Last week I recounted the tale of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy young men, both still teenagers, who exactly a hundred years ago squandered all their advantages in life to commit "the perfect crime." They bludgeoned to death 14-year-old Bobby Franks, a neighbor of Loeb's (and also his distant cousin).
But as detailed earlier, their "perfect crime" soon unraveled, thanks both to physical evidence and slip-ups during their interrogation. The police eventually obtained confessions from both, differing only in the detail of who struck the fatal blow.
Though the police had a mountain of evidence and nearly matching confessions, the two suspects pleaded "not guilty," placing the burden on the prosecution to prove their guilt. So their parents hired the most celebrated defense attorney in the U.S. at that time, Clarence Darrow, who even in 1924, had already participated in many high-profile cases.
Darrow's fee to represent both defendants is variously reported as either $65,000 or $100,000; even the lower figure would be more than $1 million today. Darrow took a long, hard look at the evidence that the prosecution had against his clients, however, and then shocked both the prosecution and public by changing their pleas to "guilty."
While they could have pleaded guilty on their own, or done so with far less skilled counsel than Darrow, his move was shrewd in several ways. First, Illinois was a death penalty state; his clients were thus facing the gallows.
Furthermore, a guilty plea left only the sentencing phase, which was before just a judge, not a jury. Darrow calculated that putting the case before an experienced jurist, Judge John Caverly, instead of 12 citizens who could be swayed by public sentiment, was their best chance to avoid execution.
Loeb and Leopold's "trial," therefore, was really a lengthy sentencing hearing. For more than a month, Darrow presented testimony from a small army of psychiatrists who related how numerous factors, including distant parenting and, at least in Leopold's case, molestation by a governess, turned them into two actors so lacking in empathy. Finally, he concluded with an eight-hour summation, in which Darrow truly earned his fee: drawing on a lifetime of oratory and rhetorical skills, he gave an impassioned plea for Judge Caverly to choose life over death.
Darrow recalled the indiscriminate killing during World War I that had raged as the defendants grew up. He suggested that it created a "climate of death" that infected society. He noted that popular sentiment certainly supported their execution, and then summed up: "Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys . . . . But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past." Or "You may save them and make it easier for every child that sometime may stand where these boys stand. . . . I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men." Caverly reportedly had tears streaming down his face when Darrow concluded.
He sentenced Loeb and Leopold to life imprisonment for the murder, plus 99 years for kidnapping. They went to the state prison in Joliet, where they did make some amends for their crimes, helping to expand the prison school system's educational offerings.
In 1936, Loeb was murdered by a fellow inmate. His attacker claimed Loeb had propositioned him sexually; he was later acquitted of Loeb's killing.
For his part, in 1944, Leopold volunteered to be infected with malaria as part of a medical experiment. He also wrote an autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, published in 1958 – ironically, just as he was actually paroled. Sponsored by a religious organization to achieve his release, he moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked as a medical orderly and X-ray technician. He even married, and died there in 1971.
In the meantime, the case has had a long legacy in popular culture, inspiring numerous "true crime" books, and at least four motion pictures. In 1948, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" told the story of two characters much like them, who murder a fellow student and then host a party with his body in a makeshift coffin as guests mill around. The film otherwise has little relation to the real case, and is remembered today mostly because it consists of eight uninterrupted 10-minute shots.
Most significant, however, is 1959's "Compulsion," which closely follows the facts of the original case. Because Leopold was still alive, the producers changed the names (apparently to protect the guilty). Leopold sued for invasion of privacy anyway, but a court ruled he could not have been harmed by the film. The Clarence Darrow figure was played by Orson Welles, who delivers a masterful version of Darrow's real closing argument in his magnificent baritone; it's a dramatization that still holds up today.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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