Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 497: Leopold and Loeb Part III - What About The Birds?

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

To conclude the story of Leopold and Loeb, the boys discuss the murder trial and we learn how, with the help of attorney Clarence Darrow a.k.a. "The Attorney of the Damned", the murderous duo was able to avoid the death penalty.

There's no place to escape to this is the last talk on the left That's when the cannibalism started Okay boys planning the perfect murder We already failed because this is recorded No, but if we are gonna I say the perfect murder and someone that no one cares about when they go missing, right? But now these days, but honestly, let's leave these poor sex workers alone, right great Is there a great, you know me? Let's leave these children of the rich alone. Sure because they've gone through so much Absolutely, not easy. That's right. You know, we need to get who is the fucking Pillsbury dough boy. I

Fucking see what his little guts look like and guess what man. He's dough again. Yeah, man But he's alive. I want to see what his little fucking doughnut guts look like and because guess what if we can kill him And then everyone makes big. Oh, you can't believe kill the Pillsbury dough boy, right? We get another fucking dough, Gepetto To make another one of them. Yeah, but like if we could get one of them He can make another one of them, right? You know, I always sort of thought of the Pillsbury dough boy as a kind of a supernatural being not a biological being in any way whatsoever like some one of a like a go more like a ghost actual actually like a spirit like some like made of Interesting always thought of him at least

Interesting cuz I always thought of him kind of like is like a golem I thought that he was like a built constructed like like a panacea Yeah, he is made by somebody who wanted to fuck something that was young But he knew that if he made it out of dough, he could and then if there'd be no evidence because you just close up the hole By just mushing all the dough back into its old place I always thought he was just a contrived product to make kids eat Pillsbury dough with the fuck I know it's not crazy. Welcome to last podcast on the left everyone. I am Ben Kissel hanging out with Henry Zabrowski Marcus perks. My voice is gone from this weekend in Nashville

So I apologize if your ears aren't getting your usual succulent tones Going like all right everyone today. We are on to Leopold and lo part three I know Kissel your voice is gone, but I will say at some point your catchphrases have to change from various animal noises I just don't like like oh my god Yeah So when we last left Nathan Leopold and Richard lobe they had not only fully confessed to killing Bobby Frank's in great detail They'd also literally walk the police through the entire day of the murder from buying the weapon to disposing of the body and

While I may have mixed up the names a time or two in the last couple of episodes because Leopold and lobe They're so goddamn similar you bastard I know I know please note that the tortoise shell glasses that put both boys into the clink belong to Nathan Leopold and the bird Collection which we will be discussing at length later Also belong to Nathan Leopold the so-called slave to Richard lobe's king Basically every single thing that's ugly and nerdy Nathan did yeah Richard was the handsome the one that was Giving the plank while the other dude was the one lying down Enjoying the plank all right

But just after Leopold and lobe confessed to their crimes separately Each blaming the other for the planning of the kidnapping and for the murder itself The lobe family finally called a lawyer to at the very least make sure the boys didn't hang it is crazy How much money can go into just like don't give them a noose like wheels We're gonna spend so much money just to go because in the end like it's gonna cost how much more money They are gonna sit in jail for a very long time so that it will also cost money But it is interesting to just see like they'll do anything to keep those boys alive You feel like then they'll be in jail and do you think these rich boys are gonna do very well in a lifetime in jail?

They actually might because they can get the good ramen. We're talking top shelf there They're a canteen card is gonna be full, but yeah, it's gonna be very very stressful for their throat transition Yeah Well as it happened the lawyer who represented Leopold and lobe was legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow yeah, man this fucking guy he looks like shit professional He does man. He looks so bad all the time I think they invented the word disheveled to describe Clarence Darrow

Well his thing right cuz he's kind of like was I guess you could compare him to sort of like a Bernie Sanders He shoots you straight. It's the whole thing is he shoots you straight And that's why he looks like shit all his hair is always uncombed and his fucking shirts out of his thing He's covered in stands and shit. He's very expensive. Well, he sounds like a real John tester out of Montana in every man's thinking man Yes Now these days Darrow is best known as the attorney who unsuccessfully fought for the right to teach evolution in Tennessee During the so-called scopes monkey trial, which was immortalized in the play Inherit the wind Henry do you ever do inherit the wind? I figured that was something you might have done at one point

I've never done a Full version of inherit the wind, but I did a monologue as Clarence Darrow from inherit the wind for class How did you do how what was your Clarence Darrow voice? Yeah, yeah Many reasons why Clarence Darrow sounded like Franklin Roosevelt if you want to see my full Clarence Darrow performance And this is not just the plug, but it's real your pretty face is going to hell season four Gary is when I I'm on trial and that really is me. That is me doing my best

I thought it sounded very good Henry. No, he doesn't have an accent for some reason. I thought that he was like that that is called Creative license Because he does wipe himself a lot I did that like that sort of idiosyncratic thing from him wiping the lips Wiping the back of the neck because it's always too hot for him because he's right. He runs hot Yeah, I heard zero and so I did that but I thought he had a southern accent But he does not it's actually fairly like mid-Atlantic. Mm-hmm But just one year before Darrow defended science in the south in 1925

He defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb as the so-called attorney of the damned Because Darrow was known as an attorney who defended the Indefensible as a matter of principle whether he made money from it or not. Oh, he should have married a Leah She was the queen of the damned and he was the attorney of the damn Isn't it nice to have one artist and one lawyer true? Honestly There was also back in the day when people like had principles and stood for things and did because they believed in them or whatever Because nowadays if you do get an attorney for the damned, it's just gonna be a tick-tock

Woman with pastes on and horns right there and she will have a legal degree and she will work for you But mostly it's about the aesthetic. Yeah. Well, for example as far as defending people whether they had money or not in 1893 Darrow defended a 25 year old Irishman named Patrick Prendergrast Prendergrast had unquestioningly assassinated the five-time mayor of Chicago Carter Harrison senior in a fit of Unchecked mental illness. Wow See Prendergrast become convinced that if he was not appointed to a civil position in which he could improve Chicago's railroad crossings then the city would fall into chaos and

Prendergrast wrote a multitude of letters to Harrison asserting this false belief. Oh my god. It's the first-ever internet fan Like he literally was like I know how to fix these railroads. We got a tournament to spaghetti I am sick and tired of all of these railroads not being made out of a spaghetti and me not being made the Tsar of spaghetti railroads. I love it train with meatballs train with meatballs coming through and thankfully I can legally go purchase this gun Fantastic Well when Harrison was reelected to a non-consecutive fifth term in 1893 and Prendergrast did not get his appointment Prendergrast talked his way into the mayor's home and Fatally shot him three times

Hey, just be a friendly. I hear a chimney swing. Did you just let anybody in back in the day? They just let me insane. What were you here for again sir? You gotta clean your holes. You gotta clean up. We don't even have a chimney though Let me insane for just a second because you can see I'm going to melt in the rain No problem The worst part was that he shot him while the mayor was taking a nap. That's the worst time to die at least he didn't know No, well, I'm sure he woke up before he died. Do you? If you unless you get shot in the head, that's how I would do it I put the gun right up to your sleeping head and blow your brains out that way so that you die dreaming

And I'm just yeah, I'm a neighborhood guy Yeah, now Darrow argued that Prendergrast was insane and should therefore at least be spared the hangman's rope But the jury disagreed and Prendergrast was hanged for murder which haunted Darrow for years afterward See Darrow was an early and vocal opponent of the death penalty in America Rightfully referring to it as state sanctioned murder a barbaric relic that had no place in modern society Now I missed a box. I'm actually gonna be able to use my weird voice here for a little character worked in Priscilla I'm a hang woman or a hang bitch. Whatever you want to call me I don't appreciate you say hang man. I've killed more fucking men than most people could ever even imagine

So fuck you And I'm gonna go masturbate thinking about other large women Thank you so much for bringing the hang bitch community to the table. No problem. This has really been such a cuz again We're so we're inclusive here and we want all of you to be seated here at our conicopia My name is Priscilla Marvore Winston Oh good not related or related Addicted Okay, well partly Darrow's belief came from the absolute fact that innocent people are executed far more often than death penalty

Advocates would like to admit we know that to this day Oh, yeah, but mostly Darrow's deeply held principles were inspired by a surprisingly progressive yet ridiculously titled book written in 1886 called our penal machinery and its victims Yeah, my poor beautiful wife has to deal with my penal machinery three times a week Yeah amazing Penal machinery I love that band great great tunes See the author of that book John Altgeld former governor of Illinois had found through extensive research that criminal behavior was less of a Conscious choice made freely than a matter of upbringing education and environment

