Leopold, Loeb, and Luigi

“Leopold” and “Loeb” sound like the proprietors of a furniture store, but the murder they committed was the big story of 1924. Some ­newspapers at the time called it “the crime of the century.” The 19- and 18-year-old Chicago teens had much in common with Luigi Mangione, alleged killer of United Healthcare’s CEO 100 years later: They were young; they were from wealth; theirs was a daylight street crime; and they had no personal gripe with their victim.

Leopold and Loeb’s murder of a 14-year-old boy was so ghastly that even The New York Times kept it on the front page for three days. Space fails me to cite details of the ­“perfect crime,” but it unraveled faster than you can say, “Haman was hanged on his own gallows” (Esther 7:10; Proverbs 21:30). So overwhelming was the evidence against them (much of it supplied by the braggadocious boys themselves) that the fathers begged their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, to try for life imprisonment to save the teens from death by hanging.

Darrow wasn’t in it for the money. He was a true believer. Introduced to Darwinism through Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, he became its most high-profile apostle, arguing that crime is a result of economic factors like poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. “Free moral agency is a myth, a delusion, a snare,” Darrow wrote in 1915. Thus minded, he proceeded to exonerate anarchists, gangsters, Communists, a rapist, a murderer, a crooked politician, and a pimp.

Fashions change, and so did Darrow. He eventually adopted a biological, and then a psychological, etiology of criminality. Endocrinology became the cutting-edge explanation of human behavior, followed by Freud’s theories of warring inner urges. For the Chicago trial, the rising star attorney lined up a phalanx of prominent psychiatrists from all over the country to prove the murderers were not in their right minds at the time of their heinous acts.

Are we merely the product of our influences? That question hung over the criminal proceedings, and the whole nation wrestled with it. Dickie Loeb had devoured crime novels for years, and Nathan Leopold came under the spell of Nietzsche’s ideal of Übermensch, or Superman, a man who by virtue of his superiority over other men is emancipated from common morality.

Prosecutor Robert Crowe was in a Catch-22. He was determined that the boys should swing from a rope, but he also understood that the details of the crime were so gruesome, and the defendants so eerily lacking in remorse, that it all could play into the hands of the insanity plea. After all, any person capable of perpetrating such evil on a child for no personal or financial gain (they wrote a ransom note, but that was only to throw the cops off the scent) must by definition be insane.

But Darrow stunned the court and the country by having the teens change their plea from “not guilty” to “guilty.” The state’s case was so powerful Darrow chose to gamble that a judge was less likely than a jury to sentence the pair to death. He was right, and the pair were handed life in prison plus 99 years. (Epilogue: In 1936 Loeb was murdered by a fellow inmate, and Leopold was released in 1958 after serving 33 years, dying in Puerto Rico in 1971.)

All the parties are gone now—Leopold and Loeb, Darrow, the salivating press with their flashing camera bulbs, the mobs of curiosity seekers gawking daily at Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Court. But the question still hovers over the country: Are men free or determined? Can we choose or are we hapless products of millions of years of mutations or psychological forces beyond our control? When a man is “taken captive” by the devil to do his will (2 Timothy 2:26), is not that captivity preceded by a thousand thousand micro-choices in the interplay of God’s pursuing and that man’s rejecting of His pursuit?

The “God is dead” culture has only metastasized in the century since then. We are back to the dark days of Wild West morality summed up in Judges 17:6 and 21:25: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

Scripture says, “God commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). That implies that all people are able to repent. God is not perverse, to issue a command and then withhold the ability to obey it. “Turn away from evil and do good,” says the Lord (Psalm 34:14), who is always pursuing and who takes no pleasure in the perishing of anyone (2 Peter 3:9).