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O.J. Simpson Murder Case Not As Bizarre As Leopold And Loeb
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
There’s one criminal trial that makes the O.J. Simpson case look anemic by comparison — the famous murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb with Clarence Darrow, the most famous criminal lawyer of his time, for the defense.
I’ve always found Leopold and Loeb and their lawyer, Darrow, fascinating characters, but the reason for the murder from all that I’ve read seems only puzzling.
I finally came across by far the best explanation I’ve ever encountered in an American Bar Association publication of its senior lawyers division, a magazine titled Experience (Volume 19, Number 2, 2009). The article, “Leopold & Loeb: The Case that Capped Darrow’s Career As a Criminal Lawyer,” is by Kevin O’Kelly, a writer and librarian that writes for The Boston Globe. The article is an excellent account of this famous case, and my column follows Mr. O’Kelly’s narrative.
It all started in Chicago during May of 1924 when 14-year-old Bobby Franks did not return home after school and disappeared. The wealthy family of Franks received a $10,000 ransom note indicating instructions for delivery of the money would follow. The instructions came by phone: Take the cab that would arrive shortly and go to a drug store at 1465 East 63rd St.
The father of the kidnapped child, Jacob Franks, received the call, but after hanging up he realized he didn’t remember the address. But the phone rang again. It was a call from his brother-in-law informing him that he was at a funeral home and had just identified the body of Bobby Franks.
The body was found at the shore of Wolf Lake near the Indiana border. Acid had been poured on the face and genitals of the body. The police had no leads.
After following some dead ends, the police finally started making headway. A pair of glasses had been found where the body of Bobby Franks was dumped. The police found an optician who was the only distributor of the manufacturer of the glasses. He had sold only three sets of the glasses in Chicago — one pair to a University of Chicago student named Nathan “Babe” Leopold.
When questioned, Leopold said he had probably dropped the glasses while birding near Wolf Lake. He was an accomplished ornithologist and established he had regularly taken high school students to that site for bird watching.
When questioned, Leopold said he had spent the day of the murder, May 21, 1924, with his friend, Dickie Loeb. When questioned, the stories of Leopold and Loeb held up, and they seemed to be in the clear. The police had little reason to believe that Leopold and Loeb would be involved in the case.
Here is how the author, Mr. O’Kelly, described the two young men and why they were not considered likely suspects:
“The son of a millionaire, the 19-year-old Leopold had already earned his undergraduate degree. He spoke five languages fluently and had made nationally recognized contributions to ornithology.
“And bringing in Dickie Loeb was equally discouraging. His father was a vice president of Sears and Roebuck. He had graduated from the University of Michigan at the age of 17 and had begun graduate work in history at the University of Chicago.
“Both were handsome and brilliant — everything educated young men were supposed to be and more. And there was the simple fact of their wealth. Why would they hold someone for ransom?”
The police were stumped, until a member of the State’s attorney had a hunch to question the Leopold family chauffeur. He was asked what he was doing on May 21, the day of the murder. The chauffeur remembered that Leopold had asked him to repair the brakes on his car. The chauffeur spent all day doing that and the car was in the garage until late at night.
This was the key to the case, as Leopold’s story was that he had been out in his car all day on May 21. They had him in a lie, and that lie unraveled the alibi that was perfect until then.
The chauffer remembered one other critical detail: The next day Leopold and Loeb were trying to remove stains from the carpet of a rented car. That was doubly strange as the two rarely did any sort of work.
The State’s Attorney sent a member of his staff to question Loeb. According to this account, he said, “You’re lying. We know you’re lying because Leopold’s car was in the garage all day.” Loeb asked, “Who told you that?” The answer was the chauffeur.
Loeb trembled. He tried to speak. He couldn’t. Shortly thereafter, he made a full confession as to how he and Leopold murdered Bobby Franks. Then with the details of the murder from Loeb, Leopold soon made a complete confession.
The motive for the murder defied understanding. Loeb said the kidnapping and murder was “a means of excitement, together with getting quite a sum of money.” The two originally planned a kidnapping of a stranger. But then they decided it would be easier to kidnap someone they knew rather than a stranger. (Bobby Franks lived across the street from Loeb.) They also decided they would have to kill the victim to avoid identification.