Based on his studies Altgeld found that the overwhelming majority of incarcerated criminals had grown up in poverty They were raised in families were one or both parents were absent and they were without the benefits of education schooling or discipline bereft of any other options many of these men had turned a crime to survive now for most of us we all hear this and we say No fucking shit. No shit. Yeah, exactly Yeah, this is the problem. This is the thing that we're dealing with. This is why there's a Classist problem in America that does fuck with people's lives. Yeah, all I heard you say Marcus was honey comes for dinner Well, we hear that today and we say no shit, but you know many people know this as fact We know that this is just the way shit works, but in the late 19th century. This was

Revolutionary stuff. Nobody had ever talked about this type of thing before and this was especially Because cities and society as a whole were both evolving into the modern world that we all live in today People were moving from farmlands into the cities more and more often They were becoming major Hubs of humanity and they just kept happen to start to find out. Hey, we might have to figure out how to deal with all of these people Right, like they're humans and not like they're just a bunch of like cogs in a machine Now they definitely went to the extreme like Clarence Darrow believed truly that Nobody made the choice to be a criminal like he fully believed that where now we know that that's very we'll get into it

We now know that that's very varied. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, let's not get too far Now Clarence Darrow was a fountain of compassion if ever there was one and he put the beliefs inspired by Alt-Gild's book into practice Defending everyone from the poorest sex worker to the richest corrupt politician and he defended Plenty of murderers in between. Yes, that must have been a fun day for the politician. He's like, hey Barbara. You're here too. Same lawyer, huh? How does it happen because remember Johnny Cochran back in the day? Yeah, those those style of lawyers were like Don't you realize like how much deep shit you're in if they're your lawyer? Yeah, we're like, that's the things that by the time you get the best lawyer in the world It's because you are extremely guilty of massive crimes. Well, not necessarily innocent until proven guilty. You're right

Yeah, well, I mean Henry where you said earlier about like Darrow's belief in Fred like it's a little bit more complicated A little bit more nuanced than that. It's not necessarily that they had no free will He believed that free will as we think of it is somewhat of an illusion It's not it's not necessarily that we have some sort of ordained path We don't or that we have a faith that we can't escape for what he believed is that our upbringing and our life Experiences almost make our decisions for us not in that we don't have any free will or we have no choice or anything like that It's just that what how we see the world is the you know, that's kind of the sphere in which we take all of our opinions We take our decision-making processes and people that grow up in a world where there's not a lot of choices

The idea that we can make any choice at all the complete and total free will That doesn't occur to us because we don't have complete and total free will and now his great great great grandson is in Union Square Screaming about how we all live in a simulation And I just want to say this sometimes if we do live in a simulation hit pause on some of your characters and you come on Let him rest. It's forward. It's also though. It's kind of interesting because you have a little shit face rat fuck Right super into Freddy nachos Interesting that he's falling on to the belief systems of Clarence Darrow to save him from the hangman's noose when Freddy nachos would say As a matter of fact all we have is our individual will and they need to rise to power and actually you must take control of your own life and

Change and change yourself no matter what your circumstances are so it's interesting about what they'll do when it the time comes For the court man to come a-ring it. I'm gonna Nietzsche a little drink after that You still got it and here's the other thing too is that you know It may sound like Darrow believes that all Responsibility should be removed from every criminal act and that absolutely was not the case All Darrow was talking about is that you don't deserve to die for it You don't deserve to die for your crimes Now motherfucker was trying to serve as a stopgap during a very cruel time period

Yeah, so whatever it was his viewpoint like yeah It might be a little bit to the other side far to the other end of the spectrum But somebody had a fucking be there and I think that what is what and that's what he would use all of his various Which I don't do people do that anymore or you can go into a courtroom and he used it as his like Philosophers chair where he would explain and break things down for days at a time. Does it work like that anymore? I don't think so if they are if it if they aren't there is people doing that We're not fucking paying attention to them. Yeah, it's just some kind of nerd doing policy and changing the world or fucking some shit Call me when I can see your dick on the internet, please

Yeah, I mean that's essentially what Darrow is trying to say it's another version of not your fault, but it is your responsibility You know, it's not your fault, you know, it is your responsibility that you committed that crime But it's not your fault and therefore, you know, we shouldn't be putting you in front of the fire so firing squad for it Now this view of course takes a fair amount of sympathy and compassion for your fellow man But if you're inclined towards this view then you're also probably more inclined to feel more sympathy for someone who grew up in poverty Then for say the sons of multi-millionaires people like Leopold and lo. Yeah So we talked about at the very beginning of the series, which is like why with these two people who seemingly had everything at their fingertips the entire world Why would they do this just to fuck up a bunch of people's lives, right?

But to Clarence Darrow's great credit. He did not cherry-pick his beliefs in any way whatsoever He reasoned that when it came to negative influences that shaped behavior It didn't matter if you grew up poor or if you grew up rich while it was much more likely that poverty would produce the External stimuli that created criminal behavior certain circumstances in wealthy families could create monsters of an entirely different stripe Namely Darrow believed that it was these circumstances that created Leopold and lobe Now on the other side of the courtroom in the Leopold and lobe murder trial was the aforementioned state's attorney Robert Crowe Crowe believed that Darrow's sociological arguments were total horseshit Yeah, I grow crows is so old-fashioned son of a fucking bitch man. Yeah

Crowe was described as unscrupulous cynical cunning and devious concerned mostly with the accumulation of power through the arrest incarceration and if warranted Execution of Chicago's criminals. I mean they were actively in a war street war. Yeah, dense gang So like oh, yeah, that's also the difference too is it while all of this is happening like this Well, I think we set the tone last week But like while this is this whole scenario is playing out this celebrity trial. It's like Chicago city's eating itself Yeah, but on the other hand the crow is not able to convict or even arrest any of those guys That are committing those gangland murders

So he's using the Leopold and lobe trial as a shiny little toy saying look over here look over here look over here Yeah, and he's pushing for the death penalty for all of the wrong reasons See crow sites were set squarely on the mayor's office and crow believed that people had the free will to choose criminal behavior The way the rest of us would choose where to eat lunch simple as that. Hmm. Well, it's not that simple I mean we've gotten to a massive fights over where to eat. That's honestly mostly our fights are about lunch. Yeah Now while crow and Darrow were preparing to battle it out in court Leopold and lobe still seemed as if they hadn't fully grasped the weight of their own situation Just yet and continue to approach life from behind bars as a couple of God about they're very

Menendez brother's style just fucking loving every minute of it. Wow Lovin in a letter to his parents Richard lobe wrote of how he had made captain of the seventh floor prison ball team No, what ball? What shape ball like this is a baseball. Okay, okay, baseball Yeah, it's a ball team effort. There's many balls. Yeah Lobe wrote that his cellmate By the way and lobe described his cellmate as his roommate Yeah, he described him as a nice chap even though he only had a high school education I still still a fucking snob that fucking piece of shit. He sounds like Jody Arias kind of a little bit. Yeah

And Richard lobe wrote about how the jail authorities had been quote awfully nice Although Clarence Darrow had very wisely advised lobe to not ask anyone for any special privileges while he was behind bars But along with those updates lobe also showed a sort of sociopaths Contrition in which he pretended to be absolutely bewildered as to how any of this could have happened This is what he wrote in a letter to his parents. And by the way, Henry either I'd like you to read this verbatim Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, you know, yeah, there's not everyone knows. Yeah, there's not much room for improv in this Of course, dear mom speed. I don't even know how to pronounce mom. See mom. See mom See mom mom see and pop see of course dear mom see and pop see the things all too terrible

I have thought and thought about it and even now I do not seem to be able to understand me I I just cannot seem to figure out how it all came about One thing I am certain though is that I have no one to blame but myself I am afraid that you too may try and put the blame upon your own shoulders And and I know that I am alone to blame. I never was frank with you mumps be popsy, dude And how do you suspect anything and came and talked to me? I would undoubtedly have denied Everything and I'm just gone on just the same, you know, the nice thing is his parents must have read that letter and felt like they did a Pretty good job, you know, this is I love being called mom see

Yeah, definitely sounds like the female Igor That's allowed But I actually said I read an account of him as young at a younger man That they try to put forward during the trial of like why they felt that Richard might be nicer than they thought Did they know they go and it was all about how he had gotten into a car accident with a girl that he was in school with And she got severely injured and they talked about how when he found out that she got severely injured This is what they said made him a good guy is that he threw up and fainted In the hospital room and everyone's like, oh, it's because of the care that he felt over the woman and I was like, no, dude

