For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (15 page)

As the afternoon wore on, both boys, Nathan told the state’s attorney, had become “a little bit happy; neither of us was drunk.” Nathan knew, however, that he couldn’t take Richard home so long as his breath smelled of alcohol; Richard’s father was a teetotaler and a supporter of prohibition: he would not be happy that his son had been drinking. They had dinner at the Cocoanut Grove Restaurant and then “drove up and down 63rd Street several times…to find a couple of girls with nothing to do.”

“And you found them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then we drove down Garfield Boulevard, almost to Western Avenue, and back up to Jackson Park; parked the car just north and east of the Wooded Island…. We sat around in the car and had a few drinks, and couldn’t come to an agreement with the girls; so we asked them to leave, and went to go home.”

“In other words, the girls…”

“…wouldn’t come across.”

“And they walked home?”

“That is right, yes.”
¹¹

As Nathan told the alibi to Crowe, Richard Loeb also was now in an office in the Criminal Court Building, telling the same alibi to one of Crowe’s assistants. On Wednesday, 21 May, Loeb explained, “between 10 and 11 o’clock…Leopold and I started down town. We stopped at Marshall Field’s and had luncheon. Then we…started for Lincoln Park…. Leopold wanted to spot a migratory bird…a heron…. We hung around the park for five or six hours, then ducked for Cocoanut Grove. We had something to eat. Got there about 6 o’clock and stayed to have a few drinks. Then we had a few more and beat it.”
¹²

The alibis presented by the two boys corroborated each other exactly. Richard Loeb also told the tale of the two girls—he remembered their names as May and Edna—and, like Nathan, recounted how he and his companion had made them walk home after the girls had refused to have sex.

Yet the alibi served only to heighten Crowe’s suspicions. Crowe had not yet told Nathan that one of his detectives had found the letter from Nathan to Richard indicating that both boys were homosexuals. Why would they want to spend an evening trying to have sex with two girls if they were homosexuals? Richard Loeb might vouch for Leopold’s alibi, but Loeb’s corroboration now had little value for the state’s attorney. Of course, if they could find the two girls, then the alibi was genuine and they would go free. But would they find the girls?

I
T WAS NOW ALMOST SEVEN
o’clock in the morning, Friday, 30 May. The state’s attorney had questioned Nathan Leopold throughout the night and into the early morning hours, and still the boy had shown no sign of guilt. Richard Loeb was in an adjacent room, also in the Criminal Court Building. The state’s attorney decided to keep both boys in custody. They needed to get some sleep; the detectives placed Nathan in a cell in the central police station and took Richard to the 48th Street station.

While the boys slept in their cells that Friday, the press woke up to the realization that Robert Crowe might have caught the murderers. Reporters from the newspapers descended on the Kenwood neighborhood to interview the parents of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

Both families ridiculed the idea that either boy could be guilty of murder; they had a granite certitude that their sons would soon be released. It was all a terrible mistake—an unfortunate coincidence of circumstances that would soon right itself.

At the Leopold home, Nathan Leopold Sr. invited a small group of journalists into his house to discuss his son’s plight. He knew the Franks family personally and was horrified at the kidnapping and murder of Bobby, but he assured the reporters that his son had nothing to do with it: “It is ridiculous. Of course my boy is not involved. I shall do all I can to dispel this notion of the police…. We are ready to aid the authorities in every way to solve this murder…. But it is ridiculous to suppose Nathan had anything to do with it…. I probably could get my boy out on a writ of habeas corpus, but there is no need for that sort of technical trickery. The suggestion that he had anything to do with this case is too absurd to merit comment.”
¹³

And the discovery of his son’s eyeglasses near the body of Bobby Franks? That also was merely a coincidence; his son had been bird-watching the previous weekend close to the culvert: “Nathan has been a student of ornithology for many years and has written numerous articles and papers on the subject. He has contributed to the bird magazine,
The Auk
. There is nothing to this.”
¹⁴

