March | 2023 | The Lives and Legends of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold

Hello everyone, there’s lots of news to cover today, so I’ll get right into it.

A reader of the site came to me and shared some incredible documents. Basically they saw that the psychiatric reports and confessions were often difficult to read, because they’re just scanned versions of microfilm or papers, so they created text-based, fully searchable, easy to read PDFs out of them and allowed me to share them with you all. My thanks goes out to Lingyu Kong, Jeannie, Yiping Ma, Antoine_Evans and Alina, who prepared the documents. Those can be read here.

For my part, I realized I’ve been neglecting the Non Fiction side of things, especially compared to the amount of work I put into the cataloguing and summarizing of fiction, so I’m trying to rectify that. I’ve started expanding the list of Non Fiction items related to this case that I have listed, I’m currently up to 362, and this number will keep growing as I find time to add more.

I’ve added a page for Dissertations/Thesis’ about the case, which you can see here.

The Documentaries page now includes a list of who was interviewed for each documentary that I’ve been able to watch.

My newest project has been working on creating subject specific reading lists, so if you’d like to deep dive into one particular aspect of the case, I hope to make that a little easier. So far I’ve only done one: gathering together every bit of Nathan Leopold’s writing that I’ve been able to find. It includes a list of fifty articles/books/speeches that Leopold wrote and a sentence or two description of each of them. That list is here, if you’d like to peruse. Let me know if there’s a subject you’d like to see me dive into next!

On the fiction side of things:

I’ve added around 5 new fictional adaptations, which can be seen on the Fiction page. I’m finally almost done with my backlist of fiction books and short stories to read, so additions to this page may be slowing down.
A demo for a new song about Bobby Franks was released by the band Friday Night Flicks and can be listened to here.
A new Leopold-Loeb movie called American Criminals based on Leopold’s autobiography has been announced, the website is here. They’re currently casting.

And in other news:

My book is exactly one month away from publication!

I’ll be speaking at the Elgin Public Museum in Illinois on May 3rd at 7pm about Leopold’s crime and his connections to the museum.

There’s more exciting news to come from my end, but I can’t quite make it public yet. I’ll share details as soon as I can!

Warning: spoilers ahead for The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz and Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Also quite graphic descriptions of murders.

What if I were to tell you that the Hannibal Lecter series may have been shaped in part by Leopold and Loeb? It’s a big claim, so let me explain; does the plot of this book sound familiar to you:

A rugged outdoorsy type named Graham who can get into a killer’s head and sees visions of their murders is sometimes called on by the police to help them catch killers-though some members of the force are skeptical of his abilities. He is brought to crime scenes and given access to evidence, which sometimes results in ‘visions,’ allowing him to understand the killer and their actions. He hates this ‘gift’ and the trauma that comes from witnessing so many murders firsthand.

In this book, Graham is chasing a killer who mutilates bodies and who is obsessed with the works of William Blake. The killer sees himself as one half of a duo and talks to his other half, even if it’s not there, or not even real. He’s extremely strong and has a catchy nickname that the police gave him. He was raised by his grandmother.

There’s a journalist who is trying to defame Graham, and prove that his visions make him unstable, possibly that he is the true killer, driven mad by his work.

In the end, Graham and his significant other defeat the killer, after they are attacked in their home.

If that description reminded you of Thomas Harris’ first novel in the Hannibal Lecter series, Red Dragon, you’d be correct, but it is also true of the Leopold-Loeb inspired Dean Koontz novel The Face of Fear, published under the name Brian Coffey 4 years before Red Dragon.

Of course I’ve selected out the similarities and this makes the novels seem closer than they are, unlike Red Dragon, The Face of Fear spends half of its time in a Die Hard-style skyscraper game of cat and mouse between Graham Harris and the killer, and a perilous series of climbs down the side of the building as Graham and his girlfriend try to escape. Red Dragon is a more traditional serial killer piece, with Will Graham consulting on a number of cases committed by one killer as he tries to help the FBI catch him. This includes trying to get advice from Hannibal Lecter, who Graham caught and put behind bars several years ago.

In Red Dragon, murderer Franics Dolarhyde has a split personality between himself and The Great Red Dragon, which he saw in a painting by William Blake. He tries to please, talks to and fights against the dragon. In contrast, in The Face of Fear there are two distinct killers, though they are posing as one, Frank Bollinger, the main killer, and Anthony Prine, the mystery partner who is revealed at the end. The pair were inspired to kill in part by the poetry of William Blake, the writings of Nietzsche as well as Leopold and Loeb.

