For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (2 page)

“Secure before noon today $10,000. This money must be composed entirely of old bills of the following denominations: $2,000 in $20 bills, $8,000 in $50 bills. The money must be old. Any attempt to include new or marked bills will render the entire venture futile. The money should be placed in a large cigar box…and wrapped in white paper. The wrapping paper should be sealed…with sealing wax.

“Have the money thus prepared as directed above and remain home after one o’clock P.M. See that the telephone is not in use. You will receive a future communication instructing you as to your future course.

“As a final word of warning, this is a strictly commercial proposition, and we are prepared to put our threats into execution should we have reasonable ground to believe that you have committed an infraction of the above instructions. However, should you carefully follow out our instructions to the letter, we can assure you that your son will be safely returned to you within six hours of our receipt of the money.”
¹⁴

The family felt a tremendous sense of relief. Here was assurance that Bobby was still alive. Merely for the payment of a trivial sum, a bagatelle, they would soon have Bobby back, safely home. Samuel Ettelson was sanguine—this was a professional kidnapping gang, no doubt about it; the boy was not, as he had feared, the victim of a child molester. There was now no apprehension that Bobby would end up dead.

S
EVERAL MILES AWAY,
T
ONY
M
INKE,
a recent immigrant from Poland who worked as a pump man for the American Maize Company, walked along a path that ran parallel to the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks near Wolf Lake. Few people ever ventured out to this remote part of Cook County. Farsighted action by the state legislature a decade earlier had led to the creation of the Forest Preserve district southeast of Chicago as an area of natural beauty, and by 1924 more than 20,000 acres of wetlands and marshes had been permanently set aside. It was an ornithologist’s paradise—the thick brush and low trees provided a safe haven for migratory wading birds, and during the spring and fall it was possible to spot such exotica as the yellow-crowned night heron and the snowy egret. Pawpaw trees, shingle oaks, spicebush, sycamores, and hawthorn trees were everywhere; wild prairie roses ran alongside the few paths through the wilderness; and occasionally one might discover dewberry and raspberry patches in the meadowland openings. The Forest Preserve was a magical spot, yet its distance from the city and a lack of public transportation rendered it inaccessible to most Chicagoans. Occasionally one might see a hunter, and on the weekends schoolboys would come out with field glasses to observe the migrating birds passing overhead, but otherwise the Forest Preserve remained inviolate.

Tony Minke lived nearby, on the edge of the Forest Preserve, but he did not usually take this route home. That morning, Thursday, 22 May, he was coming from the factory where he had worked the night shift. Now he was on his way to Hegewisch to pick up his watch from a repair shop before returning home to sleep. The sun was at his back, and as he passed a large ditch on his left, he looked down momentarily. The sun’s rays shone into the ditch, and Minke looked more closely: was that a foot poking out of the drainage pipe? Minke stopped and looked closer—he peered into the pipe. Inside, he could see a child’s body, naked and lying face downward in a foot of muddy water.
¹⁵

In the distance, Minke could see four men, railroad workers, on a handcar traveling slowly along the tracks in his direction. He climbed the embankment and, as the handcar approached, he signaled to it to halt. The handcar came to a gradual stop. As the workmen climbed down, Minke walked a few steps toward them, pointing back at the ditch. “Look,” he exclaimed, “there is something in the pipe, there is a pair of feet sticking out.”
¹⁶

As the men pulled the body out of the pipe and turned it on its back, Minke could see immediately that the boy had been killed: there were two large wounds on the forehead—deep gashes, each about an inch long—and toward the back of the head he could see large bruises and swelling. And those marks on the boy’s back? What had caused those scratches running down the back all the way from the shoulders to the buttocks? But the most peculiar aspect was the appearance of the face—there were distinctive copper-colored stains around the mouth and chin; and the genitals also—they were stained with the same color.
¹⁷

As his fellow workers were carrying the body to a second handcar on the tracks, Paul Korff, a signal repairman for the railroad, glanced over the scene. He wondered if any of the boy’s clothes were lying around; if so, they should gather them up and take them along. Korff could see nothing—no shirt or trousers, or even shoes and socks—but he did find a pair of eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames, lying on the embankment, just a few feet from the culvert. Perhaps they belonged to the boy; Korff put them in his pocket and joined his comrades waiting by the handcars.
¹⁸

At around ten o’clock that morning, Anton Shapino, the sergeant on duty at the Hegewisch police station, took charge of the body. Paul Korff had handed him the tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and Shapino, assuming that they belonged to the boy, placed them on the child’s forehead. Later that morning, at the morgue at 13300 South Houston Avenue, the undertaker, Stanley Olejniczak, laid the body out; as he did so, he noticed the unusual discoloration of the boy’s face and genitals and the bruises and cuts on the head—someone had obviously beaten the child violently.
¹⁹

J
ACOB
F
RANKS WAS LOOKING FORWARD
to seeing his son again. He had spent that morning in the Loop, the city’s business district, obtaining $10,000 ransom from his bank. The teller was surprised at the request for “all old, worn bills” but said nothing; it was not his place to question such a customer as Franks.
²⁰

Back at Ellis Avenue the family waited. They expected the kidnappers to call sometime after one o’clock, but time dragged on—two o’clock passed and still there was no call. Jacob Franks continued sitting in his armchair staring out of the window onto Ellis Avenue; his wife sat by his side, quietly crying.
²¹

Samuel Ettelson stayed in the library answering calls and talking with visitors. Ettelson was annoyed that the press had learned of the kidnapping—but it was perhaps his own fault. After Ettelson had asked the phone company to put a trace on incoming calls the previous evening, the family had discovered that the company’s telephone operators had been gossiping about the tracing of calls. No doubt someone had alerted the press to Bobby’s disappearance.

Even now, there was a reporter from the
Chicago Daily News
, James Mulroy, badgering him about the body of a boy found earlier that morning, out near the Indiana state line near the Forest Preserve. Of course, this was not Bobby—Mulroy had said that the boy was found wearing eyeglasses and Bobby had never worn eyeglasses in his life—but perhaps someone from the family should go down to the morgue and ensure that it was not Bobby lying on the undertaker’s slab. Ettelson turned to Edwin Greshan, the brother of Flora Franks and Bobby’s uncle: would he mind driving to South Houston Avenue with the reporter?
²²

2.
THE DRAINAGE CULVERT.
Tony Minke, a workman for the American Maize Company, discovered the body of a naked boy in this drainage culvert on Thursday, 22 May 1924.

And if, by some chance, Ettelson continued, it was Bobby at the undertaker’s, he should say only one word—“Yes”—over the phone, and nothing more. There was a telephone extension in the living room; Ettelson did not want Flora Franks to overhear the news of her son’s death.

Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. Ettelson picked up the receiver. He recognized Greshan’s voice. Only one word now mattered—“Yes.” The phone clicked off at the other end and Ettelson walked deliberately to the living room.

Flora had left the room but Jacob was still sitting in his armchair, gazing out of the window. He looked exhausted, pale and tired and crumpled; his right hand twitched and fidgeted aimlessly with a loose thread in the arm of the chair.

Ettelson leaned over to speak softly into Jacob’s ear: “It looks pretty bad, Jake. It looks to me as if the worst has happened.”

Jacob Franks glanced up into his friend’s eyes: “What do you mean?”

“That your boy is dead.”
²³

At that moment the phone rang. Ettelson picked up the extension:

“Hello?”

“Hello…. Is Mr. Franks in?”

“Who wants him?”

“Mr. Johnson wants him.”

“Who is that?”

“George Johnson.”

“Just a minute.”

As he passed the receiver to Jacob Franks, Ettelson whispered that it was the kidnapper, but Jacob was still in a daze. He was stunned at the unexpected news of his son’s death. How could he tell Flora that Bobby was dead? She was already in shock at her son’s disappearance; his death would break her heart.

