Leopold and Loeb: The "Perfect Crime" and the Murder of Bobby Franks

In May 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks got into a car with someone he knew and trusted. Minutes later he was dead — not for money, not out of hatred, but as anexperiment. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had every advantage the world could offer: brilliant minds, immense wealth, futures wide open. And they spent nearly a year planning the murder of a child to prove a single idea they heldabout themselves — that they were exceptional enough to stand above the rules that bind everyone else.

This week on Deadly Intent, we sit with the case that this whole show was built for: the one where ordinary motive nearly disappears. We trace the "perfect crime" from its cold conception through the pair of eyeglasses that unraveled it, into a courtroom where Clarence Darrow made one of the most famous pleas in American legal history — and asked a question we're still wrestling with a hundred yearslater. What kind of intent kills for the idea of it? How much can any of us be blamed for becoming what we were shaped to be? And what happens when two mindstalk each other into a monstrous lie?

We follow the folie à deux at the heart of their bond, the confessions that turned them against each other the instant fear arrived, and the strange, diverging afterlives that followed. And before we close, we bring the story back to theboy at its center — because Bobby Franks was never the footnote. He was the whole moral weight of it.

⚠️ Content warning: This episode discusses the remeditated murder of a child. Please take care of yourself while listening.

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