Intellectual Thrill Killers A New Crime Library Find
The last post featured instructions for mining content from the Crime Library and gave links to three favorite articles. This week, I’d like to concentrate on a fourth Crime Library gem, Leopold and Loeb.
Loeb (left) was considered the handsome, confident half of the pair, while Leopold was described as socially awkward
Ninty years before affluenza, the trial of two privileged 19-year-old murderers captivated the public.
Richard Loeb and Nathan Lepold both finished high school by age 15 and came from fabulously wealthy families. Loeb’s father was a lawyer and Sears Roebuck executive, and Leopold’s owned a box-manufacturing businesses.
As sometimes happens when you have teenagers with high IQs and few responsibilities, Leopold and Loeb latched onto the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The two decided that they fit the German philosopher’s definition of infallible supermen unfettered by conventional morality.
To prove it, in 1924, Leopold and Loeb plotted to carry out a murder with impunity. They kidnapped Bobby Franks, 14, a cousin of Loeb’s who lived in Kenwood, the same Chicago neighborhood of mansions that the duo called home.
The killers lured Bobby Franks into their rental vehicle by telling him they wanted to talk about tennis
They suffocated Bobby and secreted his body in a culvert, then sent a note to his parents soliciting $10,000 in exchange for his safe return. (Leopold and Loeb didn’t need the money; the demand was part of their game.)
But Bobby’s body was discovered and identified before the Franks paid any ransom. The killers had left one of his limbs protruding from the culvert. Investigators traced a pair of eyeglasses accidentally dropped at the scene to Leopold.
At first, Leopold and Loeb tried out some phony alibis, most notably that they had picked up a couple of girls (it was the Roaring Twenties, after all) and were cruising around with them at the time of the murder.
Then the two suspects cracked, admitted to the crime, and shocked the world by explaining the methodology and reasoning behind it.
Newspaper readers feasted on the story of Loeb, who received a monthly allowance of $250 and had tennis courts in his backyard, and Leopold, who had a chauffeur and, despite his young age, was an authority on ornithology.
Loeb’s parents engaged Clarence Darrow to defend their son, and he persuaded the jury that the teenagers were undeserving of capital punishment. A snippet from Darrow’s closing statement:
“It was the senseless act of immature and diseased children, as it was; a senseless act of children, wandering around in the dark and moved by some motion, that we still perhaps have not the knowledge or the insight into life to thoroughly understand.”
After his release, Leopold was law-abiding. He wrote an autobiography, “Life Plus 99 Years“
Both received life sentences. Loeb promptly died at the hands of a fellow inmate in Stateville Prison in Joliet, Ill., but Leopold got out alive after 33 years.
Writer Marilyn Bardsley’s 25-page Crime Library piece on Leopold and Loeb is a nice read and includes many vintage photos of the cast of characters as well as accoutrements such as the Hammond Multiplex typewriter used to compose the ransom note. — RR
Befriend the WayBack Machine Using Internet Archive to dig up a gem
My favorite true-crime website was itself killed off.
The Crime Library had an advantage few blogs can hope for: corporate ownership. In other words, a total budget way larger than the $52.95 a year I pay Host Gator for True Crime Truant.
The website logo lives on. It’s just harder to find
TruTV provided the Crime Library with editorial staff, IT people, and designers — who all got paid for their work. (What’s up with that?)
But what Corporate America gives, it can also take away.
Marginalized. According to a Reddit post by a former Crime Library editor, TruTV began to turn away from its true-crime roots and instead produce shows like Impractical Jokers.
The network got less comfortable with having serious murder-related subject matter as part of its brand, and gradually cut back on Crime Library’s resources until one day it sentenced the site to death.
It’s a shame because long-form true-crime pieces written for websites are in short supply.
Excavating. Fortunately, all the Crime Library content still exists online; it’s just a bit more work to dig it up. The Internet Archive makes it available via the WayBack Machine. Try following these steps:
2. In the “WayBackMachine” field at the top center of the page, type in “crimelibrary.com.” Hit return.
3. Wait patiently for it to load.
4. This is the step that can throw you off. You’ll see a horizontal time line of years above a month-by-month calendar. Scroll right to 2014, and click on it. Next, click on the blue circle around January 1 on the calendar.
