The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
at a certain time, and whether I take in that germ,
and the condition of my system when I breathe is
an accident which is sealed up in the book of fate
and which no human being can open.
These boys, neither one of them, could have com-
mitted this act excepting by coming together. It
was not the act for one; it was the act of two. It
was the act of their planning, their conniving, their
believing in each other; their thinking themselves
supermen. Without it they could not have done it.
It would not have happened. Their parents happened
to meet, these boys happened to meet; some
sort of chemical alchemy operated so that they cared
for each other, and poor Bobby Franks' dead body,
stripped and naked, was left in a culvert down near
the Indiana line. I know it came through the mad
act of mad boys. Mr. Savage told us that Franks,
if he lived, would have been a great man. I want
to leave this thought with your Honor now. I do
not know what Bobby Franks would have been had
he grown to be a man. I do not know the laws that
control one's growth. Sometimes, your Honor,
a boy of great promise is cut off in his early youth.
Sometimes he dies and is placed in a culvert. Some-
times a boy of great promise stands on a trapdoor
and is hanged by the neck until dead. Sometimes
he dies of diphtheria. Death somehow pays no at-
tention to age, sex, prospects, wealth or intellect.
It comes, and perhaps — I can only say perhaps,
for I never professed to unravel the mysteries of
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