Murder Among Friends Read online

  Nathan was just five years old when he discovered his passion for birds. That year, 1909, had been an especially unhappy one. He was sent to the Douglas Public School, a school near the Leopolds’ Michigan Avenue mansion. His parents, pleased with the school’s proximity, apparently gave little thought to academics. The place, Nathan later recalled, was full of “tough boys” who came from poor families.

  Nathan knew he was different from them. He was shy and far more studious than most children his age. While he consistently got excellent grades, he detested sports and had no athletic ability. At recess, as the other boys tumbled and ran in the schoolyard, Nathan sat on the sidelines with a book. Magnifying these differences was his parents’ wealth. He was the only student at Douglas who lived on posh Michigan Avenue, and his governess would take him to and from school, setting him even further apart. His classmates teased him relentlessly. They called him names he didn’t understand but recognized as dirty. They stole his pocket change. They knocked him to the ground and forced him to eat grass.

  Nathan didn’t say a word to his parents about this bullying. His father, Nathan Leopold Sr., had made a fortune manufacturing aluminum cans and paper and was one of the wealthiest men in Chicago. Aloof and uninvolved, Nathan Sr. was too absorbed in his business dealings to take much notice of his youngest son’s problems.

  Nathan’s mother, Florence, was no help, either. A semi-invalid since Nathan’s birth on November 19, 1904, she spent most of her time in her darkened bedroom. Doctors had diagnosed her illness as kidney disease and believed it had been caused by her pregnancy. Nathan, who adored his mother, blamed himself for her illness. If he had never been born, he told himself, she would be well. How could he bother her with his bullying problems when he’d already made her sick?

  He did have two brothers—Foreman (called Mike) and Samuel. But the siblings weren’t close. Mike, who was ten years older, wasn’t around much. And Samuel, five years older, made it clear he didn’t have time for his baby brother.

  That left Nathan’s governess, Paula Van den Bosch. A Roman Catholic, she regaled him with gory stories of the saints. Because he was Jewish, Nathan knew very little about the Christian faith. The saints’ cruel and sadistic deaths fascinated the small boy. He thrilled at the idea of Saint Lawrence being grilled alive. And his eyes lit up as he imagined a group of children hacking away at their teacher, Saint Cassian, with iron pencils. But it was the Crucifixion that especially enchanted him. “The idea of nailing anybody to anything appealed to me greatly,” he later admitted. He filled notebook after notebook with drawings of headless bodies and crucifixion scenes. “Nathan,” Paula said years later, “was a mean child.”

  She also found his mania for killing and collecting birds peculiar…and dangerous. She remembered a day when six-year-old Nathan had shot at a blue jay in his backyard. The shot went wild, shattered the next-door neighbors’ window, and just missed hitting one of their servants.

  Paula had raced outside and scolded him. His carelessness could have killed somebody.

  “I should give a damn,” Nathan had snapped back.

  That a six-year-old would be allowed to carry a gun (or curse) seemed idiotic to lots of people. But inside the family, Babe, as he was affectionately called, was considered extraordinary and precocious. According to his baby book, he’d spoken his first words at four months: “Nein, nein, Mama!” (“No, no, Mama!” The English-speaking Leopolds, whose family had emigrated from Germany sixty-five years earlier, still occasionally used German.) He’d walked at fourteen months and recited his first poem at age three: “Ich bin klein. Mein Herz ist rein.” (“I am small. My heart is pure.”) At five, he tried to learn the word for yes in every language.

  Why shouldn’t such a superior child carry a gun? his father reasoned. He lobbied city hall for a special permit allowing his son to shoot birds in Chicago’s parks. And since prominent men like Nathan Sr. typically got what they wanted, Nathan Jr. was soon walking around with his own little rifle.

