For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (44 page)

The Bowman-Hulbert report, Patrick claimed, was full of statements that, on closer examination, were so vague as to be meaningless. Nathan, it was claimed, responded to pain by sweating, weakness, and fainting; but to what degree of pain had he been subjected? A sufficiently high degree of pain might cause anyone to faint—by itself, the statement proved nothing; and, in any case, Nathan’s alleged reaction was not evidence of mental disease.
¹⁴

Nor was there was anything exceptional, Patrick claimed, in the fantasies of Nathan and Richard, and certainly there was nothing that would have compelled them to murder. The defense had represented personality quirks as psychoneuroses. Nathan’s imagination was slightly outré, perhaps, but fantasies of power and domination were not uncommon or extraordinary—everyone fantasized to an extent. And Richard’s desire to be a master criminal? It showed merely that he possessed a criminal mind and that he was ambitious. There was no evidence for the defense claim that Nathan was on the verge of dementia praecox or that Richard suffered from a split between his intellect and his emotions. Patrick had carefully read the Bowman-Hulbert report and had found no symptoms of pathological behavior in either boy.
¹⁵

Only the crime itself might be evidence of mental illness, and even that was not certain. There was no basis for asserting that the defendants were mentally diseased “unless,” Patrick concluded, “we assume that every man who commits a deliberate, cold-blooded, planned murder, must, by that fact, be mentally diseased. There was no evidence of any mental disease…in any of the statements the boys made regarding it…. There was nothing in the examination; there were no mental obliquities or peculiarities shown, except their lack of appreciation of the enormity of the deed which they had committed.”
¹⁶

A
RCHIBALD
C
HURCH, CHAIR OF THE
department of nervous and mental diseases at Northwestern, agreed with his colleagues’ diagnosis. Church—tall, broad-shouldered, and meticulously dressed, with a military bearing—was an authoritative presence on the witness stand. He, too, remembered both Nathan and Richard as free from mental disease when he had interviewed them in the state’s attorney’s office on 1 June.

“Have you an opinion, doctor,” Sbarbaro asked, “from your observation and examination, as to whether the defendant, Richard Loeb, was suffering from any mental disease on that day, at that time?…”

“The young man,” Church replied, “was entirely oriented. He knew who he was and where he was, and the time of day and everything about it. His memory was extraordinarily good; his logical powers as manifested during the interview were normal, and I saw no evidence of any mental disease.”

“Now, doctor, have you an opinion from your observation and examination of Nathan Leopold, Jr., as to whether he was suffering from any mental disease at that same time?”

“I have.”

“What is that opinion?”

“There was no evidence of any mental disease.”

“Will you state your reasons again, please?”

“Because he was perfectly oriented, of good memory, of extreme intellectual reasoning capacity, and apparently of good judgment within the range of the subject matter.”
¹⁷

Nor, Church continued, did the scientific findings presented by the defense have any significance. Clarence Darrow had claimed that the fantasy life of each boy had contributed to creating a symbiosis between Leopold and Loeb, but the defense experts had failed to demonstrate how the fantasies—either separately or conjoined—had compelled the killing of Bobby Franks. The supposition that each defendant fantasized was interesting, perhaps, but trivial in its relationship to the murder. The psychoanalytic evidence was not sufficient ground for any mitigation of punishment.

“Phantasies,” Church stated, “are day dreams. Everybody has them. Everybody knows they are dreams. They have an interest in relation to character and conduct, but they do not compel conduct nor excuse it.”
¹⁸

The witnesses for the state were unanimous in their verdict: the defendants displayed no signs of mental illness.

