Read For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago for Free Online Page B

Underwood typewriter—the typewriter used to print the ransom letter—from the backseat of the car and, with a pair of pliers, began twisting and pulling apart the keys. Now, even if the detectives found the typewriter, they could never match it with the ransom letter they had sent to Jacob Franks.
    They drove south, down Cottage Grove Avenue, and east along the Midway, out to Jackson Park. On their left, across the North Pond, the Palace of Fine Arts—the sole structure remaining from the Columbian Exposition of 1893—gleamed white in the moonlight; its silent presence was the only witness as Nathan, clutching the typewriter keys in his hand, stepped from the car onto the bridge, and allowed the keys to fall into the water of the lagoon.
    At the outer harbor, on the stone bridge, Nathan stopped a second time to dispose of the typewriter; it fell into the harbor with a splash that echoed into the silence of the night. 23
    The automobile blanket—stained brownish red with Bobby’s congealed blood—lay crumpled on the floor of the car. It had been too risky to burn the blanket along with Bobby’s clothes in the basement furnace in Richard’s house; they had to burn it in open air so that the acrid odor of the blood would not attract attention. Nathan knew a spot on South Shore Drive, close by a small copse, far from any buildings, where they could safely burn it. It took only a few minutes to burn and once it had been consumed by the flames, the last piece of evidence had disappeared. 24

    T HE POLICE FIRST KNOCKED AT the door of the Leopold house on Sunday, 25 May. Thomas Wolf, a captain from the Eighth Police District, explained that he wished to talk to Nathan about the ornithology classes he conducted by the lakes near the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. It was routine, the captain explained; in the hope of turning up clues to the murder, the police were questioning anyone who frequented the area.
    Nathan spent two hours that Sunday at the Ewing Avenue station answering questions. Yes, he had often been out at Wolf Lake; only the previous weekend, he had spent the day with a friend, Sidney Stein, hunting birds. And he also took groups of schoolchildren out to the area to look for birds; he had frequently taken boys from the Harvard School to the lake, and occasionally he had classes of boys and girls from the University High School. 25
    It was reassuring, he realized, that the detectives had no inkling that he had any connection with the murder; it quickly became apparent that their questions were indeed routine. Nathan was not a suspect and, he calculated, if the police had not yet, four days after the discovery of the eyeglasses, connected him, through the eyeglasses, to the murder, then it seemed that he was safe. Nathan reported back to Richard—neither of them was under suspicion!
    Nathan had no need for any more distractions; he had decided to apply to Harvard University law school, and that week he was taking the entrance examinations. He needed to concentrate—it would be inconvenient if there were any more questions from the police.
    One week after the murder, on Wednesday, 28 May, Nathan took his law exams. On his way from the examination hall, he passed the office of Ernst Puttkammer, the popular thirty-four-year-old law professor. Puttkammer, despite his thinning blond hair and his steel-rimmed glasses, had a youthful appearance; students found him approachable and helpful, always willing to discuss the complexities of the law and to lend a sympathetic ear to any student struggling with his class work.
    The door was ajar, and inside, Puttkammer was sitting at his desk, poring over a law journal. He glanced up as Nathan knocked and entered the room. Nathan was one of the brightest students in his class—a little eccentric, certainly, with his Nietzschean philosophy and his avowals that a superman need not regard the law; but, Puttkammer reflected as Nathan sat down, it was better to have an engaged