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University Daily Kansan Thursday, March 14. 1963
Leopold Pays Debt to Society Parole Board Sets Him Free
(Editor's note; Yesterday, the Illinois Pardon and Parole Board released Nathan Leopold from his parole. Below is a background story compiled by United Press International which briefly recounts the "Crime of the Century.")
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Thirty-nine years ago Judge John R. Caverly sat before two good-looking, brilliant teen-agers and told them that for their atrocious crime they should never be free again.
The teen-agers were Richard Loeb, the leader of the two, and shy and withdrawn Nathan Leopold. They calculatedly had killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in what came to be known as the "Crime of the Century."
LOEB DIED in a prison fight in 1936 in a sordid affair that reportedly involved sexual perversion.
Yesterday, Leopold was freed from his parole, his debt to society paid in full.
The killing of Franks was the story of the decade during the Roaring,
Riotous. 20s. The boy's head had been chiseled and his body stuffed in a culvert. Loeb and Leopold demanded a $10,000 ransom even after the lad was dead.
FRANKS' parents—wealthy South Side Chicago residents—spent huge sums of money to insure that the killers would be sent to the gallows.
Leopold and Loeb also came from wealthy, prominent families. Both were avid readers of Arthur Schopenhauer, the pessimistic German philosopher, and Friedrich Nietsche, the apostle of a "Supreman."
By night, they raided each other's fraternity houses at the University of Chicago and set fire to buildings.
DURING THE Franks' trial, prosecuting Attorney Robert E. Crowe called them "a pair of snakes." That they would die for their "perfect crime" was a foregone conclusion for many.
But Clarence Darrow, the brilliant defense attorney, his place in history
PARIS — (UPI) — Leaders of France's 200,000 striking coal miners today rejected as inadequate the government's decision to appoint a commission to study the lag in miners' wages.
French Strike Continues
As the miners' strike in defiance of the government requisition order entered its third week, President Charles de Gaulle himself took over direction of the government's long-term plan to fend off the first major labor threat to his authority.
IT WAS NOTED that the government "still has not made a pronouncement" on the miners' claim for an immediate 11 per cent wage increase.
A separate communique issued by the Communist General Labor Confederation, which controls most of
the miners, said the miners "could not be satisfied" by the government action.
It said the miners were "more than ever decided not to end the strike until their legitimate claims have been satisfied."
AS THE deadlock continued several thousand metal workers joined the strike action with scattered stoppages in Eastern France which were backed by all three national unions.
They were acting independently of the miners to press wage demands and their demand for a fourth week off paid vacation.
already assured by the Scopes evolution trial, pleaded, "What blind cruel forces drove these boys to their terrible crime?"
More trouble threatened from the 300,000 state-run railroad workers who threw train services into chaos on Tuesday with irregular two-hour strikes.
His defense helped spur the science of the mind. Such words as "pyromaniae" and "schizophrenia" became commonplace in the nation's vocabulary.
CAVERLY SPARED them, but on a condition. He gave them 99 year sentences and said:
"The court feels it proper to add a word concerning the effect of the parole law upon the punishment upon these defendants," he said. "In the case of such an atrocious crime, it is entirely within the discretion of the Department of Public Welfare never to admit these defendants to parole. Such a policy the court urges them strictly to adhere."
Caverly's words of introduction were hardly prophetic.
"LIFE IMPRISONMENT may not at the moment strike the public imagination as forcibly as death by hanging," he said. "But to the offenders, the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation."
Loeb died in prison 12 years later.
But for Leopold it was different.
HE MASTERED 26 languages and ran the Illinois State Prison Library at Stateville. When World War II came, he offered himself as a guinea pig for malaria research. He owned a Fhi Beta Kappa key.
In 1958, he was paroled from prison to go to Puerto Rico where he became a hospital laboratory technician. He earned a master's degree at the University of Puerto Rico. He married a well-to-do widow, the former Trudi Garcia de Quevedo.
Yesterday, the Illinois Pardon and Parole Board met and ordered him discharged from parole and severed the last shackles imposed on him.
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