For the Thrill of It Read online

  Samuel Ettelson was furious that the killers might escape justice. The teachers were guilty—no doubt about it. In a rare display of anger, Ettelson was quoted by the Chicago newspapers as condemning their release—he asserted that at least two of the instructors had plotted to kidnap Bobby. “One instructor at the Harvard School,” Ettelson declared, “killed Robert Franks. Another wrote the polished letter demanding $10,000 from the family. The instructor who wrote the letter was a cultured man—a man with perverted tendencies—the man who committed the actual crime is a man who needed money and who had mercenary motives.”35

  Ettelson’s outburst reflected the authorities’ frustration; one week after the murder, they had several clues, plenty of theories, dozens of leads, but no arrests. To their amazement, the police discovered that they even had a witness to the kidnapping: just after five o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, Irving Hartman, a ten-year-old pupil at the Harvard School, had been trailing thirty yards behind Bobby as the two boys walked south on Ellis Avenue. Irving’s attention had been momentarily distracted by some flowers in a yard; he stopped to look at them, and when he glanced up, Bobby had disappeared. At that moment, Irving reported, a gray Winton automobile moved away from the curb at the exact spot where he had last seen Bobby.36

  Philip Van Devoorde, a chauffeur for the Fay family, had noticed a gray Winton, spattered with mud, outside the Harvard School on Tuesday, 20 May, the day before the kidnapping. Van Devoorde provided a detailed description of the car to the police: it was a 1919 model with a gray-black top; the driver had been between twenty-five and thirty years old; and in the front passenger seat there had been a second man, red-faced, with a pointed nose and wearing a tan cap. Equally significant, the same car was standing near the front entrance of the school on Wednesday at around five o’clock, almost exactly at the time of the kidnapping.37

  Soon sightings of gray Wintons were pouring into police headquarters. One witness had seen a gray Winton at 113th Street and Michigan Avenue, not far from Wolf Lake, around eight o’clock on Wednesday evening. A man had been behind the steering wheel and a woman had sat in the front passenger seat, and in the back there had been a large bundle that might have been a huddled human form. William Lucht, a tax assessor, had seen a Winton, with two bundles in the rear seat, near Cottage Grove Avenue and 67th Street on Wednesday evening. Stanley Miner had reported a gray Winton on Lake Park Avenue and 48th Street. Frederick Eckstein, a watchman, had noticed a gray touring car—“old and decrepit looking”—on Railroad Avenue in the vicinity of Wolf Lake.38

  Robert Crowe, the state’s attorney, attached especial significance to such accounts. Irving Hartman had no reason to deceive the police with his initial account of Bobby’s disappearance—Crowe could trust his veracity. And the Winton automobile was not a popular model; it would not be difficult to track down owners of Wintons in Chicago; moreover, it was a distinctive car: its boxy appearance, elongated hood, and capacious tonneau made the Winton instantly recognizable.39

  Anyone with such a car was liable to be arrested on sight. Two days after the murder, the police took Adolph Papritz, a draftsman at Armour and Company who owned a gray Winton, to headquarters for questioning. Papritz was eventually cleared, but not before the newspapers had concluded that he was most probably the murderer. Nevertheless, he harbored no malice: “I expected it. Everybody with a gray car is being taken in.”40

  Joe Klon had the misfortune to drive a gray Winton and to wear tortoiseshell glasses. Klon eventually decided to leave his car in his garage and walk to work—too many busybodies were turning him in to the police in hopes of winning the $5,000 reward offered by the family. “This has got to stop somewhere,” Klon protested. “I’m going to have that car painted black…. I’ve got to wear glasses to see, but I’m going to do away with those tortoise shell rims. This is the third time I’ve been arrested for murder in as many days.”41

  The state’s attorney, Robert Crowe, and the chief of police, Morgan Collins, had enlisted the aid of the press in advertising the clues as widely as possible. As a strategy, it was a double-edged sword: on the one hand it encouraged the public to report possible suspects to the police, but on the other hand it often involved the detectives in a fruitless pursuit of leads based on an entirely false premise. So it was with the gray Winton automobile. Collins’s men searched out gray Wintons in every corner of the city, hauled in their owners for questioning, and interviewed countless mechanics at car repair shops—but all for naught. Not a single gray Winton could be conclusively linked to the murder. Irving Hartman’s eyewitness account, Crowe wearily concluded, had been mistaken.