He thought he was going to jail Like maybe what was happening like well, he is not I don't think the man had a single thought For another human being inside of his body. Well, technically, he is nicer than Ted Kennedy You're right. You're right. He's just kept driving I'm not sipping a squirrel Some kind of woman-shaped squirrel Well, it's also the performative nature of the sociopath because the sociopath only does an action if it benefits him him or her in Some way or another so it could be that, you know

Richard saw that there was an advantage to him crying and throwing up and passing out at the hospital Who knows that that was but it's certainly not proof that he's a good person. Well, it's not easy to just randomly throw up He's not draws from the WWE back in the 90s who did end up in a wheelchair ironically enough But it's not easy to just puke when you're thinking about you can wait. How's that ironic? I said ironic. Yeah, because he threw up when the girl was in a wheelchair after the car accident. Oh Oh It's coincidental that's a coincidence I just thought his character was somebody who would never ever ever ever ever throw up because he doesn't biologically have a throat or

Somebody who like every time he threw up he ended up in a wheel He threw up so much that he had to use a wheelchair like that would be Closer to irony, you know, man. Do you ever had 10,000 spoons and all you need is a knife? I'll fucking suck your cock in a movie theater right now But as Richard was trying to rope his parents into a sympathy trap The police were hard at work trying to pin as many unsolved murders as they could on Leopold and lobe Reasoning that if they committed one murder for the thrill of it They might have committed several more crimes for the same reason. Yeah

The first crime police tried linking to Leopold and lobe was the brutal assault of a cab driver named Charles Reem. Oh, man. Where do you ever see? Man Charles Reem is incredible and where the girls have never ever been Have you ever seen that film? No, it's a documentary film. I don't get the where the girls have never ever You know, Charlie Reem It's about Reem. It's about rib jumps. Yeah, I'm like that. Yeah, with a reeming at door. See the bottles Do you just I just need to be understood and Listen to I need to be heard and made room for Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, Reem said that in November of 1923 six months before the murder of Bobby Franks a man held him at gunpoint

While another man knocked him out with an ether-soaked rag when Reem woke up hours later near a set of railroad tracks He was bruised, bloody and worst of all Castrated. That is worse. Whoa, that is the worst. Yeah, especially just cuz like man, that's a rough Tuesday That's a real rough Tuesday. Rougher than 9-11, I think for him. Like roughest Tuesday He'd have seen that year if it happened in the same year, you know He'd be like, ah, I sure wish I didn't wake up next to that railroad. My balls cut off. Yeah 9-11 is pretty bad. You're right. Well, he doesn't know about that yet But then Henry's idea of the spaghetti track probably wasn't real either so he didn't even have a spaghetti

No, no, then he could have made a little spaghetti dick And he still would have been sad and penis-less and he would have a bunch of spaghetti in his pants and People would try to ignore him and try not to acknowledge him as he cried and he was covered in sauce And you just have to go like sir like you want beans with that or like you want rice and beans And now it's Charlie spaghetti pants. Yeah, and then he just hugs everyone really too aggressively. He's like, I'm a tail It's wet, I'm wet Well concerning Leopold and Loeb Reem had woken up about a mile from the drainage pipe where the corpse of Bobby Franks had been dumped

Interesting but not definitive. No, then there was the killing of a 23-year-old University of Chicago student named Freeman Tracy Tracy had disappeared from the streets of Chicago within weeks of the attack on Reems and Tracy's body was found with a single Gunshot to the head the gun used to kill Freeman Tracy was the same kind of revolver owned by Nathan Leopold Interesting but not definitive. I just see as Chicago's a pretty violent place. Yeah You also had Louise Holy who was kidnapped raped and let go in the outskirts of Chicago just three months before Bobby Franks was killed And finally you had Melvin Wolf who was last seen near the Harvard School for Boys where Bobby Franks was kidnapped and was soon After found decomposing in Lake, Michigan Now there were tenuous links to Leopold and Loeb from these crimes both Charles Reem and Louise Holy said that Leopold and Loeb

Were their attackers but of course that was only after Leopold and Loeb became extremely famous But when we look at the human element here none of these crimes match Leopold and Loeb's psychology or personality Because Leopold and Loeb were fucking cowards They chose a child to kidnap because a child was less likely to successfully fight back and all of the victims and these other crimes Were full-grown adults. Yes, they were amateurs and shitheads and Did not want they didn't want any problems and they wanted it to be over quickly And they knew if they prayed on someone extremely vulnerable that it would be much easier for them to do the quote-unquote perfect crime

Well, even though the links were tenuous these four crimes would later be used by the prosecution as a key component of Leopold and Loeb's relationship Crow would argue that Nathan used these crimes to blackmail Richard into a sexual relationship And as a result Loeb would even thought about killing Leopold to get out from under the proverbial sword hanging above his head Or at least that's what Loeb claimed and Loeb did his best to bolster this claim Hmm and an interview with the psychiatrist Loeb claimed that he'd been afraid of Leopold Which of course made Loeb the real victim here sure And it made Nathan even more of a villain because even the prosecution was trying throughout to make Nathan Leopold

The main villain of this case he was definitely that they made him out to be the mastermind of the pair I kind of want to put a little bit on his face. Yeah, he's the evil looking one He's the evil looking one and he's an asshole and he's an asshole Like if that's the problem is that if you don't I went deep into Freddie nachos territory and this whole thing trying to understand a little bit more And truly he completely misunderstood specifically He purposefully misunderstood. Yes, what he was reading Yeah to apply to his life, but what's interesting is what I was reading is that they the various people in

Talking to the investigators, right? Like the various people that Clarence Darrow hired to talk to all of them psychotherapists the scientists They all actually kind of believe Nathan because they felt that he was a straight shooter Like he was saying all of this stuff out loud Like the one thing was interesting. He blamed his homosexual on just being so horny his dick had to go anywhere Interesting because you know if that was also he's just making like he's it was hard to come out of the time Yeah, and yeah and then talk about it openly But yes, he said that he was just so horny that Richard would kind of alleviate of him of his symptoms That's basically what he said, but in the end. Yeah. Oh, yeah, the old-fashioned way Marcus

Yeah, it's a wig it's like yeah alleviate his symptoms, which is just balls full of calm all my balls His my balls are full of common. I need to go to the doctor and get my treatment I must get my devils. I call the devils the devils have to come out of my balls for me to focus on the day But even though these crimes were mentioned at trial neither Leopold nor lobe were charged with any of them Now when it came to media attention for this trial, it wasn't just the American press that went all in Reporters came from as far away as Australia to cover the proceedings and because of the worldwide interest It was proposed that the trial be broadcast in its entirety on the radio Now private radio ownership was still in early days in 1924 not too many people had them

But Chicago had already heard enough about Leopold and lobe's relationship to know that there was most likely going to be a Heavily sexual slant to the proceedings. We're going to say the words bummery. We're gonna say the word back Making he old icing on the I don't know You're right and there was also a rumor that Leopold and lobe had sexually abused the corpse Which would of course be mentioned at trial Therefore if it was broadcast on public airways it would possible that children would have heard all about the middle finger We mentioned last episode. Oh, oh, yeah, and it's that's not how you want to hear about it No, you want to be able to sit your family down at home and explain to them

One-on-one mother and father to child about how many fingers can go up the butthole of a dead body Every family has to have that conversation. Yes, and I remember when I had it It was five But what really put the Kaibach on the whole idea was more the fact that in those days the general public had no real idea of How a trial was conducted and specifically they had no idea how attorneys Conducted themselves during trial see the exchange between defense and prosecution Was not as dignified as people imagined it to be in those days and a superior court judge believed that if the public actually Heard just how vulgar an American courtroom could be

They'd have an even greater contempt for the law than what they had after prohibition had been introduced Judge big tits. I'd like to come up to the fucking bench for a second. Hey, you want to listen to me You want to smell my farts? Looking baby dick Yes, it's like and they all did stenographer. Just it's like very dutifully writing it down I didn't know either well I mean vulgar in the way that they would insult each other like remember there were days in the Senate like when men would beat each other with Sticks, of course, you know, that's pre-civil war days and things were pretty heated then I want them to fight openly again

That is the only way I view them as remotely honest is if they're all like fun I like that in Parliament where they're all yelling and rowing cups at each other and shit. It's it's nice But therefore the trial was not broadcast and the public had to make do with daily reports from the dozens of newspapers To cover the proceedings day after day now in the beginning Clarence Darrow had a vague plan of pleading not guilty Possibly by reason of insanity because it was the only option left after Leopold and Loeb had confessed to everything so thoroughly So to determine if this was indeed a viable option Darrow brought in a slew of medical scientific and Psychological experts to examine Leopold and Loeb from head to toe inside and out The whole telescope they got you go there it's amazing the scientific experts studied the boys endocrine system

Endocrine endocrine endocrine endocrine endocrine endocrine system including their thyroid glands Their pineal glands their adrenal glands and their thymus glands All to see if an imbalance might have contributed to Leopold and Loeb's behavior glands glands always hold the hands That's what they say and after the glands were examined and the results were found to be interesting But inconclusive there's glands here. There are did you have any clue how many glands are honestly? I didn't know we had like nine of them. Yeah, well, it was interesting in that You know like the Leopold had weird glands, but Loeb did not have weird glands

I just didn't even need any our holden our Holden's bumps glands. No, no, those are cysts They're not there a Started a gland was a part of the package when you came out the vagina what Holden has our accessories is some part of I guess Some Excelsior plan his parents signed up for he was born Interesting A roast as dark as the night perfect for fueling the cryptid research and mad raving's required for your Podcasting don't mind the red eyes. He's just trying to warn you of the bridge Finally from the caffeine-addled brains of Spring Hill Jack coffee and last podcast on the left

Bre bring you moth men's red-eye blend. Yes delicious Panama beans go to last podcast merch calm to order yours today Well after the glands were examined and the results were found to be interesting, but inconclusive you wouldn't believe there's like nine of them in here Yeah, don't you know I'm not only just a hang bitch. I'm also a gland bitch I'm actually I've licked every one of their glands and I'll tell you one thing not guilty Yeah That is the wisest woman I've ever met. Yes. Yes. Thank you for calling me a woman by the way most people call me much more derogatory terms Well, Nathan's glands were found there like when Nathan's glands were like fucking weird, bro

But like lobes glands are are normal So they couldn't use any of that. Yeah, they couldn't use glands in the argument But after they examined the glands then x-ray machine was brought inside the Cook County Jail to examine Richard and Nathan's bone structure And interestingly Nathan skull did show an abnormality at the age of 19 Nathan had a hardening of the cartilage that typically occurred in people between the ages of 30 and 45 and his pineal gland, which As far as its function goes still a fucking mystery. We still don't really know Yeah, but it was found that Nathan's was prematurely hardened and calcified

Interestingly, the pineal gland is believed by some to be the so-called Third eye that is the gateway to higher consciousness or the gateway to the collective Unconsciousness, which might go some way towards explaining why Nathan Leopold was such a massive asshole Yeah, he might that might have something to do with it. It might just be he's a fucking asshole Yeah, I did I looked up I got really into Phrenology for some reason on this episode because I do find it interesting because it's the dumbest shit Yes, well the face of the planet those you don't know phrenology is the study of the shape of the skull that's supposed to give all sorts of insights

Everything from behavioral shit to what you're supposed to be doing for a living with your life and shit Yeah, because it was is that it's they definitely like a precursor to eugenics Yes, like the idea that we are just like again machine creatures that we're not like humans with autonomy that we just like walk around like Robots and the phrenology that they believe that the brain look like a raspberry It was a bunch of little chunks Right and that each one could be inflamed and they sometimes put a hat on you with pins on it They're like put was dumb as shit, but I was reading Nathan Leopold's phrenology chart Uh-huh, and it is interesting what they say is that apparently what they'll they they blame

his being homosexual on his nose They say his nose Gays no one means he is a feminine nature quote-unquote that he's gay and that the problem is also they then also blame the bump on the very back of his head the back ridge as Contributing to his great love of sex and he also said he's sensuous lips They had problems with it. Okay, honestly, it's all he does. He does he does have sensuous lips. I'll say that they're full But they are it's a horny reading. Yeah, because they really talk about his excessive vanity and the back half of his head They have a flat part. They said that it's a part of his homicidal

Inclinations, huh? What do you know? Yeah, we know mine's not flat the back of my head is a little indentation back there I do have a problem, but everyone everyone has the bump everybody like sex. No, that's not Not everybody What I haven't tried my brand new non-human dick-sucking machine Oh, I will turn every asexual into a absolutely The depraved pervert by the end of this quarter isn't that nice the Jell-O machine What did reveal quite a bit about Leopold and Lowe? However was the psychological examinations of both young men

Richard told psychiatrists that he'd always wanted to be famous and had imagined himself in roles ranging from admired athlete to Adventurous explorer, but as we know Richard chose master criminal because it's much easier than either one of the things that he just said He just wanted to be anybody who just wants blanketly to be famous is Needs to be locked up. I really do think that if you said that's what you want Like if you come out as a kid and that's the only thing that you said that you want You should like be put in a square for like a year to like think about it like really think that's where the Quakers didn't No, we put them I said that's Battle Royale time man You put all those fucking people you put them on an island then they get to be famous then they get to fight for who gets to be famous

That's awesome. Yeah, and we get rid of all of them at the same time. We don't have to fucking deal with any of them And we never let them off the island That's a thing man is that the last person who fucking survives they're just they're alone. They're the front. No, they don't say Yeah, they're the first one in the next fucking They should be able to get like a fucking they should get a bump stop. Oh, no, they get upgrades It's a pretty much a rogue like you know, they should get upgrades in a loot box. Yeah Nathan meanwhile focused on his own intellectual brilliance during his psychological examination He bragged that he'd learned a dead language from Italy called Umbrian

Specifically because it emphasized his status as an individual that existed above the common rabble The best part of learning a language doesn't exist is that I don't get to talk to anybody. Oh, very nice Can't even physically make a friend if I wanted to Nathan Leopold admitted that he had no regard for anyone and lived solely for his own advantage Drawing upon his wildly misunderstood Nietzschean beliefs He claimed to be above the law and above morality and therefore he had no obligations to society You know Freddie nacho said that because God was dead He actually was very sad because what it what God served was a

Distractionary point for everybody to try to not deal with the pain of being alive and now that God is dead That we don't have anything to distract us from the the never-ending cycle of our eternal recurrence Oh, you don't think there's any distractions out there. He was incorrect Freddie nachos was a fucking literally What's his name from the secret garden? He was like the the he's more like Edward scissorhands He is like Eddie Eddie like Gore. I was like Bruce Springsteen. Yeah So so Freddie nacho basically like the whole opiate of the masses thing is that what he was saying is like he wasn't saying it Condescendingly he would saying it would be nice. He he laments that we need it that we do need it And he wished that it wasn't necessary for us to live

Quote-unquote happy life and the goal is to abandon that and any other illusory Thing that will distract from like wanting to better yourself. He also was definitely against having any sort of fun He was against alcohol. He thought that that was the same as Religion because what that did was make you because he said when you drink all your problems go away But they're still there and you're not dealing with them interesting. Yeah But but then they do go away don't they it's the things they do go away. Yeah, it does work But no, I had to he's just you know He's very sickly and he was very upset

But he was always thankful for his sickness because he said it allowed him the pain that he lived with allowed him constant opportunities to change interesting Yep, it's sad. It's fucked up dumb. It's a horrible. I feel up. Yeah Well as far as the murder of Bobby Franks went Nathan said that his only regret was that they had failed In fact, he said that he was not as disappointed with getting caught as he was with missing out on the feeling that getting away with it Would have given him. Yeah Yes, of course, right make sense

Well as far as fantasies went though both Nathan and Richards were in a word Confusing hmm and we already covered Loeb's fantasies of being whipped by male prison guards while women looked on But Leopold's fantasies also involved both a woman and spectators I just love the crowd these guys really just needed to be Of only they could have been comedians And that's the other thing too is that Nathan's fantasies Much darker than

Than Richard's fantasies because Richard's fantasies are masochistic. They're all inward Nathan's fantasies He imagined himself as a German officer in World War one raping a woman on a table While his soldiers looked on and he imagined himself watching his soldiers do the same while he directed their actions and Additionally, Nathan and Richard often engaged in a fair amount of rape roleplay when they had sex together Where Richard would pretend to be drunk and Nathan would pretend to take rough advantage You ever you ever look at your boyfriend and just say what you thinking about I wonder what he's thinking about Literally for me. I am the meme where it is shoes, but I hope it's not ever this Yeah, I don't want it to be this but you know what you know

