Once apprehended, Leopold and Loeb retained Clarence Darrow as counsel for the defense. Darrow pleaded for leniency, and ultimately saved the two from death. Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Loeb was killed by a fellow prisoner in Their belief in their own abilities led them to feel that they were superior to others and not under the jurisdiction of the laws of common men.
Loeb yearned to commit what he thought was the perfect crime, a murder that was so calculated and so perfectly devised that no one could ever determine who had done it. He wanted a partner for his illegal activities, and when Leopold attempted to engage him in a sexual relationship, Loeb agreed on one condition, that Leopold join him in committing various crimes, all of which Loeb was sure would never be traced back to them. The two men succeeded in perpetrating many criminal activities over the next few years, including arson, robbery, and vandalism.
Loeb was still not satisfied, and continued to work out details of an undetectable murder. He even had a victim in mind, a distant cousin named Bobby Franks. On May 21, , Leopold and Loeb picked up the year-old Franks in their car. Leopold, who at the time was the youngest person to graduate from the University of Chicago, was a law student at the University of Chicago, and was transfering to Harvard Law School. Loeb was the youngest graduate ever from the University of Michigan.
On the Murder charge and 99 years for kidnapping. Late in the spring of Leopold and Loeb grew bored with the series of petty crimes they had committed. They decided that they should commit the perfect crime which the Friedrich Nietzsche devotees believed would confirm their status as "supermen.
They would ask for a ransom as a way to hide the fact that the perpetrators of the crime were wealthy. They constructed a scheme to collect the ransom without getting caught, by giving the person who would drop the money a long series of instructions, to be given one at a time by telephone. They decided that the murder weapon should be a chisel. They spent the next several weeks searching for a victim. The misfortune of their selection fell upon year-old Bobby Franks, the son of wealthy Chicago watch manufacturer Jacob Franks, and Loeb's second cousin.
While Franks was walking home from the Harvard School for Boys, he was approached by Leopold and Loeb driving a car rented under an assumed named, and was offered a ride home. Only two blocks from his house, Bobby declined the offer. Loeb, who had played tennis with Bobby at the Loeb's family's home a few days earlier, told Bobby he wanted to discuss the tennis racket Bobby was using.
Bobby entered the car, where he was beaten with a chisel and gagged. Frank's body was taken to a culvert along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks approximately 25 miles north of Chicago near Wolf Lake in Hammond, Indiana.
Hydrochloric acid was poured on Franks to obscure his identity. After returning to Chicago, where the search for the missing boy had already begun, Leopold called Booby Frank's mother, identified himself as "George Johnson", and told her that her son had been kidnapped and instructions would follow.
A ransom note arrived in the mail the next morning and Leopold called with the first set of instructions. But the Franks family member who took the call forgot the address of the store where the next set of instructions was to be communicated.
However, the charade ended when the family was soon after informed that Bobby's body had been found. Police found a pair of eyeglasses near the body. Though common in prescription and frame, they were equipped with an unusual hinge mechanism purchased by only three customers in Chicago; one was Nathan Leopold.
When questioned, Leopold offered the possibility that his glasses might have dropped out of his pocket during a bird-watching trip.
Police soon found the typewriter used to type the ransom note. During questioning they claimed that on the night of the murder, they had picked up two women, "Edna" and "May", in Chicago, using Leopold's car, then dropped them off sometime later near a golf course without learning their last names. However, Leopold's chauffeur told police that he was repairing Leopold's car that night, when the men claimed to have used it. The first to crack under questioning by the Chicago Police Department's top homicide detectives was Loeb.
He confessed, but insisted that it was Leopold's idea, that Leopold killed Franks; Loeb claimed to have just driven the car. Leopold soon gave his own confession in which he was the driver and Loeb the murderer.
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