Queer Histories of Crime

The Queer Histories of a Crime: Representations and Narratives of Leopold and Loeb
Author(s): DAVID S. CHURCHILL

Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality , MAY 2009, Vol. 18, No. 2 (MAY 2009), pp.
287-324
Published by: University of Texas Press
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The Queer Histories of a Crime: Representations
and Narratives of Leopold and Loeb
DAVID S. CHURCHILL
University of Manitoba
"'This,' i said, 'is the court-room where Nathan

years old, and Richard Loeb, eighteen years old, the son
side parents and both university students, were tried a
imprisonment for the brutal murder of little Bobby Fr
old, son of another wealthy south sider, in 1924. The cr
trial in this room goes down in history as Chicago's mo
der.'"1 For John Drury, escorting his friend Anne M
tour of Chicago, the criminal court was one of the must-
through the city. What made the courthouse a place
not the architecture of the building or the detail of th
the popular memories of the crimes prosecuted with
centrality to the urban spectatorship of Chicago.2 The
set of things past, part of the historical theater of Chi
In drawing on popular recollections of the murder
it to the physical space of the court proceedings, Dr
able to collapse the distinction between participant and
textual narrative and historical actor. For the two t
Loeb became bits of Chicago to be consumed like the
Institute, lunch at Marshall Field's Grill, or jazz at B
The narrative of the murder has its own history, a gen
discourses of anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, homo
privilege play out in distinctive ways, shifting with tim
1 John Drury, Chicago in Seven Days (New York: Robert M. M

2 Judith Walkowitz argues that urban spectatorship was central t
men were able to see London as a "backdrop for personal adventur
of Dreadful Delight [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 1
became not only a geographic site to be traversed but a cognitive r
were indiscriminately and dangerously transgressed." By the 1920s
been the subject of scrutiny for a generation of reformers, journal
slummers. This new audience expanded the urban spectatorship bey
privilege to a much larger spectrum of society.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 2, May 2009

© 2009 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 7871
287

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288 David S. Churchill
emergent cultural landscapes. This article is about histo

process of interpretation and contestation, as they rela
of sexual modernity and, more specifically, the sexualit
petrators, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.3 1 argue
and stories around the murder and murderers were pol
ally inflected vehicles that need to be understood and r
contexts, whether at the time of the murder in the 19
that followed, especially the 1930s and 1950s, when
perpetrators received renewed attention.
The shifting narratives of "Leopold and Loeb" illustra
place of sex in modern understandings of American soc
creasingly reliant on professional and expert assessments
and orientation. More than simply the imposition of re
and taxonomies, however, sexual modernity has also
gotiation of sexual and gender identities matched to com
or what anthropologist Gayle Rubin has termed "sex
The dynamic of sexual modernity is formed in the s
regulatory epistemological functions of sexuality and th
ing made and defended by sexual subjects themselves
In focusing on the issue of sexuality I concentrate on
very important, category of analysis through which
of Leopold and Loeb can be scrutinized. The work of
cluding art historian Paul B. Franklin's insightful analy
of anti-Semitism in Franks's murder, has argued tha
the "collapse of homophobia into anti-Semitism and
sexuality came to be matched to Jewishness - even to
assimilated American Jewry. Building on the work of lit
Gilman, Franklin's argument parallels historical anthrop
insightful assertion that Jews and queers have played s
3 Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, und

Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1 1-12, 28-29. See al
Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithac
Press, 1999), 94.
4 Gayle Rubin, "Sexual Traffic," interview by Judith Butler,
(1994): 6.
5 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U
133-34. 1 don't mean to juxtapose regulatory regimes and forms of
cally with presumptively "good" community formation and identity. S
can be totalizing and exclusionary, and they also run the risk of p
social and political consciousness based simply on lived experienc
Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race
versity of Chicago Press, 1991), 49-50.
Paul B. Franklin, "Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisem
in the Trial of 'Babe' Leopold Jr. and Richard 'Dickie' Loeb," in Que
Question, ed. Daniel Boyarín, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegri
University Press, 2005), 140.

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Queer Histories of a Crime 289
others in the process of modern state formation, in which a national com-

munity seeks to reproduce itself as ethnically homogeneous, healthy, and
moral.7 This analysis is productive for understanding the case within the
context of the rampant nativism and anti-Semitism of the 1920s, but what
is less clear is how central Jewishness was to the operation of narratives of
perversion and sexual pathology of the 1930s and the postwar decades. I
would argue that narratives of the murder and murderers work as case stud-
ies with broad social application because of the dynamics of transgressive
same-sex sexuality rather than as markers of the Jewish "other." This is not
to say that anti-Semitism falls away; the presumptive Jewishness of the two
young murderers remained, but their sexuality received the greater degree
of attention and scrutiny not only at the time of the crime but also in the
years that followed.
The kidnapping and murder of Bobby Franks, the trial of his murderers,
and the response of the media to the crime and to the lives of his mur-
derers before and after their crime have proven to be prolific sources for
cinematic, literary, journalistic, and scholarly works.8 These varied texts,
first published in 1924 and then in the years since, have attempted to tell
the "tale" of the murder or, more often, have attempted to tell the tale of
the murderers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. These historical narra-
tives, both fictional and nonfictional, have been incorporated at particular
historical moments into larger contemporary cultural fields. As a result,
the various productions of history - films, novels, newspaper articles, and
other media - more often speak to the social anxieties, relations of power,
and contest over "legitimate" sexuality than serve as actual explications
of Bobby Franks's murder. These multiple narratives reveal the protean
understandings of homosexuality and gender as interpolated through the
7 Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 104-27.
8 Two important nonfictional accounts are Hal Higdon's book on the murder ( The Crime of
the Century [New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975]) and historian Paula Fass's article on the
murders and their connection to juvenile justice and conceptualizations of juvenile delinquency
("The Making and Remaking of an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,"
Journal of ^American History '80, no. 3 [1993]: 919-51). Higdon's treatment is a thoughtful and
well-researched journalistic attempt to get at what really happened to Bobby Franks and what
were the motivations of the young murderers. Higdon carefully examines the massive amount
of published material generated by the case and reconstructs the events as well as the thoughts
of the various actors. In a very different vein Fass examines the contested professional discourse
around the murderers and their actions. Fass's project is closer to my own in that she examines
how the case was used by others, mainly at the time of the murder, to develop representations
of juvenile delinquency. In her article Fass argues that the defense alienists (the contemporary
term for psychologists, a term that described "experts," usually doctors, who were concerned
with an individual's mental rather than physical health) were able to transform the image of
Leopold and Loeb from perverted and abject to familiar yet deeply disturbed. I share with Fass
an interest in how the murder resonated in specific cultural contexts and the ways it has been
used to advance particular ideological notions of social order and social policy.

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narrative and representations of the murder. Following

rian Gail Bederman, I argue that same -sex sexuality and
in a "historical ideological process," a process throug
configured and identified and, as such, receive cultural
according to the types of individuals they are seen to be
The murder of Franks and the trial of Leopold and
long tradition of crime stories that have moved easily b
tabloids, "true crime" accounts, popular fiction, and, mor
television. As historian Lisa Duggan has noted, the stories
have provided an empirical source for shifting theories o
that have mutated along with developments of medical un
ogy, and psychological notions of erotic corporeal intim
scholar Karen Halttunen has similarly traced the changin
murderous acts in America from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth cen-
tury. In her examination of accounts of murders, their retelling in newspapers,
broadsheets, sermons, and other moral writings, Halttunen identifies a change
from murder as indicative of original sin and the murderer as a "representative
of all sinful humanity" to a vision of the murderer as utterly alien and other,
that is, someone outside the embrace of civilization.11 Indeed, the retelling
of murders is part of "a fictive process" that in Halttunen's view "reveals
much about the mental and emotional strategies employed within a given
historical culture for responding to serious transgression in its midst."12 Here
again, murder becomes the cipher through which contemporary understand-
ings of morality, character, instinct, and behavior are produced, interpreted,
reconfigured, transmitted, and received.
Following literary critic Sharon Ullman's work, I, too, argue that court
trials and their extensive coverage in the popular press were "mechanisms
that drove the shift in sexual attitudes" during the first decades of the twen-
tieth century13 Significantly, this historical analysis of the murder and its
narratives differs from other historical treatments of the case in a number of
important ways. In particular, my own reading of the murder and its narra-
tives differs from that of historian Paula Fass, who argues that the alienists'
testimony resulted in a new popular conceptualization of Leopold and Loeb
during the 1920s. Though expert professional testimony did have an effect
9 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7.
10 Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2000), 198-99.
11 Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9-10. For another recent and interesting
study of murder accounts, stories, and newspaper coverage see Sara Knox, Murder: A Tale of
Modern American Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
12 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 2.
13 Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 7.

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Queer Histories of a Crime 29 1
on popular understandings of deviancy, it was, in my view, more proscribed

and limited than Fass suggests.14 The psychological conceptualizations of
the murderers were just one narrative strand - albeit an important one - in
the structure of feeling of sexual modernity. By looking at the way the case
has entered public consciousness in three different periods, it is possible to
demonstrate that the psychological constructions of the young men did not
have the immediate impact that Fass suggests but rather developed slowly
only after psychology and psychiatry had worked their way into American
popular culture.
1924: The Narrative of the Murder
Any examination of the narratives and events of Franks's murder inev

requires its own narrative explanation and retelling. In brief, on 21
1924 Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, two young Jewish men fr
prominent and wealthy Chicago families who had become friends while
the University of Chicago, kidnapped their Hyde Park neighbor, fourte
year-old Bobby Franks, by luring him into their car as he walked home
school and then killed him by bludgeoning him to death. Leopold
Loeb then drove south of the city, where they stripped off Franks's cl
poured acid on his face and genitals, and dumped his body in a rural dr
age culvert. The two young men then attempted to extort Franks's fat
telling him that Bobby was still alive and that he should obtain $10,000
old unmarked bills as a ransom for his son's safe return. This plan, how
was foiled before any ransom was ever paid. Franks's body was discover
day later, and the police found a pair of expensive prescription eyeglas
the crime scene that they easily traced to Nathan Leopold. This disc
ultimately led to the questioning and arrest of both Leopold and
Within days the families of the two young men had hired the prom
defense attorney Clarence D arrow, and the media was in a frenzy to c
every angle and detail of the sensational crime, turning it into a hallm
event of Jazz Age Chicago.
The murder of Bobby Franks took place at a time when American
ban society was undergoing multiple changes, including a rapid inc
14 This assessment is echoed by historian Patrick Ryan in his review of Fass's more
work on the history of kidnapping in America (review of Kidnapped: Child Abduc
America, in Reviews in American History 27, no. 3 [1999]: 471-72). Ryan takes issu
Fass's view that it was the Leopold and Loeb trial and coverage from which Americans
to replace notions of innate and unnatural evil with those of pathology and disease
seems to be," writes Ryan "an overstatement at best. Clearly psychiatric language e
the legal and mass media domains as a powerful new discourse, but it does not appear
that it replaces the dominant and older explanations for violence." I argue that the tr
the coverage were sites of competing narratives, which over time came to be used and
by various advocates for alternative theoretical paradigms on the ontology of sexualit
criminality.

