Nathan Leopold (left) and Richard Loeb (center) under arrest

Nathan Leopold, Jr. (November 19, 1904 – August 29, 1971) and Richard Loeb (June 11, 1905 – January 28, 1936), more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy Jewish University of Chicago students who murdered Bobby Franks and received sentences of Life plus Ninety Nine years. Their crime was notable in being largely motivated by an apparent need to prove their belief they were capable of committing a perfect crime, and for its role in the history of American thought on capital punishment.

Leopold, who was 19 at the time of the murder and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be relative supermen who could commit a "perfect crime", in this case a kidnapping and murder without fear of being apprehended. On Wednesday, May 21, 1924, they put their plot in motion by luring 14-year-old Bobby Franks, a distant relative and neighbour of Loeb's, into a rented car, where they suffocated him, after Loeb bludgeoned him with a chisel. After concealing the body in a culvert under a railroad track outside of Chicago, 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, a Polish immigrant named Tony Manke found the body. Investigators saw at once that this couldn't be a simple kidnapping, since there would have been no reason for a kidnapper to kill Bobby Franks.

A pair of eyeglasses found with the body were eventually traced back to Nathan Leopold. The ransom note had been typed on a typewriter that Leopold had used with his law-student 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 wouldn't be discovered until long after the ransom delivery. But the ransom wasn't their primary motive; either one's family gave them all the money they needed. In fact, they admitted that they were driven by the thrill. For that matter, they were still thrilled by the attention even while in jail; they regaled newspaper reporters with the lurid details again and again.

The public, driven by the newspapers of the day, was outraged. In the Jewish community, no one had imagined that such shining examples of success could have committed such a crime. Both of Leopold and Loeb's families were quite well-off, and each dapper young student at the University of Chicago surely had had a fine future ahead of him; there had been no need to turn to crime. Meyer Levin spoke for many in the Jewish community when he said that it was "a relief that the victim, too, had been Jewish."

Although anti-Semitic ministers such as Gene Scott have cited this case in their continuing propaganda, neither defendant was a practicing Jew. Furthermore, Loeb's mother was Catholic (thereby disqualifying her children from Jewish lineage), and Leopold often professed his atheism before and during the trial.

The trial proved to be a media spectacle and was one of the cases to be dubbed "The Crime 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 kidnap. When everyone expected them to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, Darrow surprised everyone by having them both plead guilty. In this way, he avoided a jury trial which, due to the strong public sentiment, would certainly have resulted in a pair of hangings. Instead, he was able to argue before a single judge, pleading for the lives of his clients.

Darrow gave a two-hour speech (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/cdarrowpleaformercy.htm) which has justifiably been called the finest of his career. It may be, in fact, that he took the case in order to be able to make such a speech, since he knew that his strong argument against capital punishment would be reprinted in newspapers around the world. And if he could show 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 each of Leopold and Loeb to a sentence of life in prison for the murder and 99 years for the kidnapping.

In prison, Leopold and Loeb used their education to good purpose, teaching other prisoners and showing signs of becoming rehabilitated. But in January of 1936, at age 30, Loeb was attacked by fellow prisoner James Day with a straight razor, and he died from his wounds. Early in 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole. He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid attention from the press. He married a widowed florist. In 1971, at age 66, he died of a heart attack.

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), and Tom Kalin's more openly gay-themed Swoon (1992) as well as Barbet Schroeder's Murder by Numbers (2002).

External links

• Leopoldandloeb.com (http://www.leopoldandloeb.com)
• Crime Library article (http://www.crimelibrary.com/loeb/loeb/loebmain.htm)
• Famous Trials article (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/leopold.htm)