For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (42 page)

Throughout the hearing, Robert Crowe had repeatedly asked how two boys, supposedly suffering from mental illness, could have planned and prepared a murder so meticulously; their attention to detail, their intelligence and perspicacity, could not, Crowe had asserted, be reconciled with mental disease.

Benjamin Bachrach now prompted Glueck to respond to Crowe’s assertion. Could such qualities associated with the preparation and planning of a crime coexist with mental illness?

“Doctor,” Bachrach asked, “from your experience in dealing with persons of disordered mind, state whether or not it is common and ordinary to find in such persons a high degree of intelligence existing at the same time as the abnormality or diseased condition?”

“If I should give an answer to this question in a general way,” Glueck replied, “I should say that it is quite characteristic of paranoid individuals to have along with their disordered mental state a highly developed intelligence….”

“Have you observed among other such persons under your care the ability to plan like ordinary intelligent people without abnormality?”

“I have observed the most ingenious and great capacity to plan among paranoid patients…. Patients suffering from mental disorder—and 90 percent of my patients in private practice do suffer from mental disorder—carry on their activities while they are under treatment for their mental disorder.”

Benjamin Bachrach indicated that he had completed his questioning. “You may take the witness,” he told Robert Crowe.

T
HE CROSS-EXAMINATION WAS BRIEF.
Crowe, once again, poured scorn on the notion that Nathan and Richard were emotionally stunted and, once again, demanded to know what, in any case, that might have to do with the murder. But the state’s attorney seemed temporarily to have run out of steam; he spared Glueck the inquisition that he had meted out to William White and William Healy, and by half past two, just two hours after he had begun, he had ended his cross-examination of the witness.
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Glueck lingered in Chicago, before taking the train back to New York City, just long enough to sit for an interview with Maurine Watkins, a reporter for the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. Watkins had asked Glueck, as an expert on juvenile delinquency, to give advice to the parents of Chicago’s children, and Glueck was only too happy for the opportunity to impart progressive, modern ideas on bringing up children. His philosophy was one of tolerance and understanding; parents should encourage their children to talk out problems and concerns; they should eschew discipline, especially over trivial matters; and they should talk frankly on sexual matters. “This tragedy,” Glueck said, referring to the murder of Bobby Franks, “may do great good: if it makes parents know that contact with their children must be psychological as well as physical, and that children can’t be kept to their own devices.”
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Glueck’s statement was intended as the antidote to those critics who claimed that the murder defied explanation. Glueck identified himself with the child guidance movement, a coalition of experts on the proper upbringing of children that explained deviant behavior as a consequence of dysfunctional relationships between parent and child. Child psychiatrists asserted that all behavior was a product of its environment and that delinquent behavior in the child could best be avoided, therefore, by providing affection, love, education, recreation, and wholesome advice. There was, according to the child guidance experts, no divide separating normal and abnormal behavior—everything could be explained in terms of familial relationships.
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That analysis seemed plausible, perhaps even unexceptional, except that it demonstrably failed to account for the murderous behavior of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. There seemed to have been nothing dysfunctional about either the Loeb family or the Leopold family. On the contrary, both sets of parents had provided their sons with a familial environment that, in appearance at least, had lacked for nothing. Glueck’s philosophy of child guidance might account for deviancy in some cases, perhaps—but its precepts could not be applied to Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. The question still remained: why had two highly educated, wealthy, intelligent young men sought out a random victim for murder?

O
N
F
RIDAY
, 8 A
UGUST,
Walter Bachrach called Harold Hulbert to the witness stand. Hulbert seemed impossibly young—he looked more like a graduate student than a learned expert—and the air of innocence that he conveyed reinforced the general impression that he had somehow blundered his way into the witness box by error. He carried a thick loose-leaf binder of typewritten notes under his right arm; as he settled himself into the chair, Hulbert opened it gingerly—taking care not to allow some loose sheets of paper to fall to the floor—and placed the binder on his lap.
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Harold Hulbert was an important witness. His evidence, Darrow believed, would be unimpeachable. Hulbert’s testimony—a summation of the endocrinological examinations—rested on the hard objectivity of rational science and relied for its persuasive power on quantification and measurement. White, Healy, and Bernard Glueck had presented the psychoanalysis of Leopold and Loeb, but such evidence, by its nature, was open to question and liable to dispute. Hulbert would present the endocrinological evidence, evidence obtained through physical examination and expressed mathematically—how could Robert Crowe dispute such objective testimony?

In preparation for his appearance on the witness stand, the defense attorneys had spent considerable time coaching Hulbert. Crowe would attempt to discredit the endocrinological results by questioning the reliability of the evidence. The defense attorneys had no way to know just how or where Crowe would attack; yet, for all that, they were confident that Hulbert would be a capable witness.

Walter Bachrach began by asking Hulbert to list the physical tests that the scientists had employed in their examination of Richard and Nathan. What were the specific results? Bachrach asked Hulbert to begin with Richard Loeb.

“As I understand you, you say you took his blood pressure?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us the result of that test.”

“Systolic, 100; diastolic, 65. Blood pressure, 35. Pulse rate, 88 to 92….”

“Did the result of that test in any way indicate a deviation from the normal, as far as blood pressure is concerned?”

“It is below normal,” Hulbert replied.
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“You said you took a basal metabolism test. State what that is and its purpose.”

“The basal metabolism test is a chemical test to determine the rate at which the body tissues oxidize the food which the body has ingested, and gives us an indication of the vital forces of the body. The test is done in a technical way by having the patient appear without any breakfast and lie quietly for an hour in loose clothing, breathing into an apparatus which has been clamped to the mouth, the nose having been shut tight, to measure the carbon dioxide of the breath.”

