The Leopold and Loeb Files - by Nina Barrett (Hardcover)

About the Book

A history of Chicago's infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, told chiefly through a rare collection of carefully arranged primary source material, including confessions, court transcripts, psychological reports, evidence photos, and more.

Book Synopsis

In 1924, University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were young, rich, and looking for a thrill. The crime that came next--the brutal, cold-blood murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks--would come to captivate the country and unfold into what many dubbed the crime of the century. As the decades passed, the mythology surrounding the unlikely killers continued to capture the interest of new generations, spawning numerous books, fictionalizations, and dramatizations.

In The Leopold and Loeb Files, author Nina Barrett returns to the primary sources--confessions, interrogation transcripts, psychological reports, and more--the kind of rare, pre-computer court documents that were usually destroyed as a matter of course. Until now, these documents have not been part of the murder's central narrative. This first-of-its-kind approach allows readers to view the case through a keyhole and look past all of the stories that have been spun in the last 90 years to focus on the heart of the crime.

Carefully curated and steeped in historical context from Barrett, this book allows the surviving Leopold and Loeb documents, most of which are in the form of either transcripts or narrative, to function as both artifact and literature, recounting the moves of the murder and sentencing hearing as well as addressing the questions that continue to fascinate--issues of morality, sanity, sexuality, religious assimilation, parental grief and responsibility, remorse, and the use of the death penalty.

This comprehensive, ephemera-driven history allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall and speaks powerfully to the unsolved mysteries of this distinct crime, in which the guilt of the perpetrators is unambiguous but almost everything else is open to interpretation.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Leopold and Loeb Files:

"You have not experienced this case with anything approaching the astonishing and compelling detail that you will in 'The Leopold and Loeb Files'. . . . graphically stunning." --Chicago Tribune

"It's one thing to read the canned narrative of the crime and another to see it coalesce in real time via police records, psychiatric reports, and court transcripts. . . . The effect is something like a séance scripted by David Simon. It's fascinating to read the transcripts of Leopold and Loeb as they talk in looping confabulations, backtrack, contradict each other, and double down. Their voices on the page thrum with the smugness of youth." --The Paris Review

"'The Leopold and Loeb Files' explores the dark side of the American dream. . . . It's a thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated chronicle that offers new insights into a murder and court battle that transfixed and fascinated Chicagoans--and still does." --Chicago Review of Books

"True crime junkies, this one's for you." --Make It Better

"Photographs, interview transcripts, newspaper accounts, and more create an entrancing mosaic chronicle of a notorious early-20th-century murder. . . . Barrett's collection of primary sources results in a fresh view of an infamous crime, as well as the social mores of an era." --Publishers Weekly

"A new primary source collection gives new insight into the case, highlighting the ambiguities of the trial in a way that only true crime can." --CrimeReads

About the Author

Nina Barrett, a graduate of both Yale University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, is the author of three books and numerous articles, essays, and reviews. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Nation, among other places. In 2009, she curated an exhibition for Northwestern called The Murder That Wouldn't Die, which inspired The Leopold and Loeb Files. Barrett is also the founder and owner of Bookends & Beginnings, an independent bookstore in Evanston, Illinois.