The Most Terrible Thrill

     Remember that post I put up about the Harvard School for Boys?  Remember how I said that all would be revealed today?  Well, I am a man of my word, so sit back and prepare to have the veil lifted from your eyes.

     At the dawn of the 20th Century, the Kenwood neighborhood was a hamlet of the wealthy and affluent(which it still is to this day, being the Chicago residence of President Obama), attracting lawyers, executives, and rich immigrant families.  At some point, two recent college graduates who lived in the area with their families made the acquaintance of each other.  Their names were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.  Leopold had an IQ of 210, had completed an undergrad degree at the University of Chicago, allegedly spoke 27 languages fluently, was a skilled ornithologist, and was currently attending the University of Chicago Law School.  In short, he was a genius.  Loeb was no slouch either.  Despite expressing a desire to be more focused on non-academic pursuits, he nonetheless skipped several grades in school and became the youngest graduate of the University of Michigan, a distinction that still stands to this day.

     When the two men met, they both realized that they had a strong interest in crime, so they began to exercise that hunger by engaging in a streak of petty crimes, eventually working their way all the way up to arson.  However, they still were largely ignored, and so they decided to up the ante.  To do this, they turned to Leopold's interest in Nietzsche, specifically his idea of the Ubermenschen, or the Superman(this was the same idea that would inform Hitler's obsession with the Aryan race a decade later).  Leopold believed the two of them to be Supermen, which meant that they could pull off the perfect crime.  After several months of research, the duo concocted a plan to kidnap and murder a young boy all for the thrill of it.

     The ball started rolling on Wednesday, May 21, 1924 when the duo pulled up in a rented vehicle to the HARVARD SCHOOL FOR BOYS.  Their intent was to lure one of the students to their car.  Loeb ended up selecting Bobby Franks, his second cousin and son of a Chicago millionaire.  As they drove off with Franks, one of the boys sat in the back seat and struck him in the head with a chisel.  After the deed was done, the duo drove to a lake in Hammond, Indiana to dispose of the body.  After that, the boys went back to Chicago and whiled away the rest of the night playing cards.  The next day, Chicagoans were transfixed to the news of Franks' disappearance.  An investigation was soon launched, which soon hit pay dirt.  Police found a pair of glasses at the body dump.  Additionally, only three people in the whole city had that specific type of glasses, one of them being Leopold.  Suspicion was immediately cast upon the two boys, and they were hauled in for questioning just 8 days after killing Franks(Police 1, Ubermenschen 0).  While they were being questioned, Leopold's chauffeur came in with a change of clothes for the boys.  As he was leaving, the man casually mentioned that the boys had to innocent, as the family's car was in the shop the day of the murder.  Unbeknownst to him, Leopold's alibi centered around the fact that the two of them had driven that same car on the day of the murder.  The perfect crime had been defeated by the casual small talk of a lowly chauffeur.

     The two of them were put on trial soon afterwards.  Fearing the imposition of the death penalty, Loeb's family hired Clarence Darrow to represent him.  Even with Darrow's status as a rock star in the legal world firmly entrenched, little hope was held out for the two of them.  But Darrow gave it all he had, starting off with a 12-hour argument on the first day of the trial, which contained what many regard as his finest speech, which included this line: "This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor... Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?... It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university"  As a result of his masterful words that left the courtroom in silenced awe, Darrow succeeded in delivering the boys from an apparently certain death sentence.  The court instead sentenced each of them to life plus 99 years in prison.  They immediately were sent to Joliet to serve their time.

     In 1936, Loeb was stabbed to death with a straight razor by a fellow inmate.  In 1958, Leopold was released on parole after spending 33 years in prison.  He soon moved to Puerto Rico to avoid media attention.  On August 29, 1971, Nathan Leopold died of a heart attack, providing the Chicago media with one final time to reflect on the murders.  Leopold's corneas were later donated to a deserving recipient.