For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (25 page)

Medical experts testified also that the defendant suffered from partial insanity. Harold Moyer, a specialist in nervous disorders, believed Emma Simpson to be manic-depressive. She was certainly insane at the time of the killing. Archibald Church, a professor of nervous and mental diseases at Northwestern University, had examined Emma Simpson and found her to display “egregious egotism and lack of self control,” both of which, Church concluded, suggested insanity.
⁴⁹

In his closing speech, Clarence Darrow focused on Elmer Simpson’s raffishly disreputable character. Emma Simpson had married beneath her, Darrow suggested, and she had discovered—too late!—that the man she had wed was an incurable philanderer who cheated on her at every turn. He had married her for her fortune, and just as soon as he had exchanged the matrimonial vows, he had taken up with another woman. No wonder, Darrow continued, appealing to the twelve jurymen, that Emma Simpson had sought to end her misery by shooting her husband—anyone else would have reacted similarly under such provocation! “Does it seem to you, gentlemen, that a person in his or her right mind would pick out a court, a temple of justice, where a dozen persons are gathered, to do a murder?…A large number of women, under the same conditions as Mrs. Simpson faced, would go insane.”
⁵⁰

Darrow’s eloquence worked its customary magic. The jury needed only thirty minutes to agree with his diagnosis of partial insanity. The judge committed Emma Simpson to the Illinois Northern Hospital for the Insane, but her confinement lasted less than a year. A few months after her arrival the hospital psychiatrists decided that Emma Simpson had regained her sanity. She was free to return to Chicago and resume her previous life.
⁵¹

B
Y THE EARLY
1920
S,
Darrow no longer regarded crime as a consequence of economic circumstances. Darrow now looked to biology—understood in its broadest sense—to explain human behavior. Darrow had an autodidact’s awareness of science and scientific theory. His father, Amirus, had an easy familiarity with such nineteenth-century classics as Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
and Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
and had transmitted some of that familiarity to his son. In middle age, Clarence Darrow had read Herbert Spencer’s
First Principles
and had immediately taken Spencer’s evolutionary viewpoint as his own. Darrow was never consistent in his adoption of Spencer’s philosophy: he subscribed to the deterministic belief that mind is contingent on matter yet refused to accept the idea that society need make no attempt to ameliorate the lot of the underprivileged. And, although Darrow had never taken courses in science as an undergraduate at Allegheny College, he had, during the 1910s and 1920s, read omnivorously on scientific topics and had kept abreast with the most recent scientific propositions, especially as they touched on criminology. “I have always leaned strongly toward science,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography, “and longed to give myself over to its study. I know something of astronomy and geology; I know a good deal of biology and psychology…. In that department of science I have spent a great deal of time and labor, and no one can make much of a success of any subject unless he knows a good deal about man himself.”
⁵²

In
Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
, a monograph published in 1922, Darrow attributed criminal behavior to biological determinants. He was, Darrow admitted in the preface, no scientific expert—he had no specialized training in biology or psychology. Yet he had, nevertheless, picked up sufficient science, in the course of a long life, to know that crime was a consequence of biomedical circumstances.
⁵³

It was obvious, according to Darrow, that each individual differed from every other in mental and physical makeup. Such differences originated in the embryo and were modified only slightly in the passage from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood. The complexity of the nervous system, the capacity of the brain, the strength of the instincts and the emotions—everything found in the adult was potential in the nucleated cell. “There is no exception,” Darrow wrote, “to the rule that the whole life, with every tendency, is potential in the original cell…. The child is born with a brain of a certain size and fineness. It is born with a nervous system make up of an infinite number of fine fibers reaching all parts of the body, with fixed stations or receivers like the central stations of a telephone system, and with a grand central exchange to the brain.”
⁵⁴

The metaphor of the body as a telephone system served Darrow’s claim that human action was less a consequence of free will and more a result of the effects of external stimuli. Sensory impressions traveled along neural pathways to register their impact on the brain, and knowledge was no more than an accumulation of sensations. “The child…feels, tastes, sees, hears or smells some object, and his nerves carry the impression to his brain where a more or less correct registration is made.” Each individual operated as a machine might operate; if the machine was defective, then of course it would operate imperfectly. “All of these impressions are more or less imperfectly received, imperfectly conveyed and imperfectly registered. However, he is obliged to use the machine he has. Not only does the machine register impressions but it sends out directions immediately following these impressions: directions to the organism as to how to run, to walk, to fight, to hide, to eat, to drink, or to make any other response that the particular situation calls for.”
⁵⁵