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in popular forms of leisure that were dramatically alter

encountered and expressed sexuality in the public sp
men and women between 1900 and 1930 saw the deve
new realms of entertainment and sociability.15 These r
ized recreation opened up new heterosocial spaces in
began to challenge older notions of respectability. More
independence many younger workingmen and -wom
their families allowed them to develop novel modes
As Kathy Peiss observes, many of the amusements p
working-class men and women "incorporated a free and
their attractions."17 Dance halls, nightclubs, theater
provided even more intimate settings for the creation
and sexual sensibility, thus recasting visions of appropr
These new sexual mores did not simply replace existin
causing tremendous concern and social anxiety. Popular
and moral reformers were deeply troubled by the m
youth, and sexuality. For many middle -class Americans
exacerbated by the fact that these new freedoms involv
the more established social order. Cultural pursuits
frequenting a speakeasy were often seen as rebellious ac
Lewis Erenberg points out, the speakeasy and the bo
especially popular during the Prohibition Era ( 1920-33),
white middle-class patrons could become tourists, social
Americans and people of other classes and encounter
forms of sexuality. These nightspots confused the exist
criminal and legal, moral and amoral, respectable and
previously ordered and demarcated social action.18 M
15 On working-class leisure see John Kasson, Amusing the Millions:

of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); David Nasaw,
Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Ra
ments: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New Y
University Press, 1986).
16 On the "new woman" and the creation of a more fluid gender
Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chic
University of Chicago Press, 1988); Christina Simmons, "Modern
of Victorian Repression," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in Histor
A. Padgug, and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple Univers
Kathy Peiss, "'Charity Girls' and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on
1880-1920," in Peiss, Padgug, and Simmons, Passion and Power, 57-
berg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gend
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New
Press, 1985), 245-96; and Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution:
Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York Universi
17 Peiss, "Charity Girls," 59.
18 Lewis Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New Tork Nightlife and the Tran
Culture, 1890-1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 233-59

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social reformers were particularly alarmed by the presence of younger men

and women in these establishments and began to decry what they saw as
the moral laxity of the day's youth.19 In the summer of 1924 Leopold and
Loeb seemed the perfect examples of this new generation of reckless, out-
of- control youth.
The connection of Leopold and Loeb to this generation of flappers and
sexual permissiveness emerges in the earliest accounts of their arrest. Loeb
in particular was envisioned as a Lothario whom women found irresistible.
Maureen McKernan, a Chicago court reporter, wrote that "when he was
arrested, and the news of his crime became public, at least a half dozen girls
in his own set were prosterated [sic]. Two or three of them went to pieces,
hysterically informed his family and his closest friends that 'Dick' was the
boy whom they cared about most. His pink cheeks, his soft brown eyes,
his sweet ingratiating way endeared him to female hearts old and young.
He was irresistible to girls his own age."20 An article in the Chicago Daily
News, describing the efforts of detectives to learn more about the lives of
the murderers, characterized Leopold and Loeb as belonging to the "gin
and petting set" at the University of Chicago.21 Youth, sexual appeal, and
illicit drinking all combined to conform to popular stereotypes of culturally
permissive college students - harbingers of new social styles leading lives of
leisure, privilege, and excess.
In an interview with the alienists for the defense at his trial Leopold con-
tended that drinking was a significant bond in his and Loeb's friendship.22
Despite the prohibition on the sale of alcohol, the two young men had
little trouble in gaining access to liquor. Indeed, their attempts to remove
bloodstains from the car they rented for the kidnapping and murder were
explained away as spilt wine. The image of boozing college students was
mores and social practices of the 1920s see Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Court-
ship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988);
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Eric
Garber, "A Spectacle of Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," in
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha
Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Meridian, 1989), 318-31.
19 Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), 20.
20 Maureen McKernan, The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb (Chicago:
Plymouth, 1924), 60.
21 Chicago Daily News, 2 June 1924, 3.
22 Alvin Sellers, The Loeb-Leopold Case (Brunswick, Ga.: Classic Publishing, 1926), 20.
The Leopold and Loeb trial was not the first criminal proceeding in which expert psychiatric
evidence was used extensively. As early as 1881, during the trial of President James Garfield's
assassin professional testimony with regard to the mental state of the accused was introduced.
See Charles Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Giteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded
Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

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something that both young men cultivated, even going

ing it into their alibi for the day of the murder. Tellin
and Loeb had spent the afternoon drinking and looking
Park, Leopold continued to spin out a narrative of the t
and womanizers: "We drank quite a bit there and wh
Dick was pretty drunk and I advised him not to go h
at the Coconut Grove, 63rd and Ellis Avenue, and la
girls, whom we later dropped in Jackson Park."23 The c
story in the Chicago Evening American quoted Leopo
and Loeb had picked up two girls named Edna and M
to Jackson Park. Once there they parked the car and "to
out and walk."24 During the pretrial hearing the investi
Leopold told them that he and Loeb could not "com
with the girls" and that the young women "wouldn't com
refused to drive them home.25 In Leopold and Loeb
account of the day of the murder they represented the
image of out-of-control youth by combining the theme o
and the specter of casual premarital sex. Their self-repr
the district attorney over hours of interrogation, emplo
narratives of social transgression and youthful rebellion
sible to know exactly why Leopold and Loeb employe
possible explanation is that the image of heterosexual
kids served to undermine speculation in the press that t
work of "perverts."
Leopold and Loeb's self-devised narratives were no
and used unreflectively by journalists. Even after the y
sented their stories they came to be interpreted and rei
the young men did not intend. In general, the constr
men as drinkers served an important function for journ
them to connect Leopold and Loeb to discourses of v
privilege. Leopold and Loeb's bold descriptions of the
reinforced the notion that the murderers saw themselv
and entitled to privileges denied to ordinary citizens. To
ment a number of papers carried a story claiming that Le
letter in court asking for someone to retrieve a bottle of
Demanding gin during the era of Prohibition not only a
but in a courtroom was an illustration of the young me
law and their failure to exhibit an appropriately contrit
Speakeasies, gin joints, and coffeehouses were fixtures
Chicago during the 1920s. This was a world with whi
23 Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1924, 1.

24 Chicago Evening American, 30 May 1924, 2.
25 Higdon, Crime of the Century, 82.
26 Chicago Daily News, 2 June 1924, 3.

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had at least a passing familiarity. Germain "Patches" Reinhart, a women

whom Loeb had dated in the months before the murder, was described as
being "a member of the near-north side literary and art colony."27 Another
newspaper described Reinhart as a "shocker" and a "slick dancer": "In her
set, and it includes the habitués of the north side studios, waffle shops, and
dancing places, Miss Reinhart is known as 'Bud.' The origin of this sobriquet
she did not explain."28 Leopold and Loeb's busy social lives, the mobility
their cars afforded them, and their interest in intellectual pursuits were
presented as evidence that the young men took part in Chicago's artistic
and bohemian milieu. In his memoirs writer Kenneth Rexwroth recalls that
Leopold and Loeb were frequent visitors to the bohemian salon held at the
home of Richard Loeb's uncle Jacob.29 These gatherings would draw the
likes of Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Margaret Anderson, Frank
Lloyd Wright, and other individuals who were active in the cosmopolitan
social life of Chicago's near north side.30
The center of this intellectual and bohemian life was Towertown, a diverse
neighborhood of artists' studios, teahouses, and restaurants located on the
city's near north side. According to University of Chicago sociologist Harvey
Zarbaugh, Towertown was a place in which people could explore experiences
inaccessible in other parts of the city. Writing five years after the murder, he
observed that "in the anonymity of this mobile area 'anything goes' and
persons seeking unconventional experiences escape from the regulations of
better organized communities into the promiscuity of its supposedly bohe-
mian night life."31 Zarbaugh's description of Towertown as a place in which
"anything goes" and a place of "unconventional experiences" suggests a
location of social and sexual transgression. In his work on Chicago during
the late 1920s and early 1930s historian Chad Heap argues that Towertown
was a site for the interplay of sexual identity in which nascent notions of
sexual representation, sensibility, and style were "mutually constituted" by
artists, performers, slummers, lesbians, and gay men.32 Through their asso-
ciation with friends and acquaintances such as "Patches" and the bohemians
they encountered at Jacob Loeb's salon, Leopold and Loeb were well aware
of Chicago's emergent bohemian scene. Moreover, the young men's self-
representation, in particular their stylized gender and sexualized ambiguities,
suggests an identification with the cultural dynamics of Towertown.
27 Chicano Evening American, 6 June 1924, 1.

28 Chicago Tribune, 7 June 1924, 2.
It was Jacob Loeb who hired Clarence Darrow as the defense attorney in the case.
Richard's uncle also acted as a family spokesperson throughout the hearing and attended most
of the court sessions.
30 Kenneth Rexwroth, An Autobiographical Novel (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966),
105.
31 Harvey Zarbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago's Near
North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 102.
Chad Heap, Towertown, unpublished essay available from the author.

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Nonetheless, representations and constructions of sexu

case did not begin with the arrest of Leopold and Lo
Reading back through the early coverage of the case
Bobby Franks's body, one is reminded how much sexuali
the journalistic narratives. Long before their lawyers and
the sexual lives of Leopold and Loeb on display and even
men were named as suspects, sexuality served as a dynam
narrative of the murder. There are two obvious reasons
might have seized on a sexual motive for the crime. F
a sexual motive was supported by the fact that the mur
apparent reason, stripped Bobby Franks completely n
pers wished only to kill the young man, why would
take his clothes off? Second, in a case that seems superf
about ransom, it is strange that the kidnappers killed
detection of the body before receiving the money from
To many contemporary observers these two elements
murder was sexual, that Bobby Franks was abducted
of blackmail but to satisfy some "perverted" desire.
On the day following the discovery of the body one C
three possible motives for Franks's kidnapping and m
for purposes of extortion, or it was the work of a "m
person" who had used the ransom as a "mask" for a "
the boy," or it was a form of revenge against Bobby
article reported that the coroner's examination of Fr
no signs of an "immoral attack."33 Yet the assessmen
aminer was not enough to banish the theory that the
motivated. The police and journalists continued to refer
in their investigation and reporting of the murder. Desp
terial evidence of sexual assault, the cultural logic of the
the focus on the sensational sexual motive. The Chicag
that "some of the police and some persons close to th
boy was the victim of a degenerate who sought to cl
boy's presumedly [sic] accidental death by the demand
focusing on the murder as a sex crime, the press was ab
ages of "abhorrent" sexuality already in circulation. In a
"rounding up the usual suspects," the Daily News repo
started their search for the kidnappers with "suspici
kinds, then morons and perverts."35 According to a
"persistence in the moron theory set squads of police sc
men who have been in court on charges ofthat nature b

