For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (56 page)

The Chicago newspapers, in recounting the murder of Suzanne Degnan, ceaselessly compared it with the murder of Bobby Franks twenty-two years earlier, dwelling on the uncanny similarities between the two killings. Yet when the governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, did eventually consider Nathan’s petition for clemency, he ignored the sensationalism of the newspaper reports and acted on a recommendation from the parole board to reduce Nathan’s sentence to eighty-five years. “The commutation in this case,” Stevenson announced, “was recommended and is being made pursuant to a program to reward prisoners who voluntarily risked their lives in malaria experiments for the armed services…. The parole board has given special consideration to prisoners who voluntarily participated in the malaria research program. It is the conclusion of the board, and I concur, that Nathan Leopold is also entitled to this consideration.”
⁴⁸

The difference might have seemed trivial. Eighty-five years or ninety-nine years—under either sentence, Nathan would spend the remainder of his days at Stateville. But in terms of his early release, there was a significant distinction. Nathan could not previously have hoped for parole until 1957; now he would be eligible for parole as soon as January 1953.

By 1952 Nathan had begun to believe that he might soon win his freedom. It might happen; it could happen…but Nathan, in an interview with the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, seemed intimidated, almost cowed, by the prospect. He had thought often of his release from Stateville but had given no consideration to the practical problems of emerging as a free man. Where would he go? What would he do? “I have no plans,” he confessed to the reporter. “I don’t know where I’ll go, except it won’t be Chicago.”

His two brothers, Mike and Sam, had changed their names not long after the murder of Bobby Franks. Would he also, the journalist asked, take on a new identity?

“I don’t know,” Leopold slowly replied, as though the question had never occurred to him.

Could he tell the readers of the
Tribune
about his years in prison? the reporter asked. How had he spent his days?

“I have studied. I have learned a lot,” Nathan boasted, suddenly eager to tell the world, once again, of his intellectual ability. “I read some 26 or 27 languages—Polish, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Russian, Egyptian—as well as the more common ones. I’ve studied mathematics, too. I went about as far in math as it was possible to go in prison.”
⁴⁹

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
N
ATHAN APPEARED
before members of the parole board. There was a sadness about him as he sat across a wooden table from the three members of the board. His cockiness was gone, worn down by the long years of incarceration, and in its place there was an air of quiet resignation. His paunch pressed against the belt of his trousers; his large, bulbous, heavy-lidded eyes looked out from a fleshy, pallid face; his hair, still black, was now receding away from the temples; and his nicotine-stained fingers revealed that he still smoked as compulsively as ever. Nathan Leopold, dressed in a denim shirt and blue jeans, his prison number—9306D—stenciled on the back of his shirt, now bore little resemblance to the teenager who had first entered Joliet Prison in 1924.
⁵⁰

“I would like to say,” Nathan began, “that I was only 19 when I committed the crime. Today I’m a man of 48. Over 60 per cent of my life has been spent in prison. My life has changed completely. My personality has changed. My outlook has changed. I assure you I never would be in trouble again if paroled.”

Why had he murdered Bobby Franks? one member of the board asked. How did he now explain the killing?

“I couldn’t give a motive which makes sense to me,” Nathan answered. “It was the act of a child—a simpleton kid. A very bizarre act. I don’t know why I did it. I’m a different man now. I was a smart aleck kid. I am not anymore…. I can only tell you that what happened in 1924 can’t happen again.” It had been, and it remained, an inexplicable act by two foolish boys, Nathan repeated. He was unable to account for the murder. “It seems absurd to me today, as it must to you and all other people. I am in no better position to give you a motive than I was then.”
⁵¹

Nathan had known that the parole board would ask about his plans if he were to win his freedom, yet in that regard he had come unprepared. In response to a question from a member of the board, he replied that he had not given the matter much thought. Perhaps, he answered with a slight smile, in a misguided attempt to strike a humorous note, he would sell neckties or work behind a soda fountain. Anything would do, he concluded; he certainly had no grand ambition to make a career for himself.
⁵²

