For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (41 page)

“When Leopold began to plan with Loeb this murder,” Crowe asked, “…what was acting then, his intellect or his emotions?”

“His intellect,” Healy replied, “but always accompanied by some emotional life, as it always is…”

“Which was in control, the intellect or the emotions, at the time they planned to steal the typewriter, so that they could write letters that could not be traced back to them?”

“I think the intellect was the predominating thing there probably.”

“And when they rented the room in the Morrison Hotel, intellect was still walking in front?”

“Yes.”

“And so on through all the details of this murder?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was nothing, Crowe concluded, about this murder that revealed the actions of two children. It was a preposterous defense—without any merit—designed solely to bamboozle the court.

C
ROWE’S SKEPTICISM WAS ECHOED OUTSIDE
the courtroom. The murder of a child for a thrill by two wealthy, college-educated teenage lovers seemed to signal the moral collapse of Western civilization or, at the very least, the corruption and degeneracy of the modern age. The evangelical preacher Billy Sunday, passing through Chicago on his way to Minnesota, warned that the killing could be “traced to the moral miasma which contaminates some of our ‘young intellectuals.’ It is now considered fashionable for higher education to scoff at God. The world is headed for Hades so fast no speed limit can stop it. Precocious brains, salacious books, infidel minds—all these helped to produce this murder.”
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Arthur Kaub, pastor of Winslow Park Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago, deplored the sentimentality that denied the murderers’ responsibility for their actions. Christian beliefs were fully congruent with the death penalty, he asserted, and the killers of Bobby Franks should not escape their just deserts.

“When notorious criminals,” Kaub preached to his congregation, “are found guilty of atrocious crimes deserving the death penalty, a host of sympathetic people intercede for them, urging pardon or a lesser sentence…. We must not shirk responsibility…. Neither must we condone sin because of sympathy with the parents or the criminal. We must have the law upheld, justice meted out and proper punishment executed upon the evildoer.”
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Certainly, it was difficult for the majority of Chicagoans to understand why, since the murderers had admitted their guilt, there should be such a protracted and elaborate hearing. The proceedings would cost the state alone almost $100,000, and if the defense appealed the verdict, the expense might exceed $500,000. Why should the taxpayer have to bear such a burden for two murderers who had yet to express any remorse for their actions?
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Edward Gore, a former president of the Chicago Association of Commerce, speaking to a meeting of the Central Lions Club on 5 August, criticized the hearing as “an example of the slowness of our judicial procedure” and appealed for a quick resolution—“Why are two confessed murderers permitted to take up the time of our criminal courts?”—in order to demonstrate the resolve of the Chicago courts to end crime. Thomas R. Marshall, a former vice president of the United States who had served in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet for eight years, added his voice to the chorus of criticism, complaining that “high-minded men have been pouring into the ears of the public the idea that in reality there is no such a thing as crime. It is just disease, they have been arguing, and ought to be treated as such.”
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The less one knew about the case, it seemed, the more likely one was to criticize the hearing as a waste of time and money. Harry McDevitt, a judge on the Common Pleas Court of Philadelphia, knew only what he had read in the Philadelphia newspapers yet he confidently asserted of the defendants that “their alleged ‘split mentality’ and their much talked-about superior intellect had little to do with the crime…. They are the personification of conceit, vanity, and asininity. They manifested no respect for the law of God or man and have a contempt for the conventions of reality…. Were the case being tried in Philadelphia, I am confident a jury would return a verdict of murder in the first degree. It wouldn’t take long to reach a conclusion.”
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Such comments indicated that the murder of Bobby Franks seemed sui generis in its depravity. It appeared unique, set apart from crimes of passion and anger, and elevated above other killings by its deliberate character. Yet when viewed as symbolic of the times, it seemed to reveal much about the United States in the 1920s that many white Protestant Americans found deeply troubling. Sometime within the past few years—perhaps immediately after the war—the country had experienced a sudden shift in public morality that had entirely overthrown Victorian conventions. Women now bobbed their hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, and wore short skirts; sexuality was everywhere and young people were eagerly taking advantage of their new freedoms; a flood of new consumer goods poured onto the market while advertisers beckoned and cajoled with subversive messages; and the predictable failure of Prohibition had transformed formerly respectable Americans into habitual lawbreakers. The traditional morality, centered on work, discipline, and self-denial, had evaporated and in its place there was a culture of self-indulgence. There were no longer any social restraints; each individual now sought self-fulfillment and self-realization in an unceasing pursuit of pleasure. The United States, prosperous throughout the 1920s, was now a society that valued a species of hedonistic self-absorption.
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What single event could better illustrate the dangers of such a transformation than the heinous murder of Bobby Franks? The two killers had cheerfully confessed their motive: the killing had been done solely for the experience, for the sensation, for the thrill of murder. Neither Leopold nor Loeb had yet uttered a single word of remorse; neither had expressed contrition. The worship of youth, the rejection of morality, the obsession with sex and sexuality—all eloquently described in the novels and short stories of Scott Fitzgerald—had found their ultimate expression in this perverted act by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Fitzgerald, in his books and in his personal life, had discarded traditional morality and had consequently found himself trumpeted as the spokesman of the Jazz Age, but the abolition of restraint had now produced a callous and cynical murder that far surpassed anything in fiction.

N
O ORGANIZATION WAS MORE HOSTILE
to the licentiousness of the 1920s than the Ku Klux Klan. The abrupt revival of the Klan in the early 1920s, after several decades of quiescence, centered less on white supremacy and more on Protestant fundamentalism. The Klan was still violently opposed to blacks, of course, but now other groups in the Klan’s worldview also threatened traditional morality: Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.