35 Chicago Daily News, 28 May 1924, 2.

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kidnapping of Bobby Franks gave the police a reason to question, harass,

and detain gay men or those men whom they perceived as queer.
The strongest evidence that police followed this strategy was their in-
vestigation into three of Bobby Franks's teachers at the Harvard School in
Hyde Park. The coverage in the Chicago Daily News intimated that these
men might have been "perverts." Under a heading entitled "Detectives
Say Pervert Known to Youth Lured Him into Auto, Slew Him to Seal Lips
and Concocted Kidnapping Tale as a Blind," the article began with the
news that one of the boy's teachers, Walter Wilson, had been taken into
custody.37 Wilson became a suspect after the police learned that he had
taken both Bobby Franks and his brother Jacob to an amusement park the
previous summer. The trip had caused the boys' parents concern because
Wilson and the young men did not return until very late in the evening.38
Police thought that another of Franks's teachers, Mott Kirk Mitchell,
was a homosexual because he was effeminate. After extensive questioning
from police, Mitchell admitted that he had engaged in "numerous acts of
perversion" but denied having kidnapped or killed Franks.39 Many of the
other references to the teachers were loaded with innuendo. One article
used the words of the former landlady of a teacher; she described him as
an "eccentric."40 Another article told of "immorality at the institution,"
where the "instructors told improper stories to the boys." One student
was quoted as telling his concerned mother that "other things are going
on I wouldn't even tell you, mother."41 The concentration on the teachers
as prime suspects motivated by depraved lust tied sexuality to the earliest
narratives of the kidnapping and murder.
In the ten days between the discovery of Bobby Franks's body and
Leopold and Loeb's confession to his murder the police and the press
managed to closely link deviant sexuality with the crime. Thus, it is not
surprising that the sexual lives of Leopold and Loeb became an important
area of speculation. Journalists were quick to seize upon the dynamics of
the friendship between the two young men. In particular, the falling out
between Leopold and Loeb shortly after their arrest received a great deal
of scrutiny. An article in the Chicago Tribune noted that the differences
in their testimony had caused a "temporary breach" in the friendship,
which, according to the article, had lasted "them during all the days they
'chummed' together in college and while they were 'pals' on their search
for pleasure and excitement."42 The placing of the words "chummed" and
37 Chicago Daily News, 23 May 1924, 1.

38 Ibid., 3.
39 Higdon, Crime of the Century, 71. Higdon's source for the quotation comes from the
Michigan City Evening Dispatch, 26 May 1924.
w Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1924, 3.
42 Chicago Tribune, 6 June 1924, 2.

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"pals" in quotation marks seems particularly unusual, si

of the period often used colloquialisms without drawing
with special emphasis. The article even went on to re
of the reconciliation between Leopold and Loeb. In
have come directly from Bernarr MacFadden's True
magazine of the day, Loeb supposedly told Leopold,
"What the hell's the use. We're both in for the same ride so we
might as well ride together, Babe."
Leopold turned and looked straight into the deep blue eyes of the
boy.
"Yes, Dickie," he smiled, "we have quarreled before and made up
and now when we are standing at the home stretch of the greatest
gantlet [sic] we will ever have to run it is right that we should go along
together. Shake."
So they clasped hands and once more were the "pals" they used to
be on the University of Chicago campus.43
The florid tone of the exchange seems more appropriate for college sweet-
hearts than for ordinary friends. Loeb's language is that of the boyfriend,
replete with a manly curse and an "aw shucks" tone. In contrast, Leopold's
deliberate gaze "into the deep blue eyes" of Loeb and his sentimental
response positioned him as a sort of girlfriend. The journalist's continued
emphasis on the young men as "pals" served to underscore the gender
transgression of the dialogue.
The ideological constructions of Leopold and Loeb as sexually deviant in
the earliest journalistic accounts were seldom blatant declarations that the
young men were homosexual. Instead, the newspaper employed a referential
strategy, matching Leopold and Loeb to "queer" things or people. One
of the more obvious allusions to their potential homosexuality operated
through an association with Oscar Wilde. In two different Chicago Tribune
articles printed on consecutive days Leopold and Loeb were connected to
Wilde. The first article began with a quotation from Wilde that read, "To
regret an experience is to nullify it." The quotation was followed by a note
that informed the reader - lest he or she forget that Wilde went to jail for
engaging in "indecent acts" with another man - that this line was written
"from the depths of the Old Bailey." The article continued: "And Oscar
Wilde was one of the heroes of Nathan Leopold, held for questioning in
43 Chicago Tribune, 6 June 1924, 2. True Romance was a popular magazine of "true"
stories of romance and love; for discussions of True Romance see Pamela Haag, "In Search of
'The Real Thing': Ideologies of Love, Modern Romance, and Women's Sexual Subjectivity in
the United States, 1920-1940," in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the
Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), 161-91; White, First Sexual Revolution, 28-54; and Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women,
Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 105-6.

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the Franks murder case."44 Again the Wilde reference served the multiple
purpose of conflating the construction of the murderers with that of aris-
tocratic excess and a reckless pursuit of sensual pleasure. In the words of
the journalist, "Like the cultured red [sic] of whom Oscar Wilde wrote so
autobiographically, these university lads surfeited with every psychic and
physical satisfaction they wished, sought to squeeze still dryer the sponge
of life."45 The other article asserted a similar connection between Wilde
and Leopold: "I refer in particular to Oscar Wilde, another of Leopold's
literary idols who carried the art of pose, of seizing the public attention at
all costs and by all methods to the point of his own undoing."46
At his interrogation Leopold's demeanor was also described as being like
that of "a youthful Oscar Wilde at a London tea party."47 By evoking Wilde
the press compared the young men with a notorious historical figure who
was the very embodiment of highly civilized and elite sexual deviance and
the very antithesis of normative virile masculinity.48 This linkage enabled
the press to connect the murderers to other Wilde types (for example,
the "pansy") who were gaining visibility both in urban American public
culture and in the commercial mass culture of film, drama, and music.49
Moreover, the allusion to Wilde also allowed the journalists to knit together
the discourses of aberrant sexuality, antielitism and anti-intellectualism. In
particular, certain books and ideas came to be seen as sexually charged in this
narrative, and intellectual curiosity was equated with prurience; accordingly,
intellectual exploration was closely tied to sexual exploration. One article
claimed that Leopold and Loeb were members of a secret club called the
Green Chalybete, which strove "for the exotic and erotic atmosphere in
interior decoration" and where "strange subjects culled from sex psychology
and books suppressed by reform organizations" were discussed.50 During
questioning with police one reporter recounted how Leopold welcomed
the drift of the questioning toward the realm of "perversion." He suppos-
edly remarked, "Yes, I have made a study of perversion although I have
never practiced any forms of it. ... I was a deep student of the writings
44 Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 May 1924, 3.

45 Chicago Sunday Tribune, 1 June 1924, 3.
46 Chicago Evening American, 11 June 1924, 6.
48 There is a large and ever-growing literature on Oscar Wilde. For his importance to
popular notions of same-sex sexuality see Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present Mr.
Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent's Tail, 1988); Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a
Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1993); Richard Ellman,
Oscar Wilde (London: Vintage Books, 1988); and Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Oscar
Wilde, Effeminacy, and the Queer Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
49 In Gay New York Chauncey shows that the term "pansy" was a popular term for gay
men, especially effeminate gay men, during the 1920s and 1930s. According to Chauncey,
this representation of the flamboyant gay man was "the predominant image of all queers in
the straight mind" (15, 301-29).

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of an Italian who made a study of perversion and w

the sixteenth century. At the time I thought of makin
of this author, who treated of thirty- two different for
This suspicion of knowledge and education as a corrupti
history within American culture but took on a particul
Prohibition Era. The danger of books was that they
leading the mind places where the body might follow.5
The media's use of the Wilde reference also served as a r
able readers of the dangers posed by elite and upper-class
to the more common association of deviance and crimin
street and the poor.53 Sexuality was a perilous pathway o
could illicitly link zones of domestic respectability with
the city dominated by the geography of vice.54 Thus, e
Leopold and Loeb could be joined with so-called low-c
shared fondness for drink, gambling, and commercializ
sexuality. Between such examples of aristocratic perversio
degeneracy lay a respectable middle-class sexuality attem
within a world of commercialized public amusements.
The constructions of Leopold and Loeb entered
the introduction by their defense of the psychologic
young men. Drs. Karl Bowman and Harold Hulbert
"case study" that documented minute details from
lives.55 The findings of Bowman and Hulbert provid
the foundation for their argument that the two murde
"mentally disturbed" at the time of the crime but show
ing so disturbed.56 This image of the two killers con

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New
1963).
53 Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific
Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 45-48.
54 Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 90-95.
According to Jennifer Terry, Dr. Bowman would provide an important liberal and hu-
mane voice regarding homosexuality and treatment of sex offenders throughout the 1930s
and 1940s. In particular, Bowman felt that sexual activity between consenting adults of the
same sex should not constitute a criminal offense (Terry, An American Obsession, 279-81,
324-26).
56 Leopold and Loeb's confession to the murder left their defense team with few options.
One would have been to plead not guilty by reason of insanity and go through a lengthy
murder trial. The problem with such a strategy, however, was that legal insanity was a technical
standard, and it might have been very hard for the defense to have shown that the two young
men fit this standard. Leopold and Loeb's lawyers, Clarence Darrow, Walter Bachrach, and
Benjamin Bachrach, also decided against such a strategy because the outcome of a jury trial
was so much in question. The jury may have decided to hang the young men even if they were
found to have been insane. Instead, the lawyers had Leopold and Loeb plead guilty and ask
the judge to listen to mitigating testimony on the mental state of the murderers. It was the

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those of the police and the press. Rather than being spoiled and arrogant
murderers, Leopold and Loeb appeared in this study to be lonely and
troubled boys. In particular, Leopold emerged as a weak and sickly child
who was devastated by the death of his mother and had a difficult time
fitting in and making friends. The representation of Loeb also focused on
his isolation and loneliness. According to Bowman and Hulbert, Loeb had
developed an elaborate fantasy world as a child where he would engage in
animated discussions with his teddy bear. In both cases the doctors blamed
the unhealthy influence of nannies and governesses for many of the boys'
psychological problems. As Hal Higdon observes, Drs. Bowman and
Hulbert were careful not to place any blame on the people who were pay-
ing for the report, the Loeb and Leopold families.57 The Bowman-Hulbert
report also revealed that in the months prior to the murder Leopold and
Loeb had entered into a criminal and sexual contract with one another.
During the trial another of the alienists for the defense, Dr. William Healy,
testified to the specifics of this compact. According to Healy, Leopold agreed
to participate in criminal activity with Loeb in exchange for sex. Such trad-
ing had apparently been going on between the two men for a number of
years but had become much more regulated in the six months prior to the
murder of Bobby Franks. After Judge Caverly cleared the court of women
and told Healy to whisper his testimony into his ear so that the journalists
in the court could not easily hear, Healy described the sexual acts in which
Leopold and Loeb had engaged.58 The next day the newspapers reported
Healy's testimony by declaring that Leopold and Loeb's "baseness" had
been revealed, but the newspapers refrained from describing the base acts.
Healy's testimony provided a form of unarticulated "proof for the media
that Leopold and Loeb were perverts.59
Until the release of the Bowman-Hulbert report, Leopold had been
viewed as the instigator of the crime and depicted as an intellectual homo-
sexual who had exercised a hypnotic power over Loeb. In contrast, Loeb
was seen more as a college kid who had run with the wrong crowd and
become corrupted by gin, sex, and, most tragically, the charms of the evil
genius Leopold. One reporter wrote, for example, that "Loeb was clay in
the hands of the potter Leopold."60 Yet as the hearing into the murder
hope of the defense that the judge would be more willing to accept such evidence and that
Leopold and Loeb would be saved from a death sentence. In the end the strategy succeeded
because the judge decided to sentence the two men to life in prison plus ninety-nine years.
The judge made his decision based on the young age of Leopold and Loeb, however, and
not because of the mitigating testimony.
s/ Higdon, Crime of the Century, 196-98.
58 Testimony of Dr. William Healy, 4-5 August 1924, Chicago Daily News, 5 August 1924,
1; Chicago Daily News, 6 August 1924, 1.
59 Chicago Daily News, 4 August 1924, 1, 3.
60 Chicago Tribune, 5 June 1924, 2. Another article described Leopold's mesmeric power
over Loeb and his knowledge of hypnotism {Chicago Tribune, 10 June 1924, 1).