  AND THE KIDNAPPERS’ MOTIVE? The authorities had as little certainty about motive as they had regarding the clues. Could the killing of Bobby Franks be an act of revenge against the father for a business deal gone sour? Jacob Franks had a good reputation as an honest businessman, but it was difficult to believe that in his long life as a pawnbroker and realtor, often dealing with gamblers and pimps, he had never crossed someone. Indeed, Bobby’s death had sparked an avalanche of hateful, vengeful letters to the Franks household. One anonymous writer promised “to strangle you to death…. You shall suffer minute by minute, you lowdown skunk”; and this writer concluded by threatening to kill Franks’s daughter, Josephine. The threats against the Franks family might be the work of cranks, but they could not be taken lightly. Might the other children be at risk? No one was prepared to ignore the possibility that someone was planning a second act of violence against the family; and so, on Saturday, 24 May, a police guard, consisting of eight sergeants, was set up around the Franks home.42

  Had Bobby been the victim of a child molester? Publicly, at least, the coroner’s physician, Joseph Springer, claimed that “young Franks had not been the victim of a pervert”; yet in his final report, Springer hinted that someone may have raped the boy: “the rectum was dilated and would admit easily one middle finger.”43 Chicago had no shortage of pedophiles; and everyone could recall the rape and murder of six-year-old Janet Wilkinson in 1919. Perhaps the abductor had molested Bobby and, fearing identification by the boy, had decided also to kill him.

  Morgan Collins detailed a police squad to arrest N. C. Starren, a notorious pedophile who had taught at Lindblom High School; and on the Monday following the murder, Collins issued a general order to arrest all “persons known to be perverts, those who have ever before been charged with or convicted of any unnatural act.” It was a comprehensive roundup of pedophiles and homosexuals that included anyone either fined or sentenced in the criminal and municipal courts and anyone who had served a term for sexual deviancy in the state penitentiary. John Caverly, the chief justice of the Cook County Criminal Court, endorsed Collins’s draconian measures. The kidnapper, Caverly believed, was most probably a mental defective who had taken Bobby Franks in order to sexually abuse him. There were other possible motives, of course; perhaps it was a straightforward kidnapping case with the ransom as the principal object, or perhaps the kidnapper bore a grudge against Jacob Franks. But Caverly had little doubt that the abduction was the work of a child molester. “All evidence so far,” he pronounced in support of Collins, “points to the moron theory as the most plausible.”44

  But would a pedophile attempt to extort a ransom from the boy’s father? Would a kidnapper interested in sexually abusing the boy also phone the boy’s parents, arrange for a cab to arrive at the Franks home, and mail a letter asking for a ransom? That was possible, of course—anything was possible—but in the opinion of the state’s attorney, Robert Crowe, it was highly unlikely: “It is not to be considered tenable that the boy’s attackers were perverts. They would not have bothered about sending letters and chauffeurs to complicate the matter.”45

  Crowe believed the murder was the consequence of a ransom demand gone awry. The kidnappers had lured Bobby into an automobile (but how? did the boy know his abductors?); perhaps one kidnapper had sequestered the boy in a remote location (near Wolf Lake?) while the
second kidnapper had stayed in Chicago to phone the parents and mail the letter. Bobby had probably recognized the captor who had killed him not long after the kidnapping; the second man, unaware that their victim was dead, had proceeded with the plan.

  Crowe hinted that cocaine addicts, in the pay of a criminal mastermind, had abducted Bobby Franks. Never mind that there was no evidence to support this assertion—Crowe knew that, by linking the use of illegal drugs to the murder, he could legitimately call on outside assistance without losing face. If the resources of the Chicago police department were inadequate, perhaps federal agents from the Bureau of Investigation could find the culprits: “We shall, by a process of elimination, try to find some one user of drugs who was sufficiently well acquainted with the habits and movements of the Franks family to have contrived a kidnapping plot…. Dope will be found at the bottom of it all.”46

