Murder Among Friends, page 23
At the back of the room, a deputy sheriff poked his head into the corridor. “Rest o’ natural life,” he told the police officer standing guard. The officer passed the verdict on to a bailiff, who passed it along to another officer. Eventually, it spread to the guards stationed at the main entrance. One of them cupped his mouth and shouted to a motorcycle cop, “It’s life!” He carried the news to the crowd, and in a twinkling five thousand people were repeating it over and over. “Yeah, it’s life.”
It was a tremendous victory for Clarence Darrow. He turned to shake his clients’ hands. Their fingers barely touched before guards whisked Richard and Nathan away.
Reporters flocked around the attorney. “I have always hated capital punishment,” he told them. “This decision caps my career as a criminal lawyer.”
Would the boys ever get paroled?
Darrow nodded. Based on his understanding of the law, he thought the pair might be eligible for parole within thirty years or so.
Reporters swirled around Nathan’s and Richard’s relatives, too. Jacob Loeb spoke for both families: “There is little to say. We have been spared the death penalty, but what have [we] to look forward to?…What is there in the future but grief and sorrow, darkness and despair?”
Robert Crowe refused to talk with reporters. His face stormy, he crossed over to Darrow and shook his hand. Then he elbowed his way out the door. Back in his office, he wrote an official statement, which he distributed to the press. “The state’s attorney’s duty was performed,” he reminded the public, who would be casting their votes in less than eight weeks. “He is in no measure responsible for the decision of the court.”
Within minutes of the sentencing, reporters were pounding on the Frankses’ door at the Drake Hotel. Jacob wasn’t there, but Flora said a few words: “Bobby didn’t believe in capital punishment. He wrote about it and read his article at school, and told me it was wrong and somehow—after that—how could I ask it? I didn’t want to say or do anything that interfered with the prosecution, of course, but—I didn’t want them to hang.”
And in the Cook County Jail, Nathan and Richard celebrated. Tomorrow they’d be sent to the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet. But tonight they would feast.
“Go out and order us a big meal,” Nathan told his jailers. “Get us two steaks this thick.” With his thumb and finger, he measured off three inches.
“Yes,” agreed Richard, “and be sure they are smothered in onions. And bring every side dish that you can find. This may be our last good meal.”
“And bring chocolate éclairs for dessert,” added Nathan.
* * *
• • •
“Faced with the facts of the gruesome case, the death sentence should have been an easy one,” the San Francisco Bulletin declared. It found Caverly’s argument about the defendants’ youth nothing more than an excuse. The real reason Leopold and Loeb got off was that “there is one law for the obscure, and one law for the socially prominent.”
The Kansas City Post agreed: “The theory that there is one set of laws for the rich and another for the friendless poor [is] gnawing at the very vitals of national confidence and pride.”
So did the New York Sun: “The sentence shakes the faith of the people in the blind equality of justice. They will not believe any poor man who committed [such] a crime…would have escaped death.”
But other newspapers applauded the decision. The New York Times homed in on the fact that Caverly had based his decision on the criminals’ age, not their wealth. In fact, all the pricey lawyers and experts “went for nothing,” editors wrote. “Judge Caverly simply ignored [them]. Had the youthful murderers been poor and friendless, they would have escaped capital punishment as Leopold and Loeb escaped it.” This proved that there was not “one law for the poor and one for the rich.”
In Chicago, many people were left scratching their heads. There wasn’t any Illinois law that excused criminals younger than twenty-one from hanging. Indeed, as both Crowe and Assistant State’s Attorney Thomas Marshall had pointed out in their closing arguments, the state had twice executed youths. To some, it appeared that Caverly had seized on the pair’s ages as a convenient excuse for helping out the rich families. Others wondered when the judge had made his decision. He’d known the boys’ ages from the day they’d been arrested. Had he always believed their youth precluded them from hanging?
