Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (59 page)

“I went in to do what I could, for sanity and humanity,” Darrow recalled. He viewed the case as a vehicle with which to assault America’s treatment of crime, and in particular its use of capital punishment. And he certainly looked forward to getting paid by two wealthy families. “I will of course get a fair and substantial fee,” he told Paul. “The families are fine people and will do what is right.”
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A
ND SO
L
EOPOLD
and Loeb met their lawyer. “My first impression was horror,” Leopold recalled. “On the other side of the bars stood one of the least … impressive-looking human beings I have ever seen.

“The day was warm and Darrow was wearing a light seersucker jacket,” said Leopold. “Only this one looked as if he had slept in it. His shirt was wrinkled, too, and he must have had eggs for breakfast that morning. I could see the vestiges. Or perhaps he hadn’t changed shirts since the day before. His tie was askew … and his unruly shock of lusterless, almost mousey hair kept falling over his right eye. Impatiently he’d brush it back with his hand … He looked for all the world like an innocent hayseed, a bumpkin.…

“Could this scarecrow know anything about the law?” Leopold asked himself. “He didn’t look as if he knew much of anything!”

The killers had seen to it that the prosecution had the requisite evidence to hang them. Their only apparent course was a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Yet the two young men had lived lucid lives for months, made plans for summer vacation, socialized with friends and family, and displayed no signs of craziness as they carried out minute preparations to collect a $10,000 ransom. Once in custody, they had spoken frankly and intelligently—arrogantly, in fact—about their deeds to the state’s prosecutors and psychiatrists, and explicitly rejected any notion that they were ill.

The defendants were arraigned and pled not guilty. The case was set for arguments on July 21 and trial on August 4. “Never did I have a more hectic life,” Darrow recalled. His apartment was crammed with legal and medical experts. “This case is quite perplexing, and will most likely be a hard struggle to save the lives of the boys,” he told Jessie.
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As the trial approached, Darrow became convinced that his clients would do best to embrace a time-honored tradition: to offer a plea of guilty and throw themselves on the mercy of the court. In Chicago there was precedent for treating young criminals mercifully: no teenaged killer who pled guilty to murder had ever been executed. If Dickie and Babe were stockyard toughs who had killed a neighborhood boy and confessed, Crowe would almost certainly have cut a deal to clear the case, and sent the pair away for life.

The problem was finding someone to accept the plea. Crowe would not: he was running for reelection that year, and his office was working overtime to keep the city frenzied. Nor could Darrow wager that a jury would be merciful to his monsters. That left the judge. Darrow had known the sixty-three-year-old
John Caverly for decades, since the jurist was a lawyer for the Democratic machine, giving Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John advice in the First Ward. “Johnny is a good boy,” Kenna had told former mayor Carter Harrison Jr. “He ain’t shanty-Irish. He comes from good people, has an education, is a good lawyer and is clean. That is what we want him to be.” Even after he became a judge, Caverly was a fixture at the raucus First Ward balls, and when the mobster
Big Jim Colosimo was gunned down in 1920, Caverly served as an honorary pallbearer.

Darrow saw Caverly as “kindly and discerning in his views of life”—a Catholic whose sympathies might lead him to spare the defendants. The defense would present an array of medical testimony, Darrow decided, but not to a jury. He would offer it to Caverly as mitigating evidence. It was a
rare strategy, but Darrow had employed it to save lives before. “Boys, we are going to ask you to do something that may strike you as very strange,” Darrow told Loeb and Leopold, swearing them to secrecy. “It’s the only way … We’re going to plead you guilty.”
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On July 21, Darrow was recognized to offer what motions he might make. “It is unnecessary to say that this case has given us many perplexities and sleepless nights,” he said, speaking softly. “We want to state frankly here that no one in this case believes that these defendants should be released. We believe they should be permanently isolated from society, and if we as lawyers thought differently, their families would not permit us to do otherwise.”

The reporters leaned forward to catch every word. What was he up to? Darrow reached under his jacket and tucked his thumbs in his suspenders. He tossed his shoulders back. “After long reflection and thorough discussion we have determined to make a motion in this court … to withdraw our plea of not guilty and enter a plea of guilty,” Darrow said.