It all sounds like it's these silly little rich boy men these little boys because they really are mentally like little fucking Shithead boys and it's about the fact that they um, they resent their big powerful dead eaves And daddy's tell them all what to do and they they can't wait to be big strong men and they're gonna move They're gonna be bad and everyone's gonna be like, oh, you're bad and mean you're in charge of me and he and you know Well, mostly they I mean, unfortunately, they were Gonna just walk into being lords of men They were just about to just walk into these various massive industries and have total control over many people's lives And then they but they didn't want that they wanted something even they wanted this garbage

Now after examining both young men it was surmised that neither of them had ever Emotionally developed past childhood Richard had never progressed past the childish desire to solely gain pleasure and avoid pain Well, Nathan had never learned to adjust his own desires to account for the needs of others. However It was found that while Leopold and lobe were basically clinical dickheads No psychiatrists found them insane in the legal sense and when Clarence Darrow knew that there was no way out because of the confessions He changed his tactics and this is crazy, man When he did change streams if fucking rocked the worlds in a way like people couldn't believe that he was doing Yeah, Darrow had Leopold and lobe changed their plea to guilty

If only because at this point the best they could hope for was avoiding the gallows and by doing this Darrow avoided a trial by Jury which meant that the only thing between Leopold and lobe and an executioner was the judge who decided the punishment for the crime Don't worry. I have a picture of him in pennies. It'll seal this whole thing up nice So to avoid the rope Darrow used the arguments put forth in our penal machinery and its victims and Flipped them saying that Leopold and lobe's upbringing and the subsequent ways it fucked them up were mitigating factors and adjudicating punishment Yeah, and so the trial to decide Leopold and lobe's fate began with state's attorney Robert Crow Presenting 14 witnesses on the first day including Bobby's father Jacob the corner who examined the body at the pharmacist the hardware clerk and The manager of the car rental company who of course knew Richard as Mort Ballard. I still say I didn't meet Richard that day

I met mort and mort was a good man And we had a nice long conversation about this sequel to game of thrones And I love Mort. I don't know who Richard is. You can always trust a mort Darrow meanwhile didn't cross-examine any of the prosecution's witnesses and Leopold and lobe Perhaps playing into Darrow's argument that they were to put it crudely all fucked up They laughed and snickered through the whole thing. That was the thing. It was the two of them. It really it's did Nothing changes nothing changes. You put a camera on these guys They're the same as true crime people we see now like playing to the court playing to the all playing to the audience

Laughing as if this was such a waste of their fucking time like there's just and it's because their life is on the line Which really kind of shows like in terms of the the term clinical dickhead. They are that they have a block in Understanding the stakes that are there that are on them and what's exciting is the attention that they're getting they do not care That they are about to probably be executed for more. Yeah Now this lack of cross-examination wasn't surprising considering how none of Darrow's defense rested on arguing against physical evidence or eyewitness Testimony Darrow's entire case was based on psychological factors But he had to convince the judge that this was a reasonable argument to make in a court of law So when it was his turn to present Darrow began by comparing Leopold and lobe's case to that of a murderer

Who had almost been sent to the gallows by none other than Robert Crowe. Why are you doing this to me Clarence? Why are you doing this to me? I'm done with this Clarence The murderer in question was a sephilitic gangland enforcer named Eugene Geary Who'd shot and killed a man named Harry Rekkis on the orders of a southside whiskey bootlegger named Rex Bain That's a cool name. Oh, all these are great fucking prohibition names You know, what's weird is that we actually just covered on side stories the story of this guy I think a guy's known of the Hawaiian master of disguise who one of his Recent fake names was Aaron Bain. Bain's a good name. Bain's a cool name

Now Geary had pled not guilty by reason of insanity owing to the fact that he was an alcoholic But more importantly, he had also been suffering from syphilis for 19 years Amongst other mental defects Geary said that he saw flies and bugs in everything he ate He never let anyone turn off any lights when he was around and he Sincerely believed that every yellow cab driver in Chicago was trying to kill him as a part of a yellow cab Conspiracy, you might not have been wrong. It's very possible. I think anybody who got more of those yellow cabs has taken their life In their hands. Also, there's a lot of bugs in these foods. We talked about it before a lot of bugs out there Yeah, bug parts. He did actually kill a yellow cab driver, but he was found not guilty of that one

It's interesting again That's all gangstalking activity. Isn't that interesting that it's the same shit. It's like the same style of Breakdown it's also sort of the plot to maniac the og maniac where all of the victims come back to haunt him Oh, yeah. Yeah, but even though Geary was originally found guilty of killing the gangland member and sentenced to hang a Second trial was held in which a jury determined Geary Insane and he was therefore spared the hangman's rope. Yeah, I am insane I'm in the middle of being incredibly sane Wasn't that something but put extremely simply without getting into a lot of legal maneuvering on both sides

Darrow basically used the Geary case as a precedent that mental illness could be used as a mitigating factor in Determining punishment or at least he used it as a part of his entire argument. It was a lot that went into it I don't fucking understand all those lawyer shits. I mean, I but it's basically how I get it But that but that's that's the basic idea from way lawyers have what they have said to me So what I saw Sina do is that you memorize cases so that you could use those examples as precedent in the court And then everybody weighs them against each other and then some man that somehow got that job with the big robe on He decides and it's scary and sometimes that guy doesn't even have a lot of grace. Sometimes. He's just someone that got elected He's just a guy. Yeah

Sometimes every single time I'm like everyone's like oh judges need to be respected Then I last night I saw Andrew Zimmern on the new iron chef and I was like well I think that all credibility can be gone now as far as I'm concerned Well, that's it. That's a judge for a TV cooking show. Is it not the same? Is it not the same? They're kind of that's the only place where justice can happen is in some ways of iron chef I do think the beat Bobby play is completely and utterly flawed. Yeah, you think so. I think it's I think there needs to be an open Investigation to be Bobby play and I want to look at it. I want to from all sides I want to talk to Bobby place family. He wins too much. Yes

So once the defense was able to get up and running with establishing the mental states of their clients a Psychiatrist testified that Richard Loeb was in effect infantile somewhere between four and five years old emotionally For example, Richard Loeb still talked to his teddy bear as if it was a person See, this is interesting as that he is he is a high society But he's this guy. He's a snob. He's his college snob fancier than everybody But then he literally just goes like mr. Boo Bear. Are you ready to go to sleep? He's like me too. Me too. Wasn't it hard to kill that child? Mr. Boo Bear. No, it's actually really easy Yeah, you're right. You're right. It was the perfect cry

It's like that movie Ted, but with like a serial killer twist. Whoa save that Save that hold that I well furthermore it was argued that Loeb was manipulated into a life of crime by his hard-nosed Governance and I'm not talking about the sexy German one Nathan had the sexy German guy. Yeah From what the psychiatrist surmised? Richard's governance hounded him into submission by preventing socialization and placing academic demands on him that were so extreme That Richard had to lie in order to satisfy his cruel mistress. Oh, no school was too hard That's why he killed the boy. Oh, I see and from there Richard fell into a pattern of pathological lying Which led to his fantasy life as a master criminal who could elude his enemies forever through deceit and subterfuge

It was homework Yeah It was then said that Nathan Leopold the other one He had been a lonely and unhappy child who had been abandoned by his family to a sexually abusive Governance whose overprotectedness towards an admittedly brilliant child as much as Nathan Leopold was an asshole He was fucking brilliant. All of that had resulted in brutal bullying Yeah, I mean he didn't if he did get his dick sucked by his nanny like that's not like great But seriously, I mean he's gay remember it's gonna fuck you up pretty hard gonna fuck you up

So I feel like yeah, even if you're not gay. It's still gonna fuck you. It's pretty hard if you're 12 and a grown woman seduces you It's not fun. It's not gonna help you. It's not gonna help you you're standing in society But still you know a lot of people get their dick sucked by their teachers and shit and they go on to be like comedians and like That much I'm just saying like a lot of people like that I think a lot of people end up getting the I'm just saying people who get molested actually don't often kill No, no, of course not but the psychiatrists maintain that this is how Nathan's ultimate fantasy was to be a slave Who was also the strongest man in the world both submissive towards his slave master and dominant over everyone else?

