For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (52 page)

Robert Crowe was furious at the judge’s decision; how could the death penalty ever again be imposed if these two malicious killers had escaped with a prison term? True, Caverly had asked that Leopold and Loeb never win parole, but it was at least possible that they would eventually be released. It was a bitterly disappointing verdict, and in his statement to the press, Crowe made sure everyone knew whom to blame. “When the state’s attorney arrested the defendants he solved what was then a mystery. And by the thoroughness of his preparation of the case, the state’s attorney forced the defendants to plead guilty, presented a mountain of evidence to the court and made his arguments.

“The state’s attorney’s duty was fully performed. He is in no measure responsible for the decision of the court. The responsibility for that decision rests with the judge alone.”
³⁰

Later that day, Jacob Franks also spoke to the reporters. He was pleased that it was finally over. There was now no possibility that the defense would appeal the sentence. “There can be no hearing in regard to their sanity,” Franks said; “there can be no appeal, there can be no more torture by seeing this thing spread over the front pages of the newspapers. It will be easier for Mrs. Franks and for me to be relieved of the terrible strain of all this publicity.”
³¹

N
EITHER
N
ATHAN NOR
R
ICHARD HAD
ever expressed remorse for the killing, and neither thought now to use their final interview with the press to admit contrition. Nathan, back in his cell in the county jail, was his customary imperious self; he called to the sheriff, Peter Hoffman, with one final request.

“Go out,” he commanded, “and order us a big meal. Get us two steaks”—he held out his thumb and forefinger—“that thick!”

“Yes, and be sure,” Richard chimed in, “they are smothered in onions. And bring every side dish you can find. This may be our last good meal.”

“And,” Nathan added, “bring chocolate éclairs for dessert.”

At eight o’clock that evening, Nathan was fast asleep on his bunk. Richard sat smoking a cigarette, sitting on the edge of his bed, an unfinished novel lying beside him, watching through the bars of his cell as the guards patrolled the corridor. Detectives from police headquarters stood in the main lobby of the Cook County jail while uniformed police, in addition to the jailers, kept watch on the hallways and corridors.

Tomorrow they would leave on a dangerous journey to the Joliet penitentiary.

Feelings about the verdict ran deep in Chicago. It was a provocation that two pampered rich boys had gotten away with murder—every Chicagoan had hoped to see Leopold and Loeb swinging from the end of a rope. It seemed a travesty, an affront, that Bobby Franks was in his grave yet Leopold and Loeb were very much alive, eating chocolate éclairs and bantering with the journalists.

That evening Robert Crowe issued another statement. It was a provocative, inflammatory statement that said more about the boys’ relationship than anyone had ever before publicly revealed; Crowe now gave substance to the rumor that Leopold and Loeb were homosexuals.

“In malice, premeditation, and deliberation the crime of these defendants is unequaled in the criminal history of the state. It is an atrocious and cold blooded murder…executed after months of planning and careful deliberation…. The evidence indicated acts of perversion between Leopold and Loeb extending over a long period of time. The evidence indicated that Loeb had committed other crimes…major crimes of a serious nature. Both defendants were known to have associates of a loose and immoral character, and Loeb had a venereal disease at 15.

“Both had the reputation of being immoral…degenerates of the worst type…. The evidence shows that both defendants are atheists and followers of the Nietzschean doctrines…that they are above the law, both the law of God and the law of man…. The murder and kidnaping for ransom of 14 year old Robert Franks struck terror to the heart of every father and mother throughout the community…. It is unfortunate for the welfare of the community that they were not sentenced to death.”
³²

Crowe might have waited until Leopold and Loeb were safely locked up in Joliet Prison before releasing his statement. Now he had magnified the prisoners’ villainy and greatly increased the danger to their lives on the car journey from Chicago to the penitentiary. Would someone take Crowe’s words as a license to kill? Would there be an ambush on the road to Joliet?

F
EARS OF AN ATTACK PROVED
exaggerated; no one ambushed the motorcade. But there was almost a nasty accident on the road; as the three-car convoy proceeded along the highway, the brakes on the lead car, a black Cadillac sedan, suddenly locked. Leopold and Loeb, traveling in the second car, a Packard limousine, at fifty miles an hour, received an unpleasant jolting—their driver swerved to avoid the Cadillac, veered off the roadway, and ended up on the adjacent tracks of the Chicago, Joliet and Elgin Railroad. They suffered only minor bruises, and after the sheriffs had pushed the Packard back onto the road, the motorcade proceeded once again to the penitentiary.
³³

As they approached the prison, they could see the high sandstone walls of the penitentiary illuminated in the headlights of the cars. A huge crowd waited by the large gates to greet the two celebrities; as the cars approached, a roar of recognition rose up from the mob. Sheriffs and prison guards battled to clear a path through the prison gates, and within seconds Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were inside Joliet Prison.

