Murder is an unforgivable and unthinkable crime. On May of 1924, two young boys kidnapped and murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks by asphyxiation and repeated blunt force trauma to the head. It was a ruthless killing. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were the first known people to murder for thrill, causing nationwide terror during The Great Depression.
As teens, Leopold and Loeb had their whole life perfectly set ahead of them. Leopold was a nineteen year old genius. He studied law at the University of Chicago, and his father was a highly respected millionaire. Loeb’s father was a wealthy executive at Sears. When Loeb was seventeen, he became the youngest person to ever graduate from the University of Michigan. The two had been best friends
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( Newman “Leopold and Loeb” ) Leopold and Loeb pleaded guilty, and gave all the details of their planning and murder to the judge. They had been planning the murder since they were fifteen years old. Both boys admitted to an obsession with crime and wanted to feel the thrill and vertigo of murdering someone. ( Hartman “Leopold and Loeb, Trial of” ) Like Russian roulette, they choose their victim at random. They prowled the streets in Kenwood for many hours, waiting to find the perfect person to lure. When Loeb spotted Bobby Franks around 5 pm, the two offered him a ride home, knowing that he would agree since the boys had a good reputation in the town. When Bobby sat in the car, either Leopold or Loeb ( it was never verified ) stabbed him in the head repeatedly with a blunt chisel while the other drove onward. When Bobby did not succumb to the beatings, they forced a cloth on his mouth until he died of suffocation. After Bobby was dead, the pair drove to the state border of Illinois and Indiana, where they dumped his body in a culvert. They removed all of Franks’s clothing and poured hydrochloric acid on his body and face to make potential identification harder. After burning his clothes in a furnace at Loeb's house, they socialized with Leopold’s father until he went up to sleep. (Koopmans