Yet on May 21, 1924, they did something appalling: They kidnapped a 14-year-old student named Bobby Franks, murdered him, dumped his body in a drainage ditch at Wolf Lake, several miles southeast of Chicago, and then tried to extract $10,000 in ransom from his parents. They were intelligent and had already graduated from first-class colleges.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were sons of Chicago's Jewish aristocracy, youths - Leopold was 19 and Loeb 18 - who had been denied little in life and who gave every evidence of having brilliant futures. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Set against the backdrop of the 1920s-a time of prosperity, self-indulgence, and hedonistic excess in a lawless city on the brink of anarchy- For the Thrill of It draws the reader into a world of speakeasies and flappers, of gangsters and gin parties, with a spellbinding narrative of Jazz Age murder and mystery. But the families of the confessed murderers hired Clarence Darrow, entrusting the lives of their sons to the most famous lawyer in America in what would be one of the most sensational criminal trials in the history of American justice.
When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were intellectuals-too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them.
It was a crime that shocked the nation: the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience.
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