5. It’ll take you to a Crime Library landing page with one or more promoted stories accompanied by photos; ignore this content. (It’s from the site’s later days, when corporate owners were pushing the editors to create lightweight items.)
6. On the righthand side of the page, use Categories to click through lists of older, more substantial pieces.
Some good ones:
• An American Tragedy: The Murder of Grace Browntells the true story behind Theodore Dreiser’s novel An America Tragedy and the movie A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift: In 1906, a social-climbing young executive named Chester Gillette killed his pregnant working-class girlfriend, Grace Brown. The highly publicized trial was a precursor to the Lindbergh and OJ circuses.
• Dr. Jeff MacDonald is about the Mr. Everything That’s Great About America surgeon convicted of the 1970 murders of his wife and two small children. The story remains relevant because MacDonald still has advocates working to get him out of prison. Crime Library writer John Boston argues the case for his innocence, a none-too-popular stance since the book Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss pretty much locked him in as guilty in the minds of the public. But it’s definitely worth reading the Crime Library’s take on the matter, particularly since MacDonald does have a few heavy hitters, including New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, on his side.
• John List, the accountant who executed his family in 1971, has never stopped fascinating true crime fans. He left a note explaining that he shot his mother, wife, daughter, and two sons to save their souls. Then he disappeared for two decades. His gigantic Victorian house in Westfield, New Jersey, remained empty, spooking neighborhood kids (scavenger hunts would require players to retrieve something from the property) and then mysteriously burning down. The Crime Library piece by Katherine Ramsland provides details I never read or saw anywhere else, including in the Forensic Files episode “The List Murders.”
Please leave a comment to let me know whether you find the WayBack Machine instructions useful — and whether you discover any other treasures in the Crime Library. There are surely many more to be recovered and reexamined. Cheers.— RR
We Americans sure do like women who kill. That is, we like to watch them and read about them.
To market tawdry books based on real crimes, publishers used romanticized drawings, like this one of Belle Gunness in the early 1900s. See below for a photo
It’s not just a recent phenomenon. A century before Casey Anthony and Jodi Arias delivered ratings for HLN, the story of Belle Gunness, a Norwegian-American who killed her suitors, husbands, and even her own offspring, sold fanciful paperbacks for enterprising publishers.
Genuine evil. Forensic Files has brought us many a memorable modern-day murderess, including Stacey Castor, who poisoned her husband and then tried to blame the crime on her daughter. And Sharon Zachary, who beat to death the old man she was paid to take care of; she was in his will and couldn’t wait. Sixteen-year-old Idaho resident Sarah Johnson, who shot her parents to silence their objections over her relationship with an older boy, was another memorable one.
And Dante Sutorius, the newlywed who seemed charming until she got greedy and executed her husband for life insurance money, made a colorful subject for “A Second Shot at Love.”
Not that the media coverage these types of crimes receive has ever fooled viewers into thinking that women are going berserk out there, mowing down anyone standing in the way of their ambitions. Most homicides are committed by men. But I got curious about exactly how the numbers break down by gender.
Below, the results of a little research.
Relative trouble. Only 20 percent of people who killed family members were female, according to the most recent (2005) numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Narrowing it down to spouse murderers, women committed just 17 percent of those crimes. Of those Americans who killed a boyfriend or girlfriend, women were slightly more heavily represented, at 25 percent. Most spouse murderers — of either gender — were over 35 years of age. (Maybe it takes a while to build up homicidal fury.)
Men committed 90 percent of murders overall — that is, any homicides, regardless of whether the victim was a stranger, acquaintance, friend, love interest, or spouse.
Getting quantitative. Recent statistics on male vs. female convictions for spouse homicide were hard to come by, but a 1995 BJS study of cases in the 75 most heavily populated U.S. counties reported that women were five times more likely to beat murder raps. Juries acquitted 31 percent of wives, but only 6 percent of husbands.
