Cook County Jail Lives
Leopold was quoted as telling a repoter: “When I get out of this I’m going to start a school for the higher education of you reporters. Your grammar is atrocious.”
His cellmate, August Vogel, was sent to Pontiac today.
Copycat Crimes
Teenagers Walter Borcya, Walter Derus and Ignatious Clombras were arrested for trying to get $8,000 from Jacob Franks after sending him a letter threatening his daughter, Josephine. Franks informed the police, dropped a decoy package, and the trio were arrested when they went to retrieve it.
Outsider Opinions
Psychiatrist Siegfried Block diagnosed the pair with “manic depressive insanity with “unharnessed emotions and reasoning, with possibly a touch a sex perversion mixed in with the other tendencies.”
He explained: “While I have not had an opportunity for a personal examination of Leopold and Loeb, the details I have read in the newspapers about their mentality, environment and education lead me to the opinion that these boys are insane. Their type of insanity is common and their exceptional mental faculties make it clear to an alienist that they are suffering from what is termed manic depressive insanity.”
Ralph Dennis, a professor at Northwestern University rebutted the idea that education had made Leopold and Loeb kill. As he said: “The public wonders if scientific study produces Leopolds and Loebs. It does not. The seeds for their development were sown long before they struck a college campus.”
The real problem was “that vast army of men and women students who are satisfied with a ‘gentleman’s’ grade, who are content to ‘get by,’ who master nothing. They cram, they crib, they dodge. Today they pass an exam as a result of high pressure study. A week from now an exam in the same subject sprung on them unexpectedly would bowl them over.”
Visiting Reporters
Clarence Darrow’s friend and one-time mistress Mary Field-Parton went to a dinner with Darrow and his “dame friend” this night, and wrote in her diary that she was disappointed by his conduct: “D. treats women as play mates rather than workmates. Great disappointment to me, especially when I know what richness of mind and experiences he could share. Instead cheap, stale jokes! “Soggy wit”! Dull puns.”
Photos
Sources
- Chicago Daily Journal, June 24, 1924
- Chicago Evening Post, June 24, 1924
- Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1924
- Torrance Herald, June 24, 1924
- University of Oregon, Margaret Parton Papers
The Lives and Legends of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold 