April 15th Update: Book Release and Website Updates

The day has finally arrived, my Leopold biography has been unleashed onto the world!

To coincide with the book coming out I’m planning on giving some talks in the coming months, and information about those will be able to be found on this page.

I’ve been working on updating the website, doing some editing and adding to pages that I haven’t touched in years! Notably, many of the ‘Their Lives‘ pages have had minor changes, the FAQ page has some new additions and while I had hoped to add about a dozen more people to the Friends page, I had to start travelling before I could complete it. But that’ll get finished next week.

I have so many plans and hopes for the continuing growth of this site, though I may be a little slow as I work on the presentations and interviews that come with the book release. Soon enough I hope to be back to my normal research routine and sharing my findings with you all.

Happy spring!

The Books Are Here!

Surprise! It appears that for people who pre-ordered my book through my publishers website, copies of my book are starting to arrive early!

If you get your copy soon, I hope you enjoy!

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

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!

March 1st Update

Hello everyone, I hope March is starting out well for you all.

I feel I need to…explain today’s post, and even apologize for it. It’s not something I intended to write, and I doubt I’ll do anything like it again. It’s only vaguely Leopold-Loeb connected, it’s mostly an odd jumble of theories and quotes from books that are only maybe distantly related to the case. But it just jumped out at me as I read and I figured what do I have a website for if not to post my inane ideas on? At least every so often.

In other news, the movie Rope seems to be showing at some local theatres this month for its 75th anniversary, congratulations to those in Detroit and Charlottesville, catch them if you can.

I’m working on some website updates which should go live in a couple weeks, and I have some other projects on the backburner which I’ll be able to update everyone about once I have more information.

January 24th Update: Book Coupon and Other News

Hey all, I wanted to share this coupon code (RLFANDF30) with you to get 30% off my book. This only works if you order through my publisher’s website, and only applies to pre-orders (books ordered before April 15th).

Now for some website news…

I posted a new page about Leopold-Loeb trading cards (yes they exist)

I also wanted to share that I’ve finally finished uploading all of the non-Chicago public domain newspaper photos to my photo database, so I’m hoping to make that available to the public at the beginning of next month!

And I have a tumblr now, where I’ll be posting more casual updates and info.

I hope everyone’s doing well and keeping warm!

Advanced Review Copies of my Book Are Now Available!

Hello everyone, I have a very exciting update to share: as of this morning, an electronic version of my book is available to be read and reviewed on the website NetGalley!

You have to sign up for a free account, and put in a request for the ebook which will be accepted or denied by my publisher (I have no say in it, unfortunately.) Priority is given to people who are librarians, booksellers or professional reviewers, but regular readers will also be considered as well.

Please note that this isn’t the final version of the book and won’t reflect some changes and additions which have been made since.

If you’re interested, you can request it here.

Good luck to everyone who tries for an early read!

September 15th Updates

Hello all! I’m sorry for the lack of post today, but I thank you all for your patience. I’m nearly finished indexing and proofreading my manuscript, so I should be back on track to get out a new post on October 1st. I’m hoping to do three thematically spooky posts throughout the month delving into some of the supernatural aspects of the case, so stay tuned.

Exciting news: some advanced reviews have started arriving for my book, you can see them here (under the Reviews tab).

I also may have found a Japanese movie from 1960 and a Japanese short story from 1925 that were inspired by the case, but will have to do a little more digging to find out if that’s true-after my indexing is finished, that is!

I hope everyone’s been having a good month, thanks for everything.

September 1st Updates

Site Updates

• An article about Loeb’s friend Lorraine Nathan has been posted here.
• The 1988 play Prisoners has been added to the Fiction and Theatre pages.

Book News

• I’ve received a PDF of my galley proofs (what the book roughly will look like) and I’ll be spending the next three weeks proofreading and making my index. Because of this, the September 15th post will likely be delayed, sorry about that! (Honestly it was a miracle that I got Lorraine ready in time.)

