Leopold and Loeb: The True Story of the "Perfect Crime" That Shocked 1924 Chicago

By Domonique Luchin · Published October 27, 2026 · 11 min read

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In the spring of 1924, two of the most privileged young men in Chicago decided they were smart enough to commit a murder no one could solve. Nathan Leopold Jr., 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, were students at the University of Chicago, sons of wealthy families from the city's Kenwood neighborhood, and convinced of their own superiority. On May 21, 1924, they kidnapped and killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Within ten days, a pair of eyeglasses had put them in an interrogation room, and their "perfect crime" became one of the most famous murder cases in American history: the case newspapers called "the crime of the century." This is the true story of Leopold and Loeb: what happened, how they were caught, why they didn't hang, and what became of them.

Who Were Leopold and Loeb?

Both killers came from enormous wealth and both were, by any conventional measure, gifted. Neither needed money. That detail is central to why the case horrified the country: it was a murder committed, in the words of the men themselves, for the thrill and to prove a point.

Nathan Leopold Jr.

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. was born in Chicago on November 19, 1904, the third son of a wealthy German-Jewish family. He was a child prodigy. By the time of the murder he had already finished an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago with Phi Beta Kappa honors and planned to start at Harvard Law School after a trip to Europe. He had studied a reported 15 languages and was a nationally recognized amateur ornithologist; he and other bird experts documented nesting sites of the rare Kirtland's warbler. He was also, by many accounts, sensitive about his small stature and appearance, and he threw himself into intellectual achievement.

Leopold had developed a philosophy to justify the crimes he and Loeb committed. He described himself as a hedonist who weighed the pleasure and pain of any act. He told a psychiatrist that deciding to commit murder was "practically the same as making up my mind whether or not I should eat pie for supper." He was also fascinated by his own reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the Übermensch, or "superman," a person so superior that ordinary laws did not apply. In a letter to Loeb he wrote that a superman "is not liable for anything he may do."

Richard Loeb

Richard Albert Loeb was born in Chicago on June 11, 1905, the son of Albert Loeb, a lawyer and retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Loeb was also exceptionally bright. He finished high school early and in 1923, at 17, reportedly became the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. Unlike Leopold, he was athletic, charming and popular. He was also an avid reader of detective stories, and he had been stealing since childhood.

A Dangerous Partnership

The two had known each other casually growing up in Kenwood but became close around 1920, and their relationship deepened at the University of Chicago. Historians and the trial record establish that they were in a sexual relationship from early 1921 until their arrest. Their crimes escalated over time: cheating at bridge, petty theft, burglary, throwing bricks through windows, and setting fires, then mingling in the crowd to watch firefighters work. After they burglarized Loeb's old fraternity house at Michigan, stealing items that included a typewriter, Loeb proposed the ultimate test: a "perfect crime" that would capture public attention and prove they were above everyone else.

The Murder of Bobby Franks: What Happened on May 21, 1924

Leopold and Loeb reportedly spent about seven months planning. To disguise their real motive, they built the crime around a fake kidnapping with a ransom demand and an elaborate, step-by-step system for collecting the money. They scouted for victims around the Harvard School for Boys in Kenwood.

They settled on Robert "Bobby" Franks, born September 19, 1909, the 14-year-old son of wealthy watch manufacturer Jacob Franks. Bobby lived across the street from the Loeb family. He had played tennis at the Loeb home.

On the afternoon of May 21, 1924, using a car Leopold had rented under the false name "Morton D. Ballard," the pair pulled up beside Bobby as he walked home from school. He was less than two blocks from home and at first said no to a ride. Loeb persuaded him to get in by talking about a tennis racket.

Exactly who did what next has been disputed ever since, because each man later blamed the other. The prevailing view, supported by most observers, is that Leopold drove while Loeb sat in the back and struck Bobby several times in the head with a chisel wrapped in tape, then gagged him. Bobby died in the car.

The killers drove to a spot they had chosen in advance near Wolf Lake, on Chicago's far South Side. After dark, they stripped the body and hid it in a culvert along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. They poured hydrochloric acid on the boy's face and body to hinder identification.

The Ransom Plot

That night Leopold phoned Bobby's mother using the name "George Johnson." He told her that her son had been kidnapped and that instructions would follow. The pair mailed a typed ransom note demanding $10,000, burned Bobby's clothes, scrubbed blood from the rental car, and spent the rest of the evening playing cards.

