On the afternoon of May 21, 1924, Bobby Franks was walking home from the Harvard School for Boys in Chicago's wealthy Hyde Park neighborhood when he vanished. The 14-year-old son of a millionaire family, Bobby was forced into a rented car, bludgeoned with a chisel, and suffocated with a gag. His body was hidden in a drainage culvert on Chicago's south side. The killers were not strangers to him — they were Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, fellow members of Chicago's privileged elite, and Bobby Franks was Loeb's own distant cousin.
The motive was not profit. The two college students — Leopold, 19, a University of Chicago graduate who spoke multiple languages and was widely described as exceptionally intelligent, and Loeb, 18, who had finished college a year early — wanted to commit the perfect crime, a killing that would demonstrate their intellectual superiority over the laws that governed ordinary people. They had rehearsed the abduction for weeks, established false identities, scouted disposal sites, and typed a ransom note demanding $10,000 from Bobby's wealthy father. They got neither the money nor the clean getaway they imagined.
The first mistake was the body itself. Bobby Franks's body was discovered in a culvert the next morning, ending any hope the kidnappers had of controlling the case through ransom demands. Investigators also found a pair of horn-rimmed glasses near the body. The frames had an unusual hinge sold to only a handful of customers in Chicago, one of them Leopold. Police also traced the typed ransom-note evidence to a machine associated with Leopold. Both young men confessed within days.