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No one knows what will be the fate of the child they get or the child they

bear.

The mother, who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe, cannot help but

wonder what will be the end of this child, whether it will be crowned with

the greatest promises which her mind can imagine, or whether he may meet death

from the gallows.

Clarence Darrow.

The body was found on the morning of May 22nd, 1924.

A 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks, who'd gone missing from his Chicago

neighborhood the day before.

A ransom note had been sent to his parents.

But before they'd had a chance to pay, the kidnappers had killed their son.

The crime itself was so shocking.

They bludgeoned a child to death, poured acid on his face to try to

disguise his features.

He was stripped of his clothes and left in a culvert. It was as desolate a place

as you could possibly imagine leaving a body.

The murder would rivet the nation.

All the more so when police at last caught the killers, Nathan Leopold and

Richard Loeb, wealthy, well-educated teenagers who had done it, they said,

for the sheer thrill.

This is an inexplicable murder.

These were children of privilege, of high ideals, who had everything given to

them. They were the last people who had any reason to commit...

a kidnapping, much less a murder.

As the case unfolded over that hot summer of 1924, with Cook County

prosecutor Robert Crowe and famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow

debating the death penalty, and scores of commentators weighing in from the

sidelines, the question of motive would be turned over and over again.

And what at first seemed a simple matter of evil...

gradually would give way to a complex assessment of the murderer's minds and a

searing indictment of the forces that had shaped them.

I think that the murder said something to people about American society.

This was seen as a culmination of trends that were dangerous, that were immoral.

So you had all of a sudden this...

question thrown up against our culture, which is that, is it rotten? Is there

something wrong? Are we going in the wrong direction?

There are mysteries wrapped inside of enigmas in this case, and it's why it

won't go away.

On May 22nd, 1924,

Just hours after the body of Bobby Franks was found, the hunt for his

killers got underway.

To state's attorney Robert Crowe, a combative 45-year-old Irishman who'd

been elected on a promise to vanquish crime in Chicago, the case was a career

-making opportunity.

Robert Crowe was very politically ambitious, and his ambition... was

eventually to become mayor of Chicago, to become one of the most powerful men

in the city.

Crowe had certainly hoped that a success in this case would help him as a

politician.

The police had few clues.

The ransom note, a tip about a gray sedan that had been idling where Bobby

Franks was last seen, and a pair of eyeglasses found near the body.

When the glasses first were found, it was thought that they were Bobby Frank's

glasses. They were even put on the corpse in the funeral home. And when his

relative came in to identify the body, he said, well, those aren't his glasses.

And at that point, they thought, well, they must be the glasses of one of the

criminals.

The prescription was actually a very average one.

What was unusual about the eyeglasses is that they had a certain hinge.

And when the police began to inquire, they found that only three pairs of

eyeglasses with that hinge had been sold in the Chicago district.

One of the three belonged to a man who'd been abroad for weeks, another to a

woman who was quickly ruled out as a suspect.

That left 19-year-old Nathan Leopold from the exclusive neighborhood of

Kenwood on Chicago's South Side.

Although it seemed doubtful that the boy had had any hand in the murder,

Crow sent three detectives to the Leopold home with orders to bring Nathan

in for questioning.

Nathan Leopold was studying for law school.

He was an extraordinary young man with a potentially fantastic future before

him. Nathan Leopold was not regarded as a likely suspect simply because his

family was very prominent.

By 1924, the family was worth about $4 million.

Why would someone like Nathan Leopold want to kidnap a young child? It didn't

seem to make any sense.

Crow would spend the rest of the afternoon and long into the night

downtown

interrogating Nathan Leopold.

When confronted with the eyeglasses, the young man shrugged.

He was a recognized expert on birds, he boasted to Crow, the author of an

article about the rare Kirtland's warbler.

He frequently led birding expeditions near the place Frank's body had been

found.

The glasses, he said, must have fallen at some point from his jacket pocket.

As for the night of Frank's murder, he'd spent it driving around town in his red

Willis night with his good friend, Richard Loeb.

Leopold's alibi was that he and Loeb had gone off in the park, started drinking,

picked up a couple of girls, fooled around them a little bit.

Those two girls that they did pick up refused to have sex with them, so they

dropped them off and then they continued home. That was the alibi they had.