Reporters dashed for telephones. A bailiff called for order as the spectators voiced their shock. Loeb and Leopold seemed indifferent—Darrow had broken the news that morning—but
Jacob Loeb, head bowed, was weeping. Nathan Leopold Sr. sat stiffly, lost in pain.

“Your honor,” Darrow told Caverly, “we dislike to throw this burden upon this court, or any court. We know its seriousness and its gravity, but a court can no more shirk responsibilities than attorneys. And, while we wish it could be otherwise, we feel that it must be as we have chosen.…

“The statute provides that evidence may be offered in mitigation of the punishment, and we shall ask at such time as the court may direct that we may be permitted to offer evidence as to the mental condition of these young men, to show the degree of responsibility they had and also to offer evidence as to the youth of these defendants and the fact of a plea of guilty as further mitigation,” said Darrow. “With that we throw ourselves upon the mercy of this court and this court alone.”

It was, said the
Daily News
, “a sensational turnabout.”

“If these boys were poor, I am confident I could get a verdict of acquittal,” Darrow said, working the reporters who gathered around him after court was adjourned. “Their wealth is a tremendous handicap.” He saw the need to relieve the pressure on Caverly, and so Darrow had the Loeb and Leopold families issue a public statement. They would not use their
money “to stage an unsightly legal battle … in an attempt to defeat justice,” they promised. “There will be no large sums of money spent, either for legal or medical talent.”
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“You have no doubt been surprised at the turn we have taken in the Loeb-Leopold case,” Darrow wrote Paul. “We have concluded it is the most hopeful way of saving the boys’ lives.” But his expectations were low. “It is doubtful if any way will accomplish it,” Darrow told his son. “The papers have been so rotten that the feeling runs high.”
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I
N THE MIDST
of that chaotic summer, Mary Field Parton arrived. Her husband, Lem, had called upon his friends in journalism to get her what both hoped would be a career-boosting assignment.

“Left for Chicago on 20th Century. Full of hope!” she wrote in her diary on the train from New York. “Get a story from Darrow on this strange murder … Loeb and Leopold, rich boys, precocious, everything to live for—kill a little boy of 14, ‘for the thrill’ they say. Whole country, foreign countries, avid for news—for explanation … Darling Lem put this one for me.”

Mary arrived in Chicago on June 17 with her nine-year-old daughter, Margaret, in tow and was welcomed by the “same old Darrow … chuckling at the human race whose elephant feet and ostrich head he so loathes—and pities.” But her dreams of a big exclusive were misplaced. “Terribly disappointed,” she wrote in her diary on June 20. “Darrow will not give me anything. Nor will he see my position. I too am employed … Oh hell—he is like all business men! Business first.”

A few days later, Mary dined with Darrow, University of Chicago sociologist
Ellsworth Faris, and “some dame friend of Darrow’s.” It was “a stupid, tiresome Babbitty affair,” she told her diary. “Cheap, stale jokes! Soggy wit! Dull puns. Invited to a banquet and taken to a one-arm lunch counter!” She blamed the presence of Darrow’s other dame. He was “at his worst when he is with two women,” she wrote. “With one, his wisdom, his philosophy, his companionship is possible,” but otherwise he “treats women as playmates rather than workmates.”

Lem, in a letter, tried to cheer her up. “Don’t be unhappy, Mary, about not turning up the big yarn. It was clearly understood that this was a short-end gamble, and it is understood that Darrow is in a position where it might
be ruinous for him to play any favorite,” he wrote. But as high as she had been on the journey to Chicago, Mary was that low returning to New York.

At some point, Ruby learned of the visit. As she remembered things, Mary had arrived with a suitcase, demanding access, and Darrow had ordered a bailiff to send the “bloodsucker” packing. “She had a mealy, insinuating and misleading manner,” said Ruby. But unless Mary was lying to her diary—and recognizing Darrow’s tendency to reach out for solace in the tension of a big trial—there was probably more to the visit than Ruby knew, or admitted.

