Richard Loeb – 1905-1936

On May 21, 1924, with college friend Nathan Leopold, Loeb kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Robert (“Bobbie”) Franks for no other purpose than to commit the “perfect crime.” At trial, the pair was defended by Clarence Darrow, who did not claim the innocence of his clients, but successfully mitigated their sentence from death to life imprisonment, arguing for the first time in American legal history that they were psychopaths—sane, yet incapable of moral judgment. In contrast to Leopold, who, after parole in 1958, dedicated himself to working among the poor of Puerto Rico as a hospital technician, Loeb, the more ruthless of the two, was murdered by a fellow inmate, toward whom he had made sadistic homosexual overtures.