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Documentary, The Perfect Crime - The Trial of the Century-2016
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00:01Tonight.
00:02Leopold and Loeb were a couple of boys
00:05playing a strange and sadistic game.
00:08Committing the perfect murder would be a way for them
00:11to demonstrate their superiority.
00:14This case interrogates the idea of evil.
00:17The Perfect Crime on American Experience.
00:30Active Crime on American Experience.
00:34cc.
01:00Exclusive corporate funding for American Experience is provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance.
01:07American Experience is also made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
01:12and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
01:30No one knows what will be the fate of the child they get or the child they bear.
01:40The mother who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe cannot help but wonder what will be the end of this child,
01:50whether it will be crowned with the greatest promises which her mind can imagine,
01:56or whether he may meet death from the gallows.
02:00Clarence Darrow.
02:11The body was found on the morning of May 22nd, 1924.
02:17A 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks who'd gone missing from his Chicago neighborhood the day before.
02:26A ransom note had been sent to his parents.
02:31But before they'd had a chance to pay, the kidnappers had killed their son.
02:47The crime itself was so shocking.
02:50They bludgeoned a child to death, poured acid on his face to try to disguise his features.
03:01He was stripped of his clothes and left in a culvert.
03:05It was as desolate a place as you could possibly imagine leaving a body.
03:09The murder would rivet the nation, all the more so when police at last caught the killers.
03:20Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, wealthy, well-educated teenagers, who had done it, they said, for the sheer thrill.
03:28This is an inexplicable murder.
03:34These were children of privilege, of high ideals, who had everything given to them.
03:41They were the last people who had any reason to commit a kidnapping, much less a murder.
03:46As the case unfolded over that hot summer of 1924, with Cook County Prosecutor Robert Crowe and famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow debating the death penalty,
04:01and scores of commentators weighing in from the sidelines, the question of motive would be turned over and over again.
04:10And what at first seemed a simple matter of evil gradually would give way to a complex assessment of the murderers' minds,
04:20and a searing indictment of the forces that had shaped them.
04:23I think that the murder said something to people about American society.
04:30This was seen as a culmination of trends that were dangerous, that were immoral.
04:36So you had all of a sudden this question thrown up against our culture, which is that, is it rotten?
04:43Is there something wrong? Are we going in the wrong direction?
04:45They're mysteries wrapped inside of enigmas in this case, and it's why it won't go away.
05:04On May 22nd, 1924, just hours after the body of Bobby Franks was found, the hunt for his killers got underway.
05:13To state's attorney Robert Crowe, a combative 45-year-old Irishman who'd been elected on a promise to vanquish crime in Chicago,
05:26the case was a career-making opportunity.
05:30Robert Crowe was very politically ambitious, and his ambition was eventually to become mayor of Chicago,
05:38to become one of the most powerful men in the city.
05:40Crowe had certainly hoped that a success in this case would help him as a politician.
05:47The police had few clues.
05:51The ransom note, a tip about a gray sedan that had been idling where Bobby Franks was last seen,
05:57and a pair of eyeglasses found near the body.
06:03When the glasses first were found, it was thought that they were Bobby Franks' glasses.
06:09They were even put on the corpse in the funeral home.
06:11And when his relative came in to identify the body, he said,
06:14well, those aren't his glasses.
06:16And at that point, they thought, well, they must be the glasses of one of the criminals.
06:21The prescription was actually a very average one.
06:25What was unusual about the eyeglasses is that they had a certain hinge.
06:30And when the police began to inquire, they found that only three pairs of eyeglasses with that hinge had been sold in the Chicago district.
06:39One of the three belonged to a man who'd been abroad for weeks.
06:45Another to a woman who was quickly ruled out as a suspect.
06:50That left 19-year-old Nathan Leopold from the exclusive neighborhood of Kenwood on Chicago's south side.
06:58Although it seemed doubtful that the boy had had any hand in the murder, Crowe sent three detectives to the Leopold home with orders to bring Nathan in for questioning.
07:14Nathan Leopold was studying for law school.
07:19He was an extraordinary young man with a potentially fantastic future before him.
07:26Nathan Leopold was not regarded as a likely suspect, simply because his family was very prominent.
