For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (9 page)

As he outlined his idea for the perfect crime, Richard steadily grew more excited. They should kidnap a child, he proposed, and to increase the intricacy of the crime, they should demand a ransom from the child’s parents. The money was important, not for its own sake, but to magnify the complexity of the crime. They would have to leave directions in order to obtain the ransom, but they must make sure that they left no clues for the police. They would have to kill the child, of course; it would be foolish to leave open the possibility that their victim might recognize them at a later date.
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Had Richard a particular child in mind? Nathan asked. There were many wealthy families living in Kenwood and Hyde Park whose sons attended the Harvard School; and some of the children at University High School also had wealthy parents who would pay any ransom they asked.

Their victim should be a girl, Nathan suggested. One of his most vivid fantasies, he explained, had always been the image of a gang of German soldiers stripping the clothes off an attractive French girl and raping her while she was tied with ropes to a kitchen table. Sometimes in his fantasy, Nathan was the commanding officer who stood to one side and watched as his men raped the girl; on other occasions he would participate in the rape. If they were to kidnap and kill a child, therefore, they should abduct a young girl; it would give him enormous pleasure, he told Richard, if he could rape her before they killed her.
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But Richard had intended the kidnapping to be the perfect crime that he had always imagined himself planning. The rape of a girl had never been a part of his intention; he was not about to allow Nathan to hijack the fantasy for his own ends.

They bickered about it as they drove into Chicago. A boy or a girl? Would raping the child be part of their plan? In any argument with Nathan, Richard usually got his way, and this occasion was no exception. They would kidnap a boy, Richard declared with finality, most probably one of the pupils at the Harvard School, someone whose parents could afford to pay a ransom.

They had now entered the city limits. As Nathan wended his way through the streets of the South Side, Richard continued to talk about the kidnapping scheme. It was to be a brilliant crime, he mused, one that would shock Chicago with its daring. They would obtain the ransom, dispose of the body, and leave no clues behind; the police would never catch them. Already Richard could feel the thrill of anticipation; already he could sense the enjoyment he would derive from planning the murder.

No one, he believed, would ever know who had committed his perfect crime.

C
HRISTMAS AND
N
EW
Y
EAR CAME
and went. After the holidays, both boys picked up their studies again: Nathan resumed his law courses while Richard attended the graduate seminars in the history department.

During the winter quarter, details of the kidnapping plan gradually developed. They proposed to lure a boy into their car; somehow render him unconscious, perhaps with chloroform; and drive him to a deserted spot near the Indiana state line, southeast of Chicago. There was a drainage culvert, almost three feet in diameter, running underneath the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, close to 118th Street; this, Nathan volunteered, would be the perfect hiding place for the body. He knew the spot well; he had often passed by the culvert while bird-watching near Wolf Lake. They could stuff the corpse inside the pipe—it would accommodate a boy’s body. No one would ever find it. Drainage water trickling through the pipe, along with the summer heat, would quickly decompose the body.

But how to kill their victim so that they would share equal responsibility for the murder? It would be easy to put a bullet through the boy’s head, but in that case, Richard claimed, whoever pulled the trigger would alone be guilty of murder. Richard was adamant on this point: they must both participate in the killing. If both were directly guilty of murder, both would be liable for the death penalty and neither would have any advantage in confessing to the police. They should, Richard suggested, strangle their victim; if each pulled on one end of a rope around the boy’s neck, they would then be jointly culpable.
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B
Y THE END OF
M
ARCH,
snow and ice no longer blanketed the campus; winter had turned to spring and leaves had appeared on the elms in the main quadrangle. It remained bitterly cold—harsh winds still swept in from Lake Michigan—but the sun shone more bravely on the students crisscrossing the campus, making their way to class.

The kidnapping plan slowly matured; the details became clearer.

There was, Nathan and Richard realized, one formidable difficulty that, no matter how they approached it, seemed insuperable. How were they to obtain the ransom money while avoiding capture? They had decided to demand $10,000 from the boy’s parents for his release, but to obtain the money at no risk to themselves seemed impossible.

They talked it up and down, picking holes in each other’s ideas, rejecting any suggestion that would not guarantee their safety. Their discussions eventually bore fruit; at last, it seemed they had a foolproof method of securing the money.

The Michigan Central train from Chicago to Boston departed from Central Station at 12th Street and Michigan Avenue and made its way south, parallel to the shoreline of Lake Michigan, stopping at branch stations on the South Side. Each day the train left Central Station at three o’clock standard time; eighteen minutes later it stopped at the 63rd Street station before heading east to Michigan City and on across Indiana and Ohio.

They would telephone the victim’s father and instruct him to go to a drugstore on 63rd Street and Blackstone Avenue, adjacent to the local train station, to wait for a second phone call. This subsequent phone call would arrive shortly before the train reached 63rd Street. He was to board the train, walk to the rear carriage, and look in the telegraph box for a letter that would instruct him to throw the ransom, securely wrapped in a cigar box, from the train five seconds after he passed the distinctive redbrick water tower of the Champion Manufacturing Company. They calculated that the package would fall close to 74th Street; Nathan and Richard would be waiting at that spot, ready to grab the money and make a quick getaway.
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Would this plan work? There was only one way to find out; and so, on Wednesday, 24 April, Richard Loeb boarded the three o’clock train to Boston. It left Central Station punctually and made its way south; Richard, standing at the rear of the train, could see Lake Michigan on his left, and, to his right, the close-packed, narrow houses of the stockyard workers. The train reached the 63rd Street station on time, exactly eighteen minutes after leaving Central Station. It paused to take on passengers; the conductor shouted his customary warning; and gradually the carriages moved forward as the engine picked up speed. Richard looked to his left, out across a jumble of ugly factory buildings packed closely together. The water tower with its distinctive white lettering spelling out “Champion Manufacturing Company” suddenly came into view. Richard paused for a count of five and threw a package from his right hand as far as possible.