  Not long after the shooting incident, Paula quit. Mathilda Wantz, an eccentric thirty-year-old woman with lightning-quick mood changes and twisted morals, replaced her. She hid her perversity behind a mask of modesty and respectability. She smiled. She curtsied. She appeared so pleasant and hardworking that Florence Leopold, cloistered in her bedroom, gave her free rein over the household. Nathan nicknamed his new governess “Sweetie.” And like dead birds and bloody crucifixions, she fascinated him. “She had a very great influence over me,” he later said. “She displaced my mother.”

  For the next six years, Sweetie oversaw every aspect of Nathan’s care—his schooling, his diet, his daily schedule. When they were alone, she slapped and pinched him. She even blackmailed him, once encouraging him to steal some stamps from another boy’s stamp collection and then threatening to tell his parents if he didn’t do exactly as she told him. Nathan kept all this to himself.

  He kept darker secrets, too. Sweetie sexually abused both Nathan and his brother Samuel. In her dressing closet, she encouraged them to examine her body from head to toe. “Your mother wishes she had a figure like me,” she told them. She bathed with Nathan in the same tub. And she rewarded his good behavior by allowing him to wrestle naked with her on her bed. “Many of the things she did to him have been forgotten or repressed,” claimed Dr. Harold Hulbert, a psychiatrist who later examined Nathan. As for the incidents he did recall, Nathan detailed them factually and with little embellishment. He never expressed his feelings about them.

  Around the age of nine, perhaps as a way to cope with the bullying at school and the abuse at home, Nathan began fantasizing. Lying in bed, he imagined a different life in which he transformed himself from a puny, picked-on boy into the strongest man in the world. Nathan became, as he called it, “a slave” who had saved the life of a king and earned his undying gratitude. The king would offer Nathan his freedom, which Nathan would refuse. He wanted only to serve the king. Sometimes the king would need someone to fight for him, and he always chose Nathan. Nathan would always win. Sometimes Nathan took on one combatant. Other times he’d vanquish a thousand soldiers with guns. When he wasn’t fighting, he would lie at the king’s feet, attached by a tiny gold chain.

  Nathan called these evening revelries his “king-slave fantasies.” And like bird-collecting, they became a compulsion. He was building a sanctuary that allowed him to escape his reality. He dwelt in these fantasies—expanding them, changing them—well into his teens.

  The summer before his twelfth birthday, Nathan was sent off to camp. He dreaded going. Just the thought of cabinmates and outdoor activities made him shudder. Once there, though, he experienced a new and powerful emotion: sexual desire. His male camp counselor, an attractive eighteen-year-old, consumed Nathan’s thoughts. At night in his cabin, Nathan sank into his king-slave fantasy. But now the counselor was the king and Nathan his slave. It was the first time reality slipped into his fantasy world. It would not be the last.

  One fall afternoon, after Nathan’s return from camp, Florence made a surprise appearance in her son’s bedroom. Pushing open the door, she caught Sweetie in the act of dumping Nathan out of bed. Florence was livid. Nathan had been suffering from a bad cold. He still had a fever and a cough. She fired the governess on the spot, apparently never knowing about the sexual abuse.

  Nathan felt adrift without Sweetie. In his mind, she’d taken the place of his mother and was the only person in whom he could confide. “I was devoted to her,” he later admitted.

  That same year—1916—the family moved from their fashionable home on Michigan Avenue to an even grander mansion in Kenwood. At a time when Jews were excluded from many Chicago neighborhoods, Kenwood was a rare mix of Jewish and Gentile families. Still, the neighborhood did have its so-called “mink coat ghetto,” half a square mile where the wealthiest and most socially prominent Jewish families in the city lived.

  Nathan’s parents en
rolled him at the Harvard School for Boys (no relation to the Ivy League college), just one street over from their house. Unlike his previous school, Harvard had a student body made up of boys from rich families, Jewish as well as Gentile. Additionally, the school took academics seriously, and its students were educated with the goal of sending them to elite East Coast colleges like Harvard and Dartmouth. Many attended the University of Chicago, an excellent school just ten blocks from the Leopolds’ house. Unlike so many other colleges across the country, the University of Chicago imposed no restrictions on the number of Jewish students it would admit. And because it was academically competitive with Ivy League schools, many of the city’s richest families sent their children there. Its campus, which resembled the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, dazzled Nathan. He envisioned himself walking its quad, garnering dozens of scholastic awards, winning the admiration of professors, and earning a Phi Beta Kappa key.

  Nathan excelled in his studies at the Harvard School. He was particularly good at languages—German, French, Italian—as well as philosophy. But he still didn’t fit in. His classmates still teased him. They made fun of his shortness, his extreme intelligence, and his all-consuming interest in birds. They called him “flea” and “the crazed genius.” They even printed a cruel speech bubble above his picture in the yearbook. It read: “Of course I am the great Nathan. When I open my lips, let no dog bark.”

  Their teasing humiliated him. It made him feel small and worthless. To compensate, he assumed an attitude of superiority and indifference. He made cutting, sarcastic remarks. And he sneered at what he considered his classmates’ lesser intellectual abilities.

  In the spring of 1920, fifteen-year-old Nathan, now a junior, had enough credits to graduate. Why spend his senior year as the butt of his classmates’ jokes? he asked himself. Besides, there wasn’t anything more he could learn from the school’s teachers. He was more than capable of doing university work. And so he applied to the University of Chicago. After breezing through the entrance exams, he was accepted. He would start in the fall.

  Preparation for his new college life included joining the university’s Campus Club, a student social organization. Admittedly, Nathan couldn’t have cared less about the dances and picnics the group threw. He’d be entirely too busy studying and bird-collecting to take part in such trivial activities. Still, it did seem like an intelligent choice to attempt some social life. He might make connections and meet up-and-coming young men who would later help advance his career. So Nathan suffered through a couple of get-togethers that included incoming freshmen, feeling both uncomfortable and disdainful.

  * * *

  • • •

  On most Saturdays, Richard Loeb went “shadowing.” The fifteen-year-old would walk along the streets of Kenwood, scanning the faces of passersby, searching for the perfect person to follow.

  Should he follow that man in the pinstriped suit? Yes, he looked like a banker, but Richard’s instincts told him the man was really a jewel thief.

  Or maybe he should tail that woman in the park? Richard could see through her disguise. She wasn’t homeless. She was a bank robber.

  How did he know?

  Because he was “the master criminal.”

  Eventually, Richard chose someone—a suspect—to shadow. For hours, he stalked that person. Keeping a safe distance so as not to be seen, he darted down alleys and hid behind trees. He watched his suspect’s every move. He grinned if the person did something private like pick his nose or pee in the bushes. Not only did it prove the master criminal’s extraordinary stealth (the victim hadn’t noticed he was being watched), but he got to see something he shouldn’t have. Richard loved seeing and doing things he shouldn’t.

  Naturally, the master criminal headed a gang of hardened no-goods. Richard conjured up this gang in his mind. He communicated with his imaginary criminals by using hand signals. He thumped his chest with his fist twice. He tap-tap-tapped three fingers to his chin, then cupped his ear. He might be signaling them to rendezvous at the hideout or beware of cops.

  While he was shadowing, Richard’s delusions ran free. Reality faded. He didn’t hear the cars honking when he stepped, trancelike, into traffic. He didn’t see the passersby staring when he waved his hands around. He was immersed in an alternate world. He’d been doing it since childhood.

  Born on June 11, 1905, Richard was the third of Albert Loeb’s four sons. Albert was the vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, the biggest mail order business in the United States at the time. One of the richest men in Chicago, he kept his family in regal style. His sprawling redbrick mansion on Ellis Avenue was, recalled one neighbor, “built to be important,” and it dwarfed the homes of the other Kenwood elite. Stretching across three lots, its grounds held a greenhouse, a tennis court, a nine-hole golf course, and a fishpond. Inside, a staff of maids, valets, chefs, and chauffeurs satisfied the family’s every whim. Growing up, Richard was fed, dressed, and driven to school by these servants. The cook baked his favorite cookies. The gardener let him dig for worms in the flowerbeds. But no one cuddled or sang to him. No one on the staff had time for that.

