Bobby was returning home when a car pulled up next to him on the road: it was his second cousin Richard Loeb and his friend, Nathan Leopold. The teenagers convinced the little boy to get into the vehicle with the excuse of showing him a new tennis racket. However, once inside, the minor suffered a wave of blows to the head with a chisel, which left him semi-conscious. Finally, he died of asphyxiation when a rag was stuffed down his throat.
Hours later, Bobby's family received a ransom message: “Your son has been kidnapped. He is fine ". That was the beginning of a Machiavellian plan: to perpetrate “the perfect crime.” Leopold and Loeb, two gifted students, millionaires, obsessed with Nietzsche and detective stories, felt unpunished, superior and above good and evil. A very dangerous cocktail.
Nathan Leopold was born on November 19, 1904 in Chicago, into a wealthy family of German immigrants of Jewish origin. He was an intellectually advanced child, that is, gifted: he began to speak at four months, at the age of 19 he graduated with honors in Philosophy, spoke five languages fluently and was a renowned ornithologist.
His interest in philosophy focused on Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the superman, an idea that ended up obsessing him. Just like him so did masochism, slavery and good and evil. This was also influenced by the educational methods of his governess, Mathilda Wantz. She was very strict.
After graduating from the University of Chicago, Leopold entered law school to begin his law studies. It was at this time when he met another child prodigy, Richard Loeb, who would become his great friend, as well as a part and accomplice of his criminal career. The boy, born on June 11, 1905, also in Chicago, was the third child of a renowned Jewish lawyer from the Sears, Roebuck firm.
His intelligence was exceptional, but he decided to combine his studies with an incipient criminal life. Loeb managed to graduate from the University of Chicago at the age of 17 (he entered when he was fourteen) while committing shoplifting, the proceeds of which he used for gambling and alcohol.
On the other hand, Loeb also immersed himself in everything related to the world of crime. Such was his fascination with detectives and murders, that he ended up becoming obsessed with the perfect crime.
In 1921 this couple of brilliant students teamed up: they were looking for strong sensations, to experience danger and to transgress what was forbidden. This is how they started a wave of petty crimes, mainly vehicle thefts and store robberies. Then came acts of vandalism such as arson and home invasions.
Over the next three years, Leopold and Loeb fed off each other, developing personalities as twisted and cruel as they were Machiavellian. The young people felt intellectually superior to others, they believed they lived above good and evil, and their education, always among governesses, helped to magnify that perversion and lack of empathy. Until one day, they took the next step: perpetrating the perfect crime. They felt prepared.
On May 21, 1924, Loeb and Leopold rented a car under a false identity, changed the license plate, bought a chisel, rope, and hydrochloric acid, and drove to Harvard School in search of a victim. Until that moment, it was 2:30 p.m., the murderers had not chosen their prey.
It was about three hours later when, upon seeing Bobby Franks, Loeb's second cousin, they agreed to kidnap him. The little boy, 14 years old, met the three premises for this: he was a child, his family was millionaires and he could pay a large ransom, and he knew them, so it would be easier to deceive him. That's how it went.
After the murder, they poured the acid on both Bobby's face and genitals, burned his clothes, and dumped the body in a drain near Wolf Lake. Afterwards, they thoroughly cleaned the car to remove any traces of blood and, at nine at night, they called the Franks' mansion asking for a ransom.
While Bobby's father tried to look for his son in the surrounding area and filed the relevant complaint, the murderers spent the night playing cards and writing the ransom note with a typewriter, which they got rid of shortly after. The next morning, they sent the message to the Franks and, at noon, they made a second call with instructions for the little boy's release. They had to pay 10,000 dollars.
That same night, a railroad worker found Bobby's body. Therefore, the plan hatched for months by the murderers had just been truncated. The authorities began an unprecedented operation to search for any remains at the crime scene. Among the evidence found were glasses and a typewriter.
The lenses were crucial to discovering their owner, since they were exclusively patented by Almer, Coe
Leopold claimed to teach ornithology classes and frequently go with students to the aforementioned place, and claimed to have lost them when he was carrying them in his robe. However, there was something in his testimony that made them suspicious, so they continued the interrogation until Richard Loeb's name came up.
According to the ornithologist, on the day of the crime he took his family's car with his friend, they went bird watching, then they picked up two friends and the four of them were in Lincoln Park. Now, upon verifying the alibi, the driver dismantled his testimony and confirmed that the vehicle never left the home because he had been checking the brakes.
When cornered, the students confessed to Bobby's kidnapping and murder, although there were moments in which they accused each other of the intellectual and material responsibility for the crime. But the evidence was irrefutable, as was seen during the trial.
On July 21, 1924, Leopold and Loeb sat in the dock in Cock County Court accused of one of the most vile crimes at the hands of minors. At that time they were 19 and 18 years old respectively (the age of majority is 21 years old).
Among the evidence provided by the prosecution were, apart from the glasses and the driver's testimony, the typewriter - they found it in the water -, the statement of a witness who saw blood in the car when he passed by it and also those of the workers of the store where they bought the chisel, the rope and the hydrochloric acid, apart from the paper used to write the ransom request.
Also relevant were the reports of the psychiatrists who analyzed the young people, who concluded that their friendship and intellectual union were lethal. Not to mention the explosive combination of their characters. Richard had a schizoid personality with psychopathic tendencies, while Leopold's was paranoid.
According to the book Accidental Deaths, recently published by criminologist Paz Velasco de la Fuente, the motivation of these murderers was based on vanity. There was “intellectual elitism and a search for notoriety and public recognition in the face of their idealized impunity.” All this led them to try to perpetrate the perfect crime.
“It was just an experiment. For us to justify crime is as easy as for an entomologist to impale a beetle on a pin,” Leopold declared. The judge sentenced the young people to life imprisonment and 99 years for kidnapping. After the verdict was read, they were transferred to Joliet prison.
On January 28, 1936, Richard Loeb was stabbed to death by another prisoner, while Nathan Leopold remained in prison until 1958, the year in which he was released on parole and began his new life.
He published his autobiography, emigrated to Puerto Rico where he married and started a family, and spent the rest of his days studying birds and working in a hospital. He died on August 30, 1971 of a heart attack. One of his most relevant phrases features Richard Loeb, his criminal accomplice: “He was my best friend and, strange as it may seem, he was also my worst enemy.”