Nathan had intended to make a good impression, but to his listeners sitting across the table, his answers seemed too trite and too quick. There was still something about Nathan’s manner reminiscent of the arrogance of youth. His remarks seemed almost offhand. He was not sufficiently contrite.
⁵³

Robert Crowe, emerging from retirement to write a note of protest to the parole board, forcefully urged the members not to grant parole. Crowe pointed out that at the original hearing in 1924, the judge had extended mercy to Leopold by giving him a life sentence. There was no reason for the parole board to grant mercy to Leopold a second time. “I thought at the time,” Crowe explained, referring to both Leopold and Loeb, “they ought to hang. There were no extenuating circumstances; it was a brutal murder.”
⁵⁴

Victor Knowles, the chairman of the parole board, had no hesitation in denying parole. Leopold, Knowles explained to the press, was a liar and a fraud who had exaggerated his contributions to the malaria project and who continued to embellish his supposed achievements during his years in prison. Leopold’s absurd claim to be able to read twenty-seven languages was a case in point. Who could be so gullible as to believe something so preposterous? Leopold had not expressed sufficient contrition for the murder, Knowles continued, and his attempt to pass it off as merely an irresponsible act by two adolescents was tantamount to denying his culpability.
⁵⁵

Five years would pass before the parole board would again consider Nathan Leopold’s petition. Those years had given Nathan time to prepare and to consider the lessons he learned from his failure in 1953. He had hired a competent lawyer, Elmer Gertz, to present his case before the board, and he had reached out beyond the prison walls to enlist the support of prominent sympathizers. Former classmates at the University of Chicago—Abel Brown, Arnold Maremont, and others—had secured job offers for Nathan. Everyone agreed that it would be impossible for Nathan to return to Chicago: it was important for him to avoid the glare of newspaper publicity if he was to serve out his parole successfully. One job offer had come from Florida, a second from California, and a third from Hawaii—all at a sufficient distance from Chicago. Might Nathan be willing to work in Puerto Rico? The Church of the Brethren, a small Protestant group with its headquarters in Elgin, Illinois, had built a mission hospital in the village of Castaner, sixty-five miles southwest of the capital, San Juan. A representative of the church, Harold Row, had met Nathan’s younger brother, Sam, several years earlier and now offered to sponsor Nathan’s employment as a medical technician at the Castaner hospital.
⁵⁶

Elmer Gertz, speaking before the parole board on 5 February 1958, reminded his audience that Nathan presented no risk of violating parole. He had four job offers, and more to the point, he had proved himself rehabilitated by his good works in prison. Nathan had helped organize a school for inmates within Stateville; he had been a volunteer for the malaria project in the 1940s; and he had worked steadily and conscientiously as an X-ray technician and as a psychiatric nurse in the prison hospital. What more could the parole board require of Nathan Leopold? Should he remain in Stateville solely on account of his notoriety while other inmates obtained their freedom? In the years since 1950, Gertz continued, the board had paroled almost 200 murderers, yet it had continued to deny Nathan Leopold his freedom. Art Newman, a notorious gangland killer, had murdered seven people; the state’s attorney had demanded that he remain behind bars for the remainder of his life; and yet the parole board had released Newman after he had served twenty-six years. Nathan Leopold had now lived in prison for his entire adult life, a total of thirty-three years. Was it just that Nathan be denied his liberty? At Stateville, only one other inmate—Russell Pethick, the murderer of a young woman and her infant son—had been imprisoned longer than Nathan Leopold! “Few convicts have ever served as long as Nathan Leopold,” Gertz stated, “and some have been convicted of murders more brutal even than his. Some of them, unlike him, have previously been convicted of other heinous offenses or have violated probation or parole. Very few have had as fine prison records as Leopold.”
⁵⁷

