For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (27 page)

But before he could think about running for mayor, Crowe would first have to demonstrate his commitment to fighting crime. Chicago was one of the most lawless cities in the nation, and few agencies were more important in the war against the criminals than the office of the state’s attorney. It was now Robert Crowe’s responsibility not only to put the bootleggers and racketeers out of business but also to reduce the numbers of murders, burglaries, and assaults that plagued the city. In this regard, Crowe, as always, was fortunate, for just a few days after assuming office, he would make a decision that would ensure the conviction of an infamous murderer and raise his personal popularity to new heights.

O
N THE EVENING OF
M
ONDAY,
21 June 1920, Carl and Ruth Wanderer strolled home after seeing the movie
The Sea Wolf
. They had been childhood sweethearts: Ruth Johnson had been only sixteen when she had first met Carl in 1915 at a Sunday service at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. During World War I, Carl had served as a first lieutenant in the Seventeenth Machine Gun Battalion in the Allied Expeditionary Force in France. After Carl’s return to Chicago at the war’s end, he and Ruth were married on 1 October 1919.

They made a perfect match. Ruth was an attractive woman—men always tried to flirt with her, but she remained faithful to Carl while he was in Europe. For his part, Carl seemed to be the man every mother would want as a son-in-law. He never smoked, or drank, or swore; he attended church regularly; and he, too, ignored opportunities to flirt, claiming that Ruth “was the only girl I ever kissed.”
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Ruth was in a happy mood that night. She was expecting her first child in two months. She glanced at her husband fondly as they walked home together—Ruth was glad that Carl had settled down after returning to Chicago. He had found work as a butcher in his father’s shop, and he, too, seemed content.

As they approached the two-story apartment building at 4732 North Campbell Avenue, Ruth suddenly sensed a man walking behind them. She glanced backward—he seemed very close, just three yards away. He was a young, good-looking man, but dressed in old, dirty clothes, untidy and unkempt, as though he had been sleeping rough, and now he was walking up the path toward their building. Ruth glanced at her husband, but Carl seemed unconcerned. She hurried to open the front door of the building and step inside the darkened foyer.

The first bullet caught Ruth in the thigh as she stepped across the vestibule—she felt the burning sensation as it hit her. The second bullet passed through her body on the left side. Ruth remained conscious…more shots came from someone’s gun…now her husband was kneeling beside her on the blue tiles of the vestibule floor…Carl was holding her hand. Her life was leaving her body but she could still see her husband kneeling above her, looking into her eyes.
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“Carl, I’m shot.” Ruth knew already that the second bullet had passed through her child. “…The baby…Carl, my baby is dead.”
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Her husband had shot and killed the tramp. Now, as he tenderly stroked her hair, Carl murmured words of consolation to his dying wife: “I’ve got him, sweetheart…I got him. He won’t hurt you anymore.”
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Ruth’s mother, Eugenia, lived in their apartment; Ruth whispered to her husband to call Eugenia.

It was too late. Ruth’s eyes closed. Her blood spread slowly out across the floor, forming a dark-red pool around her body.

By the time John Nape, the first policeman on the scene, arrived, a small crowd of neighbors had gathered outside the hallway. The sergeant pushed his way forward into the vestibule. A woman’s body lay close to the second doorway—Nape assumed she was the young wife. A few feet away, a tramp lay dead, his shabby brown jacket and cheap cotton trousers stained with blood. Two revolvers lay side by side in the center of the vestibule.
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Carl Wanderer explained how the tramp had tried to rob them. His wife had been on the point of opening the inner door when the man had fired two bullets into her, killing her almost instantly. Carl had pulled out his own gun, a forty-five-caliber army revolver, and had gunned down the assailant.

It seemed a straightforward killing, one of many such murders in Chicago that year.

But the police were puzzled that the tramp would have killed Ruth Wanderer without waiting to rob her. Ruth had not resisted or fought back, according to her husband. It was remarkable also, the detectives realized, that although ten shots had been fired in the narrow hallway, Carl Wanderer had emerged unscathed—he had gunned down his assailant but had walked away from the gunfight without a scratch.

The case soon became even more mysterious.

Ruth Wanderer had withdrawn $1,500 from her savings account a few days before she died. And when the police examined the provenance of the revolver supposedly used by the tramp to shoot Ruth, they discovered that they could trace it back to…Carl Wanderer!
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O
N
F
RIDAY
, 9 J
ULY
1920, Carl Wanderer confessed. He had grown bored with his wife, he explained, and he had a seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Julia Schmitt. It had seemed easy enough to get rid of his wife. He had met the tramp on the corner of Halsted and Madison streets and had promised him a job if he would follow him and his wife home that evening. When they reached the apartment building, Carl first killed his wife and then shot the tramp.
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But on the opening day of Wanderer’s trial—4 October 1920—for the murder of his wife and the unborn child, Wanderer repudiated his confession. His attorney, George Guenther, protested that the police had beaten his client in a basement dungeon until he confessed. Carl Wanderer, Guenther explained to the jury, was not guilty, by reason of insanity. Guenther presented a brilliant defense: he put several of Wanderer’s acquaintances and friends on the stand to describe Wanderer’s eccentric behavior.
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This defense worked. Some members of the jury believed Wanderer insane but worried that he would be committed to an asylum and released after a few years. Other jurors believed that Wanderer had knowingly and maliciously killed his wife and that he deserved the gallows. But no one wanted a mistrial, and so, after arguing for twenty-three hours and casting five ballots, the jurors came up with a compromise: on 29 October, they decided that Wanderer was guilty and would serve twenty-five years in prison.
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The jury’s decision provoked an uproar. With time off for good behavior, Wanderer would be a free man in less than fourteen years! The judge, Hugo Pam, could not conceal his dismay at the jury’s folly. Immediately after hearing the foreman pronounce sentence, Pam admonished the jury, “A grievous error—you call him a wife murderer and say that he shall pay with twenty-five years imprisonment. A regrettable error.”
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Jimmy O’Brien, the assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case, was outraged. O’Brien was astonished at the jurors’ ineptitude. “They found him guilty of murdering his beautiful young wife, the trusting woman who was about to become a mother. And they gave him twenty-five years…. What foolishness!…It was an asinine finding, calling for the severest censure.”
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None of the jurors would admit that he had voted for anything other than life imprisonment or the death sentence, but the damage had been done. Wanderer was jubilant at the result—“I knew they couldn’t crack me…. I knew I’d never swing”—and, as he listened to the judge discharge the jury and thank the lawyers, a gleeful smirk played across his face.
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But Wanderer’s trial had coincided with the 1920 elections. On 2 November, just four days after the jury had returned its verdict, Robert Crowe was elected the new state’s attorney for Cook County. Crowe had followed the Wanderer trial closely, and now that he was state’s attorney, he promised that, despite the jury’s decision, Wanderer would eventually swing from the gallows. “One of the first things I will do,” Crowe predicted to a reporter from the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, “will be to force Wanderer to trial a second time. The punishment meted out by the first jury is entirely unbefitting the atrocity of the crime.” The murder had been a willful act—it would be a travesty, Crowe declared, if Wanderer were to escape with a prison term.
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Carl Wanderer had received twenty-five years for the murder of his wife and unborn child. But what about the tramp? Crowe announced that he would put Wanderer on trial for the killing of the tramp.
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The defense attorney at the second trial, W. D. Bartholomew, offered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychiatrists for the defense had examined Carl Wanderer in his prison cell and diagnosed his illness as dementia praecox catatonia. William Hickson, the director of the Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court, had put the prisoner through a series of mental tests and had discovered that Wanderer had been insane since infancy. A psychologist, E. Kester Wickman, testified that Wanderer had the mental age of an eleven-year-old; and James Whitney Hall, president of the Medical Insanity Commission, told the jury that Wanderer suffered from hallucinations and was undoubtedly insane.
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But on Friday, 18 March 1921, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and fixed the punishment as death by hanging. The jury had reached its verdict after only twelve minutes. The defense attorney, Bartholomew, complained ( justifiably) that the jury had not given the evidence proper consideration.