Science and scientism constituted the core of Darrow’s philosophy. Admittedly Darrow’s view of science might have seemed, in the 1920s, slightly outdated and old-fashioned. Darrow had come under the spell of positivism and had never abandoned his faith in a thoroughly mechanistic and materialistic universe. The natural world, according to Darrow, alone constituted reality. There was no room within this world for mental processes independent of materialism. The laws of matter and motion governed the world, and nothing, including mankind, could be exempt from their diktat.
⁵⁶

Science and technology provided the metaphor of the machine—the telephone system—that supplied an accurate understanding of the human condition. It had become a truism, Darrow believed, that scientific law could account for all phenomena, and there was now no reason to believe that human beings were exempt from the regulations governing the natural world. “That man is the product of heredity and environment and that he acts as his machine responds to outside stimuli and nothing else, seem amply proven by the evolution and history of man…. The laws of matter are now coming to be understood. Chance, accident and whim have been banished from the physical world.”
⁵⁷

Science, Darrow believed, had eliminated free agency in human behavior—how could individuals choose their actions if they were susceptible to natural law? Each new scientific fad seemed to confirm Darrow’s faith that an individual acted according to the rules governing the natural world. Endocrinology—the study of the glands and hormonal secretions—was a case in point. The hormones that poured into the bloodstream had a demonstrated effect on human behavior: the proper supply of hormonal secretions seemed to regulate the body precisely as though it were a machine. “Certain secretions,” Darrow wrote in
Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
, “are instantly emptied from the ductless glands into the blood which, acting like fuel in an engine, generate more power in the machine, fill it with anger or fear and prepare it to respond to the directions to fight or flee, or to any type of action incident to the machine. It is only within a few years that biologists have had any idea of the use of these ductless glands or of their importance in the functions of life. Very often these ductless glands are diseased, and always they are more or less imperfect; but in whatever condition they are, the machine responds to their flow.”

Other sciences also captivated Darrow in the years immediately following World War I. Accounts of the research of Jean-Henri Fabre on instinct and its acquisition by insects and arachnids had recently made their way from France to the United States. Fabre had spent his life in obscurity, patiently observing the insects in the countryside around Sérignan, southwest of Montpellier, and publishing his conclusions in
Souvenirs Entomologiques
. Fabre’s predecessors had endowed insects with the ability to reason; but Fabre had demonstrated that their actions were entirely instinctual. The mason bee, the red ant, the dung beetle, the
Sphex
wasp—all caught their prey or provided for their off-spring instinctually. Recognition of Fabre’s work arrived just before his death in 1915—he had been solitary, reclusive, and impoverished—and it resulted in an avalanche of popular works that brought his research to a general audience for the first time. The American public had to wait until 1921 for the first account of Fabre’s work to reach the United States, but that account provoked a torrent of popular articles in the magazines and newspapers in praise of Fabre’s work.
⁵⁸

In a lecture before the Rationalist Society of Chicago in 1921, Darrow drew his own conclusions from a reading of Fabre’s observations of instinct in insects and arachnids. The importance of instinct in the animal world, Darrow stated, provided a clue to its significance in higher forms of life. Human beings believe that they act rationally, but might they not also be subject to instinctual drives? Fabre’s research was grist to Darrow’s deterministic mill—human beings were no more capable of free agency than the mason bee or the red ant.
⁵⁹

Darrow’s exegesis remained vague on such questions as the relative significance of instincts vis-à-vis the effects of hormonal secretions. Nor was it apparent that instinct explained human actions comprehensively enough to enable Darrow so casually to dismiss agency and free will. No matter that his account was vague: Darrow seized every opportunity to proselytize his opinion that science had made the concept of choice redundant. Instinct was one more way for him to push home his point. “Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion…. These instincts and emotions are incident to every living machine and are the motor forces that impel the organism…. Instincts are primal to man. He has inherited them from the animal world.”
⁶⁰