The family’s faith in Nathan was complete. This trust in the boy’s veracity could not be shaken, even in the face of a growing accumulation of evidence that tied him ever more closely to the murder. His elder brothers were also present at the interview with the journalists that Friday; one brother dismissed any possibility of a connection: “The idea of Nathan having anything to do with the Franks boy’s death is too silly to discuss. The family is not particularly alarmed for we know just what he did the night the Franks boy disappeared; we know just how he occupied his time, and we know that he can account of himself. If he can help any in solving the crime, so much the better. We know so well where he was that night, we know our brother so well, that we are in no way alarmed at his examination by police.”
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A few blocks away, at the Loeb house on Ellis Avenue, Anna Loeb was equally convinced that her son was blameless. She faced the reporters that Friday to tell them that neither her son nor Nathan Leopold had anything to do with the murder. “We have absolute confidence that Richard is telling the truth. The implication that either he or the young Leopold are involved in the Franks case is impossible on its face. No matter the circumstances of the spectacles, the idea of connecting them with the crime is absurd.”
¹⁶

Ernest Loeb echoed his mother’s assurance. There would be no difficulty in providing Richard with an alibi, he told the reporter from the New York
World
, since he was sure that his brother had been in the presence of family members that day. “We know exactly where Dick was every hour of this particular Wednesday and he could not have done the thing the police are charging him with.”
¹⁷

The failure of either family to comprehend the gravity of the boys’ situation translated into a complacency that over the next forty-eight hours was exposed as astonishing naïveté. Both families expressed a wish to assist the state’s attorney in solving the murder, yet neither realized, until it was far too late, that Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold had become the leading suspects. The families saw no reason to call in their lawyers to go to the Criminal Court Building to advise the boys. As a consequence, Robert Crowe had already had them in custody for almost twenty-four hours without yet making a formal arrest, and without even having to justify their continued detention.

Nathan Leopold’s father was self-consciously complicit in the state’s attorney’s decision to hold his son for questioning. In response to an inquiry from a reporter from the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, he expressed confidence in both the state’s attorney’s integrity and his son’s innocence. “While it is a terrible ordeal both to my boy and myself to have him under even a possibility of suspicion, yet our attitude will be one of helping the investigation rather than retarding it…. And even though my son is subjected to the hardships and embarrassment of being kept from his family until the authorities are thoroughly satisfied…yet my son should be willing to make the sacrifice, and I am also willing for the sake of justice and truth.”
¹⁸

Robert Crowe could scarcely believe his luck. Crowe was now sure that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were the murderers. All the clues pointed to that conclusion. Leopold’s handwriting matched that on the envelope enclosing the ransom letter addressed to Jacob Franks; Leopold’s eyeglasses had been found near the corpse; the boys were lovers who had concocted an alibi that could not be confirmed; and at that moment, late on Friday afternoon, he was getting news that detectives had discovered typed legal notes belonging to Leopold that matched the typed ransom letter delivered to Jacob Franks the day after the murder.

Yet he continued to hold both suspects for questioning without any interference from either family! Eventually, Crowe thought to himself, one or both families would surely alert the lawyers to the boys’ plight.

He had to get the boys to confess before their lawyers could shut their mouths. Neither boy had yet asked for a lawyer; neither boy had refused to answer his questions. How, therefore, could he wring a confession out of them, a confession that would surely send them to the gallows? And could he get that confession before lawyers for the boys appeared with a writ of habeas corpus?

C
ROWE RECEIVED HELP IN HIS
task from an unexpected quarter. Two cub reporters from the
Chicago Daily News
, Alvin Goldstein and James Mulroy, had been following the case from the beginning. Goldstein had been at the morgue on South Houston Avenue after the discovery of the body; Mulroy had driven with Edwin Greshan from the Franks home to check the identity of the boy lying on the undertaker’s slab. Both reporters were recent graduates of the University of Chicago; they knew the campus well and still had many friends at the university.

