Леопольд и Лоэб: Преступление века в Чикаго

American kidnapper murderer duo

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. (November 19, 1904 – August 29, 1971) and Richard Albert Loeb ('/l//oʊ//b/; June 11, 1905 – January 28, 1936), usually referred to collectively as Leopold and Loeb, were two American students at the University of Chicago who kidnapped and murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on May 21, 1924. They committed the murder – characterized at the time as "the crime of the century" – hoping to demonstrate superior intellect, which they believed enabled and entitled them to carry out a "perfect crime" without consequences. After the two men were arrested, Loeb's family retained Clarence Darrow as lead counsel for their defense. Darrow's twelve hour summation at their sentencing hearing is noted for its influential criticism of capital punishment as retributive rather than transformative justice. Both young men were sentenced to life imprisonment plus 99 years. Loeb was murdered by a fellow prisoner in 1936. Leopold was released on parole in 1958. The case has since served as the inspiration for several dramatic works.

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. was born on November 19, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois, the third son of Florence (née Foreman) and Nathan Leopold Sr., a wealthy German Jewish immigrant family. A child prodigy, Leopold was recorded in his baby book as having spoken his first words at the age of four months and three weeks old. At the time of the murder, he had completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago with Phi Beta Kappa honors and planned to begin studies at Harvard Law School after a trip to Europe. He threw himself into intellectual pursuits where he met with remarkable success. Leopold had studied fifteen languages and claimed to speak five fluently. He had achieved a measure of national recognition as an ornithologist. He maintained his interest in birds after his crime, raising birds in prison and working to help with the struggling Puerto Rican Parrot population after his release on parole.

Richard Albert Loeb was born on June 11, 1905, in Chicago, the third of four sons of Anna Henrietta (née Bohnen) and Albert Henry Loeb, a wealthy lawyer and retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic. Like Leopold, Loeb was exceptionally intelligent. He was an avid reader, with a passion for history and crime stories. At age 12, he entered the innovative University High School. With the encouragement of his governess, he completed his high school education in two years. In 1923, at the age of 17, he would become the University of Michigan's youngest graduate. Following graduation from Michigan, Loeb enrolled in a few history classes at the University of Chicago. Loeb was not as strictly intellectual as Leopold. He often socialized, played tennis, and read detective novels.

The two young men grew up with their families in the affluent Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The Loebs owned a summer estate (the farm part of which is now called Castle Farms and is a popular wedding venue) in Charlevoix, Michigan, as well as a mansion in Kenwood, two blocks from the Leopold home. Though Leopold and Loeb knew each other casually while growing up, they began to see more of each other in mid 1920s, Leopold was particularly fascinated by Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "supermen" (Übermenschen), interpreting them as transcendent individuals possessing extraordinary and unusual capabilities, whose superior intellects allowed them to rise above the laws and rules that bound the unimportant, average populace. In a letter to Loeb, he wrote, "A superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do." The pair began asserting their perceived immunity from normal restrictions with acts of petty theft and vandalism. Breaking into a fraternity house at the University of Michigan, they stole penknives, a camera, and a typewriter that they later used to type the ransom note for their murder victim, Bobby Franks. Emboldened, they progressed to a series of more serious crimes, including arson, but no one seemed to notice. Disappointed with the absence of media coverage of their crimes, they decided to plan and execute a sensational "perfect crime" that would garner public attention and confirm their self perceived status as "supermen".