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continued to probe the dynamics of the relationship be

the scenario of Leopold as the leader and Loeb as th
began to unravel. Leopold had told the alienists that he
being a strong and beautiful slave serving a king. In mo
Leopold imagined Loeb to be that king. Leopold woul
the life of the king or acting as the king's champion to
As the slave he would devote himself to the king, even r
freedom when it was offered.61 These revelations, alon
that Loeb had been obsessed with crime, altered the
the two young men. Leopold's fantasies of enslavement
with Loeb presented a very different vision of the mur
and their power dynamic. Rather than having been sedu
and sex by Leopold, Loeb emerged as at least an equal
instigator of the murder.
The alienists for the defense were careful not to la
either Leopold or Loeb. For these psychologists the c
young men revealed their interdependent relationship a
ing of alter egos that had resulted in the murder. C
Walter Bachrach underscored this point in their introdu
Maureen McKernan's book on the crime by assertin
concluded that each boy was suffering from mental dis
disturbance of his emotional life, which, when the two
into association with each other, resulted in the mur
Franks."62 According to the alienists, then, Leopold
partners in the murder, and it was the interaction of t
that led to Franks's death. This psychological assess
sexual relationship of the young men: separately th
but together they were homosexual. The two murder
what historian Jennifer Terry has termed an "Amer
imbrications of science, criminality, and sexuality i
knowledge/power. 63
One of the strongest voices against the psychologi
sented by the defense was that of the state's attorney,
led the prosecution at the trial. Crowe called the find
"a lot of silly rot" and referred mockingly to the three
testified for the defense as the "three wise men from t
Crowe was vehement in his assertion that the murder o
the work of two "perverts." When referring to either o
would talk about "the pervert" or "this pervert," consta
61 McKernan, Amazing Crime, 118-19; Chicago Daily News, 4

McKernan, Amazing Crime, 118-19; Chicago Daily News, 4 A
Tribune, 5 August 1924, 1, 2.
Terry, An American Obsession, 9-20.

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construction of them as lustful, depraved, and corrupt.64 During his closing

remarks Crowe attempted to substantiate his representation of Leopold and
Loeb as perverts by drawing upon testimony made by a defense witness.
He stated: "I want to tell Your Honor, bearing in mind the testimony that
was whispered into your ear, one of the motives in this case was a desire to
satisfy unnatural lust."65 To support his claim of "unnatural lust" Crowe
drew on the controversial coroner's report. Crowe argued that Franks's
distended rectum was proof that a "perversion" had indeed occurred.
Leopold and Loeb's lawyers objected to Crowe's inference and insisted on
a reading of the coroner's exact wording into the court record. According
to the coroner, Franks's rectum was distended, but "there was no evidence
of forcible dilation."66 Crowe, however, was not discouraged by this chal-
lenge to his assertion that "perversion" was a motive. He also endeavored
to cast Leopold and Loeb as deviants by asking why they had stripped
Franks naked. Why was it, he asked the court, that the two murderers had
first removed Franks's pants, not bothering with the rest of the victim's
clothes? For Crowe, these actions cut through all the psychological theory
and revealed the true purpose of the crime - the desire to sexually violate
the body of a young boy.
Crowe was not alone in his assessment that the "expert testimony"
served to mask the real motives of the crime. Criticism of the psychologists
became especially intense after Judge Caverly sentenced Leopold and Loeb
to life in prison instead of execution. Writing in the periodical America,
Dr. James Walsh wrote: "We have had the unusual spectacle of the medi-
cal experts, who receive their fee for that purpose, using their knowledge
of cases on the borderline of insanity in order to save the clients who are
paying them for their opinion from due punishment for their acts."67 Dr.
Thomas Salmon, writing in defense of the expert testimony, admitted that
the "public disagreement" with Judge Caverly's sentence stemmed from the
"frank disbelief in the "fairness and honesty" of the defense's psychiatric
testimony.68 Leopold and Loeb's wealth, used to pay for the services of the
best "experts," served to undermine the authority of the psychologists' con-
structions.69 A survey of editorial and legal responses to the judge's rulings
64 "Closing Arguments of State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe, in Behalf of the People in the
Case of the People of the State of Illinois vs. Nathan F. Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb,"
trial transcript (microform), Leopold and Loeb, Criminal Court of Cook County, Illinois,
1924, reel 3, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.
65 Ibid., 25.
66 Ibid., 37.
67 James J. Walsh, "Criminal Responsibility and the Medical Experts," America, 4 October
1924, 586.
68 Thomas W. Salmon, "The Psychiatrist's Day in Court," Survey, 15 October 1924, 74.
69 "Crime and the Expert," Outlook 137 (August 1924): 626. A number of periodicals
did support the judge's ruling and the value of the psychological testimony. See Leonard

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in the Literary Digest revealed the strong reactions on t

the nation's daily newspapers to the sentence. Editori
Cleveland, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and New
the reasoning behind letting two "vicious degenerate
Tribune article praised Crowe's prosecution of the case a
how any convicted murderer could be put to death with
set by Leopold and Loeb's sentence. The psychologica
by the defense created another construction of Leopold
attempted to shift the representation of them as "perve
young men. This new construction was not, however, un
accepted. The reactions of journalists and editors to the
the hostility and suspicion toward this new psychology
Leopold and Loeb.
Even while Leopold and Loeb played with ambiguou
cation - affecting, for example, the cultivated sexually a
film star Rudolph Valentino, who was at the height of h
years surrounding the murder and trial - they also seem
worried about being identified as gay.71 In a move that
homosexuality as part of the narrative of the case, the C
lished a letter written before the murder that discussed
of the ways between the two friends. In the letter Leop
such a termination of friendship might appear. He wrot
advice. I do not wish to influence your decision either w
to warn you that in case you deem it advisable to disc
ship, that in both of our interests extreme care mus
of 'A Falling Out of
undesirable and forms an irksome but unavoida

According to Hal Higdon, the missing word in
"cocksuckers."73 Throughout their friendship,
to have contended with their reputation of bein
Loeb rushed a fraternity at the University of Mic
that he and Leopold were lovers and had been ca
another friend. According to an interview Higd
Blumgart, "The New Psychology and the Franks Case," Na

George W. Kirchwey, "Old Law and New Understanding t
gerpost in Criminology," Survey, 1 October 1924, 7, 8, 64
New Republic, 23 September 1924, 88-89.
70 "Rich and Poor Murderers," Literary Digest, 27 Septembe
caused by the sentence see Chicago Daily News, 11 Septemb
71 On the place of Valentino within popular culture and his
and sexual system see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (C
versity Press, 1995), 267-68.
73 Higdon, Crime of the Century, 83. A transcript of the l
http://www.leopoldandloeb.com/letters.html.

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Loeb's fraternity brothers, Max Schrayer, the fraternity questioned Loeb's

brother Allan about the rumors. Apparently, Allan Loeb was concerned
enough about the matter to drive to Ann Arbor to explain the incident
away. In the end the fraternity accepted Loeb, but only on the condition
that he cease his friendship with Leopold.74
The narrative of Leopold and Loeb's sexuality in the journalists' accounts
was often confused and even contradictory. Some constructions, such as that
of state's attorney Crowe, asserted that the young men were indeed abnormal
and that their actions were indicative of their perverted and deviant sexual
natures. In these narratives Leopold and Loeb were different, exceptional,
and other. Their actions were not those of college kids who had happened to
commit a terrible act but those of persons who were completely anomalous
and utterly foreign. Still other narratives of the case attempted to link Leopold
and Loeb's actions to larger social concerns, using them as illustrations of
what can happen when "y°ur" child goes bad. In these scenarios Leopold
and Loeb became deluded by the intellectual pretensions of their education,
spoiled by their families' wealth, and seduced by participation in an amoral
and erotic social milieu. The alienists and the defense put forth yet another
representation, portraying the young men as victims of childhood traumas
that had resulted in the development of pathology. In all cases Leopold and
Loeb's transgressive sexual behavior was closely linked to their murderous
actions. Sexual exceptionalism was understood, then, as a predictor for other
types of dangerous antisocial behavior.
Most of these ideological constructions survived the 1920s to reappear in
later narratives of the Franks murder. What, then, was the narrative legacy
of the murder? Paula Fass argues that the psychoanalytic testimony had
the effect of democratizing Leopold and Loeb. She maintains that "the
new psychology transformed them from arrogant Nietzschean criminals
(the early representation of Leopold) into vulnerable boys (Loeb and his
teddy bear) and linked them to ordinary boys of America."75 Yet the "new
psychology" also set the stage for the young men to be seen as profoundly
disturbed. Where the narratives of the journalists had attempted to label
Leopold and Loeb as "perverts," the alienists attempted to understand their
perversion, to trace its causes and comprehend its manifestations. Fass is
74 Higdon, Crime of the Century, 146-47. Leopold and Loeb began their college careers at
the University of Chicago but transferred to the University of Michigan after their sophomore
year. The two had been living together off campus at the University of Michigan in the year
before Loeb joined the fraternity. Loeb's joining and perhaps his pledge not to associate with
Leopold may have prompted Leopold's return to the University of Chicago. Loeb stayed at
Michigan and completed his degree before returning to Chicago to do postgraduate work.
In a statement made years later Leopold acknowledged that his and Loeb's families had been
suspicious of the time the two young men spent alone together one summer, rumors about
Leopold and Loeb that existed prior to the publishing of the Bowman -Hulbert report, in
which the history of their sexual relationship was first detailed. See Nathan F. Leopold Jr.
Collection, box 32, folder 1, notes on Compulsion, 1959, Chicago Historical Society.
75 Fass, The Damned, 936.