The murders themselves are also very different, the killers in The Face of Fear killing young women, while Dolarhyde kills families. Add to that, Thomas Harris said that Dolarhyde was loosely based on the BTK killer, and aspects of Will Graham’s character were taken from FBI agent John Douglas. But still, to me, there are a few too many coincidences for me to rule out the theory.

In some ways it seems as though Thomas Harris borrowed ideas from Fear and tweaked them a bit. Graham Harris’ clairvoyant visions are changed slightly to try and explain them in a scientific way for Will Graham. Frank Bollinger was raised by his doting grandmother who gave him a superiority complex. So Francis Dolarhyde was raised by an abusive grandmother who gave him an inferiority complex. Anthony Prine was born in the south and trained himself to hide his southern accent to fit in. Not sad enough; Dolarhyde was born with a cleft palate and after surgery attempts to avoid talking normally to fit in.

I’ll try to show the similarities with quotes from both books.

FoF refers to a passage from The Face of Fear, RD a passage from Red Dragon. The numbers after them are the page numbers the quotes are from in the versions of the books I’m using.

Descriptions of Graham, the main character:

(FoF 29) Graham Harris was handsome. Thick reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes, heavily crinkled at the corners. Leather skin with sharply carved lines from all the years he had spent in an outdoor life. Five-ten; not tall, but lean and hard. He was thirty-eight, yet he still had a trace of boyish vulnerability about him.

(RD 28) Graham was nearly forty.

(RD 35) The ice-blue eyes were starling in his brown face.

Graham’s vision ability described:

(FoF 17) [Graham is clairvoyant and has psychic visions of murders] “I can see things that have happened-and very occasionally, things that soon will happen-in places where I’ve never been. But I can’t read minds. I can’t explain human motivations.”

(FoF 45) “Usually when I study or touch an item intimately connected with the murder I can pick up on the emotions, the mania, the passion behind the crime. It’s like leaping into a river of violent thoughts, sensations, images.”

(FoF 20) His own power scared him…these inexplicable visions were the ultimate fear.

(RD 152) [It’s said that it’s possible Graham has psychic ability, but he refused to be tested.] “What he has is pure empathy and projection…He can assume your point of view, or mine-and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift.”

Graham visualizing what happened to victims:

(FoF 36) Graham closed his eyes and shuddered. “This…cork…” He was beginning to perspire. He felt ill. He wasn’t receiving a vision, just a strong sense of what had happened, a hunch that was difficult to ignore. “He put the cork…in her right hand and closed her fingers around it. That’s where you found it.”

“Yes.”

(RD 29) This first small bond to the killer itched and stung like a leech. Graham bit the sheet, thinking.

Why did you move them again? Why didn’t you leave them that way? Graham asked…

Did you open their eyes?

Mrs. Leeds was lovely, wasn’t she? You turned on the light after you cut his throat so Mrs. Leeds could watch him flop, didn’t you? It was maddening to have to wear gloves when you touched her, wasn’t it?

Reporter character considering Graham as unstable:

(FoF 79) “For years Harris has been tuning in to murder with the deepest levels of his mind, exposing himself to trauma as few of us ever do. He has been literally delving into the minds of wife killers, child killers, mass murderers…He’s probably seen more blood and violence than most career cops. Isn’t it conceivable that a man, unstable to begin with, could crack from all he violent input? Isn’t it conceivable that he could become the kind of maniac he’s worked so hard to catch?”

(RD 95) “It takes one to catch one,” a high federal official told this reporter. He was referring to Lecter, known as Hannibal the Cannibal,” who is both a psychiatrist and a mass murderer.

OR WAS HE REFERRING TO GRAHAM???

The Tattler has learned that Graham, former instructor in forensics at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., was once confined to a mental institution for a period of four weeks…

The killers being interested in William Blake:

(FoF 7) He was an admirer of William Blake’s poetry; indeed, he fancied himself an intimate spiritual student of Blake’s. [The killers write lines from Blake’s poetry on the walls of some of their victim’s homes]

(RD 81) [Dolarhyde is obsessed with the William Blake painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun] The picture had stunned him the first time he saw it. Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon.