While Crowe interrogated Leopold, police ransacked his bedroom and study and

turned up a letter to Richard Loeb, which suggested the boys were lovers.

Crowe found it odd.

If Leopold and Loeb were homosexuals, why would they have spent an evening

chasing girls?

Now, he wanted Richard Loeb brought in for questioning as well.

Richard Loeb graduated from high school when he was 14 years old and immediately

matriculated at the University of Chicago as a full-time student.

He was very popular as a student.

Richard Loeb's father was the vice president of Sears Roebuck.

He was worth about $10 million by 1924.

Loeb corroborated his friend's alibi.

Still, Crowe felt there was something suspicious about these young men.

So long as their parents were cooperating, certain that their sons had

been involved in no wrongdoing, Crowe planned to keep Leopold and Loeb in

custody.

Meanwhile, the circumstantial evidence was mounting.

The handwriting on the ransom notes envelope matched Nathan Leopold's, and

the note itself had been linked to a typewriter he owned.

Then, the Leopold family's chauffeur showed up at Crow's office.

He'd been sent by Nathan's father, with information Mr. Leopold was sure proved

the boy's innocence.

The two could not have been anywhere near the place the body was left, the

chauffeur said, because on the day in question, Nathan's car was being worked

on in the garage.

Certain now that the boy's alibi was a lie,

Crow ramped up the pressure.

They had been left in rooms by themselves under drilling for 24

hours. This was a pinning down of these guys.

And everything pointed to them.

The two boys were originally held separately, in separate rooms.

And Robert Crowe first went to Richard.

Richard confessed and then gave Crowe details that only the murderers could

have known.

Crow takes those details to Nathan, and Nathan realizes that Richard is

confessing. And then immediately Nathan also starts confessing, but blaming

everything on Richard.

So Richard is blaming Nathan, Nathan is blaming Richard.

The crime, both boys admitted, had been months in the planning, and they'd had

every expectation of getting away with it the intention was always to murder

from the very beginning it was all part of the plan to commit the perfect crime

to do this crime that would be sensational and to get away with getting

the ransom that was the intention as a police stenographer took down their

words first loeb then leopold described how they'd rented a car under an assumed

name to use on the day of the murder

and typed out the ransom note even before they chose their victim.

The afternoon of the crime, they were rolling around the neighborhood in their

rental car looking for a victim, literally looking for a victim.

And suddenly, on the other side of the street, they saw Bobby Franks, who was

the cousin of Richard Loeb.

They drive up behind Bobby Franks.

Richard, who's sitting in the back seat, invites Bobby into the front seat.

And then as soon as Bobby is inside the car, the murder takes place almost

immediately.

Leopold and Loeb confessed that they'd bludgeoned Franks with a chisel, then

crammed a rag into his mouth, which had suffocated him.

Then they'd driven out to the wetlands near Lake Michigan, stopping along the

way for hot dogs and root beer, poured acid over Bobby's face and genitals to

obscure his identity, and pushed him into the drainage pipe where he'd been

found.

Crow, hoping to build his case and cement the boy's guilt in the public

mind,

Now had Leopold and Loeb retraced their steps on the day of the murder, leading

investigators and a caravan of journalists, from the hardware store

where they'd purchased the chisel all the way to the spot where they'd

disposed of the body.

The two most helpful people in sorting out the evidence were Leopold and Loeb

themselves.

They were sort of giving a guided tour to the people that were going to

eventually prosecute them.

It just sort of almost boggles the mind how much they gave away.

They literally demonstrated how they had done it and walked them through the

scenes of the crime as if once they were discovered, they were proud of the

plotting.

They became almost braggarts about it.

Crow was elated.

It was an open and shut case, he told the press.

A premeditated murder carried out in cold blood.

He vowed that justice would come in the form of the death penalty.

The morning papers after the murder, front-page story.

And literally for two, three, four months, it was the front-page story

on every newspaper in Chicago.

It is not possible to overstate the media attention given to this case.

This case made the headlines, the front page of The New York Times. This is not

Chicago, The New York Times, three days in a row.

It was a case of tremendous sensation.

Suddenly, Leopold and Loeb were everywhere.

And the horror of the murder began to pale before the specter of the

murderers.

Two arrogant young men in stylish suits, smoking cigarettes and chatting blithely

with reporters about the killing of Bobby Franks.