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correct when she asserts that the reports served to fam

the murderers, but such sympathetic representations did
other popular narratives of the murder. The representat
Loeb as effete, sinister, and decadent perverts was neithe
subsumed by the psychological testimony. Instead, these
tives revealed a particularly tumultuous ideological lands
was no singular naturalized construction or conceptualiza
sexuality. Journalists, prosecutors, psychiatric experts,
themselves all engaged in an intense struggle to solid
the fluid gender system of the era. The plurality of conf
the case demonstrates the way that the murder served a
or normalize various social constructions.
The suggested presence of homosexuality provided Leopold and Loeb's
lawyers an opportunity to place the men's behavior within a frame of
pathologized action and of mental illness that could then be argued as a
mitigating factor in the murder. For the prosecution the sexual behavior
of the young men was further proof of perversion, of the rottenness at the
core of Leopold and Loeb's character. Same-sex sexuality, just like the
murder, was a manifestation of the inherently evil nature of the two mur-
derers. Though same-sex sexuality had been interpolated into professional
medical discourse, older notions of sin, of aberrance, and of bad seeds
persisted. The dialectic between these competing narratives continued to
make homosexuality a contested category in American life, one that would
provide different frames in the telling of the Franks murder and of the lives
of Leopold and Loeb in the decades to come.
1936: The Narrative of the Murder as Told

through Another
The story of Leopold and Loeb would again garner national attention ear
in 1936. This time, however, it was the murder of Richard Loeb in
Statesville Penitentiary in Jolie t, Illinois, that generated the new wave
media coverage and commentary. Though Loeb's death and the parti
circumstances of how he died would be a focus of scrutiny, they did
match the multiple narratives of the initial crime and sentencing trial.
a result, much of the complexity of representation and discourse ar
sexuality of the 1920s was lost. Nonetheless, this more limited retelling
the case and renewed analysis of Leopold and Loeb provide useful p
of comparison. What sorts of representations persisted over the dec
Could the effects of the psychological understandings of homosexuality
found in these new narratives?
When Richard Loeb died in prison in January 1936 it was his notorious
crime as much as the circumstances of his own death that dominated the

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Queer Histories of ci Crime 307
obituary published in Time: "On May 21, 1924 two perverted Chicago
youths named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnapped fourteen year
old Bobby Franks, knocked him unconscious, violated him, killed him,
poured acid over his face, buried his body in a culvert on a forest preserve."76
Twelve years after the hearing during which Leopold and Loeb were sub-
jected to intense psychological scrutiny and profiling, the representation of
the murderers in the popular press had clearly narrowed and set. The young
men were "perverts" who "violated" Bobby Franks and then murdered him.
In the obituary Leopold and Loeb were explicitly identified as homosexual;
the ambiguity and coyness that had been part of the narratives in 1924 had
been replaced by frank talk that left little room for nuance or contradiction.
Rather than a psychological characterization of Loeb, a strict moralizing
script was repeated and reproduced throughout the coverage of his murder
and the retelling of the murder he committed.
The murder of Bobby Franks had taken place in the comparatively more
fluid sexual and gender system of the 1920s. By the time Richard Loeb's
murder occurred twelve years later, the configuration of gender and sexual
roles in American urban culture had become more static. The ambiguity of
identity and sexual subjectivity that had once existed seemed to have given
way to a more tightly proscribed sexuality. New York City in the 1930s saw
the banning of the popular "pansy" acts from nightclubs. Establishments that
were popular with gay crowds or were known as "queer" also faced increased
harassment and raids by the police in the same period, and images and repre-
sentations of same-sex sexuality were also subject to censorship. The adoption
of the production code by the Hollywood studios in 1930 and the establish-
ment of the Production Code Administration in 1934 effectively eliminated
all references to same-sex sexuality in the motion picture industry.77
Explaining the emergence of more rigid notions of masculinity and more
restrictive gender roles in the 1930s or the crackdowns on morality and
public forms of sexuality is beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless,
the suppression of nonheterosexual expression in the 1930s seems deeply
implicated with the crisis of capitalism and the ensuing economic hardship
of the Depression years. The massive unemployment, particularly among
working- and lower-middle-class men, dramatically changed the dynamics
of the family and the gender system. To sustain even a minimal standard of
living, many women and children worked to support their families. Many
men who had once been the sole or at least the principal wage earners found
themselves out of work and reliant on others. As historian Lizabeth Cohen
has argued, the Depression resulted in a widespread loss of self-esteem on
the part of many Americans. The loss of economic autonomy and a sense of
76 Time, 10 February 1936, 15.

77 Chauncey, Gay New York, 352-54.

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sexual order buttressed by the role of breadwinner created

roles. By the time of the death of Richard Loeb in State
the economic crisis of the Depression had gripped the U
six years. It was within this very different social and ec
the first notable retelling of the murder since the mid-
What makes Loeb's death even more noteworthy wa
he died and how the narrative of his death dovetailed
Franks. Thus, the events of Loeb's death provided n
insight into the motivation for the murder of Bobby Fr
the lives of his murderers. Moreover, the circumstan
and his years in prison were envisioned through the nar
first murder, ordering the representations and famil
Like Franks, Loeb was the victim of murder, killed with
inmate named James Day in a prison shower. It was the
murder by Loeb's killer that evoked earlier construct
Loeb as deviant sexual subjects. Indeed, the initial med
murder carried Day's charge that he had been "houn
long time with improper advances."78
After the killing Day became the star witness before th
into Loeb's death. In his testimony Day maintained th
voked to kill Loeb only out of self-defense. Loeb, accord
demanding sexual favors from him in exchange for a be
prison. The Daily News reported that "Day declared that
him since last June with abnormal proposals, had gotten
job and threatened to take it away from him if he woul
minded.'"79 The paper then lent credibility to Day's vers
by asserting that although Day was a thief, he was "o
This characterization of Day helped to remind readers to
mal and perverted. Day's testimony also maintained that
special privileges within Statesville. He characterized Loe
was able to dole out patronage to other prisoners. For ex
that the shower room in which the killing took place wa
accommodate a correspondence school being set up by
within the prison. Loeb apparently had a key to this roo
to meet Day there during the lunch hour.81 With such r
position of Leopold and Loeb, their wealth, and their abili
privileges once again became issues.
78 "Convict Kills Loeb, Franks Boy Slayer," New York Times, 29 J
79 Chicago Daily News, 29 January 1936, 1 . 1 assume the author in
to be a pun, referring to both sexual permissiveness and the suppos
transgression of sex between men.
80 Ibid.
81 Chicago American, 29 January 1936, 4; Chicago Herald Examiner, 29 January 1936,
1-3.

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Day's charge that Loeb was able to use his wealth to influence prison-
ers and guards also reintroduced images of class privilege from the Franks
case in 1924 as well as claims in the late 1920s that the two were treated
as "pets" by the warden.82 At that time the press had made much of the
wealth of Leopold and Loeb's families and of the "million-dollar defense"
employed to save their lives. Intentionally or unintentionally, Day was able
to play on the old themes of affluent privilege and the perception that there
remained two sets of rules in society, those for the rich and those for the
poor - a message heard all the more loudly in the era of the Depression.
One article reported that Loeb had "promised to reward him [Day] hand-
somely if Day would submit to his attentions."83 Other articles asserted that
Loeb had enjoyed a "free run" of the prison and had acted like a "dictator"
toward other inmates.84
The testimony of other Statesville inmates helped support Day's claim
that Loeb was able to exert unusual influence over other prisoners. Before
the prison's warden reduced the amount of money a prisoner could spend
in the prison commissary to five dollars a month, Loeb had been receiving
an allowance from his family of fifty dollars a month. At the time Loeb and
Day had been cellmates, and Loeb had apparently bought Day cigarettes and
groceries with his ample cash. According to Gladys Erickson, the reduced
income created tensions between Day and Loeb: Day supposedly felt that
he should continue to receive items from Loeb even though Loeb's abil-
ity to purchase goods had been greatly curtailed. The quarreling between
Loeb and Day became serious enough that Day was removed from Loeb's
cell. All of this had taken place about six weeks before Loeb's murder.85
Day claimed that he had avoided Loeb after Loeb unsuccessfully tried to
seduce him; guards, however, saw the two prisoners "arm-in-arm" in the
prison yard shortly before the killing.86
There are other reasons to believe that Loeb and Day's dispute may
have stemmed from the trade of sex for groceries. An interview conducted
in 1936 by a sociologist from the University of Chicago, Ernest Burgess,
with a former fellow inmate named Vic gives a glimpse of the dynamics of
prison sexuality.
Q: Ever make the hole [solitary confinement]?

A: Plenty of times. Mostly over kids.
Q: So you went for kids?
82 "Loeb and Leopold Deny They Are Pets," Washington Post, 1 October 1928, 1; "Boy
Thrill Slayers to Enjoy Ease," Los Angeles Times, 28 September 1928, 16.
83 Chicago Daily News, 30 January 1936, 3.
84 Chicago Herald Examiner, 30 January 1936, 1; Chicago Herald Examiner, 31 January
1936,1,3.
85 Gladys A. Erikson, Warden Ragen of Joliet (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 78-85.
86 Chicago American, 31 January 1936, 2.

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A: Everyone does. I never fucked one. I just had my jo

ceived fellatio]. There's plenty of fruit in the joint, L
the biggest fairies in the joint, and he goes for blacks
I seen him one day, top a nigger cock a foot long in t
plenty of dough out of him, I caught him fucking arou
and I made him pay-off. His partner Loeb, was a good
he was wolf, and he went strong for kids too.
Q: You think he was really bumped off [murdered]?
A: He was bumped, there was no way to fix that.87
Vic's version of prison sexuality and his recollections

seem to support a number of Day's claims. Vic's asser
"strong for kids" and his depiction of Loeb as a "wol
claim that Loeb was interested in him sexually is not
possibility.
Vic's narrative - in which his own normative masculinity is asserted in
contrast to that of the "fruit" Leopold - conforms to what historian Regina
Kunzel identifies as the "sexual geography" of mid- twentieth -century
American prisons.88 In particular, the term "wolf was used to describe an
older, often dominant, and traditionally masculine man who sought sex
with younger, usually smaller men, called "punks." The dynamics of wolves
and punks existed alongside other sexual categories, such as "normal men"
and "kids" and "fruits," all noted in the historical documents related to the
Leopold and Loeb case. According to historian George Chauncey, a punk
often "let himself be used sexually by an older and more powerful man,
the wolf, in exchange for money, protection, or other forms of support."89
Loeb and Day would seem to fit easily into this wolf-punk profile. Loeb
was definitely the older of the two, at thirty years of age to Day's twenty-
three, and was bigger in terms of both height and weight, at 5 '9" and 160
pounds to Day's 5 '6" and 145 pounds. Day's murder of Loeb allowed
Day to repudiate any potential charge of being a punk even while situating
Loeb as a predatory wolf. This ideological construction of Loeb was ef-
fective because it operated within a context of real social relations and the
historically particular forms of sexual modernity within U.S. prisons of the
mid-twentieth century. Loeb may "really" have been a wolf and Day may
"really" have been a punk, but it was the plausibility of these narratives as
well as Loeb's personal history that were mutually reinforcing.
87 Ernest Burgess Papers, box 134, folder 2, notes from interview with Victor and Jean
Neilson, 8-9 October 1936, Joseph Regenstein Library, Special Collections Research Center,
University of Chicago. Burgess's question on whether Loeb was "bumped off stems from
rumors that Loeb's death had been faked, that his family had bought his release, and that the
murder was simply a ruse. See Chicago Daily News, 30 January 1936, 1.
88 Regina G. Kunzel, "Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century
United States," GLQ8, no. 3 (2002): 253-70.
89 Chauncey, Gay New York, 84-85.