  Neither did Albert Loeb, who was consumed by business.

  Nor did Anna Loeb, whose days were taken up with charity work and social causes. Richard’s mother cared deeply about him, as well as her other sons, but in those days, women of her social rank rarely took on the day-to-day tasks of child care. Instead, they employed governesses. And so, when Richard was four and a half years old, Anna hired Emily Struthers.

  Miss Struthers took charge of all three Loeb boys—Richard, twelve-year-old Allan, and nine-year-old Ernest. (The youngest son, Tommy, would not be born for another five years.) But the older boys, already in school, needed her for very little. So the governess focused all her attention on Richard.

  * * *

  • • •

  Miss Struthers had definite ideas about how a boy should be raised. A strict disciplinarian, she expected Richard to “mind her to the minute.” For the next ten years, she would dominate his every move. Her word was law, and her greatest desire was to remake him into her “ideal boy.”

  In the Loebs’ book-lined library with the sun shining through the tall leaded-glass windows, Miss Struthers read him the work of Dickens and Shakespeare, as well as world histories and other books she considered the best. Every day, she accompanied him to school and back so she could consult with his teachers. She asked for extra work and more advanced studies. She was determined that Richard would excel in school…and life.

  Richard often felt like Miss Struthers’s prisoner. He wasn’t allowed to play after school like the other boys. While they played baseball or fished in the lagoon at Jackson Park, he spent his free time at a big mahogany desk, Miss Struthers right beside him. She urged him to work hard, learn more, study, study, study. “I was kept under,” Richard later said.

  One afternoon when he was seven, he decided not to wait for her after class. Snatching at freedom, he raced down the street. He paid dearly for that delicious hour of play. Miss Struthers punished him by sending him to bed for the rest of the day.

  Is it any wonder he began to chafe at her iron rule? Daily, his resentment grew. “To get by her,” he recalled, “I formed the habit of lying.” He lied about his grades. He lied about taking his big brother Allan’s tie. He lied to a neighbor boy who had a lemonade stand. No, no, he hadn’t stolen the boy’s little cash register. Oh, no, he had no idea where it went. (Richard had taken and buried it.) Lying became both his pleasure and his art form. He lied by making false claims and omitting facts. He lied for no reason. He made up stories simply because he could. No one—not his parents, or his schoolmates, or even Miss Struthers—suspected him. He just smiled and oozed charm and people believed his every word. And he never felt guilty or remorseful.

  He lied to Miss Struthers about his nightly reading, too. She insisted he retir
e with only literature of quality, but around the age of nine, Richard developed a passion for crime stories and detective novels. It had started by accident. While looking for something to steal from his brother’s bedroom, he came upon a book by mystery writer Frank L. Packard.

  Richard stole it.

  And devoured it.

  He found himself enthralled by Packard’s story about a famous criminal who planned and executed breathtaking and elaborate robberies. Richard secretly bought and read the rest of the Packard series. He also read all the Sherlock Holmes books. But his favorite books were by Wyndham Martyn. They featured a character called Anthony Trent, Master Criminal.

  To further feed his new obsession, he began sneaking out to the drugstore at night to buy crime magazines—True Detective Mysteries, Master Detective, Black Mask. Wildly popular, these and a dozen other publications like them hit magazine stands every month. Richard inhaled them.

  Miss Struthers never suspected a thing. This made him feel superior, like Anthony Trent, Master Criminal.

  At the age of ten, the “picturalizations,” as Richard called them, began. Lying beneath his cotton duvet, he held his teddy bear close and let the images play across his mind: He saw himself in jail. Then the prison guards came. They tore off his clothes, threw him against the iron bars of his cell, and whipped him. Richard, however, felt no fear. He didn’t feel pain, either, even as blood dripped down his back and puddled onto the floor. All he felt was gratification. People were looking at him as he was being punished, and he enjoyed their looking. He deserved their fascinated attention because he was a famous criminal.