And what about Bernard Grant, who was scheduled to hang in six weeks? Wasn’t he as deserving of life in prison as Leopold and Loeb—perhaps even more so? Mary Grant, his mother, bitterly compared her son’s fate to theirs. “What can we do?” she asked reporters. “We were not able to hire [psychiatrists] at $250 a day to say he is insane.” In an editorial printed on September 14, just four days after Caverly’s decision, the Chicago Sunday Tribune urged clemency for Grant. “If he hangs while Leopold and Loeb live, the inequality in our process of justice will be gross.” Six days later, Illinois governor Len Small stayed Grant’s execution, but his sentence was never commuted. He was stabbed to death in prison by his partner in crime, Walter Krauser, before that could happen. Krauser went on to serve two consecutive life sentences—one for the murder of the police officer and the other for the murder of Bernard Grant.
The public was especially worried that the killers would somehow get an early release. The wording of Judge Caverly’s decision fueled this concern. For some reason, it did not specifically state that the sentences—life plus ninety-nine years—should be served one after the other. This meant that the sentences would run concurrently, with the prisoner serving the longer of the two. Had the judge done this on purpose, or had it been an oversight?
Some people believed it was intentional.
But others claimed it didn’t matter. Life was life. What could be longer than that?
Hinton G. Clabaugh, Illinois supervisor of pardons and paroles, weighed in. According to the law, men serving life sentences were eligible for parole after twenty years. Additionally, they could reduce their time through good behavior and the prison’s merit system. Either teen, he said, could be out of prison in eleven years and three months. “They will still be young men scarcely over 30 years old,” he said. “I don’t mean to say [they] will necessarily be out in eleven years…but I do say it is hard to see how their legal privileges can be denied them any more than to other convicts.”
Eleven years! Chicagoans were aghast. And even more convinced that the families had bought their sons’ way out of trouble. The Chicago Daily Tribune summed up the sentiment best. “Life-imprisonment…[is] justified only if these two youthful murderers are placed in confinement so deep they will never be heard from again.”
* * *
• • •
Sometime in the hours before he was taken to the penitentiary in Joliet, Nathan Leopold scrawled a long letter of thanks to Clarence Darrow. He praised the lawyer, claiming he’d never met anyone as brave or intelligent. “This alone would cause me to bow down in abject hero-worship,” he wrote. “It would be an inconsistent Superman indeed who did not reverence his superior.” But it was Darrow’s heart that surprised Nathan the most, “a heart in which there is room for all the world even including murderers and state’s attorneys.” Nathan marveled at the “spontaneous sympathy and understanding which instantly goes out of you to the most dastardly criminal. It [would be] sacrilege for me, who is so utterly lacking them, to attempt to measure them. But even lacking them, I can admire and wonder in awe.”
Darrow would reply three weeks later, and give the teen this advice:
Most of life is within us and man is a wonderfully adaptable animal. I think you know this, too. Of course, you will be there for a long time & will naturally find out the best way to make things tolerable…. I am ambitious for you to write your bird book. I have had a good deal of pleasure, or rather forgetfulness in writing books which no one reads, & I want you to write one which will be read. Anyhow, I won’t forget you and I’m sure I can help you in many ways.
Always your friend,
Clarence Darrow
Darrow knew John Whitman, the warden at Joliet, well and planned to periodically check in with him on the teenagers’ behalf. His continued presence, he knew, would provide them a bit of additional protection within the penitentiary’s walls.
The following evening at dusk, the assistant jailer slapped handcuffs on the two young men. Then he marched them between double rows of rifle-toting guards to a row of cars parked in front of the jail’s courtyard. This show of force was to safeguard their lives. Since the sentencing, the prison had received bomb threats, and a crowd was constantly gathered outside the jail.
The cars’ engines were already running when Nathan and Richard, along with their jailer, climbed into the backseat of a black Packard. Two Cadillacs would escort them, one driving in front of their vehicle and the other behind. Each was packed with armed deputy sheriffs. As they pulled away, cars filled with reporters and photographers followed. Sirens screaming, the motorcade sped along at fifty-five miles an hour down Archer Avenue. Soon it left the city behind. The landscape became one of rolling farmland broken occasionally by a small town.
