 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for this afternoon's program. Whether you're here in the theater or joining us on Facebook or YouTube. Before we hear from Nina Barrett about her new book, The Leopold and Loeb Files, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up soon here in the McGowan Theater. On Tuesday, October 15th, at noon, bestselling author Harlow Giles Unger will be here to talk about his new book, Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence. And on Thursday, October 17th at 7 p.m., we'll host a panel discussion connected to our special exhibit right for the hers, American Women in the Vote. The program is called Women's Suffrage and the Men Who Supported Them, the Suffragents and their role in the struggle for the vote. To keep informed about these events throughout the year, check our website, archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach programs. And you can check out their website, archivesfoundation.org to learn more about them and join online. Archivists occasionally find unexpected things in their collections. Sometimes these discoveries are mere curiosities. Sometimes there are significant additions to the documentary record. When an archivist at Northwestern University in 1988 pulled out a sheet of paper from a bag he'd found in the basement of the law school, he uncovered a trove of documents from the Leopold and Loeb trial. Nina Barrett used these documents and more in an exhibit in 2009. And then as the basis of her book, her retelling of an already well-toned, well-told tale shows the rewards of going back to the sources. As an old reference librarian who still dabbles in connecting researchers with the information they need to do their work, I was thrilled to be able to connect Nina and with National Archives records from St. Elizabeth's Hospital and a patent application for a unique eyeglass frame. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, book reviewer Rick Kogan noted that many books, plays, and films inspired by the crime and yet he declared, even if you have seen or read all of these works, you have not experienced this case with anything approaching the astonishing and compelling detail that you will find in the Leopold and Loeb files. Nina Barrett is a graduate of Yale University and Northwestern's Middle School of Journalism. In 2009, she curated an exhibit at Northwestern University called The Murder That Wouldn't Die, which inspired her book. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and the Chicago Tribune and many other publications. She's also trained as a professional chef in her food reporting for Chicago's NPR. Station WBEZ earned her the James Beard Award for the best radio show two years running 2012 and 2013. She's twice served as a judge for the James Beard Cookbook Awards. In 2014, she and her husband, Jeff Garrett, founded Bookends and Beginnings, an independent bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my friend, Nina Barrett. Thank you, David. Yes, David did contribute in many ways to this book, so I want to thank you for that and for the invitation here. I am very awed to be in the home of so many incredible historical documents. This book is not only, we're going to not only talk about murder today, but of course, this book is very much about documents and this whole trove of documents that it's based on. Really, it's a miracle that they even survived because in 1924 when this case took place, there was no archive for the court, and so normally what happened at the end of a case like this is that all the documents got thrown away. Only because this case was so notorious, even as it unfolded in 1924, did a lot of the participants in the case walk away with documents that should not have been in their private possession, but because they did that, the documents were preserved and then resurfaced years later, and many of them, as David said, ended up in these Northwestern collections. And the story of the book begins, if we can forward the slide. All right. So David mentioned the exhibit that I curated at Northwestern, which was called The Murder That Wouldn't Die. You all know this was the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, and I called it The Murder That Wouldn't Die because besides being international news when it first happened in 1924, this is a story that just has kept coming back over and over again in the form of different books and movies and plays. So there was The Drama Rope, which started life in 1929 as a play and then was famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as a movie in 1948. There was the best-selling novel, Compulsion, which was by Meyer Levin, and this was published in 1956 and went on to become both a Broadway play and a blockbuster 1959 film starring Orson Welles. There was Nathan Leopold's own memoir, Life Plus 99 Years, which was a best-seller when it came out in 1958, even though Leopold absolutely refused to discuss the crime at all in the book. And the reviewer said that if you wanted any insight into his psyche or why he might have committed this murder, you were better off reading Meyer Levin's fictionalized version. There have been three major true crime retellings and multiple other theatrical dramatizations, including a play called Never the Sinner by Academy Award-winning screenwriter, John Logan, who actually was an undergraduate at Northwestern and ran across all of these documents in the same collection. And then my favorite is a 2005 off-Broadway musical production in which Leopold and Loeb actually get to sing. And I'm gonna share a little bit of that with you here. Oops. Hello, John. May I please speak to your brother? Tell him it's important. Very important. Hello, Nathan. Richard, have you seen the