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In his examination of Loeb's death Hal Higdon attempted to discern

what "really happened" between Loeb and Day in the shower room on
28 January 1936 and concluded that Day was guilty of the premeditated
murder of Loeb. The actual dynamics of the fight between Day and Loeb
are not critical to our understanding of the ideological construction of Loeb,
however. Rather, the importance of the event lies in the fact that the jury
at Day's trial accepted his version of the events and found him not guilty.
How was it, then, that the jury could have come to such a conclusion? Why
did Day's story ring true for the men who acquitted him? In large part, it
seems that Day's version of the murder was effective because it was able
to draw on preexisting images of Loeb, images that had been carried over
from the 1920s. It is also possible to speculate that the jury was willing to
believe Day's version of the murder because it corresponded to a popular
image of sexual life within prison.
A Chicago Tribune article connected Day's charges of Loeb's "extraor-
dinary privileges" directly with "the series of scandals that have attended
prison administrations in Illinois under Governor Horner," thus linking it
with broader representations of prison life. Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago also
used Loeb's death as an opportunity to criticize the operation of prisons in
Illinois. "There should be more watchfulness," he stated, "on the part of
the guards and more guards if necessary. And the minds of the prisoners
should be kept on a healthy plane." At the time of Loeb's murder Mayor
Kelly and Governor Horner were engaged in a struggle over the Democratic
gubernatorial nomination.90 Kelly used Loeb to heat up his oratory during
the primary campaign and to link Horner with the negative discourse roused
by the murder. Kelly asked rhetorically, "Do you suppose if Ed Kelly were
governor two degenerates would be allowed private baths, conduct a school,
and play poker for $l,500?"91 The Tribune, which also opposed Horner,
quoted another of the governor's political opponents, Judge Harrington,
as stating that "there is no excuse for extending privileges to men of their
type. Their weaknesses are known to the authorities. Prisoners who have
social delinquencies should never be put in places of power where they can
dominate other prisoners."92
Time positioned Loeb's killing as part of a larger sexual scandal, connect-
ing it to "the revelations of vice and perversion" uncovered two years earlier
at the Welfare Island Prison in New York City. Raids on that prison, carried
out by the new administration in New York City Hall, had produced a glut of
newspaper stories that detailed the supposed "liberties" granted to homosexual
inmates. Like the controversy surrounding the Loeb killing, the corruption
in the New York prison and sexual activity between prisoners was used to
90 Thomas Littlewood, Horner of Illinois (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press,
1969), 169; see also Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli, The Mayors: The Chicago Political
Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 99-125.
Littlewood, Horner of Illinois, 179.
92 Chicago Tribune, 30 January 1936, 4.

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discredit political opponents.93 The political ramification

did not escape Ti me magazine. "Even non-partisan citizens
"wondered if it were customary at Statesville to pamper
[or to] place perverts in positions of authority."94 Again, t
perverted sexuality and the privileges of wealth were wove
a powerful image of moral and monetary corruption.
The charge that Loeb acted like a corrupt "precinc
Statesville Penitentiary resonated loudly in the political c
Governor Horner, responding to criticism in the press an
cal opponents, established a commission to investigate
system. In a letter written on 3 February he stated:
You have, no doubt, read accounts of the recent tr

Statesville branch of the Illinois State penitentiary, in
oner lost his life in an altercation with another. In our
resulted in a question in the minds of some of our citiz
the management of our prison system. Intimations hav
laxity of discipline, and favoritism in dealing with con
charged by some of the press. Many of these charges a
grotesque and flighty and no thinking citizen would dig
his sanction.95
It is unlikely that the death of a less famous inmate would

sort of response. Even before Day's claims of self-defe
regarding Loeb 's power within the prison became p
sought to control potential political fallout by establi
sion. Not to act would have provided the governor's criti
tool to use against him: that special favors were given to
those in prison.
The official report of the Prison Inquiry Commissio
little over a year after Loeb's death. Over 680 pages in len
a detailed survey of the condition of Illinois penal institu
mostly of broad recommendations ranging from hours of
guards to the dearth of painted walls in cells to the quali
food served to prisoners. First, the commission acknowle
sexuality existed within Illinois prisons, though the auth
claimed that the extent of its existence was "greatly exag
ing to the report, the principal causes for these "sexual a
shared cells, the lack of bedclothes (inmates tended to sle
well as a shortage of work, exercise, proper reading mate
instruction. Of homosexuals the report concluded: "It
93 Chauncey, Gay New Tork, 91-95.

94 Time, 10 February 1936, 15.
95 Illinois Prison Inquiry Commission, The Prison System in Illinois: A
of Illinois (Springfield: State of Illinois Press, 1937).

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abnormality is curable, they should be treated, and if not, they should be

put under restraint for the protection of the other inmates, who have the
right to this protection."96 Such restraint was to be accomplished by plac-
ing "mental and depraved homosexual perverts" in single cells in a special
prison or in a separate section of existing prisons. The practice of segregating
supposedly homosexual prisoners was not new in the 1930s. According to
George Chauncey, prison officials had been segregating prisoners who were
effeminate and who therefore seemed to be "fairies" or "pansies" since the
early part of the twentieth century.97 Following up on Day's other charge
that Loeb had received special privileges, the report also recommended that
civilian employees and not inmates do "sensitive" or important work such as
teaching or secretarial support, thus reducing the possibility that prisoners
would use these positions to curry favor or peddle influence. By making its
recommendations, which endeavored not only to curtail privileges but also
to "deal" with homosexuals, the commission members sought to assuage
public fears that prisons were places where homosexuality was not only
tolerated but rewarded.
The subtle representations and distinctions of Leopold and Loeb that their
defense team had constructed during their trial for Franks's murder were
clearly no longer operative in 1936. The complex psychological constructions
of the young men would have been awkward ideological vehicles for politi-
cians such as Mayor Kelly to employ. Instead, the starker and more sinister
portrait - indeed, the one drawn by state's attorney Crowe in 1924 - animated
the 1936 depiction of Loeb. The unambiguous image of Loeb as a sexual
predator also conformed to the particular same-sex cultural dynamics of prison
life. Loeb appeared to be a wolf because wolves did exist and because Loeb
seemed to fit this representation. The more fluid sexual profile from 1924 of
Loeb as a rebellious, confused, and out-of-control heterosexual youth had
been replaced by that of a more menacing figure, a sexual deviant on the prowl
who was able to maneuver and buy his way into positions of power. Yet this
ideological construction of Loeb as a pervert was not the final installment in
the narrative representations of Bobby Franks's murderers. Fourteen years
later the marginalized psychoanalytic narratives of the case resurfaced as the
dominant popular representations of Leopold and Loeb and as the principal
explanatory narrative of the Franks murder.
The 1950s: Narratives of Murder, Real and Fictional
The reappearance of Leopold and Loeb in the public eye in the 1950s did
not stem from a single event. Unlike the murder of Bobby Franks in 1924
and the death of Richard Loeb in 1936, the representations in this period
emerged from a variety of sources separated by over a decade in time,
96 Ibid., 175.
97 Chauncey, Gay New York, 91.

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starting in 1948 with the release of Alfred Hitchcock's f

ing in 1959 with the film version of Meyer Levin's nove
published in 1956. It is also worth noting that in this lat
of the murder entered popular culture as film and fi
the journalistic representations of the earlier periods. U
chaotic storm of competing and confusing images, or 19
distinctions between good and evil, finally, the const
and Loeb in the 1950s were complex, nuanced, and p
highly psychoanalytic frame.
These differences in representation reflect the changin
and sexual life in the 1950s and in particular the cont
traditional masculine identity. Unlike 1930, however,
masculinity in the 1950s cannot be related to econom
eral, the postwar years were a period of remarkable econ
expansion in the United States as well as a period of a ub
culture. Why was it, then, that homosexuality remained
despite this new prosperity and success? Part of the ans
stem from the continued transformations in and the in
nature of American society. World War II in particul
indelibly altering many of the patterns of everyday life a
Moreover, the war had propelled the United States into
position in what seemed to be an increasingly dangerous
that the cold war and the arms race of the 1950s only co
Americans the family provided a site in which to seek s
order. As Elaine Tyler May points out, the American
offer a psychological fortress" against the external th
nation and world in the atomic age. Furthermore, the
provided a symbolic example of the proper functioning o
rule and fatherhood in particular a sign of benevolen
and familiar model for how the world itself should be ru
effective operation of this domestic ideology was the m
distinctions between male and female gender roles an
98 On social transformations in the United States after World War

war see Allan Beruhe, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay M
War Two (New York: Plume, 1990); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early
and Culture at the Dawn of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of
1985); William Chafe, Unfinished Journey: America since World Wa
University Press, 1986); Frank Costigliola, "'Unceasing Pressure f
Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold
can History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1309-39; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politi
The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-19
of Chicago Press, 1983), 23-39; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Boun
the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and Michael S. Sh
War: The United States since the Ì930I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Un
May, Homeward Bound, 11-14.

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maintenance of rigid notions of "normal" social behavior. Individuals who

failed to conform to this domestic model were seen as threats not only to
the family but also to an American way of life.100
By the late 1940s and 1950s the popular image of homosexuality had also
increasingly become couched in the psychological discourse of pathology.
Historian Beth Bailey describes the shift away from moralizing narratives
to therapeutic intervention in American discourse.101 A principal reason
for this change was the increased influence of psychology and psychologi-
cal language in the everyday lives of Americans.102 According to Estelle
Freedman, one of the results of this construction was that the image of
the sexual psychopath came to serve "as a code for homosexuality."103 This
image was in turn popularized and promoted by the media and by U.S.
government agencies such as the FBI.104 According to historian Philip
Jenkins, the linkage between violent crime and so-called sexual deviation
had "bleak implications for homosexuals, who faced the most immediate
collateral damage from the movement against psychopathy" during the
1950s.105 The image of the psychopath provided an identifiable type that
connected older notions of perversion and degeneracy with the emerging
psychological model. The power of this figure was that it effectively merged
criminal behavior, same-sex sexuality, and mental illness.
The surface invisibility of homosexuality also helped to make homo-
sexuality a concealed and impending threat to the American body politic
and a symbol of cold war fears of Communist expansion. As intellectual
historian Kyle Cuordileone has noted, the discourse of manhood, which
was so suffused with anxiety around proper emotional and psychological
100 Joanne Meyerowitz, "Introduction: Women and Gender in Post-War America,

1945-1960," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed.
Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); and David Savran, Cowboys,
Queers and Communists: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee
Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 2-10.
101 Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002),
53-54.
102 On the impact of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in American culture see
Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); see also John C. Burnham, "The Influence
of Psychoanalysis upon American Culture," in American Psychoanalysis: Origins and Develop-
ments, ed. Jacques Quen and Eric T. Carlson (New York: Brunner & Mazel, 1978); Elizabeth
Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
103 Estelle Freedman, "'Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psychopath,"
in Peiss, Padgug, and Simmons, Passion and Power, 213. See also George Chauncey, "The
Post War Sex Panic," in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graeber (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1993), 160-78; and John D'Emilio, "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics
of the Cold War in America" in Peiss, Padgug, and Simmons, Passion and Power, 226-40.
104 Chauncey, "The Post War Sex Panic," 160-78.
ios Philip Jenkins Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 61.