“Mr. Franks?”

“Yes?”

“This is George Johnson speaking…. There will be a yellow cab at your door in ten minutes…. Get into it and proceed immediately to the drug store at 1465 East 63rd Street.”

“Couldn’t I have a little more time?”

“No, sir, you can’t have any more time; you must go immediately.”
²⁴

What was this? Bobby was dead—but the kidnapper still expected to get the ransom money? Perhaps, Ettelson thought, Edwin Greshan had misidentified the body in the morgue and Bobby was still alive.

And, look, there at the front gate, there was a yellow cab pulling up at the curb. What should they do? If Jacob Franks got into the cab, could they still save Bobby’s life? Or would that also put Jacob in danger?

The cab was waiting in the street, its engine running. Ettelson was struggling with the possibilities. Jacob Franks was exhausted—he had gone more than thirty-six hours with very little sleep. And he was flustered and confused, shocked and sad; so perhaps it is not surprising that, by the time Ettelson turned back to speak to him, Franks had forgotten the address of the drugstore—he remembered only that it was on 63rd Street.

Samuel Ettelson pleaded with Jacob to recall the location of the drugstore. Had the kidnapper identified it by name? Was there any other detail that Jacob could remember?

No. Jacob struggled to remember, but it had gone. Ettelson paid off the cabdriver and stood silently on the sidewalk, watching the cab drive down Ellis Avenue; eventually it disappeared and Ettelson sensed that their last chance to rescue Bobby had disappeared with it.
²⁵

T
HE HUNT WAS NOW ON
for the killers. Morgan Collins, chief of the Chicago police department, promised that he would commit all his resources to tracking down the murderers. Collins undoubtedly exaggerated when he described the killing as “one of the most brutal murders with which we have had to deal. Never before have we come in contact with such cold-blooded and willful taking of life.” His exaggeration was for effect; Collins was a political appointee, selected the previous year by Chicago’s Democratic mayor, William Dever, with a mandate to enforce prohibition. Collins could not possibly, in a city such as Chicago, end the liquor trade—better to divert attention to a crime more tractable. “The children of our schools must be protected against the possibility of any such crime as this…. We intend to hunt down the slayers if it takes every man in the police department to do it. I have assigned some of our best men to the job and told them that I would supply every aid necessary. They can have as many men as they want.”
²⁶

Fortunately, Collins already had his eye on a group of likely suspects: the instructors at the Harvard School. In the early hours of the morning, around three o’clock on Friday, 23 May, the police began rounding up the Harvard teachers. Walter Wilson, the instructor of mathematics; Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher; and Richard Williams, the athletics coach, were dragged out of bed and taken to the Wabash Avenue station. Within the next two days, the police brought in Fred Alwood, the chemistry teacher; George Vaubel, the physical education instructor; Charles Pence, the school principal; and Edna Plata, the French teacher.
²⁷

The teachers were suspects because they had access to the boy; because they knew that Jacob Franks was wealthy and able to afford a $10,000 ransom; and, tellingly, because the ransom note was flawless. The letter contained few grammatical errors and no typographical mistakes; only an educated person could have composed it. Hugh Sutton, an expert with the Royal Typewriter Company, thought that the kidnappers had used an Underwood portable typewriter, probably less than three years old; the typist had used two fingers to compose the letter. “The person who wrote this letter,” Sutton concluded, “never had learned the touch system…. The touch system strikes the keys pretty evenly, with an even pressure on the keys. The man who wrote this was…a novice at typing…. Some of the letters were punched so hard they were almost driven through the paper, while others were struck lightly or uncertainly.” The kidnapper had written Jacob Franks’s address on the envelope in block letters; handwriting experts determined that the letters displayed a uniform slant, and a regular spacing and character; it was obviously the penmanship of a capable writer.
²⁸