In the spring of 1924, two of the most precocious students in America lived in the same wealthy Chicago neighborhood. Nathan Leopold, 19, had published in the country's leading bird journal at 15 and was studying law. Richard Loeb, 18, had graduated from the University of Michigan at 17. They set out to prove that superior minds stood above ordinary morality by committing a murder no one could solve. On May 21 they killed Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy from their own streets. Ten days later both had confessed. Their "perfect crime" unraveled almost at once. Its shadow has lasted a century.
The Boy Who Knew the Birds
Leopold was born on November 19, 1904, into a wealthy German-Jewish family. He entered the University of Chicago at 15 and graduated in 1923, at 18. Then he enrolled in its law school, with plans for Harvard Law after a trip to Europe.
His real passion had wings. In 1920, at 15, he published a note on rare spring birds of the Chicago area in The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists' Union. He made himself an authority on the Kirtland's warbler, a songbird that nested in only a handful of counties in northern Michigan. His paper on the species, read to the Union in 1923 and printed in The Auk in January 1924, recorded cowbirds laying their eggs in warbler nests. Conservationists would later have to beat that threat to save the bird. At home he kept about 3,000 specimens.
Legend added more: fluency in a dozen languages, an IQ above 200. The historian Simon Baatz found no evidence for either. The ornithology needs no embellishment; it is in print.
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Loeb, born in Chicago on June 11, 1905, moved even faster. He entered the University of Chicago at 14, transferred to Michigan in 1921 and graduated in 1923 at 17, reportedly its youngest graduate to that time. He came home to take graduate courses in history. Leopold was the scholar; Loeb was the popular one, dominant in the friendship and fascinated by crime.
A Pact Above the Law
They met at the University of Chicago in 1920. Leopold, steeped in Friedrich Nietzsche, convinced himself that superior men were exempt from the rules that bind everyone else. Loeb wanted to plan a crime that would defeat the police. Together they stole and set fires long before they planned a killing. Then they spent months on the scheme: a false name, a rented car, a ransom demand. What they wanted was a "perfect" crime with no motive at all.
May 21, 1924
Robert "Bobby" Franks was 14, a pupil at the Harvard School for Boys, the private school Leopold had attended. He was Loeb's second cousin, lived across the street from the Loebs and had played tennis on their court. On May 21, 1924, the two young men coaxed him into their rented car on a South Side street. He was dead within minutes. They hid his body in a railroad culvert near 118th Street and demanded $10,000 from his family by telephone and letter. The body was found the next day.
Undone by a Hinge
Near the culvert, police found a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with a patented hinge. Only one Chicago store sold that frame, and only three people had bought it. One was Nathan Leopold, who said he must have dropped them while birdwatching. The Chicago Daily News matched the typing on the ransom note to Leopold's typed study notes; two of its reporters later won a Pulitzer Prize for their part in solving the case. Loeb broke first. On May 31 both confessed, and each named the other as the one who struck the fatal blows.
Darrow's Gamble
The families hired Clarence Darrow, America's most celebrated defense lawyer. Guilt was not in doubt. The gallows was. On July 21, Darrow changed both pleas to guilty. That removed the jury and left the sentence to one man, Judge John R. Caverly. For 33 days, defense psychiatrists and State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe argued over whether they should hang. On August 22, Darrow began a summation that ran some twelve hours across three days, as much an assault on capital punishment as a plea for his clients. "Your Honor, if these boys hang, you must do it," he told Caverly.
Life Plus 99 Years
On September 10, 1924, Caverly sentenced each of them to life in prison for murder and 99 years for kidnapping. He said he was "moved chiefly by consideration of the age of the defendants," not by the psychiatric evidence, and urged that they never be paroled. They went to the state penitentiary at Joliet, later Stateville. In the early 1930s they built a school for fellow prisoners. On January 28, 1936, a fellow inmate attacked Loeb in a prison shower. He died that day, at 30.
The Model Prisoner
Leopold worked in the prison library, expanded the school and kept studying languages. In 1944 he volunteered for the wartime malaria experiments the University of Chicago ran inside Stateville, first as a test subject and later as an X-ray technician. Parole petitions failed for years. The poet Carl Sandburg testified on his behalf, and on March 13, 1958, after more than 33 years inside, Leopold walked out on parole.
The Birdwatcher of Puerto Rico
He moved to Puerto Rico, where the Church of the Brethren gave him work at its Castañer hospital in the mountain town of Adjuntas as a laboratory and X-ray assistant. He earned a master's degree at the University of Puerto Rico, taught mathematics there and joined the island's work against leprosy. In 1961 he married Trudi Feldman García de Quevedo, a widow he had met at a Passover seder in San Juan. In 1963, almost 40 years after his warbler paper, he published a checklist of the birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Leopold died of a heart attack in San Juan on August 29, 1971, aged 66. He donated his organs to a local medical school and an eye bank.
On Screen and in Print
- Rope (1948), film, Warner Bros., directed by Alfred Hitchcock from Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play, reportedly inspired by the case. John Dall and Farley Granger play the two killers.
- Compulsion (1956), novel by Meyer Levin, a thinly fictionalized account of the case.
- Compulsion (1959), film, 20th Century-Fox, directed by Richard Fleischer. Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman play the Leopold and Loeb figures, Judd Steiner and Artie Straus; Orson Welles plays the Darrow figure.
- Swoon (1992), film, Fine Line Features, written and directed by Tom Kalin. Craig Chester plays Nathan Leopold and Daniel Schlachet plays Richard Loeb.
- Murder by Numbers (2002), film, Warner Bros., directed by Barbet Schroeder and loosely based on the case. Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt play two gifted high-school students who plan a murder.
- Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story (2003), stage musical, book, music and lyrics by Stephen Dolginoff. Off-Broadway at the York Theatre Company in 2005, Dolginoff played Leopold and Doug Kreeger played Loeb.
- Life Plus 99 Years (1958), memoir by Nathan F. Leopold Jr.
Why Leopold and Loeb Are Called Geniuses
Because the precocity was real, and in Leopold's case it produced lasting work. At 15 he was publishing in The Auk. At 18 he was adding to what science knew about one of North America's rarest songbirds. In his late fifties he was still cataloguing the birds of the Caribbean. Loeb finished a university degree at an age when most students are just starting one. That record is why they appear on Geniuses.club. It is also why their story is a warning, not a tribute. They spent their gifts planning the death of a 14-year-old boy who knew them, for nothing more than the thrill of getting away with it. Bobby Franks never saw 15. Intelligence did not make the crime perfect; it made it colder. Darrow saved their lives by reminding a judge that they were young. He never claimed they were innocent, and nothing in their minds excuses what they did.