27.
LEOPOLD AND LOEB ENTER JOLIET PRISON.

The lock in the center door clanked as the key was turned to shut out the world. The prison, first opened in 1858, was a forbidding place at the best of times; now, in the twilight, the massive stone walls behind them and the steel-barred gates in front conspired to give the penitentiary a menacing, threatening atmosphere. Richard stumbled on a paving stone, but caught himself, as he stepped toward the first steel gate; Nathan looked around and noticed the prison guards staring silently down at them from a second-floor gallery, their rifles, cradled in their arms, pointing skyward.
³⁴

The warden, John L. Whitman, received the confinement papers from the Cook County sheriff, who turned to leave for the ride back to Chicago. It was already eight-thirty in the evening; there was no time tonight to go through the customary procedures—photographs, medical history, paperwork; those could wait for the morning. Three guards escorted the prisoners across the jail yard, past the shadowy form of the bakery on the left, and down a gravel path to the isolation block for new arrivals. The prisoners had ten minutes for a shower in the bathhouse and then a new set of clothes: Richard had discarded his golf sweater and gray flannel trousers and Nathan had removed his suit jacket and trousers; now the guards provided both prisoners with the standard prison uniform of blue denim jacket and pants.
³⁵

Both boys lay on straw mattresses in their cells—Nathan at the east end of the block; Richard, as far distant as possible, in a cell at the other end of the corridor. In the darkness, staring at the ceiling, not thinking to go asleep, but just running over the day’s events, they could hear the murmur of the guards’ voices in the corridor, beyond the cell bars.

Very soon both Nathan and Richard were fast asleep; they spent their first night in Joliet peacefully.

17 THE AFTERMATH

I was asked in Pottsville whether L & L would ever get out. I replied that the law of Ill. permitted a pardon or parole after twenty years:—Whether they would ever get out no one could say.
¹

Clarence Darrow, December 1924

C—sort of hates to admit that he is
NOT
rather well-off, after all the world supposing that he reaped
such
a reward from the L-&-L case ooo, ooo, lalala-lalala-LA! while, in truth, for that he received LESS than for anything that took so much time and tissue out of him and his life.
²

Ruby Darrow, n.d. (1925)

L
IFE IN PRISON!
C
AVERLY’S DECISION,
according to the editor of the
Newark Evening News
, was a travesty of justice. It would surely confirm the popular prejudice that even in a court of law, the rich could purchase the result they desired. “There is one law for those who can command unlimited resources and the highest legal talent, another for the poor devil who must take his chance with the best he can afford…. The machinery of justice in Illinois has once more operated to an end that comes close to accounting for the murder-ridden criminal record of Chicago.”
³

It was a theme endlessly repeated in newspaper editorials: money had subverted justice; wealth had done away with the principle that all were equal before the law. The crime had been atrocious, one that conspicuously deserved the death penalty, yet the defendants had escaped the scaffold solely because they had had the wherewithal to purchase the guile and ingenuity of Clarence Darrow. “In the criminal history of the country there is nowhere recorded a more cold-blooded, a more sinister and cruel murder than that of young Franks,” the San Francisco
Bulletin
declared. “It was done with extreme cunning by youths—one 19 years of age, the other 18—of exceptional education, intelligence and careful breeding. In the face of these facts Judge Caverly has given to Leopold and Loeb an ‘easy sentence.’…Judge Caverly’s verdict…will tend to a lowered confidence in our machinery of justice…. It is to be feared that it will augment a growing sense that there is one law for the obscure and another for the socially powerful.” The editor of the
Kansas City Post
warned that anarchists and other malcontents would point to the judge’s decision as evidence of a divided society: “The theory that there is one set of laws for the rich and another for the friendless poor has received substantial support as a civil propaganda gnawing at the very vitals of national confidence and pride.”
⁴

But did the wealth of the defendants in fact have any influence on the decision? Caverly had based the sentence on only one criterion—the youth of Leopold and Loeb—and in his conclusion he had explicitly disregarded the psychiatric evidence. In this light, therefore, the efforts of Clarence Darrow and the testimony of the medical experts had been of no account and had no effect on Caverly’s determinations. “What the lawyers did or said for the defense went for nothing,” wrote the editor of the
New York Times
. “Judge Caverly simply ignored it. Had the youthful murderers been poor and friendless they would have escaped capital punishment precisely as Leopold and Loeb have escaped it. The Judge has effectually stopped the mouths of those who might have been inclined to complain that in Illinois there is one law for the poor and another for the rich.”
⁵