Leopold and Loeb, who were 19 and 18, respectively, at the time, settled on kidnapping and murdering a younger adolescent as their perfect crime. They spent seven months planning everything, from the method of abduction to disposal of the body. To obfuscate the actual nature of their crime and motive, they decided to make a ransom demand, and devised an intricate plan for collecting it involving a long series of complex instructions to be communicated, one set at a time, by phone. They typed the final set of instructions involving the actual money drop in the form of a ransom note, using the typewriter stolen from the fraternity house. A chisel was purchased to knock their victim unconscious. They also purchased a length of rope; to make sure each of them was equally culpable in the murder, they planned to wrap it around their victim's neck and each pull on one end, strangling him to death. After a lengthy search for a suitable victim, mostly on the grounds of the Harvard School for Boys in the Kenwood area, where Leopold had been educated, the pair decided upon Robert "Bobby" Franks, the 14 year old son of wealthy Chicago watch manufacturer Jacob Franks. Bobby Franks was an across the street neighbor of Loeb's who had played tennis at the Loeb residence several times. Leopold and Loeb put their plan in motion on the afternoon of May 21, 1924. Using an automobile that Leopold rented under the name Morton D. Ballard, they offered Franks a ride as he walked home from school. The boy initially refused, because his destination was less than two blocks away, but Loeb persuaded him to enter the car to discuss a tennis racket that he had been using. The precise sequence of the events that followed remains in dispute, but a preponderance of opinion placed Leopold behind the wheel of the car while Loeb sat in the back seat with the chisel. Loeb struck Franks, who was sitting in front of him in the passenger seat, several times in the head with the chisel, then dragged him into the back seat and gagged him, where he died. With the body on the floor of the back seat, out of view, the men drove to their predetermined dumping spot near Wolf Lake in Hammond, Indiana, 25 mile (40 km) south of Chicago. After nightfall, they removed and discarded Franks' clothes, then concealed the body in a culvert along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks north of the lake. To obscure the body's identity, they poured hydrochloric acid on the face and genitals to disguise the fact that he had been circumcised, as circumcision was unusual among non Jews in the United States at the time. By the time the two men returned to Chicago, word had already spread that Franks was missing. Leopold called Franks' mother, identifying himself as "George Johnson", and told her that Franks had been kidnapped; instructions for delivering the ransom would follow. After mailing the typed ransom note and burning their blood stained clothing, then cleaning the blood stains from the rented vehicle's upholstery, they spent the remainder of the evening playing cards. Once the Franks family received the ransom note on the following morning, Leopold called a second time and dictated the first set of instructions for the ransom payment. The intricate plan stalled almost immediately when a nervous family member forgot the address of the store where he was supposed to receive the next set of directions, and it was abandoned entirely when word came that Franks' body had been found. Leopold and Loeb destroyed the typewriter and burned a car robe (lap blanket) they had used to move the body. Chicago police launched an intensive investigation; rewards were offered for information. Both Leopold and Loeb enjoyed chatting with friends and family members about the murder. Leopold discussed the case with his professor and a girl friend, joking that he would confess and give her the reward money. Loeb helped a couple of reporter friends of his find the drug store he and Leopold had tried to send Jacob Franks to, and when asked to describe Bobby he replied: "If I were to murder anybody, it would be just such a cocky little son of a bitch as Bobby Franks." Police found a pair of eyeglasses near Franks' body. Although common in prescription and frame, they were fitted with an unusual hinge purchased by only three customers in Chicago, one of whom was Leopold. When questioned, Leopold offered the possibility that his glasses might have dropped out of his pocket during a bird watching trip the previous weekend. Leopold and Loeb were summoned for formal questioning on May 29. They asserted that on the night of the murder, they had picked up two women in Chicago using Leopold's car, then dropped them off some time later near a golf course without learning their last names. Their alibi was exposed as a fabrication when Leopold's chauffeur told police that he was repairing Leopold's car while the men claimed to be using it. The chauffeur's wife confirmed that the car was parked in the Leopold garage on the afternoon of the murder. The destroyed typewriter was recovered from the Jackson Park Lagoon on June 7.

Loeb was the first to confess. He insisted that he was the driver and Loeb the murderer. Their confessions otherwise corroborated most of the evidence in the case. Leopold later claimed, long after Loeb was dead, that he pleaded in vain with Loeb to admit to killing Franks. "Mompsie feels less terrible than she might, thinking you did it," he quotes Loeb as saying, "and I'm not going to take that shred of comfort away from her." Most observers believed that Loeb did strike the fatal blows. Both Leopold and Loeb admitted that they were driven by their thrill seeking, Übermenschen (supermen) delusions, and their aspiration to commit a "perfect crime".