Brawny Indiana farmer Belle Gunness, seen here with her children, got away with dozens of murders from 1884 until authorities caught on in 1908
Please leave a comment if you find any other interesting homicide stats or have a theory about why women commit way fewer murders (and are more likely to escape conviction when they do) than men. — RR
Q&A with an Advocate for Trauma Victims (“Tourist Trap,” Forensic Files)
Amid the violence of the Miami tourist-robbery epidemic, Helga Luest’s case stands out as something of an anomaly. As recapped in the November 10th blog post, Luest and her mother faced attackers in stereo, one on either side of their car.
Helga Luest in 2016
The unusual part was that Stanley Cornet and his accomplice seemed caught up in brutality for brutality’s sake. “We offered to give them everything to leave us alone,” Luest recalls, “but they said they were going to kill us.” The pair either forgot, or never intended, to steal anything from the women.
Instead, Cornet and an unidentified associate pummeled them. Cornet bit down on Luest’s arm, piercing the muscle.
Luest subsequently appeared on “Tourist Trap,” the Forensic Files episode that told the story of the early-1990s South Florida crime wave that shocked the world. At the time, nightly newscasts were reporting story after story about brazen thieves ambushing travelers in daylight, smashing the windows of their rental cars, and occasionally killing those who resisted and some who didn’t.
Today, Luest lives in the Washington, D.C., area and is a senior manager at research and consulting firm Abt Associates. “Tourist Trap,” filmed in 2003, briefly mentioned the other work she started, as an advocate for people living with the effects of trauma.
To catch up on her work on behalf of victims since then, I spoke to Luest last month. She also discussed the Florida robbery epidemic, the assault by Cornet, and her efforts to ensure he stays tucked away in prison forever. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow.
One theory said that assailants made the South Florida robberies so violent to make victims afraid to revisit the crimes by working with investigators, testifying, etc. Do you think that’s valid? I know that in my case, the nature and intensity of the violence was largely due to the assailants’ being on drugs.
But yes, tourists were specifically targeted because they were less likely to come back to prosecute. The theory was that tourists were targeted because they would be so traumatized that they would go back home and stay there.
How much time was there between the attack on you and your mother and the jailing of Stanley Cornet? It was a matter of a week or two weeks because he was apprehended while attacking a police officer’s mother — whom Cornet was robbing and assaulting [including a biting]. It’s very unusual for a victim to be bitten during a crime, so that made the link to our robbery stronger. They flew me to Florida to do an in-person ID of photographs, and I identified Stanley Cornet.
So the fact that the police caught him in the commission of another crime helped to speed along your case? Yes, if not, it would have been just my word against his. With the bite mark evidence, it was more difficult for him to claim he didn’t do this and to be believed by the jury.
You were originally a TV producer. How did the attack change your career path? My career changed completely. Because of my physical injuries, I could no longer carry gear in the field when I was producing news stories — so I knew I had to make a change. I came to see my life’s work as helping to prevent violence wherever possible and making sure victims have the support they need to heal and live well again.
What happened gives me insight into the nature and impact of trauma and how trauma affects whole health. When someone is traumatized, the effects are not just physical and mental but also spiritual and economic. It can lead to workplace presenteeism [difficulty focusing because of the trauma, so your productivity is affected].
I believe the final stage of the healing process is when you can take the dark cloud of what happened to you and make it something positive. I’m serving on the Governor’s Family Violence Council in Maryland. I use my experience to try to better inform programs and use what I know as a survivor to inform and help other people. What was once a senseless incident that happened to me became something I could turn into actions with a positive purpose.
I manage two groups, on Linkedin and Facebook. The Facebook “Trauma Informed” group has more than 1,300 members (with 3 to 5 new members daily) and is more conversation-oriented. It includes people from as far away as China and Australia. The LinkedIn group has more than 700 members.
