Nathan Leopold was my Father's Friend

George Barker could have ended up just another punk kid who turned to crime on the grimy streets of Chicago during the Depression. But, he didn't. Barker was smart, well-read, articulate and he wrote about his life behind bars and the people he met there. The Journal is proud to present a portion of Barker's story.


By Stan Barker

My father, George Barker, was born in Chicago one hundred years ago in 1911. Smart, cocky, rebellious, he grew up a wild teenager in Lakeview and Uptown in the Roaring Twenties. He and his friends began committing petty burglaries– grocery stores, barber shops– for kicks. He got caught at age 17 and was sent to the Reformatory at Pontiac, IL for 2 years.

When he got out he tried to go straight. He got a job. He met a girl. But it was the Depression now, and he lost his job. Then the father of his girl found out about his record, and wouldn’t let her see him any more. My dad became depressed and thought, “What’s the use?” One night he and an acquaintance burglarized another grocery store. There was no money so they took two cartons of cigarettes, which cost then $1.25 each. They got caught.

Thomas J. Courtney was the State’s Attorney then. Courtney was ambitious. He wanted to be Mayor. He wanted to be Governor. He needed to build a record of successful convictions. One way he did it was through heavy use of the “Hab” Act. The Illinois Habitual Criminal Act stated that if you were convicted a second time of the same offense, you could be given the maximum sentence for that offense. So, for two cartons of cigarettes-- $2.50– my father was given the maximum sentence for burglary...

Life in prison. With no hope for parole.

Just 22, he was sent to Joliet/Stateville, thrown in with murderers, psychopaths and sadistic guards. He learned to survive by recognizing and accepting each man for who-- and what– he was.

While incarcerated, he kept a written record of life in Joliet/Stateville, from the 1930s to the 1950s– the brutal, inhumane conditions of the time, the warden who ruled with an iron fist, the men– good and bad– who were his brothers behind bars. These writings form a historical record, never before published. Only parts of his manuscript still survive. I have filled in the missing pieces and am currently looking for a publisher for My Father’s Story.

My father was in the Old Prison on Collins Street in Joliet when Richard Loeb was murdered [1936] in the new prison, Stateville, by fellow inmate James Day. My father wrote:

I was in the Hole in the Old Prison when they brought over Jimmy Day. Comments had already seeped into Solitary that some kind of blow-up had occurred at the New Joint. Day was afraid, shaking and mumbling to himself. He wanted to whisper about it but was evasive on the details. I got out of the Hole the next morning. Back at work, the screw on duty, knowing I’d been in Solitary with Day, quietly said to me, “They’ll never convict him; this town hates Loeb and Leopold.”

It was Johnny Dorf, “Little Duke”, who sparked my curiosity about what really happened. Johnny had been over to the New Prison a month before, and having associated with Dick and Nate at Jewish holidays he knew a bit of the inside details. He said Loeb made the mistake of telling Day he was an intellectual equal. Though records belied this– Loeb had access to Day’s psychiatric and punishment reports from the Boy’s School at St. Charles– it was what he wanted Day to think. Instead of saying “I’ll take care of you,” he pulled the equality pitch. Loeb liked to play cat and mouse. It was not unlike the game he had played with the police before they knew who killed Bobby Franks.

What began as “Good morning, Dick”, and “Hi, Jimmy”, became “Good morning, Dick”... and no answer. The love affair was over and a forlorn Jimmy didn’t know where to turn.

That’s where fellow inmate George Bliss came in. His agitation simmered a long time. Strangely, it wasn’t Loeb that Bliss hated as much as he hated Leopold, nicknaming him “The Leper” and sneering at Nate’s IQ. It was a personality clash that smoldered a long time. Bliss adroitly fed the flames.

Official reports say Jimmy walked into the shower room where Loeb, lathered up, was waiting. Loeb is said to have pulled a razor and swung on Jimmy, who wrestled the razor away from Loeb and slashed him to death.

That was Jimmy Day’s defense... an innocent young man, protecting his virginity! So they acquitted Day and that wound up the case...Or did it? Think this over...

Loeb was about 5 foot 9 inches tall, athletic, exercised daily, and could box. Day was about 5'6", frail and could not box. Now, a 5'6", skinny kid walks in on a man 5' 9", waiting with a razor in his hand. The taller, more athletic man lunges with the razor; the skinny, shorter kid takes it away without a cut on himself and kills his attacker!

Pictures of Loeb after death went to the prison Bureau of Identification; I saw them when I worked there in later years. Noticeable were the slashes... 58 of them!

Who first said, “Hell hath no fury...”?

The murder of Dick Loeb brought on another round of ‘reforms’ at the old and new prisons. Rules were changed. Prisoners were shifted from one place to the other.

In 1938, four years into his sentence, my dad was transferred from the Old Joint to the new prison, Stateville, four miles away.
One of the friends he made there, a cellmate, was Joe Majczek, the wrongly-convicted man whose story became the Jimmy Stewart film Call Northside 777. Another was the infamous Nathan Leopold.

