There are signs that, even though 90 years have passed since Bobby Franks’s life was abruptly and infamously terminated by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, visitors to Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago still think to make pilgrimages to his tomb. Or at least that, coming across the otherwise undistinguished mausoleum with the name JACOB FRANKS inscribed across its lintel, they know to look for him inside.
They leave tiny tributes tucked into the grillwork of the mausoleum’s doors. Not the flowers and teddy bears people come purposely to leave at the shrines of tragedy when it is new and freshly shocking, but the kinds of little spontaneous offerings you can imagine prehistoric people leaving at sanctuaries where they thought spirits dwelt. There are pebbles, pennies, knotted scraps of fabric, things these visitors might have had in their pockets or found nearby when the tribute urge came over them—and one little Matchbox car, reminding us that Bobby, who would be 108 if he were still alive today, is forever frozen in a childhood he did not outgrow.
The doors are chained and padlocked, but unlike those of many of the surrounding tombs, their windows are transparent, making it possible to peer straight in through the grillwork. It makes me feel ghoulish and voyeuristic to do this, but I do it anyway. I don’t know what I expect to discover here, peeking into the only place where Bobby and his family ever resumed anything like normality after the events of the summer of 1924—it being normal, in a cemetery, to be dead just like everyone else.
But the first thing that does strike me, scanning the six engraved slabs inside, is that the date of death inscribed on Bobby’s tombstone—May 22, 1924—is jarringly wrong. In fact, he died on May 21. This seems like an odd mistake to have gone unnoticed, even by a family as dazed with shock as his was in the weeks and months following his death. This sensational murder—the Crime of the Century, as it was often called, at least before other hideous crimes followed along in the course of the twentieth century—was also one of the most documented, scrutinized, and analyzed murders ever. There were thousands of pages of court transcripts, confessions, psychiatric reports, newspapers packed with coverage in Chicago and around the world, and as the decades went on there were books and films and plays and even, eventually, a way-off–Broadway musical. In the course of curating an exhibit on the case and then researching a book, I’ve pored through most of that material, and the correct date of Bobby’s murder is engraved with absolute certainty in my mind.
Still, later I double-check a variety of sources. It troubles me deeply that, beyond the unfathomable indignity of the collision with fate that ended this child’s life, the packaging in which he has been sent into Eternity contains a typo. To the people who loved him, this can’t possibly have been a detail that didn’t matter. It’s only then, when I start to think about how the whole tragedy unfolded for them—his parents Jacob and Flora, his brother Jack and his sister Josephine—that the error on the marble slab starts to make sense.
***
On May 21, 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks left an after-school baseball game to walk the three blocks home to his house in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, and simply vanished. After dinner, his worried father Jacob began calling and then looking around the neighborhood, but no one had any idea where Bobby was. At about 10 p.m., while Jacob was still out, his wife Flora was called to the telephone. A man identifying himself as “Mr. Johnson” informed her that Bobby had been kidnapped. The caller hung up, and Flora fainted.
The Frankses spent a sleepless night frantic with worry before receiving, at 9 a.m. on May 22, a special delivery letter informing them that their son was still alive but that they must deliver a $10,000 ransom that afternoon in order to keep him safe. Jacob Franks was at the bank withdrawing the money as instructed in old $20 and $50 bills when a tip came in from a morgue in Hegewisch, Indiana, near the Illinois border, that a boy’s body had been found in a drainage ditch in a nearby swamp. It wasn’t clear how or when or why the boy had died, but a Chicago Daily News reporter who’d seen the corpse phoned another Daily News reporter who was already staking out the Franks house to say that he thought someone from the family should come down to take a look. When the next phone call came later that afternoon from “Mr. Johnson” with further instructions for delivering the ransom, Jacob Franks was too distraught to follow what Mr. Johnson was saying because another call had just come in from his brother-in-law down at the morgue in Hegewisch: the body of the dead boy was, indeed, Bobby’s.
The fact that a millionaire’s son had been found mysteriously murdered was instant front-page news in Chicago. And the story only gathered steam over the next few days, as the papers filled with speculation: Why had Bobby’s killer not even waited to get the ransom? Why did the ransom note have such an oddly literary quality? Who owned the pair of spectacles found lying on the ground near the body?