Loeb’s father went to Clarence Darrow to handle the defense of his son and Leopold. Darrow took the case because he wanted to deal a deathblow to capital punishment. A student of Darrow wrote that “one purpose dominated his whole life: to defeat the law of capital punishment.” Darrow figured if he could prevent capital punishment in this case, it would be hard to impose it in other cases.
Darrow took the case. He launched an exhaustive study of the background of the two, and immediately brought in three of the nation’s leading psychiatrists to examine them.
The two were arraigned on June 11, 1924. They both entered pleas of not guilty. The judge ordered the trial to begin no later than Aug. 4, 1924. In mid-July Darrow announced they would employ an insanity defense.
The trial started on July 21, 1924. Darrow stunned the court by withdrawing the plea of not guilty and substituting a plea of guilty. He did that because he knew he would never get a jury that would acquit. Furthermore, apparently Darrow thought he would have a better chance of avoiding capital punishment if he could make his arguments to a judge, a judge who had never sentenced a juvenile to death.
Darrow set off an extensive legal debate when he said he wanted to offer psychiatric testimony regarding the mental health of the defendant. He wanted to use it as a mitigating factor. Psychiatric testimony had been used before only to prove a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity and not as a mitigating factor in determining punishment. After extensive argument and a two-day adjournment for the judge to make up his mind, he decided to admit the psychiatric evidence in mitigation.
Then the most interesting part of the trial began. The first witness for the defense was Dr. William White, president of the American Psychiatric Association. He started by saying that the murder of Bobby Franks could not be understood without understanding the relationship of the two murderers.
Loeb, since adolescence, believed he was a master-criminal able to do his deeds with impunity. Mr. O’Kelly writes, “As a teenager, he stole from his relatives: money from a brother, bottles of scotch from an uncle. But acting alone was unsatisfying. He wanted an audience. He found it in Nathan Leopold.
“The two started out by stealing cars, throwing bricks through windows. They soon worked their way up to arson. From time to time, Loeb combed the Chicago papers for reports of their crimes. He was disappointed by the paltry coverage.”
Dr. White said Loeb considered the murder of Bobby Franks an intellectual feat. Leopold saw the murder as a method of getting an emotional premium.
Another member of the psychiatric team explained Leopold. He had a “king-slave phantasy.” He needed someone to whom he could ‘surrender himself as an abject slave.’ That someone was Richard Loeb.” They did have a homosexual relationship.
In addition, the psychiatrist said, both were raised by governesses who played crucial and negative roles in their lives. Loeb’s governess limited his contact with other children and pushed him through school at an accelerated rate. Dr. White said he had no healthy childhood development and was totally unprepared for adolescence. Leopold governess sexually molested him.
But even the psychiatrists admitted their childhood experiences could not totally explain their behavior. Their report said that Loeb’s “remarkable unscrupulousness, untruthfulness, unfairness … and … total lack of human feeling and sympathy” were “indicative of some abnormal tendencies in this boy himself.” As for Leopold, they attributed his intellectual precocity and “the fact that the cruel instincts show but little inhibition” to the abnormal functioning of his endocrine glands. They added that there was still a dispute as to the impact of the endocrine glands on mental development.
After more than a month of testimony and cross-examination, the judge adjourned the court so he could consider his decision. On Sept. 10, he reconvened the court to announce his decision. (Notice the whole investigation and trial took less than four months. Think what that would take in today’s environment.)
The judge said the psychiatric testimony was “of extreme interest” and a “valuable contribution to criminology.” However, he said the testimony was useful to understand crime in general rather than the two defendants. For these reasons, he said, “The court is satisfied that his judgment in the present cannot be affected thereby.”
He concluded, “In choosing imprisonment instead of death the court is moved chiefly by considerations of the age of the defendants.” He sentenced them to life in prison and 99 years.
After that, the prosecutor said he still believes that the death penalty is the only penalty feared by murderers. Darrow said, “This decision … caps my career as a criminal lawyer.” The father of the murdered Bobby Franks said he was satisfied with the verdict.
