The story of two wealthy, intelligent college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in Chicago for sheer thrill is still intriguing 85 years later.
The new University Library exhibit, “The Murder that Wouldn’t Die: Leopold & Loeb in Artifact, Fact and Fiction,” tells the story of University of Chicago graduate students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks in 1924. The exhibit will run on the main floor of the library March 3 to April 30.
The nature of the story makes it “creepy” and interesting to both the public and historians, said Janet Olson, assistant university archivist.
“It’s a very macabre story of two really smart boys who suddenly decide to kill someone,” she said. “They wanted to prove how smart they were by getting away with murder. It didn’t work too well.”
The exhibit features artifacts from NU’s library collections, including the original ransom note Leopold and Loeb sent to Franks’ parents, the original transcripts of their confessions after their arrest and their psychiatric and medical evaluations.
Reading the transcript of the students’ candid confessions is like hearing them try to figure out an intellectual exercise, exhibit curator Nina Barrett said.
“What bugs people is they seem like everyone’s idea of the ideal kids, but they were capable of doing something like this,” she said. “Neither one felt bad about doing this. They just felt bad they got caught.”
Leopold and Loeb planned to find a random victim, murder the victim and then collect ransom. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses left at the scene of the crime and the typewriter used to type the ransom note revealed their identities, but who actually committed the murder – and why they did it – still remains a mystery, Barrett said.
The question “Why?” is one that historian Simon Baatz tackles in his 2008 book “For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder that Shocked Chicago,” which chronicles the history of the Leopold and Loeb case using the information found in the NU archives.
“The huge advantage in writing this book was that Northwestern had all the manuscript material,” he said. “My jaw dropped to find that stuff.”
Leigh Bienen, senior lecturer at the School of Law , also used the collections to research for her book “Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O.J. Simpson,” a legal analysis co-authored by Gilbert Geis, and on her Web site, “Homicide in Chicago.”
Baatz said he was attracted to the crime’s role in shaping the history of science and psychiatry.
The case indirectly tackled issues of homophobia and anti-Semitism directed towards the two murderers and caught the interest of famous attorney Clarence Darrow, who took the case to defend the students as part of his fight against the death penalty.
“Clarence Darrow wanted to show the American public that it was possible to cure crime, almost as an illness,” Baatz said. “What Darrow brought in that was new was pleading mitigation on the case of mental illness. Instead of pleading them insane, he pleaded them guilty and then asked to lessen the penalty because of mental illness.”
Today, the story has moved beyond history into art.
John Logan (Communication ’83), who wrote the screenplays for “Gladiator” and “The Aviator,” got his start at NU with his play “Never the Sinner,” based on the Leopold and Loeb case. Other spin-offs include Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rope” and a musical, “Thrill Me,” Barrett said.
The exhibit, with five-foot photos of the people involved, is designed to get people emotionally involved in the story, Barrett said.
“It tells a story,” she said. “It’s designed visually to draw you into the story so that by the time you get to the artifacts, you understand why it’s cool that they’re there.”