What’s the first thing you should do if you’re the victim of a crime?First and foremost, is safety — get with people who can support you. If it’s a rape, go to the hospital. If it’s something else traumatic, report it. More people regret not reporting a crime than reporting it.
How long does it take to overcome the effects of trauma? Everyone heals differently. Sometimes after a year a two, it can seem that everything is back to normal, but then a life change — like getting married, losing a parent, starting a new job, having an illness — can unearth pieces of healing that you weren’t ready to explore earlier. People heal along their lifespans and in their own time and in their own way.
Is counseling generally effective? I believe counseling can be good, but victims also benefit from connecting with other trauma victims and those who can relate to their experience.
How do victims find one another? When I was attacked, there really weren’t any groups for crime victims.
Now with social media, it’s easier. Sometimes a victim can use a different name to protect privacy. We now have a deeper understanding of the nature of trauma. I see more state and grass-roots level opportunities to have discussions on crime and trauma in the community, so that heightens awareness.
Does it take longer for children to recover? It can be different for kids and adults. Kaiser and the CDC did an Adverse Childhood Experiences study some years ago. We know from the study that, although one event can have a big effect, children can be resilient. But if it’s happening again and again, it can ultimately affect a person’s life span.
How can children heal from trauma? They need at least one supportive and safe person and a safe space to heal. The research has really informed what’s being done with schools. For example, 15 years ago, if a child wouldn’t sit in her chair, it was because she’s a bad child. Now, we’re not asking about what’s wrong with this kid but rather what’s happening with this kid and what are they trying to tell me. If things are volatile at home, it makes sense that school would be a place a child would let it out. This is where we would see the school-to-prison pipeline. Now we’re in a different place and can use trauma-informed approaches to help and provide interventions.
What’s the most common effect of trauma on victims?The feeling that so much is out of their control. When an assailant is caught, he has Miranda Rights. But you as a victim don’t have a right to a speedy trial. No one tells you how long the process is or when VINE (Victim Information and Notification Everyday) is going to contact you. It really is a long-term commitment.
The forensic dental expert lost the photo of the bite wounds I sustained [from Stanley Cornet]. And I called every week for years to ask where the photos were, if they’d been found. Also, Cornet’s cap came off in the attack, and I gave it to police but it was never registered into evidence. I’m wondering: Will this ever go to trial? Will this ever be over? These are things you would never know until you have experienced it.
Forensic Files also didn’t show that Cornet found a loophole in the prosecution process. In 2001, I got a call from VINE notifying me that he was transferred back to Miami for a hearing. They resentenced the case, so I went back down to Florida and testified again.
Stanley Cornet sat there and smiled at me during proceedings — now, for a second time — as he heard what I went through physically and emotionally. The court saw that he was not remorseful. This judge sentenced him to life in jail without parole.
Your mother didn’t appear on Forensic Files. How did she contend with the aftermath of the robbery? My mother didn’t testify or come back to Florida to see the case investigated or prosecuted. Every survivor has a different process of dealing with that kind of thing. It happens along the survivor’s own timeline and in their own way — and it’s important to understand and respect that.
So she didn’t want to relive it? Yes, it was hard for my parents to even hear about what happened to me.
Do you still have physical effects from the beating? Yes. I don’t have feeling on one side of my face. I’ve had chronic back issues, although now I’m back to running — and now I’m running marathons. I also have scars, but I’ve become more comfortable with them as part of my body.
I’m a big fan Forensic Files. Did you have a good experience with the show?I felt that they did an accurate portrayal. It was difficult for me to see the reenactments. The producer and crew were very respectful, though, and I appreciated their including information about the nonprofit I founded. [Luest now works with Trauma Informed.]
Do you feel incidents that cause trauma are on the downswing?As we’re changing administrations, the US is in an unusual place where violence and threats of violence are increasing. I work with the National Bullying Prevention Initiative and have been tuned into news reports of increased bullying and hate crimes in school. The NEA recently said these incidents are rising. We’re seeing more bullying in schools. We need to set the right example, build empathy, and pay attention to what can cause kids lifelong problems.♠
of older, more substantial pieces.