From My Father’s Story:

When he first told me this, I couldn’t understand it. How could my dad have been friends with one of the most notorious murderers of the Twentieth Century... one of the”thrill killers” of a 14 year old boy? My dad tried to explain it to me.

In prison,” he said, “you learn to accept people for the way they are ‘now’, in the present. Not for what they did in the past. Everyone in prison did something wrong in their past, sometimes something horrible. The question becomes: Is he an okay guy now? Nate was.”

My father believed Leopold when he said that he, at least, never intended to murder Bobby Franks. “Nate always said the plan was to just kidnap him . He was driving the car while Loeb was in the backseat with the boy. According to Nate, Loeb suddenly decided to kill Bobby Franks, and did it before Nate could do anything to stop him.

“From that point on, Nate was an accomplice, as guilty of the murder as Loeb. Loeb was the dominant personality of the two, and had always bossed Nate around. Nate came into his own as a person in the joint after Loeb was killed.”

Why did my dad befriend Nathan Leopold? The main reason was intelligence. My father had always been intellectual. Now he was stuck in a world where the majority of men-- cons and screws alike-- were “dese, dems, and dohs”. He hungered for intelligent conversation, mental stimulation... a life of the mind that could lift him beyond the limitations of his life behind bars. Leopold had scored between 205 and 210 on the Army Alpha IQ Tests. My father had scored 192. It was water seeking its own level.

They shared a love of books, and especially, languages. Leopold taught school at Stateville. My dad did not teach or attend but he and Leopold discussed books and ideas and studied languages together.

The terrible thrill killer may well have saved my father’s life by giving him an mental equal to relate to in the nightmare world of prison.

Leopold tried to help my dad get his manuscript published. From My Father's Story:

One day early in 1943, my dad was at his job when Father [Eligius] Weir (Stateville’s Catholic chaplain, a friend to both my dad and Leopold) walked in along with a well-tanned man in a expensive suit. Weir came over to my dad and said, “George, I want you to meet someone. This is Bryan Foy, from Twentieth Century Fox Studios in Hollywood.”

My father knew, of course, who Foy was. The son of vaudeville legend Eddie Foy, as a child Bryan Foy and his brothers and sisters had made up the famous “Seven Little Foys” musical comedy act. He went on to become a movie producer, first at Warner Bros., now at Fox. The prison had been buzzing for some time with the news that Foy was making a new picture, “Roger Touhy, Gangster,” [released 1944] based on the Touhy-Banghart escape, and had come to Stateville to interview Touhy and scout locations. But he had something else on his mind as he shook my dad’s hand.

“I’ve been talking with Father Weir,” said Foy, “and earlier I spoke with Nathan Leopold. Both of them told me you’ve written quite a prison book. I’d like to read it. Maybe we can do something with it.”

As my father recalled it all:

Before World War II, newspapers and radio liked to depict us inmates as simians of the lowest order. As an angry young man, I wrote a book in dissent. Doing that, of course, was an infraction of the rules. So from the outset, caution was priority. The shadow of the Hole loomed over every line, every page.

“Meatball” [the prisoners’ nickname for Warden Joseph Ragen] often boasted, “When three convicts talk together, two of them are mine.” His fifth column of rats functioned well, but what he forgot was– we had the third man! In a community of several thousand men, that gave us a working minority. Beating “Meatball’s” system was easy if one was careful.

Notes were made in triplicate in case of discovery or loss. They were hidden throughout the prison in office files, stock rooms and tool cribs, library shelves and general store canisters, power house recesses, chapel offices, the soap factory, even the office for the Hole. [A further precaution– copies were written in six different languages my father knew.]

Doctor Donald Clemmer, the prison psychologist, read it and believed in its message. He was a bit of a stormy character himself, later becoming a controversial Director of Federal Corrections in Washington, D.C. (In talks and papers he referred to me as a “Jean Valjean of America”.) He smuggled the manuscript out for me and got it to my father.

Bryan Foy, studio executive who came to the prison to make a movie about Roger Touhy, learned about the book, contacted my father, and took the manuscript back to Hollywood for critique. Hedda Hopper, Sid Skolsky and Nate Gross, entertainment reporters of the time, all mentioned it in their columns...

Hedda Hopper was the queen of Hollywood columnists in those days, syndicated in newspapers all over the country. My father had told me many times that she had written about him, but it wasn’t until I started work on this book that I found the actual column:

“LOOKING AT HOLLYWOOD“ By Hedda Hopper
“Hollywood, Cal., Feb. 26 [1943]– When Producer Brynie Foy went to interview Roger Touhy about his life story and take some pictures at Joliet prison, he found Touhy in the hospital, after 16 days in solitary confinement (but they’re no longer solitary– it’s two men to a cell.) While there, Brynie saw Leopold, of the Loeb and Leopold case, who asked that his name be taken off the cell when it was photographed. Leopold got bored being a trusty in the library, so was washing windows.
“Brynie was handed 17 different stories written by inmates. One he thinks is a magnificent yarn, called ‘Lords of the Lamps’, written by William Barker [sic], age 31, who’s already served 11 years. Barker has learned eight languages at Joliet. He’s starting now on Japanese. The book’s so good Foy is trying to have it published for him.”

