For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago by Simon Baatz Page B

in the court of public opinion. Nathan and Richard had confessed, but those confessions might yet be repudiated. However, if they were to talk of the murder to the reporters, and if their remarks were to be printed in the newspapers, how could their guilt be denied? Nathan and Richard had not yet expressed any remorse for the murder or any regret for the pain they had caused the Franks family. They seemed, rather, to have adopted a cynical, callous attitude toward the killing, as though it were morally inconsequential; all the better, therefore, if their comments about the murder were reported in the newspapers for public consumption.
    On the ride to Hessville, a journey of approximately forty minutes, Walter Sullivan sat with Nathan in one car while Morrow Krum traveled with Richard in the other car. It was not long before both prisoners were gossiping about the crime, revealing details about themselves that blackened them irretrievably when Chicagoans opened their newspapers the following day.

    A S THE CAR MADE ITS way out of the park, the bell clanging to clear a path through the crowd of onlookers trying to peer into the car window, Walter Sullivan asked Nathan about the murder. Whose idea had it been? And who had wielded the chisel to strike the deathblows? Had Nathan initiated the plan, or had it been Richard’s idea?
    The mere mention of Richard Loeb was sufficient to send Nathan into a tantrum of anger and indignation. He was still furious that Richard had blamed him for the murder—Richard’s treason had been a cruel blow to Nathan’s love. “It was all Loeb’s idea,” Nathan replied, bitterly, “he planned the kidnaping.”
    The car had now left Jackson Park and was threading its way through the streets of the South Side, out toward the Michigan City road.
    “It was Loeb…who enticed the boy into the car and it was Loeb who struck him on the head the next instant.” Nathan played nervously with the unlit cigarette in his hand, turning it through his fingers. “I could not—it would have been physically impossible for me to have struck the blow that killed Robert Franks. Loeb knows this too…. My repugnance to violence is such that I could not have killed Robert…. He thinks that by proving me the actual slayer he will eventually go free.”
    Nathan paused; he leaned his elbow against the car window and stared at the houses as they passed. It had been a bitter blow, he acknowledged, knowing that Richard was willing to sacrifice him to preserve his own skin.
    But his mood lasted only a minute. They passed the South Shore Country Club and then a golf course—what a ridiculous game, Nathan remarked!—and Nathan was soon his old self again, joking and bantering with the reporter. He leaned over and touched Sullivan lightly on the knee and sat back in his seat with a grin on his face, “Now you’re contaminated,” he joked. “You’ve been touched by a murderer.”
    Sullivan smiled politely. He wondered how Nathan felt about the killing. Granted that Richard had struck Bobby with the chisel, nevertheless, he asked, how had Nathan felt about the boy’s death?
    It didn’t concern him, Nathan replied. He had no moral beliefs and religion meant nothing to him: he was an atheist. Whatever served an individual’s purpose—that was the best guide to conduct. In his case, well, he was an intellectual: his participation in the killing had been akin to the desire of the scientist to experiment. They had killed Bobby Franks as an experiment; Nathan had wanted to experience the sensation of murdering another human being. It was that simple.
    “A thirst for knowledge,” he explained to Sullivan, providing a helpful analogy to the murder of Bobby Franks, “is highly commendable, no matter what extreme pain or injury it may inflict upon others. A 6-year-old-boy is justified in pulling the wings from a fly, if by so doing he learns that without wings the fly is helpless.” 27

    I N THE OTHER CAR, Richard