Leopold-Loeb News

• Nothing but the Night by Greg King and Penny Wilson, a book which purports to challenge everything you thought you knew about the case, will be published on September 20th.

My Book is Available for Pre-Order

I have some very exciting news to share; my biography of Nathan Leopold is now available for pre-order, both through my publisher’s website and Amazon. The book doesn’t have a cover yet (my publisher and I are working on it), and won’t be out until April 15, 2023, but I wanted to provide the details that are available.

Edit: (7/15/2022) My book has a cover now, enjoy!

Title

Arrested Adolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold

Summary

Nathan Leopold seemed to live a charmed life: a published, polyglot college graduate by the time he was 18 and from a prominent, wealthy Chicago family. So it was a shock to everyone when he and his lover, Richard Loeb, confessed to killing their 14-year-old neighbor Bobby Franks “for a thrill.”

During the summer of 1924 the world watched in fascinated horror as the pair were defended by the famous Clarence Darrow in what many labeled “the trial of the century.” There was a massive public outcry when the murderers were spared the death penalty, and once they were behind bars, most hoped they would never be heard from again.

33 years after the murder, it seemed that Nathan Leopold was a changed man. In prison he ran a high school and library, worked as a nurse and helped find a cure for malaria. He was deemed rehabilitated and paroled to a tiny town in the mountains of Puerto Rico. There he got a degree in social work, raised funds to build a hospital and advocated for the abolishment of prisons and capital punishment. When he died in 1971 there was an outpouring of support for the “gentle” “reformed” killer. Yet his life was not what it seemed.

100 years after the murder, this groundbreaking new biography uses previously unseen archival collections this biography looks at the full life of Nathan Leopold to reveal the motivations behind Bobby’s death and the secrets kept hidden from history.

Pages (approx.)

340

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: Childhood

Chapter 1: Growing Up

Chapter 2: A New Relationship

Chapter 3: Wild Lives

Part Two: Crime

Chapter 4: Planning

Chapter 5: Execution

Chapter 6: Caught

Part Three: Sentencing Hearing

Chapter 7: Incrimination

Chapter 8: The Hearing Begins

Chapter 9: The Hearing Ends

Part Four: Prison

Chapter 10: A New Code

Chapter 11: Turbulence

Chapter 12: The Prime of Life

Chapter 13: Loss

Chapter 14: Depression and New Hope

Chapter 15: Image Rehabilitation

Chapter 16: Parole

Part Five: Freedom

Chapter 17: A New Life

Chapter 18: Emerging from Seclusion

Chapter 19: Freedom

Chapter 20: Notoriety Becomes Celebrity

Chapter 21: High Life

Chapter 22: Decline and Death

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

Thanks for all the support, I’m really excited to be able to give out more information as we get closer to the publication date!

June 2022 Updates

My Book Update

-Thank you to everyone for being understanding about the hiatus I took while I worked on my book. I’m happy to report that my manuscript has been submitted and is now in production, which means a few months off for me before I have to start the next round of proof-reading, etc. This should give me a lot more time to work on this site!

Website Updates

-I’ve added around two dozen new entries to the main Fiction page and have reorganized it to hopefully make navigation easier.

-I’ve added a Poetry page to the Fiction section.

-I’ve added an Other page to the Fiction section, which gathers together the fictional works that I’ve seen claimed are based on Leopold-Loeb, but which I’m not sure about, missing fiction that was planned and never made or lost to time, fiction which is based off a Leopold-Loeb adaptation but not the case itself and honorable mentions-which used to be on the main fiction page.

-I’ve posted a review of Hollow Fires, a new modernized young adult book inspired by the case.

Leopold-Loeb News

-The popular podcast Last Podcast on the Left has begun a Leopold-Loeb series. Be warned that this is a comedy podcast, is very inaccurate and makes highly offensive jokes about sensitive subjects.

-The Leopold-Loeb book Nothing But the Night by Greg King and Penny Wilson is on NetGalley, so if you have an account, you can request to get an electronic advanced reader’s copy.