Leopold

On May 21, 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks failed to return home from Harvard Preparatory School, located in a fashionable district on the South Side of Chicago. Later that evening, his parents received a phone call, informing them that their son had been kidnapped and that he would be returned safely if the Franks family carefully followed instructions. The following day, they received a letter, telling them to secure $10,000 in old bills and await another phone call. While waiting for the kidnappers' call, the Franks heard from the police that the body of a boy had been found in a swamp on the outskirts of town. Refusing to leave the phone, Jacob Franks sent his brother-in-law to the mortuary to examine the body. He then received a call from the kidnapper, giving instructions for delivering the money. As Franks was about to leave the house with the money, his brother-in-law called to inform him that the dead boy in the mortuary was Bobby.

Seven days later police arrested Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, and soon both confessed to the murder. The two young men (Leopold was 18; Loeb, 19) were scions of two extremely wealthy and respected Jewish families and had achieved outstanding academic records. Loeb was the youngest student ever to have graduated from the University of Michigan, and Leopold was a student at the law school of the University of Chicago. The two had conspired to commit the perfect crime, confident that their intellectual superiority would enable them to outwit police investigators. They derived part of their rationale from the teachings of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his doctrine of the "superman," which argued that superior individuals lived "beyond good and evil," the moral constraints that governed ordinary people. But their crime was far from perfect. They had committed a number of obvious blunders: Leopold had left his glasses at the scene of the crime, and Loeb had tossed the murder weapon, a chisel, out the window of their