You can't have a cake you need to Can you choose one? That's what I said to him. Don't even get me going on that. I know And when you put these two personalities together psychiatrists argued you had the recipe for murder Now Richard needed Nathan's subservience to bolster his image as a master criminal while Nathan needed Richard to play the role of The king who would come up with plans that put both of them in a superior position Yeah, like so it's like kind of on you to make me be the slave to really important guy You know what I'm saying? So it's kind of on you got to be the important guy Yeah, so I can be your fun little sex life. Okay, so you can be worthy of being my master

Yes, and I have actually said this to Natalie because I told her I want to be her erotic butler And I would do things for her on the house and the nude I would do stuff But then she said that that was for me and not for her Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That's like a gift gift you know bowling ball with your own name on it What they should do is give good fun recipes to the jurors What do you mean baked goods? Salisbury steak for what purpose just to butter them up a little bit. Oh, you're talking about bribing the jury Make it naked bribery, but with very paltry gifts

Campering with witness. Well, this was the era of gelatin. Yes. So a lot of gelatin rush straight from the roof And of course when the king faltered when Richard faltered Nathan The slave could pick up the slack and keep the plan going because the ultimate purpose was to help the king achieve his goals That's why the gesture was allowed to say his criticisms of the king Because you know the just didn't speak the truth. Didn't he? Yeah, but the gesture also gets killed like a bunch of times Yeah, I feel like a lot of times the gesture is the first to go. Yeah. Yeah, and of course, we're not saying that all this shit is true We're not saying all this shit even holds weight or that it's even worth anything

But what's interesting about all of this analysis of Leopold and lobe is that the introduction of these ideas into the courtroom Also introduced Freudian interpretations of psychology to the American public for the first time But that's why in terms of true crime history This story is really really important because you're seeing now as a template for the way These criminals would be approached in court from now on and how they would be the type of thing You'd go into how a defense attorney would defend somebody who was obviously guilty of a crime and and we see it to this day Yeah, it's specifically how a sociopath or a serial killer somebody like that is Defended I would hire a bunch of little mice to steal the good judges gavel

Again, if you said that they'd be like, that's why you need Clarence Darrell because they're right Oh, obviously you're guilty of many crimes if we're now to the point where you think you could control a mice army We now need to get a more lawyer in the courtroom five five mice just five What even outside of the true crime realm Freudian psychology Effectively entered mainstream American society through the Leopold and lobe trial and from what we can tell from the newspaper Coverage of the day the second hand nature of hearing these ideas Massively fucked up a good portion of the public. Oh, yeah It's opening up that fucking box of thought

Because these are not ready. They're not ready for not ready. No, not at all because Freudian analysis back in the day was like hours long Like you sat and it was for the very rich like the certain people and the very sick like the truly insane Right, like who would get these guys attention and it's kind of wild to think that like you're just for the first time hearing Things like the edible complex like these types of thing. You're and you're like does my son want to fuck me? Yeah, people were not only suddenly questioning their own children like people are wondering like am I creating a little Leopold and lobe Like they're also seriously questioning what they themselves were capable of am I gonna kill today? But I feel like what I know what I think what's good is asking a question. Yeah, it gets out of the system Pamela Pamela, you're a great mom, but stop dressing so sexy

Well in a newspaper cartoon published during the trial that had the oddly modern title of that awkward moment when we find we're all somewhat insane whoa tic-tac Yikes busload of Chicagoans reading newspaper coverage of the psychiatrist testimony are shown with thought bubbles above their heads And among other thoughts they say things like these statements That description fits me exactly. I must apply for admission to an asylum Next one guess I guess I ought to have my bean surveyed I used to think I was a brave knight saving the lovely princess and most interestingly Mercy are we all queer? I've always had fantasies

That's a fun bus, but that's yeah, that is a fun bus But it's the truth This is a like it might be nice because then you can actually say like you're not alone and you're not alone That is true. There is that side of it But on the flip side of it it seems from what I can tell that the Leopold and lobe trial It kind of introduced neuroticism to the world at large. Oh, no No, I mean that doesn't mean that people weren't neurotic before 1924 of course not people have always been neurotic But introducing this deep analysis of psychology in turn to cause people to deeply and more importantly

Inexpertly analyze themselves which in turn just created more neuroses that was passed on throughout the generations They did their own research on their own insanity Marcus And I think that's really important that they made their own conclusions and found out for themselves like we all must have Yeah, I am completely unbridled Lee and saying yeah In addition the Leopold and lobe trial introduced the ideas of motivations and triggers to the general public Which changed the way that people thought about each other and why we do the things we do that's arguably a good thing Now while it's definitely a stretch to say that the Leopold and lobe trial in effect changed human consciousness in some very fundamental Ways, it did introduce ideas previously kept to academia and philosophy to pop culture

Which certainly counts for something. I think so and I think that it Again, it's all about getting away from the mechanist or the reductionist view of us Like the idea that we're just things you feed and walk and work and do these like again like like little automatons That there is a very complicated Subconscious, yeah Hey, what's up everyone, how you doing Ben Kissel here with Henry Zabrowski Yeah, bro Henry Zabrowski is smoking some of that sweet last podcast Go out there and purchase yourself some I hope you enjoy it

We have sativa we have indica and we have a hybrid and I have to tell you for my personal experience They are wonderful super tasty live resin You really get the delicious weedy taste which is what I like and three different experiences you go to your local vape store and get it Absolutely. Thank y'all so much for supporting the show We absolutely love you can't wait to see on the road and get that vape put it in your brain and have a good time And if you want to set your favorite weed store give them a call and ask for them by name last podcast on the left It's weed hail yourselves everyone. Hail Satan Now back to the case itself after Darrow psychiatrists said their piece Robert Crowe came back with his own

Psychiatrists who of course said the exact opposite of everything Darrow psychiatrists claimed and basically countered the defense's arguments with some very Intelligent-sounding na-uh No, whoa say all that yeah, yeah sure not not indeed But when it came time for closing statements Clarence Darrow put on a show for the ages or at least It was a show for the ages depending on your point of view Oh, yeah, cuz I sent you a clip of Clarence Darrow talking for three minutes, which I loved it I loved it personally. Yes, but I I oh man, I was bad in school, dude. I fell asleep as soon as that lecture voice comes on

I go straight to dreamland. Well, it's the FDR voice That's the that he sounds a lot like FDR and I can listen to FDR talk all day and all night over the course of All right, yeah, that's all he does yeah, he loves them Well over the course of three days Darrow argued that had Nathan and Richard been from poor families They're guilty plea would have resulted in a life sentence without question or thought Especially since Leopold and Loeb were teenagers when the crime was committed. Did you ever see the compulsion with Orson Welles? I've never watched compulsion. I've seen rope a million times. I fucking love rope. That's one of my favorites

Right rope is like the cooler version of compulsion Yeah, Orson Welles as Clarence Darrow is pretty fantastic because again He plays Clarence Darrow in a way which always seems like it's just like a man who just missed the bus He's just like yeah And we'll take a look at the case again like it interested He just is like it's sad that it's been raining outside his sandwich got wet. Oh Well to give an example Darrow stated that in the entire history of Chicago Only three out of the 90 people who pled guilty to murder were hanged

But because the Leopold and Loeb case was high-profile The prosecution was merely trying to make a splash with an execution which had no bearing on actual justice And strangely Darrow then pivoted to a bit of a ramble saying that the biggest factor contributing to the murder of Bobby Franks was Ben, can you guess it? Peanut size I'll give you three guesses one give me two more Number two would be Ball size

Okay, well, what would be the contributor? What would contribute to the murder of this child? Society society, yeah Seinfeld What is it world war one? Well, I never saw a war footage and been like better go kill a boy Well, Darrow argued he actually made somewhat of a collective unconsciousness argument He argued that the war quote has left it stains of blood upon every human heart and upon every human Oh, it's beautiful stuff. It is it really is yeah and throwing two more bodies on the pile

He said would do no good to anyone I mean I basically feel the same way after all of this time like we're still gonna let the government kill people Yeah, you know like after all of this time Now, of course Darrow's three-day long closing arguments have been called everything from brilliant to a disorganized mess Very little of his psychological or scientific testimony was mentioned and Darrow used most of his time to rant against the death penalty Yes, that's the things that all of this money was spent and all of this time was was a crude measuring their heads

Looking up their assholes like seriously like doing right bodies and then none of it came to it then it came down to war What is it good for like that was all he said which is good I mean he needed it But it is interesting that you could that was what guys like him could do back in the day where they could just sit and talk about it Like now we need to talk about why pogs are a face Right a long one, but indeed a phase Robert Crowe meanwhile counter Darrow's argument by saying that the case was high profile because it involved a child Then he spent much of the rest of his closing arguments talking about the victim's distended anus