I
T WAS REGRETTABLE, OF COURSE,
that each set of psychiatrists—one for the state, the other for the defense—had contradicted the other. Few observers noticed that each side spoke for a different branch of psychiatry and was, therefore, separately justified in reaching its verdict. The neurologists, witnesses for the state—Krohn, Patrick, Church, and a fourth expert, Harold Douglas Singer—had found no evidence that any organic trauma or infection might have damaged either the cerebral cortex or the central nervous system of either Nathan or Richard. Neurologists assumed the somatic origins of psychiatric illness, and there were no symptoms of organic disease in either defendant. The conclusion reached by the neurologists was, therefore, a correct one—there was no mental disease.

The psychoanalytic psychiatrists—White, Glueck, and Healy—could assert, with equal justification, that according to their understanding of psychiatry, an understanding informed by psychoanalysis, the defendants had suffered mental trauma during childhood that had damaged each boy’s ability to function competently. Nathan and Richard had each experienced abuse at the hands of a governess: in Richard’s case, Emily Struthers had imposed a set of demands that had distorted his perception of reality; in Nathan’s case, Mathilda Wantz had seduced him when he was still a child. The damage inflicted on each boy at an early age had resulted in compensatory fantasies that led directly to the murder.

Most commentators, however, were unaware of the epistemological gulf that separated neurology from psychoanalytic psychiatry. The expert witnesses all claimed to be psychiatrists, after all; and it was, everyone agreed, a dark day for psychiatry when leading representatives of the profession could stand up in court and contradict each other. If men of national reputation and eminence could not agree on a common diagnosis, then could any value be attached to a psychiatric judgment? Or perhaps the experts in each group were saying only what the lawyers required them to say—for a fee, of course. But if psychiatrists, leaders of the profession, no less, were so avaricious as to hire themselves out as mercenaries for a few hundred dollars, then of what value was the psychiatric profession?

It was an evil that contaminated the entire profession, thundered the
New York Times
, in an editorial similar to dozens of others that appeared at the same time. The experts in the Leopold-Loeb hearing were “of equal authority as alienists and psychiatrists,” apparently in possession of the same set of facts, who, nevertheless, gave out “opinions exactly opposite and contradictory as to the past and present condition of the two prisoners…. Instead of seeking truth for its own sake and with no preference as to what it turns out to be, they are supporting, and are expected to support, a predetermined purpose…. That the presiding Judge,” the
Times
concluded sorrowfully, “is getting any help from those men toward the forming of his decision hardly is to be believed.”
¹⁹

D
ARROW HAD LISTENED PATIENTLY
as Joseph Sbarbaro asked Archibald Church questions about the mental condition of Nathan and Richard. Now it was his turn. The neurologists had had only one opportunity to examine the boys, Darrow began, and they had come into court arguing that their examination—on Sunday, 1 June, in the office of the state’s attorney—allowed them to claim that neither boy suffered from mental disease. But how, Darrow asked, could they have examined Nathan and Richard under conditions that were far from ideal? Darrow himself had been in the anteroom to Crowe’s office that Sunday afternoon, trying to get access to the boys; he had seen for himself the to-and-fro of the police sergeants, the stenographers, the psychiatrists, and various functionaries. How had it been possible to have determined the boys’ mental condition under those circumstances?

“Now, there were,” Darrow asked Church, “some fifteen people in the room while you were talking to these boys?”

“I think,” Church replied cautiously, “hardly that many, but there were many, I know that.”

“Too many,” Darrow suggested, “for a thorough consultation?”

“Too many,” Church admitted, grudgingly, “for an ideal consultation.”

“You never had anybody bring you a patient to treat where you called in any such number of people as that, did you?”

“Occasionally it is very difficult to keep all the members of the family out.”

“I asked you a specific question,” Darrow responded tartly, his voice rising slightly.

“No, I never treated a patient in private practice—” Church paused, reluctant to concede Darrow’s point; “—examined a patient before as many people.”

“You have laid down the rules yourself as to how a private examination should be conducted, have you not?”

“Well, I control the situation under those conditions.”

“Did you ask any questions?”

“Yes.”

“Who did most of the questioning?”

