Leopold and Loeb murder Bobby Franks - May 21st, 1924

On this day in 1924, two wealthy college students abducted and killed a 14-year-old boy in an effort to commit a “perfect crime.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that unmasks history one day at a time. I'm
Gabe Lucier, and today we're grappling with the troubling implications
of one of the most unusual murders in Chicago history.

(00:28):
As a warning, today's episode includes descriptions of violence which
some listeners may find upsetting. The day was May twenty first,
nineteen twenty four. Two wealthy college students abducted and killed
a fourteen year old boy in an effort to commit

(00:50):
a perfect crime. The killers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold,
were eighteen and nineteen years old, respectively, at the time
of the murder. Both were keenly intelligent and highly privileged,
born to well to do families in the Chicago suburbs.
Loeb had recently graduated from the University of Michigan and

(01:11):
had returned to his hometown with the plan to begin
law school in the fall. His neighbor, Leopold, was already
a law student at the University of Chicago, where he
had developed a growing fascination with criminal psychology. Leopold was
also fixated on the philosophy of German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche,

(01:31):
especially his conception of the Ubermensch or superman. As Leopold
once explained in a letter to Loebe, 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. Lob for his part,

(01:55):
was an avid reader of detective fiction, and was obsessed
with the idea of a perfect crime, one so meticulously
planned and organized that no detective in the world could
solve it. The boy's interests, when paired together, convinced them
that the way to become supermen themselves was to commit
an unsolvable crime. To that end, they pulled off several

(02:18):
burglaries together, as well as a few acts of arson.
But to their dismay, none of those crimes were deemed
notable enough to warrant a full investigation. In fact, they
weren't even reported in the press, and so in the
spring of nineteen twenty four, Leopold and Loebe decided to
up their game by committing a crime so heinous it

(02:39):
would be guaranteed to get the whole city talking. Their
plan was to kidnap and murder a child and then
send a ransom note to the parents as a way
to delay the search for the body. They didn't have
a victim in mind, because their crime wasn't motivated by
vengeance or personal gain. The act of killing was almost

(02:59):
in material. They didn't want a murder so much as
they wanted to get away with murder. The pair established
fake identities which they used to rent a car, and
then began rehearsing how to carry out the crime and
where to dispose of the body. On May twenty first,
nineteen twenty four, Leopold and Lob went driving in search

(03:20):
of a victim. They had nearly given up for the
day when they spotted fourteen year old Bobby Franks walking
home alone from school. The boy had never met Leopold before,
but he was Lob's second cousin. The two of them
sometimes played tennis together, and it was because of that
familiarity that Franks accepted a ride from them, even though
his school was just a few blocks from his home.

(03:44):
Franks climbed into the front passenger seat next to Leopold,
while Lob sat in the back, plying the boy with
questions about tennis. Rackets. Then, once the car was in motion,
lob struck Franks on the back of the head with
the blunt end of a chisel. Infused and panicked, the
boy fought for his life, but was eventually pulled into
the back seat and bludgeoned to death by his cousin.

(04:08):
The pair drove to a secluded spot near the Indiana
border and dumped Franks's body in a culvert. Along the way,
they stopped at a restaurant for hot dogs and root beer.
The following morning, the killer scrubbed the boy's blood from
the rental car and sent his parents a ransom note
demanding ten thousand dollars for his safe return. The ruse

(04:29):
didn't work as plan, though, because before the family could
pay the ransom, a passer by discovered the child's body
and reported it to the police. A pair of eyeglasses
was also found a short distance away, and the police
assumed they belonged to the boy. However, when Franks's parents
arrived to identify the body, they said their son had

(04:51):
never worn glasses in his life. It turned out that
Leopold's glasses had fallen out of his pocket when they
were moving the body, and while that wouldn't have been
enough to identify him in most cases, especially since his
finger prints were not yet on file. His eyeglasses happened
to be very distinctive. The expensive horned rim frames included

(05:14):
a specially patented spring and could only be obtained from
one optometrist in Chicago. The police learned that only three
people had purchased the frames, and after interviewing and dismissing
the first two, they turned their attention to Nathan Leopold.
When called in for questioning, Leopold explained that he must
have dropped his glasses while bird hunting in the area

(05:37):
a few days before the murder. The story likely would
have fooled police, but a few days later, reporters working
the case uncovered letters from Leopold that matched the format
and style of the ransom note. The police then spoke
to the Leopold family's chauffeur, who revealed that he had
seen the two boys washing the interior of a rental

(05:57):
car after claiming to have spilled red wine in it.
When confronted with this evidence ten days after the murder,
both boys confessed their guilt and provided a detailed account
of how and why they did it. The subsequent trial
made headlines nationwide, not only because of the horrific nature
and bizarre motive of the crime, but because the boy's

(06:20):
parents had hired Clarence Darrow to lead the defense. Darrow
was one of the most famous and expensive criminal attorneys
of the era, having made a name for himself by
representing railway union leader Eugene Debs during the trial over
his role in the Pullman strike of eighteen ninety four.
Darrow knew that his clients would be convicted, as they

(06:42):
had both already signed full confessions. His goal was to
help them avoid the death penalty, something that would have
been next to impossible if the case had been decided
by a jury. To avoid that outcome, Darrow had his
clients plead guilty so that the sentencing would be left
up to the judge. With his client's guilt established from

(07:03):
the start, Darrow focused his time on building a compelling
argument against the death penalty. In a wide ranging eight
hour closing speech, he asserted that although his client's actions
were their own, their characters had been influenced by forces
beyond their control and should therefore be shown leniency. Why

(07:24):
did they kill little Bobby Franks? Darrow asked, not for money,
not for spite, not for hate. They killed him as
they might kill a spider or a fly for the experience.
They killed him because they were made that way. Because
somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making

(07:44):
up of the boy or the man, something slipped, and
those unfortunate lads sit here, hated, despised, outcasts, and the
community shouting for their blood. Most of Darrow's speech was
directed to the death penalty itself, which he had long
decried as a barbaric, vengeful form of punishment. He didn't

(08:06):
think the sentence had any place in a modern judicial system,
but especially not in a case concerning clients as young
as his. I am not pleading so much for these boys,
he said. I am pleading for the future. I am
pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not
control the hearts of men, when we can learn, by

(08:26):
reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life
is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute
of man. We can't say for certain that Darrow's speech
swayed the judge, but in the end he did as
the attorney asked and spared Leopold and Loeb from the
death penalty. Instead, they were sentenced to life in prison.

(08:51):
Richard Lobe served about a decade of his term before
being killed by a fellow inmate. Nathan Leopold served thirty
three years in prison and was released on parole in
nineteen fifty eight. In his youth, he had fancied himself
a superman, but at his parole hearing he said that
all he wanted now was the chance to be a

(09:12):
humble little person. If only he and his accomplice had
afforded that same chance to Bobby Franks, all three of
them could have been so much more. I'm Gabe blues
Gay and hopefully you now know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to

(09:34):
keep up with the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, feel free to send him my
way by writing to this day at iHeartMedia dot com.
Thanks to Kasby Bias for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again

(09:55):
tomorrow for another day in History class. The printer Picter Pick,
the Bolted