The next morning the Franks family received the note, and Leopold called again with the first instructions. The plan stalled almost immediately: Jacob Franks forgot the address of the drugstore where he was supposed to receive his next directions. Then the whole scheme collapsed. That same day, the body was discovered in the culvert, and the family learned that Bobby was dead.

Leopold and Loeb got rid of the typewriter and burned a blanket used to move the body, then carried on as if nothing had happened. They talked openly about the case. Leopold discussed it with a professor. Loeb helped reporters he knew find the drugstore from the ransom instructions. That brazen confidence, the belief that they could hide in plain sight, would not last long.

How Leopold and Loeb Were Caught: The Eyeglasses

The single most famous clue in the Leopold and Loeb case is a pair of eyeglasses. Investigators found glasses near the culvert where Bobby's body had been hidden. The prescription and frames were common, but the glasses had an unusual hinge. Only three customers in Chicago had bought that hinge, and one of them was Nathan Leopold.

When police questioned him, Leopold had an explanation ready: he was a bird-watcher, he often walked that area, and the glasses might have fallen from his pocket on a birding trip the previous weekend.

The alibi fell apart next. In formal questioning on May 29, the two claimed they had spent the evening of the murder driving around in Leopold's car with two women whose last names they never learned. But the Leopold family chauffeur told police he had been repairing that car all afternoon, and his wife backed him up. The car they claimed to be using had never left the garage.

Then there was the typewriter. The ransom note had been typed on the portable typewriter stolen in the Michigan fraternity burglary. On June 7, it was recovered from the Jackson Park Lagoon, where the pair had dumped it.

The Confessions

Under pressure, Loeb confessed first. He said Leopold had planned the crime and killed Bobby while Loeb drove. Leopold then confessed, but said Loeb was the killer and he himself had been driving. Apart from that point, their accounts matched each other and the evidence. State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe announced both confessions on May 31, 1924, just ten days after the murder.

Both admitted they had been motivated by the thrill and by their "superman" fantasy of committing a perfect crime. Leopold said he had been curious to know what it would feel like to be a murderer, and was disappointed to find he felt the same as ever.

The Trial of the Century

The families hired Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the country and a lifelong opponent of the death penalty. Rumors claimed he was paid $1 million. He was actually paid about $65,000.

Most people expected an insanity defense. Darrow made a different calculation. A jury, he believed, would almost certainly convict and sentence his clients to death. So he had them plead guilty, which meant there would be no jury. A single judge, Cook County Circuit Court Judge John R. Caverly, would decide their sentence.

What followed was technically a sentencing hearing, not a trial, but it ran for 32 days and became a national media event. The prosecution called 88 witnesses to establish the brutality of the crime and argued for hanging. The defense presented extensive psychiatric testimony aimed at mitigation, describing emotional abnormalities, glandular problems, too much money and too little supervision, and, in Leopold's case, abuse by a governess. Both sides also used the men's sexual relationship to argue their case: the prosecution as a supposed motive, the defense as evidence of mental disturbance.

Clarence Darrow's Closing Argument

Darrow's closing argument, delivered over roughly eight hours and concluding August 25, 1924, is considered one of the greatest speeches of his career and a landmark argument against capital punishment. He argued that the defendants were too young and immature to be put to death, that a culture brutalized by World War I had cheapened human life, and that executing them would only add to the cruelty. Near the end he told the judge, "Your Honor stands between the past and the future," and said he was "pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men."

The Sentence: Life Plus 99 Years

On September 10, 1924, Judge Caverly sentenced both men to life imprisonment for the murder plus 99 years for the kidnapping. He explained that he based his decision mainly on precedent and the defendants' ages rather than on the psychiatric evidence. That's why Leopold and Loeb didn't hang: they were spared largely because they were 18 and 19.

A little over a month after the sentence, Richard Loeb's father died of heart failure.

Prison and the Death of Richard Loeb

Leopold and Loeb were first held at Joliet and later both ended up at Stateville Penitentiary. Although officials tried to keep them apart, they stayed close. Together they expanded the prison's school, adding high school and junior college courses.

