Compulsion. Meyer Levin

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       BOOK TWO

       The Trial of the Century

       About the Author

FOREWORD

       by Marcia Clark

      BEFORE IN COLD Blood, before The Executioner’s Song, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion was the standard-bearer for what we think of as the nonfiction novel. I was eight years old when I read it for the first time. I’d found the paperback, already yellowed with age, on a nightstand. Though I could not possibly grasp the depth of the storytelling or recognize the beauty of the prose, the experience proved to be indelible. The story haunted me from that day forward. Reading it again now, I marvel anew at Levin’s accomplishment, and the utterly fascinating and profoundly timeless aspects of the case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

      To fill in those who are not crime buffs, Compulsion tells the true story of two sons of multimillionaire families who, back in 1924 when they were nineteen and eighteen years old, respectively, kidnaped and murdered a fourteen-year-old boy simply (ostensibly) for the thrill of it all, to prove that they could. The victim, Robert Franks, was the son of an equally wealthy family who lived in the community. Leopold and Loeb deliberately set the ransom low, at ten thousand dollars, because they knew the father would easily be able to pay it.

      Though these two highly intelligent young men—one (Loeb) an obsessive reader of true-crime detective stories—planned the crime for the better part of a year, they made so many glaring mistakes in covering their tracks that some have hypothesized that they wanted to get caught. They rented the car in which they murdered their victim yet failed to wash down all the blood. They parked the car near Leopold’s house, where the family chauffeur spotted it. They typed the ransom note on Leopold’s portable typewriter, which was easily identified by college schoolmates. And Leopold lost his glasses very close to where the body was found.

      Despite these gaffes, the police continued to look everywhere but at the true culprits, resisting the obvious logical conclusion to the bitter end. Because the last people they—or anyone else—were inclined to suspect were the two sons of well-heeled, well-respected South Side Chicago families.

      The story held a nation in thrall back in 1924 (the novel was written in 1956), and it continues to captivate even today. Other duos have committed more prolific crimes since then—Lyle and Eric Menendez, who slaughtered their parents; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters. But none continues to fascinate in quite the same way as Leopold and Loeb.

      I believe that the lasting impact stems from the fact that, unlike in most other crimes, the motivation did not fall into any of the usual categories. Leopold and Loeb were not serial killers and this was not a crime of passion, greed, or revenge.

      The moment the teenagers were arrested and charged with the murder, this atypicality became the key issue in the case. There was no question of guilt: both of the boys confessed, and the evidence against them was overwhelming. Their lawyers, recognizing that the best they could hope for was to avoid the death penalty, had Leopold and Loeb enter guilty pleas and focused on proving that the boys suffered psychological problems serious enough to require that their lives be spared. And so both sides raced to hire the best, most respected “alienists”—as psychiatrists were then called—to find the explanation for the kidnaping and murder of Robert Franks.

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