UBC: Higdon, Leopold & Loeb

[truepenny]

Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century by Hal Higdon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book, originally published in 1975 as The Crime of the Century, is excellent. Higdon is patient and thorough; he answers questions that a much later book, For the Thrill of It (2008) fails even to ask, and he manages something else Baatz fails at: to make the story gripping and compelling, despite the fundamental emptiness at its core. Partly this is because Higdon is a gifted writer; partly, I think, it's because he's genuinely interested in the unanswered--and unanswerable--question that lives a dark Heisenbergian life underneath the whole thing: who actually killed Bobby Franks?

Legally, Leopold and Loeb were equally responsible, so in one sense it doesn't matter. But Leopold said Loeb did it, and Loeb said Leopold did it, and neither of them ever wavered. Circumstantial evidence suggests Leopold did it; psychological evidence (including what may be a Freudian slip in his confession) suggests, much more strongly, that Loeb did it. But we can't know, and that uncertainty at the very heart of the case, for me, spreads outward, twisting and unsettling everything it touches. We don't know when exactly Bobby Franks died--the coroner contradicted himself on the witness stand, and neither prosecution nor defense demanded he resolve his testimony. (A tremendous flaw in the American legal system, as I have said in other reviews, is that a trial is a competition to tell the most compelling story, not an investigation to uncover the truth.) There are injuries to Bobby Franks' body that have never been explained. There are things about this crime, which is the epitome of the senseless murder, that don't make sense, even in its own upside down logic. There's the mystery of the other four crimes that Loeb mentioned but that were never pursued--the defense didn't want them brought to light, and the prosecution, arguing a death penalty case on first degree murder with confessions from both murderers, couldn't be bothered with. There's something very existentialist about Leopold and Loeb, about the dreary banality of their "perfect crime," about the unknowability of the details, about the tremendous emptiness that sits where a motive should be, as if they were invented by Sartre or Camus.

For two young men of such academic precocity and high IQs and with such inflated ideas of their own Ubermensch-ness, Leopold and Loeb were most dreadfully stupid. As Higdon points out, even without the most damning evidence of the glasses which Leopold somehow dropped when they were shoving the body into a culvert, there were a dozen leads that would have pointed the police directly at them, and the two of them were a fractured enough unit (they couldn't even keep their alibi straight) that they would inevitably have been tripped up in interrogation.

So much for Nietzsche.



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