Nathan Leopold Research Paper

Imagine finding a ransom note one day, telling you your son was taken and you must follow the directions given to get him back. Sadly, that is exactly what happened to Jacob Franks and Flora Franks. Murder has always been a big issue in big cities like Chicago. People are shot or stabbed in the heat of the moment, but not as common is a planned murder. There are many different reasons people kill other people, greed, anger, drugs, revenge, even self-defense, but the reason Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed Bobby Franks was for a completely different reason; to see if they could get away with it. In Chicago during this time there hadn’t been a lot of serial killers, just random murders, other than the infamous H.H. Holmes, so when people

Leopold having an IQ of 210, and Loeb also having a high IQ but not as high as Leopold’s. Since they were so smart they skipped grades in school. Leopold graduated from the University of Chicago at the age of 18 and Loeb even graduated from University of Michigan at the age of 17. Not only were they super smart, but they were also part of some of the richest families in Chicago at the time. Loebs dad was a lawyer and Leopold was the son of a wealthy german immigrant. The boys were fairly healthy, except Leopold a couple months prior started getting headaches, so he was prescribed reading glasses and when the headaches went away he stopped wearing them. Loeb and Leopold became good friends, but they had nothing in common. Eventually, Loeb allowed Leopold to commit petty crimes with him in exchange for sex. They committed small crimes such as vandalism, which led to theft and arson. Loeb and Leopold both enjoyed crime, and they were disappointed in a sense that they weren’t getting any attention from the media. Because of this they decided they wanted to try something even bigger than petty theft, or arson. They wanted to see if they could get away with murder. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb started crafting a plan for the “perfect murder”. They decided on the murder weapon, how to dispose of the body and everything else they’d need to get away with it. The planning took about 7 months until it was finished. The only thing they

Even Darrow defended someone who was arrested with murder, Mr. Patrick Eugene Prendergast, and he pleaded for insanity, his whole family was known to be crazy, but he was still given capital punishment, which is the death sentence. The reason the trial with Leopold and Loeb was so important was because it was one of the first cases in Illinois where the insanity plea worked. It also helped show the importance of how capital punishment is seen more as revenge, rather than “transformative justice”. In other words, the death sentence is really only a way to get revenge and not a way you can help a person. After this case and many more cases, Illinois has finally prohibited the death sentence in 2011. It is important for there to not be the death sentence because like previously mentioned, all you’re doing is getting revenge, not helping anyone. In a sense, we aren’t any better than the person being killed. We are basically killing someone because they killed someone. So because of the murder trial of Bobby Franks, the plea for insanity has been used more and has worked