For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (29 page)

The prosecution, Darrow sneered, had failed to find even one scrap of evidence to convict his client. “There never was,” he shouted, with ludicrous exaggeration, “a more infamous conspiracy against the liberties of men. Every law distorted, every fact magnified and lied about.” Darrow turned to appeal to the jury, holding his hands palms upward, his eyes fixed on the twelve men sitting silently before him. “Gentlemen, they have given you quite a job. Loeb was on record and he had to stick to his story. Therefore we could show it a lie…. I have been long in the courts and have never heard such a baseless case brought against any citizen. If it were not a tragedy it would be a joke. What if Lundin did sell insurance and windows? You might as well indict Marshall Field & Co. for selling to the school board.”
⁵⁷

It was a shameless performance, equal parts bombast and cynicism, by a demagogue who had long ago abandoned the principles that, in Darrow’s youth, had earned him a progressive reputation. Darrow was a mesmerizing speaker who could cast a spell over any jury…but only if the jury—captivated by the cadence and inflection of his voice—could be lulled into forgetting the facts. Fred Lundin was a political fixer, a backroom operator, who had self-consciously organized the corruption of Chicago politics to a degree unequaled in the history of the city, but in Darrow’s telling, he was one part saint, one part sage: “I have met many kinds of men and I will guarantee there is not one in 100,000 with his intelligence…his courage, independence, and truthfulness. He might be able to lie. I think he is too proud.”

It was in vain that the prosecuting attorney, Hobart Young, in his summation, defended Jacob Loeb as “a man of good standing in this community” and showed again that gouging and price-fixing had become the normative behavior of the Board of Education. The jury deliberated for four and a half hours and acquitted Lundin and his codefendants on all charges.
⁵⁸

Lundin’s acquittal was a consequence more of Clarence Darrow’s guile than of an absence of evidence, according to an editorial in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. “The defense,” wrote the editor, “was in the hands of the shrewdest criminal lawyers of the Chicago bar…. As a lawyers’ battle, it suggested a fight between Fatty Arbuckle and Jack Dempsey.” The Thompson-Lundin ring would revive itself, the newspapers predicted, and there would be renewed bloodletting among the Republican Party factions.
⁵⁹

Robert Crowe shared the general disappointment that Fred Lundin had escaped. But Crowe still held the lead position among the Republicans. His faction was unified and cohesive and wielded more influence than any other group within the City Council. His own position also was secure. He was confident of reelection in November 1924. And the mayoral elections were still almost four years in the future; Crowe expected to be a candidate in 1927 and saw no reason why he should not win.

PART THREE

THE COURTROOM

10 THE INDICTMENT

M
ONDAY,
2 J
UNE
1924–T
HURSDAY,
12 J
UNE
1924

Of course, dear Mompsie and Popsie, this thing is all too terrible. I have thought and thought about it, and even now I do not seem to be able to understand it. I just cannot seem to figure out how it all came about. Of one thing I am certain tho—and that is that I have no one to blame but myself…. I am afraid that you two may try and put the blame upon your own shoulders, and I
know
that I alone am to blame. I never was frank with you—Mompsie and Popsie dear—and had you suspected anything and came and talked to me I would undoubtedly have denied everything and gone on just the same….

I am on a floor of the jail confined entirely to young fellows under twenty years of age…. My first cell mate was a clean looking young fellow, who was exceedingly nice to me and helped very materially to make things easier. My present ‘room-mate’ is also a very nice chap—somewhat older than I and with a good high school education. I have managed to get along fine with all the fellows and was, in fact, made captain of the seventh floor ball-team….

The jail authorities have been awfully nice about everything and I seem to get along with all of them splendidly. Upon Mr. Darrow’s advice we have not asked for any special privileges, but a number of them have of their own accord gone out of the way to make things easier for me.

Furthermore several of the girls have been awfully nice about visiting me at the jail. Helen, altho her Father did not want her to take the chance of newspaper publicity by coming down here, wrote me a wonderful letter. Buddy Ringer and a couple of the other boys have sent nice messages thru the girls or thru one of the newspaper reporters that I know.