07:33By 1924, the family was worth about $4 million.
07:39Why would someone like Nathan Leopold want to kidnap a young child?
07:45It didn't seem to make any sense.
07:49Crowe would spend the rest of the afternoon, and long into the night,
07:53downtown, interrogating Nathan Leopold.
08:01When confronted with the eyeglasses, the young man shrugged.
08:06He was a recognized expert on birds, he boasted to Crowe.
08:10The author of an article about the rare Kirtland's warbler.
08:13He frequently led birding expeditions near the place Frank's body had been found.
08:21The glasses, he said, must have fallen at some point from his jacket pocket.
08:27As for the night of Frank's murder, he'd spent it driving around town in his red Willis night with his good friend, Richard Loeb.
08:37Leopold's alibi was that he and Loeb had gone off in the park, started drinking, picked up a couple of girls, fooled around them a little bit.
08:50Those two girls that they did pick up refused to have sex with them, so they dropped them off and then they continued home.
08:56That was the alibi they had.
09:01While Crowe interrogated Leopold, police ransacked his bedroom and study.
09:07And turned up a letter to Richard Loeb, which suggested the boys were lovers.
09:15Crowe found it odd.
09:17If Leopold and Loeb were homosexuals, why would they have spent an evening chasing girls?
09:21Now, he wanted Richard Loeb brought in for questioning as well.
09:28Richard Loeb graduated from high school when he was 14 years old and immediately matriculated at the University of Chicago as a full-time student.
09:37He was very popular as a student.
09:40Richard Loeb's father was the vice president of Sears Roebuck.
09:45He was worth about $10 million by 1924.
09:48Loeb corroborated his friend's alibi.
09:54Still, Crowe felt there was something suspicious about these young men.
10:00So long as their parents were cooperating, certain that their sons had been involved in no wrongdoing, Crowe planned to keep Leopold and Loeb in custody.
10:13Meanwhile, the circumstantial evidence was mounting.
10:18The handwriting on the ransom notes envelope matched Nathan Leopold's, and the note itself had been linked to a typewriter he owned.
10:28Then, the Leopold family's chauffeur showed up at Crowe's office.
10:34He'd been sent by Nathan's father, with information Mr. Leopold was sure prove the boy's innocence.
10:42The two could not have been anywhere near the place the body was left, the chauffeur said, because on the day in question, Nathan's car was being worked on in the garage.
10:54Certain now that the boy's alibi was a lie, Crowe ramped up the pressure.
11:00They had been left in rooms by themselves under drilling for 24 hours.
11:09This was a pinning down of these guys, and everything pointed to them.
11:15The two boys were originally held separately, in separate rooms, and Robert Crowe first went to Richard.
11:24Richard confessed and then gave Crowe details that only the murderers could have known.
11:31Crowe takes those details to Nathan, and Nathan realizes that Richard is confessing.
11:38And then immediately Nathan also starts confessing, but blaming everything on Richard.
11:46So Richard is blaming Nathan, Nathan is blaming Richard.
11:53The crime, both boys admitted, had been months in the planning.
11:59And they'd had every expectation of getting away with it.
12:03The intention was always to murder, from the very beginning.
12:08It was all part of the plan to commit the perfect crime.
12:11To do this crime that would be sensational, and to get away with getting the ransom.
12:17That was the intention.
12:19As a police stenographer took down their words, first Loeb, then Leopold,
12:25described how they'd rented a car under an assumed name to use on the day of the murder.
12:31And typed out the ransom note, even before they chose their victim.
12:38The afternoon of the crime, they were rolling around the neighborhood in their rental car, looking for a victim.
12:45Literally looking for a victim.
12:47And suddenly, on the other side of the street, they saw Bobby Franks, who was the cousin of Richard Loeb.
12:56They drive up behind Bobby Franks.
12:59Richard, who's sitting in the back seat, invites Bobby into the front seat.
13:04And then as soon as Bobby is inside the car, the murder takes place almost immediately.
13:13Leopold and Loeb confessed that they'd bludgeoned Franks with a chisel.
13:19Then crammed a rag into his mouth, which had suffocated him.
13:23Then they'd driven out to the wetlands near Lake Michigan, stopping along the way for hot dogs and root beer.
