The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
everybody could see, where eyes might be at every
window as they pass by. They hit him over the
head with a chisel and kill him.
They pull the dead boy into the back seat, and
wrap him in a blanket, and this funeral car starts
on its route. If ever any death car went over the
same route or the same kind of a route, driven by
sane people, I have never heard of it, and I fancy
no one else has ever heard of it. This car is driven
for twenty miles. First down through thickly populated
streets, where everyone knew the boys and
their families, and had known them for years, till
they come to the Midway Boulevard.
The slightest accident, the slightest misfortune,
a bit of curiosity, an arrest for speeding, anything
would bring destruction. They go down the Midway,
through the park, meeting hundreds of machines,
in sight of thousands of eyes, with the dead
boy. They go down a thickly populated street
through South Chicago, and then for three miles
take the longest street to go through this city, built
solid with business buildings, filled with automobiles
backed upon the street, with street cars on the track,
with thousands of peering eyes; Leopold driving and
Loeb on the back seat, with the corpse of little
Bobby Franks, the blood streaming from him, wet-
ting everything in the car.
Nothing I know of can compare with it except the
mad acts of the fool in King Lear.
And yet they tell me that this is sanity; they tell
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