The Perfect Crime In The 1920's

It was the crime of the century in the 1920’s, it was committed by two wealthy college men, Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Lobe. They wanted to prove that they were smart enough to get away with murder. They said it would be the perfect crime and went on to perform the crime for the thrill of it, “To kidnap a child would be an act of daring—and no one, Loeb proclaimed, would ever know who had accomplished it.” (Baatz 1). It was indeed not the “perfect crime” they imagined. On May 21, 1924, they kidnaped Bobby Franks a fourteen-year-old boy, bludgeoned him to death in a rental car, and then dumped his body into a culvert in the next town over. The crime that had been written about hundreds of times “These varied texts, first published in 1924 and then in the years since, have attempted to tell the "tale" of the murder or, more often, have attempted to tell the tale of the murderers, Nathan …show more content…
The crime was “one of the most intriguing murders in the history of Cook County” (Baatz 3). Crowe knew that he had a chance to make the case an advantage for him. He would be running for mayor in the next term, and he knew that the death penalty would look good in the eyes of the public. He was right about the publics ideas of the case. People were starting to enjoy learning of the gruesome nature of the crime. The publics morality had changed just recently. The traditional ideas that people originally had, were replaced by ones of self-indulgence and “The murder of Bobby Franks took place at a time when American urban society was in popular forms of leisure that were dramatically altering the way people encountered and expressed sexuality in the public sphere.” (Churchill 291-292). Crowe had a challenge though, he was up against the best and most expensive lawyer in Chicago at the