The Girls of Murder City

by Douglas Perry

  16

  The Tides of Hell

  Maurine Watkins had no time to reflect on what happened in Judge Lindsay’s courtroom. While Beulah Annan and her husband celebrated with family members at their little flat on Sunday, the Tribune reporter was five blocks away, at the fortress-like house of Jacob and Flora Franks. Maurine may have been within shouting distance of the Annans’ brick apartment building on East Forty-sixth Street, but this block in Kenwood, on the other side of Cottage Grove Avenue, was a different world. No mechanics or assistant bookkeepers lived here, except in the servants’ quarters.

  The mood also was completely different. The wealthy men and women of Chicago’s South Side were somber, for they had come to see the Franks bury their son, Bobby. The family held the funeral service in their living room. Jacob, widely known as Jake, had been born a Jew, but he and his wife practiced Christian Science. A large crucifix stood prominently on a table. For much of the morning, as family friends, flowers, and telegrams arrived, Flora remained upstairs, but visitors had no doubt about how she was holding up. Her husband, in the living room with their seventeen-year-old daughter, Josephine, winced noticeably as screams of anguish periodically reverberated through the ceiling.

  As she did in her report on Wanda Stopa’s funeral, Maurine detailed the scripture readings and religious songs that the other papers glossed over or mentioned only for maudlin effect. The rituals of faith and the promise of the afterlife remained more important to Maurine than the tears of those remaining earthbound. (Maurine was one of the very few reporters to show restraint in her coverage. The American even came up with a fictional re-creation of the murder through the eyes of the dead boy himself: “I matched my strength, born of desperation, with that of my fiendish captors, with the tides of hell running like molten lava through their accursed veins.”)

  Maurine stuck with a straightforward account of the funeral, though she noted the tension in the air caused by the fact that the murder remained unsolved. There was a bubbling dread, some thirty years after a serial killer had roamed the concourse of the World’s Fair in Chicago, that the kidnap-pings were not yet done. “Only relatives, a few close friends, and twenty of Robert’s schoolmates from the Harvard private school [an exclusive prep school on the South Side] were admitted at the house, where grief is mingled with horror and fear,” Maurine wrote. Eight of Bobby Franks’s Harvard friends carried the casket down the front walk and placed it in the hearse, an emotionally burdensome task for any fourteen-year-old boy. Bobby’s parents and Josephine slipped out a side door, led by a private guard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Jake and Flora Franks wanted to avoid the three hundred or so people who had gathered in the street to watch the procession depart for the cemetery.

  The crowd was nowhere near as large or unruly as the one that had congregated outside the Stopa place a month before. Like the curious gathered around the Franks residence, Maurine also seemed less engaged by Bobby Franks’s funeral than by Wanda Stopa’s. Maybe it was the setting: The broad hallways and soaring ceilings of the Franks home was unlike any residence she’d known growing up. The family’s suffering, even with the killer or killers uncaught and the threat of more violence hanging over them, didn’t seem as raw to Maurine as the Polish family’s in the little walk-up on Augusta Street. The Stopas had been humiliated as well as grief-stricken. And they didn’t have wealth to protect them.

  The Franks family’s suffering also wasn’t the chief concern of the city’s other newspapers. They were more interested in playing detective. The Herald and Examiner recognized that all of Chicago had become supremely fascinated by the search for those responsible for Bobby Franks’s death. The paper’s editors figured it would be a major circulation boon if they could involve in that search not just their police reporters but everyone in the city. In the Monday edition, the Herald and Examiner published a call to action, giving it greater play than the funeral report:

  How and why was Robert Franks, a fourteen-year-old heir to $4 million, killed? Police investigators may clear that up. But have you a theory now? Can you write a logical theory, telling step by step how the crime was committed and what motivated the participants? The Herald and Examiner will give a prize of $50 to the reader who writes the best theory. The winner also will be eligible for a share in the $10,000 reward if his theory should aid in the solution of the slaying. The judgment will take place when the slayers are apprehended, if they are, and if they are not, upon the logic and probability of credence obtained in the written theory. The theories should be written in condensed, concise form, cleanly written or typed, on one side of the paper, and should be addressed to the City Editor, Herald and Examiner.

