In the tradition of The Devil in the White City comes a riveting recreation of one of the most infamous crimes of the 20th century-the scandalous Leopold-Loeb murder case that shocked Chicago. His style, which he calls "literary," relies on fictional techniques: People's thoughts are expressed in distractingly melodramatic exclamations ("Already past six o'clock and still no sign of Bobby!"), and we find factually dubious moments such as when Darrow's wife, Ruby, "lifted herself on her elbow" in bed to look at her husband and "thought he was still an adorable man." This lack of an objective narrative voice also prevents Baatz from acknowledging incongruities: He notes, for instance, that blood splashed on Nathan's pants during the murder, yet on the next page he is going into the Dew Drop Inn apparently without changing his clothes.FOR THE THRILL OF IT Simon Baatz Mint Condition / Factory Sealed Book : Story of Leopold & Loeb Chicago Murderers. Dramatically, as well as legally, Caverly's opinion is an anticlimax after Baatz's prolix account, readers are left wondering what all the fuss over psychiatry was about.īut Baatz's narrative goes off the rails much earlier. Caverly sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life plus 99 years solely on the basis of their youth, disregarding the psychiatric testimony. The psychiatrists conducted penetrating examinations of their mental and emotional states.īut it was to no avail. Perhaps it is Baatz's background in the history of medicine that leads him to dwell too long on the defense experts' examinations of Leopold and Loeb - the X-rays, metabolimeters and plethysmographs - seeking physiological causes of the boys' apparent mental defects. The insanity issue is also at the core of Baatz's narrative, which highlights the battle in forensic psychiatry that played out in the courtroom of Judge John Caverly.Darrow called in three prominent psychiatrists - William Alanson White, William Healy and Bernard Glueck - who shared an agenda not unlike Darrow's: "to extend and expand the influence of psychiatry within the courtroom in a way that would challenge the authority of the legal profession," replacing judgment with diagnosis and punishment with treatment. The question of the young men's mental states was at the core of the sentencing hearing held after Loeb's defense attorney, the great Clarence Darrow, suspecting they had no chance with insanity pleas before a jury, had them plead guilty.
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