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Notorious Lives

Richard A. Loeb.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Nathan F. Leopold, Jr.

by Patrick Adcock

American “thrill” killer

Major offenses: Kidnapping and murder

Active: May 21, 1924

Locale: Chicago, Illinois

Sentence: Life imprisonment for murder and ninety-nine years for kidnapping; served thirty-four years

Early Life

Nathan Freundenthal Leopold, Jr. (NAY-thuhn FRUN-dehn-thawl LEE-uh-pohld), a privileged child, was born into a wealthy Chicago family. His father was Nathan Freundenthal Leopold, a manufacturer, and his mother was Florence Foreman Leopold. He was a precocious boy in certain ways, quite underdeveloped in others. He was intellectually brilliant, but his emotional and social growth was stunted. He was submissive and introverted by nature. His mind was ripe for the hero worship of a charismatic personality and, unfortunately, he eventually fell under the sway of just such a person.

Leopold attended the University of Michigan in 1921-1922 and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1923. He graduated at the age of eighteen. By 1922, he had written a privately published study of bird migration. He studied law in 1923-1924. His close friend, Richard A. Loeb , was seven months younger than he but was the dominant figure in the boys’ relationship. Loeb, also born to wealth, had graduated from the University of Michigan at seventeen.

Criminal Career

Leopold and Loeb carried out several petty acts of theft and arson, so as to experience the excitement of committing a crime. These were minor preparations for the act that would link the boys’ names as an entity for generations thereafter. Reportedly, the teenagers read Fyodor Dostoevski’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886), a novel in which the protagonist, Raskolnikov, a poor university student who believes himself to be one of the world’s extraordinary people, murders an old pawnbroker. He thinks because of his superiority to his victim he will feel no remorse, but the novel is an account of how he suffers horribly from guilt. The boys decided that in a similar circumstance they would experience no such guilt, and they set about putting their theory into practice.

They chose as the victim for their “thrill killing” (a term popularized by this crime) Bobbie Franks, a younger boy whose family was known to both the Leopolds and the Loebs. On May 21, 1924, on the south side of Chicago, they lured Franks into a rented automobile and kidnapped him. Loeb hit the youngster on the head with a chisel and stuffed a gag in his mouth. Within minutes, Franks was dead. They buried the body in a railway culvert but not very well—it was soon discovered. They knew the Franks family was wealthy, so, by telephone and in writing, they demanded a ransom of ten thousand dollars.

Legal Action and Outcome

Every step in the theoretical “perfect murder” was performed incompetently. The car was easily traced, and Leopold had even dropped his eyeglasses beside the body. The young supermen were quickly arrested, and just as quickly they confessed. Defending them was a formidable task as they were Jewish, rich, and homosexual, any one of which factors was sufficient to arouse prejudice in a Chicago jury in 1924. Perhaps for this reason, Judge John R. Caverly conducted a bench trial. Leopold’s father hired Clarence Darrow, a lawyer who boasted that no client of his had ever faced the gallows. The boys pleaded guilty.

The trial lasted thirty-three days in July and August, 1924. Darrow defended the boys by turning the trial into an indictment of external forces—the psychological effects of their upbringing, societal attitudes, and capital punishment. The defense made extensive use of psychiatrists—“alienists” in legal terminology. Darrow concluded with an eloquent appeal against capital punishment. He secured a sentence of life imprisonment rather than execution, regarded as a victory under the circumstances. The defendants were sent to Northern Illinois Penitentiary near Joliet to serve their sentences of life plus ninety-nine years.

Loeb died in prison, but Leopold, after years as a model prisoner, was paroled March 13, 1958, on condition that he go to Puerto Rico to work as a hospital technician and never return to the continental United States. He married Gertrude Feldman, a widow, on February 5, 1961. Leopold spent the rest of his life as a respected ornithologist and medical researcher. He taught ornithology while writing books and articles on birds and their migratory practices. He earned a master of social work degree from the University of Puerto Rico in 1961 and performed social work thereafter. He also wrote about penal policies, sometimes under a pseudonym. He died of a heart attack in 1971.

Impact

The notorious Leopold-Loeb case had less impact upon jurisprudence than upon literature and the popular culture. In 1929, Rope, a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, dealt with two brilliant young thrill killers. Hume Cronyn adapted Rope for the screen, and the motion picture was released by Transatlantic/Warner Brothers in 1948, starring James Stewart and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Compulsion, a documentary novel by Meyer Levin, appeared in 1956; only the convicts’ names were changed. It so clearly identified the case that shortly after its publication, Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., sued the author for $1.5 million. His claim that Levin had unjustly appropriated his name for profit was dismissed on First Amendment grounds. In a revised version, Levin adapted his novel as a play in 1957, and Compulsion became a successful motion picture in 1959. Orson Welles played Jonathan Wilk (a character easily recognizable as a portrayal of Clarence Darrow).

Leopold presented his own version of the case in Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years (1958), and he was working on an autobiography, “Grab for a Halo,” at the time of his death. A testament to the enduring interest in the case was Teen Thrill Killers, a television show produced by the A&E television network in 2005. It prominently featured newsreel footage of the infamous Leopold and Loeb trial.

Further Reading

1 

Higdon, Hal. Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Explores why, despite all the mass murders since, Leopold and Loeb’s remains the “crime of the century.”

2 

Leopold, Nathan Freundenthal, Jr. Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Presents the consequences of the crime and its punishment from the murderers’ point of view.

3 

Levin, Meyer. Compulsion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Although framed as a novel, the book is fact-based and is one of the best studies of the case.

4 

Payment, Simone. The Trial of Leopold and Loeb: A Primary Source Account. New York: Rosen, 2004. A summary of what has been written about the sensational trial.

5 

Rompalske, Dorothy. “Leopold and Loeb: The Murder That Shocked a Nation.” Biography (A&E) 6, no. 10 (October, 2002): 26-27. A printed adaptation of the episode of the television series.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Adcock, Patrick. "Nathan F. Leopold, Jr.." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1358.
APA 7th
Adcock, P. (2007). Nathan F. Leopold, Jr.. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Adcock, Patrick. "Nathan F. Leopold, Jr.." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.