Tribune? Yes. How could they have found the boy I'm shaking? I thought you said we had the perfect spot. Could I have dropped my glasses there? Why can't I find them anywhere? They were inside my pocket. Now they're not. So they found the body that's... I'll just note that I'm now Facebook friends with the playwright. And so I see that this thrill me has gone on to have an incredible life. It's playing all over the world right now. It's playing in London. It's playing in Japan. So why does this murder refuse to die? You know, why do we keep telling this story over and over despite the fact that it was never even a murder mystery in the traditional sense? After the first 10 days, the identities of the killers were never in doubt. So the real mystery in this case has always been the why of it. And I think, I mean, it just raises very primal questions about morality, sanity, justice, remorse, and rehabilitation that writers and artists cannot resist exploring, but also embellishing. But in fact, when you encounter these documents, what you find is that the story does not need any embellishing at all. So in the Leopold and Loeb files, I really wanted to use these documents to let readers peek right through the keyhole of history and experience this case as it was actually unfolding at the time so that you could draw your own conclusions. So first, we're gonna have a little refresher in the basic outlines of the story. And then we're gonna weave in something about the documents as we go along. So this is Bobby Franks. On May 21st, 1924, he was 14 years old. He lived in a mansion in the wealthy Kenwood section of Hyde Park in Chicago. And I don't know how many of you may be familiar with that neighborhood, but where his house is exactly one block away from where the Obama house still is in that neighborhood. It was an expensive, exclusive neighborhood and he went to an exclusive prep school called the Harvard School that was just a few blocks away from the house. And that afternoon, on his way home from school, he stopped in an empty lot to play baseball with his friends and left about five o'clock to walk just three blocks home. And he never came home. He just simply vanished. So that night, Bobby's parents got a phone call from a man who said that Bobby had been kidnapped. He said that in the morning, the family would receive instructions about what they needed to do to make sure that Bobby was returned to them alive. Mrs. Franks promptly fainted. Mr. Franks spent that night in an anxious vigil with his friend and attorney, Sam Edelson. The next morning, and this is how the Chicago Tribune reported it, they said just before 9.30 a.m., the special delivery letter addressed in ink and written on two sheets of paper on the typewriter with black ribbon arrived. Nerves whipped taught by an anguished all night vigil almost broke as it was opened. And as Mr. Edelson said, its deliberate tone struck terror into our hearts. So the author of this note claimed to be named George Johnson. And this is what he said. I'm not gonna read you the entire note, but I just want you to get a feeling for this, the tone. So dear sir, as you no doubt know by this time, your son has been kidnapped. Allow us to assure you that he is at present well and safe. You need fear, no physical harm for him, provided you live up carefully to the following instructions and such others as you will receive by future communications. Should you, however, disobey any of our instructions even slightly, his death will be the penalty. So the note said to secure $10,000 in old bills before noon and then to expect another call with further instructions. And it concluded, as a final word of warning, this is a strictly commercial proposition and we are prepared to put our thread into execution should we have reasonable grounds to believe that you have committed an infraction of the above instructions. However, should you carefully follow out our instructions to the letter, we can assure you that your son will be safely returned to you within six hours of our receipt of the money. So Mr. Franks went to his bank and immediately collected the money. But by the time the kidnappers called again later that afternoon, he was too distraught to pay attention to much of what they were saying on the phone because he had just gotten another phone call and this one was from a morgue near the Indiana border where the body of a murdered boy discovered in a swamp that morning right around the time the ransom note was arriving at his house had been identified as Bobby's. And so this is the Chicago Tribune photographic page on the day that the news of the killing broke. And here you see over on your upper left, this is the iconic photograph of Bobby that almost always appears in any story about this case. This is Bobby's house in Hyde Park and it's a little blurry, but you can see Gawkers have already gathered outside to crowd the house and stare at the poor Franks family. This is Mr. Franks. Here they actually published a photographic reproduction of the ransom note envelope. And of course, this is I think the most poignant thing on this page, it's the only two pieces of evidence that were found near the body, one of them being Bobby's knee sock and one of them being this notorious pair of glasses. So the Leopold and Loeb case was often referred to in its day as the crime of the century. And this mystery of Bobby's murder just transfixed Chicago for the next 10 days. Why would a murderer bother sending a ransom note apparently after he had already murdered the boy? And why would anyone well educated enough to write such an eloquent almost literary ransom note be in the kidnapping business in the first place? That is an unusually well written ransom note and in fact, detectives also immediately noticed