  Whether or not cocaine addicts were behind the kidnapping, it certainly appeared that the desire to obtain a ransom was the least improbable motive for Bobby’s disappearance. Some detectives wondered why the kidnappers would choose a fourteen-year-old; if ransom was the motive, why not abduct a younger child, who would be less likely to recognize the kidnappers at a later date? But this reasoning failed to disturb the emerging consensus: the ransom provided the motive.47

  ON MONDAY, 26 MAY, FIVE days after the murder of Bobby Franks, the police learned that another child, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, had also disappeared the previous Wednesday. Gertrude Barker had left St. Xavier’s Academy on Cottage Grove Avenue to walk north toward her home on Blackstone Avenue. She would have arrived at 49th Street and Ellis Avenue—the scene of Bobby’s abduction—at almost exactly the moment when Bobby had disappeared. Had she witnessed the kidnapping?

  Had the kidnappers bundled Gertrude into the car to prevent her from informing the police? The girl’s aunt could not imagine that Gertrude had done anything foolish—she was not one to fall in with a bad crowd. “She preferred her home and her books to the school friends she had made. She loved to fish and ride, and expected to take up horseback riding as soon as the weather got warmer.” Her family was frantic with worry; Gertrude had been missing for almost a week. Perhaps, her aunt speculated, she also was lying dead in a ditch. “I feel sure something untoward has happened to her. She…would have been on 49th Street just about the time that poor little Franks boy was kidnaped…. I am afraid she saw those terrible kidnapers, and they abducted her also, fearing she might tell the police the license number of their automobile.”48

  Gertrude was not so innocent as her aunt had imagined. Later that week, the police discovered her living with a twenty-seven-year-old stable boy, Bert Jeffery. Gertrude explained that she had met Bert in a local diner. “I flirted with a nice-looking boy in a drug store where I stopped to get a soda.” Bert declared his love for Gertrude and his intention to marry her, but the police had other ideas: they bundled Bert into a cell in the South Clark Street police station and returned Gertrude to her family.49

  THEIR QUICK SUCCESS IN FINDING Gertrude Barker was the only bright spot for the police in an otherwise grim week.

  On Monday, 26 May, the Franks family held a funeral service for their son at their home on Ellis Avenue. It would have been impossible for the family to have held a funeral service in a public place; the crowds would be too large and the ceremony might turn into a circus. Every day since the kidnapping, hundreds of sightseers had milled outside the house, gawking at the drawn curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of Bobby’s father and mother.

  Thus a select group—members of the family, twenty of Bobby’s classmates, and a few close friends—gathered around the white casket in the library for the service. Banks of flowers crowded the room; lilies of the valley, bouquets of peonies and mignonette, wreathes of roses, and baskets of orchids surrounded the small coffin.50

  The Franks family had converted from Judaism to Christian Science. Elwood Emory, the first reader of the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist read the Lord’s Prayer, the Twenty-Third Psalm, and other passages from the scriptures. Glenn Drake, a choral singer from the church, sang two hymns, and then the mourners moved silently and slowly toward the front door, where black limousines waited to drive to Rosehill Cemetery. Eight boys carried the coffin to the hearse; the other boys from the Harvard School clustered in the hallway at the bottom of the large staircase. As Flora Franks passed them, she looked wistfully over their faces: her son had belonged to that group, and now he was gone—never again would Bobby talk to her excitedly about hitting a ball out of the baseball lot; never again would he tell his mother of his plans, his disappointments, and his victories.

  There was now a crowd of 300 waiting in the street. The family slipped out of a side door with a police escort to escape the photographers. There were no disturbances: Morgan Collins had sent out a large detail of police to keep order. At Rosehill Cemetery, Elwood Emory offered prayers, and Bobby Franks was laid to rest in the family mausoleum.51

  The police investigation seemed to be at a standstill. The detectives had been unable to connect anyone to the gray Winton car seen by Irving Hartman; they had no evidence linking the teachers at the Harvard School to the killing; they could not identify the author of the ransom note.

