Word: leopold
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...Martin's previous winning stories, all for the Satevepost: The Riot at Jackson Prison, in 1953, the first year of the award: a four-part series on Nathan Leopold, in 1955; Inside the Asylum, an expose of mental hospitals...
Perhaps the weirdest thing about the book is the reconstructed conversations with Accomplice Dickie Loeb, who, in Leopold's recollections, speaks a weirdly dated slang. It is with a kind of horror that the modern reader finds an appalling crime described in a debased Tom Swift idiom. Writes Leopold: "Dick was in high spirits . . . 'That'll be a snap. Nate. Nothing to it.' " Says Loeb to Leopold, as they are planning to collect ransom for Bobby Franks: "Hey, this is neat, Nate-hey, I'm a poet!" When headlines announce: BODY OF BOY FOUND...
...Best Pal." Leopold seems to have an oddly clumsy, cloying sentimentality; in a gushing letter to Clarence Darrow, he wrote about the lawyer's courage in taking the case: "Nay, it is more than bravery. It is heroism." From prison he wrote a poem to his aunt ("Birdie, angel bright and fair. So sweet of face and white of hair"), and when he tells of Loeb's murder by a fellow convict, Leopold writes solemnly: "Strange as it may sound, he had been my best...
This poorly written book is far less fascinating reading than Compulsion, Meyer Levin's bestselling fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb case (TIME. Nov. 12, 1956), which made Leopold "physically sick." In its own way. though, it may be more revealing...
...Nathan Leopold says he sometimes wished that he had been condemned to death rather than allowed to live his long life through. At this point, the reader will feel a twinge of uncommon pity for this twice-doomed man who, at 53, has emerged into the world-or at least into a career as an X-ray technician in a Puerto Rico mission hospital, where, hoping that this book and his crime may some day be forgotten, he claims the charity of silence...