Nothing but the Night, page 1
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INTRODUCTION
It’s been a century since Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy, Jewish Chicago teenagers, kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. It was the original “Crime of the Century.” Although other crimes had shocked the nation, the 1924 drama surrounding Leopold and Loeb was among the first to be covered as a national—even an international—media event. Newspapers and radio stations fought to report every stray fact, every bizarre assertion. While denouncing interest in the case as prurient, they eagerly printed up the latest gossip, the newest developments, and the most sensational details in efforts to satiate the seemingly unending public appetite for news about the crime and its perpetrators.
From the beginning it seemed so bizarre. Leopold and Loeb were both prodigies, graduating from college by eighteen. Leopold’s father was a millionaire box manufacturer; Loeb’s father, even wealthier, had been vice president of Sears, Roebuck. Their young sons, denied nothing in life, with everything to look forward to and very little to gain, upended expectation by joining together, locked in an amoral danse macabre in which they fed off each other and eventually murdered.
These two disaffected young intellectuals, it is often said, were obsessed with the work of Nietzsche and viewed themselves as supermen. That they had apparently killed just for the experience, to see if they could commit the perfect crime as if it was some kind of childish game pitting their wits against the police, was incomprehensible to Jazz Age Chicago. How had two young sons of wealthy families gone so wrong? The seeming lack of remorse left people reeling as the confessed killers grinned, gave interviews, and gave every appearance that they were enjoying their time in the spotlight. From the start there was an idea that the case offered important lessons. People tried to wrest some moral lesson from the chaos, making the murderers proxies for the clash between traditionalism and hedonism. They were held up as living warnings of juvenile delinquency and intellectual precocity.
Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow managed to save Leopold and Loeb from a date with the hangman, winning them life sentences. In 1936, a fellow inmate murdered Richard Loeb, claiming that he had done so to resist his unwanted sexual advances. This left Nathan Leopold: he rewrote history, blaming his former lover for their crimes and attempting to present himself in the best possible light in his quest for eventual parole. A smuggled straight razor wielded by another fellow convict deprived Loeb of his redemption story; Leopold, by default, claimed the mantle of remorse, won his freedom in 1958, and lived on for another thirteen years.
The case has never quite gone away, even as other more notorious crimes supplanted it in the public imagination. Writing about the case, historian Paula Fass noted that the story has an almost “Dostoevskian quality that made it at once compelling and unsolvable.”1 It has spawned films, documentaries, myriad scholarly articles, and a plethora of books—ironically the most famous, Compulsion, was a novel, a fictionalized recounting of events in 1924. There have been psychological explorations, historical narratives of varying accuracy, an autobiography by Nathan Leopold and, bizarrely, even two books aimed at a young adult reading audience.
Gallons of ink have been spilled over the case; sometimes the facts seem set in stone. Yet after a century, it’s time to take a fresh look at the original Crime of the Century, to strip away the legends and challenge accepted history. The Leopold and Loeb case remains relevant today, encompassing as it did so many issues still in headlines: the death penalty; mental illness; anti-Semitism; homophobia; and the corrupting influence of money on the justice system. Darrow delivered an epic closing argument against the death penalty that spared his clients’ young lives. A century has wrapped it in legend, extolling his brilliant advocacy. In truth, it was dishonest, disjointed, and often offensive.
Then there is the groundbreaking courtroom battle of psychiatric arguments and Freudian theories—the first time such testimony took center stage in an effort to transform villains into victims. The wealthy Leopold and Loeb families hired a veritable Who’s Who of American psychiatry to examine the pair. Defense alienists proposed a litany of alleged mitigating circumstances: abusive governesses; parental neglect; improper reading materials; and a host of minor physical ailments that, under Darrow’s careful machinations, skirted the truth. The portraits fell just short of insanity, leaving the popular though erroneous impression that these two young defendants were, at best, emotionally fragile and, at worst, so mentally damaged that they had been unable to resist their murderous compulsions.
Newspapers played up the fact that the Leopolds, the Loebs, and Bobby Franks’s family were all Jewish. It didn’t matter that the Leopolds were far from observant, that Richard Loeb’s mother was Catholic, or that the Franks family had converted to Christian Science—much public opinion seems to have lumped them all together. For some, their Jewish roots made them alien: Jewish intellect, it was said, fed the crime, and Jewish money corrupted them and defeated justice.
And, from the first, whispers surrounded the nature of Leopold and Loeb’s relationship. Even the most sensational newspapers refrained from printing the details, instead merely referring to the pair’s “perversions.” The truth burst forth in stunning testimony during their trial: Nathan was gay, and Richard had gone along with his sexual demands in order to secure him as an accomplice. The issue was deemed so shocking in 1924 that at one point the presiding judge ordered all women from his courtroom, lest details offend their refined sensibilities. It left the distasteful and inaccurate idea that the pair had killed only because of their sexuality.