13:32Poured acid over Bobby's face and genitals to obscure his identity.
13:38And pushed him into the drainage pipe where he'd been found.
13:42Crow, hoping to build his case and cement the boy's guilt in the public mind.
13:53Now had Leopold and Loeb retrace their steps on the day of the murder.
13:58Leading investigators and a caravan of journalists.
14:02From the hardware store where they'd purchased the chisel.
14:05All the way to the spot where they'd disposed of the body.
14:12The two most helpful people in sorting out the evidence were Leopold and Loeb themselves.
14:19They were sort of giving a guided tour to the people that were going to eventually prosecute them.
14:26It just sort of almost boggles the mind how much they gave away.
14:32They literally demonstrated how they had done it and walked them through the scenes of the crime.
14:41As if once they were discovered, they were proud of the plotting.
14:46They became almost braggards about it.
14:55Crow was elated.
14:57It was an open and shut case, he told the press.
15:03A premeditated murder carried out in cold blood.
15:07He vowed that justice would come in the form of the death penalty.
15:12The morning paper is after the murder.
15:18Front page story.
15:20And literally for two, three, four months, it was the front page story on every newspaper in Chicago.
15:29It is not possible to overstate the media attention given to this case.
15:36This case made the headlines the front page of the New York Times, this is not Chicago, the New York Times, three days in a row.
15:44It was a case of tremendous sensation.
15:46Suddenly, Leopold and Loeb were everywhere.
15:52And the horror of the murder began to pale before the specter of the murderers.
15:58Two arrogant young men in stylish suits, smoking cigarettes and chatting blithely with reporters about the killing of Bobby Franks.
16:07They said they did it because they could, because he was there, because it was fun, for the thrill of it.
16:17They didn't seem to show much remorse at all.
16:21Of the two, Nathan Leopold seemed the more chilling figure.
16:26When asked how he felt about Bobby Frank's murder, Leopold casually replied that it didn't concern him.
16:34It is as easy to justify such a death, he said, as it is to justify an entomologist impaling a beetle on a pin.
16:43Leopold was seen as the monster.
16:46He seemed like an evil mastermind, whereas Loeb seemed like such a carefree playboy who could easily be led astray by this stronger, darker intellect.
16:57The truth of the matter, of course, is the complete opposite.
17:08The boys had met four years earlier, in the summer of 1920.
17:15Richard Loeb was then 15.
17:18He not only graduated from high school, but already had completed his first year of college at the University of Chicago.
17:27Nathan Leopold, just six months older, was equally precocious.
17:33He was to begin his freshman term at the University that fall.
17:38They both zoomed through school, zoomed into college, well ahead of their peers.
17:44So I think once they were on each other's radar, there was a sense of them sniffing each other out, of realizing here, in a way, is a kindred spirit.
17:54In many ways, the two had been cut from the same cloth.
18:00Both the scion of wealthy Jewish families, they had been raised in comfort and had spent their childhoods in the constant care of governesses, mere blocks from one another.
18:11They became fast friends, somewhat to the bewilderment of those who knew them both.
18:19Richard Loeb was a dazzling human being.
18:24He was the kind of human being that, when he walked through a room, the molecular energy changed.
18:31You couldn't help looking at him.
18:34He wore clothes incredibly well.
18:36He had a flashing smile.
18:38He was dazzlingly handsome.
18:40Nathan Leopold was the complete opposite.
18:45There is something beetle-browed and intense and dark about Leopold.
18:50He was the kind of guy I think you'd instantly take a dislike to at a party.
18:56He was the know-it-all, who would have an opinion on everything.
19:01Leopold fell in love with Richard Loeb and idolized him.
19:04And Loeb felt it was nice to have an acolyte.
19:08It was nice to have someone around him who would always make him feel beautiful or intelligent or special.
19:14I think the deeper truth, they sensed another predator in the room.
19:19And they were drawn to each other.
19:23What would end with the murder of Bobby Franks had begun almost innocently,
19:29with a scheme Richard devised to cheat at cards.
19:32That small transgression had bound the boys together,
19:37put them in league against the rest of the world.
19:41But Richard longed to play more dangerous games.
