The Perfect Crime

The twentieth century was scarred by so many atrocities designated as “the crime of the century” that it may be somewhat capricious to single out a 1924 event in Chicago: the kidnapping and murder of fourteen-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks. Nevertheless, two features of this crime make it distinctive. First, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, who were ultimately tried and convicted of the murder, lacked a discernible motive. They were not animated by greed—their families were fabulously wealthy—nor did they detest their victim, a child chosen at random. Bobby Franks was, in fact, Loeb's second cousin, and the two had played tennis together the day before the abduction and slaying. Thus, the perpetrators exemplified Samuel Taylor Coleridge's portrayal of Iago—“motiveless malignity” (Ernest Rhys, ed. Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Poets and Dramatists, 1907, p. 388). The second distinction of this crime is the abstractness of this atrocity. For six months Leopold and Loeb schemed to commit a perfect crime, cunningly devised to elude capture and as a way to enact their reading of advanced thought. After a series of petty thefts, arson, and vandalism, Loeb managed to persuade Leopold that the defiance of conventional morality should include repudiation of “thou shalt not kill”; and Leopold assured Loeb that justification could be found in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

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