by Simon Baatz
"How do you do, Mr. Mitchell ? " Nathan inquired sincerely. "I haven't
seen you for a long time; how are you?"12
Mitchell peered at the young man in front of him--who was he?
Yes, he recognized him now. Nathan Leopold had been a student at the
Harvard School a few years back. Mitchell remembered him as an obnoxious pupil: clever, certainly, one of the best students in the class, but
too arrogant and cynical to be likable.
"Have you heard," Mitchell asked, "about the Franks boy?" "No," Nathan replied.
Everyone at the Harvard School, Mitchell explained, was worried
at the disappearance of Bobby Franks. There was a rumor going around
that someone had kidnapped Bobby, and now there was news that a
boy's body had been found out by the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks
near the Indiana state line.
"Do you know him?" Mitchell asked.
Nathan shook his head, "No."
"Robert Franks?"
"No."13
Mitchell stayed a few minutes more on the sidewalk, talking about
the murder, as Nathan listened. It was inexplicable, Mitchell proclaimed,
that someone would murder Bobby Franks--and what effect would it
have on the Harvard School? Bobby had disappeared the previous day
on his way home after school, not far from where they stood--was any
child safe while the murderer was still at large?
Mitchell soon stopped talking; he was in a hurry, he explained.
There was to be a meeting of the school staff that evening with the principal; in all likelihood, the Harvard School would be closed tomorrow. They shook hands. As he made his way across the road, Nathan
realized that his nausea had disappeared. In its place, he felt a sudden
sense of exhilaration--they had succeeded in a crime that would be the
talk of the town!
Shortly after noon on the following day, Friday, 23 May--just two days after Bobby's death--Richard stood in the entrance hall at the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity on Ellis Avenue, smoking a cigarette and chatting with friends; he had already had lunch in the dining hall, and now he was killing time, wondering how to spend the afternoon.
He saw Howard Mayer enter and nodded a greeting. Howard was a senior at the university, and, although he had never rushed for the fraternity, he knew many of its members. Richard had heard that the
Chicago American had hired Howard as a stringer; he detached himself from his group of friends and stepped across the hallway to ask what Howard knew of the murder.
Everyone knew about the killing; everyone knew all the details; but, Mayer realized, Richard seemed almost to have an insider's knowledge of the case. Mayer listened attentively as Richard talked about the ransom demand. The newspapers had reported that the kidnappers had telephoned Jacob Franks at his home, directing him to go with the ransom to a drugstore on 63rd Street. Was there some reason for Franks to go to a particular drugstore? And what was Franks expected to do once he arrived at 63rd Street?
Could it be, Richard speculated, that the kidnappers had intended to give Franks a second message, perhaps instructing him to hide the ransom somewhere? After all, Richard said, the kidnappers would hardly wish to meet Jacob Franks face-to-face.
"You know these kidnappers would not meet a man on a busy street," Richard exclaimed, exhaling cigarette smoke as he spoke, "that is common sense."
Howard Mayer nodded in agreement; clearly there had been some reason for the kidnappers to direct Franks to the drugstore.
"Why don't you," Richard continued, without waiting for an answer, "make the rounds of some of these drugstores on East 63rd Street, and see if you can't find the one at which some word was left for Mr. Franks?"
Despite Richard's enthusiasm, Mayer hesitated; it seemed a quixotic mission to hazard an afternoon searching out such a faint target; and, anyway, he was already behind on his schoolwork and he had hoped to spend that afternoon studying.
While Mayer hesitated, two others approached them. James Mulroy and Alvin Goldstein were alumni, contemporaries of Richard Loeb
during his time at the university; now both were reporters for the Chicago Daily News.
As they approached, Richard addressed Mayer a final time, nodding in the direction of Mulroy and Goldstein,
"If you won't take my proposition, why I will put it up to them."14 What proposition, Mulroy asked? What scheme was Richard cooking up now?