Although my dad told me many times about Hopper’s column, he never mentioned that she got his name wrong. I imagine the mistake occurred because his manuscript had my grandfather Will’s name and return address on it– naturally, my father didn’t want a publisher writing directly to him at Stateville, where “Meatball’s” censors would open and read the letter first. Sadly though, Foy was unable to get the book published or filmed. As my dad wrote:

It wasn’t the blood and guts type of book that would have made the typical prison film. It was too philosophical and too pedantic... too anxious to show the world that we convicts were not all morons. In that day, that’s not what producers or publishers were looking for. The rejection letter from one New York literary agent gave all of us cons a good laugh. His advice? “Why don’t you write on a subject you know?”

“Lords of the Lamps” was the original title of my dad’s book. What it referred to– something from the Bible? The Arabian Nights?– I don’t know. After its initial rejection my father decided to rework it, and in our talks, he always referred to it by the second working title he gave it, “Compassion, Compression, Compatriot.” As I came to understand more about my dad, I found it a very apt title, reflecting the main sentiment he learned behind bars (Compassion), the terrible restriction of freedom he faced (Compression), and the way he came to accept his fellow inmates, despite whatever they had done, as men the same as him (Compatriots). Again, though... hardly the typical ‘Bang Bang’ crime story title.

The manuscript itself went through quite a lot over the years... it was typed and retyped, hidden and smuggled, and later, moved with our family from house to house, and from Chicago to downstate Illinois and back again, at least twice. Unfortunately– but not surprisingly, given all that– parts of it were lost over the years. The fragments that are left are what I’m using here.

When America entered World War II, my father found a possible way to get out of prison. Again, Nate Leopold was part of the story:

September, 1944:

Nate Leopold was working in the prison hospital when Warden Ragen came in with a visitor. He introduced the man as Dr. Alf S. Alving of the University of Chicago Medical School. Ragen told Leopold and the other six inmates working at the Hospital to step into the Hospital office, that Dr. Alving wanted to speak to them.

Alving told the inmates that the U.S. government needed human ‘guinea pigs’ to test new, experimental drugs being developed to try and cure malaria. Malaria was “the number-one medical problem of the war in the Pacific.” An estimated 85% of our forces there were coming down with the disease. According to the doctor, we were losing “more men to malaria than to enemy bullets.”

The government felt that the prisoners at Stateville might be willing to volunteer to be infected with malaria and test the as-yet untried drugs. Alving asked the inmate hospital workers whether they thought enough men would volunteer.

Leopold asked, “How many will you need?” Alving said perhaps as many as two hundred. Leopold thought a moment, then said, “You’ll get two or three times that many.”

Leopold told my dad about the project when he got off work that day. The drugs might prove to be toxic– perhaps fatally so. And there were no promises of anything in return for volunteering. But Leopold remembered reading about Dr. Walter Reed and the volunteers in the fight against yellow fever. The nation had considered them heroes. He thought this new project might change public opinion about convicts.

He told my father, “George– if they ever shorten our sentences, it could just be for this.”

Of course, there was the chance they might die instead... But if they didn’t volunteer, with Life sentences they were sure to die in prison anyway.

Nearly five hundred inmates volunteered the day the project was announced, my dad and Leopold among them. Every man was tested to make sure he was in good health, physically fit to be subjected to the drugs. Forty men were selected to be the first subjects. To my dad’s disappointment, he was not part of that first group. Leopold wasn’t either, but he was working in the hospital with the doctors from the University of Chicago and the Army medical corps. “Be patient, George,” he counseled my father. “You’ll get your chance.”

Originally, the project was only intended to test the toxicity of the new drugs. But by March, 1945, the scope of the experiments expanded. The entire third floor of the prison hospital was given over to the project. Laboratories were set up. Army and University personnel increased... and now included women– nurses and lab technicians.

( Nate Leopold noted: “Many of the fellows had not been that close to a woman for years, and everybody felt a little shy and strange. But the girls themselves soon put everybody at ease. They were so genuinely friendly, while at the same time keeping their dignity...” Yet, even so... as part of the program, each volunteer’s blood pressure was tested every week. “The first week the nurses were present, everyone’s blood pressure rose... (an average) twenty points.”)

With the laboratories installed and operational, the doctors could now begin the most dangerous part of the project– actually infecting the inmates with malaria, to test how well the new drugs worked.