At the inquest on the afternoon of May 24, coroner Joseph Springer told reporters that death had resulted “from an injury to the head, associated with suffocation.” He added that rigor mortis had not yet set in at the time he did the autopsy on the morning of the 22nd, and he therefore concluded—mistakenly, as it turned out—that death had occurred within two to five hours before this examination.
This explains the date on the slab, then. It’s all the information Bobby’s family had to go on as they prepared to bury him in the tomb his father had already constructed in the area of Rosehill where many of Chicago’s most prominent Jewish families settled permanently. We know for a fact that the inscription with the death dates was already engraved by the time of the interment on May 25. The funeral was supposed to be a private affair, but a detailed newspaper account survives because an ambitious young reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune managed to crash the event posing as a mourner. The reporter, incidentally, was Maurine Watkins, who would later go on to write the play that became the musical Chicago. “Mr. Emory again read from the scriptures,” she wrote. “Mrs. Franks, assisted by [Bobby’s sister] Josephine and her brother, stood for a long time at the door [of the mausoleum] looking down at the coffin where her boy lay. Then they put aside the blanket of crimson buds and placed the slab: ‘1901—Robert Franks—1924.’”
***
That was Saturday afternoon. Not till the following Thursday, May 29, did detectives trace the pair of spectacles found near Bobby’s body to 19-year-old Nathan Leopold, affectionately nicknamed Babe—a University of Chicago law student who’d just taken his entrance exams for Harvard Law School, who was also the son of a prominent Kenwood self-made Jewish millionaire. The detectives initially thought it so absurd that such a fine boy could have had anything to do with such a sordid matter that when they arrived at his home that afternoon, they parked in front of some apartment buildings down the block to avoid embarrassment to the family, and took him for questioning to the LaSalle Hotel rather than the State’s Attorney’s office to avoid even the appearance of considering him a suspect.
And it wasn’t till the pre-dawn hours of Saturday morning that Leopold and his friend Richard “Dickie” Loeb, making their confessions in separate rooms, told police how and when Bobby had really died—mere moments after they picked him up in a rented car as he walked away from that baseball game on May 21 around 5 p.m. It hadn’t been that hard to lure him into the car, even though he’d told them he didn’t want a ride, they said. Dickie Loeb was his second cousin and lived right down the block. They’d played tennis a few days before on the court behind the Loebs’ mansion, and Dickie said he just wanted to chat about the tennis racket Bobby was using.
As soon as he got into the front seat, one of them—each accused the other—hit him over the head repeatedly with the taped end of a chisel and then stuffed a rag deep into his mouth to stifle his cries, because, as Leopold told the detectives, “the boy did not succumb as readily as we had believed.” Then they drove down to a swamp near the Indiana border where Leopold often went bird-watching—stopping on the way for a snack of hot dogs and root beer, which they ate in the car with Bobby’s body under a blanket in the backseat—to stuff the corpse into a drainage culvert Leopold knew about, where they were convinced it would decompose beyond recognition long before it was ever found.
***
The Leopolds, the Loebs, and the Frankses lived within blocks of each other in Kenwood. Bobby’s house is the only one of the three still standing, at the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard and S. Ellis Avenue. If you approached it a few years ago from the general direction of the University of Chicago, heading west down Hyde Park Boulevard, you ran into the Secret Service barricade a block from President Obama’s official residence. There were two extremely polite agents there in bullet-proof vests sipping coffee from take-out containers the day I came by, explaining that I was looking for the famous house where the victim of the Leopold-and-Loeb murder had lived.
“Oh yeah, Crime of the Century, right?” said one of them, a big burly guy whose accent sounded vintage Chicago.
The second one shrugged. “Never heard of it,” he said. You could tell he wasn’t from around these parts.
“Really?” I said. “It was one of the most famous murders ever! I can’t believe you don’t have people coming by here all the time asking where the houses are.”
“Ma’am,” he said patiently, “the people we tend to see coming around here are usually looking for this other really famous house.”
He waved me off down Hyde Park Boulevard, calling after me, “Be safe,” which might have been some Secret Service equivalent of “Have a nice day,” or might have been an actual exhortation. Mansions still abound here—many of them far more immense and ornate than the Obamas’ relatively middle-class house—but lots of them seem to be struggling with the challenge of maintaining their originally intended air of elegance and respectability, as do the blocks of aging apartment buildings that stretch between them and often actually tower over their lawns. Generally, the neighborhood has the feeling of having been partially swallowed up by the squalid world its turn-of-the-last-century Gatsbys were trying to wall out.
