99 years ago, on May 21, 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb committed what they believed would be the “perfect crime.” The two teenagers, in a desire to commit a high-profile, unsolvable crime and inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (figures who, as they interpreted his work, had evolved beyond traditional morality and were above the laws that governed normal men), had agreed to kidnap and murder a child. The two ultimately decided to kill Loeb’s cousin, Bobby Franks, but their plan fell apart quite quickly. They did not do a sufficient job of hiding the body, and with it was found a pair of glasses that had accidentally been left behind at the crime scene. The glasses were specialty frames which had been sold to only three people in Chicago, including Leopold, and the police quickly narrowed down their suspects. The “perfect crime” had gone awry, and by the end of the month the two had confessed to the crime. Given the heinousness of the crime and the fact that the murderers had come from two prominent and wealthy families, the story became a media sensation, and it would only continue to grow from there.
The confessed killers were facing a high likelihood that they would be executed, as that was what the state’s prosecutor, Robert E. Crowe, was pursuing. But the two had a stroke of good fortune, securing famed lawyer Clarence Darrow as their defense attorney.
Darrow was a massive opponent of the death penalty, and he felt the high-profile case was the perfect opportunity to advocate against the harsh punishment. To make the case that his clients should escape the death penalty, Darrow tried to find physical and psychological abnormalities in the boys, arguing that these were extenuating circumstances that led to their decision to murder their victim. Hormonal imbalance and childhood abuse had warped the defendant’s perspective, he argued.
This defense was met with much skepticism by the public, especially since he was very critical of “the mob” who called for his clients to be hanged. The public saw Darrow’s claims that his young clients were not in the sole control of their decisions as tantamount to trying to make them seem as innocent as children. As one article in the August 20, 1924 Perth Amboy Evening News argued, “The idea that men with nothing more that baby emotions would calmly set about committing ‘the perfect crime,’ plan and calculate it for six months … the idea that baby minds could or would do all this is quite beyond even a gullible public to accept with equanimity.” Crowe also tried to undermine this argument, bringing in his own psychiatrists who came to the opposite conclusions of those testifying for his courtroom rival.
The “trial of the century,” a misnomer given the fact that the defendants had plead guilty and were simply being sentenced, ultimately came to an end in early September, with Darrow delivering his closing argument over twelve hours, where he made the case that it would be wrong to have Leopold and Loeb executed.
Judge John Caverly ended up siding with Darrow, to the outrage of Crowe and much of the public. Leopold and Loeb received life sentences for the murder, with an additional 99 years for the initial kidnapping.
Unsurprisingly, the editorial pages of newspapers everywhere were filled with pieces commenting on the outcome. Angry writers complained that the two murderers had escaped punishment. For instance, in the September 12, 1924 Palisadian, the author of “A Miscarriage of Justice” proclaimed that the two had unfairly escaped the noose and implied that things might not have turned out as they did if the defendants hadn’t had a wealthy background, writing, “The whole thing proves also that inequalities of justice seldom fail to show themselves where the rich are concerned.” Meanwhile, an editorial in the September 18, 1924 issue of The Lambertville Record noted the unanimity of the reception to the verdict in many newspapers read across New Jersey, writing that the near-universal condemnation, from the Trenton Times to the Herald Tribune, was unusual given the “divergent” points of view often taken up by the papers, declaring “It is significant that they all agree in condemning one of the most miserable miscarriages of justice ever know to the nation.”
Still, the decision had its defenders. A piece in the Perth Amboy Evening News October 7, 1924 issue noted, “People who are against capital punishment put forward many logical, emotional and otherwise convincing arguments.” The author wrote, “It is, admittedly, barbaric for the government to take human life.” Still, they too had reservations regarding the decision. They were bothered, however, not because the two escaped the death sentence, typically considered the harshest punishment possible, but because they thought it was arguable that being locked up for life until the inevitable release of death was “more barbaric and cruel.” As they wrote, “Days in the prison workshop; nights in a cramped, barred cell. This is not life. It is a living death.”
After their sentencing, the two would go on to have very different fates. Loeb was killed by another inmate in 1936. Meanwhile, Leopold was granted parole in 1958 and moved to Puerto Rico, where he earned a master’s degree, and later taught, at the University of Puerto Rico. He passed away of a heart attack in 1971.
(Contributed by Tristan Smith)
Sources:
Baatz, Simon. Leopold and Loeb’s Criminal Minds.” Smithsonian Magazine, August 2008. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/leopold-and-loebs-criminal-minds-996498/.
“Nathan Leopold.” Biography. Updated April 7, 2021. https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/nathan-leopold.
Northwestern University. “1924: Leopold and Loeb.” Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930. Accessed April 26, 2023. https://homicide.northwestern.edu/crimes/leopold/.
PBS. “The Leopold and Loeb Trial.” American Experience. Accessed April 26, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/monkeytrial-leopold-and-loeb-trial/.