For the Thrill of It

When I was growing up in Chicago, parental prohibitions against speaking to strangers were often followed by the statement: “Remember little Bobby Franks.” As childhood lessons go, it was far more compelling than vague warnings about “Mr. Stranger Danger.” In 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks was kidnapped in broad daylight and subsequently killed. He had been snatched off a city sidewalk less than a mile from the house where I grew up many years later. Rarely is history so concrete or its moral so practical. And yet that lesson misused history. Strangers did not murder Franks. He was kidnapped and killed by two acquaintances from his neighborhood: Richard Loeb (who was actually Franks's cousin) and Nathan Leopold. And Leopold and Loeb, precocious teenaged graduate students at the University of Chicago, were not sexual predators, nor had they kidnapped Franks for any material gain (their families, like the Franks family, were well-off). Instead, they claimed they killed Franks to see if they could commit a perfect crime. If the wealth of the families, the brilliance of the two defendants, and the appalling motive made the murder a sensation, it was only heightened by hints that the defendants were lovers. The defense team, led by Clarence Darrow, took a chance by pleading the defendants guilty and then used the sentencing hearing to persuade the court to spare their lives. The gamble worked; both were sentenced to life plus ninety-nine years. Loeb died in prison, murdered by a fellow inmate, and Leopold was paroled in 1958 after an extensive campaign

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