19:45It was crime that fascinated Loeb.
19:50He read detective novels, pulp periodicals.
19:53He devoured the newspapers for stories of crime.
19:56And I think to him, it's because there's a certain exceptionality about crime.
20:02Criminals are not of the common run of humanity.
20:06And he felt he was not in the common run of humanity.
20:12Nathan was more than willing to join in.
20:15But he wanted something in return.
20:17So the boys made a secret pact.
20:19There was an arrangement that Richard would agree to have sex with Nathan,
20:26if Nathan accompanied Richard when he did his crimes.
20:32Richard started out by committing small acts of vandalism.
20:37Stealing cars, setting fire to buildings.
20:44It escalated more and more.
20:47And then eventually Richard suggested the idea to Nathan of committing a murder.
20:56Nathan was not only agreeable, he urged Richard on.
20:59With a concept taken from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
21:04That of the Übermensch, or Superman.
21:08A being so exceptional that he was bound by neither law nor morality.
21:15Unfortunately, they invested in their own sort of dark and twisted version of the Nietzschean ideal.
21:22Where they began to self-identify as the Nietzschean Superman.
21:25They wanted to create a unique act.
21:31Do something that was, in their view, exalted and befitting of an Nietzschean Superman.
21:37And they thought this act, being so clever, committing the perfect murder,
21:42would be a way for them to demonstrate their superiority over other people.
21:48They were a couple of boys playing a strange and sadistic game.
21:53Now obviously this had an erotic dimension, but it also had a kind of intellectual dimension.
22:00And that, I think, is key to understanding what was going on between Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold.
22:09Neither had ever considered the possibility that they would be caught.
22:13Now, the two supermen were behind bars.
22:18And if the state's attorney had his way, they would end on the gallows.
22:22Hours after news of the confessions broke,
22:37the Loeb family sought the counsel of the country's preeminent criminal defense attorney,
22:43Clarence Darrow, soon to be known as the attorney for the damned.
22:47Clarence Darrow was, at this point in his life, 67 years old.
22:53He had just come off an amazing string of victories,
22:58defending a bunch of corrupt politicians in Chicago.
23:02Clarence Darrow is thought as a legal miracle worker.
23:05Many of his cases, his guys or his gals are found with guns and a bloody knife in their hands.
23:13And that's why he was seen as the attorney for the damned.
23:17Get them a life sentence instead of death.
23:21Loeb's uncle begged Darrow,
23:23we'll pay you anything, only for God's sake, don't let them hang.
23:27It was a request Darrow could not refuse.
23:32He hated capital punishment.
23:35He did probably 60 or more capital punishment cases in his career.
23:40He lost the first one to the hangman and he never got over it.
23:44His philosophy was definitely hate the sin and love the sinner.
23:49He believed people act the way they act because they're brought up in poverty
23:55or because they themselves have been ill-treated
23:58and that the supreme virtue was mercy.
24:02He believed that everything we do is determined by our upbringing, by our childhood, by our parents,
24:09and therefore there's veritable free choice, no free will.
24:13So he believed accordingly that capital punishment, the death penalty,
24:18was something that should not take place.
24:21Darrow was by no means alone.
24:25The previous quarter century had seen movements to abolish the death penalty
24:30in no fewer than ten states,
24:33while the number of executions nationwide had sharply declined.
24:36With the issue still being hotly debated all over the country,
24:42Darrow sensed an opportunity to tip the scales.
24:46He wants to make a statement about capital punishment.
24:50In the Leampold and Loeb case, he knows he has this amazing spotlight.
24:55Everybody's listening around the world, not just in the United States.
24:59The actor-egoist in him sought opportunities to play great parts,
25:04one writer said of Darrow.
25:07Hero parts.
25:19Darrow showed up for his first meeting with his clients
25:23in a rumpled seersucker suit and a shirt that bore traces of his breakfast.
25:27My first impression, Nathan Leopold later said, was horror.
25:33You couldn't imagine three more different planets in Constellation.
25:41There was Loeb, who was sleek and his lapels could cut you like a knife.
25:48Leopold, who was intense and brooding, his hair was almost shining
25:52and he was very sort of well put together.
25:53And then Clarence Darrow, who was a complete shambling mess.