April 1945:

My dad was chosen for the second group of test subjects, the 45th man in the group to be bitten and infected with malaria. The group he was in was to test a family of drugs known as 8-amino quinolines. A previously tested drug of this type had proved to be highly toxic, causing violent side reactions. The new versions tested now on my dad and the other volunteers would be unpredictable, but no less dangerous.

My father soon was suffering the usual symptoms of malaria. Chills that made his body shake and his teeth chatter uncontrollably. Then the opposite– so hot he was burning up, drenching his hospital bed with his sweat despite applications of ice packs. Some men had it so bad they were placed in tubs of ice. Seeing this, my dad couldn’t help but think about the mustard gas victims of the last war, those poor bastards he’d seen up in Canada as a boy, submerged in tubs of water to ease the burning of their skin...

He had a fever for thirty days, with temperatures of 106. That wasn’t that bad. Some men hit 108. He was racked with blinding headaches, so severe they felt like your head was going to split in two. When the headaches subsided, they left him dazed, not quite all there, not sure if he was dreaming or awake.

A month after he was released from the hospital, he had a relapse. He expected it– the doctors had warned him he could be in for as many as four relapses. This time the doctors needed volunteers to carry the strain of malaria. It meant going through the fever without any drugs for 14 days, so mosquitoes could bite him, feed on him, and get the malarial strain. My dad volunteered, one of 4 or 5 men at Stateville to carry the strain. He wrote:

Conway was doubled up over a pillow; it was his sixth day with crystallized urine. Most of us were either shivering under blankets in summer heat or running a temp’ of 106 degrees or better.

Last night the Army nurses had to fight with “Red” Cohen to get him into a tub filled with ice cubes. It wasn’t a prolonged fight... “Red”, like most of us, was susceptible to women. The thing was, despite his temp’ of 108.2, he had just bid seven no trump in Bridge on his partner’s Smith bid. To hell with the fever... four cartons of smokes (prison “money”) were riding on the game!

That night Nielsen went into a coma. Who was next was an unanswerable question. Some of the guys turned blue for a while from the untested drugs... but pulled through.

In those early days of volunteerism, while the War was still going on, the men kidded and scoffed and made light of the deal but each man was proud of what he was doing. No cure was yet known; no reward was promised, but down deep inside we gambled on maybe...

Leopold said to me, “George, if ever it can happen, this is it.” So... we bet our lives.

The gamble paid off. For his participation in the medical experiments, and working with Leopold on measuring other subjects’ blood counts, Governor Dwight Green commuted my father’s sentence to 45 years. This made him eligible for a parole, which he received in 1949.

He met the girl who would become my mother, a professional musician who played nightclubs in the Loop and the Chicken Basket in Willowbrook on Route 66. They fell in love, and made plans to marry.

Then, for sneaking into Chicago to see her, the State threw my father back into prison for violation of parole. This time he fought back in court. And after serving twenty years for two cartons of cigarettes, my father won a complete release from prison.


(Above: Happier times. George Barker and his wife, Jeannette, in 1953.)

One month after his release, my father and mother were married. In November 1956, I was born. My dad wanted his friend Nate, still in prison, to be my godfather, but Leopold told him,

“I’m too notorious, George. You don’t want to saddle the boy with the ‘thrill-killer’ for a godfather.”


[Nathan Leopold was released from prison in 1958. He died in Puerto Rico in 1971]

STAN BARKER is a former Contributing Editor for The Artist’s Magazine, sister publication to Writer’s Digest, and has written for Chicago History Magazine and The Encyclopedia of Chicago.He may be contacted via email: StanBrkr at aol dot com

Copyright 2011 Stan Barker; no portion of this article may be reprinted without the express permission of the author.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: My dad is not mentioned in Leopold’s book, Life Plus 99 Years, because— according to my father– when the book was being published and Leopold was being paroled in 1958, he told my dad, “You have a family and a business now. You don’t need me dredging up your past.” However proof of my father’s friendship with Nathan Leopold– their studying languages together and working on measuring the malaria subjects’ blood counts– can be found in Parole Board documents in my father’s file.

Recommended reading:

Leopoldandloab.com

"Nathan Leopold and Chicago Criminology" by Laurel Duchowny

Photo credits:

George Barker, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 25, 1929
Photo of James Day: TruTV.com
"Roger Touhy: Last of the Gangsters" poster: Tuohy's of the World
Nathan Leopold (Wikipedia)
George Barker and his wife, Jeannette photo provided by the author

The Strange Case of Leopold and Loeb: Part 2

By Peter J. Spalding

When Clarence Darrow introduced himself to Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, they weren't the least bit impressed.

Both boys were on trial for their lives, and all the Chicago papers had called for them to be hanged. Leopold and Loeb needed the best lawyer they could find, but the one who stood before them was a frumpy old man.