In 1936 Loeb was murdered by a fellow prisoner. In 1958 Leopold was paroled. He moved to Puerto Rico, where he taught mathematics at the University of Puerto Rico and got married. He died in 1971. But the inability to fully understand people like Leopold and Loeb continues and probably will forever.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
I’ve always found Leopold and Loeb and their lawyer, Darrow, fascinating characters, but the reason for the murder from all that I’ve read seems only puzzling.
I finally came across by far the best explanation I’ve ever encountered in an American Bar Association publication of its senior lawyers division, a magazine titled Experience (Volume 19, Number 2, 2009). The article, “Leopold & Loeb: The Case that Capped Darrow’s Career As a Criminal Lawyer,” is by Kevin O’Kelly, a writer and librarian that writes for The Boston Globe. The article is an excellent account of this famous case, and my column follows Mr. O’Kelly’s narrative.
It all started in Chicago during May of 1924 when 14-year-old Bobby Franks did not return home after school and disappeared. The wealthy family of Franks received a $10,000 ransom note indicating instructions for delivery of the money would follow. The instructions came by phone: Take the cab that would arrive shortly and go to a drug store at 1465 East 63rd St.
The father of the kidnapped child, Jacob Franks, received the call, but after hanging up he realized he didn’t remember the address. But the phone rang again. It was a call from his brother-in-law informing him that he was at a funeral home and had just identified the body of Bobby Franks.
The body was found at the shore of Wolf Lake near the Indiana border. Acid had been poured on the face and genitals of the body. The police had no leads.
After following some dead ends, the police finally started making headway. A pair of glasses had been found where the body of Bobby Franks was dumped. The police found an optician who was the only distributor of the manufacturer of the glasses. He had sold only three sets of the glasses in Chicago — one pair to a University of Chicago student named Nathan “Babe” Leopold.
When questioned, Leopold said he had probably dropped the glasses while birding near Wolf Lake. He was an accomplished ornithologist and established he had regularly taken high school students to that site for bird watching.
When questioned, Leopold said he had spent the day of the murder, May 21, 1924, with his friend, Dickie Loeb. When questioned, the stories of Leopold and Loeb held up, and they seemed to be in the clear. The police had little reason to believe that Leopold and Loeb would be involved in the case.
Here is how the author, Mr. O’Kelly, described the two young men and why they were not considered likely suspects:
“The son of a millionaire, the 19-year-old Leopold had already earned his undergraduate degree. He spoke five languages fluently and had made nationally recognized contributions to ornithology.
“And bringing in Dickie Loeb was equally discouraging. His father was a vice president of Sears and Roebuck. He had graduated from the University of Michigan at the age of 17 and had begun graduate work in history at the University of Chicago.
“Both were handsome and brilliant — everything educated young men were supposed to be and more. And there was the simple fact of their wealth. Why would they hold someone for ransom?”
The police were stumped, until a member of the State’s attorney had a hunch to question the Leopold family chauffeur. He was asked what he was doing on May 21, the day of the murder. The chauffeur remembered that Leopold had asked him to repair the brakes on his car. The chauffeur spent all day doing that and the car was in the garage until late at night.
This was the key to the case, as Leopold’s story was that he had been out in his car all day on May 21. They had him in a lie, and that lie unraveled the alibi that was perfect until then.
The chauffer remembered one other critical detail: The next day Leopold and Loeb were trying to remove stains from the carpet of a rented car. That was doubly strange as the two rarely did any sort of work.
The State’s Attorney sent a member of his staff to question Loeb. According to this account, he said, “You’re lying. We know you’re lying because Leopold’s car was in the garage all day.” Loeb asked, “Who told you that?” The answer was the chauffeur.
Loeb trembled. He tried to speak. He couldn’t. Shortly thereafter, he made a full confession as to how he and Leopold murdered Bobby Franks. Then with the details of the murder from Loeb, Leopold soon made a complete confession.
The motive for the murder defied understanding. Loeb said the kidnapping and murder was “a means of excitement, together with getting quite a sum of money.” The two originally planned a kidnapping of a stranger. But then they decided it would be easier to kidnap someone they knew rather than a stranger. (Bobby Franks lived across the street from Loeb.) They also decided they would have to kill the victim to avoid identification.
