Murder Among Friends, page 13
Meyer Levin, a University of Chicago student who decades later would write a bestselling novel about the case, recalled that around Jewish families’ dinner tables “there was one gruesome note of relief in the affair. One heard it uttered only amongst ourselves—a relief that the victim, too, had been Jewish. Though [the religious] aspects were never overtly raised in the case…we were never free of the thought that the murderers were Jews.”
However, that very morning, the Chicago Daily Tribune did raise the issue overtly, pointing out to readers that the importance of this case lay in the fact that “it concerns a particular people. The three principals in the tragedy…the Franks boy, Leopold and Loeb are all Jews.”
The mayor of Chicago, William Dever—who counted Albert Loeb among his closest friends—obviously feared an antisemitic backlash in which the public might hold the whole Jewish population responsible for the crime. And so that Saturday afternoon, in his first public comments on the murder, he congratulated the detectives for their “efficient and vigorous work.” Then, in a carefully worded way, he called for citizen restraint. “I have the deepest sympathy for the parents of all three boys. I know Mr. Loeb, whom I regard as a man of splendid character and attainment. It is sad that such a tragedy should be visited upon these people and it invites the sympathy of all.”
Chief Justice of the Cook County Criminal Court John R. Caverly, a short, gray-haired man with rimless glasses, spoke with the press, too. As the judge who would be hearing the case, he promised to move quickly, and expected to go to trial within thirty days. That the defendants’ parents were rich pillars of the community made no difference to his timetable.
Some reporters wondered if the teens could be tried as juveniles. According to Illinois law at the time, persons under twenty-one were considered minors. They couldn’t vote, sign contracts, or marry without parental permission. Their guardians were legally responsible for all their actions and decisions.
Caverly patiently explained that Illinois law set the age of criminal responsibility at fourteen. At that age, a person was deemed by the state to be capable of committing a crime and, therefore, completely responsible for it. It did not matter that Leopold and Loeb were minors. They would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
What might the boys’ punishment be?
Nathan and Richard had both confessed to first-degree murder, as well as kidnapping. For the crime of murder, Illinois’s statutes called for death, or a term of not less than fourteen years in prison. Kidnapping, too, carried the death sentence, or a term in prison of not less than five years. The only way the teenagers could get a lesser sentence was to prove to the court that they were insane.
Would the boys hang?
That remained to be seen.
* * *
• • •
Crowe had kept the murderers sitting and waiting in the interrogation room while he spoke with the press. They were still there two hours later when—without breakfast or a wink of sleep—he had them put into two separate cars and taken on a field trip to the sites involved in the murder. The state’s attorney wanted to strengthen his case by corroborating the teenagers’ confessions. He also expected the families’ lawyers to come charging in at any moment, now that the news of their confessions was public.
A long procession of police cars followed by reporters and photographers wound its way through the city’s streets to the Rent-A-Car Company on Michigan Avenue. Flanked by police officers, Nathan went inside.
Did the clerk recognize the teenager?
He did. He handed over the rental contract signed by Mr. Ballard.
Next they visited the diner where Richard had waited to be called as Ballard’s reference.
Nathan eyed the lunch counter. “Let’s eat!” he suggested.
Ignoring him, Detective Hughes asked the diner’s owner if she recognized either youth.
She pointed at Richard. She remembered him waiting near the phone booth for almost an hour.
Richard went pale. His knees buckled and he crumpled to the floor.
Nathan looked on contemptuously. Either Richard was a weakling who couldn’t take the pressure, or he was faking it. Whatever the reason, Nathan disdained his behavior.
Police officers helped Richard back to the car. Rather than making him continue on with them, they took him to the Hotel Windermere. This, too, was Crowe’s idea. To prevent the teens’ families (and their lawyers) from talking with the pair, he would keep them on the move. The strategy was simple, he’d told Detective Hughes earlier. “Shuffle them here, there, all over town, out into the country, from one hotel to another, while the boys talk and talk and talk.”
Nathan went on to the hardware store, where the clerk was unable to identify him as having purchased a chisel recently. (This was because Richard had bought it.) At the drugstore where Nathan had purchased the hydrochloric acid, however, the druggist did remember him. Who could forget such an unusual order?
The procession drove past the lot on Drexel Boulevard where the teenagers had watched the group of boys playing baseball, then stopped at the Leopold house to pick up the hip boots Nathan had worn while shoving the body into the culvert.
At Jackson Park, Nathan pointed out the places where Richard had dumped the typewriter keys and then the machine. Detective Hughes immediately called for divers to search the lagoon. It would take them six days to find the battered Underwood in the murky depths.
The car carrying Nathan continued along South Shore Drive. When it neared the secluded spot where he and Richard had burned the robe, he piped up. “Pull in here….” He pointed to a pile of ashes.
Police sifted through them. They found a remnant of the robe. It was bloodstained.
And from then on, Nathan told them whatever they wanted to know.