Unpleasant, ugly rumors had circulated that Nathan was a homosexual, Gertz continued, and that he had sex with other inmates in Stateville. But that was false. Nathan had a brief infatuation with Richard Loeb many years previously, but that relationship had been a juvenile affair. Nothing had occurred within Stateville. Nathan’s disciplinary record in the prison contained no mention of homosexuality. “Gentlemen, let me say this openly and without equivocation. Nathan Leopold is not now, and has not been since his imprisonment, a sexual deviate, or, indeed, a sexual problem in any respect. The prison records will bear out, and the public should know it, that there is not the slightest evidence of any sexual impropriety on his part…. I hope I have made my meaning clear.”
⁵⁸

The gossip about Nathan’s sexuality was symptomatic of the myths that now overlay the true story. Even now, thirty years after the murder, the public remained fascinated by the case. The tabloid newspapers eagerly fueled the public’s appetite by retailing half-truths and outright lies. The facts had been lost in the making of a legend that now bore little relationship to reality.

It was important, Gertz reminded the parole board, to go back to the original court documents and, in determining whether to grant Leopold parole, to consider which of the two boys had been principally responsible for the murder of Bobby Franks. The transcript of the 1924 courtroom hearing showed that Richard Loeb had initiated the scheme to kidnap and kill a young child, that Loeb had planned the details of the ransom demand, that Loeb had imagined himself the master criminal, and that Loeb had struck the deathblow with the chisel in the back of the automobile. Nathan Leopold had participated in the killing, but only as an accomplice, content to follow the other boy’s lead. “We have no desire,” Gertz explained, “to labor the point that Loeb’s share in the crime was greater than Leopold’s, because in a legal and moral sense both were guilty. But it is necessary once and for all to let the truth be known.” It was not that Nathan bore no responsibility for the murder—such a suggestion would be a step too far—but that Nathan had been too infatuated with Richard to resist the other boy’s criminal intent.
⁵⁹

A succession of character witnesses now appeared to speak on Nathan’s behalf. John Bartlow Martin, a writer for the
Saturday Evening Post
who had interviewed Nathan in prison; Martin Sukov, a prison psychiatrist; Eligius Weir, the prison chaplain at Stateville; and the poet Carl Sandburg, then Chicago’s most celebrated literary figure—all testified that Nathan had earned parole through his outstanding rehabilitation.

Finally it was Nathan’s turn to speak. He had learned from his previous experience five years earlier; now he was ready to proclaim his remorse. “Gentlemen,” he began, “it is not easy to live with murder on your conscience. The fact that you know you did not do the actual killing does not help. My punishment has not been light. I have spent over one-third of a century in prison. During that time I have lost most of those who were near or dear to me. I never had an opportunity to say a prayer on their graves; I forfeited all home and family; forfeited all the chances of an honorable career. But the worst punishment comes from inside me. It is the torment of my own conscience. I can say that will be true the rest of my days…. All I want in this life is a chance to prove to you and the people of Illinois, what I know in my own heart to be true, that I can and will become a decent, self-respecting and law-abiding citizen, to have a chance to find redemption for myself by service to others. It is for that chance that I humbly beg.”
⁶⁰

The members of the parole board listened politely as Nathan continued to talk. Soon he had finished. John Bookwalter asked Nathan about his attorney’s assertion that Richard Loeb had conceived and planned the murder of Bobby Franks. Was it, Bookwalter inquired, also Nathan’s belief “that Loeb had a stronger personality…and [that] you were more or less a follower?”

“Yes, sir,” Nathan replied.

“Through your adoration for him?”

“That is correct.”

“As you sit there today, don’t you take a equal share of blame for this?”

“Definitely.”

“You are not trying to place it on him?”

“Believe me,” Nathan explained, “it is not easy to try to push blame on a man that is dead…. I did not want to throw blame on another. It is not an attractive thing to do, but I must answer the question honestly.”

Bookwalter was still not satisfied. Leopold seemed to want to have it both ways: to express his remorse and yet to deny that he had any meaningful role in the murder. Bookwalter knew the details of the case; he had read the transcripts of the courtroom hearing; and now he probed again.