The prosecution was delighted at the result. Robert Crowe was vindicated; his decision to put Wanderer on trial again might have backfired if Wanderer had escaped the death penalty a second time, but now Crowe was the hero of the moment. Crowe laughed and joked with reporters at the entrance to the Criminal Court Building. He puffed on a large cigar as he gave his comments to the press. “It’s a great victory,” Crowe exclaimed as he stood side by side with his assistant, Lloyd Heth. “Justice has been done and a great error has been corrected.”
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C
ROWE’S SUCCESSFUL PROSECUTION OF
W
ANDERER
was an auspicious beginning to his career as state’s attorney. Crowe, now one of Chicago’s most prominent elected officials, had the responsibility for tackling the crime wave that so troubled Chicagoans during the early 1920s: if he succeeded, he might be the next mayor of Chicago; if he failed, he would be consigned to political oblivion.

Although Chicago was not the most dangerous city in the United States (both St. Louis and New York outranked it in per capita murders and assaults), a series of gangland killings in 1920 had created a perception of the city as the epicenter of the crime wave that swept over the United States after World War I. Murder, robbery, rape, and assault seemed almost routine; and nothing better illustrated the lawlessness of the United States than comparisons between Chicago and other American cities, on the one hand, and comparable cities in Canada and Europe. Thus Chicago, which recorded 352 murders in 1921, had a murder rate approximately fourteen times greater than that of Berlin; Los Angeles, with a population one-tenth that of London, recorded a greater number of murders than were committed in London; there were more murders in New York City in a single year than in Britain and France combined. Only a few hundred miles separated Cook County from Canada; yet the discrepancy in the crime figures was startling: twice as many burglaries, four times as many robberies, and four times as many murders were committed in Chicago as in the whole of Canada.
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What could be the cause of such an avalanche of crime? Was it a consequence of economic and social conditions: of poverty, unemployment, and inadequate housing? Was a high level of crime inevitable in a society divided so sharply between the wealthy and the impoverished? Crime was a result of socioeconomic circumstances, reformers argued, and until poverty was eliminated, the crime wave would continue.

Such sentiments had significant support within American society in the 1920s, yet the opposite viewpoint, that crime was less a consequence of impersonal forces and more a matter of free agency and deliberate choice, also had widespread backing. The murderer chose to kill his or her victim; crime was the result of a conscious decision, freely undertaken, and talk of determining circumstances served only to absolve the criminal of responsibility, to undermine the rule of law, and thus to make a bad situation worse.

Those who assumed that crime was the consequence of deliberate choice, malevolence, and evil intent recommended a stricter application of the law. Punishment was failing to deter only because it was not sufficiently stringent. Too few judges sentenced murderers to death; and too few death sentences were carried out. Unscrupulous and devious lawyers exploited loopholes in state constitutions and criminal codes in order to save their clients from punishment. Delays in the courts and procedural inefficiency postponed trials for years and allowed criminals to escape punishment. The Eighteenth Amendment against the sale and manufacture of alcohol was widely disregarded, and in consequence contributed to indifference and apathy among the public toward crime and criminal behavior. The inadequacy of the police and the courts found its counterpart in the increased competence and organization of criminals. Professional criminals arranged burglary as one might organize a commercial business—they paid the police to look the other way; sent stolen goods, often ordered ahead of time, to fences in distant states; and, in the unlikely event of capture, colluded with professional fixers, including bondsmen and corrupt lawyers, to fix juries and spirit away witnesses.
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