  Somewhere in Chicago, behind a desk, or in a street car, or in a foundry, may be a keen analytical mind adapted but not trained to detection and the reconstruction of past events, as a hunter reconstructs the story of the chase from the muddy records of the spoor. It may be yours. Send in your theory.

  Just a day before the funeral, Belva Gaertner had been confident that, with Beulah’s case decided and soon to be off the front pages, she would now have the spotlight all to herself. A young boy being killed was terrible but hardly unprecedented in Chicago. And the murderer, undoubtedly a simple-minded pervert, uninteresting in every way, was sure to be caught at any moment. Belva had every reason to expect that her impending trial, scheduled to get under way at the beginning of June, would once again make her the leading story in the city. But it wasn’t to be. The Herald and Examiner announced that within a few days of its appeal, it had received more than three thousand theories from readers about the Franks murder, with more coming every hour. No one could quite put his finger on it yet, but there was something different about this particular murder. No other news story could possibly compete.

  Somehow the police made progress without the aid of the Herald and Examiner’s sleuthing readers. Within days of the murder, police turned their attention to Dick Loeb and Nathan Leopold, after a pair of eyeglasses found near the body was identified as Leopold’s. The boys—both from wealthy South Side families, both intellectual prodigies who had graduated from prestigious universities by the age of eighteen—were brought in for questioning on Thursday, May 29, five days after Beulah’s acquittal.

  From the start, it seemed clear to reporters that the boys were not serious suspects. Police took them to a comfortable downtown hotel to be interviewed, not a police station. Prosecutors provided breaks and restaurant meals. The nineteen-year-old Leopold, in particular, was completely at ease as he faced questions from the police. “He caught them lightly and deftly, answering suavely,” observed Maurine, one of the reporters covering the story. “He has not once taken the defensive. No question has shaken his calm or penetrated his urbanity.”

  The boys, by their relaxed manner and easy smiles, showed that they found the whole thing amusing. They claimed that they had been out birding in the area where the Franks boy was found. Some police officers accepted the explanation without reservation, believing the boys’ relationship to the case was pure coincidence. After all, these were future leaders of the city, maybe the country. Still, the questioning continued, with the hope that perhaps Leopold or Loeb had seen something that would prove valuable to the investigation. Leopold’s father, as horrified by the murder as the rest of Chicago, publicly promised that the family would cooperate with the police. “While it is a terrible ordeal both to my boy and myself to have him under suspicion, our attitude will be one of helping the investigation rather than retarding it,” he told reporters. “And even though my son is subjected to hardships, he should be willing to make sacrifices, and I am also willing for the sake of justice and truth until the authorities are thoroughly satisfied that this supposed clue is groundless. 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.”

  The questioning of t
wo brilliant sons of Chicago’s elite meant that the departure of another woman from the Cook County Jail would slip by almost without notice. Kitty Malm, the most famous gun girl in Chicago just three months before and Belva’s best friend behind bars, shipped out to Joliet on the same day that the police brought Leopold and Loeb in to be interviewed. It wasn’t just that compelling new events—first Belva, Beulah, and Wanda, now the Franks murder—had overtaken the Wolf Woman’s criminal exploits. Since her conviction, Kitty had become “a most docile prisoner,” which was hardly interesting to newspaper readers. She was preparing for her time in the state pen by letting go of all resistance, by abandoning everything Otto Malm had taught her about how to handle herself around authority. “You’ll not find me making any trouble if they put me under lock and key,” she told the jail’s matrons. “This rough stuff doesn’t get you anything, anyway. If I have to go to prison for a long stretch, I’m going to behave myself and maybe they will let me out sooner.”