Loeb’s father went to Clarence Darrow to handle the defense of his son and Leopold. Darrow took the case because he wanted to deal a deathblow to capital punishment. A student of Darrow wrote that “one purpose dominated his whole life: to defeat the law of capital punishment.” Darrow figured if he could prevent capital punishment in this case, it would be hard to impose it in other cases.
Darrow took the case. He launched an exhaustive study of the background of the two, and immediately brought in three of the nation’s leading psychiatrists to examine them.
The two were arraigned on June 11, 1924. They both entered pleas of not guilty. The judge ordered the trial to begin no later than Aug. 4, 1924. In mid-July Darrow announced they would employ an insanity defense.
The trial started on July 21, 1924. Darrow stunned the court by withdrawing the plea of not guilty and substituting a plea of guilty. He did that because he knew he would never get a jury that would acquit. Furthermore, apparently Darrow thought he would have a better chance of avoiding capital punishment if he could make his arguments to a judge, a judge who had never sentenced a juvenile to death.
Darrow set off an extensive legal debate when he said he wanted to offer psychiatric testimony regarding the mental health of the defendant. He wanted to use it as a mitigating factor. Psychiatric testimony had been used before only to prove a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity and not as a mitigating factor in determining punishment. After extensive argument and a two-day adjournment for the judge to make up his mind, he decided to admit the psychiatric evidence in mitigation.
Then the most interesting part of the trial began. The first witness for the defense was Dr. William White, president of the American Psychiatric Association. He started by saying that the murder of Bobby Franks could not be understood without understanding the relationship of the two murderers.
Loeb, since adolescence, believed he was a master-criminal able to do his deeds with impunity. Mr. O’Kelly writes, “As a teenager, he stole from his relatives: money from a brother, bottles of scotch from an uncle. But acting alone was unsatisfying. He wanted an audience. He found it in Nathan Leopold.
“The two started out by stealing cars, throwing bricks through windows. They soon worked their way up to arson. From time to time, Loeb combed the Chicago papers for reports of their crimes. He was disappointed by the paltry coverage.”
Dr. White said Loeb considered the murder of Bobby Franks an intellectual feat. Leopold saw the murder as a method of getting an emotional premium.
Another member of the psychiatric team explained Leopold. He had a “king-slave phantasy.” He needed someone to whom he could ‘surrender himself as an abject slave.’ That someone was Richard Loeb.” They did have a homosexual relationship.
In addition, the psychiatrist said, both were raised by governesses who played crucial and negative roles in their lives. Loeb’s governess limited his contact with other children and pushed him through school at an accelerated rate. Dr. White said he had no healthy childhood development and was totally unprepared for adolescence. Leopold governess sexually molested him.
But even the psychiatrists admitted their childhood experiences could not totally explain their behavior. Their report said that Loeb’s “remarkable unscrupulousness, untruthfulness, unfairness … and … total lack of human feeling and sympathy” were “indicative of some abnormal tendencies in this boy himself.” As for Leopold, they attributed his intellectual precocity and “the fact that the cruel instincts show but little inhibition” to the abnormal functioning of his endocrine glands. They added that there was still a dispute as to the impact of the endocrine glands on mental development.
After more than a month of testimony and cross-examination, the judge adjourned the court so he could consider his decision. On Sept. 10, he reconvened the court to announce his decision. (Notice the whole investigation and trial took less than four months. Think what that would take in today’s environment.)
The judge said the psychiatric testimony was “of extreme interest” and a “valuable contribution to criminology.” However, he said the testimony was useful to understand crime in general rather than the two defendants. For these reasons, he said, “The court is satisfied that his judgment in the present cannot be affected thereby.”
He concluded, “In choosing imprisonment instead of death the court is moved chiefly by considerations of the age of the defendants.” He sentenced them to life in prison and 99 years.
After that, the prosecutor said he still believes that the death penalty is the only penalty feared by murderers. Darrow said, “This decision … caps my career as a criminal lawyer.” The father of the murdered Bobby Franks said he was satisfied with the verdict.
In 1936 Loeb was murdered by a fellow prisoner. In 1958 Leopold was paroled. He moved to Puerto Rico, where he taught mathematics at the University of Puerto Rico and got married. He died in 1971. But the inability to fully understand people like Leopold and Loeb continues and probably will forever.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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