It was a routine test, Hulbert explained, commonly used to search for glandular disease; it served as a reliable method to pinpoint endocrinological disorders. “This has all been carefully tabulated in thousands of cases…. We are able to contrast the results obtained in any one patient with what would be normal for that patient considering his age, weight, etc. The metabolism test, in the case of Richard Loeb on June 14th, taken under ideal circumstances, was minus seventeen percent, which is abnormally low.”

“What,” Bachrach prompted, “does such an abnormally low basal metabolism result signify…?”

“A disorder of the endocrine glands and the sympathic nervous system,” Hulbert replied. “It is one phase of medical evidence to indicate that there is such a disease of the endocrines and sympathetic nervous system.”
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Hulbert continued to read off the results of his tests on Richard Loeb, occasionally consulting the loose-leaf binder spread across his knees. The Wassermann test for syphilis had been negative; the sugar tolerance test had been slightly high; the blood physics test had shown Loeb to be slightly anemic; the blood chemistry test had revealed a slight excess of nonprotein nitrogen in the blood; and the urine examination had been normal—the urine showed “clear transparency and amber color,” Hulbert replied, “no albumin, no sugar, no indican…but there was mucus present, and a few epithelial cells….”

“That,” Crowe interrupted sarcastically, grinning at his quip, “throws considerable light on this murder, does it not?…”

“I object,” Bachrach shouted angrily, “to counsel interrupting!”
⁴⁵

Bachrach turned back to the witness.

“Did you make an X-ray examination of Richard Loeb?”

“We did,” Hulbert replied, indicating several X-ray photographs, along with charts and diagrams, lying on the documents table in front of the bench. Hulbert explained that the scientists had taken X-ray photographs of the skull, face, wrists, and thorax. There was no pathology, he concluded; the X-rays revealed extensive dental work, but in all other respects Richard Loeb was normal.
⁴⁶

T
HE SCIENTISTS HAD EXAMINED
N
ATHAN
Leopold also, Hulbert continued. Measurement of Nathan’s metabolism had produced a result of minus five percent, well within the normal range; the Wassermann test for syphilis had been negative; and the blood physics test had shown that Nathan was only slightly anemic. His blood pressure reading had been low; the sugar tolerance test had revealed that Nathan did not metabolize sugar properly; and a chemical analysis of his blood had revealed premonitory signs of kidney disease.
⁴⁷

Hulbert continued to read from his notes. He had a flat, emotionless voice and his matter-of-fact recitation of the tests scarcely hinted at their significance. Crowe no longer bothered to interrupt the witness with objections or sarcasm, and even the reporters seemed to have lost interest. One by one, the stenotypes stopped clicking. The reporters merely listened, without bothering to record the testimony for their readers, until eventually only a solitary Caligraph machine, recognizable by its enormous keyboard, remained in operation, quietly clacking away as an accompaniment to Hulbert’s voice.
⁴⁸

Walter Bachrach pointed to the X-ray photographs lying on the documents table. Had the X-rays revealed anything unusual, he asked, with respect to Nathan Leopold?

The clerk of the court, Ferdinand Scherer, stepped across to the documents table to hand the X-rays to the witness. Hulbert had stopped speaking; he was now looking through the photographs, holding each to the light in order to make his choice.

“The X-ray of the skull,” he began, “revealed the most pathology. The tables of the skull, the bony tables of the skull, are of normal thickness, but the union between the various bones of the skull has become firm and ossified at the age of 19.”

“What in normal life,” Bachrach asked, “is the time at which such ossification takes place?”

“It varies, but usually at full maturity or when a man is in his prime.”

“In terms of years when does that usually take place?”

“I would say from thirty to thirty-five.”
⁴⁹

As John Caverly leaned across to look at the photograph, Hulbert rose slightly from his chair, holding the X-ray in his right hand, and pointed to a slight shadow at the base of the skull. The photograph showed that the pineal gland had calcified prematurely, he explained, as Caverly looked on; in a normal individual, the pineal gland did not calcify until thirty years of age.
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“The pineal gland,” Hulbert explained, “in this x-ray throws a definite shadow, typical of a calcified pineal gland.”

“What is the pineal gland?” Bachrach asked. “What is the function of the pineal gland so far as it is known to science?”

The pineal gland had two functions, Hulbert replied. It acted as a brake on sexual desire, serving to inhibit the libido, and it stimulated mental development.
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Nathan displayed other indications of glandular pathology. His thick, dry skin and his coarse hair; the early appearance of his primary and secondary sexual characteristics; his low blood pressure, low body temperature, and slight anemia—these were signs that Nathan had previously suffered from an abnormal thyroid gland.
⁵²

Nathan’s medical history during childhood and early adolescence—his lack of resistance to disease, including such skin infections as urticaria—indicated a disorder of the adrenal medulla.
⁵³

X-rays of Nathan’s skull had shown that the
sella turcica
, the bony cradle at the base of the skull enclosing the pituitary gland, was smaller than one might have expected, and its small size would have the effect of congesting and crowding the pituitary gland. Other indications of hyperpituitarism, according to Hulbert, included Nathan’s sexual development and activity, his inability to metabolize sugar at a normal rate, and his coarse, heavy hair.
⁵⁴

Finally, Hulbert concluded, Nathan’s sex glands were undoubtedly diseased. Nathan possessed an abnormally high sex drive and both his primary and his secondary sexual characteristics had appeared prematurely.
⁵⁵

Nathan, sitting immediately behind Clarence Darrow, whispered an occasional remark to the attorney, while listening to the witness. Hulbert paused in his testimony and Nathan turned slightly in his seat to see Richard Loeb, sitting to his left, grinning mischievously. As Nathan turned toward him, Richard murmured in his ear that it looked as if he, Nathan, were in a bad way—and both boys laughed quietly at the joke.
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