They also knew Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Goldstein was a member of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and he and Loeb had become acquaintances during Loeb’s postgraduate year at the university. Neither boy was then an undergraduate, but both boys spent time at the fraternity clubhouse, playing cards, swapping stories, and keeping up with fraternity gossip.
¹⁹

Both Goldstein and Mulroy were surprised that Nathan and Richard were in police custody. But if Nathan was a suspect, could they match the typewritten notes for his law classes with the ransom letter sent to Jacob Franks? Alvin Goldstein knew that Nathan had belonged to an informal study group at the law school; the boys in this group met each week to go over legal cases and type up a set of notes for the group. He asked around; sure enough, several boys had copies of the notes.
²⁰

It did not take Robert Crowe long to confirm the reporters’ hunch that one typewriter, a portable Underwood, had been used for both the ransom letter and Nathan Leopold’s legal notes. This was one link in the chain of evidence that Nathan would find difficult to break!

But to forge that link, Crowe needed to find the typewriter. If it was in Nathan’s study, the case against Nathan would be sealed as tight as a drum.

Forty minutes later, the police were back at the house on Greenwood Avenue. William Shoemacher’s men searched again through the study and bedroom. Nathan’s aunt was puzzled; the police had taken away Nathan’s Hammond typewriter earlier that day; did the detectives not know that it was already at the Criminal Court Building?

Shoemacher explained that he was looking for a second typewriter, a portable Underwood—had any of the staff seen Nathan using a portable typewriter? He questioned the maids—what could they tell him?

Elizabeth Sattler hesitated. She had worked for the Leopolds for four years; she liked her employer and was reluctant to hurt the family; but she had a strong sense of duty and the police captain was persistent. She stepped forward.

“Yes, that typewriter was here.”

Shoemacher felt a thrill of appreciation at the words. The link was forged; the net was closing around Nathan. He looked directly at the maid.

“When did you see it last?”

“I seen it two weeks ago.”

“Well, what became of it?”

“I don’t know, it ought to be around here.”
²¹

The detectives searched everywhere for the Underwood, but it was not in the boy’s bedroom or study; there was no sign of it in the library; there was no trace in any of the other rooms in the house. But Elizabeth’s testimony was vital—the police may not have been able to locate the typewriter, but now they knew that it had been in the house only a few days before the murder of Bobby Franks.

T
HE QUESTIONING BEGAN AGAIN THAT
Friday at 6:30 p.m. Both Nathan and Richard had woken up around three o’clock in the afternoon; the detectives had given them time to wash, to catch a bite to eat, and to prepare for the evening’s interrogation before driving them back to the Criminal Court Building.

Joseph Savage, an assistant state’s attorney working in Robert Crowe’s office, asked Nathan about the portable typewriter. What could Nathan tell him about it? Nathan replied that he remembered having seen a typewriter at his house, but, of course, it was not his; it belonged, no doubt, to one of the boys in his study group.

During the winter and spring quarters at the law school, Nathan had studied with four friends at his house. In preparing for the first-year exams, it was usual practice among the students at the University of Chicago law school to study a number of cases, to winnow the points of law from each individual case, and to classify them. The students even had a slang expression—“dope sheeting”—for this form of study; the law students would customarily discuss the principal points and type up a summary of the points on “dope sheets” for each member of the group.
²²

“The only typewriter other than my own,” Nathan explained, “that I ever used in my home was a portable typewriter, what make I don’t know, which I had there for a few weeks for the purpose of dope sheeting for law courses.”

“Whose typewriter was that?” Savage asked.

“It belonged to one of the boys in the dope section; I am not sure which one.”
²³

The five boys usually worked upstairs, in Nathan’s study on the third floor, but occasionally they would gather in the downstairs library on the first floor. It was warmer and more comfortable in the library, and the lighting was better. If Nathan’s father needed to use the library, then the little group of scholars would make for the third-floor study.
²⁴