Or, Darrow and others suggested, it was money that had corrupted their young minds and driven them to murder. Not want of it—until their incarcerations Leopold and Loeb lived in mansions, drove fast cars, sported the latest fashions, and freely indulged their every desire. Rather, defenders and critics alike claimed, it was this privilege that had so corrupted them and freed them from any sense of social obligation. It was perhaps the earliest example of what became known as the “affluenza defense,” a strategy echoed in 2013 when sixteen-year-old Texan Ethan Crouch killed four people while driving under the influence and tried to claim that wealth had stripped him of an ability to determine right from wrong.
Here we have tried to answer the remaining questions: Did Leopold and Loeb commit other murders? Who actually killed Bobby Franks? Was he sexually assaulted? Did Nathan have a hand in Richard’s murder? Here, and often for the first time, we have attempted to address these issues at length, even if much is still speculative. We’ve also dug deeply into the psychological relationship between Leopold and Loeb. History (and Leopold) portrayed Loeb as the psychopathic impresario, with Nathan positioned as his weak, infatuated disciple swept up in a mad folie à deux. But we discovered evidence contradicting this view. It is time to even out the scales in an attempt to understand what really happened in 1924, even if this introduces a certain imbalance in the narrative.
A century later, this tumultuous crime and its enigmatic criminals demand a fresh investigation, exploring persistent themes, exposing common fallacies, and probing for the hidden truth. By turning a critical eye to what has come before, reexamining Leopold and Loeb’s personalities and relationship, and exploring controversial theories, it is possible to pull the curtain back just a little more on events that summer a hundred years ago.
—Greg King and Penny Wilson
June 2021
PART I
THE MISSING BOY
CHAPTER ONE
At half past two on the afternoon of May 21, 1924, the doors of Chicago’s elite Harvard School for Boys flew open. Classes were over, and students spilled from the three-story brick building in the city’s South Side Kenwood neighborhood. Previous days had been gray and heavy with rain; now, the thick, scudding clouds had finally begun to fade, washed away by mild but persistent winds blowing from Lake Michigan to the east. Spring was late this year: oaks and maples marching along adjoining streets still bore bare patches open to the sky. But the break in the weather offered a chance to relieve pent-up boyish energy.
Some boys climbed into family limousines sent to fetch them; others walked down Ellis Avenue, toward the rows of impressive mansions nearby. But several groups lingered: with thoughts of home and homework pushed aside, they dropped their books and organized impromptu baseball games. One team formed in the schoolyard while another started off for a nearby vacant lot. Harvard instructor J. T. Seass, who had volunteered to supervise, decided he should follow the second g
Seass recognized him: everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know eighteen-year-old Richard Loeb, the handsome, charismatic son of one of Chicago’s most prominent families. Richard’s father, Albert, had made a fortune rumored at nearly $10 million as vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company; the family lived just three blocks down Ellis Avenue, in an immense Elizabethan-style mansion.2 Called Dickie by his family, young Richard was an academic prodigy: a year earlier, he’d been the youngest man to ever graduate from the University of Michigan.3
The instructor exchanged a few words of greeting before continuing to the vacant lot; as he left, Seass saw Richard speaking with his ten-year-old brother Tommy Loeb, who attended Harvard.4 Then Richard stopped nine-year-old Johnny Levinson, son of a wealthy attorney. “What are you doing after school?” he called out to the boy.
“I’m going to play baseball,” Johnny replied and quickly walked away.5
Shouts rang out from a vacant lot at 49th Street and Drexel Boulevard as Seass approached the second game. He’d barely arrived when he again saw Richard Loeb, standing off to one side, his eyes on the gathered boys. As Johnny Levinson went to bat, Loeb shouted, “Hit it up!” before finally leaving.6 The game lasted some two hours before the boys began making their ways home.
It was a quiet afternoon; only a few cars passed along the street. Sometime after half past four, Carl Ulving, chauffeur for the Spiegel family, was driving north on Ellis when he spotted a “dark colored” touring car going south on the avenue. Something made Ulving look closer—perhaps the fact that, despite the nice weather, the car had its canvas side curtains pulled up. Ulving saw Richard Loeb “sitting behind the wheel.” He’d known Richard for years—“since he was a boy”—and raised his hand to wave. Loeb saw him and waved back in acknowledgment.7
The second group of boys, playing baseball in the schoolyard at Harvard, ended their game at five. They might have gone longer—the sun was now shining—but most knew that their parents would be expecting them home for dinner. Fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks left the yard and began walking the three blocks to his house on Ellis Avenue—he lived just across the street from the Loebs. He hadn’t yet hit a growth spurt—at five feet tall and a hundred pounds the brown-haired boy was smaller than most of his classmates, but that didn’t stop him from joining their play. Bobby loved sports, with a special passion for baseball: his most prized possession was a baseball signed by Babe Ruth.8 He hadn’t played that afternoon but instead served as umpire.