Night had already fallen when the motorcade arrived at the penitentiary thirty-three miles from Chicago. As it approached the prison gates, the cars’ headlights swept over the stone fortress. It occurred to Nathan that until now he hadn’t considered what the prison in Joliet might be like.
“Well, boys,” said Richard with bravado. “Let it be written that we came through here on the eleventh of September, 1924.”
Inside the prison grounds, an army of reporters waited. As Richard and Nathan climbed from the car, flashbulbs popped. The pair blinked, momentarily blinded. A second later, they got their first look at their new home.
Twenty-five-foot-high limestone walls, appearing as if they’d been dipped in a cauldron of bile, surrounded them. The administration building—a looming, castlelike fortress—was equally awful. The prison had been built to be intimidating, and it was.
Richard’s bravado evaporated. As he moved toward an open doorway, the muscle in his cheek twitched. He stumbled on the uneven paving stones.
Nathan peered around and saw prison guards dressed in blue uniforms patrolling the thick walls. Each carried a rifle.
The pair was shoved through the doorway and into a waiting room. Nathan glanced back at the reporters. He spied Ty Krum, the newspaperman who had smuggled bourbon into their cells at the county jail each night. “It’s 1924,” he called back to Krum through the still-open doorway. “It will probably be 1957 when we get out, and I’ll have a beard so long.” He motioned from his chin to his waist.
“Shut up and face the wall,” ordered a prison guard.
The steel door clanged shut.
“LIFE IN PRISON IS JUST WHAT YOU MAKE”
On a November afternoon in 1963, carrying a paper cone of white lilies, his shoulders hunched against the cold, Nathan Leopold wove his way through the Jewish section of Chicago’s Rosehill Cemetery. Almost four decades had passed since he’d been here, but he remembered the way. His mother’s grave was just ahead.
Once he’d come weekly to stand at her headstone, the last time just days before murdering Bobby Franks. Back then he’d been a sophisticated Jazz Age teen. Now he was a pudgy fifty-nine-year-old ex-con with a heart condition.
Decades behind bars had taken their toll.
The cramped, slightly damp cells; the bedbugs; the weekly three-minute showers; even the slop buckets for toilets—by inches, fastidious Nathan had adjusted to it all. But he never got used to the “deadly, leaden, unrelieved monotony” of prison life. If only Richard had been there to liven things up. But the warden had separated them. Kept in opposite wings of the prison, they’d never seen each other.
The public rarely saw or heard about either of them. Only small bits of information about Leopold and Loeb escaped the prison in Joliet. Brief stories occasionally appeared in the back pages of newspapers. It was reported that Nathan had undergone surgery for appendicitis; Richard had caught the measles; Nathan worked in the prison’s shoe shop doing clerical work; Richard cleaned the prison yard.
On the first anniversary of the pair’s imprisonment, reporters flocked to the penitentiary for a follow-up story. The warden had granted permission for the pair to talk with them through the prison’s heavy iron gate. Nathan refused to be interviewed. But Richard went out and stuck his hands through the bars and shook hands all around. James Mulroy of the Chicago Daily News thought he “presented a particularly pitiable figure, compared with the dapper Loeb of old.”
“I can’t talk to you boys,” said Richard. “I’d like to say something, but I’m afraid I’d get in bad. I bear no grudges against any of you, and I’m trying to do my best down here to make good.”
Mulroy learned from a prison guard that both teenagers’ nerves were “scorched,” and they went about with “drawn faces, twitching lips, brooding expressions.” They were, the guard added, “suffering tremendously.” Warden Whitman agreed. He predicted Loeb would be “lucky to last five years.”
