For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (47 page)

“Your Honor,” Darrow said, speaking above the din, “I think I had better wait.”

“Is that hall filled outside there?” Caverly called out to a bailiff standing at the back of the room. “Officers,” he instructed a group of sheriffs, “clean out that hall, please and if you have not got enough men, get fifty more. Put everybody out of the building except those in the room now.”

The crowd eventually retreated down the corridor and back down the stairs to the fifth floor. Curses and shouts could still be heard, but they came more faintly now; within five minutes the scuffling outside the courtroom had ended.
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Robert Crowe’s demand for the death sentence, Darrow began, speaking in a quiet, subdued voice, was solely a consequence of the wealth and prominence of the defendants’ families. Take away the Loeb fortune; take away the Leopold fortune; take away the Franks fortune—and would anyone be interested in the case now before the court? The newspapers had devoted countless articles, many thousands of words, day after day, to the courtroom hearing—but, if the defendants had been unknown, obscure, and penniless, would anyone apart from the immediate families have cared about the murder of Bobby Franks? It had not even, Darrow continued, been a particularly bloody or violent murder, and if one were to compare it with some of the cases that had previously appeared before the Criminal Court, it would seem unremarkable.

But the wealth of the defendants, together with the random nature of the killing and the absence of any motive for the crime, had transformed the case into one of the most sensational crimes in the history of Chicago. And, of course, Darrow remarked, with bitterness in his voice, the state’s attorney had done everything possible to elevate the notoriety of the murder, portraying it, falsely, as the worst such act in the history of Illinois. “I have heard”—Darrow’s voice was sharper now, less subdued—“nothing but the cry for blood. I have heard raised from the office of the State’s Attorney nothing but the breath of hate.” In any other case, the prosecution would have been content with a life sentence for a guilty plea from two teenagers; but the wealth of the families had barred them from the customary consideration that Robert Crowe would normally have extended.
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Both Nathan and Richard had pleaded guilty—yet Crowe demanded the death penalty! Nathan and Richard had been minors, nineteen and eighteen years old, respectively, when they killed Bobby Franks—yet Crowe demanded the death penalty! Did the court realize, Darrow asked Caverly, that it would be an unprecedented act to execute defendants so young on a guilty plea?

Darrow stepped across to the defense table and picked up a single sheet of paper containing a typewritten list of executions in Cook County. There had been ninety hangings in the history of Chicago, he continued; only three of those ninety persons had been hanged on a guilty plea; and none of those three had been younger than age twenty-nine. Julius Mannow, thirty years old, had pleaded guilty to murder with robbery and was hanged in 1895; Daniel McCarthy, twenty-nine years old, was executed on a guilty plea in 1897; and Thomas Fitzgerald, forty-one, the murderer of six-year-old Janet Wilkinson, had received the death sentence on a plea of guilty in 1919.
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There was no precedent, Darrow exclaimed, for Crowe’s demand that the court hang two defendants who had not yet reached their majority. Capital punishment on a guilty plea—just three cases in the history of Cook County!—was so infrequent that its imposition seemed unjust and unwarranted. Moreover, recent decisions of the Criminal Court made the death penalty appear even more archaic. Since 1914, 350 people had pleaded guilty to murder in Cook County, but only one, Thomas Fitzgerald, had received the death penalty. And it was no coincidence, Darrow remarked, pointing directly at the state’s attorney, that Robert Crowe had been the judge who sentenced Fitzgerald to death.
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There was no justification, according to precedent, for the death penalty in the case before the court; it would be an unprecedented act to hang Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Nor, continued Darrow, was there even any justification in the circumstances of the act. The murder had neither motive nor purpose; it had been a senseless, random action that could be explained only on the basis of mental illness. The prosecution had hinted that the boys had killed Bobby for the ransom, to pay off their gambling debts, but this seemed too far-fetched to contemplate seriously for more than a moment. Both Nathan and Richard had as much money as they could possibly desire; each boy received a generous allowance from his father. The state, moreover, had provided scant evidence that either Nathan or Richard had gambled for high stakes. There had been one witness—one witness!—who had testified that he had seen Nathan and Richard play cards but the amount wagered had been derisory, a total of ninety dollars. Crowe was desperate, no doubt, to find a motive for the killing, but he was clutching at a weak reed if he hoped to establish the ransom as a sufficient motive for the murder.
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The state’s attorney had claimed that this was the worst murder in the history of Illinois. But where was the motive? The killing had been “a senseless, useless, purposeless, motiveless act,” Darrow challenged. “There was absolutely no purpose in it all, no reason in it all, and no motive in it all…. What does the State say about it? In order to make this the most cruel thing that ever happened, of course they must have a motive. And what, do they say, was the motive?…‘The motive was to get ten thousand dollars’ say they. These two boys, neither one of whom needed a cent, scions of wealthy people, killed this little inoffensive boy to get ten thousand dollars.” But Richard Loeb had $3,000 in his bank account and had not even bothered to collect the interest on three Liberty bonds that he owned. Nathan Leopold had been about to go on a European vacation that summer, a vacation paid for by his father. Why, Darrow asked, was there any need for them to risk their freedom, and even their lives, in a scheme to kidnap a boy for ransom? “Your Honor,” Darrow appealed to the bench, holding out his hands before him, as though in supplication, “I would be ashamed to talk about this except that in all seriousness—all apparent seriousness—they are asking to kill these two boys on the strength of this flimsy foolishness.”
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It was futile, Darrow exclaimed, to seek a rational motive for so bizarre a crime. The crime was inexplicable unless one assumed that both Nathan and Richard were mentally ill. And each boy’s mental condition was a consequence of the forces that had determined him. “Science has been at work,” Darrow stated, with his customary self-assurance; “humanity has been at work, scholarship has been at work and intelligent people know that every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him. He is made as he is and he is the sport of all that goes around as applied to him…. Under the same stress and storm, you might act one way and I might act another.”