Darrow’s philosophy of human behavior was built on the certitude provided by the sciences. This certitude pointed to a conclusion that, to Darrow at least, seemed inescapable. Objective forces compelled individuals to act. Crime was not the consequence of choice, and therefore punishment was inappropriate and futile. “Before any progress can be made in dealing with crime,” Darrow declared, “the world must fully realize that crime is only a part of conduct; that each act, criminal or otherwise, follows a cause…that however much society may feel the need of confining the criminal, it must first of all understand that the act had an all-sufficient cause for which the individual was in no way responsible, and must find the cause of his conduct, and, so far as possible, remove the cause.”
⁶¹

F
EW OF
D
ARROW’S CLIENTS CARED
one way or the other about his philosophy of behavior. They knew only that he had an extraordinary knack for obtaining the best possible outcome in the courtroom. And so, in May 1924, the parents of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb sought out Clarence Darrow to save their boys. Darrow had accomplished miracles in the courtroom—it would take a miracle for their sons to escape the scaffold.

And Darrow would accept the case, not because the defendants were deserving but because it was the opportunity for which he had been waiting. The trial of Leopold and Loeb would capture the attention of the nation. It would be Darrow’s chance to prove to the world that crime was less a consequence of free will and deliberate choice and more a result of forces that had compelled the boys to an act of murder. Both families had promised him unlimited resources in the defense; Clarence Darrow would use those resources to make his philosophy of crime and punishment a reality.

9 ROBERT CROWE

In recent years the American public has been influenced to some extent by an active, persistent and systematic agitation based on an unfortunate and misplaced sympathy for persons accused of crime. This sympathy forgets the life that was blotted out. It forgets the broken hearted left behind. There should be no sentiment about it. Persons whose existence means death and disaster to others who have done no wrong have no claim upon society for anything—not even for life itself. I believe society should have no hesitancy in springing the trap every time the noose can be put around a murderer’s neck.
¹

Robert Crowe, 18 February 1928

J
ANET
W
ILKINSON SKIPPED UP
the main entrance stairs of her apartment building at 112–114 East Superior Street. She had golden blond hair, cut in a bob; china-blue eyes, set wide apart; a broad forehead, fair complexion, and firm chin—and she always had a smile on her face. No wonder the six-year-old was the darling of the neighborhood! That Tuesday morning, 22 July 1919, she wore a blue sailor frock with a collar edged with pearl buttons and, on her feet, white cotton socks and a pair of black oxfords. Janet had just come from the public playground on Chicago Avenue; she had forgotten to return the metal identification tag issued by the playground and it hung, attached by a clasp, from the edge of her dress.
²

Halfway up the stairs, Janet suddenly paused. One of her neighbors, a thin, bespectacled, middle-aged man, was leaning over the banister looking down, watching her intently as she climbed the steps. Janet continued to walk up the stairs, more slowly now. She recognized the man. The previous December he had shown her some comic books in his apartment, and after she had told her parents, her mother had insistently forbidden Janet to speak to him a second time.
³

Several mothers in the building had complained to the police about Thomas Fitzgerald. He had often befriended children in the neighborhood. On at least three occasions he had exposed himself from the window of his second-floor apartment to girls walking on Superior Street; and a few months earlier, the Morals Court had fined him $100 for indecent behavior.
⁴

17.
ROBERT CROWE.
After studying law at Yale University, Robert Crowe became assistant state’s attorney for Cook County in 1909. He won election as a judge on the Circuit Court in 1916 and served as chief justice of the Cook County Criminal Court in 1919 and 1920.

Now he stood on the landing, still staring down at Janet as she walked timidly up the staircase. Fitzgerald wore rimless glasses over his large brown eyes; he sported a faint mustache under an obtrusive nose, and at that moment his clothes and hair were rumpled and disheveled, as though he had just got out of bed. He was a shy, solitary man with few friends, diffident and awkward in the company of adults. Indeed, everything about his manner expressed a tremulous hesitancy, as though he expected to be contradicted at any moment. Even the few people who knew him well had a disregard for this nervous and vaguely unpleasant man.