25:58It was like a hobbit suddenly walked into a room of tango dancers.
26:05By the time Darrow arrived, Leopold and Loeb had been in Crow's custody for three days,
26:11talking all the while.
26:12The state's attorney had even arranged for Leopold and Loeb to be examined by Chicago's leading alienists,
26:22as psychiatrists were known, in an effort to block what he assumed would be Darrow's only possible line of defense.
26:29Not guilty by reason of insanity.
26:32Crow's alienists all said that the defendants were perfectly sane and there was nothing wrong with them,
26:43other than that they simply failed to appreciate the enormity of what they'd done.
26:48But that was hardly insanity, that was in the state's view, you know, evil, not madness.
26:55On June 11th, Darrow appeared with his clients before Judge John Caverly.
27:04As expected, he entered a not guilty plea, which gave him several weeks to prepare his defense.
27:11Next, he gathered a team of experts from all over the country to evaluate Leopold and Loeb,
27:18including a physician, an adolescent criminologist, and a psychiatrist versed in the new analytic techniques of Sigmund Freud.
27:29Over the next five weeks, Leopold and Loeb would be subjected to rigorous examinations derived from the cutting edge of modern science.
27:38Their bodily functions were measured, intelligence tested, family histories probed.
27:49Meanwhile, the boys' unfathomable crime prompted a rash of national hand-wringing over the perils of modern life.
27:57He did say something about the 20s, you know, the music is wild, the skirts were short, there was gin, it was a fast-living society.
28:12So, the madcap fun was suddenly a very dark implication of unchecked emotion, unchecked youth, unchecked wildness can lead to things.
28:25So, there was a lot of uneasiness about who we were and where we were going.
28:32You had some ministers saying it was because Americans were over-educating their children.
28:38There was too much prosperity, too much modernism, too much indulgence of American children taking place at the time.
28:47All of these things rained down on the Leopold and Loeb kiss.
28:58Concerned for his client's image, Darrow sent men into the streets of Chicago to gauge public opinion.
29:0460% of those queried thought Leopold and Loeb should hang.
29:11Darrow's early letters to his son and to his ex-wife from early June are very bleak, and they say,
29:22I doubt that I'll be able to save these boys.
29:25And this is a man who has pulled the trick off dozens of times throughout his career.
29:30But he says, you know, the newspapers are just too bad.
29:37On July 21st, two months after Bobby Frank's murder, Darrow and his clients joined Prosecutor Crowe in the criminal court building
29:46to present motions before Judge John Caverly.
29:51It was 10 a.m., and though the already sweltering courtroom was filled to capacity, the crowd was mostly silent.
30:00Darrow, disheveled as ever, his thumbs hooked under his trademark suspenders spoke first
30:08and turned the entire case on its head by entering a plea of guilty.
30:12He stood up and told the judge that we're going to change the plea to guilty.
30:18Reporters jumped and ran to the rooms in all the afternoon newspapers that Leopold and Loeb are pleading guilty.
30:26When you plead somebody guilty, it changes the game entirely because now you're not going to impanel a jury.
30:33So then it became the judge's decision to decide whether they would hang or whether they would be just sent to prison for life.
30:42Crowe, who moments earlier had confidently swaggered into the courtroom chomping on a cigar, was apoplectic.
30:51Crowe thought he had everything sewn up, that he was all ready for a plea by the defense of not guilty on account of insanity.
31:00Darrow has this radical idea that he's going to introduce evidence about his clients' backgrounds and about their mental states to argue for a sentence less than death.
31:12Darrow's strategy to introduce this evidence was absolutely groundbreaking.
31:16It was so groundbreaking that no one had ever heard of it.
31:21The state's attorney thought it was completely ridiculous and he shouldn't be allowed to do this.
31:28Darrow wanted to present psychological weakness as a mitigating factor for sentencing.
31:34So essentially what he was saying to Judge Cavalry was, we admit that we committed the crime, but I'd like to show you why we committed the crime.
31:48When the sentencing hearing got underway on the morning of July 23rd, 1924, the stifling courtroom was so thronged with spectators that reporters commandeered the empty jury box.