They said they did it because they could.

because he was there, because it was fun for the thrill of it.

They didn't seem to show much remorse at all.

Of the two, Nathan Leopold seemed the more chilling figure.

When asked how he felt about Bobby Frank's murder, Leopold casually replied

that it didn't concern him.

It is as easy to justify such a death, he said, as it is to justify an

entomologist. impaling a beetle on a pin.

Leopold was seen as the monster.

He seemed like an evil mastermind, whereas Loeb seemed like such a carefree

playboy who could easily be led astray by this stronger, darker intellect.

The truth of the matter, of course, is the complete opposite.

The boys had met four years earlier in the summer of 1920

Richard Loeb was then 15 He not only

graduated from high school, but already had completed his first year of college

at the University of Chicago Nathan Leopold just six months older

was equally precocious He was to begin his freshman term at the University that

fall

They both zoomed through school, zoomed into college, well ahead of their peers.

So I think once they were on each other's radar, there was a sense of them

sniffing each other out, of realizing here, in a way, is a kindred spirit.

In many ways, the two had been cut from the same cloth.

Both the scion of wealthy Jewish families, they had been raised in

comfort. and had spent their childhoods in the constant care of governesses mere

blocks from one another.

They became fast friends, somewhat to the bewilderment of those who knew them

both.

Richard Loeb was a dazzling human being.

He was the kind of human being that when he walked through a room, the molecular

energy changed. You couldn't help looking at him. He wore clothes

incredibly well. He had a flashing smile.

He was dazzlingly handsome.

Nathan Leopold was the complete opposite.

There is something beetle-browed and intense and dark about Leopold.

He was the kind of guy I think you'd instantly take a dislike to at a party.

He was the know-it-all who would have an opinion on everything.

Leopold fell in love with Richard Loeb and idolized him.

And Loeb felt it was nice to have an acolyte. It was nice to have someone

around him who would always make him feel beautiful or intelligent or

special.

I think the deeper truth, they sensed another predator in the room, and they

were drawn to each other.

What would end with the murder of Bobby Franks had begun almost innocently, with

a scheme Richard devised to cheat at cards.

That small transgression had bound the boys together, put them in league

against the rest of the world.

But Richard longed to play more dangerous games.

He was crying.

That fascinated Loeb.

He read detective novels, pulp periodicals.

He devoured the newspapers for stories of crime.

And I think to him, it's because there's a certain exceptionality about crime.

Criminals are not of the common run of humanity.

And he felt he was not in the common run of humanity.

Nathan was more than willing to join in, but he wanted something in return.

So the boys made a secret pact.

There was an arrangement that Richard would agree to have sex with Nathan if

Nathan accompanied Richard when he did his crimes.

Richard started out by committing small acts of vandalism, stealing

cars, setting fire to buildings.

It escalated more and more, and then eventually Richard suggested the idea to

Nathan of committing a murder.

Nathan was not only agreeable, he urged Richard on, with a concept taken from

the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that of the Übermensch, or

Superman, a being so exceptional that he was bound by neither law nor morality.

Unfortunately, they invested in their own sort of dark and twisted version of

the Nietzschean ideal, where they began to self-identify as the Nietzschean

Superman.

They wanted to create a unique act, do something that was, in their view,

exalted and befitting of a Nietzschean Superman.

And they thought this act, being so clever, committing the perfect murder,

would be a way for them to demonstrate their superiority over other people.

They were a couple of boys playing a strange and sadistic game.

Now, obviously, this had an erotic dimension, but it also had a kind of

intellectual dimension.

And that, I think, is key to understanding what was going on between

Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold.

Neither had ever considered the possibility that they would be caught.

Now, the two supermen were behind bars.

And if the state's attorney had his way, they would end on the gallows.

Hours after news of the confessions broke, the Loeb family sought the

counsel of the country's preeminent criminal defense attorney, Clarence

Darrow, soon to be known as the attorney for the damned.

Clarence Darrow was, at this point in his life, 67 years old.

He had just come off an amazing string of victories, defending a bunch of

corrupt politicians in Chicago.

Clarence Darrow is thought as a legal miracle worker.

Many of his cases, his guys or his gals are found with guns and a bloody knife

in their hands.