that it sounded suspiciously as if it almost had been plagiarized from a fictional ransom note that had appeared in a recent issue of Detective Story Magazine. And when the identity, the true identity of George Johnson was revealed 10 days later, the story really went from being a Chicago sensation to being a nationwide sensation. And you can see here in this picture that this is not the Chicago Tribune anymore, this is the Boston Globe with this headline, two college men confessed to murder of Frank's boy. So George Johnson turned out to be Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb to reportedly brilliant University of Chicago students from wealthy socially prominent families who were neighbors and in fact in Loeb's case, a cousin of Bobby's. So the focus of the story immediately shifted from the who to the why. They had not needed the ransom money. They had no personal grudge against Bobby. In fact, they had pretty much randomly selected him as their victim after stalking a number of other classmates of his that afternoon. On the surface, they personified the kind of attractive, overachieving, well-mannered boys every parent might hope to raise. And yet what they essentially said in their confession to the police, which were then immediately leaked in all of their gory detail to an almost gleefully horrified press, was that they had really enjoyed planning this crime and they had fully expected that it was going to be the perfect crime. And they would do it again tomorrow, they said, if they could get away with it. So now we're gonna shift gears and talk a little bit about the surviving documents. We're gonna start with the ransom note because it's definitely one of the creepiest artifacts of the case that has survived. But also, so a lot of people know about the glasses, the infamous glasses, but actually the ransom note was very important in leading the detectives to suspect Leopold in the first place. So detectives had called in a Mr. Hugh P Sutton of the Royal Typewriter Company to analyze the ransom note. And he could tell that it had been typed on an Underwood portable typewriter, purchased less than three years ago with a defective lowercase T and F. And furthermore, Mr. Sutton could also tell that the man who wrote this was either a novice at typing or else used two fingers since some of the letters were punched so hard they were almost driven through the paper while others were struck lightly or uncertainly. Also in the meantime, police had traced the pair of spectacles that were found near Bobby's body to Nathan Leopold. And detectives were sent to the Leopold mansion to bring him in for questioning. So another remarkable document that has survived is a transcript of this interrogation. And Leopold at first firmly denied that he owned an Underwood portable typewriter. So the police searched his house and they turned up nothing but the family made told them she had seen one in the house until just recently and definitely within the past two weeks. And as this line of questioning continued, these two enterprising reporters for the Daily News who were named James Mulroy and Alvin Goldstein and they also happened to be University of Chicago students and in fact were friends and fraternity brothers of lobes. So they happened to hear about a law school study group that regularly met at Leopold's house and members of this group told them that Leopold regularly typed up the notes from the study group and distributed them to the members of the group. So they got hold of Mulroy and Goldstein by the way, later when the Pulitzer Prize, not just for their writing about this case but the fact that they helped break it. So they got hold of the study group notes and then they took them to Mr. Hugh B. Sutton of the Royal Typewriter Company and guess what? The type matched exactly. So then police rounded up the study group members to confront Leopold with the fact that his Underwood portable typewriter did in fact exist and I'm gonna read you a little bit from the interrogations just so you can hear how theatrical this original dialogue really is. And so Leopold by the way has now admitted that as recently as two weeks ago, he may have had a typewriter but he can't remember what happened to it, he says. His questioners here are police captain Shoemaker and assistant states attorney Joseph Savage and one thing I also find incredibly interesting and very poignant about this excerpt is Sam Edelson is also present and you may remember that I said he was the close friend of the Franks family who was there with Mr. Franks that whole night, the first night that Bobby was missing and was there when the ransom note arrived. So it turns out he was also, he lived next door to the Leopolds. This was a very small intimate neighborhood. He lived next door to the Leopolds. He had watched Nathan grow up and in the beginning he told detectives there was no way that this boy could be mixed up in something like this but what you hear in the excerpt I'm about to read you, he's in the room and you can hear it dawning on him that Nathan is not as innocent as he is asserting that he is. So Captain Shoemaker says, you lose your memory, do you? And Nathan doesn't respond and Savage says, I'm gonna give you credit for one thing. I think you have got the most remarkable memory of any man I ever came in contact with for age or otherwise. Now I sat and listened to you yesterday, go back three and four weeks and in detail, minutely describe your actions as to just what you had done day in and day out, what you did this day, what you did that day and in detail. Can't you think Nathan where that typewriter came? How it happened to come into the house and how it happened to go out or whether it is still there? And Leopold says, I think very