“Really, there were very few questions asked,” Church glanced momentarily toward Hugh Patrick and William Krohn, sitting behind the state’s attorney and his assistants. “Dr. Patrick asked a few and Dr. Krohn asked a few and Mr. Crowe asked a few, but most of it was continuous narrative on the part of Mr. Loeb and some questions asked him by Leopold and some back and forth conversation between them….”
²⁰

“Did you ask any questions to find out evidence of mental disease?”

“No.”

“Did anybody else that you know of?”

“Well, all of the questions and conversations were for the purpose, as far as I was concerned, of determining their mental status.”
²¹

In other words, Darrow concluded, the examination had been entirely superficial, so superficial as to render it worthless. There had been perhaps fifteen people in Crowe’s office during the examination—could it even be properly called an examination? he wondered—and yet the state’s witnesses persisted in saying that they had evaluated Nathan and Richard! The examination had lasted a mere three hours, and none of the neurologists, according to Church, had even asked questions designed to elicit evidence of mental disease!

Had Darrow known, he could have asked whether Church had carried out the routine tests that neurologists customarily used when evaluating defendants. By the 1920s, physicians had devised well-known procedures for determining lesions of the nervous system. Church could have used an esthesiometer, a needlelike instrument designed to measure tactile sensibility and to test for damage to the peripheral nervous system. He could also have used a dynamometer, an instrument for measuring muscle strength and movement, useful in detecting signs of decreased muscle tone (hypotonia), symptomatic of cerebellar lesions. And even if the state’s experts had not had such instruments at their disposal during the examination, it would have been possible for them to have tested for ataxia (a loss of balance due to lesions of the cerebellum) by requiring Richard and Nathan to perform simple walking and standing exercises.

Roentgenology also had become an accepted procedure in neurological diagnosis. It had become possible, as early as 1910, to map the central nervous system by X-rays; and by the 1920s, physicians had learned to detect tumors of the spinal marrow with the aid of X-rays.

The lumbar puncture—the insertion of a fine needle into the lumbar interspace of the spine to collect a sample of cerebrospinal fluid—enabled neurologists to calculate pressure measurements of the cerebrospinal fluid and to draw off a sample for biochemical and serological analysis. By 1924, the lumbar puncture had become the most common diagnostic technique favored by neurologists to test for tabes dorsalis, a form of syphilis that results in the degeneration of the dorsal columns of the spinal cord.
²²

That Darrow knew nothing of such diagnostic procedures and their use in neurological examination did not prevent him from pushing forward his attack on the state’s testimony. Church had been a coauthor, with Frederick Peterson of Columbia University, of the textbook
Nervous and Mental Diseases
, long the standard work on neurological disorders and their treatment. Darrow had a copy of the most recent edition, the ninth, on the table before him. He picked up the book, a heavy volume with black covers, and turned toward Church to read his words back to him. “This is your latest on this subject,” Darrow began “and you have said here: ‘The examination of a patient with mental disorder is a much more complex process than that of a case of physical disease…. For it is necessary in the former not only to ascertain the present physical condition, as with ordinary patients, but also to investigate the mental state, which involves the employment of unusual and new methods and brings us into contact with a novel series of psychic phenomena, and moreover to attain our end we need to study the whole past life of the patient, his diseases, accidents, schooling, occupation, environment, temperament, character; nor can we stop here; for it is of the greatest importance to inform ourselves as to conditions among his antecedents to determine the type of family from which he sprung, and the presence or absence of an hereditary taint. There is therefore much to learn even before seeing the patient in person.’”
²³

Darrow paused. He looked from the book to the witness. “And you did not learn that before seeing them, surely?”

“I did not,” Church replied, “have the opportunity.”

Church explained that the state’s attorney had called him at midday on 1 June. He had not had the time to prepare for the examination. And in any case, Church continued, his coauthor, Frederick Peterson, had written the words that Darrow had quoted. The preface, Church explained, stated that Church had been responsible for the sections on neurology and that Peterson had contributed the second section on psychiatry.