Leopold and Loeb
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Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. (November 19, 1904 – August 30, 1971) and Richard A. Loeb (June 11, 1905 – January 28, 1936), more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and received sentences of life in prison.
Their crime was notable in being largely motivated by an apparent need to prove the duo's belief that their high intellects made them capable of committing a perfect crime, and also for its role in the history of American thought on capital punishment.
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[edit] Motive
Leopold, who was 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a "perfect crime" (in this case a kidnapping and murder) without fear of being apprehended.
The friends were exceptionally intelligent: Leopold had already completed college and was attending law school at the University of Chicago. He spoke five languages and was an expert ornithologist, while Loeb was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. Leopold planned to transfer to Harvard Law School in September, after taking a trip to Europe. Loeb planned to enter the University of Chicago Law School after taking some post graduate courses.
Both Leopold and Loeb lived in the wealthy Jewish neighborhood of Kenwood, Chicago. Loeb's father, Albert, began his career as a lawyer and became the Vice President of Sears and Roebuck. Besides owning an impressive mansion in Kenwood, two blocks away from the Leopold home, the Loeb family also had a summer estate in Charlevoix, Michigan.
The pair had worked themselves up to committing the crime for months, starting out with petty theft.
[edit] Timeline
On Wednesday, May 21, 1924, they put their plot in motion. The pair lured Franks, a neighbor and distant relative of Loeb's, into a rented car. Loeb first struck Franks with a chisel. Leopold and Loeb then suffocated Franks. After concealing the body in a culvert under a railroad track outside of Chicago—the body was burned with hydrochloric acid[citation needed] to make identification more difficult—they did their best to make it seem that a kidnapping for ransom had taken place; the Franks family had enough money that a request for $10,000 in ransom was plausible.
Before the family could pay the ransom, though, Tony Minke, a Polish immigrant, found the body. Investigators saw at once that this could not be a mere kidnapping, since there would have been no reason for a kidnapper to kill Franks.
A pair of eyeglasses found with the body was eventually traced back to Nathan Leopold. The ransom note had been typed on a typewriter that Leopold had used with his law school study group. During police questioning, Leopold's and Loeb's alibis broke down and each confessed. Although their confessions were in agreement about most major facts in the case, each blamed the other for the actual killing.
They had spent months planning the crime, working out a way to get the ransom money without risking being caught. They had thought that the body would not be discovered until long after the ransom delivery. Regardless, the ransom was not their primary motive; each one's family gave him all the money that he needed. In fact, they admitted that they were driven by the thrill. For that matter, they basked in the public attention they received while in jail; they regaled newspaper reporters with the crime's lurid details again and again.
[edit] Public reaction
Driven by the newspapers of the day, the public was outraged. The fact that both murderers were of Jewish origin led to fears of anti-Semitic responses. Meyer Levin has been quoted as saying that it was "a relief that the victim, too, had been Jewish" (reducing the chances of bigots using this crime to justify anti-Semitic violence). Within the Jewish community no one had imagined that such shining examples of ideal success could have committed such a crime. Both murderers' families were affluent.
The murder and subsequent trial received worldwide publicity, and part of the fascination was based on public perception of the crime as a Jewish crime. In 1924, Chicago was consummately an ethnic city, where the majority of residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and in which politics, neighborhoods, and institutions often carried ethnic labels. Neither defendant was a practicing Jew. Loeb's mother was Catholic and his father was Jewish. Bobby Franks' parents, while ethnically Jewish, were converts to Christian Science.
Leopold and Loeb both admitted to the press that they had a sexual relationship, and this increased the lurid (for that time) aspects of the crime considerably.
[edit] Trial
The trial proved to be a media spectacle; it was one of the first cases in the USA to be dubbed the "Trial of the Century."[citation needed] Loeb's family hired 67-year-old Clarence Darrow—who had fought against capital punishment for years—to defend the boys against the capital charges of murder and kidnapping. While the media expected them to plead not guilty (by reason of insanity), Darrow surprised everyone by having them both plead guilty. In this way, Darrow avoided a jury trial which, due to the strong public sentiment against his clients, would most certainly have resulted in a conviction and perhaps even the death penalty. Instead, he was able to make his case for his clients' lives before a single person, Cook County Circuit Court Judge John R. Caverly.
Darrow gave a twelve-hour speech, which has been called the finest of his career. The speech included: "this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor … Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university."[1]
It may be, in fact, that Darrow accepted the case because it offered a huge public platform for such a speech; he knew that his strong argument against capital punishment would be reprinted in newspapers around the world. And if he could successfully reason that such heinous murderers should not be executed, perhaps he would make other capital punishment cases more difficult to prosecute. In the end, Darrow succeeded; the judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb each to life in prison (for the murder), plus 99 years each (for the kidnapping).