The Franks residence now is just the forlorn shell of a house, its windows boarded up, its yard a mess of construction dirt, only partially screened by a fence wrapped around its ground level like a concealing bath towel. A private owner is in the process of rescuing it from the exhausted wreck it became after years of use as a school, and its later complete abandonment.
This wasn’t random violence, or stranger danger, or the bureaucratic banality of evil…This was a neighborhood crime, a tribal crime, a family crime.The former Loeb property is just down the block, across the street. As attorney and right-hand-man to Sears president Julius Rosenwald, Dickie Loeb’s father Albert was even wealthier and more socially prominent than Jacob Franks or Nathan Leopold, Sr., and photos of the family’s mansion show that it dwarfed the Franks house. Albert was first cousin to Bobby’s mother Flora, and relations between the two families were obviously close right up until the moment of the murder. Albert had sold Jacob that property on the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard and Ellis Avenue to build his dream house on, and when Bobby didn’t come home for dinner on the night of May 21st, one of the first places Jacob thought to look for him was down the street at the Loebs’ tennis court.
Though the Loeb mansion was torn down and replaced by another private home in the 1970s, the original brick wall that surrounded the property survives, making it easy to stand on the sidewalk gauging the distance between the two households. Even with just the ghosts of the homes to measure by, the proximity is chilling, and instantly illuminates the intimacy of this crime, and one of the most horrifying, indigestible realities it embodies. This wasn’t random violence, or stranger danger, or the bureaucratic banality of evil—all of which offer us the chance to distance ourselves emotionally from those we recognize as being bad. This was a neighborhood crime, a tribal crime, a family crime. This was a crime you couldn’t possibly read about—and still cannot, today—without finding yourself contemplating whether it would be worse to have been the parents of poor murdered Bobby Franks, the boy who never came home from school that day, or the parents of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who did.
***
Jacob Franks sweated through the whole long, hot summer of 1924 in a courtroom along with the families of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to see whether Clarence Darrow, America’s most famous attorney, would be able to save them from the gallows—an outcome everyone thought unlikely. Because Darrow had counseled them to plead guilty, their sentencing lay in the hands of one judge, John Caverly, before whom Darrow paraded a series of psychiatrists, or, as they were then referred to, alienists. Without pleading insanity, which would have triggered a jury trial he knew he would never win, Darrow was hoping to convince the judge that some mental or biological cause could be found for their otherwise bafflingly careless cruelty that explained it, in some convincing way, as being beyond their control. And certainly, he also understood that the more they were humanized in the judge’s eyes by the alienists’ talk of their teddy bears, their deficient governesses, the bullying they had suffered as schoolboys, the less likely it was that any reasonably empathic judge would order their execution.
Almost all the news coverage from that summer follows the courtroom drama, supplementing it with amateur analysis (William Randolph Hearst invited Sigmund Freud to come over from Germany for a look into the boys’ psyches, but he declined) and frequent interviews with both defendants (Leopold later recalled that he and Loeb gave exclusives to one particular Chicago Daily Tribune reporter who regularly smuggled in cocktails for them from the Loebs’ well stocked bootleg cellar). The legends that would permanently define Leopold and Loeb, separately and together, were being forged by sensational daily revelations: about Leopold as a genius and Nietzschean “superman,” and his “master-slave” fantasies involving Loeb; about Loeb’s irresistible big-man-on-campus charisma and his secret longing to make his mark forever as a master criminal; about how part of their original plan to commit “the perfect crime” had involved strangling the victim with both their hands on the rope in order to be sure they would both share equally in the guilt.
Meanwhile, Bobby had faded to a ghostly footnote of the main narrative. There are only a few small details you can glean about Bobby no matter how thoroughly you scour the sources, and these come mainly from the news stories in the week just after he was murdered, but before the discovery of his murderers upstaged him. You only learn that he was his mother’s darling; that he was looking forward to wearing his first long pants; and that, in a school debate very shortly before his murder, he argued vehemently against the use of capital punishment for criminals—and won.
