The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
Dr. William Healy testified next for the defense.
He said in part:
To my mind this crime is the result of diseased motivation
— that is, in its planning and commission. It was possible
only because Leopold had these abnormal mental trends with
the typical feelings and ideas of a paranoiac personality. He
needed these feelings and ideas supplemented by what Loeb
could give him. There is no reason why he should not commit
the crime with his diseased notion. Anything he wanted
to do was right, even kidnaping and murder. There was no
place for sympathy and feeling to play any normal part. In
other words, he had an established pathological personality
before he met Loeb, but probably his activities would have
taken other directions except for this chance association.
Loeb's secret abnormal mental life swallowed up his ambition.
He is very friendly, pleasant, well-mannered; a very
charming boy, having many nice qualities on one side, and
yet on the other hand, having carried out for many years a
dual personaHty, having been an extensive liar and a most
unscrupulous individual, in a manner and to an extent that
is quite beyond any in my experience. He has shown a
curious desire for sympathy in pathological ways; a desire
to get along socially. Contrasted with this is the fact that
he is most remarkably unscrupulous, untruthful, unfair, un-
grateful, and disloyal in many social relationships, disloyal
even to his comrade when he cheated him, and to his frater-
nity when he robbed them.
He expresses, on the other hand, some loyalties to family
life in certain ways, and he has some well expressed and very
decent ideas about girls.
All of that, of course, shows a disparity and a contradiction
that to my thinking is certainly abnormal. The ability to
carry on for many years this tremendously contradictory
dual hfe is certainly pathological.
Their association began at 15 years of age. It is very clear
that each came with peculiarities in his mental life; each
arrived at these pecuharities by different routes; each supplemented
the other's already constituted abnormal needs in
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