It was predictable, therefore, that the Klan would add its condemnation to the critical comments of the politicians and clergymen who remarked so freely on the courtroom proceedings. The Klan had experienced remarkable growth in Chicago in the early 1920s. In 1922, for example, it had enrolled more new members in Chicago than in any other comparable urban center in the United States, and the City Council, fearful of the Klan’s rapidly growing influence, had voted not to hire known Klan members as municipal employees. The Klan, never reluctant to blame marginal groups as the cause of all social problems, portrayed itself as the guardian of public morals and, in that role, was eager to see two Jewish homosexuals sent to the scaffold for the murder of a child. “I can tell you,” an official of the Klan confided to a reporter from the
Chicago Evening Post
on 5 August, “that members of the organization are in the court every day. They are determined to see that justice is done.”
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Members of the Klan not only attended the court sessions but also sent threatening letters to the judge and occasionally telephoned him in the middle of the night to demand that he hang Leopold and Loeb. The Klan persisted in its campaign of intimidation throughout the hearing, earning the organization welcome publicity in the newspapers. In July the Klan burned a fiery cross, fourteen feet high, on a vacant lot not far from the Loeb family home. On another occasion, toward the conclusion of the hearing, Klan members left a human skull and bones near the Loeb house along with a note that promised a lynching of the two defendants.
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The threats of the Klan, along with the comments of the clergymen and politicians, viewed as attempts to influence the judge, were in contempt of court. Public sentiment might demand the death penalty for Leopold and Loeb, but Caverly was resolute, nevertheless, in his determination to give the defendants their constitutional rights. “This sort of thing,” he announced, “is wholly out of order, whether it is a bloodthirsty demand, purporting to come from the Ku Klux Klan, or a plea for mercy from a clergyman. In either case, the writer not only displays poor taste but is actually violating the law…. The fact of the matter is, I have not yet made up my mind as to what is to be done with these boys. I am still listening to the evidence.” Yet Caverly’s statement was not enough to quiet the complaints of Clarence Darrow that the comments of influential politicians, businessmen, and religious leaders were harming his clients’ opportunity for an unprejudiced hearing and might influence the judge to truncate the proceedings prematurely and hand down the death penalty. “If the boys hang,” Darrow fumed, “the United States might well vote murder indictments against the unjudicial agencies, many of them far removed from Chief Justice John R. Caverly’s courtroom, who are trying to ‘fix’ public opinion.” There was only one reason, Darrow explained, for the intense public interest in the case; it was the wealth of the defendants’ families that caused the mob to shout for the death penalty. If the defendants had been poor, unknown, of humble origin, no one would have paid the slightest attention to the case.
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T
HERE WAS NOT A GREAT
deal in Bernard Glueck’s testimony, either on his first day in the witness box—Tuesday, 5 August—or on the next, that had not already been said by the two other psychiatrists. Glueck, also, remarked that he had found Richard’s emotional detachment unusual. Indeed Richard Loeb lacked any emotional or affective response to the killing.

“I then took up with Loeb the Franks crime,” Glueck responded, in answer to a question from Benjamin Bachrach, “and asked him to tell me about it. He recited to me in a most matter of fact way all the gruesome details of the planning and execution of this crime, of the disfiguring and the disposal of the body, how he and Leopold stopped with the body in the car to get something to eat on the way. He spoke to me in a most matter of fact way about his doings and movements immediately following this act. As his recital proceeded, I was amazed at the absolute absence of any signs of normal feeling, such as one would expect under the circumstances. He showed no remorse, no regret, no compassion for the people involved in this situation, and as he kept on talking…there became evident the absolute lack of normal human emotional response that would fit these situations, and the whole thing became incomprehensible to me except on the basis of a disordered personality…. In the course of my conversation with him he told me how his little brother…passed in review before him as a possible victim of the kidnapping and killing. Even in connection with this statement, he showed the same lack of adequate emotional response to the situation.”

“In the conversation with Richard Loeb,” Bachrach asked, “did he say anything about who it was that struck the blow on the head of Robert Franks with the chisel?”

“He told me all the details of the crime, including the fact that he struck the blow….”

“If you have reached any conclusion with reference to his mental condition, you may now state it.”

23.
CLARENCE DARROW.

“My impression is very definite that this boy is suffering from a disordered personality, that the nature of this disorder is primarily in a profound pathological discord between his intellectual and emotional life.”
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“Now then, doctor, are you ready to begin with your examination of the defendant Nathan F. Leopold, Jr.?”

“Yes.”

“You may proceed….”
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“I started out with him by asking him to tell me about the Franks murder…. He argued with me that for many years he has cultivated and adhered to a purely hedonistic philosophy that all action is justified if it gives pleasure; that it was his ambition and has been for many years to become a perfect Nietzschean and to follow Nietzsche’s philosophy all the way through…. He told me of his attitude toward Loeb and of how completely he had put himself in the role of slave in connection with him. He said, ‘I can illustrate it to you by saying that I felt myself less than the dust beneath his feet.’…He told me of his abject devotion to Loeb, saying that he was jealous of the food and drink that Loeb took, because he could not come as close to him as did the food and drink…. Nathan F. Leopold, in my estimation, is a definitely paranoid personality, perhaps developing a definite paranoid psychosis. I have not seen a definite psychosis of this sort in as young a person as he is. His aberration is characterized primarily by this abnormal pathological transformation of his personality and by the delusional way of thinking.”
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