But was this not, nevertheless, an arbitrary decision? What was it about the youth of Leopold and Loeb that entitled them to escape hanging? There was no clause in the Illinois statutes that excused murderers younger than twenty-one from the death penalty. On what grounds did Caverly use their age as a reason to save Leopold and Loeb from the scaffold? Did Caverly believe that because they were nineteen and eighteen years old, respectively, their judgment was therefore necessarily inchoate and immature? Was their sense of responsibility necessarily diminished because they were still teenagers? Neither Leopold nor Loeb had shown any signs of immaturity in his academic career; moreover, the planning of the murder had demonstrated calculation and determination, qualities difficult to reconcile with immaturity. “It is narrow legalism to excuse Loeb and Leopold on the score of their youth,” the
St. Paul Dispatch
argued. “In a formal sense they certainly do comply with the definition. They are, in years, youths and they did enter a plea of guilty. Yet, in any real sense they are not youths, their crime was not an outburst of youthful irresponsibility, and if they had not committed this crime no one would have judged them intellectually ‘immature.’”
⁶

At what point had Caverly arrived at his decision? He had known the age of each defendant at the beginning of the hearing. Had he determined, at that moment, that they were too young to hang? Surely not! “It is repugnant to all our concepts of law and justice,” wrote the editor of the New York
Sun
, “to suppose that a Judge, knowing that the law provided for capital punishment in certain cases, would take his seat to try these cases, predetermined not to inflict capital punishment.” Yet it seemed equally unlikely that Caverly would suddenly decide, during the hearing, that the youth of Leopold and Loeb precluded the death penalty. It was a puzzle made even more inscrutable by the defendants’ behavior in the courtroom, continued the
Sun
. “During the trial Loeb and Leopold did not conduct themselves in a manner suggestive of youth. Neither indicated the least repentance for the shocking crime to which they had pleaded guilty…. Not once, we are sure, did either of the murderers impress anybody—except perhaps Judge Caverly—with his youth…. And yet it must have been during that period that the Judge, who had begun the trial knowing the ages of the defendants and knowing that capital punishment still existed in Illinois, decided within himself that…these murderers were too young to be hanged.”
⁷

And if murderers below the age of twenty-one should not be executed, should not all such murderers be spared? Why some and not others? Many youths had received the death sentence in Cook County for lesser crimes; many were now sitting in the Cook County jail awaiting execution. Should not those cases now be reviewed?

In the excitement attendant on the sentencing, everyone had forgotten about Bernard Grant, the nineteen-year-old convicted of the murder of Ralph Souders, the policeman guarding the A&P store on Morgan Street. But now the newspapers took up Grant’s cause. Leopold and Loeb had escaped death, but Grant sat in Cook County jail awaiting his imminent execution. “Bernard Grant, of Chicago, is puzzled,” the
Detroit Free Press
explained, “and what’s bewildering him is this: Bernard is nineteen years old, just the age of Nathan Leopold. But while Leopold escaped the gallows on account of his ‘youth,’ Bernard is to be hanged by the neck until he is dead…. Bernard thinks this isn’t fair. Yet it is all plain enough if only you get the right angle. Bernard Grant is a poor boy. He was obliged to quit school at fourteen in order to help support his family. Consequently, he never was able to save enough money to hire a high-priced, emotional lawyer who makes a specialty of cheating the gallows. When he got into trouble, he had to take what counsel he could get…. The very fact that Grant thinks an injustice is being done to him shows how inexperienced and unsophisticated he is. Without money, without influence, without ability to entertain the crowd, without opportunity to get the alienists to talking, and writing yards and yards of deduction largely buncombe, it was silly of him to think he ever had a chance.” According to the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, a movement was afoot in Chicago to petition the governor of Illinois to commute Grant’s death sentence to life in prison. “There are murmurs in Chicago…. Grant is without education, son of a day laborer…. There is a feeling that the execution of the capital sentence will be a proof of the double standard of law—one law for the poor and another law for the rich.”
⁸