And that's why he was seen as the attorney for the damned.

Get them a life sentence instead of death, Loeb's uncle begged Darrow.

We'll pay you anything, only for God's sake, don't let them hang.

It was a request Darrow could not refuse.

He hated capital punishment, did probably 60 or more capital punishment

cases in his career. He lost the first one to the hangman and he never got over

it.

His philosophy was definitely hate the sin and love the sinner.

He believed people act the way they act because they're brought up in poverty or

because they themselves have been ill-treated and that the supreme virtue

was mercy.

He believed that everything we do is determined by our upbringing, by our

childhood, by our parents, and therefore there's very little free choice, no free

will. So he believed accordingly that capital punishment, the death penalty,

was something that should not take place.

Darrow was by no means alone.

The previous quarter century had seen movements to abolish the death penalty

in no fewer than 10 states.

while the number of executions nationwide had sharply declined.

With the issue still being hotly debated all over the country,

Darrow sensed an opportunity to tip the scales.

He wants to make a statement about capital punishment.

In the Leopold and Loeb case, he knows he has this amazing spotlight.

Everybody's listening around the world, not just in the United States.

The actor egoist in him sought opportunities to play great parts one

writer said of Darrow hero parts

Darrow

showed up for his first meeting with his clients in a rumpled seersucker suit and

a shirt that bore traces of his breakfast

My first impression, Nathan Leopold later said, was horror.

You couldn't imagine three more different planets in constellation.

There was Loeb, who was sleek, and his lapels could cut you like a knife.

Leopold, who was intense and brooding, his hair was almost shining, and he was

very sort of well put together.

And then Clarence Darrow, who was a complete shambling mess. It was like a

hobbit suddenly walked into a room of tango dancers.

By the time Darrow arrived, Leopold and Loeb had been in Crow's custody for

three days, talking all the while.

The state's attorney had even arranged for Leopold and Loeb to be examined by

Chicago's leading alienists, as psychiatrists were known.

in an effort to block what he assumed would be Darrow's only possible line of

defense.

Not guilty by reason of insanity.

Crow's alienists all said that the defendants were perfectly sane and there

was nothing wrong with them, other than that they simply failed to appreciate

the enormity of what they'd done.

But that was hardly insanity.

That was, in the state's view, you know, evil.

not madness.

On June 11th, Darrow appeared with his clients before Judge John Caverly.

As expected, he entered a not guilty plea, which gave him several weeks to

prepare his defense.

Next, he gathered a team of experts from all over the country to evaluate Leopold

and Loeb, including a physician, an adolescent criminologist, and a

psychiatrist versed in the new analytic techniques of Sigmund Freud.

Over the next five weeks, Leopold and Loeb would be subjected to rigorous

examinations derived from the cutting edge of modern science.

Their bodily functions were measured, intelligence tested, family histories

probed.

Meanwhile, the boy's unfathomable crime prompted a rash of national hand

-wringing over the perils of modern life.

It did say something about the 20s. You know, the music is wild.

The skirts were short.

There was gin.

It was a fast-living society.

So the madcap fun...

was suddenly a very dark implication of unchecked emotion, unchecked youth,

unchecked wildness can lead to things.

So there was a lot of uneasiness about who we were and where we were going.

You had some ministers saying it was because Americans were over-educating

their children.

There was too much prosperity, too much modernism, too much indulgence.

of American children taking place at the time.

All of these things rained down on the Leopold and Loeb case.

Concerned for his client's image, Darrow sent men into the streets of Chicago to

gauge public opinion.

Sixty percent of those queried thought Leopold and Loeb should hang.

Darrow's early letters to his son and to his ex-wife from early

June are very bleak, and they say, I doubt that I'll be able to save these

boys. And this is a man who has pulled the trick off dozens of times throughout

his career. But he says, you know, the newspapers are just too bad.

On July 21st, two months after Bobby Frank's murder, Darrow and his clients

joined Prosecutor Crowe in the criminal court building to present motions before

Judge John Caverly.

It was 10 a.m., and though the already sweltering courtroom was filled to

capacity, the crowd was mostly silent.

Darrow, disheveled as ever, his thumbs hooked under his trademark suspenders,

spoke first and turned the entire case on its head.

by entering a plea of guilty.