He had the idea, Richard replied, to find the drugstore to which the
kidnappers had directed Jacob Franks. There had to have been some
reason, he guessed, for Franks to go to 63rd Street.
Would Mulroy and Goldstein care to go down to 63rd Street? It
wouldn't take long to search out the drugstores, Richard pleaded, perhaps only an hour if they went by car.
It was raining outside; they could see a steady drizzle coming down
and no sign that the weather would change for the better. But Mulroy
and Goldstein were eager, and Mayer, anxious that he might be scooped,
abandoned his schoolwork for another day.15
By the time they had reached Blackstone Avenue, the rain was
pouring down. They had already scouted out several drugstores along
63rd Street, having worked their way west from Stony Island Avenue,
but there was nothing, no clue, to indicate that they had found the kidnappers' drugstore. Mulroy was discouraged and at Blackstone Avenue
he announced that he would wait in the car; if the others wished to
continue looking, that was their business, but he was ready to return to
the university.16
While Alvin Goldstein checked out the cigar store on the other side
of the street, Richard and Howard Mayer went together to the Ross
drugstore on the corner.
Richard interrogated the porter, James Kemp. Had he received any
phone calls yesterday afternoon from someone asking for Mr. Franks?17 Yes, Kemp replied; it had been around two-thirty. He had answered the phone himself, while he had been at the back of the store,
cleaning up. A man's voice had been on the other end of the line. "The man asked for Mr. Franks," Kemp explained to Richard. "I told him I didn't know Mr. Franks and then he asked me to look around the store. He gave me a very detailed description of Mr. Franks, even to saying that probably he would be smoking a cigarette." But no one answering the description had been in the store, and the caller had hung up.18
Richard turned to Mayer in triumph; his guess had worked out. "You see, I told you we could find it. Now you have got a scoop."
He stood at the door of the pharmacy; the rain had eased off. Alvin Goldstein stood by the car talking to James Mulroy through the open window. Richard waved at the two reporters excitedly; he shouted for them to come over, "This is the place!"19
As they drove back to the university, Mulroy and Richard talked together in the rear of the car. Mulroy had not realized before that Richard Loeb and Bobby Franks had been second cousins. Mulroy was surprised also at Richard's knowledge of the murder; he seemed to know more about the killing than anyone else Mulroy had met. Mulroy was curious to learn more about Bobby Franks. The principal of the Harvard School had said that Bobby was one of the best students in the school and an excellent athlete--had Bobby been as good as everyone claimed?
Richard replied caustically that he had never had much regard for his fourteen-year-old cousin; he remembered Bobby as an arrogant boy, accustomed to having his own way, spoiled and selfish. "If I was going to murder anybody," Richard remarked, "he was just the kind of cocky little son-of-a-bitch that I would pick."20
Richard's adventure in leading the journalists to the drugstore had seemed innocuous, inconsequential, at the time. Richard knew, nevertheless, how dangerously he had f lirted with the possibil
ity of discovery-- one slip, one revelation that he knew too much about Bobby's death, and he might become a suspect. But, like the killing itself, his f lirtation with the reporters excited and aroused him. He could not openly boast, of course, that he was the architect of one of the most sensational crimes in Chicago's history. But his secret knowledge of the murder was congruent with his self-image as a master criminal. While Mayer and the rest blundered about in confusion and ignorance, he, Richard Loeb, had been able to unveil an important detail. Richard knew how close to the f lame he hovered, but it was irresistible; it thrilled him to lead his friends along a dangerous path.
Later that night Nathan waited in his car at the corner of 51st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. It was almost two o'clock in the morning. The rain had stopped, but the night was cold and chill and a strong wind blew in from Lake Michigan.
21
Nathan sat in the dark, waiting for Richard--they planned to dispose of the remaining evidence that night.
He was worried that the police had discovered the corpse so soon. Nathan had expected the hydrochloric acid to have burned away Bobby's face, but apparently it had not worked--the newspaper reports said only that the face was discolored--and the police had identified Bobby as the victim almost immediately.