On January 28, 1936, Loeb was attacked with a straight razor in a prison shower by inmate James Day. He suffered more than 50 wounds, including defensive cuts and a throat slashed from behind, and died in the prison hospital. Day claimed Loeb had tried to sexually assault him. Several officials, including the warden, believed Loeb had been murdered, but a jury acquitted Day after a short trial. Leopold later ridiculed Day's story, and the prison's Catholic chaplain said it was more likely Day had attacked Loeb after Loeb rejected him. Loeb was 30.

Nathan Leopold After Loeb

Leopold spent another 22 years in prison. He continued teaching and running the prison school, and in 1944 he volunteered for the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, in which inmates were deliberately infected with malaria to test treatments. He later wrote that his good works were an effort to make up for his crime.

In the 1950s, author Meyer Levin wrote Compulsion (1956), a novel based on the case, over Leopold's objections. Leopold then published his own memoir, Life Plus 99 Years (1958), as part of his campaign for parole. It spent 14 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, though critics accused him of glossing over the darkness of his past.

After 33 years in prison, Leopold was paroled on March 13, 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, where the Church of the Brethren's service commission gave him work as a laboratory and X-ray assistant at a hospital in Adjuntas. He earned a master's degree at the University of Puerto Rico, did research on public health and leprosy, published a checklist of the birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in 1963, and married in 1961. He sued unsuccessfully to block the film version of Compulsion; the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the confessed perpetrator of the "crime of the century" could not claim his reputation had been injured. Nathan Leopold died of a diabetes-related heart attack on August 29, 1971, at 66.

Why the Leopold and Loeb Case Still Matters

The case still matters a century later for a few reasons.

The myth of the "perfect crime"

Two of the smartest young men in Chicago planned for months and were caught within ten days because of a dropped pair of glasses, a chauffeur who remembered fixing a car, and a typewriter in a lagoon. The case is still a lesson that arrogance makes mistakes.

A turning point in the death penalty debate

Darrow's plea is still studied in law schools as an argument against capital punishment, and the sentence showed how much a defendant's youth could weigh against execution.

A cultural template

The case inspired Patrick Hamilton's 1929 play Rope and Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film of the same name, Levin's Compulsion and its 1959 film, John Logan's play Never the Sinner (1985), Tom Kalin's film Swoon (1992), the musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story, and the thriller Murder by Numbers (2002), among many others. If you are looking for a Leopold and Loeb documentary or movie, these dramatizations, along with podcast and video retellings like ours, are where most people first meet the story.

Leopold and Loeb Timeline

• Nov 19, 1904: Nathan Leopold Jr. born in Chicago.
• June 11, 1905: Richard Loeb born in Chicago.
• Sept 19, 1909: Bobby Franks born.
• May 21, 1924: Bobby Franks kidnapped and killed; ransom call that night.
• May 22, 1924: Ransom note arrives; body found near Wolf Lake.
• May 29, 1924: Leopold and Loeb formally questioned; alibi collapses.
• May 31, 1924: Confessions announced.
• June 7, 1924: Typewriter recovered from Jackson Park Lagoon.
• Aug 25, 1924: Darrow finishes his closing plea.
• Sept 10, 1924: Both sentenced to life plus 99 years.
• Jan 28, 1936: Loeb killed at Stateville.
• March 13, 1958: Leopold paroled.
• Aug 29, 1971: Leopold dies in Puerto Rico.

Hear the Full Story on The Sealed Docket

We cover the case in two parts on The Sealed Docket. The first, "They Planned the Perfect Murder. A Pair of Glasses Gave Them Away," follows the crime and the clue that broke it. Part 2, "The Perfect Crime," picks up the story from there. For more cases from the same era, browse the Sealed Docket case index.

Related Case Studies from The Sealed Docket

• D.B. Cooper: The True Story of the 1971 Hijacking and the Man Who Vanished
• What Happened to Judge Crater? The True Story of the 1930 Disappearance
• John Dillinger: The True Story of Public Enemy No. 1 and the Biograph Theater

Sources

• Wikipedia: Leopold and Loeb
• Famous Trials (Prof. Douglas O. Linder, UMKC): Leopold and Loeb
• Nathan F. Leopold Jr., Life Plus 99 Years (1958)
• Clarence Darrow, closing argument, August 1924
• Wikipedia: Clarence Darrow

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