  In March a group of society ladies had made noises about taking Kitty on as a cause, at the very least to get her sentence shortened. The interest pleased Kitty, but witnessing the attention bestowed on Belva, she didn’t put much stock in it. “Some other woman might get off, but not me,” she said. She was right. Efforts to push her case up to the Supreme Court got nowhere. By May, there was no reason for her to remain at the Cook County Jail. “Kitty Malm was taken to the Joliet penitentiary today, there to spend the remainder of her life,” the American reported in a brief buried deep in the back pages. The matrons had brought her three-year-old daughter in on Thursday morning for a “final visit” at the jail. Kitty didn’t have much to say to her beloved Tootsie. There was nothing left to say. She hugged Tootsie close and tried, without success, to hold back the tears. The American’s reporter said the one-time “tiger woman” now “presented a pathetic little figure” as she was taken out of the jail. “Goodbye, Kitty, and good luck,” one of the other prisoners said as she passed. The send-off cracked Kitty’s already shaky composure: Tears bubbled in her eyes again, and she chomped on her lower lip in hopes of avoiding a breakdown. “Not much luck for me, I guess,” she said in response. Tears rolled down her cheeks as the heavy door to the women’s quarters swung open and she was marched through. The Evening Post’s headline—as in the American, it was buried far back in the paper—declared: “Kitty Malm Sobs as She Starts to Begin Life Term.”

  Reporter Owen Scott, seeing Kitty carted off in chains, noted the difference from Beulah Annan’s triumphant departure from the jail five days before. “Her mistake,” he wrote, “was in being ‘hard boiled’ and none too good looking.”

  By Friday, thanks to Nathan Leopold and Dick Loeb, interest in the Franks case had increased still more. The glamorous college boys had impressed everyone during a brief initial exposure to the press the day before, leading the police to make them available for a question-and-answer session with reporters. Leopold and Loeb had shown a remarkable ability to talk philosophy, history, and ethics at a high level, so Maurine’s editors gave her a straightforward assignment: to record what they had to say at the press session, in the event that select quotes might be newsworthy, even independent of the Franks investigation.

  Maurine, however, had something more in mind. She sensed that there was something unusual about the boys, aside from their wealth, charisma, and intellectual abilities. She was intent on doing “a character analysis, a study of their temperament.” She later remembered that “the room was full of reporters and we were each allowed one question. I was the only woman. I asked Leopold, ‘What three men do you consider the greatest who ever lived?’ He named Nietzsche, Haeckel and Epicurus. I took an absolute gamble in asking it. I wasn’t thinking about the crime. I was thinking about my story—how I could get two columns out of one question. So I got the books they had read, their educational background. Nietzsche believed in the superior man, Haeckel taught that there was no immortality of the soul and nothing beyond this life, and Epicurus advocated the right of the individual to do as he pleased.”

  Could anyone have come up with a more perfect synthesis to express the Chicago Idea? It seemed to Maurine that all Chicagoans thought the same way Nathan Leopold did, even if most of them couldn’t articulate it nearly as well. Being guided by your own thoughts and abilities, living out there on the high wire and being rewarded for it: That was the Chicago way. Nothing else counted. If it were sensational enough, whether a scientific breakthrough, a rousing new style of music, or an underworld murder, it would be celebrated. “With that sort of philosophy as a foundation, one could begin to see how they might have done it,” Maurine said. She was among the first reporters to seriously consider the possibility. She noted that the boys had mentioned “Oscar Wilde’s remark, ‘To regret an experience is to nullify it,’ ” and that they touted a belief that there was no God.

  Leopold did most of the talking during the question-and-answer session. “In clear, precise language,” Maurine wrote, “he dictated to the reporters a statement for the papers: ‘The police are more than justified in holding me in custody for a limited period, as I am the victim of an unusual set of circumstances. ’ ” He added, “ ‘And won’t you thank President Burton [University of Chicago president Ernest DeWitt Burton] and Dean Woodward of the Law School for their expression of sympathy and confidence in me?’ ”