And the detectives had also found a pair of eyeglasses near the body! No doubt they had fallen out of his jacket. How could he have been so careless? He should have checked the jacket pockets before going out on Wednesday. If the police were to question him about the eyeglasses, he had an explanation for their discovery near the corpse-- he would claim he had dropped them the previous weekend while bird-watching near Hyde Lake--but it was unsettling, nevertheless, to realize that the police now had a clue that could link him to the murder.
Richard finally arrived. He was in a good mood. That afternoon, he recounted to Nathan, he had gone with three journalists--Howard Mayer of the Chicago American and Alvin Goldstein and James Mulroy of the Chicago Daily News--along 63rd Street, pretending to look for the drugstore and finding it at the last moment, just when they were about to abandon the search!
It was exasperating, Nathan replied, that Richard would behave so foolishly; did he not understand the risk? Their perfect crime, Nathan warned, was already beginning to unravel. Why would Richard behave in such a provocative way? Nathan hit the steering wheel with his open palm for emphasis as he admonished Richard; Nathan reminded him that the police had discovered the eyeglasses near the corpse--had Richard thought how he could explain their presence by the culvert?
Perhaps, Nathan wondered, they should prepare for the worst; perhaps they should create an alibi in case the police did question them in connection with the murder.
Richard agreed--better to be on the safe side. They would say that they had gone out to Lincoln Park on Wednesday in Nathan's car; that they had been drinking that afternoon; and that, in the evening, they had had dinner before meeting a couple of girls.
This alibi would stick if each vouched for the other. So long as they both held fast to this alibi, they would be safe--but if either one buckled under police pressure, then the other also was doomed. In any case, they would need to use the alibi only if the police apprehended them within a week of the crime. No one could reasonably be expected to remember what he had done on a given day if one week had since gone by.22
They had talked for almost an hour; it was already three o'clock in the morning. Nathan lifted the Underwood typewriter--the typewriter used to print the ransom letter--from the backseat of the car and, with a pair of pliers, began twisting and pulling apart the keys. Now, even if the detectives found the typewriter, they could never match it with the ransom letter they had sent to Jacob Franks.
They drove south, down Cottage Grove Avenue, and east along the Midway, out to Jackson Park. On their left, across the North Pond, the Palace of Fine Arts--the sole structure remaining from the Columbian Exposition of 1893--gleamed white in the moonlight; its silent presence was the only witness as Nathan, clutching the typewriter keys in his hand, stepped from the car onto the bridge, and allowed the keys to fall into the water of the lagoon.
At the outer harbor, on the stone bridge, Nathan stopped a second time to dispose of the typewriter; it fell into the harbor with a splash that echoed into the silence of the night.23
The automobile blanket--stained brownish red with Bobby's congealed blood--lay crumpled on the f loor of the car. It had been too
risky to burn the blanket along with Bobby's clothes in the basement furnace in Richard's house ; they had to burn it in open air so that the acrid
odor of the blood would not attract attention. Nathan knew a spot on
South Shore Drive, close by a small copse, far from any buildings, where
they could safely burn it. It took only a few minutes to burn and once it
had been consumed by the f lames, the last piece of evidence had disappeared.24
The police first knocked at the door of the Leopold house on Sunday, 25 May. Thomas Wolf, a captain from the Eighth Police District, explained that he wished to talk to Nathan about the ornithology classes he conducted by the lakes near the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. It was routine, the captain explained; in the hope of turning up clues to the murder, the police were questioning anyone who frequented the area.
Nathan spent two hours that Sunday at the Ewing Avenue station answering questions. Yes, he had often been out at Wolf Lake; only the previous weekend, he had spent the day with a friend, Sidney Stein, hunting birds. And he also took groups of schoolchildren out to the area to look for birds; he had frequently taken boys from the Harvard School to the lake, and occasionally he had classes of boys and girls from the University High School.
