The Original Natural Born Killers - Issue 17 : Big Bangs
▻http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/the-original-natural-born-killers
In May of 1924, the city of Chicago was shocked by a brutal murder. Two precocious University of Chicago graduate students, Richard Leopold, 18, and Nathan Loeb, 19, lured, abducted, and murdered Loeb’s 14-year-old cousin Bobby Franks by clubbing and asphyxiation. The duo fancied themselves as master criminals beyond the law—they planned to play a ransom game with the victim’s family, savor the newspaper reportage, and get away with murder. But the body was discovered before the ransom could be collected, and because Leopold lost his rare fashionable glasses at the crime scene, the police traced the two young men in no time. The Leopold and Loeb case, thoroughly analyzed by the criminology professor and historian Simon Baatz in his recent book For the Thrill of It, was unique in the (...)