  Only one promising clue remained: the tortoiseshell eyeglasses found by Paul Korff near the corpse. Gradually, during the first week after the murder, the police had come to realize that the eyeglasses constituted an extraordinarily valuable clue—perhaps their only way to track down the killer. Crucially, the lenses could have been obtained only with a prescription; they had not been purchased over the counter. Somewhere there must be an optician who had ground the glasses; that optician had doubtless kept a copy of the prescription in his files.52

  But the prescription was a common one, given to “persons suffering from simple astigmatism or astigmatic farsightedness,” explained one Chicago optician. “The lenses are of a convex cylindrical type, also a common pattern.” Thus the prescription alone would not materially advance the search—there could be thousands of Chicagoans with such glasses—but what about the frames? Were they distinctive?53

  Yes, they were unusual. Composed of Newport zylonite, an artificial composite, the frames had distinctive rivet hinges and square corners. No firm in Chicago, or even in the Midwest, manufactured Newport zylonite frames. They originated in Brooklyn, and only one optician in Chicago sold such frames: Almer Coe and Company. The owner of the firm recognized the glasses immediately. “We…identified them as of a type sold by us and not by any other Chicago dealer. The lenses had markings used by us, and as far as we know, not used by any other optician in Chicago. The lenses are not unusual; such prescriptions are filled often by us, possibly once a week. They are lenses for eye-strain or headache, and would not materially improve vision…. They might be used only for reading or for what is known as mild astigmatism. Their measurements are average in every way.”54

  Average in every way. Perhaps the killer would slip away again. But for the first time in eight days, state’s attorney Robert Crowe sensed that the net was gradually closing. That Thursday, 29 May, the clerks at Almer Coe began the laborious task of checking the thousands of prescriptions in the company files: they were looking for a distinctive frame and a common lens prescription. How many would they find and to whom would these belong?55

  THAT AFTERNOON, THE POLICE KNOCKED at the door of Nathan Leopold Jr., a nineteen-year-old law student at the University of Chicago. The journalists following the Franks murder were mildly curious that the police had taken Leopold into custody—but this was certainly only a routine matter. Everyone knew Leopold’s father as one of the wealthiest Jewish businessmen in Chicago; the family was socially prominent, with influential connections. And Nathan Leopold? He was a brilliant student—Phi Beta Kappa at Chicago—who had recently applied to transfer to the law school at Harvard University that fall. The journalists shrugged their shoulders at the news. There was no copy to be filed with th
eir editors about this—obviously Nathan Leopold had nothing to do with the murder of Bobby Franks.

  2 THE RELATIONSHIP

  Their criminal activities were the outgrowth of an unique coming-together of two peculiarly maladjusted adolescents, each of whom brought into relationship a long-standing background of abnormal life.1

  Psychiatrists’ Report for the Defense

  (Joint Summary) [July 1924]

  [Nathan] was very egocentric. Practically all the time I was with him, in ordinary social conversation, he attempted by any sort of ruse possible to monopolize the conversation. It didn’t make any difference what was being said or what was being talked about, he always attempted to get the conversation revolving around him so he could do most of the talking…. He thought his mentality was a great deal superior to the ordinary person.2

  Arnold Maremont, student at the University

  of Chicago, 7 August 1924

  [Richard] smoked very much, constantly…. We were in the habit of seeing him drunk a good deal…. We would be sitting in the house playing a game of bridge and Dick would walk in and one or two of us would say he is drunk again and one or two of us would say no he is not. Half of the time it would work out he was drunk.3

  Theodore Schimberg, student at the University

  of Chicago, 8 August 1924

  NATHAN LEOPOLD WAS JUST FIFTEEN YEARS old; but already he felt that he was passing into adulthood, gratefully slipping out of his adolescence, gladly discarding his high school years. That month—October 1920—he was to begin his freshman year at the University of Chicago.4

  The university had been in existence less than three decades, but to Nathan it seemed to have been around forever. He had grown up in its shadow—the Leopold house was just ten blocks from the campus. He had often walked past the imposing, monumental Gothic buildings, constructed of gray Bedford limestone, that stretched south from 57th Street to the Midway. There was much to admire about the campus: Mitchell Tower—reminiscent of the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford—with its august presence on 57th Street signaling the approach to the university; Cobb Gate, linking the anatomy and zoology buildings, the fantastic gargoyles on its inclines representing the upward progress of the classes; the student dormitories with their red-tiled roofs, ornamented doorways, and heavyset bay windows; and Harper Library, a massive, brooding building looking out over the green fields that stretched south of the Midway.