Empire of Deception by Dean Jobb

Author:Dean Jobb [Jobb, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th century, True Crime, Hoaxes & Deceptions
ISBN: 9781616204969
Google: UBOJBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1616201754
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2015-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

23

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

THE BOY’S NAKED body was found stuffed into a culvert on the outskirts of Chicago, and only by chance. A factory worker walking along a rail line happened to look down at the right moment and spotted the boy’s feet floating in the water. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses had been discarded nearby.

The victim, Bobby Franks, was just fourteen and the son of wealthy parents. He had been badly beaten and had died of asphyxiation, not drowning—he was dead before he wound up facedown in the culvert. It was a brutal murder, even by Chicago’s brutal standards, and the boy’s age and his family’s stature made it an instant sensation. Robert Crowe ranked it as “the most cruel, cowardly, dastardly murder” in American history. The judge who had sent the killer of little Janet Wilkinson to the gallows was now the prosecutor determined to avenge the death of young Bobby Franks. Those responsible, he assured shocked and outraged Chicagoans, would be found and punished.

By the time Franks’s parents received a note demanding a $10,000 ransom, they knew their boy was dead. The kidnappers had not counted on the body’s being found so quickly, within a day of his death. Police rounded up an array of suspects, from the boy’s male teachers to the owners of cars like one seen near his school, but the eyeglasses were the clue that cracked the case. The frames were unusual; only one optician in Chicago sold them, and only one customer who bought them could not find his pair when police showed up at his door. He was Nathan Leopold, a nineteen-year-old university student and the son of a prosperous factory owner. Leopold’s best friend, Richard Loeb, eighteen, was a neighbor of the Frankses and well off, too—his father was a top executive with Sears, Roebuck. Both were brought in for questioning.

Crowe took charge of the marathon interrogations. The alibis the pair had concocted for the day of the kidnapping crumbled. Loeb, caught in too many lies, finally confessed to John Sbarbaro that they had hatched a scheme to kidnap and kill a kid from a rich family, hide the body, and demand a ransom. Loeb claimed Leopold had inflicted the fatal blows with a chisel. Confronted with his friend’s admission, Leopold said Loeb was the murderer. The motive? Not the ransom, Leopold insisted. They already had plenty of money. They had pulled off a string of petty crimes—vandalism, a break-in, car theft—and the kidnapping and murder were supposed to be their criminal masterpiece, the perfect crime. They did it, Leopold said, for the “love of thrills.” They killed for kicks.

Nineteen twenty-four was the year Vladimir Lenin died. Adolf Hitler, jailed for his role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, had time on his hands and started to write Mein Kampf. Four intrepid US Army pilots in two planes recorded the first round-the-world flight, a marathon that took 175 days to complete. But for millions of newspaper readers that year,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.