At home in New York, Mary kept track of the case and worked to knit a magazine piece from the string she had collected. “Wise Darrow—of course no jury could try that case without prejudice … I’ll bet the judge gives them life,” she told her diary. “Wise saturnine Darrow.”
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C
AVERLY CALLED THE
sentencing phase of the case to order on July 23. Like many of the big trials in Darrow’s career, it took place in sweltering weather. The sixth-floor courtroom was tightly packed, and a few electric fans gave meager relief. Pillars blocked the view of many spectators. Still, hundreds of people were turned away, and out-of-town reporters begged for the little pink ticket, signed by the judge, that would give them access. Young women, hoping to glimpse “Angel Face Dickie,” as the Hearst papers called him, lingered for hours at the “bridge of sighs” that spanned the alley between the county jail and the Criminal Courts Building.

Leopold and Loeb smoked cigarettes, lighting one from another, as they waited to enter the courtroom. “Are you nervous?” someone asked Babe. “Do I look it?” he asked, with a raspy laugh. As the trial went on, the newspapers would describe the defendants’ attitude as “chipper” and “debonair,” “jaunty” and “facetious.” Of the two killers, Loeb seemed slightly more worried. Leopold made plans to write a book before their hanging and was drafting the protocol for an experiment in which, after his body was hauled down from the gibbet, scientists could try to contact his spirit. He was certain they would fail.

Crowe opened the proceedings with a florid description of the wealthy ingrates who had committed such a repellent crime. The “cautious, crafty, cruel and vicious” youths had committed “the most cruel, cowardly, dastardly murder ever … in the annals of American jurisprudence,” he said.
Because he could identify them,
Bobby Franks was “struck four times over the head with this cold chisel,” said Crowe, “and then the man in the back seat grabbed this little, fragile, dying, innocent boy and pulled him back, shoved a gag down his mouth … and so held him until life left this little fragile body.”

The prosecutor was trying not so much to persuade Caverly as to keep the public pressure on him. That became abundantly clear when Crowe described how Leopold had boasted that his wealthy family could hire slick lawyers, bribe jurors, or “get a friendly judge” to evade justice. The prosecutor would return to the “friendly judge” comment time and again in the course of the trial. The implication was as evident as it was ugly: if Caverly was to rule in the boys’ favor, it would be because he was bought by their families’ wealth and influence.

The judge didn’t like it, and Darrow, sensing that, responded. Crowe had displayed “poor grace” when giving a speech that “meant only to appeal to the passion of man,” said Darrow, thumbs in his suspenders, rocking on his heels. It was a “lurid painting … made for nothing excepting that a hoarse cry of angry people may somehow reach these chambers.” The defense would have objected, Darrow told Caverly, except that it knew the judge would disregard Crowe’s tactics, and instead do “what is just, fair and merciful.”

Indeed, Darrow was as cool as Crowe had been hot. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets, and gazed hard at the floor. It was all a matter of precedent, Darrow said. “We shall insist in this case, your Honor, that terrible as this is—that terrible as any killing is—it would be without precedent if two boys of this age should be hanged by the neck until dead,” he said. “It would be without precedent … if on a plea of guilty this should be done.”

The themes had been sung; what followed was adornment and elaboration. In the coming weeks, Crowe would call dozens of witnesses to illustrate, in detail, the horror of the crime. And Darrow would parry, call for calm, offer more palatable explanations for murder, and return, again and again, to the age of his two lost boys. “His arguments and pleadings had for their purpose the building up of an atmosphere in which the judge might feel justified in following a tradition, and the public would acquiesce,”
Victor Yarros said.

Crowe began the first day with the coroner, who described the victim’s
wounds. Then the prosecutor brought the boy’s parents to the stand. It was the first time that the public had seen
Flora Franks since her son’s funeral. She was a figure of “listless sorrow … tragic and valiant … like some graven thing in mournful bronze,” the
Tribune
said. Stoically, the parents identified the bits of clothing—a sock, a buckle, shoes—that Bobby had been wearing on the day he died.

Dickie Loeb marveled at his own cold heart. One would think, he said to himself, that this wrenching testimony would evoke some kind of sympathy. But “I did not have any feeling,” he discovered. “There is nothing inside me.”