9.
THE RANSOM DEMAND.
The kidnappers intended that the victim’s father wait for a phone call at a drugstore at 63rd Street and Blackstone Avenue. He would then board a train at the 63rd Street station and, after passing the Champion Manufacturing Company, would throw the ransom money from the train.

The rehearsal worked perfectly. Nathan, waiting in his car at 74th Street, watched the train travel above him on the elevated tracks. The package landed as they had expected; it was a moment’s work for Nathan to retrieve it and drive away.
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Nathan and Richard congratulated themselves on devising such an elaborately clever plan. It could not go wrong. Even if the police accompanied the victim’s father to the drugstore and even if they boarded the train at 63rd Street along with him, they would not be able to capture the kidnappers waiting in the car on 74th Street. And if the train suddenly began to slow down after leaving 63rd Street, Nathan and Richard would know that their plan had been discovered; they would abandon the ransom and make good their escape.

It was foolproof! What could possibly go wrong?

B
UT THERE WAS ANOTHER DIFFICULTY,
a second obstacle. Nathan’s red sports car, a Willys-Knight, with its nickel bumpers and disk wheels, was too distinctive to use in the kidnapping. Nathan drove to the university every day and usually parked in a prominent place, close to the center of campus, on 57th Street; any witness to the kidnapping would certainly remember a red Willys-Knight sports model, and the police would have little difficulty in linking Nathan with the abduction. So it was necessary to use a rental car for the kidnapping.

However, to hire a rental car it was necessary to assume false identities. If even one witness connected the kidnapping with the rental car—perhaps while the car was parked near the Harvard School on the day of the kidnapping—the police would track their way to the kidnappers through the rental agency.

On Wednesday, 7 May, Nathan walked into the Hyde Park State Bank. The bank was almost empty; it had been a slow afternoon and Charles Ward, the cashier, was looking forward to closing up for the day. Ward noticed the young man even before he approached the desk—well dressed, with thick black hair and gray eyes, about five feet six inches tall but with a noticeable slouch. The customer walked up and began talking about opening a checking account.

Ward considered the applicant standing before him. Did he live locally? Could he provide a reference from someone in the neighborhood?

“Do you know anybody in Hyde Park?”

“No, I don’t know anybody in Hyde Park.”

The cashier reached down into his desk and pulled out a card; he handed it to the young man to write down his details.

“Well, have you any other address?”

“Yes, Peoria, Illinois.”
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As the customer began writing on the card, Ward leaned over the desk to read the details. He found the application unusual. Why would a traveling salesman from Peoria want to open a checking account in Hyde Park if he knew no one in the area? Surely he would do better to open an account in one of the larger banks downtown, in the Loop? But, the cashier reflected, this was none of his business. Who was he to quarrel with a new customer? The customer, who had signed himself Morton D. Ballard, held out $100 as a deposit; Ward took the money and again reached down into his desk drawer: first for a checkbook, and then for a passbook showing the $100 deposit.
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That was sufficient. Nathan now had a new identity as Morton Ballard.

The same day, Richard Loeb walked into the lobby of the Morrison Hotel at Clark and Madison streets. He carried a rattan suitcase in his right hand, but it contained only books: four books that Loeb had previously borrowed from the university library. Loeb also claimed to be a traveling salesman; he, too, had come from Peoria and he also had assumed the pseudonym Morton D. Ballard.

J. B. Cravens, the clerk on duty that afternoon at the reception desk, gave the guest a key to room 1031 and waved an arrival slip at the bellboy waiting on the hop bench. The transaction took only a few minutes—the bellboy, distinctive in his cherry red uniform with green piping, jumped up from his place on the bench to show the salesman to his room before returning to the lobby.
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One hour later, Morton Ballard came down from his room to the reception desk. He was staying in Chicago only one night, he explained to Cravens, but he expected to be back in the city in a few weeks. There might be mail addressed to him at the hotel; would Cravens keep it for him for his return? Cravens nodded his assent: the guest seemed rather young to be in business—Cravens guessed that he was not much older than seventeen or eighteen—but he had an open, honest face and he seemed a trustworthy sort.

Two days later, on Friday, 9 May, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Nathan Leopold walked into the offices of the Rent-A-Car Company at 1426 Michigan Avenue. Nathan had $400 in cash in the left pocket of his jacket, and in the right pocket he carried the passbook from the Hyde Park State Bank made out in the name of Morton Ballard.
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William Herndon, assistant manager of the Rent-A-Car Company, rose to his feet to shake hands with the young man who introduced himself as Morton Ballard, a salesman from Peoria. Ballard explained that he was in Chicago on business and needed a car to visit some clients that afternoon. He was new to the area; it was the first time he had covered the Chicago district for his company. As Ballard spoke, he produced the passbook from the Hyde Park State Bank and reached into his pocket for his wallet. Since he was a new customer, he told Herndon, he would be willing to put down a deposit of $400 for a rental car. And if there was any question about his honesty, he continued, he could provide references: he had the telephone number of an acquaintance, Louis Mason, who could vouch for him.
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