"My first impression was horror," Leopold later wrote. "For on the other side of the bars stood one of the least prepossessing, one of the least impressive-looking human beings I have ever seen. The day was warm, and Mr. Darrow was wearing a light seer-sucker jacket. Nothing wrong with that, surely. Only this one looked as if he had slept in it. His shirt was wrinkled, too, and he must have had eggs for breakfast that morning. I could see vestiges. Or perhaps he hadn't changed shirts since the day before. His tie was askew.... He looked for all the world like an innocent hayseed, a bumpkin who might have difficulty finding his way around the city. Could this be the renowned Darrow (for I had heard much of his reputation in the last twenty-four hours)?"

Actually, Darrow had been building his reputation for decades. His résumé was practically a history of late-19th-century Chicago, and he had a knack for taking on unpopular causes. Among other things, he had helped secure pardons for three accused Haymarket bombers. He had represented assassin Eugene Prendergast after the shooting of Mayor Carter Harrison. He had also defended labor leader Eugene Debs against charges stemming from the Pullman Strike.

Darrow had also gotten his share of hard knocks. The low point had come in Los Angeles in 1911. Darrow had represented two labor organizers accused of bombing the anti-union Los Angeles Times, which had left 21 people dead. Union leaders were convinced the suspects had been framed, and they saw Darrow as their savior. But before the case got to trial, Darrow realized that his clients had in fact done it. He knew he had no chance of winning, so he convinced the defendants to plead guilty, which the labor movement saw as a betrayal. On top of that, one of Darrow's assistants was caught trying to bribe a juror, which nearly got Darrow disbarred. By the time it was over, organized labor had lost all credibility in L.A., and Darrow had agreed to stop practicing law in California.

Leopold and Loeb would be his biggest case to date. He'd need to defend an indefensible killing; he'd need to confront overwhelming evidence; and he'd need to win over a furious public. And he'd need to do it all in the glare of the national spotlight.

"I felt that I would get a fair fee if I went into the case, but money never influenced my stand one way or another," Darrow wrote in his autobiography. "I knew of no good reason for refusing, but I was sixty-seven years old, and very weary.... I went in, to do what I could for sanity and humanity against the wave of hatred and malice that, as ever, was masquerading under its usual nom de plume: 'Justice.'"


Darrow quickly ruled out one angle of attack. An insanity defense was the most obvious way to go, but Darrow knew it wouldn't work. His clients were so smart and articulate that they wouldn't come across as lunatics in the usual sense.

"I'm not insane, and I'm not going to be made to appear insane," Leopold told the Chicago Herald and Examiner. "I'm sane-- as sane as you are."

Darrow decided to try an untested idea. No matter what his clients said, the fact remained that their actions made no sense. They had killed a teenaged kid in cold blood, and as their attorney, Darrow had to offer some kind of explanation. So he hired a panel of psychologists.

The prosecution had already hired the best analysts in Chicago, but they hadn't shed any light on what had happened. These doctors had followed the conventional wisdom of the time, which was based on 19th-century thinking. They assumed that a patient's mental health was driven by his physical health, and physically speaking, the boys' medical history was routine. Leopold had a calcified pineal gland, but that was thought to be a vestigial organ, and his condition was common in adults anyway. Loeb's voice had changed later than most, and he'd been in a car accident at the age of 15. None of that could explain-- much less justify-- what they'd done.

Darrow took a completely different tack. He had no use for traditional psychologists; he went for the avant-garde instead. He cast a nationwide net, bringing in the most distinguished physicians from New York, Washington, and Boston. Darrow hired endocrinologists-- who had just started to theorize that chemical imbalances could affect behavior-- and he sought out believers in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. All of these theories were very new, and many Americans actively dismissed them. But Darrow knew they would be key to his case.

The boys seemed to treat it all as a joke. Loeb hardly cooperated, and Leopold openly challenged his doctors. "I suppose the function of all this is to prolong my life as something worthwhile," Leopold said in one session. "I can’t quite correlate that with my philosophy, but... my folks have decided on all this. Of course I am desperately trying to co-operate with them. As for me, I think this medical ‘Psychiatric’ stuff is all horseshit. Now, I don’t know what it’s all about, you’ve not let me in on it, but if you insist on a lumbar puncture you must have good reasons, which you think out-weigh the discomfort for me."

But as the doctors dug deeper, they found that the boys were a psychologist's catnip. Every piece of the story seemed to play into Freud's theories.

Leopold, for example, had developed a serious hangup over his mother's death. Her doctors had told her to stop having kids after her third son, but she'd gotten pregnant with Leopold-- her fourth-- and her body had never recovered. She was an invalid from there on out, until she died of nephritis when Leopold was 15. Leopold blamed himself, saying "my presence is the reason for her absence." He hadn't had a healthy relationship with a woman since.

Loeb's mother, like most society ladies, had had nannies take care of her kids. Because of that, Loeb's real mother figure was his governess Emily Struthers. She was the one who'd pushed him so hard in school, to the point where he'd gotten into college at age 13. That had come at the expense of a normal childhood, since he'd rarely made real friends or played with other kids. "I always obeyed her to the minute-- second," Loeb said. "Her word was law. To myself I would think certain things were not as they should be. I would brood some. To get by her I formed the habit of lying.... When she left I sort of broke loose."