“I knew, I suppose, that [the police] were building their case,” he later explained about that day. “Making it absolutely airtight. But it struck me as a waste of effort. The harm—all that could possibly be done—had already been done. We had admitted our guilt…. What did it matter how many witnesses [the police] did or did not assemble? I didn’t think ahead to a possible trial. I didn’t consider the possibility of there being more than one punishment. We had confessed; we would be hanged.”
Reporters, however, had a different take on Nathan’s chatter. It was about “egotism and precocity,” declared Orville Dwyer in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Nathan Leopold liked showing off.
Next the group headed east into Indiana, looking for the place where the killers had left Bobby’s shoes. It took a while—Nathan had forgotten the exact location—but finally he shouted, “Stop here!”
He climbed out of the car and walked along the side of the road, kicking at underbrush, finding nothing. He and the detective continued searching. But the weather had turned cold and gray. Rain threatened. It was decided to take Nathan to the hotel, too.
They had one last stop—the Hyde Park police station. One of the detectives there held out an object. Could Nathan identify it?
He nodded. It was the chisel Richard had used to bash in Bobby’s head. It still had the adhesive tape wrapped around its blade and was stained with blood. He wondered how they’d found it.
A night watchman had seen it thrown from the car, a police officer explained. He’d picked it up, noticed the blood, and turned it in.
Some master criminal Richard was, Nathan must have thought.
Later, as the killers slept in separate rooms at the Hotel Windermere, a suitcase that had been packed by one of the Leopolds’ servants and delivered to the state’s attorney’s office was brought over by a police officer. It contained a pair of silk pajamas and a change of clothes for each teen. Mike Leopold had also included a deck of cards, magazines, and some candy for his kid brother. It was, noted one police officer, like the care package sent to a kid who is away at camp.
At one a.m. police rousted the pair out of their comfortable beds. It was time to move again, this time to the Wabash Avenue police station near the Loop, where they would remain in separate cells until daylight.
* * *
• • •
The boys’ confessions made the front pages in New York and California and dozens of places in between. Some newspapers, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, sent their own top reporters to Chicago. “The case is one of the most remarkable ever to win the interest of an eager public,” claimed the Post’s editor. It was too juicy a story to rely on secondhand reports. Out-of-town reporters, like their Chicago counterparts, led with the lurid and sensational, as this lengthy headline published on the front page of the New York Times on June 1 proves:
TWO RICH STUDENTS CONFESS TO KILLING FRANKS BOY IN CAR
SONS OF WEALTHY CHICAGOANS HIT HIM WITH A CHISEL AND THEN GAGGED HIM.
THEN DISPOSED OF BODY
YOUTH’S CLOTHING, WHICH THEY STRIPPED FROM HIM, BURNED IN HOME OF ONE SLAYER.
LONG PLANNED SUCH CRIME
ONCE THOUGHT TO KIDNAP ROSENWALD’S GRANDSON—CHAUFFEUR UPSET THEIR ALIBI.
It seemed everyone, everywhere, wanted to know about the murder.
“IMPALING A BEETLE ON A PIN”
Late that same Saturday, in an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, a doorbell rang. Ruby Darrow woke with a start. Who could be at the door at this hour? She glanced over at her still-sleeping husband, Clarence.
The bell rang again.
With a sigh, Ruby climbed out of bed, pulled on her robe, and moved sleepily down the hall. She knew it would be legal business.
When she opened the door, she found four men on the threshold. Ruby recognized one of them, Jacob Loeb. He was the former president of the Chicago Board of Education. He was also, she knew from the newspapers, the uncle of one of the teenage murderers.
Loeb pushed past her into the apartment. “We’ve got to see Clarence Darrow. Is he here?”
Ruby nodded. But he was sleeping. He couldn’t be disturbed.
Loeb ignored her. He charged down the hall to the Darrows’ bedroom and barged in.
Darrow sat up in bed. The rumpled sixty-seven-year-old lawyer ran a gnarled hand over his face as Loeb dropped to his knees beside him. “You must save our two boys,” he pleaded. “Get them a life sentence instead of death. That’s all we ask…. We’ll pay anything, only for God’s sake, don’t let them hang.”
Why did Jacob Loeb, as well as the Leopold family, want Darrow to represent both teens, rather than hiring two separate lawyers?
Since the pair had committed the crime together, they would be tried together. That was Illinois law. In addition, it made no legal difference who had killed Bobby Franks. Intent to kill—to which Nathan and Richard had both admitted—carried the same maximum penalty: death. Both could be hanged if found guilty. This left the families with just one practical option: hire the very best criminal attorney to defend both their sons. And Clarence Darrow was the best.
Throughout the 1910s and into the early 1920s, Darrow had defended a hundred people who were facing the death penalty. He’d saved all of them from the gallows. His clients came from every part of society—Black, white, working class, and upper class. Just five years earlier, he’d gotten Emma Simpson, a wealthy socialite charged with first-degree murder for shooting her husband, off on a plea of insanity. Simpson had spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital before being allowed to resume her life in Chicago. Jacob Loeb must have hoped Darrow would do the same for Nathan and Richard.