Which previously had not been mentioned at all and they were like cut this closer All right, I know it worked okay, but that was a specific night. Sometimes you got to let it go Absolutely, well Crowe took two days for his closing statement and he vastly expanded upon Leopold and lobe's relationship at the last minute While also attempting to expose Clarence Darrow as a charismatic fraud But while both of these men were fighting for their own versions of justice in the closing days the judge in the case John Caverly found that being a part of such a highly publicized trial wasn't all that it was cracked up to be Oh, I don't know. I remember it judge. Edo. Yeah, judge. Edo did love it the dancing Edo's That's a bit of a myth judge. Edo didn't the only thing judge Edo loved was the dancing Edo

He liked dancing like all the rest of it. He hated it was a murder trial two people almost lost their heads Yes, but it was kind of funny the way that tonight show was like, but what if the judge dances? Yeah, well in the final days Caverly's wife got a prank phone call from a man claiming to be a police captain Who had news that her foot this guy called them said hey, you're fucking get your husband's been killed at the cemetery You better go there right now And then when she got there She found her husband merely chatting with friends and they had to deal with this shit for the entirety of the trial Judge Caverly actually became such a figure himself much like Lance Edo in the OJ trial that it was reported that a

Patient at the Illinois hospital for the insane roamed the halls of the institution with a razor blade Demanding to speak to Caverly himself. Mmm. That's not good. It's just the razor blade. That's the problem You can write a letter letters are great like that's fine. You can you can even have your razor blade Sitting right next to you. Sure. Sure Leopold and Lowe meanwhile were taking none of it seriously Throughout the trial they'd been visited by old girlfriends relatives classmates Celebrities came by six players from the fucking Chicago Cubs came and coached Nathan on his batting Yeah, man. No, this is what's cuz they dumped a punch money and they have all of this money

So they got to immediately they got to immediately experience a different criminal life than anybody else And just the idea of having all the baseball players come and take your pictures and shit with them Be like he killed a boy Guilty to killing a boy killing a boy which is like it's again It's not like white collar crime like I could see like getting in with like a guy who did like tax evasion or some shit Cuz that's kind of fun if he's like a fun guy, you know if he's like a comedian Yeah, sure if he's you no no no some other guy some of the funny guy Well at the same time Nathan drew up a will which mostly concerned his bird collection

Now I got just the tiniest bit Fascinated with Nathan Leopold's birds this week. Yes. You did this We were talking about this and I literally I went into a Nathan bird Nathan's bird hole. Yeah, I love it and I found a video made by a man who had the same question What's up with the birds? And you know what I like is is that this shows how much you've grown you've applied Kissles point of view for one moment What about the birds? Yeah, what about the birds? What's up with them birds? What's the deal with the birds?

I think you probably just like to clip their wings so they couldn't fly and he can hold them hostage forever Now this man did a little bit of digging and discovered that Nathan's collection was far larger than previously thought Instead of dozens Nathan reportedly had stuffed birds that he'd killed and either preserved or taxidermied himself numbering in the hundreds some estimates said that he had 1500 stuffed birds That's just so much and it's got a smell bad and then it's like what do you do with all those birds? You could see pictures of inside Nathan Leopold's house when they went to like the press came when they were first questions about the murder they came to his house and took these pictures and

To say that it looked chaotic Inside of that living room. I think is it that's saying it lightly a thousand screaming Stuck birds in her tiny room. It's a lot. Yeah, I do feel like you could still hear them screaming if you really pay attention Well, that's the things that Nathan liked to taxidermy them as if they were screaming You really love to make it look like they were screaming But the other thing is that not every bird was taxidermy because this was back in the day when these birds were mostly because you didn't have

Still photography that worked in the same way that still photography worked today So if an ornithologist wanted to study a bird you had to look at a dead bird So he had these birds that he preserved and so he just had drawers upon drawers upon drawers He just opened it up so many dead birds and every Dead bird so weird man. They're just laying there like little lumps. They're just like little chunks of bird in But it's so weird like the idea of like I love birds with all my heart I spend all my days searching for them hoping to see the bear's glance of a bird. Oh look It's the speckled greckle

You have to break its neck Beautiful bird And I get to play with its little dead body and the licking little dead bird asshole But that's the thing about it is that even though Nathan did all these as a teenager the specimens were pretty sharp looking He knew what the fuck they were doing and because these bird specimens were highly coveted by the ornithological community The birds were donated to the Abaddon Society of Elgin, Illinois And they made their way from there to the Elgin Public Museum of Natural History where many are still on display today however

None are marked as Nathan Leopold's because after the public got a little weird about a child murderers birds being in their town the Museum purposefully lost track of which birds were Nathan's in which ones weren't which basically told the public fuck you Now if you want to get rid of Nathan's birds, you got to get rid of all the fucking birds Okay, you want to have a problem with some of these fucking birds? Guess what? You see this canary, throw it in the pile Now I'm shaking it up. You wouldn't even fucking know if this was his bird I got piles of these dead motherfuckers. All right, and they all look exactly the same. I got 15 of these owls I got 15 of these robins. You don't fucking know the difference, do you? But the most interesting part about this is that the museum curators did privately pass on information

As to which birds did belong to Leopold's and those birds Strangely enough they were all taxidermied to appear in the most predatory poses possible They're all the ones going Now on the day of the Leopold and Lowe verdict, it's estimated that 5,000 people showed up to the courthouse and the city was ready for whichever way the judge decided to rule because no one knew How anyone was going to react to either decision? 14 hours before it was to be announced the sheriff gathered 70 motorcycle cops 50 mounted cops

100 foot cops five squads of detectives and an unknown number of Planklose cops to protect the attorneys and the judge who'd all received threats that range from dismemberment to shooting to bombing To actual crucifixion. I'd also I'd get some cops that have hands as well But at the end of it all when the judge finally came to a decision none of the psychological or scientific evidence had any bearing but Nor did the physical evidence the eyewitness statements or the premeditation of the murder In the end the judge ruled that for the kidnapping and murder of Bobby Franks

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were to be sentenced to life in prison Simply because they were too young to hang. Yeah, man. Whoa. They already knew that Didn't even need any of that didn't need any of that Your word Clarence Darrow said the near word Clarence Darrow said didn't hear a word the defense the prosecution said in the end He just came up. Well, I mean Clarence Darrow did mention like hey, yeah, they're pretty young But in the end it really was just the judge deciding all on his own. This is what I think Well following the verdict Leopold and Loeb treated it as seriously as anything else They showed no remorse and asked the sheriff to go out and get them steaks smothered in onions with chocolate eclairs for dessert

Because it was likely to be their last good meal for a while Smothered in onions. What is with everything being covered in a lot of onions then I adore steak smothered in I also love liver and onions. I love liver and onions But it is weird that that was such a thing because that's old school. That's how my dad used to cook. Yeah now Yeah, Robert Crow meanwhile couldn't believe the verdict and decried the fact that these men of quote Loose and immoral character i.e. homosexuals these atheists these Neatians and sound not be killed for their crimes exactly Interestingly while judge Cavali said that he believed life in prison was a fate worse than death

His decision actually made it far harder to execute people in Illinois Which was inadvertently a victory for Clarence Darrow and his anti-death penalty campaign You'll take it man. It W's a W. Yep Similarly the psychological community claimed victory as well Oh, even though their testimonies and analysis had absolutely nothing to do with the eventual outcome of the verdict But that's the thing you just you just claim victory. Yeah, just claim victory and you just say hey at least we got that free lunch Yeah, it was kind of nice to meet that baseball team. Oh, so cool. Yeah, and now people are thinking about their buttholes More than they ever had before way more. That's great

Now after the Leopoldan lobe case Robert Crow's career stagnated then took a downward dive the murder rate doubled every year that he was state's attorney while convictions declined and that was despite a budget that kept pace with the former finally one of Crow's staff a man named William McSwiggan was killed in a gangland shootout While congregating with known gang members at a speakeasy which effectively killed Crow's career as well Yeah, because they were all on the same team. Yeah, everybody was on the same team in Chicago Yeah, and and and Crow couldn't explain why McSwiggan was at the bar and so the public law finally lost faith him He's last name is McSwiggan. Yeah, I mean, where else exactly if he's not drinking technically It's like one of those being named like Baker or quick where it's like that's what you did forever, right?

