The Redemption of Nathan Leopold, Maybe

[Valin]

First Things

Helen Rittelmeyer

January 29, 2013

 

Everyone forgets that Nathan Leopold died a free man. The first part of his story is familiar enough: He and Richard Loeb were two intellectually precocious teenagers from Chicago’s wealthy German Jewish elite, and they read too much Nietzsche and started thinking they were supermen. Loeb, the sociopath of the pair, fixed his heart on committing the perfect murder, so together they kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. They were caught, tried, and would have been hanged if their defense attorney had not been the great Clarence Darrow, whose closing statement was such a triumph of courtroom rhetoric that the Cook County judge sentenced them to life in prison instead.

 

That, for most people, is when the curtain comes down. But the story of Leopold & Loeb didn’t end in a Chicago courtroom in 1924. It didn’t even end at the gates of Stateville Penitentiary in 1958, when Nathan Leopold was released on parole after serving thirty-three years, six months, and two days. (Loeb was slashed to death by a fellow inmate in 1936.) It ends in Puerto Rico in 1971, when Leopold died of a heart attack after thirteen years of freedom, most of which he spent doing hospital work in a little town called Castañer with the Church of the Brethren, a Mennonite-like Protestant sect. He also married a widowed florist named Trudi Feldman, to whom he’d been introduced at a friend’s Passover Seder.

 

In all its externals, Leopold’s life followed the arc of a basic redemption story. He felt remorse for what he had done, unlike Loeb, who only regretted that he had been caught. He devoted his time in prison to service. He reorganized the prison library, he participated in an experimental test of a new malaria drug as both a lab tech and a lab rat (the latter at some risk to himself), and when a young Italian man arrived at Stateville newly blind after a mishap during his last hold-up, Leopold learned Braille so he could teach the man to read. He expanded the course offerings at the Stateville prison school by writing stacks of new lesson plans and grading the papers himself.

 

(Snip)

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