It was a comforting assumption, but it remained just that—at least in Darrow’s account. Heredity and environment had shaped each boy’s conduct, but how, exactly? Darrow claimed, once again, an emotional deficiency in the boys’ reactions to the murder—all the psychiatrists had remarked the contrast between each boy’s advanced intellect and his stunted emotional capacity. But beyond some vague statements on “the emotional life…the nerves, the muscles, the endocrine glands, the vegetative system,” Darrow was unable to give any more complete account.
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Darrow’s reluctance, in his closing speech, to use the testimony of his scientific experts was nothing less than an admission of failure. He could not rely on the scientific evidence, because the evidence did not demonstrate that either boy had acted under compulsion in committing the murder. William White’s psychoanalysis, William Healy’s intelligence tests, and Harold Hulbert’s endocrinology—none of it, either separately or in combination, was sufficient to explain the murder; and Darrow, compelled to abandon the scientific evidence, had only his homespun philosophy of extreme determinism to fall back on. “I know,” Darrow continued, speaking of Richard Loeb, “that one of two things happened to this boy; that this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor, or that it came through his education and his training after he was born. I do not know what remote ancestors may have sent down the seed that corrupted him, and I do not know through how many ancestors it may have passed until it reached Dickie Loeb. All I know is, it is true, and there is not a biologist in the world who will not say I am right.”
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But if Richard’s mental condition was a consequence of the hereditary and environmental forces that had determined him, then where could one fix responsibility? Richard, in Darrow’s account, was a plaything of impersonal forces, some stretching back over many generations; and in this rendering, Richard bore no responsibility for his actions. But if one extended the argument, was not everyone shaped by such forces? Therefore, was anyone ever responsible? There was, in Darrow’s world, no such thing as individual responsibility, and there was no purpose in a legal system that assigned responsibility and determined punishment. Indeed, Darrow was explicit in his rejection of the concept of individual responsibility. With a characteristic shrug of his shoulders, his left hand buried in his trouser pocket, his right hand gesturing vaguely at the bench, Darrow expelled the concept of blame from the courtroom. “Is Dickey Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because of these infinite combinations he was born without [emotional capacity?]…Is he to blame for what he did not have and never had?” Darrow pushed back a lock of hair from his forehead and half-turned toward the spectators. “Is he to blame that his machine is imperfect?”
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Nathan Leopold also was blameless. Nathan too suffered from emotional incapacity; he too had an excess of intellect and a deficit of emotion. Nathan was “just a half boy,” Darrow continued, “an intellect, an intellectual machine going without balance and without a governor, seeking to find out everything there was to life intellectually; seeking to solve every philosophy, but using his intellect only.”
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The metaphor of the machine was the intellectual kernel of Darrow’s philosophy. Crime was a consequence of imperfections in the machinery—a loose cog here, a missing governor there—and just as the concept of responsibility was inapplicable to the machine, so individuals were blameless for their conduct. Neither Nathan nor Richard was responsible for the killing of Bobby Franks. If responsibility had to be assigned for that event, then, Darrow argued, blame society for the killing and refrain from punishing Nathan and Richard. “I protest,” Darrow cried, “against the crimes and mistakes of society being visited upon them.”
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It was the Great War that, more than any other single event or factor, had contributed to the murder of Bobby Franks. The killing of human beings had become so commonplace, so casual and routine, that society now had a bloodlust which, almost inevitably, had found its way into Nathan and Richard. “It is due to the cruelty that has paralyzed the hearts of men growing out of the war. We are used to blood, your honor.” Darrow held his right hand out before him, his forefinger pointing upward. “We have not only had it shed in bucketfuls, we have it shed in rivers, lakes and oceans, and we have delighted in it, we have preached it, we have worked for it, we have advised it, we have taught it to the young, encouraged the old, until the world has been drenched in blood, and it has left its stains of blood upon every human heart and upon every human…. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men, Christian against Christian, barbarians uniting with Christians: anything to kill…. I need not tell your honor this, because you know; I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some gone to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned how cheap human life was. You know it and I know it.”

Darrow had now droned on for three days, interminably rambling his way down rhetorical paths in a disorganized, chaotic mess of a speech. There was little structure to his remarks; he habitually veered off on a tangent at the slightest provocation. Despite its length, his summation contained little of substance; Darrow scarcely even mentioned the scientific testimony introduced during the hearing. His audience fidgeted and yawned yet listened respectfully; and it was only toward the conclusion of the speech, when he indulged in his customary theatrics, that the spectators saw and heard the Darrow of legend.

The path of progress, Darrow argued, led inexorably to the abolition of the death penalty. Society looked back in horror at the barbaric punishments inflicted in previous centuries for petty crimes; and 100 years from now, in the twenty-first century, society would recoil at the realization that capital punishment had been a part of the penal code in the United States. Would John Caverly side with the barbarism of the past or align himself with the steady march of progress? Would he conspire with the forces of reaction? Or would he stand with the enlightenment of the future? “If your honor can hang a boy 18, some other judge can hang him at 17, or 16, or 14. Some day, some day, if there is any such thing as progress in the world, if there is any spirit of humanity that is working in the hearts of men, some day they will look back upon this as a barbarous age which deliberately turned the hands of the clock backward, which deliberately set itself in the way of all progress toward humanity and sympathy, and committed an unforgivable act.”