Leopold and Loeb
Nathan Leopold Junior (born November 19, 1904 - August 29, 1971 ) and Richard Loeb (born June 11, 1905 - January 28, 1936 ), better known as Leopold and Loeb , were two students of the University of Chicago from each very wealthy house, who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life imprisonment for this. Her act was noteworthy because it was mainly motivated by the students' ambition to commit the perfect crime. Crime also played a role in the American debate on the death penalty .
background
Leopold and Loeb, 19 and 18 years old respectively at the time of the crime, planned a kidnapping and subsequent murder . They believed they were supermen in Nietzsche's sense , which is why they were not afraid of being caught. The two friends were exceptionally intelligent: Leopold had graduated from college at the age of 19 and was studying law at the University of Chicago. He spoke five languages and was an expert in ornithology . Loeb was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan . Both lived in Kenwood, an affluent area in southern Chicago.
The crime
On May 21, 1924, Leopold and Loeb lured Bobby Franks, a distant relative and neighbor of Loeb, into a rented car. There Loeb first struck him down with a chisel , then they suffocated him together. After Leopold and Loeb hid the body in a ditch under railroad tracks outside of Chicago (near Hammond, Indiana ) - the face burned with acid to make identification difficult - the victim's family received a ransom note for $ 10,000. So they wanted to fake kidnapping.
Before the family could find the ransom, however, railroad workers found the body. It was immediately clear to investigators that this could not be an ordinary kidnapping - a kidnapper would have had no reason to kill Bobby Franks.
A pair of glasses found next to the corpse finally led to the trail of Nathan Leopold. It had been custom built and only three people in the Chicago area had owned one. The ransom note had been typed on a typewriter that he had used with some of his fellow students. During the interrogation, the perpetrators' alibis collapsed. Both confessed to the crime, but accused each other of actually killing Bobby Frank.
For months they had planned the deed and figured out ways to get the ransom without being caught. They always assumed that the body would not be discovered until long after the money had been handed over. Money wasn't her main motive, though; their families provided for them sufficiently. Rather, both admitted to having sought the thrill that came with the act . Even in prison, they tried to keep that thrill going by repeatedly providing newspaper reporters with the bloody details of their crime.
The consequences and the legal process
The public was shocked. No one in the Jewish community had imagined that people with exemplary success could commit such a crime. Both the Leopolds and Loebs families were very wealthy, and almost every student at the University of Chicago had a secure future ahead of them. So there was absolutely no reason to become a criminal. Anti-Semitic priests attempted to use the crime for their propaganda , although none of the accused were practicing Jews . Loeb's mother was a Catholic , and Leopold had often professed atheism before and during the trial . The reporter Meyer Levin stated within the Jewish community “a relief that the victim was also Jewish”.
The trial turned into a media spectacle, and there was public talk of the “crime of the century”. The Loebs family hired the 67-year-old attorney Clarence Darrow , a fierce opponent of the death penalty, as defense attorney . It was expected that he would plead for acquittal for insanity ; However, Darrow surprised the public by making both defendants plead guilty. In doing so, he avoided a jury verdict that might have resulted in death by hanging because of the heated public opinion. Instead, he could now argue before a single judge and plead for the lives of his two clients.
Darrow made what is considered the best of his career. Perhaps Darrow had just taken on the case to make such a plea, as it enabled him to spread his strong arguments against the death penalty to a wide audience through newspaper reports around the world.
Darrow's argument that the two defendants were minors was particularly decisive. The judge then refrained from using the death penalty in view of the global development of criminal law. The case is therefore often mentioned in connection with the discussion about the punishment of minors in the USA. Even then, the death penalty was publicly called for, regardless of the age of the accused.
The responsible judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment for the murder and a further 99 years in prison for the kidnapping.
Leopold and Loeb, who initially sat in Joliet , were later relocated to Stateville . In prison, the two put their education to good use by teaching other inmates. In January 1936, at the age of 30, Loeb was killed with a razor by his cellmate James Day. Day was later able to make it credible that Loeb had tried to rape him in the washrooms and that he had acted in self-defense . Nathan Leopold later questioned this account in his book "Life Plus 99 Years". The Catholic prison chaplain, Eligius Weir, reiterated these doubts, stating that it was actually James Day who pushed the killed Richard Loeb into sexual acts. Loeb was killed by him because he resisted it.
In 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole . He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid press attention and married a widowed florist. He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 66.
Adaptations in literature, film and theater
- The crime inspired Patrick Hamilton to write the novel Rope . This was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock under the same name (in German: Cocktail für eine Leiche ) in 1948.
- In 1956 Meyer Levin dealt with the case in his novel Compulsion (German Zwang ), a fictionalized version of the real events in which the names of the perpetrators were changed to "Steiner" and "Strauss".
- In 1959 the o. G. Book Compulsion as a template for the film Der Zwang zum Bad by director Richard Fleischer , in which Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman played the leading roles. The character based on Darrow was portrayed by Orson Welles . His speech at the end of the film, in which Darrow's closing argument is taken up, is considered to be one of the longest monologues in film history.
- In 1991 John David Coles made the film Darrow , which deals with Darrow's life. The Leopold and Loeb case is also presented, but it is only one of many.
- In 1992 the theme was taken up in the film Swoon
- In 1997 Michael Haneke made the film Funny Games , in which two young, educated men are shown torturing people to death for no reason. In Haneke's US remake of his own work from 2007, Michael Pitt plays one of the murdering men - as in the movie Murder According to a Plan .
- In 2002, Murder According to the Plan, starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Gosling, appeared in the lead roles. In terms of content, there is a loose connection to the real case.
- In addition, the crime was picked up for the stage in 2003. Stephen Dolginoff staged the theme as a musical under the title Thrill me - the Leopold and Loeb Story . It was played worldwide and in 2012 for the first time in Germany, on the stage of the Katielli Theater in Datteln.
- In 2004 the RBB and the MDR produced a radio play by the writer Rolf Schneider on the case with the title Die Affäre Leopold-Loeb .
- The musicians Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel once appeared under the name Loeb and Leopold as the opening act for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention .
- Fever by the Jewish author Leslie Kaplan relocates the murderer's motive to commit murder in order to assert his intellectual superiority to the setting in Paris.
Web links
- crimelibrary.com (English)
- Famous Trials article (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Website of the University of Missouri - Kansas City (Eng.)
- ^ In Search , 1950 in Google Book Search
- ↑ Clarence Darrow - "A Plea for Mercy" (1924) , Darrow, C. (1936). A Plea for Mercy. In A. Thorndike (Ed.), Modern Eloquence (Vol. 6, pp. 80-85). New York: PF Collier & Son. (Original work published in 1924).
- ↑ Life & Death In Prison ( Memento of the original from March 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by Marilyn Bardsley. Crime Library - Courtroom Television Network, LLC
- ^ Prison and Later Life. thrillkillers.weebly.com, accessed February 1, 2019 .