32:05Crowe presented the state's evidence first, armed with a lengthy list of witnesses who would provide testimony on every ghastly detail of Leopold and Loeb's crime.
32:21Even though it's not a trial, Crowe has to present evidence to show the defendant's guilt.
32:27He does so quite thoroughly. He introduces more than 80 witnesses and when he's done, there's absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that Leopold and Loeb committed these offenses.
32:40These witnesses would appear and Darrow would just sort of sit in the corner and do nothing because he realized that to cross-examine the witness even gave more spirit to what was there.
32:54So he remained silent.
32:57Crowe hammered away at the facts of the case for seven full days.
33:03The senseless, brutal slaying of a 14-year-old boy.
33:08The calculated disposal of the material evidence.
33:13The glib demeanor of the killers once they'd been caught.
33:16It was, the prosecutor said, the most cruel, cowardly, dastardly murder ever committed in the annals of American jurisprudence.
33:30He demanded the death penalty.
33:35Throughout, Leopold and Loeb sat just behind their attorneys, snickering.
33:40It was remarkable, one observer noted, to see two kids on trial for their life acting like that.
33:49One of the things that was very striking was their absence of remorse.
33:55They never apologized. They never said sorry.
33:58And of course, their families were terribly distraught and upset.
34:02Leopold's father came to every single day of the hearing.
34:09The Loeb family was represented by one of Loeb's brothers.
34:14The parents retreated to their summer home.
34:18I think they never came to grips with what had happened.
34:22I think they were in as much shock as anybody else.
34:25On July 30th, the defense finally took charge of the Roeb.
34:34It was his intention, Darrow told Judge Caverly, to show that his clients were diseased.
34:41Both physically and mentally.
34:43And therefore, not responsible for their actions.
34:46Calling his team of experts to the stand one by one, Darrow spelled out for the court the findings from the elaborate pretrial examinations of Leopold and Loeb.
34:59Offering a catalog of the boys' abnormalities.
35:03One witness testified to their dysfunctional endocrine glands.
35:08Another, to the delusions that had led to their crime.
35:12The psychiatrists argue that in fact it was Loeb and not Leopold who was responsible.
35:21And that Leopold had been his servant.
35:24That there had been a master-slave relationship between the two of them.
35:28Richard had this fantasy of being a master criminal.
35:32And Nathan had the fantasy of being a slave to a king.
35:36And it's that inner fantasy life that created the bond between the two boys.
35:43Referring to the two as Babe and Dickie, their childhood nicknames, the witnesses for the defense argued that both boys suffered from stunted emotional growth.
35:53Richard, in particular, was a little child emotionally, still talking to his teddy bear.
36:01One psychiatrist told the court.
36:03He is infantile.
36:05I should say somewhere around four or five years old.
36:08Both boys had been neglected by their parents.
36:14Both had a governess.
36:16And these governesses exerted an enormous amount of control over the children.
36:23Nathan Leopold had been abused sexually by his governess when he was about 12 years old.
36:31With Richard Loeb, it was a case that his governess virtually stepped in as a mother figure, pushed him to excel in the classroom.
36:45And as he tells it to the psychiatrists, he began to be so resentful that he started to lie.
36:52And Richard himself traced his crimes back to those lies that he told his governess.
36:58It took a tremendous amount of chutzpah, but Clarence Darrow made the argument that these two very privileged sons of very wealthy families were actually victims.
37:12They were in this very sheltered life with cold families and that, therefore, they should be pitied rather than hated.
37:22To Crow, the entire defense was preposterous.
37:26He fairly wore himself out with objections and vehement cross-examinations.
37:33Constantly through the trial, he is going back, returning to the savagery of the crime.
37:41Because he knows what Darrow is doing.
37:43He knows that he has to pressure Judge Caverly in the opposite direction.
37:46So the whole thing is a struggle between these two legal titans, Crow and Darrow, for the judge's mind.
37:54There were plenty of Americans who agreed with Crow, that the boy's guilt was all that mattered.
38:00But for many others, Darrow's defense offered an intriguing new perspective on human behavior.
38:08What the Leopold and Loeb defense team did was to introduce Freudian interpretations into the courtroom.
38:19And that was all very new.
38:23And it just grabbed the American public.
38:28It riveted them.
