to their pupils, and determined that each boy should, if he desired, have the opportunity to attend college.

Fewer than 200 boys attended the Harvard School. The primary school included eight grades, with approximately fifteen boys in each grade; the high school consisted of four classes, ranging from the fresh-man class to the seniors. The Harvard School emphasized academic excellence; the size of each class, along with an extensive counseling program, enabled the teachers to give each boy individual attention. Very occasionally, a boy might forgo university to enter directly into his father’s business, but more typically, every member of each graduating class went on to college: in the majority of cases, either to the University of Chicago or to an elite private institution in the East such as Yale, Cornell, or Dartmouth.

The classes at the Harvard School were too small to support sports teams, and success in sports was always elusive. In 1919, the school abandoned football because of a lack of interest among the seniors; and, although the school fielded baseball and basketball teams, other, larger schools, most notably the Francis Parker School, Chicago Latin, and Wendell Phillips, invariably trounced the Harvard boys.
¹³

Nathan Leopold had no interest in sports—he was indifferent to the lack of success of the Harvard teams—but he excelled in the classroom. At the Harvard School, he took, in addition to the assigned courses, electives in German and classical Greek, and he succeeded, year after year, in standing at the top of his class. He was still an outsider—his classmates regarded him as an eccentric loner—but by his junior year, he had won a few friends through a shared interest in ornithology. Nathan had a passion for collecting birds, a passion that had begun six years earlier through the encouragement of a teacher at the Douglas School. His bird collection, kept in a study adjoining his bedroom, encompassed over 2,000 specimens; on weekends, he would drive to the lakes southeast of the city near the Indiana state line to hunt up new species for his collection.
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By spring 1920, Nathan, fifteen years old, now a junior at the Harvard School, felt that he had nothing more to learn from his teachers. He had accumulated sufficient credits to forgo his senior year and was eligible to matriculate at the University of Chicago. He was eager for the challenge. And so, in 1920, Nathan prepared to enter the university’s freshman class.
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