[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]
On three
broader issues to which the pair of “perfect
criminals” can be connected (from the most straightforward to the most
complex).
1)
The Death Penalty: Once Leopold & Loeb had
been arrested for and confessed to the murder of 14 year-old Bobby
Franks, the central remaining question was whether they would be sentenced
to death (the famous
trial was much more of a sentencing hearing, as both men had already pled
guilty). It was directly to address that question that Loeb’s family retained
Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous trial lawyer and an avowed opponent
of the death penalty; Darrow’s twelve-hour
summation on the subject is considered one of the most important speeches
in American legal history. His speech convinced the judge to give the two young
killers life in prison instead, and while that didn’t end up mattering for Loeb
(who was murdered
by a fellow inmate a dozen years later), it did for Leopold who was paroled
in 1958 and lived the last 8 years of his life as a free man. This isn’t
nearly enough space for me to get into all that I feel about the
death penalty, but I’ll just note that to my mind 19 and 18 year olds are
far too young for such absolute punishments.
2)
Sexuality: Not that the death penalty isn’t
plenty complicated, but (when it comes to these figures and this crime) this
subject is a great deal more thorny still. Not the basic fact, which is that Leopold
& Loeb seem to have been in a sexual relationship
with each other (although only for a few months before the murder). But the
ways in which that fact became a
sensationalized part of the story, not only for example by the press in the
aftermath of Loeb’s murder in prison (when it was reported,
with no evidence, that he had made sexual advances on the killer), but also
by Darrow himself during the trial. Darrow brought in
psychiatric experts to claim that the pair were abnormal, with their sexuality
front and center in that defense. I wrote in
this post about how the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic
personality disturbance”; obviously those ideas went far beyond this one trial
and case, but I can’t say that they helped the cause any.
3)
School Shootings: This subject definitely
represents a far more tenuous connection than my first two, and I want to be
clear that there are plenty of differences between L&L and school shooters.
But I would also suggest that there are at least parallels between this criminal
pair and (for example) the Columbine
shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—a sense of superiority to all their
peers, a willingness to take the lives of young people (something shared by all
school shooters of course), and of course a sociopathic separation from the
layers of community that bind most of us to one another. But fortunately for
Leopold & Loeb’s peers, guns were both far less powerful and destructive
and far more difficult to come by in the 1920s, and so they could senselessly take
the life of only one young person in their act of mutual criminality.
Next duo
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?
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