38:30The parents who read the newspapers were fixated on what they could learn about their own more normal children from these young people.
38:43What about my child?
38:53The major effect of all the scientific testimony was that it convinced the people of Chicago, America and around the world that there were indeed motivations.
39:03It wasn't just a matter of good and evil.
39:06There were flaws in human beings and triggers that make people act the way they do.
39:14On August 18th, after two and a half weeks of testimony, the defense rested.
39:21What remained now were the closing arguments.
39:24The last chance for both sides to convince Judge Caverly to either spare the boys lives or else sentence them to hang until they were dead.
39:41The curious spectators began to descend on the criminal court building at midday on Friday, August 22nd.
39:48By 2 p.m., more than 2,000 people had mastered the doors and begun pushing their way in.
39:58They had come to hear Clarence Darrow's closing argument, rumored to be the last the legendary attorney would give before his retirement.
40:09Darrow teased the press that this could be his last big case.
40:13This was a way of Darrow to focus attention.
40:18It wasn't just Clarence Darrow defending Leopold and Loeb.
40:21It was Clarence Darrow's last stand.
40:24Your Honor, I have stood here for three months as one might stand at the ocean trying to sweep back the tide.
40:34I hope the seas are subsiding and the wind is falling, and I believe they are.
40:44But I wish to make no false pretense to this court.
40:48The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients.
40:59We are asking this court to save their lives.
41:05Speaking continuously for the better part of three days,
41:09Darrow offered the court a rambling summary of the reasons Leopold and Loeb should be spared.
41:17If you read Clarence Darrow's arguments today, they sound in desperate need of an editor.
41:22But if you think about the effect that they had in the courtroom before the age of television and radio,
41:29when this was supreme human drama,
41:32you realize that he was very smoothly, seductively creating a mood, casting a spell,
41:40touching their emotions quite masterfully.
41:43Before I would tie a noose around the neck of a boy,
41:50I would try to call back into my mind the emotions of youth.
41:55The brain of the child is the home of dreams, of castles, of visions, of illusions and delusions.
42:04And whether they take one shape or another shape depends not on the dreamy boy,
42:12but on what surrounds him.
42:17Again and again, Darrow spoke of youth,
42:22reminding Judge Caverly that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, at 19, were but children.
42:28During the previous century, no one younger than 23 had been executed in Illinois on a guilty plea.
42:39For the prosecutor to demand such an execution was barbarous, Darrow said,
42:46and evidence of the savagery the recent World War had unleashed.
42:51We are used to blood, Your Honor.
42:55We have not only had it shed in buckets full,
43:00we have it shed in rivers, lakes and oceans.
43:05We have delighted in it.
43:08We have preached it until the world has been drenched in blood
43:14and has left its stains of blood upon every human heart.
43:20It was almost as though he had been scripted by Shakespeare.
43:22He was a brilliant man. He had a tremendous capture of the law.
43:27He didn't need notes. He was the consummate actor.
43:32I am not pleading so much for these boys as I am for the infinite number of others to follow.
43:40Your Honor stands between the past and the future.
43:47You may hang these boys.
43:49You may hang them by the neck until they are dead.
43:52But in doing it, you will turn your face towards the past.
43:57Clarence Darrow had that courtroom eating out of his hands.
44:04He brought Loeb, who giggled and chuckled and smirked throughout his own trial, to tears.
44:10The judge had tears in his eyes when Darrow was done.
44:14Prosecutor Crowe, in his rebuttal, fought back hard.
44:20He even went so far as to insinuate, without any conclusive evidence, that there had been a sexual motive for the crime.
44:28Crowe introduces the idea that poor Bobby Franks was molested either before and or after death.
44:37At which point, Judge Caverly tells the female reporters that they have to leave his courtroom because their dainty ears can't be listening to such awful testimony.
44:45Attorney Crowe really was sort of between a rock and a hard place.
44:52They were pleaded guilty.
44:54So all he can do is bring in the grotesque evidence of the case, how horrible it was, and show what terrible, terrible beings they were.
45:07If Judge Caverly was leaning one way or the other when the hearing finally concluded on its 32nd day, he gave no indication.
45:17But Chicago's bookies had already begun offering 3 to 1 odds against a death sentence.
