For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: forensic psychiatry, psychopathic hospital, ransom letter, Richard Loeb, Nathan Leopold, Robert Crowe (more...)

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were sons of Chicago's Jewish aristocracy, youths -- Leopold was 19 and Loeb 18 -- who had been denied little in life and who gave every evidence of having brilliant futures. They were intelligent and had already graduated from first-class colleges. Yet on May 21, 1924, they did something appalling: They kidnapped a 14-year-old student named Bobby Franks, murdered him, dumped his body in a drainage ditch at Wolf Lake, several miles southeast of Chicago, and then tried to extract $10,000 in ransom from his parents.

Why did they do it? Less than two weeks later, after confessing to the crime, Leopold spoke to the state's attorney for Cook County and three psychiatrists. He said:

"I am sure, as sure as I can be of anything, that is, as sure as you can read any other man's state of mind, the thing that prompted Dick to want to do this thing and prompted me to want to do this thing was a sort of pure love of excitement, or the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different; possibly . . . the satisfaction and the ego of putting something over. . . . The money consideration only came in afterwards, and never was important. The getting of the money was a part of our objective, as was also the commission of the crime; but that was not the exact motive."

The scheme was Loeb's. As a boy his "real passion . . . was for crime stories and detective mysteries," and as he grew older that passion only intensified. After he and Leopold carried out a petty robbery as a test of their criminal skills, he proposed that "they should commit a perfect crime, a crime so intricate and complicated that planning and calculating its flawless execution would be a challenge. . . . They should kidnap a child, he proposed, and to increase the intricacy of the crime, they should demand a ransom from the child's parents. The money was important, not for its own sake, but to magnify the complexity of the crime. . . . It was to be a brilliant crime, he mused, one that would shock Chicago with its daring. They would obtain the ransom, dispose of the body, and leave no clues behind; the police would never catch them."

It didn't quite work out that way. Three days after his murder, Bobby Franks's body was discovered by "a recent immigrant from Poland who worked as a pump man for the American Maize Company," and a week later Leopold and Loeb were taken into custody; they had left plenty of clues. The crime, the arrests of the privileged youths and the subsequent trial aroused the nation's attention much as did another famous case of the 1920s, the trial of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for the killings of a paymaster and a guard during a payroll robbery in Massachusetts. The Leopold and Loeb case had no political overtones, as the Sacco and Vanzetti case had, and -- somewhat surprisingly, given prevailing attitudes of the time -- anti-Semitism does not seem to have been a significant contributor to public outrage over it, but it caught popular attention much as the O.J. Simpson case did seven decades later.

Zillions of words have been written about Sacco and Vanzetti, not to mention O.J. Simpson, yet as Simon Baatz points out in For the Thrill of It, "although the Leopold-Loeb case was one of the most infamous murders of the twentieth century, historians have largely ignored it." It has been the subject of novels (most notably Compulsion, by Meyer Levin) and the basis for movies (most notably Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope"). But when, several years ago, Baatz learned about the case for the first time, "no one had yet written a book that considered the episode in its complexity and intricacy." Hal Higdon published The Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case in 1975, but it is little more than pop history.

Baatz -- formerly of George Mason University, now associate professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York -- has written a narrative history that aims, he says, "to recapture the drama of the events that it describes" but also to deal with the "complex issues that give the subject its significance." By and large he has succeeded. The book is overly long; presented with voluminous court documents, journalistic accounts and other raw material, Baatz sometimes quotes to excess. But For the Thrill of It is meticulous and thorough, and it puts the case in historical perspective as a clash between two conflicting views of criminals and crime, one espoused by Robert Crowe, the state's attorney, and the other by Clarence Darrow, who represented Nathan Leopold and was the most famous American lawyer of his day, perhaps indeed of any day.

"Criminals," Crowe believed, "were fully responsible for their actions and should be treated accordingly -- it was foolishness to absolve them of blame for their misdeeds." By contrast, Darrow was a "determinist" who believed that "the criminal did not freely choose wrongdoing; rather, factors outside his or her conscious control acted to determine criminal behavior. There was no such thing as individual responsibility. Imprisonment was futile and even counterproductive; it served no purpose either as a deterrent or as a punishment." Baatz continues:

"The trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb would be a contest between two charismatic individuals -- Darrow, who had built his reputation by defending unpopular causes; and Crowe, the most competent and energetic state's attorney in a generation. And there would be a second contest, a contest between opposing philosophies of crime and punishment. Which one would triumph?"

As it happens, neither side won a clear victory. Darrow and the lawyers for Richard Loeb decided before the trial began that it would be hopeless to plead not guilty by reason of insanity because "neither Nathan nor Richard was legally insane." So the not-guilty plea was withdrawn. The youths pled guilty. Their only hope was to be spared the gallows. To that end Darrow told the court, "The statute provides that evidence may be offered in mitigation of the punishment and we shall ask at such time as the court may direct that we may be permitted to offer evidence as to the mental condition of these young men, to show the degree of responsibility they had and also to offer evidence as to the youth of these defendants and the fact of a plea of guilty as further mitigation of the penalties in this case." Darrow, Baatz writes, "needed only to persuade the judge that they were mentally ill -- a medical condition, not at all equivalent or comparable to insanity -- to obtain a reduction in their sentence. And Darrow needed only one reduction -- from death by hanging to life in prison -- to win his case."

The irony is that though Darrow won in the immediate sense -- the youths were sentenced to life in prison -- he failed to win the broader legal and philosophical argument. That one was left unresolved. The judge reached his decision because "the court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants." Darrow and his associates had presented a formidable amount of evidence about the defendants' upbringing, psychological makeup and relationship with each other, including homosexual activities. Yet in the end, none of it amounted to anything. Darrow didn't keep Leopold and Loeb away from the gallows; a slightly soft-hearted judge did, and in doing so he said: "Life imprisonment may not, at the moment, strike the public imagination as forcibly as would death by hanging but to the offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severer form of retribution and expiation."

Loeb lasted only until January 1936, when he was brutally stabbed and slashed to death by an inmate to whom he had made repeated sexual overtures. Leopold made it all the way to February 1958, when he was paroled. He moved to Puerto Rico, married, and, after he won his release from parole five years later, traveled frequently and visited old friends in Chicago. He died in August 1971.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060781025
• ISBN-13: 978-0060781026
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #51,053 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MUST_READ, August 10, 2008

By	Nola Harroway - See all my reviews

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

This book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in human behavior, the criminal process, Chicago, Clarence Darrow or political ambition, among many other things. Baatz has taken a chilling and complex case and made it terrifically readable and exciting. His meticulous research assures the reader that s/he is reading non-fiction, yet Baatz is a superb storyteller and the book reads like a great piece of fiction. All of these events took place in my neighborhood in Chicago, and I now find it easy -- and creepy -- to picture the parties to this crime on my streets. I can't praise this book enough, I hope someone makes a movie of it that is faithful to this well-told story.

13 of 14 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 (REAL NAME)

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.