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development, also permeated the field of U.S. politica

late 1940s and 1950s.106 Homosexuality threatened b
authentic American masculinity as well as U.S. national s
David Johnson vividly depicts the "lavender scare" that
U.S. government during the early 1950s.107 Like Com
ality could not be detected at first glance or by casual o
all the more insidious for it. In literary critic Robert Co
way that the discourses of national security contained o
norms of masculinity and femininity was to exploit the
no way to tell homosexuals from heterosexuals."108 O
and attentive study could an individual read the subt
uncover the homosexual. Leopold and Loeb's story, w
compacts and murderous actions, provided ideal illus
historical referents for postwar sexual and political men
In August 1948 the film Rope was released in the Un
directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, the British
then at the peak of his career, and based on a 1929 play
by Patrick Hamilton that was largely recognized as h
the Leopold and Loeb case. A member of the audience
any other film with homosexual themes during the post
have had to observe very carefully to catch the mov
about homosexuality. The restrictive censorship code
still in effect, and the Hays Office required that the mak
expressions such as "my dear boy" from the script becau
lieved to be examples of homosexual dialogue.109 Eve
the script were not enough to satisfy all critics. After t
number of communities across the United States restricted or even banned
its screening. In Chicago the police censor board deemed that the film was
not "wholesome" and prohibited its viewing. After a week of lobbying by
the producers and the studio, the police board reversed its decision and
allowed the film to be shown but with an "adult only" proviso.110
Watching the film today, it is hard to imagine what could have been so
disturbing. As literary critic D. A. Miller has pointed out, "The homosexu-
ality of the protagonists" in Rope is "never either visually displayed (with a
106 K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New
York: Routledge, 2005), 2-24, 51-53; and Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 164.
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians
in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 70, 67-75.
108 Robert J. Corber, "Cold War Femme: Lesbian Visibility in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All
about Eve," GL£) 11, no. 1 (2005): 1-22. See also Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold
War America: Resistance and the Crisis in Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1997).
Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New York:
Harper & Row, 1987), 92,
110 New York Times, 21 November 1948, II, 5, 19 September 1948, II, 5.

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kiss) or verbally disclosed (by a declaration)."111 Instead, the sexuality of the

two fictional murderers is arrived at through a deferred identification. The
fictional murder was linked to the 1924 killing of Bobby Franks through a
number of direct allusions and similarities to the "real" events. This drawing
upon the real is accomplished through insinuation, especially by mirroring
the motivations of the fictional killers to those of Leopold and Loeb. The
audience recognizes that the characters are based on Leopold and Loeb
because both the real and fictional characters share a desire "to commit
the perfect murder" just for the thrill of it. Moreover, the killers in Rope
are obsessed with Nietzschean ethics and with their own sense of superior-
ity, themes that also link them directly to Leopold and Loeb. The oblique
sexuality is made clearer by this narrative connection to the actual Franks
case. By evoking the historical memory of the 1924 murder, in short, the
fictional killers become homosexual because Leopold and Loeb were read
as homosexual.
Audiences of the film did not, however, need to recognize any of these
historical references to read the main characters as homosexual. Many of the
published reviews of the film made explicit connections to homosexuality
as well as to Leopold and Loeb. A discussion of the movie in the New York
Times referred to the cinematic killing as "a degenerate thrill" performed
by "psychotic murderers."112 Another review referred to the killers as
"practicing psychopaths."113 Other reviews made more direct connections
to the Franks case, stating, "The story of Rope was courtesy of . . . Messrs.
Loeb and Leopold."114 One review asserted that the main characters "were
pretty clearly derived from the Loeb -Leopold case - were highly cultivated,
effeminate aesthetes."115 By referring to Leopold and Loeb and by evoking
the powerful image of the cultured sexual psychopath, the reviewers helped
ensure that the film's killers would be seen as homosexuals.
This continued association with sexual psychopathology created a
dilemma in self-representation for Leopold, who was still alive when the
film was released and who became eligible for parole less than a year later
in April 1949. In his attempt to save his life during his 1924 trial, all the
intimate details of his sexual relationship with Loeb had been revealed so
as to paint a picture of the mitigating circumstances as part of his defense
strategy. Twenty-five years later Leopold's homosexuality was an established
fact and constituted a clear obstacle in his attempts to gain parole. Leopold
attempted to confront this representation of himself by explaining it in terms
of psychological development. He situated his sexual history as belonging
to another person, a self different from the contemporary Leopold. This
111 D. A. Miller, "Anal Rope," in Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss
(New York: Roudedge, 1992), 121.
112 New York Times, 29 August 1948, II, 1.
113 Newsweek, 19 August 1948, 68.
114 New Republic, 13 September 1948.
115 Time, 13 September 1948, 105.

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youthful self, he contended, was emotionally and intelle

even primitive, compared to the modern adult Leopold. A
hearing Leopold claimed that he was a "wild, irrespon
participated in Bobby Franks's murder but that his tw
prison had changed him.116 He was denied release, but h
same theme four years later at yet another parole hearin
changed completely," Leopold entreated the parole bo
ity, even my physical being has changed. No cell that
the time of the crime is there today."117 In acknowledg
strove to demonstrate that he had transformed himself
Leopold's psychological narrative also served an impo
signing blame for Franks's killing. In this version of
lack of emotional maturity made him susceptible to L
personality. In a reversal of the earlier scenario, whi
Leopold as having beguiled Loeb, Loeb now became t
had exercised an unhealthy influence over Leopold. In
the parole board in 1957 Leopold stated that he wen
murder simply "to comply with his [Loeb's] wishes becau
extravagantly." Leopold also asserted that he had been "c
away by my admiration for Loeb. I had not yet learned
emotions of adolescence; I did what he wanted."118 By
initial representation of the young men, even while buil
findings in the Bowman-Hulbert report, Leopold w
himself as less guilty than Loeb - who was, conveniently
to challenge the representation. Leopold, by presentin
consequence of insufficient psychological development, w
himself from the signs both of murderer and of homos
new narrative both of these typologies became remo
that he had been able to leave behind. Sociologist Lau
Leopold's testimony before the parole board as also car
neutral language of social science so as to provide an
his preparedness to resume life in contemporary society
to understand himself according to its perspective.119
In advancing this particular sort of account of himself
doubtedly aided by the contemporary popularity of psych
explanations. Yet his representation of himself was sh
example, the journalist John Bartlow Martin wrote a ser
articles in the Saturday Evening Post m 1955 that echoed
116 "Leopold 'No Longer Wild,"' New York Times, 23 April 1949
117 "Leopold Asks Parole," New York Times, 9 January 1953, 14.
118 Chicago Sun-Times, 10 July 1957, 1.
119 Laurel Duchowny, "Life Plus 99 Years'. Nathan Leopold and
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21, no. 4 (2005): 336-4

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of Leopold's sexual relation with Loeb as improper development. Martin

described Leopold as having worshiped Loeb "for reasons rooted in his
own inadequate emotional development."120 Martin added:
It was a childish relationship and did not involve acts usually thought of
as adult homosexuality. Leopold was in no sense a "true homosexual."
His prison record discloses not a single homosexual episode during his
thirty years of incarceration. . . . He said recently that his sexual rela-
tionship with Loeb was the only one he ever had with another male.
He believes his childish relationship with Loeb was of no importance
so far as his total style of life was concerned.121
Martin's articles and Leopold's own explanations are rife with psychological
notions of sexual development. Indeed, arrested sexual or dysfunctional
development had become increasingly one of the most common psychiatric
explanations for the cause of homosexuality by the 1950s.122 The Freud-
ian paradigm understood sexual development as a process by which an
individual developed from a universal infantile polymorphously perverse
stage through bisexuality to normal adult heterosexuality. Homosexuality
was the result of a delay or a stoppage in this development that kept an
individual's sexuality at an adolescent stage and prevented the individual
from becoming an emotionally mature adult.123
Leopold's and Martin's focus on sexual development was aided by
an increased awareness of homosexuality itself within American popular
culture. Indeed, since the publication of Alfred Kinsey's controversial
studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ( 1948) and Sexual Behavior
in the Human Female (19 S3), homosexual acts could not simply be con-
signed to a freakish and small minority but rather, as historian Miriam
Reumann notes, reflected a troublingly common feature of "American
life."124 The implications of Kinsey's work can be seen in the representa-
tions of Leopold and Loeb. In the introduction to Leopold's memoirs,
which were published in 1958 and entitled 99 Tears Plus Life, Earle
Stanley Gardner wrote that the homosexual nature of Leopold and Loeb's
120 John Bartlow Martin, "Murder on His Conscience," Saturday Evening Post, 4 April
1955, 86.
121 Ibid., 87.
122 Neville Hoad, "Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolu-
tionary Narratives of Difference," Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2000): 133-58.
123 Terry, An American Obsession, 55-73; Henry Abelove, "Freud Male Homosexuality and
the Americans," Dissenta?», no. 1 (1986): 59-68; Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American
Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1981); and Kenneth Lewes, The
Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: Meridian, 1988).
124 Miriam Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in
the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 167-68; see also Jonathan
Gathorne-Hardy, Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998).

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relationship had been greatly exaggerated. He also n

prison record indicated "no homosexual tendency wh
Gardner attempted to portray Leopold and Loeb's sex
the confines of "normal" adolescent sexuality. He wr
This crime occurred a generation before the revelation
Report, which disclosed that homosexual relations i
group were not as unusual as the smug citizens of 1924
tend. In the light of the Kinsey Report, it is quite pos
of the persons who turned thumbs down upon Lo
condemning them as perverted monsters of an alien em
had uneasy memories which they were trying to expia
force of their condemnation.126
It is important to note the rhetorical strategies at work h

ing the Kinsey Report to show that Leopold and Loeb
a relatively common phenomenon among men their ag
the additional psychological explanation that represse
helped to explain the widespread demonization of the
comments about those condemning Leopold and L
monsters" and "alien" also serves to blunt such contempo
calling into question the sexuality of any critics of the t
The strength of the psychological explanation for
crime can be clearly seen in the various testimony offer
porters at his parole hearings. In 1957 Abel Brown, one o
brothers from his college days, testified that the deceas
"bad apple" and had exhibited "sadistic" tendencies. When
board member for an example of such tendencies, Brown
that Loeb had been the "terror of the freshmen" at the fr
initiation rituals, which included striking the buttocks of
"When he would paddle them, he would force them acro
other wall. No one else ever paddled them like that."
discovering Loeb "dead drunk" and about to dunk a fresh
for neglecting to address him as "sir."127 By terming Lo
than a "pervert," Brown kept his construction of Loeb w
ies of popular psychological discourse. Others used dif
with the same intended result. At another of Leopold's p
example, the poet Carl Sandburg said that Leopold "w
he came here, but he has made a magnificent struggle to
In the 1950s that "light" was not just a place of remorse o
a belief in the sanctity of human life but the secure site
125 Earle Stanley Gardner, "Introduction," in Nathan Leopold, 99

City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), 11.
126 Ibid., 11.
127 Chicago Tribune, 10 July 1957, 2; Chicago Sun-Times, 10 July
128 Higdon, Crime of the Century, 304.