A few other brief reports made the papers over the years. But for the most part, Leopold and Loeb faded from public view, though Nathan years later wrote a book about his prison experiences. Richard did not. His daily life behind bars remains, for the most part, a mystery.
In 1925, Leopold and Loeb’s separation grew wider. Prison officials transferred Nathan to Stateville, a new correctional facility three miles north of Joliet. “Life in prison is just what you make,” the warden told him on the day he arrived. “Behave and you’ll get along pretty well. Act badly, and you’ll get into trouble. It’s up to you.”
Nathan chose trouble. He spent time in “the hole,” or solitary confinement, for stealing sugar and getting into fights with other inmates and forging the chaplains’ names to slips that permitted prisoners to go to the chapel. This last offense earned him seven days.
Seven days in solitary confinement was hard time. The small concrete cell had no furniture, just a blanket and the inevitable slop bucket. For most of each day, Nathan was handcuffed to the cell’s inner barred door, with the solid steel outer door closed and locked. He was left to stand there for hours on end, and his feet swelled and his legs cramped. Twice a day, he was released. He fell to the concrete floor, exhausted and aching, and lay there until the guards called him back to the barred door.
Nathan was unruly for six years. Then one day, he recalled, “I sat down and considered carefully [this] question: Should I attempt to escape, should I commit suicide, or should I serve out my sentence?”
He decided to make what he could of his life in prison. He began a program of self-study, teaching himself calculus, logic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. He stopped getting into fights. His improved behavior earned him better jobs. Because of his education, he was given the task of reorganizing the prison library, a job he relished. He also willingly used his education to do the various clerical jobs needed to run the prison, such as typing up the daily logs about inmate behavior and organizing prisoner files. He gained the warden’s trust. By 1931, during those hours when prisoners were allowed out of their cells, Nathan could go anywhere in the prison.
But he still missed Richard.
And then, miraculously, his friend was transferred to Stateville. “The next four years from 1932–1936 were, in many ways, the best I have known in prison,” Nathan later recalled. Both Richard and Nathan had an education far in advance of most of the other prisoners, so with the warden’s blessing, they started a school. This activity allowed them to spend long hours together each day, even though they didn’t share a cell. “Dick and I were as close as it is possible for two men to be,” said Nathan.
At lunchtime on January 28, 1936, an inmate stopped by Nathan’s cell. “[Loeb’s] hurt,” he said. Nathan rushed to the prison hospital to find Richard on the operating table. His throat had been slashed with a straight razor, and his body was covered in gashes—fifty-four in all. He’d been attacked in the shower by James Day, a convict with a long record of offenses, including armed robbery. Day claimed Richard had made sexual advances and that he’d acted in self-defense, but few people believed this. Why, if it was self-defense, was Richard’s throat cut from behind? And why slash him all those additional times? Without any witnesses to the attack, these questions went unanswered. Day, however, was placed in solitary confinement until the following June.
There was little the doctors could do to save Richard. Nathan stood at the end of the operating table, watching his best friend’s life slowly drain away. It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Richard Loeb died. He was thirty years old.
Nathan helped the surgical nurse wash the body. “We covered him at last with a sheet, but after a moment, I folded the sheet back from his face and sat down on the stool by the table where he lay. I wanted a long last look at him.”
* * *
• • •
Nathan was bereaved. “I missed [Richard] terribly,” he later admitted. “We had shared everything and planned everything together. I was very lonely.” He tried to keep busy. He studied twelve more languages. He took more college courses by mail and became a trained X-ray technician. During World War II, he offered himself for the malaria-treatment experiments being conducted in the prison hospital. He also kept up with ornithology, reading all the journals. He even raised a brood of canaries in his cell.
He also wrote his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, which begins after the boys had left Bobby Franks’s body in the culvert. “I am not going to describe my childhood and youth,” Nathan explains in the book’s opening pages, “especially, I am not going to describe the crime…. I simply cannot bring myself to poke and probe again at the horrible…experiences. To pick the scab from the wound.”
