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 and received sentences of life plus 99 years. Their crime was notable in being largely motivated by an apparent need to prove (their belief) that their high intellects made them capable of committing a perfect crime, and for its role in the history of American thought on capital punishment.
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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 pair had worked themselves up to committing the crime for months, starting out with petty theft.
Timeline
On Wednesday, May 21, 1924, they put their plot in motion. The pair lured Franks, a neighbour of Loeb's, into a rented car. Loeb first bludgeoned 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 acid 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.
Public reaction
The public, driven by the newspapers of the day, was outraged. In the Jewish community, no one had imagined that such shining examples of ideal success could have committed such a crime. Both of Leopold and Loeb's families were affluent, and each dapper young University of Chicago student surely had a fine future all but guaranteed for him -- there was absolutely no reason to turn to crime. Although Meyer Levin was 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 increased anti-Semitic violence), neither defendant was a practicing Jew.
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." 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, would certainly have resulted in an unfair trial. Instead, he was able to make his case for his clients' lives before a single person, the judge.
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."
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 was successful in avoiding the sentence of execution. Instead, the judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb each to life in prison (for the murder), plus 99 years each (for the kidnapping).
Prison and later life
In prison, Leopold and Loeb used their educations to good purpose, teaching classes in the prison school. But 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 afterward 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.) Early in 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole. He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid media attention. He married a widowed florist. In 1971, at age 66, he died of a heart attack.
Impact on popular culture
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 adopting 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. Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes incorporated the case into his book Ice Haven, released in 2005. The case is also mentioned in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, in which Allen's character falsely attributes a humorous quote to the 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 and Order.