He stood up and told the judge that we're going to change the plea to

guilty. Reporters jumped and ran to the rooms in all the afternoon newspapers

that Leopold and Loeb are pleading guilty.

When you plead somebody guilty, it changes the game entirely because now

you're not going to impanel a jury.

So then it became the judge's decision to decide whether they would hang or

whether they would...

be just sent to prison for life.

Crow, who moments earlier had confidently swaggered into the courtroom

chomping on a cigar, was apoplectic.

Crow thought he had everything sewn up, that he was all ready for a plea by the

defense of not guilty on account of insanity.

Darrow. who has this radical idea that he's going to introduce evidence about

his clients' backgrounds and about their mental states to argue for a sentence

less than death.

Darrow's strategy to introduce this evidence was absolutely groundbreaking.

It was so groundbreaking that no one had ever heard of it.

The state's attorney thought it was completely ridiculous and he shouldn't

be allowed to do this.

Darrow wanted to present...

psychological weakness as a mitigating factor for sentencing.

So essentially what he was saying to Judge Cavalry was, we admit that we

committed the crime, but I'd like to show you why we committed the crime.

When the sentencing hearing got underway on the morning of July 23, 1924,

the stifling courtroom was so thronged with spectators that reporters

commandeered the empty jury box.

Crowe presented the state's evidence first, armed with a lengthy list of

witnesses who would provide testimony on every ghastly detail of Leopold and

Loeb's crime.

Even though it's not a trial, Crowe has to present evidence to show the

defendant's guilt.

He does so quite thoroughly. He introduces more than 80 witnesses, and

when he's done, there's absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that Leopold and

Loeb committed these offenses.

These witnesses would appear, and Darrow would just sort of sit in the corner and

do nothing because he realized that to cross-examine the witness even gave more

spirit to what was there.

So he remained silent.

Crowe hammered away at the facts of the case for seven full days.

The senseless, brutal slaying of a 14-year-old boy.

The calculated disposal of the material evidence.

The glib demeanor of the killers once they'd been caught.

It was, the prosecutor said, the most cruel, cowardly, dastardly murder

ever committed in the annals of American jurisprudence.

He demanded the death penalty.

Throughout, Leopold and Loeb sat just behind their attorneys, snickering.

It was remarkable, one observer noted, to see two kids on trial for their life

acting like that.

One of the things that was very striking was their absence of remorse.

They never apologized. They never said sorry.

And, of course, their families were terribly distraught and upset.

Leopold's father came to every single day of the hearing.

The Loeb family was represented by one of Loeb's brothers.

The parents retreated to their summer home. I think they never came to grips

with what had happened.

I think they were in as much shock as anybody else.

On July 30th, the defense finally took charge of the room.

It was his intention, Darrow told Judge Caverly, to show that his clients were

diseased, both physically and mentally, and therefore not responsible for their

actions.

Calling his team of experts to the stand one by one, Darrow spelled out for the

court the findings from the elaborate pretrial examinations of Leopold and

Loeb, offering a catalog of the boys' abnormalities.

One witness testified to their dysfunctional endocrine glands, another

to the delusions that had led to their crime.

The psychiatrists argue that, in fact, it was Loeb. and not Leopold, who was

responsible, and that Leopold had been his servant, that there had been a

master-slave relationship between the two of them.

Richard had this fantasy of being a master criminal, and Nathan had the

fantasy of being a slave to a king.

And it's that inner fantasy life that created the bond between the two boys.

Referring to the two as Babe and Dickie, their childhood nicknames, the witnesses

for the defense argued that both boys suffered from stunted emotional growth.

Richard, in particular, was a little child emotionally, still talking to his

teddy bear, one psychiatrist told the court.

He is infantile. I should say somewhere around four or five years old.

Both boys had been neglected by their parents.

Both had a governess.

And these governesses exerted an enormous amount of control over the

children.

Nathan Leopold had been abused sexually by his governess when he was about

12 years old.

With Richard Loeb, it was the case that his governess virtually stepped in as a

mother figure, pushed him to excel in the classroom.

And as he tells it to the psychiatrists, he began to be so resentful that he

started to lie.

And Richard himself traced his crimes back to those lies that he told his

governors.

It took a tremendous amount of chutzpah, but Clarence Darrow made the argument

that these two very privileged sons of very wealthy families were actually

victims.

