The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
According to the testimony of his tutors he had
written the dope sheets for his law examination on
it; numbers of them. These were still in existence.
The State's Attorney got them; the typewriter could
be identified without the machine at all. It was
identified without the machine; all that was needed
was to show that the same machine that wrote the
ransom letter wrote the dope sheets and wrote the
other letters.
No effort was made to conceal it through all these
months. All the boys' friends knew it; the maid
knew it; everybody in the house knew it. Were
they trying to conceal it? Did they take a drive
in the nighttime to Ann Arbor to get it, together with
other stuff so that they might be tracked, or did
they just get it with other stuff without any thought
of this homicide that happened six months later?
The State says, in order to make out the wonder-
ful mental processes of these two boys, that they
fixed up a plan to go to Ann Arbor to get this ma-
chine. And yet, when they got ready to do this act,
they went down the street a few doors from their
house and bought a rope; they went around the
corner and bought acid; then went somewhere else
and bought tape; they went down to the hotel and
rented a room, and then gave it up, and went to
another hotel and rented one there. And then Dick
Loeb went to the hotel room, took a valise contain-
ing his library card and some books from the library,
left it two days in the room, until the hotel took the
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