Clarence Darrow wrote to his son Paul: “I have been so busy that I have hardly had time to think of anything but this weird case. Don’t know how I will come out. It is very hard to get a fair hearing. As to fees I will of course get a fair & substantial fee as yet I have no idea how much time it will take. The families are fine people and will do what is right & of course you know I will.”
A friend of Albert Loeb’s reached out to him with sympathy and his theory for the crime: “It seems needless for your friends to tell you that you have been in their thoughts. I have gotten this expression everywhere…This case is so strange, that it must be based upon some sort of pseudo-reality existing in the minds of the boys, quite apart from the world, as it is seen by people who are not meddling in mental experimentations and it has seemed to me, from the beginning. That such a state of mind as I am trying to outline, could exist and could be made plain. It is of course an abnormal state, and yet it is as complete reality to these boys.”
Cook County Jail Lives
Leopold allegedly had some indigestion in the morning and went to see the jail doctor. However when a reporter asked him about it he replied: “I’m all right. Never better.”
The psychiatric examinations continued, allegedly with a “mysterious instrument,” and Benjamin Bachrach visited them, as he explained to reporters: “Just to let the boys know that their lawyers haven’t forgotten them,” as it had been over a week since the lawyers had seen their clients.
Described Pre-Murder
The State questioned some of the women who had taken part in Leopold’s ornithology classes over the years. Clara Friedman, a family friend whose daughter Kay assisted Leopold in his classes recalled that: “he was very logical in all that he did. I could not quarrel with any of his views of life or the reasoning by which he arrived at his conclusions except in the case of his atheism. He said that he had abandoned belief in God at the time of his mother’s death. ‘If there were a God,’ he told me, ‘he would not have taken my mother from me at the time when I needed her most.’”
Edward Rakow Jr., who claimed to have known Loeb for three years while they attended the University of Chicago together, said that the press was accurate about Loeb’s intelligence, saying that “he was one of the best scholars he had ever seen…No matter what the question under discussion, Loeb was sure to have the right answer.” I checked and Rakow had attended the University of Chicago at the same time as Loeb, graduating in 1924.
Sources
- Chicago Daily Journal, June 9, 1924
- Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 9, 1924
- Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1924
- New York Daily News, June 12, 1924
- Northwestern University, Richard Loeb Papers
- University of Minnesota, Clarence Darrow Collection
The Lives and Legends of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold 