You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I hope that this month readers will indulge my penchant for history, and permit me to relate a tale from the 1920s. Though the events I shall describe occurred nearly a century ago, I suspect that their legacy has remained with us in certain respects.
On May 21, 1924, two wealthy, academically precocious Jewish-American teenagers attempted to commit the “perfect crime.” Nathan Leopold, Jr. , aged nineteen, son of multi-millionaire box manufacturer Nathan F. Leopold, Sr., and Richard Loeb , aged eighteen, son of Albert H. Loeb, a multi-millionaire Vice-President of Sears, Roebuck and Company, kidnapped Robert “Bobby” Franks, a boy of fourteen years of age, as he journeyed home from the Harvard School for Boys in the exclusive Hyde Park district of Chicago, Illinois. The following morning, Bobby Franks's father, Jacob Franks, a Chicago property tycoon, received a ransom letter by special delivery, demanding $10,000 in unmarked twenty-dollar bills and fifty-dollar bills; but before Franks could respond, the police had already located the naked body of Bobby Franks, soaked in blood, its skull bludgeoned by a chisel blow, abandoned in a marsh on the South Side of Chicago.
Although intent on committing the perfect crime, Nathan Leopold had nevertheless dropped his specially manufactured