25
It was reassuring, he realized, that the detectives had no inkling that he had any connection with the murder; it quickly became apparent that their questions were indeed routine. Nathan was not a suspect and, he calculated, if the police had not yet, four days after the discovery of the eyeglasses, connected him, through the eyeglasses, to the murder, then it seemed that he was safe. Nathan reported back to Richard--neither of them was under suspicion!
Nathan had no need for any more distractions; he had decided to apply to Harvard University law school, and that week he was taking the entrance examinations. He needed to concentrate--it would be inconvenient if there were any more questions from the police.
One week after the murder, on Wednesday, 28 May, Nathan took his law exams. On his way from the examination hall, he passed the office of Ernst Puttkammer, the popular thirty-four-year-old law professor. Puttkammer, despite his thinning blond hair and his steelrimmed glasses, had a youthful appearance; students found him approachable and helpful, always willing to discuss the complexities of the law and to lend a sympathetic ear to any student struggling with his class work.
The door was ajar, and inside, Puttkammer was sitting at his desk, poring over a law journal. He glanced up as Nathan knocked and entered the room. Nathan was one of the brightest students in his class-- a little eccentric, certainly, with his Nietzschean philosophy and his avowals that a superman need not regard the law; but, Puttkammer ref lected as Nathan sat down, it was better to have an engaged student who talked too much than a student who talked not at all.
Nathan explained that he had wanted to discuss the legal ramifications of the murder of Bobby Franks; would the sentencing guidelines in Illinois necessarily mandate the death penalty for the kidnappers?
Suppose that the kidnappers had abducted Franks solely for the purpose of the ransom and suppose also that the murder had occurred accidentally, say, as the boy was being kidnapped. If there had been no intent to kill, would the kidnappers nevertheless receive the death penalty?
Puttkammer twirled his pencil in his hand, looking at Nathan from across the desk.
"Isn't kidnapping," Puttkammer replied, "a felony here in Illinois?"
"Yes," answered Nathan.
Puttkammer laid
the pencil on his desk and leaned back in his chair. "Supposing a man causes somebody's death while he is intending to commit a felony? Is that murder or manslaughter?"
Nathan hesitated. Perhaps the kidnappers had intended only to rape Bobby. What then? "Suppose that the intent were simply to take improper liberties with this boy?" he replied. "I understand that that is a misdemeanor here in Illinois."
"Well . . . you still are talking about someone who had an intent to kidnap at the time, so that it is none the less a case where the intent is to commit a felony, even though other crimes might enter into it which are simply misdemeanors."
Puttkammer was pleased that Nathan was taking such an interest in the case. The majority of students seemed interested in the law only as a way to make a living; Nathan was one of those rare students with genuine intellectual curiosity.
Puttkammer confessed his ignorance of the case; he had been too preoccupied with keeping up with the decisions of the Illinois supreme court to spend much time reading the newspapers. But he had attended the Harvard School himself as a young boy, so, to that degree at least, the case was very interesting.
"I went to the school myself," Nathan interrupted.
"Well, then, your interest perhaps is even greater than mine, because you went there so much more recently and must know many more of the people."
Puttkammer had read in yesterday's papers that the police had arrested Mott Kirk Mitchell, the English teacher, as the leading suspect. That was unexpected--he had always thought of Mitchell as an outstanding teacher and a considerate and thoughtful person.
"Well, I don't know--" Nathan interrupted again. "I am not so sure about that."
All the boys knew, Nathan continued, that Mitchell was a homosexual; he was notorious for soliciting sex with the older boys at the Harvard School.
"Are you sure of that?"
"Yes; he made that sort of a proposition to my brother; that is straight enough, isn't it?"
The professor had picked up his pencil again and was drumming it lightly on the top of his desk, glancing at the clock, and starting to pick up a book. Nathan rose from his chair, saying, as he turned to leave the room, "I wouldn't put it past that man, Mitchell; I would like to see them get that fellow. . . ."