Leopold’s eyeglasses—with their distinctive frame—near the culvert where they hid Franks’s body, in a nature preserve by the Indiana border. The police traced the spectacles and brought Leopold in for questioning. As a bird-watcher who regularly tramped the preserve, he had already emerged as a figure of interest. Babe told the prosecutors he had tripped on a hike and no doubt lost his glasses when they slipped from his breast pocket. But no matter how he threw himself to the floor, he could not re-create the accident—the eyeglasses stayed in his coat.
Two resourceful Daily News reporters, meanwhile, interviewed the members of Leopold’s law school study group, obtained notes typed on Babe’s Underwood typewriter, and matched them to the typing on a ransom note sent to the victim’s family. And the Leopold family’s chauffeur undermined the killers’ alibi. In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 31, they confessed. For the next two days, Leopold and Loeb chatted freely with the detectives and newsmen who accompanied them on grisly scavenger hunts around town, as spectators gathered to watch. “They had a great day of it yesterday, and they responded to the trailing crowds’ morbid interest by showing off in sophomoric fashion,” the News reported. “They quarreled for the spotlight, aired their young eruditions, swaggered and posed before the worshipful Boswells, talked the cant of their intellectual set.”
Here was the bridge over the Jackson Park lagoon, where they tossed the typewriter into the water. Here was the hardware store where they bought the murder weapons: a heavy chisel and some rope. Here was where they buried the bloody blanket that they had used to lug Bobby’s body to its hiding place. The corpse lay in a foot of water for only a night before it was discovered by a passing workman in the first light of morning.
“We have a hanging case,” Robert Crowe announced.2
THE CRIME HAD no overt allurement for Darrow. These defendants were young men of privilege, not underdogs. Besides, he was sixty-seven years old. But he was a ferocious foe of hanging, and then there was that fathomless empathy. When Darrow spoke at the Lincoln Center settlement house in Chicago that weekend he was no doubt thinking of the teenaged suspects when he chose to recite the A. E. Housman poem “The Culprit.”
Housman’s work was “thought, and it is poetry, and it is music,” he told the crowd, then softly chanted:
The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.
The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.
My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang so high.
Oh let not man remember
The soul that God forgot
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot
And I will rot.
For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They had a likely son,
And I have none.
The newspapers had aroused the good folks of Chicago with the ghastly news that Bobby Franks was the victim of a pedophile. Darrow spoke, nonetheless, for compassion and understanding. “Sex … is the strongest and the deepest emotion of life excepting possibly one,” he said. “And, its very strength and its very depth and its very eternity makes it one that often goes awry.”
Character is just “a different tip of the balance one way or the other; a little change in the elements,” he told the audience. There but for the grace of God goes any man’s beloved son.
That night the Darrows were awakened by the doorbell. As Ruby later told it, she got up from bed and found “four men seeming like masked desperados, clutching at their upturned coat-collars … forcing themselves forward.” It was a delegation from the boys’ families, led by Jacob Loeb, Dickie’s uncle. They crowded into Darrow’s bedroom and pressed him to take the case.3
Darrow knew Loeb. He also knew Jacob Franks, the father of the victim, a former pawnbroker who had grown rich, in part, by the money he made buying John Altgeld’s shares in the Ogden Gas deal. And Darrow knew, without doubt, that he would be bucking the mob. But he persuaded himself that the youths were “kindly” and the victims of “strange and unfortunate circumstances.” In his account of the trial in his memoirs, he would slice a year off their ages. He