So you see, Mompsie and Popsie dear, that it is not at all hard for me. I intend to be very brave all the way thru and I want you both to know that I will do anything in my power to try and rectify a little the awful thing that I have done. You, dear ones, are always in my thoughts…. I shall write again.

Loads of love to Erny, Adele, Jane and Tommy and especially to you two.”
¹

Richard Loeb, 28 July 1924

C
LARENCE
D
ARROW SEEMED ONE OF
the least impressive men that Nathan Leopold had ever met. Darrow sat across from him, in the small windowless room—the lawyers’ cage, they called it—where prisoners in the Cook County jail conferred with their attorneys. The air in the cell was stuffy and humid, and Nathan noticed that Darrow was wearing a light seersucker jacket—just about the only kind of jacket one could comfortably wear on such a blisteringly hot day—but it was creased and wrinkled, almost, Nathan thought to himself, as if Darrow had spent the previous night sleeping in it.
²

Darrow’s tie was askew—it had been done up carelessly and it rested awkwardly around his collar. His shirt had not been ironed that morning, and Nathan could see, as he looked more closely, some yellow stains on the front. Were they, Nathan speculated, egg stains left over from Darrow’s breakfast? And finally, a pair of red suspenders stretched across Darrow’s ample stomach and attached themselves to a pair of baggy gray trousers.

Darrow’s face was lined and tired, and a shock of lustreless, mousy, iron-gray hair kept falling over his right eye; occasionally he would brush it back. There was an atmosphere of resignation in Darrow’s weather-beaten face, as though Nathan’s case were hopeless, doomed before it had even begun.

Nathan was shocked that his father had assigned the defense to such an obvious incompetent. He had heard of Darrow only within the past twenty-four hours and knew only that Darrow had a reputation as a capable, clever lawyer; yet here Darrow sat, looking more like a country bumpkin, an innocent hayseed, than a city lawyer. What could this scarecrow know of the law?
³

Darrow talked in a quiet, dry voice—there was nothing in his words that suggested urgency. He cautioned Nathan not to say anything further to the state’s attorney—both boys had already said a great deal, but their case was not yet entirely hopeless.

The police had now linked Nathan and Richard to other crimes on the South Side. It was important, Darrow warned, to tell the state’s attorney nothing which would give Crowe evidence that they had, in fact, committed those crimes.

A twenty-one-year-old cabdriver, Charles Ream, had identified Nathan and Richard as the two men who had kidnapped him one night the previous November at the intersection of 55th Street and Dorchester Avenue as he made his way home after work. One assailant, Ream charged, had held him at gunpoint while the other had rendered him unconscious with a rag soaked in ether. Ream had awoken four hours later. His kidnappers had castrated him and left him, bruised and bloody, on industrial wasteland southeast of Chicago, near 109th Street, not far from the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and less than one mile from the culvert where Nathan and Richard would later hide the body of Bobby Franks.
⁴

The police could also connect Nathan and Richard to the killing of Freeman Tracy, a twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Chicago. On 25 November 1923 Tracy had left a dance late in the evening to walk home alone. Several hours later, shortly before three o’clock in the morning, a passerby had discovered his body lying near the intersection of 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, close to the university. There had been no robbery; his wallet was untouched. But his assailants had killed Tracy with a single gunshot to the head, and the steel-jacketed bullet, according to the police, matched the automatic revolver found in Nathan’s bedroom.
⁵

18.
WAITING FOR HABEAS CORPUS.
On Monday, 2 June, Clarence Darrow presented a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. This photograph, taken that morning, shows the attorneys and relatives of the defendants waiting for the judge’s decision. Seated in front (from left) are Michael Leopold (brother), Benjamin Bachrach (attorney), Nathan Leopold Sr. (father), Jacob Loeb (uncle), and Clarence Darrow.

