Everyone forgets that Nathan Leopold died a free man. The first part of his story is familiar enough: He and Richard Loeb were two intellectually precocious teenagers from Chicago’s wealthy German Jewish elite, and they read too much Nietzsche and started thinking they were supermen. Loeb, the sociopath of the pair, fixed his heart on committing the perfect murder, so together they kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. They were caught, tried, and would have been hanged if their defense attorney had not been the great Clarence Darrow, whose closing statement was such a triumph of courtroom rhetoric that the Cook County judge sentenced them to life in prison instead.
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