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Queer Histories of a Crime 32 1
One of the individuals who testified before the parole board in 1957
on Leopold's behalf was the novelist Meyer Levin. A year earlier in 1956
Levin had published Compulsion, a semifictionalized re-creation of the
1924 murder of Bobby Franks. In his novel Levin was able to bring a new
understanding of the motivations of Leopold and Loeb to his readers by
employing one of the few truly "fictional" devices in the book. Levin wrote
Compulsion as a pseudomemoir of the murder by a reporter who happened
to be both a student at the University of Chicago and a fraternity brother
of Loeb's fictional character. Levin, a native of Chicago, was in fact a con-
temporary of Leopold and Loeb and had been studying at the University of
Chicago at the time of the murder. Through Levin's semiautobiographical
character, who is named Sidney Silver and who works as a "cub" reporter
for one of Chicago's daily papers, the reader is provided with an intimate
perspective on the murder case. At first Silver shares the reaction of his
newspaper colleagues that Judd Steiner (Leopold's character) and Artie
Straus (Loeb's character) are evil and perverted. Yet as Silver listens to the
alienists' testimony and observes the courtroom argument he comes to
reflect on the motivations of the murderers and gains a glimpse into his
own psyche as well as those of the killers. By overcoming his initial harsh
reaction to the murderers, Silver is able to see the two men as complex and
troubled individuals, not unlike himself, and deserving of understanding
and even compassion.
Throughout the novel the character Silver discusses the psychological
dimensions of the case with an older classmate named Willie Weiss. It is Weiss
who provides the most sophisticated psychological readings of the murder-
ers' actions and motivations. Steiner (Leopold) becomes a particular focus
for Weiss and Silver's analysis. Silver is particularly sympathetic to Steiner
because in the novel he competes with him for the "romantic attention"
of a female classmate.129 Levin clearly intended to contrast Silver's inner
world, his desire for love, fame, and praise, with that of Steiner. In doing
so, Levin was able to make Steiner seem familiar in a way that Leopold's
defense never could. By comparing Silver and Steiner repeatedly, Levin is
even able to show his reader how close a "normal" mind is to a disturbed
one. Unlike Straus (Loeb), who as depicted in the novel seems to suffer
from a deep pathology, Steiner is reachable; his actions and motivations
are almost comprehensible and knowable.
Near the end of the novel Silver and Weiss discuss the case once again,
attempting to understand Steiner's unconscious motivation and what com-
pelled him to take part in the killing. Weiss explains to Silver that the answer
is to be found in Steiner's childhood and sexual development. Weiss recounts
how Steiner began to get crushes on other boys that became fixations for
129 This is another of the fictionalized elements of the novel. The woman in whom both
Sidney and Judd were interested was based on Susan Laurie, a woman Leopold had dated
around the time of the murder.

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Straus. Silver is skeptical of Weiss's analysis. "'We all

that. It didn't make us all homosexuals. Or did it?'" W
"A little bit, a little bit, all of us. But we got out of it.
Judd was, with all the girl stuff in his childhood, he
what he was, so he got into it. And his conflict must
than ever. Because don't forget his nurse got him all t
he was a kid, got him mixed up about sexual release, s
didn't know it he wanted it the way she showed him, t
oral stage, or probably he was a polymorphous perverse
stage. Then he starts with Artie. He gets a fixation on
when he tries sex with a girl, he sees her as Artie. But h
struggling all the time in himself, struggling to becom
In Levin's narrative homosexuality is not something for

it becomes something that all men must struggle agains
they must develop. In Levin's Freudian- derived constru
"normal" men must reject homosexuality, but their
as normal men enables them to perform such an act of
from homosexual attachments was the way to become a
crucial step in the process of becoming heterosexual.
participation in the murder as part of this struggle to
Levin, Leopold's participation in the killing of Bobby
this symbolic transition for Leopold, after which he wo
sissy weakling but a real, powerful, and normal male.
This new perspective is made clear when Silver hear
the alienists in the courtroom. Reflecting on the rev
relationship between the murderers, Silver wonders
popular perception of homosexuality. In Levin's wo
sickness, finally frankly exposed before us. Was it so d
all the history of human behavior, of the sick and ugly
careless and sportive and mistaken things that hum
much more?"131 Although homosexuality remained her
no longer an unmitigated evil. Instead, homosexuali
understood in the context of other human failings, f
time be reformed and forgiven. In 1924 such a construc
the province of the alienists; thirty years later Levin's
moved the representation of Leopold and Loeb from pro
to popular narrative. The novel, which became a play in
1959, advanced a more humane perspective on homos
to criminality but nonetheless deserving of unders
Compulsion proved to be a very popular version of t
130 Meyer Levin, Compulsion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 19

131 Ibid., 398.

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murder narrative, selling 150,000 copies in hardcover and over a million

in paperback.
By utilizing a compassionate psychological perspective, Levin developed
a radically different ideological representation of Leopold and Loeb. Both,
indeed, become sympathetic figures in the novel, Loeb because of his deep
mental illness and Leopold because of his own misguided attachment and
his subsequent struggle to "straighten" himself out. Unlike the Bowman -
Hulbert report of 1924, Levin was able to move the analysis of the murder-
ers from professional discourse to popular conceptualization and to appeal
to widespread contemporary understandings to make sense of the men's
crime. Levin's ability to accomplish this task was aided by the popularity
of psychology and the familiarity that his reading audience had with psy-
choanalytic terminology and concepts. Ultimately, Levin's narrative of the
Leopold and Loeb story reiterates the most powerful appeal of Freudian
psychoanalysis. This appeal rests on the faith that the seemingly random,
disturbed, and inexplicable acts of an individual can be understood, that
the source of mental illness can be found in the subconscious and, once
found and identified, can be cured.
For the 1950s Levin's construction was a tolerant one. Yet despite this
tolerance homosexuality remained a pathology, something that was to be
transcended lest it result in something even more terrible such as murder.
In this way Compulsion fits neatly into other psychological narratives of the
1950s, which offered gay men a way to "right" themselves by pursuing
heterosexuality. Leopold's own assertions during this time echoed those
of Levin by presenting himself as a man who had matured from a confused
boy to a morally centered and heterosexual man. The psychological rhetoric
of rehabilitation, of treatment and personal development, served to legiti-
mate Leopold's claim even as it helped to popularize Levin's novel. It was
reasonable to assume that Leopold could transform himself because the
therapeutic ideology included promises of such change.
Conclusion
The murder of Bobby Franks in its narrative retelling has proven t

powerful instrument in the representational construction and reificati
stereotypes. The biographies of the murderers, their class backgrounds
dynamic of their relationship to one another were used to link homosex
with murder and pathology. This historical process of narrative repres
tion allowed law enforcement officials, journalists, and even popular w
to connect the events of the murder to larger social categories and gro
The ease with which the case was used as a vehicle for different ideolo
constructions has made the murder and the murderers' lives an instrumental
and adaptable historical archive. Yet it would be a mistake to argue that these
ideological constructions were simply imposed upon Leopold and Loeb or

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that these narratives were simply fictions that dominan

to pass off as "real." The efficacy of these historical narr
in part, from the ways in which Leopold and Loeb situa
themselves in relation to these broader ideological const
dynamics of sexual modernity provided both useful and
with which the two men had to contend.
Tracing the "tale" of Leopold and Loeb provides a clearer sense of the
struggle over the understandings of sexuality itself in the United States
in the twentieth century. The story has shifted as it has been produced
and reproduced, often altering to conform to the ideological contours of
particular historical periods. But the "tale" is not a living thing - it has no
capacity to judge a particular terrain and transform itself to fit an idiosyn-
cratic landscape. It was the work of individuals - authors, journalists, politi-
cians, psychologists, filmmakers, and Leopold and Loeb themselves - that
animated and reconfigured this story of murder and murderers. These real
historical actors reconstituted the events of the case and interpreted the
lives of the murderers through the lens of contemporaneous social and
political positions. They employed the narrative of the murder, changing
the construction of the characters and altering the "moral of the story," to
contest in varied ways the expression of sexual difference.
Leopold and Loeb were participants in a social world that was endeavor-
ing to create new forms of sexual expression within American public culture
and identities that would later be called homosexual. After Leopold and
Loeb murdered Bobby Franks these representations became central tropes
used by other groups such as police, psychologists, and journalists, who
connected the narrative of the case to "abhorrent" sexuality and who used
the men to illustrate their vision of moral order and appropriate sexuality
as well as to excoriate and even eliminate those who did not fit into that
vision. The murder of Bobby Franks was a sex crime not because he had
been sexually violated and abused but because so much was made of the
sexual conduct and behavior that transpired between his murderers. It was
their sexuality that helped to sustain interest in the tale as a moral allegory
throughout the twentieth century.

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The Queer Histories of a Crime: Representations and Narratives of Leopold and Loeb

Author(s): DAVID S. CHURCHILL

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40663354

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"'This,' i said, 'is the court-room where Nathan

1 John Drury, Chicago in Seven Days (New York: Robert M. M

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 2, May 2009

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emergent cultural landscapes. This article is about histo

3 Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, und

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others in the process of modern state formation, in which a national com-

7 Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna

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narrative and representations of the murder. Following

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on popular understandings of deviancy, it was, in my view, more proscribed

1924: The Narrative of the Murder

Any examination of the narratives and events of Franks's murder inev

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in popular forms of leisure that were dramatically alter

15 On working-class leisure see John Kasson, Amusing the Millions:

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social reformers were particularly alarmed by the presence of younger men

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something that both young men cultivated, even going

23 Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1924, 1.

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had at least a passing familiarity. Germain "Patches" Reinhart, a women

27 Chicano Evening American, 6 June 1924, 1.

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Nonetheless, representations and constructions of sexu

33 Chicago Evening American, 23 May 1924, 1.

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kidnapping of Bobby Franks gave the police a reason to question, harass,

37 Chicago Daily News, 23 May 1924, 1.

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"pals" in quotation marks seems particularly unusual, si

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44 Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 May 1924, 3.

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of an Italian who made a study of perversion and w

51 Chicago Tribune, 30 May 1924, 2.

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continued to probe the dynamics of the relationship be

61 McKernan, Amazing Crime, 118-19; Chicago Daily News, 4

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construction of them as lustful, depraved, and corrupt.64 During his closing

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in the Literary Digest revealed the strong reactions on t

undesirable and forms an irksome but unavoida

Blumgart, "The New Psychology and the Franks Case," Na

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Loeb's fraternity brothers, Max Schrayer, the fraternity questioned Loeb's

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correct when she asserts that the reports served to fam

1936: The Narrative of the Murder as Told