American Experience

READER

"No one knows what will be "the fate of the child they get or the child they bear. "The mother who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe "cannot help but wonder what will be the end of this child, "whether it will be crowned with the greatest promises "which her mind can imagine "or whether he may meet death from the gallows. Clarence Darrow."

NARRATOR

The body was found on the morning of May 22, 1924, a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks who'd gone missing from his Chicago neighborhood the day before. A ransom note had been sent to his parents. But before they'd had a chance to pay, the kidnappers had killed their son.

JOHN LOGAN

The crime itself was so shocking. They bludgeoned a child to death, poured acid on his face to try to disguise his features. He was stripped of his clothes and left in a culvert. It was as desolate a place as you could possibly imagine leaving a body.

NARRATOR

The murder would rivet the nation,

all the more so when police at last caught the killers

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, wealthy, well-educated teenagers who had done it, they said, for the sheer thrill.

PAULA FASS

This was an inexplicable murder. These were children of privilege, of high ideals, who had everything given to them. They were the last people who had any reason to commit a kidnapping, much less a murder.

NARRATOR

As the case unfolded over that hot summer of 1924, with Cook County Prosecutor Robert Crowe and famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow debating the death penalty and scores of commentators weighing in from the sidelines, the question of motive would be turned over and over again. And what at first seemed a simple matter of evil gradually would give way to a complex assessment of the murderers' minds and a searing indictment of the forces that had shaped them.

SIMON BAATZ

I think that the murder said something to people about American society. This was seen as a culmination of trends that were dangerous, that were immoral.

JOHN FARRELL

So you had all of a sudden this question thrown up against our culture, which is that, "Is it rotten? "Is there something wrong? Are we going in the wrong direction?"

FASS

There are mysteries wrapped inside of enigmas in this case, and it's why it won't go away.

NARRATOR

On May 22, 1924, just hours after the body of Bobby Franks was found, the hunt for his killers got underway. To State's Attorney Robert Crowe, a combative, 45-year-old Irishman who'd been elected on a promise to vanquish crime in Chicago, the case was a career-making opportunity.

BAATZ

Well, Robert Crowe was very politically ambitious, and his ambition was eventually to become mayor of Chicago, to become one of the most powerful men in the city. Crowe had certainly hoped that a success in this case would help him as a politician.

The police had few clues

the ransom note, a tip about a grey sedan that had been idling where Bobby Franks was last seen, and a pair of eyeglasses found near the body.

HAL HIGDON

When the glasses first were found, it was thought that they were Bobby Franks' glasses. They were even put on the corpse in the funeral home. And when his relative came in to identify the body, he said, "Well, those aren't his glasses." And at that point, they thought they must be the glasses of one of the criminals.

BAATZ

The prescription was actually a very average one. What was unusual about the eyeglasses is that they had a certain hinge, and when the police began to inquire, they found that only three pairs of eyeglasses with that hinge had been sold in the Chicago district.

NARRATOR

One of the three belonged to a man who'd been abroad for weeks, another to a woman who was quickly ruled out as a suspect. That left 19-year-old Nathan Leopold from the exclusive neighborhood of Kenwood, on Chicago's South Side. Although it seemed doubtful that the boy had had any hand in the murder, Crowe sent three detectives to the Leopold home with orders to bring Nathan in for questioning.

FASS

Nathan Leopold was studying for law school. He was an extraordinary young man with a potentially fantastic future before him. Nathan Leopold was not regarded as a likely suspect simply because his family was very prominent. By 1924, the family was worth about $4 million. Why would someone like Nathan Leopold want to kidnap a young child? It didn't seem to make any sense.

NARRATOR

Crowe would spend the rest of the afternoon, and long into the night, downtown, interrogating Nathan Leopold. When confronted with the eyeglasses, the young man shrugged. He was a recognized expert on birds, he boasted to Crowe, the author of an article about the rare Kirtland's warbler. He frequently led birding expeditions near the place Franks' body had been found. The glasses, he said, must have fallen at some point from his jacket pocket. As for the night of Franks' murder, he'd spent it driving around town in his red Willys-Knight with his good friend Richard Loeb. Leopold's alibi was that he and Loeb had gone off in the park, started drinking, picked up a couple of girls, fooled around with them a little bit.

BAATZ

Those two girls that they did pick up refused to have sex with them, so they dropped them off and then they continued home. That was the alibi they had.

NARRATOR

While Crowe interrogated Leopold, police ransacked his bedroom and study and turned up a letter to Richard Loeb which suggested the boys were lovers. Crowe found it odd. If Leopold and Loeb were homosexuals, why would they have spent an evening chasing girls? Now he wanted Richard Loeb brought in for questioning as well. Richard Loeb graduated from high school when he was 14 years old and immediately matriculated at the University of Chicago as a full-time student. He was very popular as a student. Richard Loeb's father was the vice-president of Sears Roebuck. He was worth about $10 million by 1924. Loeb corroborated his friend's alibi. Still, Crowe felt there was something suspicious about these young men. So long as their parents were cooperating, certain that their sons had been involved in no wrongdoing, Crowe planned to keep Leopold and Loeb in custody.