Both boys also had active fantasy lives, and they incorporated each other into their dreams. Loeb imagined himself to be a famous "master criminal." Leopold's fantasies revolved around a "king and a slave." Sometimes he saw himself in the role of the king, but usually Loeb was the king with Leopold as the slave.

The boys' obsessions-- especially with each other-- seemed to know no bounds. Even years later, Leopold seemed downright smitten with Loeb. "Everybody went for the guy," he wrote in his autobiography, "and rightly so. There wasn't a sunnier, pleasanter, more likable fellow in the world. Why, I thought more of Dick than of all the rest of my friends put together. His charm was magnetic-- maybe mesmeric is the better word. He could charm anybody he had a mind to.... But then there was that other side to him. In the crime, for instance, he didn't have a single scruple of any kind. He wasn't immoral; he was just plain amoral-- unmoral, that is. Right and wrong didn't exist. He'd do anything-- anything. And it was all a game to him."

That was what ultimately caused the boys' downfall. As Leopold and Loeb drew closer, their "games" turned into crimes. They set fires and went on joyrides with stolen cars. They outwitted the police every time, so they assumed they were invincible.

It all came to a head on November 11, 1923, when they burglarized a Zeta Beta Tau fraternity house. Loeb had pledged ZBT as an undergrad, but they had only reluctantly let him in because of rumors that he and Leopold were homosexual. The burglary seemed to be Loeb's revenge. But on the drive home, the boys got into a bitter argument; Leopold thought the crime was sloppy and juvenile, while Loeb felt betrayed at his friend's lack of support. Their relationship threatened to fall apart until they worked out a "compact."


Under their agreement, they would keep their relationship going while they planned the perfect crime. And that, in turn, would become the plot to kill Bobby Franks.

Those revelations turned the case upside down. They didn't justify the murder, by any means, but they did reveal the boys' state of mind. And as the details became public, Leopold and Loeb started to garner sympathy. Fewer and fewer papers called for them to be hanged. A few flappers even showed up at the courthouse, wanting to meet the boys.

Darrow didn't intend to get Leopold and Loeb off the hook altogether. But he did want to save them from the gallows, so he convinced them to plead guilty and waive their right to a jury trial. The papers kept on calling the case "the trial of the century," but technically it was now just a sentencing hearing. The only question was whether the boys would end up with life in prison, or death.

In court, Darrow reigned supreme. He hardly bothered to dispute the prosecution's witnesses, because the basic case facts weren't in dispute. But he did parade his doctors through the witness stand, and he spent plenty of time laying out his own views on the subject.

Darrow had always opposed the death penalty, and now he was able to broadcast his views on a national stage. He took three days to deliver his closing statement, and his words were so eloquent that death-penalty opponents still use them to this day:

Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young... [they were] boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was given to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads....

But when you are pitying the father and the mother of poor Bobby Franks, what about the fathers and mothers of these two unfortunate boys, and what about the unfortunate boys themselves, and what about all the fathers and all the mothers and all the boys and all the girls who tread a dangerous maze in darkness from birth to death? Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them? You simply show your ignorance and your hate when you say it. You may here and there cure hatred with love and understanding, but you can only add fuel to the flames by cruelty and hate....

I know that every step in the progress of humanity has been met and opposed by prosecutors, and many times by courts. I know that when poaching and petty larceny was punishable by death in England, juries refused to convict. They were too humane to obey the law; and judges refused to sentence.... If these two boys die on the scaffold, which I can never bring myself to imagine, if they do die on the scaffold, the details of this will be spread over the world. Every newspaper in the United States will carry a full account. Every newspaper of Chicago will be filled with the gruesome details. It will enter every home and every family. Will it make men better or make men worse?...
I know the future is with me and what I stand for here; not merely for the lives of these two unfortunate lads, but for all boys and girls; all of the young, and as far as possible, for all of the old. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love. I know the future is on my side. Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past.

In the end, Judge John Caverly wasn't swayed by the psychologists' findings, Darrow's closing statements, or any of the other evidence presented. Darrow had certainly won in the court of public opinion. But the only thing Judge Caverly considered was that there was no precedent for the State of Illinois hanging a youth. He said he had no choice but to sentence the boys to life plus ninety-nine years in prison.

For Loeb, it was indeed a life sentence. He would spend the next eleven years in jail, until he was stabbed by a fellow inmate. Leopold was incarcerated in the same prison, and he rushed to the infirmary as soon as he heard the news. Loeb died on January 26, 1936, with Leopold at his side.

There was no denying the irony in Loeb's death. His killer claimed to be fending off his sexual advances, but his story didn't hold up under scrutiny, and his true motive was never clear. That meant that Richard Loeb, who had committed the ultimate senseless crime, had now been killed in a senseless crime himself. And as before, his story made all the front pages; in Chicago it even upstaged the death of Britain's King George V, which had happened the same week.

