For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (54 page)

Darrow’s triumph in the Leopold-Loeb hearing now endowed his opinions with authority and gravitas. Darrow had no education or training in criminology other than that provided by his courtroom experience, yet the popular press accorded him the status of an expert on all questions connected with crime and the criminal justice system. Also, Darrow had no knowledge of science apart from that gleaned by reading popular texts, yet his pronouncements on science, medicine, and psychiatry now found their way into the newspapers. New York politicians and business leaders had recently announced the construction of a neuropathic hospital—the first in the country—at a cost of more than $2 million for the treatment of the mentally ill. The founders of the new hospital sought, and received, Darrow’s endorsement of the plan as the most essential component of the campaign against crime. If mental defectives, Darrow stated, could be identified at an early stage and if treatment facilities were readily available, then the crime rate would rapidly fall. “This movement should be countrywide,” Darrow asserted. “The case of Loeb and Leopold is, after all, merely an isolated instance…. Modern science says that young mental defectives can be adjusted to meet the problems of life in a normal manner…. Correct diagnosis, proper treatment, and healthful environment and influences can bring about cures that, in their wider application, spell crime prevention.”
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Darrow had launched his campaign against the death penalty in October 1924. Eight months later, on 25 May 1925, a special grand jury, meeting in Dayton, Tennessee, indicted John T. Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old science instructor, for teaching the theory of evolution to a high school biology class. The trial of Scopes, Darrow believed, would pit science against ignorance, knowledge against superstition, secular thought against religious fundamentalism. It was a chance for Darrow to grab the national spotlight yet again, and so on 10 July, he found himself in the sweltering heat of a Tennessee courtroom leading the defense of Scopes against the forces of reaction.

Darrow lost the case—the jury found Scopes guilty. The defense had hoped to appeal the conviction to the United States Supreme Court and then, in front of a national audience, demonstrate that the Tennessee statute was unconstitutional. But the Tennessee supreme court overturned the original conviction on a technicality; there was to be no appeal before a higher court. To the leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) it seemed that their financial support of the defense attorneys had gone for naught—the statute remained on Tennessee’s books, and the antievolution movement spread outward from Tennessee to other southern states. Mississippi (in 1926) and Arkansas (in 1928) both outlawed the teaching of evolution in public high schools.

The trial had been a disappointment for the ACLU, but for Darrow it had been a personal triumph. He had shifted the focus away from a defense of the constitutional rights of the defendant—had it been legitimate for Scopes to teach evolution to his class?—and toward a debate on the literal truth of the biblical account of creation. He had lured the prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryan, onto the witness stand. Bryan, like Darrow, was a larger-than-life character; he had been a presidential candidate in 1896 at only age thirty-six, had been a member of Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet until his resignation in 1915, and was now a national spokesman for the fundamentalist movement. The confrontation between Darrow and Bryan was the centerpiece of the Scopes trial. Bryan, responding to Darrow’s questions, was obdurate in his defense of the literal truth of the Bible; and Darrow, as a consequence, could compel Bryan to reveal to the world both his ignorance of modern science and his imprecise understanding of the Bible. Darrow emerged from the Scopes trial with his reputation intact and enlarged—he was now the darling of the intellectuals, the hero of the age, the voice of reason, and a spokesman for modern science and progressivism.
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the stratosphere, Robert Crowe’s reputation as state’s attorney dwindled and diminished in the years following the Leopold-Loeb hearing. The murder rate in Chicago had doubled during Crowe’s tenure as state’s attorney yet the number of convictions in the courts had declined precipitously. Gangland killings were a daily event, and no one seemed able to stop the violence. Crowe now had seventy deputies on his staff, and his annual budget had increased by more than $100,000, yet the gunmen always seemed able to escape justice.

A rumor began to be whispered in Chicago: was Robert Crowe or someone in Crowe’s office secretly working with the gangsters? Had the mob corrupted the state’s attorney or members of his staff?

On 27 April 1926, at eight o’clock in the evening, William McSwiggin, an assistant state’s attorney who was one of Crowe’s closest aides, emerged from the Pony Inn, a saloon on West Roosevelt Road in the town of Cicero, a few miles west of Chicago. As McSwiggin and his drinking companions walked toward their Lincoln automobile, a motorcade—five cars, one following closely behind another—moved slowly down the street toward them. As the fourth car passed McSwiggin and his friends, there was a hail of bullets, fired from a machine gun. McSwiggin and two others died later that night; the remaining two escaped unhurt.

It soon emerged that McSwiggin had spent his final hours drinking with the leaders of the O’Donnell gang. Myles O’Donnell and his brother, Klondike, along with Tom (Red) Duffy and Jim Doherty, had been feuding with the Italian gangs over the control of the beer trade. Duffy and Doherty had died alongside McSwiggin that evening; the O’Donnell brothers had ducked behind a car and lived.

Why had McSwiggin been drinking with gangland leaders? Had he been working with the O’Donnells? Had the mobsters corrupted him? Could corruption have spread further within Crowe’s department?

Robert Crowe pointed the finger of blame at Al Capone. The O’Donnells had been competing with Capone over control of the saloons and speakeasies in Cook County and Capone’s men had struck back. The gunmen had intended to kill the O’Donnells, and McSwiggin had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Capone was responsible for the death of McSwiggin, Crowe asserted, and most probably it had been Capone himself who had fired the machine gun.

