For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago [Hardcover]

Simon Baatz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2008

It was a crime that shocked the nation, a brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child, by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had first met several years earlier, and their friendship had blossomed into a love affair. Both were intellectuals—too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. However, the police had recovered an important clue at the scene of the crime—a pair of eyeglasses—and soon both Leopold and Loeb were in the custody of Cook County. They confessed, and Robert Crowe, the state's attorney, announced to newspaper reporters that he had a hanging case. No defense, he believed, would save the two ruthless killers from the gallows.

Set against the backdrop of the 1920s, a time of prosperity, self-indulgence, and hedonistic excess, For the Thrill of It draws the reader into a lost world, a world of speakeasies and flappers, of gangsters and gin parties, that existed when Chicago was a lawless city on the brink of anarchy. The rejection of morality, the worship of youth, and the obsession with sex had seemingly found their expression in this callous murder.

But the murder is only half the story. After Leopold and Loeb were arrested, their families hired Clarence Darrow to defend their sons. Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America, aimed to save Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty by showing that the crime was the inevitable consequence of sexual and psychological abuse that each defendant had suffered during childhood at the hands of adults. Both boys, Darrow claimed, had experienced a compulsion to kill, and therefore, he appealed to the judge, they should be spared capital punishment. However, Darrow faced a worthy adversary in his prosecuting attorney: Robert Crowe was clever, cunning, and charismatic, with ambitions of becoming Chicago's next mayor—and he was determined to send Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to their deaths.

A masterful storyteller, Simon Baatz has written a gripping account of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case. Using court records and recently discovered transcripts, Baatz shows how the pathological relationship between Leopold and Loeb inexorably led to their crime.

This thrilling narrative of murder and mystery in the Jazz Age will keep the reader in a continual state of suspense as the story twists and turns its way to an unexpected conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1924, Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both intellectually precocious scions of wealthy Jewish Chicago families, kidnapped and brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. Historian Baatz, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, replays the crime (on which Meyer Levin's 1956 novel Compulsion was based) from the killers' point of view, detailing their intense, often sexual, relationship that culminated in the murder. But they left a crucial piece of evidence and eventually confessed to the murder. Clarence Darrow cleverly had the boys plead guilty to avoid a trial, and the legendary defense attorney went head to head with State's Attorney Robert Crowe in a sentencing hearing before Judge John Caverly. Both sides trotted out psychiatrists to testify whether Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936; Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958. Baatz gives an acute portrait of the two murderers bound together in a web of fantasy, but his heavy reliance on novelistic techniques (there!—he had done it) and meandering pacing prevent this from being as convincing as his exhaustive research deserves. B&w photos. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb have been the objects of derision and curiosity ever since the sensational murder they committed on Chicago’s South Side in 1924. These two privileged teenagers, who killed little Bobby Franks, a neighbor, also from a privileged family, just for the thrill of achieving the perfect crime (“a murder that would never be solved”), have become almost legendary “bad boys.” Baatz’s comprehensive account of the case succeeds in identifying their peculiar personality traits as well as what it was in the nature of their relationship that made them believe in their infallibility in performing the ultimate crime. All of Leopold and Loeb’s intense planning quickly unraveled, however, when the victim’s body was discovered soon after the murder; the murderers had counted on the body never being located. The second strong point of this exhaustively researched and rivetingly presented account is the thoroughness with which the author reconstructs the police investigation and the trial itself; a vivid portrait of the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, who defended Leopold and Loeb, is a fascinating by-product. One of the best true-crime books of this or any other season. --Brad Hooper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060781009
• ISBN-13: 978-0060781002
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Failed ubermenschen, August 9, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago (Hardcover)

How to understand Leopold and Loeb, the two young men who live on in national memory as the poor rich kids who murdered a youngster in 1924 to see if they could pull off the perfect crime? Motivated on the surface by a Nietzsche-inspired urge to go beyond conventional standards of good and evil, the crime actually seems to have been drawn from much murkier waters: sexual passion, feelings of inadequacy and rage, cultural ennui. Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, what Loeb and Leopold claimed as their motive was only the tip of the iceberg.

Simon Baatz's For the Thrill of It explores the underbelly of Leopold and Loeb by focusing heavily on the psychiatric testimony of three expert witnesses marshalled by defense attorney Clarence Darrow. These three witnesses--William White, William Healy, and Bernard Glueck--shared Darrow's view that most of criminal law was really a subset of psychology: criminals are suffering from mental disorders and need to be treated rather than punished. Despite this conviction, Darrow entered a plea of guilty for his two clients, fearing that if he copped an insanity plea and took the case to a jury, he would lose. So his strategy instead was to plead guilty and try to lessen the sentence by convincing the presiding judge that Leopold and Loeb were crazy as bedbugs.

It didn't work. The two were sentenced to 99 years. Loeb was killed in prison 12 years later; Leopold was eventually paroled and died in Puerto Rico.

Baatz's book is both an intriguing history of one of the most notorious American crimes of the twentieth century, but also an interesting reflection on the insanity plea in criminal cases, told through the intense courtroom battle between Darrow and Prosecuting Attorney Richard Crowe But in all honesty, at times I found myself flipping pages. The book is perhaps 100 pages longer than it need be, and Baatz's invention of scenes and dialogue and internal monologues for the key players in a book that purports to be history is (for me, at least) disconcerting. The story is dramatic enough without Baatz's "literary" interpolations.

Still, well worth reading. Leopold and Loeb remain intensely interesting characters. One can understand, to some extent, the psychology behind In Cold Blood murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. They were social outcasts, "losers" seething with anger at the cards dealt them by fate. But what motivated Leopold and Loeb, wealthy, intelligent, educated, healthy young men? Even after a reading of Baatz, they remain mysterious.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great book; poor Kindle edition, August 19, 2008

By 

J. Chernetsky "JamesC" (Dorchester, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: For the Thrill of It (Kindle Edition)

The book is absorbing, but the Kindle edition is loaded with typographical errors that make reading difficult. Missing periods at the end of sentences occur on just about every page.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unnecessary detail embellishment?, September 10, 2010

By 

IronyDee (York, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago (Hardcover)

While I appreciate some of the never-before-seen photos in this book, right off the bat, I am troubled by some of details the author has provided. Any prior book or news article I've read about this case clearly stated that the Franks had only three children, Josephine, Jacob Jr, called Jack, with Bobby being the youngest. And yet on page 4 we are introduced to a yet another Franks child, also named Jacob, who is described as being younger than Bobby and a promising grammar school student. The author even describes him fidgeting at dinner the night Bobby was taken. (While Jack is upstairs in bed with the chicken pox.) But who exactly is this mystery boy? Where did he come from? Where did he go? He was never mentioned during the time of the trial. Jacob Franks' 1928 obituary only lists two surviving children. Jack died in 1938 and Josephine was said to be the sole survivor of Bobby's family when she was reached for comment around the time of Leopold's release from prison. Are we to believe that Jacob Number Three died sometime between 1924 and 1928, a time period when the Franks case still very much in the public mind, and the press never even made mention of this other child's death?

I checked the Franks family on the 1920 census, and it lists only Josephine, Jack, and Bobby. So if another child existed in 1924, he had to have been four years old or less at the time of the crime. This doesn't fit with the author's description of him either. I can only conclude this boy never existed.

I can certainly live with one research mistake, but the author actually describing this imaginary kid's behavior at dinner is very troubling and makes me question every other detail in this book.