Fitzgerald held a box of chocolates in his right hand. Janet looked at the candy, hesitating; Fitzgerald invited her to take one but she silently shook her head. She had remembered her mother’s warning—she was not to talk to this strange man.

As she turned away to walk up the next flight of stairs, Fitzgerald suddenly grabbed the girl by the arms. His apartment door was ajar, only a few feet away. He lifted her up as though she were a doll, a blue-eyed, fair-haired doll, and half dragged, half carried her into the apartment, pushing the door behind him with his foot to close it.

Janet was screaming now, crying and kicking. They were in the bedroom and Fitzgerald began to panic: the window was wide open; surely someone in the street below would hear her cries.

He punched the girl hard in the mouth to stop her screams—anything to stop that noise!—and he felt some of Janet’s teeth break loose under the impact of his blow. He punched her again and noticed the blood on his hand. Fitzgerald grabbed the girl by the throat and squeezed hard. Soon she had stopped crying; her head fell backward and her limp, lifeless body lay diagonally on the bed; minute specks of blood had spattered over her blue dress.
⁵

F
OUR DAYS AFTER
J
ANET’S DISAPPEARANCE,
Fitzgerald broke down and admitted the killing. He told the police that he had hidden the body in the basement of the apartment building, in the space between the wall and the flue, and buried it with coal lying by the furnace.
⁶

The circumstances of Janet’s death seemed bad enough. When a rumor spread that Fitzgerald had raped the girl, public anger in the neighborhood reached a crescendo. On Saturday, 26 July, hundreds of men and women waited through the evening outside the East Chicago Avenue police station for the chance to grab Fitzgerald from his prison cell and lynch him. Even the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, one of the city’s more cautious newspapers, could exclaim that Fitzgerald deserved nothing less than the death penalty: “Every circumstance of the crime was horrible, from the motive and the manner to the agony caused by the concealment of it…. Fitzgerald is in custody with a clear case against him…. There will be a general opinion that he is sane enough to be hanged.”
⁷

The killing had touched the heart of the city. One week after the murder, on Tuesday, 29 July, more than 1,000 spectators turned out to watch the funeral cortege travel the short distance from Janet’s apartment building to Holy Name Cathedral on State Street. Five thousand mourners crammed into the Victorian Gothic cathedral to see the small white coffin carried to the altar by six of Janet’s classmates. Banks of flowers, garlands of roses, lilies, peonies, mignonette, poinsettias—red, white, pink, yellow, blue—were massed at the front of the cathedral; the fragrance filled the air of the sanctuary and bore mute testimony to the sorrow of the city for the sudden death of the little blond girl.
⁸

O
N
21 S
EPTEMBER
1919
THE
trial of Thomas Fitzgerald began in the Criminal Court. The chief justice, Robert Crowe, left no doubt that, despite Fitzgerald’s guilty plea, he was eager to impose a death sentence.

A police physician had diagnosed Fitzgerald as syphilitic and mentally ill—“on the verge of paresis or softening of the brain”—but, nevertheless, Crowe declared, he doubted that there were any mitigating circumstances for such an atrocious killing. Crowe leaned forward over the bench and spat out the words at Fitzgerald standing nervously before him. “If you have any idea,” Crowe shouted, “[that] the court would not impose the death penalty, get rid of that notion…. If you think the court is chicken-hearted, put that idea aside, too. If the evidence shows that hanging is proper there will be no turning aside.”
⁹

The next day, the assistant state’s attorney, Jimmy O’Brien, argued for the death penalty. It had been a brutal, savage killing, he explained. Several of Janet’s teeth had been broken by the force of the blows. The police had discovered spots of blood on the walls of Fitzgerald’s bedroom. Most shocking of all, O’Brien informed the court, medical experts had concluded that Janet had still been alive when Fitzgerald had buried her under the coal in the basement.
¹⁰

It was true, O’Brien conceded, that a guilty plea traditionally mitigated the punishment. No one who pleaded guilty had been sentenced to the gallows in Chicago for several decades. Fitzgerald would be the first such case in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, O’Brien continued, the nature of the crime called for capital punishment.