As the summer and the court case wore on, though, you catch tiny intimate glimpses in the papers of Bobby’s family melting down. In early August the Daily News reported that Dickie Loeb’s mother Anna had three times made the journey down that block of Ellis Avenue from her mansion to the Franks home to express her condolences to Bobby’s mother Flora, her husband’s cousin. She had twice been turned away, the article claimed, but when she was finally allowed into Flora’s presence to say whatever she found it within herself to say about the situation, Flora simply looked at her in surprise and said, “But I’m sure Bobby will be coming back pretty soon.”
“She doesn’t seem to understand that the boy is dead,” Jacob Franks told the reporter. “She knows there is a trial going on, but she doesn’t seem to associate that with the fact of Bobby’s death. She has never seen any newspaper account of the crime or of the trial. It might have been better if she had—it might have helped her to realize the truth.”
The legends that would permanently define Leopold and Loeb, separately and together, were being forged by sensational daily revelations: about Leopold as a genius and Nietzschean “superman,” and his “master-slave” fantasies involving Loeb…Outside the house, the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard and Ellis Avenue had become “a sort of mecca for the cranks and the terrorists and curiosity’s thousand eyes,” according to the Daily Tribune. “Automobiles slow to a walk as they pass the slain boy’s dwellings. Pedestrians linger to stare at it, at the lilac bushes which fringe the southern sidewalk, at the drawn blinds that hide the sorrowing family from morbid watchers.” Copycat cranks sent letters threatening to kidnap or kill Bobby’s sister Josephine or his brother Jack. Once Jacob went so far as to carry a decoy ransom package out to a designated spot on the dark, dangerous streets of Goose Island so detectives could nab some would-be extortionists, who turned out to be three 18-year-old boys.
Another night a fiery cross appeared three blocks away, at the corner of 49th street and Drexel Boulevard, literally manifesting how the flames of anti-Semitism had been sparked by the case. (Relief was occasionally expressed in the Jewish community that all three families involved were Jewish; had Leopold and Loeb picked a non-Jewish victim, surely the anti-Semitic reaction would have been catastrophic.)
And then there was the Loeb mansion, looming in plain sight just down the block. It would have been impossible to leave the Franks house without having to confront the site where (as the confessions revealed), a few hours after Jacob went looking for Bobby at the tennis court, Leopold and Loeb were busy burning the remains of Bobby’s bloodied clothing in the basement furnace.
Late in August, Jacob Franks told the Daily News that he intended to move his family to the Drake Hotel in order to escape the gawkers and the memories, but Flora refused to leave. Then just ten days later, on August 31, the Daily Tribune reported that the house had been sold to cinema magnate Joseph Trinx for $60,000. Most of the family’s belongings were offered at auction, with a public preview in the house itself that drew hundreds of thrill-seekers. According to the Tribune, gawkers “fought to get into the rooms where Robert Franks had slept before he was made the victim of Richard Loeb’s and Nathan Leopold Jr.’s experiments.” Sniffed the anonymous reporter, “The Franks furniture was not of an exceptional type. There were one or two oriental rugs—the rest of domestic make….The games and the radio set in Robert’s room were reserved. So was a stained glad window on the first floor landing, which depicted Robert Franks and his sister, Josephine, and his brother, Jack. The Franks will remove that from the house.”
***
On September 10, Judge Caverly shocked the world by sparing the lives of Leopold and Loeb, sentencing them instead to “life plus 99 years” in prison. About a month later, Jacob Franks told a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution that life at the Drake Hotel was not noticeably denting the despair that had swallowed his wife. In a faltering voice, the reporter said, Franks had described his wife’s frequent visits to Bobby in the mausoleum at Rosehill.
“’Sometimes I think she is recovering,’ he said, ‘and then she and I go through a night of horror. Last night she cried the whole night through and never went to sleep.’
“‘School has started again, and when she sees the children coming and going, she bursts into tears. She goes to the box where we have kept Bobby’s essays and looks at them until she comes to the one that tells what our son thought about capital punishment. He thought it was wrong to put people to death and that comforts his mother a little, because she knows that Robert would be satisfied because his slayers were not put to death.'”
The reporter added that although Jacob Franks went every day to the little office of his real estate business, in fact “he has done no business of any kind since his son was murdered. In his office he spends most of his time going over dozens of letters that pour into him from all parts of the world, most of them tendering him sympathy.”
