Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two uncommonly matched friends with a high intellectual perspective. Paired these two boys thought that their high IQs were no match to the common folk they lived amongst. So they decided to play games to prove what they could get away with.
Over the course of the next four years, they committed robbery, vandalism, arson and petty theft, but this was not enough for Loeb. He dreamed of something bigger. A murder, he convinced his friend, would be their greatest intellectual challenge. They worked out a plan during the next seven months. For a victim, they chose a 14 year old boy named Bobby Franks. He was the son of the millionaire Jacob Franks, and a distant cousin of Loeb. They were already acquainted with the boy and he went happily with them on that May afternoon. They drove him to within a few blocks of the Franks residence in Hyde Park then suddenly grabbed him, stuffed a gag in his mouth and smashed his skull four times with a chisel. He fell to the floor and bled to death in the car.When the brief bit of excitement was over, Leopold and Loeb casually drove away, stopped for lunch and then ended up near a culvert along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. After dunking the boy’s head underwater to make sure that he was dead, they poured acid on his face (so that he would be hard to identify) then stuffed his body into a drainpipe.
http://www.prairieghosts.com/leopold.html
Although their plans to conceal their identities and collect a large ransom were elaborate and intricate, Leopold and Loeb were caught almost immediately because Nathan Leopold dropped a pair of glasses near to where the body of Bobby Franks had been left. The glasses had a special patented spring for the expensive horned rim frame which had been sold in only one place in Chicago, and purchased by only three people, including Nathan Leopold. Once in custody, both Leopold and Loeb showed no remorse and confessed in great detail to the crime, both to the authorities and to the press.
Their friendship had been marked by fantasies and delusions of grandeur, highly ritualized games with elaborate plots and counterplots, and the planning and carrying out of previous criminal activities together. Their friendship also had overtones of homosexuality. Several books have been written about the case, and at least four feature films have been based on the circumstances of the crime.
http://homicide.northwestern.edu/crimes/leopold1/
Life in Prison:
Richard Loeb was himself murdered by fellow prisoners in 1936. Nathan Leopold appealed for parole in 1955, represented by attorney Elmer Gertz, and left prison in 1958.
http://www.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org/?section=RecArchivePage&RecArchivePage=leopold_and_loeb
Movies:
Never the Sinner.
Rope
Murder by Numbers
Swoon
Funny Games
Off Broadway Production Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story.
All the films use different names and ways that the victim were killed, but the plot and the motive are kept the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb#Impact_on_popular_culture