Another Harvard student, Irvin Hartman Jr., followed Bobby out of the yard and down Ellis. Hartman was in no mood to rush; he lingered along the sidewalk, stopping now and then to enjoy the weather. But he could see his schoolmate walking a half block ahead of him.9 Bobby wore a pair of wool knickers; knee-length brown stockings with argyle tops; a shirt with his school tie; a tan jacket with a black-and-gold class pin on the lapel; and a cap. Since the weather had cleared, Bobby had taken off his overcoat, and had it draped over his arm.10
Out of the corner of his eye, Irvin noticed a car driving down Ellis, with its canvas side curtains up. It may have been gray, he later said, and maybe it had been a Winton, but he admitted that he hadn’t paid too much attention to it. Instead, he began eyeing the broad lawns sweeping up to the large houses along the avenue. The borders were planted with shrubs and beds of flowers. “My teacher had told us to look at tulips,” Irvin remembered, “and I saw a big red bunch of them.” He paused midway between 47th and 48th Streets. “I looked just about a minute,” he said. When he raised his head, Irvin saw that the car he had spotted earlier “was coming lickety split up Ellis going north. It whizzed past me.” He gazed down the avenue. Bobby Franks was no longer on the sidewalk ahead of him. In an instant he had simply disappeared.11
* * *
IN A CITY AWASH WITH honking automobiles, pushing crowds, and rumbling trains, the Chicago neighborhood of Kenwood was an oasis of serenity. Nature buffered it from urban sprawl: Washington Park to the west, Lake Michigan to the east, and the leafy campus of the University of Chicago and Jackson Park to the south. The large lots and quiet streets spoke of exclusivity and refinement. Ornate Italianate, Romanesque, and Elizabethan mansions of the city’s wealthiest and most important Jewish families—the Adlers, the Sulzbergers, and the Rosenwalds—marched proudly along its avenues. Here, said a resident, all was “quiet and peaceful.”12 But the great houses, as Kenwood was soon to learn, were no guarantee of security. Evil could lurk anywhere, even in this privileged enclave.
Bobby Franks lived in one of these mansions, a boxy affair at 5052 Ellis Avenue. His father, Jacob, had bought the corner lot from Richard Loeb’s father Albert in 1910: Richard’s mother, Anna, and Bobby’s mother, Flora, were first cousins, and at the time the Loebs were building their own mansion just across the avenue. Designed by architect Henry Newhouse, the Franks house, set atop a terrace adorned with lilac bushes, looked like the bastard offspring of an affair between an Italian contessa and Frank Lloyd Wright: Mediterranean arches and a clay tile roof jumbled together with Prairie-style windows and glassed-in sleeping porches.13 The yellow brick house had cost a small fortune but, with a rumored worth of some $4 million, Jacob Franks could afford the extravagance.14
Born in London, Jacob Franks had come to America with his parents in 1857 at the age of two. At nineteen he founded a pawnshop, the Franks Collateral Loan Bank, with his widowed mother and won a reputation for generous lending. He soon left this venture behind—he’d later bristle at descriptions of his pawnshop days, complaining, “I only did that for two years.” In 1901 he moved on to become president of the Rockford Watch Company and began buying up real estate in the city. This eventually allowed him to retire from daily business and focus on his portfolio of holdings.15
A quiet, reserved, serious-faced man, Jacob Franks never seemed to have made any enemies; the closest he had come to scandal was in 1903, when a woman sued him for breach of promise, insisting that he had backed out of marrying her. The suit, which he seems to have regarded as little more than blackmail, was eventually dismissed. But not until he was fifty, in 1906, did Jacob finally marry. His bride, Flora Greisheimer, was not only twenty years his junior but she had also divorced her first husband, a druggist named William Tuteur, charging him with adultery.16
Both Jacob and Flora were born Jewish, but shortly after marriage they converted to become Christian Scientists. This made them an anomaly in the Kenwood community, and despite their backgrounds they were never entirely welcomed by the neighborhood’s Jewish elite. Perhaps there was a certain snobbery at work: a former pawnbroker didn’t quite fit the refined image most Kenwood residents had of themselves.17
Jacob and Flora had three children: Josephine, born in 1906; Jack, born in 1908; and Bobby, born on September 19, 1909. As the youngest Bobby was treasured and indulged. He was especially close to his older brother Jack, who remembered the boy he called “Buddy” as someone with “a lot of fun in him, always ready to laugh and kid you along. He couldn’t stay mad to save his life.”18
The Franks sent Bobby to the nearby Harvard School on Ellis Avenue. From the beginning, the preparatory institution had attracted the sons of Chicago’s wealthiest families. Bobby was popular at Harvard: his headmaster, Charles Pence, called him “one of our most brilliant students.”19 Intelligent and not shy about expressing his opinions, Bobby sometimes seemed smug. A few of his teachers complained that he was “too self-satisfied to make a good student,” and that he harbored some “unpleasant characteristics.”20
But Bobby also had a reputation as a thoughtful, considerate boy. A few weeks earlier, as a member of the school’s debate club, he’d argued against capital punishment. Thinking that there was a link between mental illness and criminal behavior, he declared that it was wrong “to take a man, weak and mentally depraved, and coldly deprive him of his life.”21 Instead, he suggested “would it not better serve the community to put mentally weak criminals into institutions where, removed from society, they would no longer be a menace? Punishment should be reformative, never vindictive.”22