They were in...

this very sheltered life with cold families, and that therefore they should

be pitied rather than hated.

To Crowe, the entire defense was preposterous.

He fairly wore himself out with objections and vehement cross

-examinations.

Constantly through the trial, he is going back, returning to the savagery of

the crime.

because he knows what Darrow is doing. He knows that he has to pressure Judge

Caverly in the opposite direction.

So the whole thing is a struggle between these two legal titans, Crow and Darrow,

for the judge's mind.

There were plenty of Americans who agreed with Crow that the boy's guilt

was all that mattered.

But for many others, Darrow's defense offered an intriguing new perspective on

human behavior.

What the Leopold and Loeb defense team did was to introduce Freudian

interpretations into the courtroom.

And that was all very new.

And it just grabbed the American public.

It riveted them.

The parents who read the newspapers were fixated on what they could learn about

their own more normal children from these young people.

What about my child?

The major effect of all the scientific testimony was that it convinced the

people of Chicago, America, and around the world that there were indeed

motivations.

It wasn't just a matter of good and evil.

There were flaws in human beings.

triggers that make people act the way they do.

On August 18, after two and a half weeks of testimony, the defense rested.

What remained now were the closing arguments, the last chance for both

sides to convince Judge Caverly to either spare the boys' lives or else

sentence them to hang until they were dead.

The curious spectators began to descend on the criminal court building at midday

on Friday, August 22nd By 2 p.m. More than 2

,000 people had mastered the doors and begun pushing their way in They had come

to hear Clarence Darrow's closing argument Rumored to be the last the

legendary attorney would give before his retirement

Darrow teased to the press that this could be his last big case.

This was a way of Darrow to focus attention.

It wasn't just Clarence Darrow defending Leopold and Loeb. It was Clarence

Darrow's last stand.

Your Honor, I have stood here for three months as one might stand at the ocean

trying to sweep back the tide.

I hope the seas are subsiding.

and the wind is falling, and I believe they are.

But I wish to make no false pretense to this court.

The easy thing, and the popular thing to do, is to hang my clients.

We are asking this court to save their lives.

Speaking continuously for the better part of three days, Darrow offered the

court a rambling summary of the reasons Leopold and Loeb should be spared.

If you read Clarence Darrow's arguments today, they sound in desperate need of

an editor.

But if you think about the effect that they had in the courtroom before the age

of television and radio, when this was supreme human drama.

You realize that he was very smoothly, seductively creating a mood, casting a

spell, touching their emotions quite masterfully.

Before I would tie a noose around the neck of a boy, I would try to call back

into my mind the emotions of youth.

The brain of the child is the home of dreams, of castles, of visions

of illusions and delusions and whether they take one shape or another shape

depends not on the dreamy boy but on what surrounds him

again and again darrow spoke of youth

reminding judge caverley that nathan leopold and richard loeb at nineteen

were but children

During the previous century, no one younger than 23 had been executed in

Illinois on a guilty plea.

For the prosecutor to demand such an execution was barbarous, Darrow said,

and evidence of the savagery the recent World War had unleashed.

We are used to blood, Your Honor.

We have not only had it shed in buckets full,

We have it shed in rivers lakes and oceans We have delighted in

it We have preached it Until the world has been drenched in blood and has

left its stains of blood upon every human heart It was almost as though he

had been scripted by Shakespeare He was a brilliant man. He had a tremendous

capture of the law He didn't need notes. He was the consummate actor.

I am not pleading so much for these boys as I am for the infinite number of

others to follow.

Your honor stands between the past and the future.

You may hang these boys, you may hang them by the neck until they are dead,

but in doing it, you will turn your face towards the past.

Clarence Darrow had that courtroom eating out of his hands.

He brought Loeb, who giggled and chuckled and smirked throughout his own

trial, to tears.

The judge had tears in his eyes when Darrow was done.

Prosecutor Crowe, in his rebuttal, fought back hard.

He even went so far as to insinuate, without any conclusive evidence, that

there had been a sexual motive for the crime.

Crowe introduces the idea that poor Bobby Franks was molested either before

and or after death, at which point Judge Caverly tells the female reporters that

they have to leave his courtroom because their dainty ears can't be listening to

such awful testimony.

Attorney Crowe really was sort of between a rock and a hard place.