Would Clarence Darrow exert himself on behalf of Bernard Grant? Grant was as deserving as Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—perhaps more so. Mary Grant, his mother, claimed that he had been wrongly identified and bitterly compared his fate with that of Leopold and Loeb: “My boy is innocent. He was home asleep when they say he killed the policeman…. They convicted my boy just the same…. What can we do? We were not able to hire alienists at $250 a day to say he is insane.” Even the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, the scourge of the criminal class, now urged clemency for Grant—“if he hangs while Loeb and Leopold live, the inequality of our process of justice will be gross”—while simultaneously admitting that life in prison for the murderer of a policeman would, as a general rule, be a regrettable outcome.
⁹

Grant did eventually win a reprieve—the governor of Illinois, Len Small, postponed the execution until he could decide whether to commute the death sentence. Yet criticism of Caverly continued unabated. The more one examined the judge’s rationale, the more illogical it seemed. Caverly had claimed, in his summation, that life in prison for Leopold and Loeb would be more of a punishment than death. That assertion was debatable, to say the least, but more to the point, was it certain that Leopold and Loeb would spend the remainder of their days in the penitentiary, or was it more probable that sooner or later their lawyers would petition the parole board for their release?
¹⁰

The general condemnation of Caverly stemmed in great part from a widespread apprehension that somehow, by one means or another, the two killers would obtain an early release. Caverly himself had fueled such speculation by foolishly omitting to say whether the two sentences—life plus ninety-nine years—should run consecutively or concurrently. According to the Illinois criminal code, when a judge failed to state that two sentences were to be served consecutively, they would run concurrently, with the prisoner serving the longer of the two. “The law holds,” declared Hinton Clabaugh, supervisor of pardons and paroles for Illinois, “that in case one sentence is longer than the other the longer one takes precedence…. Therefore it must be decided which is longer in the case of Leopold and Loeb—ninety-nine years or life. What can be longer than life?”

But if Nathan and Richard were serving life sentences, then, according to the statutes, they would both be eligible for parole after twenty years. They could, in addition, earn early release, at the discretion of the parole board, for good behavior. Either boy might be released from the penitentiary after just eleven years and three months! “I don’t mean to say,” Clabaugh concluded hastily, “that Leopold and Loeb will necessarily be out at the end of eleven years…. But I do say it is hard to see how their legal privileges can be denied them any more than to other convicts.”
¹¹

Eleven years! That would make a mockery of the law! Could they really win their freedom as early as 1935? They would then be just thirty years old; neither would yet have even reached middle age.

Would the parole board, at some point in the future, remit the sentences? No one, in 1924, could predict the decisions of the parole board. But even if the board held firm and resolved that both Leopold and Loeb should remain behind bars, there was always the possibility that executive action by the governor of Illinois might result in their early release. The governor had the power either to grant a pardon or to commute the sentences. In response to inquiries from several journalists, a spokesman for the governor’s office stated the constitutional right of the executive to pardon the prisoners—“the governor…would be legally permitted to pardon Leopold and Loeb”—but hastened to add that Len Small had no thought of committing political suicide by releasing the two convicts.
¹²

Despite such reassurances the editorials continued their drumbeat against early release. The example of Harry Thaw was proof that even the most cynical and callous killer could eventually win his freedom. Thaw had spent several years in an asylum after his murder of Stanford White, but through the persistence of his lawyers he had won his release. Might not Leopold and Loeb do the same? The public demanded capital punishment for such crimes, the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
explained, precisely because a life sentence rarely meant permanent confinement. “There would be much more public satisfaction with the verdict if ‘life imprisonment’ meant imprisonment for life…. But in American practice it is rare that criminals under such a sentence of imprisonment are confined until the grave releases them…. We believe it is seldom, indeed, that ‘life imprisonment’ involves confinement for more than twenty years, and it is highly improbable that these men will be compelled to serve longer than that.”
¹³

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb would be able to buy favorable treatment in the penitentiary, and their lawyers would doubtless appeal their imprisonment and win their freedom. “In prison,” the
Atlanta Journal
predicted, “the money behind Loeb and Leopold will lead to special favors for them. They will receive visitors, will publish their distorted views to the world, and will in every way attempt to feed fat the notoriety and public attention they have received these last few months.” The judge had recommended life without the possibility of parole for the two defendants, but who could guarantee their perpetual punishment? The public memory of the killing would gradually fade away, and the defense attorneys would work diligently behind the scenes in favor of an early release. “Time alone will fix the merit of the life sentence passed upon Loeb and Leopold,” the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
concluded warily. “If these boys are confined in the penitentiary the rest of their natural lives the ends of justice may be served, but if they are later pardoned those who do it will assault justice and disgrace their office.”
¹⁴