Freedom for Superman

Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?

Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man, something slipped.

--Clarence Darrow's Leopold-Loeb Plea

Last week--33 years, 275 days and 18 hours after a chisel smashed the skull of 14-year-old Bobby Franks -- the summons came to Prisoner 9306-D in Stateville

Prison at Joliet, Ill. He had finished his breakfast of stewed fruit, hot cereal, a cinnamon roll and coffee, taken the first of his three daily insulin shots, worked for more than an hour at his job of clerk in the prison's master mechanic's office. Now a paunchy, balding diabetic of 53. he walked with Kidnaper Roger ("The Terrible") Touhy to the office of Warden Joseph Ragen. Said Ragen to Prisoner 9306-D : "Leopold, you and Touhy have been granted paroles." Breathed Nathan Leopold, the nation's most publicized convict: "Thank the Lord it's all over."

But it was not all over. It would never be over for Nathan Leopold, the only survivor of the Crime of the Century.

"Even Murder." Nathan Leopold, brilliant son of a millionaire Chicago businessman, youngest (18) graduate of the University of Chicago, lived in a strange, dark world of Nietzsche's superman--and of Richard Loeb, 18, son of another rich Chicagoan. "Their coming together," said Clarence Darrow, "was the means of their undoing. They had a weird, almost impossible relationship. Leopold, with his obsession of the superman, had repeatedly said that Loeb was his idea of the superman. He had the attitude toward him one had to his most devoted friend, or that a man has to a lover." Says Leopold of Loeb: "I thought so much of the guy that I was willing to do anything--even murder --if he wanted it bad enough." And Dickie Loeb wanted it bad enough.

A day after the killing, police found Bobby Franks's naked, beaten body in the Hegewisch swampland south of Chicago. Near it lay a pair-of horn-rimmed glasses, quickly traced through its unusual hinge to Nathan Leopold. Questioned, the supermen broke wide open, fell to shrilly blaming each other for their crime.

Judicial Tears. The trial began on July 21, 1924--with Defense Lawyer Darrow pleading the boys guilty and winning permission from Judge John R. Caverly to present evidence of "the mental condition of these young men." A month later, as Darrow began his closing argument, a crowd fought wildly for seats in the courtroom, and a bailiff's arm was broken in the scramble. For twelve hours Clarence Darrow argued that the crime had been one of compulsion, that Nathan Leopold and Dickie Loeb could not have helped themselves. When he finished, tears were streaming down Judge Caverly's cheeks. He sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment, plus 99 years, with the strong recommendation that they never be admitted to parole.

Dickie Loeb died in prison twelve years later, slashed 56 times with a razor blade by another convict, who said that Loeb had made homosexual advances to him. Nathan Leopold stayed on, teaching in the prison school, reorganizing the library, offering himself for malaria-control experiments during World War II. He applied for parole three times, wras turned down each time--until last week, when the Illinois parole board on a split vote approved his fourth application. He promised to devote his life to good works, plans to take a $10-a-month hospital job in Puerto Rico. Yet Leopold is still not convinced that his mind is not that of a superman. In his book, Life Plus 99 Years (Doubleday; $5.50), published this week, he refuses to recognize that he was caught up by stupidity, attributes his downfall to freaks of fate. Writes Nathan Leopold: "What a rotten writer of detective stories life is!"

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