45:28For 12 days, Chicago and the world waited, while Caverly wrestled with his decision.
45:36For many Americans, what hung in the balance was not merely the fate of Leopold and Lowe, but the very meaning of justice.
45:47You who sit there at your breakfast table, so comfortable, one columnist wrote, would you stand for justice, no matter if by taking such a stand you had to walk to the foot of the gallows with your own son?
46:03Is it going to be life in prison, or is it going to be the death penalty?
46:08Caverly is not very happy with this situation because the whole responsibility rests upon his shoulders.
46:15Whatever decision he makes, he's going to be criticized.
46:17Finally, on September 10th, the parties to the case assembled once again in Caverly's courtroom.
46:27Security was tight, the mood tense, as Caverly began to read from three sheets of lined paper.
46:36Judge Caverly comes out to give the verdict, and he says, basically, I'm not going to be moved by any of the scientific evidence.
46:47It was interesting, gentlemen, but they pled guilty.
46:50Nathan Leopold thought he was heading for the hangman.
46:53But the judge went on, and it swiftly became clear that Leopold and Loeb were headed not for the gallows, but for prison.
47:04The court believes that it is within his province, Caverly explained, to decline to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age.
47:15One of the most interesting things about Judge Caverly's ruling is how, in the end, how little all that scientific testimony, all the alienist testimony that talk about glandular secretions, how little it all mattered.
47:32In the end, he clung to that legal idea of precedent.
47:35The judge says, I am basing my decision not to impose the death penalty entirely on the defendant's youth.
47:46I can only imagine what the prosecution thought of the judge's sentence, because I could imagine them saying, if these guys don't get the death penalty, who should get the death penalty?
47:58Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Bobby Franks, plus 99 years for the kidnapping.
48:11The verdict would provoke outrage across the country, and accusations that the defendants had bought their way out of the hangman's noose.
48:20But Darrow had saved his client's lives, and dealt a powerful blow to the death penalty.
48:29As he told the reporters who crowded around the defense table, he now planned to launch a campaign to end capital punishment in Illinois.
48:40Before leaving the courtroom, Leopold and Loeb shook Darrow's hand.
48:44In the morning, the pair would be bound for the penitentiary at Joliet.
48:51Back in his cell at the county jail, Nathan called to the sheriff and arranged for what surely would be the boy's last good meal.
49:01Thick steak smothered in onions, and chocolate eclairs.
49:04Ladies and gentlemen, a month ago, I begged the members of the parole board for their compassion.
49:18They found it in their hearts to grant it.
49:25By the time Nathan Leopold was released from prison in 1958, he'd been behind bars for more than 33 years.
49:34Richard Loeb had died in prison two decades before, murdered by a fellow inmate who claimed Loeb had made unwanted sexual advances.
49:51Clarence Darrow had died back in 1938, at the age of 80, having spent much of his time outside of the courtroom, advocating with little success against the death penalty.
50:05Swarmed by reporters outside of the prison, Leopold pleaded for privacy.
50:10I appeal as solemnly as I know how, to you and to your editors and to your publishers and to society at large, to agree that the only piece of news about me is that I have ceased to be news.
50:25Leopold and Loeb would never again dominate headlines, but the perpetrators of the perfect crime would continue to compel fascination for decades to come.
50:39I think this case has a continuous hold on our imaginations because of the way it interrogates the idea of evil and whether or not there really is such a thing.
50:57Darrow tried to get us away from thinking in terms of monsters and kind of unfathomable darkness to try to understand the world in terms of sickness and health, youth and maturity, shades of gray rather than the black and white of good and evil.
51:21One of the terrifying implications of the case in 1924 was if the boys who had everything in the world ahead of them could do this act, why could not other people do this act?
51:36And I think in a way that's why we're still discussing the case, because they did something mad and we're all capable of doing something mad.
51:47Given the forces upon them or upon any of us, what are we capable of?
51:52Why then did these two boys commit this rash and horrible deed?
52:00I presume they know less about the reason than others who have studied the case and the boys as well.
52:07There are many things that human beings cannot understand.
52:12And of all the fathomless questions that confront and confuse men, the most baffling is the human mind.
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