The
competition from Chicago alone includes many legendary crimes: John Wayne Gacy,
the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre & the entire Capone-era, Silas Jayne, the
Spilotro brothers, and Richard Speck; yet only the Leopold & Loeb murder earned the moniker of The
Crime of the Century. Although
the crime took place 88 years ago, its major details are still well known. Hal Higdon’s book on the crime, trial and
aftermath fills in the less current details in a manner that leaves one rapidly
turning to the next page, as though it were a “who done it” on a best seller
list.
The
book recaps the true story of a pre-meditated murder, with a victim picked at
random. The victim, Bobby Franks, and
his murderers Nathan Loeb and Richard Leopold Jr., were all college students
living in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, then the address of the city’s elite. What was their motive? It is thought to have been curiosity, thrill,
and a belief that their intellectual superiority entitled them to test out if
they could commit the perfect crime.
If
you are a resident of Chicago, the names and places are completely familiar.
The book reads much like Erik Larson’s The
Devil in the White City in its connection to the city’s geography and
social structure. An equally frightening
comparison would be Gene O’Shea’s nonfiction book Unbridled Rage: A True Story of Organized Crime, Corruption, and Murder
in Chicago detailing the murder of three boys who disappeared on their way
to a movie in the Loop in 1955, but expanding well beyond that incident.
The
book Leopold & Loeb plays out on
so many levels that it is difficult to structure. First of course, is the crime story
itself. How these two young men planned
this murder down to minute detail, and yet in retrospect, seemed to want to get
caught. In fact, in those days, long before
the Miranda decision, they confessed to nearly everything, even aiding police
in locating missing evidence, seemingly pleased with their efforts, though
disappointed they made an error.
Yet
another level involves the time period, 1924, the mid-point of Prohibition, the
ascendancy of the Capone reign of terror in Chicago. Yet the endless front page coverage that
summer wasn’t about Al Capone, Bugsy Malone or blatant police corruption, it
was about two egg-heads, one even an ornithologist, who committed just one of
the 177 murders registered in the city in the first six months of the
year.
It
was the period of Chicago history immortalized in The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when six daily
newspapers fought for circulation by trying to out scoop and out sensationalize
each other. The story was ready made:
two kids from good families, prominent in the business community,
students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, both with
genius IQ’s, and rumored to be “perverts,” an emphasis considered more damaging
than the murder. And it was a story with
the never completely answered question: why?
And
then there was the trial, with the combatants being a States’ Attorney whose
political career could be made, or broken, by the case; versus Clarence Darrow,
arguably the most famous attorney in American history, and himself a Chicago
resident. The murder case was almost
incidental to the two legal questions fought over: the moral
underpinning of the death penalty; and the claim of mental illness as a
mitigating factor in criminal responsibility.
And
then there was the post-trial story, which extended to the summer of 1974.
Summer
reading does not get more engrossing than this.
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