Physical descriptions of the killers:

(FoF 1) He had a thick neck, broad shoulders and the biceps of a young weightlifter. At thirty-seven he was in virtually the same good condition, at least outwardly, as he had been when he was twenty-seven, or even seventeen.

(RD 221) He examined himself carefully while his muscles were pumped up. At forty, he could have competed successfully in regional bodybuilding competitions.

The closeness of the killers:

(FoF 300-301) “I was the other half,” Prine said. “We were identical personalities, Dwight and I…More than that. We were incomplete without each other. We were halves of the same organism.”

(RD 272) From the beginning, he and the Dragon had been one. He was Becoming and the Dragon was his higher self. Their bodies, voices, wills were one.

And perhaps I should have established this sooner, but Leopold and Loeb are mentioned several times during The Face of Fear. The killers are extremely close and call each other by the nicknames Dwight and Billy, perhaps a nod to ‘Dick’ and ‘Babe’. This passage describes their first meeting:

(FoF 242) From the start they weren’t awkward with each other. He felt as if they were twin brothers, as if they shared that mystical oneness of twins in addition to years of daily contact. They talked rapidly, eagerly…It was an exchange of ideas and sentiments that Bollinger had never enjoyed with anyone else. Nothing was taboo. Politics. Religion. Poetry. Sex. Self-appraisal. They found a phenomenal number of things about which they held the same unorthodox opinions. After nine hours they knew each other better than either of them had ever known another human being.

Prine introduces Bollinger to the works of Nietzsche, and they have this exchange:

(FoF 275) “So you read Nietzsche last night. What did you think?”

“I agree with him.”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“Supermen?”

“Especially that.”

The pair are convinced they are Supermen, a superior people, who should rule over the common masses. They also directly compare themselves to Leopold and Loeb:

(FoF 282) “Do you know what Leopold wrote to Loeb before they murdered Bobby Franks? ‘The superman is not liable for anything he may do, except for the one crime that it is possible for him to commit-to make a mistake.'”

And the police also notice the connection, having a four page long conversation about it, which, in part, is below:

(FoF 167-170) Suddenly excited, Enderby said, “Wait a minute. Another case. Two killers. Working together. Chicago. Nineteen twenty-four. Two young men were the murderers. Both sons of millionaires. In their late teens.”

“Leopold and Loeb.”

“You know the case?”

“Slightly.”

“They killed a boy, Bobby Franks. Fourteen years old. Son of another rich man. They had nothing against him. None of the usual reasons. No classic motive. Newspapers said it was for kicks. For thrills. Very bloody murder. But they killed Franks for other reasons. For more than kicks. For a philosophical ideal…They thought they were special. Supermen. The first of a new race. Leopold idolized Nietzsche.”

Frowning, Preduski said, “One of the quotes in there on the bedroom wall is probably from Nietzsche’s work, the other from Blake. There was a quote from Nietzsche written in blood on Edna Mowry’s wall last night.”

“Leopold and Loeb. Incredible pair. They thought that committing the perfect crime was proof that they were supermen. Getting away with murder. They thought that was proof of superior intelligence, superior cunning.

…

“So if the Butcher is two men, we’ve got a new Leopold and Loeb. Killing to prove their superiority.”

“Maybe. But then again, maybe it’s more than that. Something more complex than that.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. But I feel it’s not exactly a Leopold and Loeb sort of thing.”

This not being exactly like Leopold and Loeb is because Bollinger and Prine are killing in the hopes of furthering an agenda, creating mass chaos in New York, setting various factions of the population against each other so that Prine can rise in the ranks of politics and lead as he wishes.

Of course there’s not a direct link to Hannibal Lecter the character, but perhaps there’s a little Frank Bollinger in Francis Dolarhyde, and a little Graham Harris in Will Graham. Then again, maybe I’m totally off base with my Red Dragon theory. But it was still fun to read an engaging thriller with killers based on Leopold and Loeb from such a prominent writer in the genre. I’d recommend it, or its 1990 tv movie adaptation, to anyone looking for a bit of action/thriller fun.

The Lives and Legends of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold

Monthly Archives: March 2023

The Books Are Here!

March 15th Update: Non Fiction Revamp and Lots of News

A Possible Connection Between Hannibal Lecter and the Leopold-Loeb Case

March 1st Update