For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (55 page)

R
ICHARD
L
OEB WAS LESS EAGER
to work in tandem with the prison administration. Yet he, too, quickly won a position of privilege within Stateville, in large part because of the money at his disposal. Richard kept a permanent deposit of $500 in the prison office. This sum, always made good by his brothers, was available for his personal use at any time. His parents, unaware that Richard had a private banking arrangement within the prison, sent him an additional fifty dollars each month.
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Loeb used his money wisely, carefully bribing the prison guards to grant him privileges. He had keys to parts of the prison normally accessible to other inmates only at specific times of the day and on a restricted basis. Loeb was one of a small number of prisoners (Nathan Leopold was another) allowed to buy whatever he wished from the commissary; and he could, if he desired, eat his meals in the privacy of his cell. It was not even necessary, according to one account, for Richard to wear the prison uniform—he customarily wore a white shirt and flannel trousers.
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Richard’s influence over the guards could be used in the pursuit of sexual favors from other inmates. Convicts who were willing to have sex with Richard might be rewarded with cigarettes, alcohol, a larger cell, and an easy job within the prison; but a prisoner who fell out of favor with Richard might find himself shoveling coal in the yard or laboriously weaving rattan chairs in the furniture shop.
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James Day, twenty-one years old, was serving a one- to ten-year sentence in Stateville for armed robbery when he first met Richard Loeb in 1935. Day was short, just five feet, six inches tall; weighed 135 pounds; and had a mottled, blotchy complexion. His life had been unsettled. He had never known his father, and his mother had died in 1921, when Day was just eight years old. He moved to Chicago to live with his uncle and aunt, but he proved to be a difficult child, constantly getting into trouble for fighting, thieving, and petty crime. He first attracted the attention of the police in 1928, at the age of fifteen; in that year the Juvenile Court ordered that he be held in St. Charles School for Boys, a reform school. He served a second sentence in the Boys’ Reformatory at Pontiac. In 1935, not long after he reached his majority, Day graduated to a cell in Stateville Prison.

Richard took an immediate interest in Day’s welfare. He arranged for the guards to transfer Day to C House, to a cell in the same gallery as his own, and he began sending Day presents—cigarettes and small gifts of money. The older man—Richard was now thirty—used his influence to get Day a job in the prison office building and hinted that he might even be able to get Day a parole hearing. It would not be difficult, Richard suggested, for a clever lawyer to make an effective appeal before the parole board on Day’s behalf.

It was a calculated scheme, on Richard’s part, to put Day in a dependent position so that he would agree to have sex with Richard. Day resisted but Richard was persistent. He reminded Day that he might lose all his privileges; yet all he had to do was comply with Richard’s request—would it not be better for Day to submit to his demands?

On the morning of 28 January 1936, George Bliss, a convict in C House, surreptitiously passed a straight razor to James Day. Bliss had stolen the razor that week from the barbershop and had successfully concealed it from the prison guards. Just after noon, a work detail began its march from the dining hall, the prisoners walking in double file under the supervision of a single guard. James Day was the last in line, and as his column moved through the prison, he slipped away. Earlier that day, Richard Loeb had mentioned that he would take a shower at noon, suggesting casually that Day might meet him at the shower room. Richard had a key and could lock the room from the inside, thus allowing them to meet in private.

Day was in an angry, violent mood. Richard had been pestering him for weeks, demanding that they have sex, and threatening to withdraw all his privileges. He entered the shower room and saw Richard, naked, advancing toward him. Day struck at his tormentor with the razor, cutting him on the neck and abdomen, slashing furiously, inflicting fifty-six wounds before turning away and leaving the room, his victim collapsed on the floor in a sea of blood.

Richard died later that day. The prison doctors worked furiously to save him, suturing the cuts, but Richard had lost too much blood. Nathan rushed from his cell to the prison hospital and watched helplessly as his friend, his companion, his lover, lay dying on the operating table. And when it was over, after the surgeons and doctors and prison guards had all left the room, Nathan remained behind, to wash the body, to gently cradle Richard’s head in his arms, and to grieve silently over the loss of his companion.
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At the trial of James Day later that year, no one, not even Nathan, contradicted Day’s account. The state’s attorney had demanded the death penalty for the murder of Richard Loeb. Any convict who testified on the witness stand against Day would be responsible for sending him to the electric chair.
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Who among those prisoners who knew the truth would want to return to Stateville to face retribution for sending a fellow prisoner to his death? Richard Loeb had died; he could not be brought back to life. Better to allow Day to claim that Richard had demanded a homosexual encounter than to risk one’s own life. The jury found Day not guilty on all charges.

Few of the guards at Stateville believed Day’s claim that he had acted in self-defense. Why, for example, had it been necessary for Day to stab Richard fifty-six times? And how had Day managed to emerge from their encounter in the shower room without a scratch or even so much as a bruise?

Richard’s death had created an uproar outside the prison walls, and the revelation that Richard had corrupted the guards to obtain special privileges had deeply embarrassed the new warden, Joseph Ragen. Nothing, Ragen now realized, would be more humiliating for the institution than to have scandal touch Nathan Leopold also. As a consequence, Nathan found himself under severe scrutiny in case he, too, should step out of line. Ragen now decreed that Nathan should no longer have a cell mate; nor was he to walk around the prison without a guard to accompany him; and all his privileges were to be revoked.

The years following Richard’s death were lonely, bitter years for Nathan. He was surrounded by hundreds of men, yet he keenly felt his social isolation within the prison. “These years after Dick’s death,” Nathan wrote in his autobiography, “were not altogether pleasant. Officially there were a number of restrictions on me, and these galled me a lot. It is never easy to get along in a situation where you stick out like a sore thumb…. The fact that I had to cell alone, that I had to be accompanied by a keeper—these were widely misinterpreted. They made it much harder for me to get along. And the fact that I brought ‘heat’ wherever I went didn’t make it any easier.”
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Yet Nathan survived and even began to contemplate the possibility of parole. To dream that he might win his release from Stateville had always seemed an impossible flight of fancy. Yet memories would eventually dim; his antagonists—Crowe’s successors in the state’s attorney’s office—would eventually relax their grip, and perhaps Nathan could convince the parole board of his contrition for that terrible crime so long ago.

At the time of Richard’s death in 1936, Nathan had already served twelve years—he would be eligible for parole on the life sentence in 1944, after serving a total of twenty years. The parole board would require him to proclaim his regret for the killing of Bobby Franks, of course, but that would not be difficult. He needed also to demonstrate, by good works if possible, that he had undergone rehabilitation: that he had atoned for his deed and that there was no likelihood that he would commit some comparable act on his release.

In the early 1930s, several inmates had established a prison school at Stateville to teach the other prisoners. It had been an ambitious undertaking—in the first year, seventy convicts had enrolled in classes in English composition, algebra, geometry, bookkeeping, and history. The warden had endorsed their initiative and had provided money from the Inmates’ Amusement Fund for paper, pencils, textbooks, and mimeograph supplies. Both Nathan and Richard had been involved with the school from its inception, and in the years following Richard’s death, Nathan attempted to ease his pain and his loneliness by immersing himself in the management of the school. It was, by his account at least, a grand success—soon some 400 prisoners were taking classes. Nathan had intended the school as a memorial to Richard, but its rapid expansion proved its eventual downfall. The warden, Joseph Ragen, taking note of the popularity of the classes among the inmates, directed that each student’s academic record be reported to the central administration. Ragen intended that each prisoner’s academic accomplishments be presented to the parole board as tangible evidence of rehabilitation. But he had not foreseen the predictable outcome: prisoners with no previous interest in study and with no desire to learn now enrolled with the intention of forcing their teachers, by threats if necessary, to award superlative grades to present to the parole board in order to win early release.
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In 1941 the warden transferred Nathan to a position as an X-ray technician in the prison hospital. Later that year Nathan wheedled his way into a position as a nurse in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. He now had more responsibility—and less supervision—than before. The prison doctors relied on the nurses to look after the psychiatric patients, even occasionally allowing them to medicate those in their care. “The bug cells,” Nathan recalled in his autobiography, “were a new world, entirely different from the rest of the prison…. No more marching into the cell house every evening and out again next morning. Here we each had a nice clean cell, larger than the ones in the cell house. And we were on twenty-four-hour detail; that is, our cells were never locked…. There was very little routine or discipline as regards the nurses on the new assignment. There were no rules, and we were permitted to do pretty much as we pleased.”

In September 1944 scientists working for the federal government arrived at Stateville in connection with a project to test antimalarial drugs. In Europe the war was in its final stages, but troops fighting in the Pacific theater still faced an arduous challenge from the Japanese. Might the American troops be decimated by disease? Could the United States quickly produce drugs to combat malaria? Would the prisoners at Stateville be willing to volunteer as guinea pigs and allow the federal scientists to test the effectiveness of antimalarial drugs? The doctors would infect the volunteers with malaria and observe the course of the disease under treatment—it would necessarily be an unpleasant and even dangerous experience for those prisoners who volunteered. The scientists had already begun to test their drugs on patients at Manteno State Hospital for the Insane but they needed many more volunteers if the tests were to be reliable.
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Almost 500 prisoners volunteered. Nathan, one of the first to volunteer, caught malaria on 19 June 1945. Two weeks later, on Monday, 2 July, he experienced the first symptoms. His body began shaking uncontrollably, his teeth started chattering, his head felt as if it were about to split in two, and his temperature shot up to 104. Nathan had caught the Chesson strain of malaria. The first attack would last five days and would normally recur every two weeks. The doctors administered thirty milligrams of plasmochin and 0.6 gram of chloroquine to each volunteer with malaria, and at the first signs of relapse, they used sixty milligrams of pentaquine and two grams of quinine.

The combination of drugs was effective in preventing the appearance of symptoms, but it was too toxic as a cure for malaria. Nathan, at age forty, had previously been healthy, with no signs of illness or disease, yet, now, in the aftermath of the antimalarial experiments, he had symptoms of kidney disease and diabetes. But perhaps his participation as a volunteer would have at least one positive outcome—in 1946 a rumor started within the prison that the governor of Illinois would shorten the sentences of those prisoners who had volunteered. Would Nathan be a beneficiary of the governor’s consideration? Nathan had become eligible for parole on his life sentence in 1944, twenty years after he had been first imprisoned. But he would not become eligible for parole on the other sentence—ninety-nine years for the kidnapping—until 1957, after having served one-third of the sentence. If the governor were to reduce his term, Nathan might soon be eligible for parole on both sentences.

But was not Nathan in a class by himself? The murder of Bobby Franks had been sui generis in its wantonness and cruelty. Should not Nathan serve out the rest of his days in prison as the judge, John Caverly, had intended?

The notoriety of the crime had embedded the killing in the city’s collective memory. It had become woven into the tapestry of the history of Chicago. And for those few Chicagoans who might have forgotten the details of the murder, there was a grisly reminder in July 1946 in the arrest of William Heirens for the killing of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan. The police had claimed that Heirens, a good-looking, dark-haired seventeen-year-old sophomore at the University of Chicago, had abducted the little girl from her bedroom in the middle of the night, leaving behind a ransom note for the parents. He had allegedly strangled Suzanne with his hands, carried the body to the basement of a nearby apartment building, dismembered it with a butcher knife, and disposed of the body parts in the city sewers.
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Neither his professors nor his classmates at the University of Chicago could reconcile Heirens’s confession with their knowledge of him as a studious, mild-mannered, good-natured young man. Heirens, like Leopold and Loeb, was an intellectual prodigy who had skipped his senior year at high school to enroll at the university. He had belonged to the Calvert Club, a Catholic student group, and had been a member of the university wrestling team. He was, his shocked friends proclaimed, just about as normal an individual as one might expect to find on the campus.
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