But Darrow hesitated. He ran his hand over his face again, thinking. He wanted both to help and to stay out of it. The crime had been shocking, and the public and the press were already against the teenagers. Keeping them from the gallows would, he knew, be a tough fight. And he was “very weary,” he later recalled. “I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing down the greatest enemy that ever confronted man—public opinion.”
While Darrow often defended the rich and well positioned, his sympathies lay with the poor and oppressed. In his lengthy legal career, he’d defended union leaders against the federal government and had traveled across the country fighting for the voiceless. He was a master orator, a ruthless cross-examiner, and a brilliant strategist. He almost never took notes during a case—and he never forgot a fact. And despite his reputation, his opponents often underestimated him. Seeing the rumpled, homespun Darrow “drawl before a jury box is a notable scene,” wrote Chicago journalist Ben Hecht, “the great barrister artfully gotten up in baggy pants, frayed linen, and a string tie, and ‘playing dumb’ for a jury as if he were not a lawyer at all, but a cracker-barrel philosopher groping for a bit of human truth.”
Darrow possessed a deep compassion for those who faced loss, despair, or persecution. “Not only could I put myself in one’s place,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I could not avoid doing so.”
This compassion seeped into his law practice. Every day, the bench outside his office would be filled by “men in overalls, their arms in slings; by women huddled in shawls and threadbare clothes, wan-faced, waiting for Darrow,” recalled a friend. Darrow would step out of his office at day’s end, see the long line, sigh, and offer an understanding smile. While his dinner grew cold at home, he would invite these people in, one by one, to hear their cases and offer advice. He never asked for a dime. He once estimated that a third of his cases were pro bono.
Above all, he hated capital punishment. He claimed that the death penalty was “the State laying its bloody hand upon some poor forlorn individual who it had earlier betrayed by neglect and oppression.” And so his most ardent and strenuous fights were against what he saw as a barbarous practice, cruel and utterly useless in deterring crime. In his autobiography, he wrote, “No client of mine had ever been put to death, and I felt that it would almost, if not quite, kill me if it should ever happen.”
For this reason, Clarence Darrow slowly nodded at Jacob Loeb. He would defend the teenagers, “to do what I could for sanity and humanity against the wave of hatred and malice, that, as ever, was masquerading under its usual nom de plume: ‘Justice.’ ”
* * *
• • •
It was Sunday, June 1, and State’s Attorney Crowe had another full day planned for the killers. After changing into their fresh and fashionable Brooks Brothers suits, the teenagers were once again hustled into separate police cars.
Crowe invited a handful of reporters to ride along with Richard and Nathan. This was not surprising. As usual, it was tit for tat. Reporters would promise to write favorably about the Chicago police and their ongoing battle against crime. In return, they were given access to prisoners. The practice provided the newspapers with titillating tidbits and inside scoops that increased readership, while the police department’s less-than-stellar reputation was boosted by good press.
Today, however, Crowe wanted more than good press; he saw the reporters as an insurance policy. He’d already heard that the families had hired Clarence Darrow, and if anyone could get the confessions declared inadmissible in court, it was Darrow. But what if the teenagers told reporters something incriminating and they wrote about it? Then it would be harder for the young men to deny guilt in court.
The procession’s first stop was Daley’s Restaurant for breakfast. Nathan and Richard were seated at the same table. They angrily refused to utter a word to each other.
Sulky and irritable, Richard glared at his partner in crime. His meal grew cold.
Nathan ignored him. He joked with the police, flirted with the waitress, and ordered a second helping of scrambled eggs. He gulped down a jelly doughnut and a second cup of coffee, too, before they finally returned to the cars.
In Nathan’s car, Wallace Sullivan, a reporter from the Chicago Herald and Examiner, asked him about the murder. Whose idea was it, his or Loeb’s?
Nathan, who was chain-smoking in the backseat, grew angry at his friend’s name. “It was all Loeb’s idea,” he declared. “Loeb…enticed the boy into the car and it was Loeb who struck him on the head…. I could not—I would not have been physically able to strike the blow…. Loeb knew this, too…. My repugnance to violence is such that I could not have killed [Bobby]…. He thinks that by proving me the slayer he will eventually be free.”
Then Nathan’s dark mood passed as quickly as it had come. Pointing out the window at the South Shore Country Club, he said disdainfully, “Aren’t golf players nuts?”
Asked what he thought of the ransom note, Nathan turned boastful. “It was concise and well-phrased. It instilled terror. And it certainly impelled action.”
He bragged about the preparation for the crime, too. “We even rehearsed the kidnapping…carrying it through in all details, lacking only the boy we were to kill.”
Then he looked at James Doherty, the Chicago Daily Tribune reporter. “It was just an experiment. It is as easy for us to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.”
In case that hadn’t shocked the reporters, he added, “Making up my mind whether or not to commit murder was about the same as making up my mind whether or not to have pie for dinner.”