Thomas Fitzgerald cut a pathetic figure as he stood in the dock awaiting sentence the following day. His police guards had beaten him severely in his cell, bruising his face and arms and kicking him in the shins until his legs bled. As he faced Crowe, Fitzgerald’s fingers twitched and fidgeted; he shifted nervously from one foot to the other, as though this movement would release him from the terror that he felt at his imminent sentence of death. His eyes seemed to have sunk back into his sockets, and his face was colorless; his forehead shone under the bright lights of the courtroom.

“Have you anything to say,” Crowe asked, “before I pronounce sentence upon you for the murder of Janet Wilkinson?”

“I’m sorry. I—I ask forgiveness.”

“Is that all?” Crowe demanded impatiently.

“I ask God to forgive me.”

“Thomas R. Fitzgerald,” Crowe pronounced, in a booming voice that reached the far wall of the courtroom, “I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead on Monday, October 27, at the Cook County jail.”
¹¹

F
OR AN AMBITIOUS POLITICIAN SUCH
as Robert Crowe, it was an entirely appropriate verdict, one that bolstered his reputation as a hanging judge. Crowe, in his brief career on the Criminal Court and, in the 1920s, as state’s attorney for Cook County, was never reluctant to use such episodes for political gain. Jut-jawed and thin-lipped, with a steady gaze and an intimidating manner, Crowe had always been foursquare for law and order. He was regular in manner and regular in appearance: he dressed conservatively, in a gray business suit, white shirt, and dark bow tie, with his brown hair brushed neatly toward the right. In 1919, he had started to wear brown tortoiseshell eyeglasses to compensate for shortsightedness. In another man, those eyeglasses might have softened the appearance, made him more approachable, less minatory, but with Crowe, there was no appreciable effect, nothing that subdued his appearance of fierce, unbending determination and resolve.

Crowe was still only forty years old—the youngest man ever appointed chief justice of the Criminal Court of Cook County—and already he had a reputation as a formidable presence in the hothouse world of Cook County politics. An intensely competent and precise man who valued punctuality as a cardinal virtue, Crowe was also unscrupulous, cynical, cunning, and devious; he regarded the world with a knowing gaze and judged every situation with cold calculation. He was competitive, charismatic, and clever—as a law student at Yale University, he had quickly risen to leadership in the Republican Club; and on his return to Illinois in 1901, he rapidly made his mark as an attorney with the firm of Moran, Mayer, and Meyer.
¹²

His Yale education had given Crowe an intellectual polish and sophistication that distinguished him from his peers. Many attorneys in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century had attended Kent College of Law or one of the less reputable night schools that flourished in the city. Some had even forgone law school and had entered the profession simply by passing the bar exams after private study. Crowe was different from the rest, and he knew he could never be content with the humdrum, workaday concerns of a law practice. In 1909, at the age of twenty-nine, he wangled himself a position as assistant state’s attorney for Cook County.
¹³

This was Crowe’s first step into Chicago politics. It was a modest beginning—the state’s attorney, John Wayman, typically appointed half a dozen assistants each year—but Crowe, during his tenure in Wayman’s office, managed to attract the attention of William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson, a leader of the Republican Party and former member of the City Council. Thompson, a bluff, outspoken, gregarious patrician and accomplished yachtsman, was a brilliant speaker with an appeal that transcended class and ethnic lines. He had served one term as an alderman from the Second Ward but had lost his seat two years later because of redistricting.

In 1915 Thompson won the Republican nomination for the mayoralty. The party bosses had realized that he could attract the middle-class voters, concentrated in the Seventh and Thirty-third wards, with promises of good government, efficiency, and honesty; and they were confident that he could entice the tenement dwellers—Poles in the Sixteenth Ward, Italians in the Nineteenth Ward, African-Americans in the First and Second wards, Russian Jews in the Maxwell Street neighborhood—with vague promises and populist demagogy.

Thompson was just as good on the stump as everyone had hoped. The Republican factions put aside their differences and united around his candidacy. The Democratic candidate, Robert Sweitzer, was a party hack whose German-American heritage and boorish remarks alienated voters and torpedoed his party’s chances at the ballot box. On 6 April 1915, Thompson beat Sweitzer by 149,000 votes. It was a stunning triumph for a candidate whose only previous political experience—a two-year term as alderman—had come thirteen years earlier.
¹⁴