The Perfect Crime

Bobby Franks was a bright 14-year-old student at Chicago’s Harvard School for Boys in the spring of 1924. On Wednesday, May 21, as he was walking home from school, a grey and black Willys Knight sedan pulled up alongside him. Franks didn’t recognise the driver, but he knew the passenger, Richard “Dickie” Loeb. The Loebs lived near the Frankses in a very well-to-do Kenwood section of town. Loeb offered Frank a lift home. The lad accepted, and moments after he was introduced to Nathan Leopold Jr., the blunt edge of a chisel came down on his head. After dark, Leopold and Loeb drove to Wolf Lake Park, a place Leopold knew from his birding excursions. They dragged the body to the edge of a culvert, poured hydrochloric acid on the face and then pushed it down.

Why? For no reason than to commit the “perfect crime”

This fiendish duo had become close friends in 1920, when Leopold, just 15 started at the University of Chicago, where the 14-year-old Loeb was a fellow freshman prodigy. In 1921, they had both transferred to the University of Michigan. By 1924, Leopold had mastered five languages, gained recognition as an ornithologist and was bound for Harvard Law School. Loeb, who had immersed himself in detective stories as a youngster – to the point where he not only fantasised about lawlessness but committed several petty crimes – had become one of the youngest-ever graduates from Michigan, and he too intended to study law.

As an extracurricular activity, they decided to plot a foolproof felony. Combining Loeb’s interest in crime and Leopold’s devotion to philosopher Friedrich Nitzche, who thought some men were inherently superior (Leopold and Loeb ranked themselves among these “supermen”), they schemed to get away with kidnapping a wealthy boy, killing him and collecting a ransom. With Frank’s death, steps one and two were complete.

Less than 24 hours after the conspiracy was set in motion, it started to fall apart. Shortly after Frank’s father received a call instructing him to deliver $10,000 ransom, his phone rang again: The body of a boy found near Wolf Lake was that of his missing son. The other shoe dropped when police discovered a pair of eyeglasses near Frank’s corpse. Though the prescription proved common among Chicagoans, the unique hinges on the frame narrowed possible owners down to three, including Leopold.

He told detectives he must have dropped them while birding. His alibi included Loeb, so that police brought him in as well. Meanwhile, investigators connected the ransom note to Leopold’s Underwood typewriter.

The star of this courtroom drama was the teens’ 67-year-old lawyer, Clarence Darrow. A staunch critic of capital punishment, Darrow devised a defence that would inflame the debate. Instead of declaring themselves not guilty by reason of insanity, his clients pleaded guilty. During the hearing that determined whether Leopold and Loeb would hang, Darrow presented psychiatric evidence, which was rare at that time, from a team of experts who said that the “perfect crime” fantasy was a by-product of immaturity and emotional instability. Finally, Judge John Caverly sentenced each young man to life in prison for murder, plus 99 years for kidnapping, citing their youth as a primary reason for sparing them death.

Loeb was killed by a fellow prisoner in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, married, became involved in public service and died in 1971. And that was the end of the supermen.