probably that if I had been present when the typewriter was brought in the house and when if a remark was made about it that I should certainly remember it, yes, but. And Savage says, well, Nathan, you know, even if you weren't present, there would be something in the way of a letter or note or telephone conversation or something else telling you that the typewriter was there and you are not one who will forget dates or times or anything else. And Leopold says, no, I will tell you this has got me pretty worried. And Edelson says, well, I think it would worry you a little bit. And Leopold says, I am sorry, I am doing the best I can. I don't remember when or how that typewriter got in or out. And Edelson says, I think you are doing the best you can. The question is whether you are doing well enough. So he is not doing well enough. And even though that isn't quite the thing that triggers his confession, you can really hear the news tightening around his neck. So now we are gonna turn to the confessions because if you wanna know what happened to poor Bobby Franks on his way home from the baseball game that day, who better to tell you than Nathan Leopold himself in his confession? And here I'm just gonna show you a page from the book so you can see the way it's laid out. So over there on to your left is that's a scan of the actual first page of his confession. I'm not using scans mostly through the book there. You can see the excerpt then printed on the other page. Each one of the document excerpts because I went through 10,000 pages of documents and only took out the most interesting, exciting, relevant parts. And then each chapter opens with this little bit of narrative so you can follow the story from beginning to end. And then over there in the margin, you see what I call a news clip which is you see how the story is unfolding in the press and that is often very colorful and not entirely factual, I will say. So okay, so the context for what I'm about to share with you from Leopold's confession is he has now begun narrating the story of the murder for the police as a series of problems that they had to solve in the planning, for instance, how they were gonna notify the family, how they were going to get the ransom money. And I think what comes through in his voice is this very clinical, disinterested intellectualizing that he became famous for of something that is actually really horrific. So he says the next problem was getting the victim to kill. This was left undecided until the day we decided to take the most likely looking subject that came our way. The particular occasion happened to be Robert Franks. Richard was acquainted with Robert and asked him to come over to our car for a moment. This occurred near 49th and Ellis Avenue. Robert came over to the car, was introduced to me and Richard asked him if he did not wanna ride home. He replied, no, but Richard said, well, get in a minute, I wanna ask you about a certain tennis racket. After he had gotten in, I stepped on the gas, proceeded south on Ellis Avenue to 50th Street. In the meantime, Richard asked Robert if he minded if we took him around the block, to which Robert said, no. As soon as we turned the corner, Richard placed his one hand over Robert's mouth to stifle his outcries with his right, beat him on the head several times with a chisel, especially prepared for the purpose. The boy did not succumb as readily as we had believed. So for fear of being observed, Richard seized him, pulled him into the back seat. Here he forced a cloth into his mouth. Apparently the boy died instantly by suffocation shortly thereafter. We proceeded out to Calumet Boulevard in Indiana, drove along this road that leads to Gary being a rather deserted place. We even stopped to buy a couple of sandwiches for supper, which incidentally were hot dogs that they ate in the front seat of the car with Bobby's dead body in the back seat as they waited for it to get dark enough for them to go hide the body in a drainage pipe where they thought that no one would ever find it. And if you wanna know how much remorse they felt about this afterwards, who better to answer that question than Richard Loeb himself, as he told the psychiatrists who were immediately called in by the state's attorney, Robert Crow, to assess their sanity and hopefully to forestall any potential insanity defense. And here the immediate background is that Loeb has just said that the only real remorse he feels is about what he has done, the only real remorse he feels about what he has done is for the shame and the trouble that he knows this is going to cause for his very socially prominent parents. So Savage says, and you feel remorse for them. And Loeb says, yes, sir. And Savage says, when was the first you felt it? And Loeb says, I felt sorry about the thing, about the killing of the boy. Oh, well, that very night. But then the excitement, the accounts in the paper, the fact that we had gotten away with it and they did not suspect us, that it was given so much publicity and all that sort of thing naturally went to the question of not feeling as much remorse as otherwise I think I would have. I think if that thing had not appeared in the papers, if people had not come to me and said the fellow who did that was crazy, the fellow who did that was insane, if people would not come up, you know, and say that, things like that, I think I would have felt a great deal more remorse. So this brings us to the point where Clarence Darrow, possibly the most famous attorney in US history enters the picture. Even at the time, he was known as the attorney for the damned because he took underdog cases that no other lawyer would touch and he always won them. He also lived in this neighborhood in Hyde Park and he had a longstanding friendship