Chicago wasn’t safe.
Ghastly crimes regularly occurred, even in upscale neighborhoods like Hyde Park. The body of a murdered University of Chicago student was dumped at 58th and Kimbark. A young man went out to mail a letter and disappeared, his bloated corpse washing up on the beach at 64th Street a month later. A cab driver stepped from a streetcar at 55th and Dorchester, was jumped, etherized, and castrated — two other men were similarly maimed by “gland pirates” feeding the market for a quack testicle rejuvenation therapy popular at the time.
And then 14-year-old Bobby Franks disappeared, on May 21, 1924 — 100 years ago Tuesday. Coaxed into a car near 49th and Ellis, then bludgeoned with a chisel wrapped in tape, his body doused with acid to hide his identity before being hidden in a culvert.
Why has that particular crime echoed for 100 years while the others, equally horrible, faded? Why all the books and movies? The mystery didn’t last long — 10 days. Suspicion quickly fell to a pair of teenage University of Chicago graduate students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Self-described intellectual “supermen,” they turned out to be lousy criminals. Leopold dropped his distinctive prescription eyeglasses near the boy’s body. The two promptly confessed.
Motivation made the crime stand out. Not the usual jealousy or hate or financial need, but to stave off boredom. Asked what gave them the idea, Leopold replied, “pure love of excitement, or the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different.”
The crime had class overtones — both boys’ parents were multi-millionaires. There was sex — Leopold and Loeb had a relationship and might have assaulted Franks.
That both murderers were Jewish fed the attention in a nation rife with antisemitism. “Once again Jewish degeneracy and anti-Christianity have done their work in America,” the Ku Klux Klan’s American Standard declared.
That Bobby Franks was also Jewish — Loeb’s cousin, in fact — might have been a break for the American Jewish community; had he been a Christian boy kidnapped and killed, it was thought, the ancient blood libel would have surely flared up again.
Having the effervescent Clarence Darrow as their attorney arguing to spare them from execution certainly helped set the trial in history.
It made a difference that the case unfolded in Chicago, with its six aggressive daily newspapers. Two of them, the morning Herald and Examiner and the Evening American, were sensational sheets owned by William Randolph Hearst.
“A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,” a Hearst reporter once quipped. It was Hearst who offered to charter a ship to bring Sigmund Freud to Chicago for expert trial commentary. The Tribune attempted the same stunt. Alas, the father of psychoanalysis turned both down.
It was the Chicago Daily News that helped crack the case. A Daily News reporter wondered whether the unidentified body found in Hammond, Indiana, might be that of the missing South Side boy. And though the Underwood portable typewriter used to write the ransom note to Franks’ agonized parents was smashed and sunk in the Jackson Park Lagoon, it was the Daily News that checked the study notes typed by Leopold and saw the distinctive pattern of keystrokes matching the ransom note. The paper won the Pulitzer. The geniuses went to prison.
Chicago has had so many notorious murders — Leopold and Loeb would be joined by the Grimes Sisters, Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy. Why do we care?
Is fascination with grisly crimes a kind of compassion? Honor paid to the victims? That feels unlikely. An unrecognized plunge into the vicariously criminal? To share the thrill, at a safe distance? Maybe.
One reason crime draws fascination is that each case offers so much information to process. You can pluck out the parts that speak to you. For me, it’s the premeditation. Leopold and Loeb planned the crime for six months, carefully constructing an alias, Morton D. Ballard, renting a hotel room, opening a bank account. Two smart young men spent half a year preparing for a grotesque, heartless act that would destroy their own lives and the lives of everyone they loved.
How can people who seem to have everything going for them perform such evil with their eyes open? Vanity, obviously. They thought they were supermen, and their victim, nothing. Both ended up as victims too, of their own egos, their own disregard for others and monumental, misplaced vanity: Loeb was slashed to death with a razor in Stateville in 1936; Leopold spent a third of a century behind bars. The cost of self-infatuation can be very high. Something worth remembering today.
