Word: leopold
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These names are deliberately transparent pseudonyms for Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, in this fictionalized account by Novelist Meyer Levin of what he calls the "crime of our century." The real victim of Leopold and Loeb was 14-year-old Bobby Franks, and the dropped glasses gave them away. Only a brilliant defense by famed Lawyer Clarence Darrow saved them from hanging...
Brats or Geniuses? Many have asked their whys of the Leopold-Loeb crime, and given answers ranging from "spoiled brats" to diabolic possession. Levin, who was an undergraduate contemporary of Leopold and Loeb at the University of Chicago in 1924, has offered a new version after 32 years' thought and a two-hour conversation with Leopold...
There was no excuse for the crime. Leopold and Loeb were the sons of millionaires. They lacked nothing. They were brilliant students in law, science and languages; Leopold had a rating as "genius" in intelligence tests. Life offered them everything-and what it gave them was a 99-year-plus-life sentence in Illinois prisons. Loeb died in prison, the victim of a fellow convict's straight razor in a shower-bath row framed in homosexualism. Leopold lives on, a sad, heavy-set man of 51, deeply read in many languages, and fascinated by medical research which he works...
Pointless Crime. Leopold and Loeb had a homosexual tie, and 30 years ago the words "sex" or "perversion" or "degenerate" would have seemed adequate to explain why two rich, intellectual boys should make a game of murder. Levin is not content with this explanation. He points out that Friedrich Nietzsche had introduced them to the idea of the superman, "beyond good and evil." A really superior man, they reasoned-in one of those gloomy blunders which snarl up the scribbled notebook of adolescence-could put himself above and beyond society by the successful commission of a pointless crime. They burned...
Thus, in his 495 documented pages, Levin attempts to relate the criminal folly of Leopold-Loeb to the greatest "crime of our century"-fascism and all the ideologies by which man justifies his crimes. Levin's sermon: if it is true that men are all parts of one another, then some part of every man is pretty terrible...