with the Loeb family. So when state's attorney, Robert Crow, publicly announced following the boy's confessions that he had an airtight, quote, hanging case, the Lobes went straight to Darrow's apartment and almost literally beat his door down in the middle of the night and begged him to take on their defense. So there were two very good reasons why Darrow tended to win these cases and both of them are very colorfully illustrated in these documents. The first is that he was a brilliant legal tactician and the second was that he was an exceptionally engaging and persuasive extemporaneous speaker. So it seemed completely obvious to everyone at the time that the only possible way that Leopold and Loeb could avoid the death penalty for a crime that cold-blooded to which they had very unambiguously already confessed was by pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. So Darrow accordingly summoned a team of the nation's then most prominent psychiatrists to examine Leopold and Loeb to document the exact nature of their insanity and their findings are detailed in the Halbert Bowman reports, which have also survived. But then on the morning that court convened, Darrow shocked the world and especially the state's attorney by entering a plea of guilty. He was not going to contest the sanity question because that would have required a jury to decide and it was quite obvious to him that any jury was gonna want death for such shocking crime, but by pleading guilty, he could skip the trial phase of the case and just go straight to sentencing and that would be in the hands of a single judge. So he was gambling that any reasonably enlightened, conscientious judge was going to be much less likely to want to shoulder the sole responsibility for putting two teenage boys to death. So this tactic led to a fierce three day argument between Darrow who still wanted to introduce the findings of the psychiatrist in order to gain sympathy for the clients and hopefully to mitigate the sentence and Crow who kept insisting that if Darrow thought that the boys were anything short of legally sane and fully responsible for their actions, the psychiatric testimony was irrelevant and shouldn't be admitted, but if he wanted it in there, then they had to call the jury. So Crow suggested in fact that Darrow's psychiatrist had diagnosed Leopold and Lobe as insane, but then once Darrow himself changed his tactics, his psychiatrist had revised their diagnosis to suit his legal strategy, a charge that they vehemently denied, but I want you to remember that. So by then, the permanent caricatures that we have of Leopold and Lobe, if you have any sense of, that they're not just Siamese twins, but what their different personalities were like. So this is Leopold here in the middle and he's the one who's famous for being the sort of cold-blooded Nietzschean superman who spoke 15 languages and thought he was above conventional morality. If you've ever seen the movie Rope, that's a lot of what that movie centers around. And then Lobe who's over here, he is the smooth, socialite big man on campus who secretly fantasized that he was a master criminal. And just so you know, this is the judge here and they were just doing a little field trip out into the courtyard to look at the murder vehicle which was out there and they went out to look at the back seat. So the court transcript shows Darrow doing everything possible to humanize Leopold and Lobe. His whole, the whole defense team referred to them as Babe and Dickey which were their childhood nicknames. And Darrow leaked these supposedly confidential psychiatric reports to the press and they were just full of all this incredibly intimate detail about the boy's childhoods and they mainly came to the conclusion that the boys were the victims of the extreme wealth of their families. And this is because their upbringing had mainly been left to governesses and nurses and these were of course lower class women with all kinds of mental, emotional and social inadequacies the psychiatrist said. And in one case they even complained about the one governess's very vulgar taste in dress which as we all know, can lead to raising a murderous psychopath. So Darrow's closing argument took three days and was an absolute masterpiece of its kind. And I wanna share a very small section of that with you because I think that also like really exemplifies his voice and this famous and completely distinctive rhetorical style that he was famous for. And it also raises in a nutshell some of the points that people find most haunting and troubling about this case. So he says, no one knows what will be the fate of the child they get or the child they bear and the fate of the child is the last thing they think of. He means while they're getting it. This weary old world goes on begetting with birth and with living and with death and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end. I do not know what it was made these boys do this mad act but I do know there is a reason for it. I know they did not beget themselves. I am sorry for the fathers as well as the mothers for the fathers who give their strength and their lives toward educating and protecting and creating a fortune for the boys that they love for the mothers who go down into the shadow of death for their children who nourish them and care for them who risk their lives for them who watch them with tenderness and fondness and longing and who go down into dishonor and disgrace for the children they love. They are helpless. We are all helpless but when you are pitying the father and the mother of poor Bobby Franks what about the fathers and mothers of these two unfortunate boys and what about the unfortunate boys themselves and what about all the fathers and all the mothers and all the boys and all the girls who tread a dangerous maze in darkness from the cradle to the grave and do you think you can cure it by hanging these two? Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them? You simply show your ignorance and your hate when you say it. You may here and there cure hatred with love and understanding but you can only add fuel to the flames by hating in return. So Darrow had the whole courtroom in tears for much of that last three days and the two points I just wanna highlight from that speech are first of all this idea of social justice so how do we respond as a society to evildoers in our midst when there is just absolutely no question about whether they did it and whether they feel remorse for it which in this case they clearly didn't but the other question that I think really haunts parents whenever they hear the details of this case is he's posing the question which kind of suffering would be worse for you the parent if you were the parent of this murdered child who never came home from school that day and was never gonna come home again or if you were the parent of one of these children who you just had discovered was capable of committing an act like that and you had to live the rest of your life with that knowledge. So in the end, judge John Caverly did not sentencing Leopold and Loeb to death declaring that the defendants were simply too young to be executed. He said, this determination appears to be in accordance with the progress of criminal law all over the world and with the dictates of enlightened humanity. The records of Illinois show only two cases of minors who were put to death by legal process to which number the court does not feel inclined to make an addition. So in the end, even though the judge had dismissed a lot of what Darrow had put before him the attorney for the damned had achieved this unlikely legal victory by foregoing the obvious insanity defense and the jury trial. So this is just a little PS also involving documents. So when I was doing my last minute fact checking for the book, I went back to the Northwestern archives to look at the psychiatric reports which I had looked at a million times and these are the ones that have always been the official record of the case. They were the exact same ones that Darrow had leaked to the press in the summer of 1924. They were the ones that blamed everything on the governesses and held that Leopold and Loeb were not insane. And lo and behold, in the box next to them there was a new document which hadn't been there before. And so the archivist told me they had recently acquired it a couple of months ago from a private dealer. It had been in private hands for the whole past 90 years. He handed it to me. He said, I'm not sure exactly what it is. It seems to be like the other psychiatric reports. It's authored by the same psychiatrist. It seems to cover a lot of the same ground. I'm not really sure what it is. And so I sat down and read it and of course the shocking difference was that in this report Darrow's team of psychiatrists had definitively diagnosed Leopold and Loeb as clinically and legally insane. So about Richard Loeb, Dr. Holbert had originally written, this man is insane in my opinion based on detailed study. And a second psychiatrist had written about Leopold. It would seem obvious that under the ordinary conceptions of right and wrong tests, he is insane within the meaning of the law. So this was the documentary confirmation surfacing after 90 years that proved that Darrow had in fact suppressed the findings of his own psychiatrist in order to play this little legal trick of avoiding the jury trial, which is paid off for him. And anyone who's ever done archival research I think will appreciate the thrill you get when that kind of thing happens. I also just like to say it's a little object lesson in where and why this increasing notion that everything that you need to research is now available online. It's all been digitized. Of course, it hasn't. There are still wonderful discoveries to be made in archives. And it's also a perfect segue to the last thing I wanna talk about briefly before I wrap up and maybe take some questions. So you may recall that Loeb was murdered in prison about 12 years later, but Leopold was eventually paroled. So the final section of my book is based on another extensive collection of archival documents. And this was the correspondence between Leopold and Elmer Gertz, who was the attorney who came along much later and spearheaded his parole effort, which really was a very widely publicized cause in the 1950s and was supported by many celebrities, including, this is Carl Sandberg here, defending and saying that Leopold should be let out of prison. This is Elmer Gertz here, the attorney. This is the parole board. But the cause was also supported by Earl Stanley Gardner, who was the writer who gave us the character Perry Mason. And Meyer Levin, the author of Compulsion, who insisted that Leopold's rehabilitation in prison after he had committed the crime of the century should be referred to as the correction of the century. So the whole story of Leopold's later life is not widely known or written about if that's something you're interested in or if you're interested in the question of whether or not he really was rehabilitated in prison and how much remorse he actually ever did or did not feel about what he had done. There's a lot of fascinating material in that last part of the book. So I'm not gonna go into all of that right now, but I wanna end with my favorite passage from an exchange that he had with a member of the parole board during this last and finally successful parole hearing in 1958. And by now he has spent nearly 35 years in prison and he has become a self-described quote, fat