Leopold did survive his incarceration. In 1949 Governor Adlai Stevenson commuted his sentence, and in 1958 Leopold was granted parole. By that point he was expressing remorse for his crime, although many people doubted his sincerity. He moved to Puerto Rico to escape the publicity, got married, and tried to build some semblance of a normal life. He kept mostly to himself until died on August 29, 1971.

Today, nearly 90 years after the murder, the case has mostly faded from popular culture. It has been chronicled in a few books-- most notably Hal Higdon's Crime of the Century-- but it has never appeared in the movies, aside from some heavily fictionalized films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. The more famous cases today include the Charles Manson murders and the O.J. Simpson trial, which were as sensational in their era as the Leopold and Loeb case was in its own.

The scene of the crime is most notable now for its Secret Service presence, since President Obama's Chicago home lies just around the corner. Bobby Franks's home is in danger of demolition, but for now it still stands at the corner of Ellis Avenue and Hyde Park Boulevard. The homes of the Leopold and Loeb families are both gone, but certain pieces-- such as the Loebs' tennis courts-- are still there. Wolf Lake, where the killers hid Bobby's body, has been preserved as part of William Powers State Recreational Area.

More importantly, the impact of the case has never faded away. Today almost every serious crime involves psychological evaluations. Freudian psychology has become the conventional wisdom-- in no small part because of Leopold and Loeb-- and chemical imbalances are common knowledge.

A few things will never change. The killing of Bobby Franks is still as inexplicable as ever, and it probably always will be. And the drama, the weirdness, and the horror of the case will never fade away.

Peter J. Spalding likes to write. He has recently completed a screenplay based on the facts of the Leopold & Loeb case and is also the author of 1871: A Novel of the Great Fire, two stage plays and five additional screenplays. In addition, Spalding maintains a popular blog, "Finding the Write Words." A former Chicagoan, Spalding now resides in California.

Recommended reading:

The Leopold and Loeb Trial (Clarence Darrow Collection)
Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (Famous American Trials)

The Strange Case of Leopold and Loeb: Part 1

By Peter J. Spalding

The biggest scandal of 1920's Chicago unfolded innocuously at first, when 14-year-old Bobby Franks missed his family dinner.

It was a Wednesday evening, May 21, 1924. Bobby had just umpired a ballgame down the street from his Ellis Avenue home, and no one seemed to have seen him since. Bobby's father Jacob sensed that something was wrong; but even as he started calling Bobby's friends, he could hardly have imagined what was about to happen.

Chicago, of course, was no stranger to scandal. The month before, Al Capone had taken over Cicero's city government in the bloodiest election Illinois had ever seen, and Capone's brother Frank had been killed in the process. Jazz and drink were everywhere, as were gambling, prostitution, and a slew of other vices. Girls' hemlines were rising, and their hairstyles were shortening, both of which sent older generations into a tizzy.

When Bobby disappeared, the city was just wrapping up its sensational "jazz killer" trial. A young married woman had shot a man in her bedroom. Initially she said the dead man was a burglar, but then she admitted they'd been having an affair. In quick succession she hired a fast-talking lawyer, faked a pregnancy, and claimed self-defense, all of which would eventually get her acquitted. A prominent Tribune reporter, Maurine Dallas Watkins, would later use the scandal as the basis for her play Chicago.

Before long though, Bobby's disappearance would overshadow everything else in the news. The Franks family was wealthy, well-connected, and lived in one of the safest neighborhoods in town. It seemed inconceivable that anything bad could have happened. But within a few hours, Bobby's mother got a call saying her son had been kidnapped. The ransom note came the next morning, and its words were chillingly calm and collected:

Dear Sir:

As you no doubt know by this time, your son has been kidnapped. Allow us to assure you that he is at present well and safe. You need fear no physical harm for him, provided you live up carefully to the following instructions and to such others as you will receive by future communications. Should you, however, disobey any of our instructions, even slightly, his death will be the penalty.

The kidnapper went on to demand $10,000 in cash. He said further instructions would come by phone that afternoon. Then he said:

As a final word of warning, this is an extremely commercial proposition and we are prepared to put our threat into execution should we have reasonable grounds to believe that you have committed an infraction of the above instructions. However, should you carefully follow our instructions to the letter, we can assure you that your son will be safely returned to you within six hours of our receipt of the money.

Yours truly,
GEORGE JOHNSON

The note had clearly been written by a well-spoken, well-educated criminal. But at that moment, the family's only focus was on getting Bobby back. Jacob Franks drove to his bank and withdrew hundreds of $20 and $50 bills. The kidnappers sent him a cab and told him to drive to a drugstore, where they would call him with more instructions. But before the cab could go anywhere, Bobby's uncle Edwin Greshan called with bad news.

Bobby, it turned out, was already dead. His corpse had been found near Wolf Lake that morning, and Greshan had just identified him.