There was also the abduction of Louise Hohley, a forty-five-year-old housewife and mother of three. Hohley had identified Nathan and Richard as the two men who had kidnapped her one evening in February in front of the Riviera Theater on Lawrence Avenue. Hohley claimed that they had beaten her and, after raping her, had driven her to the outskirts of the city and thrown her from their car.
⁶

Finally, there was the mysterious disappearance, on 7 April 1924, of Melvin Wolf, a young man who had vanished after leaving his uncle’s house at 4553 Ellis Avenue to mail a letter. Was it a coincidence that Wolf had last been seen in Kenwood, less than three blocks from the spot where Nathan and Richard would kidnap Bobby Franks?

On 8 May, one month after the disappearance of Wolf, the police had found his badly decomposed body floating in Lake Michigan. Could Wolf’s death have been a suicide? But Wolf had been a happy, carefree young man, at least according to family members, and he had shown no signs of depression or melancholy. Had kidnapping and murder resulted in his death? Were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb the culprits in this case also?
⁷

C
LARENCE
D
ARROW WAS SKEPTICAL ABOUT
Nathan and Richard’s involvement in the kidnapping of Louise Hohley. Both boys strenuously denied the accusation, and even the state’s attorney doubted Hohley’s truthfulness; it remained to be proved that Nathan and Richard were connected with the castration of Charles Ream and the deaths of Freeman Tracy and Melvin Wolf.
⁸

In any case, Darrow was too preoccupied with winning Nathan and Richard their constitutional rights. His clients, he protested to the chief justice of the Criminal Court, had been in the custody of the state’s attorney for more than three days and only now, on the morning of Monday, 2 June, had they obtained access to legal counsel. He had presented petitions for writs of habeas corpus earlier that morning asking that Robert Crowe relinquish the prisoners and remand them to the custody of the sheriff.

C
LARENCE
D
ARROW, REPRESENTING THE
L
OEB
family, and Benjamin Bachrach, the attorney for the Leopold family, stood in front of the chief justice, John Caverly. They listened in silence as Robert Crowe spoke to the judge, urging that he, Crowe, be allowed to keep Leopold and Loeb in his custody, at least until after the inquest into Bobby Franks’s death.

“That’s a most extraordinary request,” Darrow exploded angrily.

“What an astonishing proposition!” he continued. “I never heard the like of it in court before. These boys are minors and under the constitution entitled to more than ordinary protection from the court…”

“A cold-blooded, vicious murder,” Crowe interrupted, almost shouting at the defense attorney, “and these boys have confessed to it.”

“It matters not how cold-blooded the murder was,” Darrow shouted back, “citizens have rights. There is but one place for them to be held, in the county jail, in the custody of the sheriff. That question is not debatable and the matter of an indictment has nothing to do with it.”
⁹

John Caverly agreed. He would place Leopold and Loeb in custody of the sheriff. Both the defense attorneys and the prosecution would have access to the boys and would be able to question them further before the start of the trial.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, T
UESDAY,
3 June, John Caverly impaneled the twenty-three members—all men—of the Cook County grand jury. LeRoy Fairbank, an assistant state’s attorney, had prepared two indictments: one for murder and the second for kidnapping for ransom.

Both indictments carried the death penalty in Illinois.
¹⁰

19.
LEOPOLD AND LOEB ENTER COOK COUNTY JAIL.
After Clarence Darrow presented a writ of habeas corpus, Leopold and Loeb were put in the custody of the sheriff of Cook County and transferred to the Cook County jail. From left: Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, David Edfeldt (deputy sheriff), and Hans Thompson (assistant jailer).

Grand jury proceedings were customarily brief, especially in a case such as this, where the corpus delicti—the facts necessary to establish the commission of a crime—were not in dispute. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had confessed and there was a mass of evidence to affirm their statements—the grand jury would surely not need long to decide that the evidence warranted formal charges against the prisoners.

But Crowe intended to use the grand jury proceedings as a record of the evidence. The Leopold and Loeb families had enormous resources—many millions of dollars—and perhaps they would use their money to postpone and prolong the trial indefinitely. Witnesses might change their minds or, if the trial were to stretch on for several months, might even die. The families of the prisoners might conceivably use their money to fix the result and to bribe witnesses to change their testimony.
¹¹

Crowe would call the witnesses now. They would testify to the grand jury, and if any witnesses subsequently changed their testimony, Crowe announced, he would prosecute them for perjury.
¹²