Read Online World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds by Charlotte Greig - Free Book Online Page A

first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Commenting on the death penalty for Hooks, the daughter of victim Phyllis Adams, Barbara Booker, said ‘I don’t think he deserves to live because those women did not have a choice’.

The Crime of the Century
    It was called at the time the Crime of the Century, a ‘superman’ murder. But in reality the 1924 killing of Bobbie Franks by two young University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, was both senseless and lazy. Far from being the ‘perfect’ murder, a secret demonstration of how much ‘better’ and ‘less bourgeois’ they were than their friends and relatives, it only proved that even intellectuals can be supremely cack-handed.
    Fourteen-year old Bobbie, the son of a millionaire, was abducted outside his school on 21 May 1924; and soon afterwards his mother received a call saying that he’d been kidnapped and that a ransom note would arrive through the post. The next day it came, demanding $10,000. But before anything could be done, the police found a body that matched Bobbie’s description. It had been discovered by maintenance men – strangled and with a fractured skull – in a culvert near the railway. Nearby lay a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
    It took only a week for the spectacles to be traced to a rich nineteen-year-old law student and amateur ornithologist called Nathan Leopold. Leopold immediately agreed that they were indeed his, and he claimed that he must have dropped them while bird-watching in the area some time before. But the spectacles showed no sign of having been left outside for long; and when Leopold was asked what he’d been doing on the afternoon of May 21st, all he could come up with was that he’d been with his friend, fellow-student Richard Loeb, and two girls called Mae and Edna. Loeb soon corroborated this, but neither man could give any sort of description by which the two girls could be traced. Besides, Leopold’s typewriter, when tested, was found to be exactly the same model as the one which had written the ransom note.
    It was, oddly, Richard Loeb – easily the more assured and dominant of the two men – who first confessed under questioning. But he was soon followed by Leopold, whose younger brother, it turned out, had been a friend of Bobbie Franks. The fourteen-year-old had been chosen as their victim, it transpired, not because of any particular enmity, but for a much simpler reason: he’d be easy to get into their car.
    Two months after the killing, defended by famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, they came to trial. Darrow did his best, claiming that both his clients were mentally ill, either paranoiac (in Leopold’s case) or schizophrenic (in Loeb’s). This defence probably saved their lives, but there could be no doubt of their guilt. They were imprisoned for life for Bobbie’s murder, and given a further ninety-nine years’ sentence for his kidnapping.
    Twelve years later, Loeb was killed by a fellow-inmate. But Leopold, who’d been throughout his term a model prisoner, was finally released in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, got married, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.

    Leopold and Loeb thought they had committed the ‘crime of the century’. They were wrong.

The Custom-Built Dungeon
    As individuals, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng were both unsavoury characters. Together, they were a deadly combination. In the space of little over a year, they killed, tortured and raped at least twelve and perhaps as many as twenty-five people, including men, women and two baby boys. The men were mostly killed for money; the women, for sexual thrills; and the babies simply for being in the way.
    Interest In Guns
    Leonard Lake was a fat old hippie obsessed with survivalism. Charles Ng was a young ex-marine from Hong Kong, with an addiction to stealing. What brought the two of them together initially was an interest in guns.
    The sexual enslavement of women had long been a fantasy of the older of the two men,