They were pleaded guilty, so all he can do is bring in...

the grotesque evidence of the case, how horrible it was, and show what

terrible, terrible beings they were.

If Judge Caverly was leaning one way or the other when the hearing finally

concluded on its 32nd day, he gave no indication.

But Chicago's bookies had already begun offering three-to-one odds against a

death sentence.

For 12 days, Chicago and the world waited, while Caverly wrestled with his

decision.

For many Americans, what hung in the balance was not merely the fate of

Leopold and Loeb, but the very meaning of justice.

You who sit there at your breakfast table, so comfortable, one columnist

wrote, would you stand for justice, no matter if by taking such a stand?

you had to walk to the foot of the gallows with your own son?

Is it going to be life in prison, or is it going to be the death penalty?

Caverly is not very happy with this situation because the whole

responsibility rests upon his shoulders.

Whatever decision he makes, he's going to be criticized.

Finally, on September 10th, the parties to the case assembled once again in

Caverly's courtroom.

Security was tight, the mood tense, as Caverly began to read from three sheets

of lined paper.

Judge Caverly comes out to give the verdict, and he says, basically, I'm not

going to be moved by any of the scientific evidence. It was interesting,

gentlemen, but they pled guilty.

Nathan Leopold thought he was heading for the hangman.

But the judge went on.

and it swiftly became clear that Leopold and Loeb were headed not for the

gallows, but for prison.

The court believes that it is within his province, Caverly explained, to decline

to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age.

One of the most interesting things about Judge Caverly's ruling is how, in the

end, how little all that scientific...

all the alienist testimony, the talk about glandular secretions, how little

it all mattered. In the end, he clung to that legal idea of precedent.

The judge says, I am basing my decision not to impose the death penalty entirely

on the defendant's youth.

I can only imagine what the prosecution thought of the judge's sentence

because...

I could imagine them saying, if these guys don't get the death penalty, who

should get the death penalty?

Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Bobby

Franks, plus 99 years for the kidnapping.

The verdict would provoke outrage across the country and accusations that the

defendants had bought their way out of the hangman's noose.

But Darrow had saved his client's lives and dealt a powerful blow to the death

penalty.

As he told the reporters who crowded around the defense table, he now planned

to launch a campaign to end capital punishment in Illinois.

Before leaving the courtroom, Leopold and Loeb shook Darrow's hand.

In the morning, the pair would be bound for the penitentiary at Joliet.

Back in his cell at the county jail, Nathan called to the sheriff and

arranged for what surely would be the boy's last good meal, thick steak

smothered in onions and chocolate eclairs.

Ladies and gentlemen, a month ago, I begged the members of the parole board

for their compassion.

They found it in their hearts to grant it.

By the time Nathan Leopold was released from prison in 1958, he'd been

behind bars for more than 33 years.

Richard Loeb had died in prison two decades before, murdered by a fellow

inmate who claimed Loeb had made unwanted sexual advances.

Clarence Darrow had died back in 1938 at the age of 80, having spent much of his

time outside of the courtroom advocating with little success against the death

penalty.

Swarmed by reporters outside of the prison, Leopold pleaded for privacy.

I appeal as solemnly as I know how to you and to your editors and to your

publishers and to society at large.

to agree that the only piece of news about me is that I have ceased to be

news.

Leopold and Loeb would never again dominate headlines.

But the perpetrators of the perfect crime would continue to compel

fascination for decades to come.

I think this case has a continuous hold on our imaginations because of the way

it interrogates the idea of evil and whether or not

there really is such a thing.

Darrow tried to get us away from thinking in terms of monsters and kind

of unfathomable darkness to try to understand the world in terms of

sickness and health, youth and maturity, shades of gray

rather than...

the black and white of good and evil.

One of the terrifying implications of the case in 1924 was if the boys who had

everything in the world ahead of them could do this act, why could not other

people do this act?

And I think, in a way, that's why we're still discussing the case, because they

did something mad, and we're all capable of doing something mad.

Given the forces upon them or upon any of us, what are we capable of?

Why then did these two boys commit this rash and horrible deed?

I presume they know less about the reason than others who have studied the

case and the boys as well.

There are many things that human beings cannot understand.

and of all the fathomless questions that confront and confuse men, the most

baffling is the human mind.