Like that's what your ancient ancestors did we're like McSwiggan. That is a alcoholic Since the year 9,000 BC, that's what my last name is kiss will come Oh, I don't I really don't like How does the browse I'm terrible at parallel parking, but is the Browsky do what is Browsky actually comes from a they do but this is true is that my there's a zebra on my Crest family crest my family crest and they think that it might have do with some kind of Duke

Version of me owning exotic animals Interesting, well, that's that's not that's interesting that you place yourself in a duke them your answers are dukes Interesting We fucking Cleopatra in a past life I have the you know that I have the body of a leader And you don't think there's nothing more Polish than bringing an African creature to Poland to try to live And see how it does in the fucking stone rock fields of garsh garsh poor poor zebra Yeah, I do love parks though. That's where that comes from. We were just park rangers way back in parks

And that's like being outside. Just like yeah, it's being like out just like being outside Well Nathan and Richard meanwhile after their conviction they were both sent to the shambling mess that was Juliet prison Well prisoners were still shitting in buckets and emptying them out daily in a large trough in the prison yard Within five years though both men have been transferred to Statesville where corruption was the order of the day See while Leopold and lobe never joined one of the many prison gangs that operated whiskey stills grew weed and pimped out younger inmates They gained influence and privilege with inmates and guards using one simple trick Money. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. What a shock Bernie Madoff. He lived in prison teaching men how to invest Lobe had a permanent deposit of 500 bucks at the prison office as well as 50 bucks a week from his parents

It's from my parents. Oh Leopold wouldn't hurt neither making the two of them a part of a small group of inmates who could buy Whatever they wanted from the commissary whenever they felt like it I'm actually really surprised they were allowed to hang out With other prisoners no with themselves. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was back in the day They don't didn't really care as much as we do now like separating these types of people No, they didn't give a shit at all It's just throw a whole bunch of men into a stone fucking box and then just let them let them fight it out. Yeah

Yeah, and since Richard lobe was prison rich and influential He exchanged cigarettes alcohol large cells and easy prison jobs for sex. Whoa Oh, conversely, he could also prevent inmates from obtaining these privileges And that was the sketchy business that led to Richard Lobe's downfall. Yeah, man You don't really I feel like in prison. You don't want to be a gatekeeper. You need to be like kind of open You need to kind of like Man things are groovy here. You know, just to like try to keep yourself from being murdered. Yeah That's the word that gets used in prison still to this day. It's groovy. They'd be

Yeah, I hear the Colorado Supermax is like far out. No, man fucking just live in that jive life, man There's a pretty good amount of acid you can get in prison though So you can just sit there and then you can like Well 1935 an inmate named James Day entered Statesville on a one to ten year sentence for armed robbery Soon he and Richard started a sexual relationship although day wasn't really into it You think I'm that into it? Yeah, but by continually giving privileges then threatening to take them away Lobe manipulated day into carrying on

This as it turned out was an Extraordinarily bad idea. Hmm on January 26th 1936 day obtained a razor from another inmate and told Lobe that he'd be taking a shower at noon that day Then casually suggested wink-wank. You might want to meet me there cuz that's where Bonertown is That's where you and I Are gonna have some sex sex with each other. Okay, cool Well Lobe showed up first and got naked But when day entered afterward the razor was produced and

And day used it to slice open Richard Lobe's neck. Whoa, they kept slicing until he'd inflicted 64 wounds all over Richard's body Lobe died later that day But possibly because nobody was all that sad about his death Day was found not guilty of Richard Lobe's murder. They let him do the job of the state Okay, Nathan meanwhile did a much better job at keeping his head down after Richard's death Nathan focused on Managing the prison school that he and Richard had founded together and he ended up teaching over 400 inmates before the end of it He also did whatever he could to earn his release

Including participating in the sort of drug testing that the United States government would use years later in the psychedelic realm With MK ultra and that's how fucking we uphold and flow Oh Touches MK ultra It's so fucking man this show dude We've been doing this for so long so many things just keep coming full circle Groovy But back in the 40s though they were still using prisoners to test for things like malaria and Leopold much to the detriment of his health

Allowed himself to be infected in the hopes that it would help with his upcoming parole hearing Take fucking anything I'll tell takin fucking give it to me man No Give me the medicine man But when that hearing came in 1953 Nathan seemed contrite But unaffected Joking that if he got out of prison he might sell neckties might we're gonna soda found I don't know what I'm gonna do bro

I don't fucking know bro Maybe not neckties Maybe that was the right profession you know cuz kid was kind of strangled and stuff Yeah In other words he showed no real remorse and his parole was denied But after learning his lesson he got it right five years later and was actually released from prison in 1958 Looking and sounding like nothing more than a harmless accountant that you don't like very much He was fairly whittled down

By the time he got out he was old too So how long was he in there for 30 years He was in there for 28? Something like that I can't exactly I mean I'm sure I did the math wrong but yeah from 1925 to 1958 Yeah 23 I think that's 28 23

Yeah it's fine it's fine 23 You're close I've gotten close yeah Yeah 25 Yeah But after he spent only a few days in Chicago being hounded by the press Nathan Leopold picked up his life and moved to beautiful San Juan, Puerto Rico

I mean that's where I fucking go dude Yeah man San Juan's fucking love San Juan Oh yeah There Leopold met a widow from Baltimore named Trudy which is a very Baltimore name This is just such a scene I can see this scene Such a Baltimore story you moved to Puerto Rico and you married Nathan Leopold Yeah I mean I'm from Baltimore Yeah I married Nathan cause he's always a real he's a better than a lot of the other guys from Baltimore

That was in 1961 and you At least he was convicted of his murder And a lot of the guys I talked to they only get off they got off they weren't even picked up by the police Using Nathan's modest inheritance Trudy opened a flower shop in San Juan and the two of them spent the rest of their lives traveling the world and occasionally returning to Chicago to visit family Yep Finally though in 1971 Nathan Leopold died of a heart attack and while we'd all love to take a trip to San Juan to see the grave Yeah The body was donated to the University of Puerto Rico

And there was no funeral service held for one of the most infamous murderers of the 20th century Was that just to check on his asshole glands? Like now we have the preserved moron They could have stopped him like one of those birds They could have he would have loved it I bet He would have loved it Wow one of the biggest stories in true crime man finally we finally got to it dude Yeah we did it Well I mean we'll eventually get to Black Dolly I know that's one of the others that we've got on the docket

Eventually we'll get to it Next year Next year But again I just want to say thank you to everybody who came out to Nashville It was such a cool fucking time and it was so good to be together And thanks to everybody who watched online too It was really sweet for so many of y'all to come out and watch us You can go to momenthouse.com slash LPOTL to check that out still I think we have a couple more days where it's available

Oh yes and just so you know we can now announce You if you've liked the last comic book on the left which we are very proud of the work that went into it We have volume two is officially we're announcing it it is coming out It is gonna come out the in the wintertime, but you can do a pre-order at Z2Comics.com slash LPOTL2 That's the number two That's the number two Yeah and yeah for those of you comic book nerds out there we got David Mack did the fucking cover like it's that's insane and I know it doesn't mean a whole lot

But yeah David Mack did the fucking cover Yeah drew all three of us he drew Ben quite angelic He really did and we also have one of my new favorite creators ever was Rick Veich who I'd never and did not know him before Oh my god Now I love him I read also we got him on the book with Tom Neely and I collaborated on a project I can't wait for you guys to see this fucking this book Marcus is writing something we got a lot of shit in the new anthology and we really can't wait for you to read it And also we got a couple more days left if you had if you didn't see the Nashville show

And you want to watch it you want to rent it go to momenthouse.com slash LPOTL and you could rent it I believe it's for ten dollars and man you can experience it at the same time I want to watch it again I'm gonna I'm gonna read it just because it wouldn't find such a blur. I don't know what I remember Wild times all around All right everyone. Thank you all so much for listening. Hail yourselves Hail Satan Ogeen Magustylations everyone

Hail me my pink little fee Yeah in all your glance And one other thing the entire replacement series on a no ducks in space is now available Yes, wherever you listen your podcast But yeah full replacement series is five parts or 4.5 because Carolina refused to do five parts or call it five parts and it's a bit arbitrary But hey, what are you gonna do? Do you remember we did it was like four hundred was like three hundred ninety nine point five We did yeah same principle. So yeah hypocrite. That's what I am. I'm a hypocrite

You are but guess what next week we're getting to something real stupid Yeah For you This show is made possible by listeners like you Thanks to our ad sponsors You can support our shows by supporting them for more shows like the one you just listened to go to last podcast network.com