The trial of Leopold and Loeb at Chicago's Cook County Criminal Court became a media spectacle and the third – after those of Harry Thaw and Sacco and Vanzetti – to be labeled "the trial of the century." The Leopold and Loeb families hired the renowned criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow to lead the defense team. It was rumored that Darrow was paid $1 million for his services, but he was actually paid $65,000 (70000.0 in 1925 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years). Darrow took the case because he was a staunch opponent of capital punishment. While it was generally assumed that the men's defense would be based on a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, Darrow concluded that a jury trial would almost certainly end in conviction and the death penalty. The trial, technically an extended sentencing hearing, as their guilty pleas had already been accepted, ran for thirty two days. The state's attorney, Robert E. Crowe, presented over 100 witnesses, documenting details of the crime. The defense presented extensive psychiatric testimony in an effort to establish mitigating circumstances, including childhood neglect in the form of absent parenting, and in Leopold's case, sexual abuse by a governess. Darrow called a series of expert witnesses, who offered a catalog of Leopold's and Loeb's abnormalities. One witness testified to their dysfunctional endocrine glands, another to the delusions that had led to their crime. at the conclusion of the hearing has been called the finest speech of his career. Its principal arguments were that the methods and punishments of the American justice system were inhumane, and the youth and immaturity of the accused:

The judge was persuaded, but he explained in his ruling that his decision was based primarily on precedent and the youth of the accused. On September 10, 1924, he sentenced both Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment for the murder, and an additional 99 years for the kidnapping. Darrow's handling of the law as defense counsel has been criticized for hiding psychiatric expert testimony that conflicted with his polemical goals and for relying on an absolute denial of free will, one of the principles legitimizing all criminal punishment.

Leopold and Loeb initially were held at Joliet Prison. Although they were kept apart as much as possible, the two managed to maintain their friendship. Leopold was transferred to Stateville Penitentiary in 1925 for an appendectomy, and Loeb was transferred there in 1930. Once reunited, the two expanded the prison school system, adding a high school and junior college curriculum.

On January 28, 1936, Loeb was attacked by fellow inmate James Day with a straight razor in a shower room; he died soon after in the prison hospital. Day claimed that Loeb had attempted to sexually assault him, but he was unharmed while Loeb sustained more than fifty wounds, including defensive wounds on his arms and hands. His throat had been slashed from behind. News accounts suggested Loeb had propositioned Day, and though several prison officials including the Warden believed Loeb had been murdered, Day was found not guilty by a jury after a short trial in June, 1936. – no evidence has been found that this lead was ever published, and actual copy from that date reads otherwise. On February 19, 1936, in a column printed in the Syracuse Journal, Mark Hellinger wrote, "I must tell you of the line that came to me from an unknown correspondent in Chicago. This anonymous contributor said he had the absolute low down on the recent slaying of Dickie Loeb. Seems that Loeb made a slight mistake in grammar. He ended a sentence in a proposition " Other newspapers at the time appeared to praise Day, who was later tried and acquitted of Loeb's murder. There is no evidence that Loeb was a sexual predator while in prison, but Day was later caught at least once in a sexual act with a fellow inmate. In his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, Leopold ridiculed Day's claim that Loeb had attempted to sexually assault him. This was echoed by the prison's Catholic chaplain, a confidant of Loeb's, who said that it was more likely that Day attacked Loeb after Loeb rebuffed his advances.

Leopold continued with his work after Loeb's death. Despite suffering from depression, he became a model prisoner and made many significant contributions to improving conditions at Stateville Penitentiary. These included reorganizing the prison library, revamping the schooling system and teaching its students, and volunteer work in the prison hospital. In 1944, Leopold volunteered for the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study. He was deliberately inoculated with malaria pathogens and then subjected to several experimental malaria treatments. He later wrote that all his good work in prison and after his release was an effort to compensate for his crime. was published in 1956. Levin portrayed Leopold, under the pseudonym Judd Steiner, as a brilliant but deeply disturbed teenager, psychologically driven to kill because of his troubled childhood and an obsession with Loeb. Leopold later wrote that reading Levin's book made him "physically sick More than once I had to lay the book down and wait for the nausea to subside. I felt as I suppose a man would feel if he were exposed stark naked under a strong spotlight before a large audience." Leopold's autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, was published in 1958 as part of his campaign to win parole. and received mostly positive reviews, though some accused him of writing the book solely as a means of rehabilitating his public image by ignoring the dark side of his past.