***
One by one, the fathers died, tattered and tattooed by the stigma of the murder. Loeb’s father Albert went first, dying in the mansion on Ellis Avenue barely six weeks after Judge Caverly’s verdict sent Dickie and Babe to Joliet prison. Already frail with heart disease before the murder, he had spent most of that summer in seclusion at the family’s country estate in Charlevoix, Michigan, while his brother Jacob and his son Allan strategized with Darrow and kept an eye on the court proceedings. The news that his son would not, after all, hang, felt like only a mixed kind of a blessing. As Jacob Loeb noted to reporters after the verdict was announced, “What is there in the future but grief and sorrow, darkness and despair?” Albert’s obituary in the New York Times summed up his legacy succinctly: “Before he collapsed under the knowledge that his favorite was a boy slayer Mr. Loeb, as Vice President of Sears, Roebuck & Co., the Chicago mail-order house, was rated as one of Chicago’s keenest business men.”
Jacob Franks went next, four years later on April 19, 1928, in his suite at the Drake Hotel. The AP story that ran in papers all across the country said, “Despite the fact that the Franks family had moved from a mansion-like home on the south side to the hotel to get away from tragic surroundings of their son’s death, the father never was able to recover from his grief and today, surrounded by his wife and two other children, Jack and Josephine, he gave up the struggle.” The Chicago Daily Tribune put it this way: “Physicians declared he died of heart disease, and his friends said he died of a broken heart.”
Old Nathan Leopold, Sr., the last of the three fathers to go, died in 1929, a few weeks short of the fifth anniversary of the murder, of complications after a surgery, though it was widely assumed that he, too, had died of grief. The Tribune called him “a respected and well liked business man” whose life was “saddened in 1925 [sic] in the discovery that his son, Nathan F. Leopold Jr., had killed little Bobbie Franks.”
***
All of them are at Rosehill, now. The Frankses are stacked neatly in two tiers inside the mausoleum with Bobby: his parents Jacob and Flora, his siblings Jack and Josephine, and Josephine’s first husband. (She lived to marry twice, and died in 2007, just short of her 101st birthday, which makes the idea of Bobby being 108 today if he’d never gotten into that car not quite so far-fetched.)
In ghostly mimicry of the proximity of their Kenwood real estate, the Loebs are just down the path about a block away, and the Leopolds a few blocks further down the way from them. Nathan Leopold, Jr. would have had to pass by both the other families’ gravesites on his way to visit his family’s plot in 1963, one of the first things he did after winning his release from prison and then serving out five years of parole in Puerto Rico.
By then Dickie Loeb had long since died, scandalizing and traumatizing his family a second time in 1936 when another male prisoner with whom he was locked, naked, in a private shower slashed him to death, allegedly because the other prisoner’s had refused his sexual advances. (This led to the legendary newspaper lede, which, if it really ever was published, has not left any printed or microfilmed evidence behind, but is nevertheless gleefully reprinted in numerous accounts of the case: Despite his erudition, Richard Loeb today ended his sentence with a proposition.
During his parole hearing in 1958, Leopold told the parole board that the kidnapping and murder of Bobby Franks had all been Loeb’s idea, and that Loeb had been the one who actually wielded the chisel. Nevertheless, he insisted that he still considered Dick Loeb the greatest pal he’d ever had. “I don’t see how you could understand it,” he told the board, “not having known the man, but Dick had a lot of good in him. Certainly he was the cause of my downfall. Certainly he was the worst enemy I ever had. He lost me my life, still he was the best pal I ever had.”
By this time Leopold was 54, a self-described “fat, middle-aged man.” When confronted by a member of the parole board with the trope he had most famously come to inhabit in the public’s imagination, Leopold denied knowing much of anything at all about Nietzsche. “I took a course or two in general philosophy and he must have been mentioned,” he said. “I know of the theory but never read a book by him.”
When he was then asked whether he had gotten over the idea of himself as a superman, he replied, “I have gotten over being nineteen.”
***
It’s only Leopold and Loeb themselves you can’t visit in the family plots at Rosehill cemetery—the two of them who tie the three families together with the invisible threads of a Shakespearian tragedy. Their mortal remains slipped away: Loeb’s disposed of secretly by his family, and Leopold’s, when he died in Puerto Rico at the age of 66, donated to science. But they hardly need tombs or tombstones to claim a foothold in remembrance, having long ago passed from the realm of fact and into the realm of myth.