With that, the whole scheme unraveled. All thoughts of the ransom disappeared, and the police embarked on a citywide manhunt. The press jumped on the story, portraying it as a senseless tragedy, a high-stakes heist, a heinous crime, and a perplexing mystery, all rolled into one. The Chicago Tribune offered a $5,000 reward for an exclusive scoop. The Herald and Examiner matched the offer and threw in an extra $50 for whomever could come up with the best theory for what might have happened.

"Police call the crime the strangest and most baffling homicide in Chicago's history," the Associated Press reported.

The truth was even stranger than the papers had thought. A week later, the killers turned up under the Franks family's nose-- and they turned out to be the most unlikely murderers imaginable.


Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, seemed like model citizens. They were both accomplished child prodigies who had entered college when most of their peers were just starting high school. In May 1924, they were 19 and 18 years old, respectively, and were graduate students at the University of Chicago. Leopold had been accepted into Harvard Law School and was set to transfer that fall.

Their pedigree was impeccable too. Leopold's father was the heir to a shipping fortune as well as a self-made businessman in his own right, while his mother came from a prominent banking family. Loeb's father was one of the top executives who had turned Sears, Roebuck, and Company into a mail-order juggernaut.

So when Leopold and Loeb were arrested for Bobby Franks's murder, the news struck the city-- and in fact the whole country-- like a thunderclap.

The Chicago papers pushed all other news aside. The Tribune, for example, devoted almost its entire front section to the case. Even hundreds of miles away, the New York Times splashed the headline across its front page: "TWO RICH STUDENTS CONFESS TO KILLING FRANKS BOY IN CAR." The Los Angeles Times ran a breathless "EXCLUSIVE DISPATCH" detailing the confessions. Hundreds of other papers ran similar pieces.

"For some reason," Leopold would later say to his parole board, "back in 1924, the newspapers found in [our] particular case apparently something that would sell, something that would interest the public, whether it was youth, the position of our families, the fact that we were college students, a combination of these things, I really don't know."


In truth, though, Leopold and Loeb invited all that attention. They took to the spotlight like natural celebrities: they read all their own press clippings, they made sure to look good on camera, and they knew just what to say to push reporters' buttons. On June 1-- a day after their confessions-- they showed the police how they'd committed the murder, and they let the press come along on a tour of the crime scenes. Along the way, the boys spouted off plenty of sound bites.

"This thing will be the making of me," Loeb said as the motorcade made its way through the city. "I'll spend a few years in jail and I'll be released. I'll come out to a new life. I'll go to work and I'll work hard and I'll amount to something, have a career."

Leopold seemed downright proud of his crime. "There was nothing flamboyant in that [ransom] letter," he said. "It was concise and well phrased. It instilled terror. And it certainly impelled action." He went on to tell the Tribune that "we even rehearsed the kidnapping at least three times, carrying it through in all the details, lacking only the boy we were to kidnap and kill."

"My mother wouldn't believe me," Loeb complained. "I told her it was true, but she wouldn't believe me. What hurts is that she won't believe. Even now I'm sure she doesn't think I did it. That hurts-- a mother's faith, the disgrace to the family."

The most infamous quote of all came from Leopold: "It was just an experiment. It is as easy for us to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin."

That was the part that upset the public the most, because Leopold and Loeb had no real motive or explanation for what they'd done. They had killed Bobby Franks for no particular reason, and they didn't seem the slightest bit ashamed.

Even the ransom was just incidental. The boys were so rich that they didn't need $10,000, nor did they have any real use for it. Leopold admitted that spending the money would've aroused suspicion, so he had planned to "hide it away, either in a safety deposit box or some other safe place, for a year, and then spend it very carefully." He later said that "the money consideration only came in afterwards, and never was important.... The money was a part of our objective, as was also the commission of the crime; but that was not the exact motive, but that came afterwards."

At least legally speaking, it seemed like an open-and-shut case. Leopold and Loeb had both confessed, and aside from a few minor details, their stories checked out. The physical evidence and the witnesses all told the same tale. The only question seemed to be how quickly the boys would be hanged.

But there the story took another unexpected turn. The most well-respected but controversial attorney in America had agreed to take on the case. Clarence Darrow felt the boys were being tried in the papers when they needed to be tried in court; and he was determined to fix that.

Darrow would not disappoint. Over the next few weeks, he would turn the story of Leopold and Loeb on its ear.

NEXT Time: The Strange Case of Leopold and Loeb: Part 2

Peter J. Spalding likes to write. He has recently completed a screenplay based on the facts of the Franks murder. He is also the author of 1871: A Novel of the Great Fire, two stage plays and five additional screenplays. In addition, Spalding maintains a popular blog, "Finding the Write Words."


Recommended reading:

Leopold and Loeb (Chicago History Online)

See also: Chicago Daily News photos; Leopold and Loeb

Above photos provided by the author.