Few things unsettle us as deeply as knowing there are people out there who would kill for no reason. Like, say, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (top, left to right, with their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, far right).
That’s why, almost a century after they killed for no reason, Leopold and Loeb are resurrected again Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET (check local listings) in a PBS American Experience documentary titled “The Perfect Crime.”
It wasn’t the perfect crime. But that was what these two gifted Chicago teenagers were sure they had concocted when, on May 21, 1924, they lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks into the rented car they were driving through the streets near Chicago.
The plan was to kill him, and that part worked. They bashed in his head with a chisel and finished him off by stuffing a rag in his mouth.
This would have been horrific enough all by itself. What catapulted the case to national attention and enduring crime legend was why they said they did it – because they just wanted the thrill of killing someone.
Anyone, really.
Bobby Franks (right), Loeb’s second cousin, happened to be walking down the wrong street at the wrong time. He was convenient.
The part of the plan that didn’t work was getting away with it.
Leopold dropped a pair of glasses near the culvert where they dumped Bobby’s body, giving police the critical clue that led them to the perps. Leopold and Loeb got away with their perfect crime for less than two weeks.
By October – justice moved faster back then – they had pled guilty and been sentenced to life plus 99 years. They owed their lives to the impassioned plea by their attorney, Clarence Darrow, and the fact that the judge ultimately decided he didn’t want to hang a couple of teenagers.
Still, this would have been just another awful and ultimately forgotten murder case if it weren’t for the reactions by Leopold and Loeb, which were no reactions at all.
Neither expressed any remorse. Loeb spent much of his time in court smirking and laughing. Leopold said killing Bobby Franks was no more significant than an etymologist impaling a bug on a pin.
Other elements in the story added to the titillation. Both Leopold and Loeb were precocious students from wealthy society families. They were gay.
But what produced the lasting chill was killing at random, for no discernible reason.
That leaves all of us vulnerable, because we don’t have to have done anything wrong, or even made a mistake. We could just be in the wrong place at the wrong moment.
It’s a chill that seemed to resonate recently when two Virginia Tech students were arrested for allegedly killing a 13-year-old girl whose only mistake seemed to be the fantasy she was “dating” a college guy.
Mass shootings and serial killings induce that same uneasiness – the notion that sending your child to school or going to a movie can put you or your child in the crosshairs of someone who just wants to kill and doesn’t care who.
Novelists write books about this. Singers write songs about it – Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Kinky Friedman’s The Ballad of Charles Whitman.
“If you ask why I did what I did,” Springsteen’s Charles Starkweather says by way of explanation for his killing spree, “Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”
The Leopold and Loeb episode of American Experience offers nothing to argue against that notion, and little that goes any deeper.
It’s a straightforward, chronological account of the case, starting from Leopold’s and Loeb’s fascination with crime and marveling at the pride they took in detailing the murder for police and reporters.
“The Perfect Crime” spends considerable time as well on Darrow’s revolutionary strategy for saving their lives.
He had them admit their guilt, then argued that their cold, lonely upbringing – poor little rich boys – had left them so emotionally scarred that they had lost their humanity.
Darrow angered a lot of people then. He’d anger a lot of people today. But whatever the cause, it was hard to dispute his conclusion.