[edit] Prison and later life
In prison (the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet), Leopold and Loeb used their educations to good purpose, teaching classes in the prison school. In January of 1936, at age 30, Loeb was attacked by fellow prisoner James Day with a straight razor in the prison's shower room, and died from his wounds. Day claimed afterwards that Loeb had attempted to sexually assault him; an inquiry accepted Day's testimony, and the prison authorities ruled that Day's attack on Loeb was self-defense. That inspired the newsman Ed Lahey to write in the Chicago Daily News, "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition."[2] Years later Day's cell mate admitted that the killing was preplanned. Day supposedly wanted revenge because Loeb no longer bought luxuries for inmates with no income.[citation needed]
Early in 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole. That year he wrote an autobiography titled "Life plus Ninety Nine Years". Leopold moved to Puerto Rico to avoid media attention, and married a widowed florist. He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 66. He donated his body to science.
[edit] Impact on popular culture
- During the first season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the episode Uncivilized was based on the Leopold and Loeb case.
- In 1956, Meyer Levin revisited the Leopold and Loeb case in his novel Compulsion, a fictionalized version of the actual events in which the names of the pair were changed to "Steiner and Strauss." Three years later, the novel was made into a film (also called Compulsion, directed by Richard Fleischer), in which the leads were played by Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman. The character based on Darrow was played by Orson Welles, whose speech at the film's end adapting Darrow's closing arguments was one of the longest monologues in film history.
- The crime was also inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948, based on the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton), and Tom Kalin's more openly gay-themed Swoon (1992) as well as Barbet Schroeder's Murder by Numbers (2002), the 1985 play Never The Sinner by John Logan, and the off-Broadway musical "Thrill Me" by Stephen Dolginoff.
- Cartoonist Daniel Clowes incorporated the case into his comic Eightball 22, released in 2001 (Later remade as Ice Haven).
- The case is also mentioned in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Alvy Singer (Allen) says, "I think there's too much burden placed on the orgasm, you know, to make up for empty areas in life", and in response to his vapid companion's question, "Who said that?", replies "Leopold and Loeb, I think."
- In the Seinfeld episode The Junior Mint, Jerry Seinfeld likens himself and Kramer to the two killers.
- The Leopold and Loeb case was also mentioned in Richard Wright's novel Native Son, which also takes place in Chicago.
- The two were also mentioned on a couple of episodes of Law & Order.
- Leopold and Loeb's names were mentioned in two episodes of the drama/comedy Gilmore Girls. Once during a dream sequence in which Lorelai Gilmore, pregnant with twins, tells her "dream husband," Luke, that she has decided to name their unborn children "Leopold and Loeb," and in another when Lorelai's mother sets her up with a former neighbor who had two dobermans named Leopold and Loeb.
- One of the plots in the BBC series Silent Witness episode(s) "The Meaning of Death" is about a pair of serial killers patterned after Leopold and Loeb.
- In the television series The Pretender, the main character, Jarod, becomes a professor at a highly acclaimed university after the original professor is murdered. Jarod suspects the murder to be the work of brilliant students who wanted to commit "the perfect crime."
- In the German film "Funny Games" (1997) by writer/director Michael Haneke, a family is tortured and murdered by two young men patterned after Leopold and Loeb.
- In the musical "Chicago," the character Velma Kelly comments that her rival Roxie being a mother is "like making Leopold and Loeb scoutmasters".
- In Michael Collins' novel "The Death of a Writer" (2006), a literature professor in America is suspected of having modeled a novel, and a crime on which his novel is based, on Leopold and Loeb.
- In the novel The Devil in the White City, writer Erik Larson mentions the Clarence Darrow defense of Leopold and Loeb (on page 383).
- In "Burning Down the House," the first episode of the third season of due South, the character Ray Kowalski compares Leopold and Loeb to other famous duets like Abbott and Costello.
[edit] Bibliography and films
- Fleischer, Richard (director). Compulsion. Film, 1958.
- Haneke, Michael (director). Funny Games. Film, 1997.
- Higdon, Hal. Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century. University of Illinois Press, 1999. (originally published in 1975). ISBN 0-252-06829-7
- Kalin, Tom (director). Swoon. Film, 1990.
- Levin, Meyer. Compulsion. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1996. (originally published in 1956). ISBN 0-7867-0319-9
- Saul, John (Author), 'In the Dark of the Night', 2006 ISBN 034548701X
- Dolginoff, Stephen (author/composer) "Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story" (Musical published by Dramatists Play Service ISBN 0-8222-2102-0
[edit] External links
- Leopoldandloeb.com
- Crime Library article
- Famous Trials article
- Bizarre magazine profile
- Thrill Me:The Leopold and Loeb Story main site/CD ordering
- Thrill Me:The Leopold and Loeb Story Review quotes from York Theatre Company
- Robert Franks
- Leopold and Loeb Trial Homepage
[edit] References
- ^ Clarence Darrow: A Plea for Mercy. American Rhetoric.
- ^ Dr. Ink (August 23, 2002). Ask Dr. Ink. Poynter Online.
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