Loeb confessed first, then Leopold. Their confessions differed only on the point of who did the actual killing, with each pointing the finger at the other. Leopold later pleaded with Loeb to admit to killing Franks but, according to Leopold, Loeb said, "Mompsie feels less terrible than she might, thinking you did it and I'm not going to take that shred of comfort away from her.
Darrow took the case in large part because it gave him a platform to attack the death penalty, which he had called "an abomination. Nathan said his first impression of Darrow was one of "horror", unimpressed as he was by Darrow's unruly hair, rumpled jacket, egg-splattered shirt, suspenders, and askew tie.
His opinion of Darrow soon changed. He later described his attorney as a great, simple, unaffected man, with a "deep-seated, all-embracing kindliness. It was Darrow's decision to change the boys' initial pleas to the charges of murder and kidnapping from "not guilty" suggesting a traditional insanity defense to "guilty.
With "not guilty" pleas, the state had planned to try the boys first on one of the two charges, both of which carried the death penalty in Illinois, and if it failed to win a hanging on the first charge, try again on the second. The guilty plea also meant that the sentencing decision would be made by a judge, not by a jury. Darrow's decision to plead the boys guilty undoubtedly was based in part on his belief that the judge who would hear their case, John R. Caverly, was a "kindly and discerning" man.
With the public seemingly unanimous in calling for death, Darrow did not want to face a jury. The defense hoped to build its case against death around the testimony of four psychiatrists, called "alienists" at the time. The best talent psychiatric talent had to offer was sought out by both sides to examine the defendants.
Even Sigmund Freud was asked to come to Chicago for the trial, but his poor health at the time prevented the visit. The prosecution argued that psychiatric testimony was only admissible if the defendants claimed insanity, while the defense argued strenuously that evidence of mental disease should be considered as a mitigating factor in consideration of the sentence.
In the most critical ruling of the trial, Judge Caverly decided against the state's objection, and allowed the psychiatric evidence to be introduced.
The trial technically a hearing, rather than a trial, because of the entry of guilty pleas of Leopold and Loeb lasted just over one month. The defense presented extensive psychiatric evidence describing the defendants' emotional immaturity, obsessions with crime and Nietzschean philosophy, alcohol abuse, glandular abnormalities, and sexual longings and insecurities. Defense psychiatrist William White testified that Leopold's "pathology began in early childhood.
Trapped "inside his world of fantasy, Nathan imagined himself a slave. As for Richard Loeb, William White described his "main outstanding feature" as "infantilism. Other lay witness testified as to Leopold's egocentricity and argumentative nature.
White offered his thoughts on the two boys' peculiar chemistry. He said, "Nathan and Richard complemented each other. Richard needed Nathan's applause and admiration in order to confir his sense of his own self. But Nathan also needed Richard to play a role; Richard took the role of a king who was simultaneously superior and inferior.
It was a pecularily bizarre confluence of two personalities, each of which satisfied the needs of the other. Nathan would never on his own initiative have murdered Bobby Franks.
And I don't believe Dickie would have ever functioned to this extent all by himself. So these two boys. Not surprisingly, prosecution psychiatrists took a different view. William Krohn testified, "In my opinion, [Richard Loeb] was not suffering from any mental disease, either functional or structural on May 21st, On August 22, , Clarence Darrow began his summation for the defense in a "courtroom jammed to suffocation, with hundreds of men and women rioting in the corridors outside.
For over twelve hours, in a voice that rose and fell, Darrow argued that his clients should not bear full responsibility for their crime. Darrow reminded Judge Caverly of the defendants' youth, genetic inheritance, surging sexual impulses, and the many external influences that had led them to the commission of their crime.
Never before or since the Leopold and Loeb trial has the deterministic universe, this life of "a series of infinite chances", been so clearly made the basis of a criminal defense. In pleading for Loeb's life Darrow argued, "Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in mysterious ways, and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we only play our parts.
We are only Impotent pieces in the game He plays Upon this checkerboard of nights and days, Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the closet lays. What had this boy had to do with it? He was not his own father; he was not his own mother All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth. He did not make himself. And yet he is to be compelled to pay. Darrow attacked the death penalty as atavistic, saying it "roots back to the beast and the jungle.
He reminded the judge how little Leopold and Loeb would have to look forward to in the long days, months, and years ahead: "In all the endless road you tread there's nothing but the night. Darrow favored specificity and vivid images in his arguments. He took Judge Caverly to the day of execution, reminding him of the possible consequences of his decision:.
The judge was swayed and imposed life sentences. Leopold was released on parole in with help from noted poet Carl Sandburg, who testified on his behalf. He lived out the rest of his life in Puerto Rico , where he died in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! American pilot Charles A.
Lindbergh lands at Le Bourget Field in Paris, successfully completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and the first ever nonstop flight between New York to Paris. His single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St.
Louis, had lifted off from Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first pilot to repeat the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the On the banks of the Mississippi River in present-day Louisiana, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto dies, ending a three-year journey for gold that took him halfway across what is now the United States.
In order that local peoples would not learn of his death, and thus disprove On May 21, , 4, Jews are deported from the Polish town of Chelm to the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, where all are gassed to death. On the same day, the German firm IG Farben sets up a factory just outside Auschwitz, in order to take advantage of Jewish slave In Washington, D. Barton, born in Mentally ill patients from throughout East Prussia had been transferred to the district of Soldau, also in East Prussia.
A special military unit, basically a Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. The killers have even been appropriated as exemplars of revisionist queer history. Their voices on the page thrum with the smugness of youth:. Loeb: I felt sorry about the thing, about the killing of the boy—oh, well, that very night. But then the excitement, the accounts in the paper, the fact that we had gotten away with it and that they did not suspect us, that it was given so much publicity and all that sort of thing, naturally went to the question of not feeling as much remorse as otherwise I think I would have.
Are there any revelations in these documents? They scorn the judgment of other students, glorying in their superior wealth, their sharper wits, their greater capacity for forbidden pleasures.
Perhaps the boys suffered from an erosion of Jewish values. Maybe she was to blame. Given every advantage and opportunity, the boys suffered a kind of agoraphobic reaction to their own privilege. That worm captivated millions in America and abroad who followed the daily news reports coming out of Chicago.
Ditto the case of O. Simpson although celebrity and race played outsize roles there. The history of American crime is the history of class and race, which are inseparable. In the American imagination, either murder itself is abetted by economic conditions or the reporting and prosecution of the murder expose the blind spots in our supposedly meritocratic capitalism.
On a superficial level, the mystery of Leopold and Loeb is what drove them to kill Bobby Franks at all, but the more fraught, subcutaneous question is why they rejected the luxuries of their pampered lives in exchange for a sordid thrill.
Theirs is a riches-to-rags story. Most of us would kill to know the kind of wealth they took for granted; Leopold and Loeb killed to divest themselves of it, to feel something visceral and real, however briefly.
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