But Crowe was never able to explain why a member of his staff had been drinking with prominent members of the Chicago underworld. Crowe seemed to have something to hide or, at the very least, seemed reluctant to reveal the truth. He petitioned the Cook County Criminal Court to impanel a grand jury investigation into McSwiggin’s death but simultaneously ensured that his political allies controlled the grand jury. The findings of the grand jury were inconclusive. No one was ever indicted for the killing of McSwiggin.
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There never was any proof of collusion between Crowe’s office and the criminal underworld, yet suspicion lingered. And by 1928, public sentiment against Crowe had hardened. He had been in office for eight years, and criminal violence in Cook County continued unabated. Crowe had hoped to be the Republican candidate for state’s attorney a third time, in the elections in 1928, but his star, even within the Republican ranks, had dimmed and he failed to win the primary election. His opponent, John Swanson, a judge on the Circuit Court, defeated him handily. It was a welcome sign, according to the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, that the public had finally given up on the political machine that Crowe had so carefully constructed. Everyone was tired of the bombings, shootings, kidnappings, and murders that had given Chicago the national reputation of a city of crime. “A machine which embraced all the jobs at the city hall…which had an army of workers in nearly every precinct, the most extensive machine organization in Chicago’s history, was pushed into the ditch by a…group which had behind it nothing but public sentiment.” Robert Crowe’s political career was over. He had been forced out of office just four years after his prosecution of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.
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political corner against enemies inside and outside the Cook County Republican Party, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb grew accustomed to the daily monotony of prison routine. The guards had put Nathan in a cell in the East Wing of Joliet Prison and, mindful that the two murderers be kept as far apart as possible, had sent Richard to the other side of the penitentiary, where he occupied a cell in the West Wing.

The prison, now almost seventy years old, was a crumbling wreck. The prison complex was a grim gray edifice with massive stone walls, enclosing a series of starkly cheerless buildings. An unhealthy, unpleasant odor permeated the cell blocks, and each individual cell—small, dark, claustrophobic, and slightly damp—was as repulsive a space as one could imagine. There were no flush toilets, of course—in the mornings, before breakfast, each prisoner carried his waste in a bucket to a large trough in the prison yard. The architect had provided the cell blocks with windows so narrow that there was little natural light. It was unbearably hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter.
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Nathan remained at Joliet Prison only until May 1925, when he obtained a transfer to the new prison at Stateville, three miles north of the town of Joliet. The Stateville prison, built in anticipation of the closure of Joliet Prison, consisted of four roundhouse buildings, each of which had an open tower in the center of a large space surrounded by a circular arrangement of prison cells. The guards standing in the central tower could thus observe all the prisoners in their cells.
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Stateville was one of the most modern penitentiaries in the United States—its circular panopticon design was unusual and innovative—but discipline within the prison was almost nonexistent. The Illinois state legislature had provided the funds for prison construction but had omitted to ensure a decent wage for the prison guards—the monthly salary was only $100, and there was no pension plan—and, as a consequence, corruption was endemic among the staff. Any convict with money could buy any privilege he desired, and by the early 1930s, internal discipline at Stateville had passed out of the hands of the prison administration. A dozen rival gangs competed for control of the prison. Each gang had constructed a motley collection of tar-paper shacks in the prison yard as its headquarters, and within these shacks the gangs operated whiskey stills, cultivated marijuana plants, and hired out the younger and more vulnerable prisoners as prostitutes.
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Not until March 1931, after Richard Loeb had been transferred from Joliet Prison to Stateville, did Nathan and Richard live in the same prison. Neither joined one of the many gangs operating behind the prison walls, but both soon gained influence over their fellow prisoners and, at the same time, were able to curry favor with the prison administration.

Both had an education far in advance of the majority of the prisoners at Stateville. Nathan, in particular, showed an eagerness to use his education in the service of the prison management, willingly performing various clerical jobs. Under other circumstances his contributions might have seemed nugatory, but Stateville in the late 1920s and early 1930s had a woeful lack of paid clerical staff, employing just six people in administrative positions inside a prison that held almost 4,000 inmates. Nathan was not a model prisoner; he had an uneven disciplinary record at Stateville and was punished several times with solitary confinement. Yet successive wardens recognized his clerical talents as a valuable resource that helped the prison function more efficiently, and over time he won the confidence of the senior officers.
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28.
STATEVILLE PRISON.
The prison at Stateville opened in 1925. In its original form, the prison complex consisted of four cell blocks. A guard tower, surrounded by a circular arrangement of four tiers of cells, stood in the center of each cell block. This photograph was taken in 1931.

Frank Whipp, the warden at Stateville in the early 1930s, emphasized reform and rehabilitation in his management of the prison. A major purpose of the penitentiary, according to Whipp, was an end to recidivism. The sooner a prisoner demonstrated eligibility for parole, the better. Nathan Leopold quickly won his way into Whipp’s good books. There was little possibility that Whipp would recommend Nathan’s parole, but Nathan adopted Whipp’s reform ideology and made sure that Whipp realized it. Nathan assisted the prison sociologist, Ferris Laune, in his attempts to determine the suitability of various categories of prisoners for early release and even published an article (under a pseudonym) on the subject in the
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
. Nathan received an appropriate reward for these efforts. By his own account, he soon had the run of the prison—he could go anywhere, and after 1933, he was infrequently subject to the disciplinary regimen imposed on other prisoners.
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