balding middle-aged man. This is him getting out of the Illinois State Penitentiary, but in what I'm gonna read you, he hasn't gotten out yet. And I want to just contextualize it by saying, by now he had already gone on and become what we know him as today. This is sort of immortal fictional character of Nathan Leopold, the Nietzschean superman. But at this point, so we don't know whether he was aware of his own sort of literary fame and that it was gonna live on forever. At this point, he just is just trying desperately to get out of prison and all he wants is to spend the rest of his mortal life in privacy and obscurity. So the guy on the parole board asks him, what about your religious beliefs today? And Leopold says, I am a practicing believing Jew. And the guy says, in other words, you have given up this philosophy of Nietzsche. And Leopold says, I never had the philosophy of Nietzsche. And the guy says, there have been some statements about that. What is your philosophy today? Tell me about your religion. What do you believe in? And Leopold says, I believe in the existence of one God, creator of the world. I believe he has given us the laws and commandments through Moses on Mount Sinai. I believe the essential part of the moral law is summed up in the 10 commandments. I believe in the trials and laws of my religion, faith, Judaism. I studied art in this prism. I learned Hebrew. Are there any specific questions I can answer? And the guy on the parole board says, well, that answers the question pretty well. So you have gotten over this super ego that prevailed in you. And Leopold says, I have gotten over being 19. So I think I'm out of time. I think I'm gonna leave it there. And if you have any questions, oh, and here he is. He's gotten out of prison now and you can see he's clutching his memoir Life Plus 99 Years, which I would highly not recommend that you read, but I would highly recommend if you were interested that you read compulsion because it is a much better explanation of the crime. And so I was told if you have questions, you should come to one of the microphones to ask them. And we have a question. Thank you so much. I was actually before you got into the fact that he testified that he was Jewish. I was gonna ask the question anyway, so I'm glad you brought it up, but I figured they were. Did that have any effect, do you think, on Darrow's decision to make this legal tactical maneuver to try to go right for the commit guilt and try to get him off later in the sentencing phase because he was Jewish? There was anti-Semitism around and the jury may have been more prone to convicting maybe because he was Jewish in that period. I don't know. Yeah, that's a good question. So I don't think that the Jewishness was relevant. And Meyer Levin, who actually also grew up in that neighborhood and was also Jewish and was part of the community, and he wrote later that everyone in the Jewish community was really morbidly relieved that the victim was Jewish because they felt that if Leopold and Loeb had murdered a Christian child, the outrage would have been so much worse. That sort of, yes, there was all this anti-Semitism, but the fact that it was an all Jewish crime kind of kept it within the Jewish community, there was, of course, the papers published a lot of, there were a lot of stories sort of analyzing like why had this happened? And it was a very prominent rabbi who came out and wrote about how this was all the result of Jews who came to America and then they lost their Jewish faith and their Jewish practice and then their sons went to places like the University of Chicago and drank gin and ran around with fast women and murdered people. So it was seen as like a loss of. For Daryl, the reason, I mean the two reasons I think he took the case, one is he did have this friendship with the Loeb family, but Daryl was really opposed to the death penalty and he really saw it as like a big platform for him to defy the death penalty. Thank you. Thank you. Would you clarify the fee that Daryl received? I've heard different accounts, one of which he received a fee or agreed to receive, the families agreed to pay him a fee of $100,000 contingent upon avoiding, persuading the judge not to impose the death penalty. Is that accurate? So are you, so there's two things in there because there's also, I mean there's a story, there's the whole issue of his fee and then there's a separate story out there that he actually bribed the judge. But so his fee was he, the fee was supposed to be set by the American Bar Association to make it because they didn't, there was of course a huge outcry that this was rich man's justice and he didn't want it to be said that like they had bought the most famous attorney and that's why the kids got off. There's some question about whether he actually ever received the fee. He claimed later in his autobiography that he wasn't ever paid for it and that the families told him that he should just be happy that he got all that publicity. But there is another story out there that the families bribed the judge. And I just think, I mean I don't know, there isn't any documentation of that but my impression is that the judge really was a conscientious judge and that he was, there were several times during the trial when he really bent over backwards to let everything be put out there in public. And I, my impression of him is that he really was trying to make an enlightened decision and basically it just came down to their age. Thanks. Anyone else? Okay. Well thank you for coming. If you are interested, of course there are books available. I'd be happy to sign one. It's called The Leopold and Loeb Files and thank you so much to David and National Archives for having me here. It's been a pleasure talking to you.