  Leopold, aware that he and Loeb were not going to face challenging questions about the case, brazenly showed off his high-dollar education at the press event. He tossed out the names of obscure philosophers and complex economic theories, the reporters struggling to keep up. (Maurine laughed at her fellow scribes’ intellectual competition with the college boys, writing that “the most conceited tribe on earth—reporters!—nibbled their pencils and coughed suggestingly [sic] for spelling and definitions!”) It seemed obvious to many there that the two brilliant friends just happened to have recently been in the same culvert where Bobby Franks’s body was found. In a city of strivers, the wealthy were typically given the benefit of the doubt, and that was the initial response to the eyeglasses discovery. When told that Leopold and Loeb had been brought in as possible suspects, American reporter Howard Mayer, who knew the boys from the University of Chicago, exclaimed, “That’s impossible.” The early police questioning of the boys yielded nothing to alter that reaction. Prosecutors expected to release them by the weekend. “The most brilliant boy of his age I’ve ever known,” State’s Attorney Robert Crowe said of Leopold, possibly to ingratiate himself with the young man and get his defenses down. But Maurine was not fooled.13 She saw a scary narcissism in Nathan Leopold, noticing that he seemed to live “in a world of his own creating, and the people around him are more or less shadows.” She immediately recognized the difference between breezy upper-class confidence (as exhibited by Leopold’s father) and a dark, possibly sociopathic sense of superiority, noting Leopold’s “slow, calm smile that admits the hearer cannot grasp his meaning.” In Saturday’s paper she wrote:

  He has built for himself a world beyond morality, beyond convention—yet he accommodates himself to the world in which he lives. And he does not preach his convictions to others, for he realizes that such meat is only for the strong.

  With his friends he smokes and drinks and “takes his pleasure where he finds it.”

  Based on a single, relatively brief interaction, Maurine proved remarkably perceptive. She took a risk in laying out such a damning interpretation of Leopold from an interview that ranged across centuries of philosophical thought but never got past the superficialities of the Franks investigation. Even though she knew the boys were likely to be released before the morning edition hit the streets, she didn’t water down her conclusion. She closed the piece with a swipe at Leopold’s touting of experience for its own sake: “If he’s not connected with the crime—what an experience! And if he is connected—still it’s experience!”

  Maurine would find out, shortly after the article went to press, that she g
ot it exactly right. Leopold and Loeb did do it—and, indeed, for no other reason than for the experience. For the thrill of it. Just a few hours after the group interview with reporters, at around one in the morning, Dick Loeb broke. Leopold, responding to his friend’s confession, soon followed. (The same court stenographer who’d recorded Beulah’s confession in her apartment on April 3 took down the boys’ confessions.) State’s Attorney Crowe, hailed in his campaign literature as “Fighting Bob,” took charge of the case himself. He knew, or at least strongly suspected, that some of the assistant state’s attorneys on his staff were on the take from gangsters. Dozens of police officers, maybe hundreds, had been corrupted by the Mob. So if the ambitious forty-five-year-old prosecutor, a Yale Law School grad and former chief justice of the criminal court, wanted to become mayor or governor (and he did), he’d have to make headlines with a different kind of sensational case, a case like this one.

  “The Franks murder mystery has been solved. The murderers are in custody,” Crowe declared outside his office at six in the morning. “Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb have completely and voluntarily confessed. The kidnapping was planned many months ago, but the Franks boy was not the original victim in mind.” A hasty collection of reporters, some expressing astonishment, rushed to file the news. The state’s attorney was the hero of the moment. Within an hour, most of the city’s papers had special editions on the street proclaiming the confessions.

  The Tribune gave over almost its entire front page to Leopold and Loeb, justifying it by stating in an editors’ note that “the solving of the Franks kidnapping and death brings to notice a crime that is unique in Chicago’s annals, and perhaps unprecedented in American criminal history.” The editors added: “The diabolical spirit evinced in the planned kidnapping and murder; the wealth and prominence of the families whose sons are involved; the high mental attainments of the youths; the suggestions of perversion; the strange quirks indicated in the confession that the child was slain for a ransom, for experience, for the satisfaction of a desire for ‘deep plotting,’ combined to set the case in a class by itself.” The wall-to-wall reports marked only the beginning of the newspaper’s obsession with the crime. In the flurry of activity following the confessions, editors directed a team of reporters to track down people who knew Leopold and Loeb. Maurine recalled later that the Tribune wasn’t picky about its sources: “Anyone who had ever spoken to either of them was good material.”