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On November 19, 1904 Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Junior was born in Chicago to a wealthy family of German immigrants. As was normal among the children of the very rich at the time his parents played a small part in his childhood, and much of his upbringing was left to a series of nurses and governesses. The traditionalist Leopold family favored European girls for these positions, and the young Leopold and his brothers Samuel and Foreman were raised in an environment where German was routinely spoken. Leopold’s first words, spoken at the age of only four months, were “Nein, nein. Mama.” His nurse at the time, and for the first five years of his life, was Marie Giessler, known as Mimie.
The Nathan Leopold that Mimie looked after was a small child, but it was already becoming clear that he was an exceptional one. Socially inept and physically awkward, Leopold showed well above average intelligence and quickly began to develop a wide range of interests.
When Leopold was five Mimie left the household and was replaced by Pauline Van den Bosch, a devout Christian who began teaching the boy about the saints. Leopold took to the subject with enthusiasm and used his wealthy background to advantage; he would get the family chauffeur to drive him around the neighborhood’s churches looking for information on saints, and then worked on separating them into categories. Van den Bosch also taught Leopold about Jesus Christ and his crucifixion, which fascinated him. He later said, “The idea of nailing somebody to something was very appealing to me.”[1] Van den Bosch only stayed for six months, but her influence had given Leopold new interests and new influences.
In Van den Bosch’s place the Leopolds hired Mathilda Wantz, an immigrant from Alsace who spoke only German. Very different from her devout predecessor, Wantz - who Leopold nicknamed Sweetie - was manipulative and devious. She formed a complex relationship with the boys, and while it is hard to blame Leopold’s later behavior on her influence she certainly didn’t teach him the virtues of honesty. On one occasion she caught him stealing stamps from a cousin. Instead of punishing him or telling his parents she blackmailed him, using her knowledge to get extra days off which Leopold covered up for. She also bathed nude with the boys and wrestled with them as a reward when they behaved well. Finally, when Leopold was twelve and suffering from an illness, his mother caught Wantz dumping him out of his bed and she was dismissed.
Leopold had a difficult school career. He started off at Miss Spade’s, a small private school that had started out co-ed but by the time Leopold got there was almost all female; only one other boy attended. There was a method in this, although it probably counts as madness too; Leopold’s mother had noticed that he had difficulty making friends with girls, and decided that going to a girls’ school would “cure him.” It didn’t. After two years he moved to the Douglas School. This was a public school and his social class made it tough to fit in. The fact that his mother told him not to touch anything or use the bathrooms there probably didn’t help. Nobody else at Douglas lived on the exclusive Michigan Avenue, and none of them were walked to and from school by a governess every day, either. He was bullied by some of the other boys, who terrorized him when Wantz didn’t arrive to walk him home.[2] He had such a bad time there that he returned to Miss Spade’s for the rest of the year.[3]
When Leopold was eight the family moved from Michigan Avenue to the Kenwood district. Their new address was only a block down from the private Harvard School, and Leopold was enrolled there. This got him away from the bullies, but he still wasn’t very popular. His nicknames included “Flea” and “Crazy Bird” as well as the sarcastic “The Great Nathan.”
When Leopold was 17 his mother died of nephritis. As her health had never recovered after giving birth to him he blamed himself, which only made his feelings about women more complicated.
Leopold had several hobbies, and one of them was ornithology. He had a genuine talent for it. With his intelligence and attention to detail the study of birds suited him well, and like most 1920s ornithologists he enthusiastically collected specimens. Modern bird watchers are happy to watch through binoculars and take photos with a telephoto lens; Leopold preferred a shotgun. He built a collection of over 3,000 specimens in his study at home, including many rare species.
Leopold knew - and shot - many birds, but he had a specialist subject, too. That was the Kirtland’s Warbler. Setophaga Kirtlandii is a small brown bird with a yellow breast, which spends the winter in the Bahamas and the summer in a small area of Michigan, and in the 1920s it was declining fast. In fact by the early 1970s it was almost extinct, although numbers are now recovering. The danger to the Warbler wasn’t Nathan Leopold’s shotgun; it’s now known that it was changing climate, which moved the Jack Pine forests whose seeds it depended on for food north. The surviving population was trapped on the Northern Peninsula and people didn’t understand why they were dying out. If anyone did know it was Leopold; by 1923 he probably knew more about Kirtland’s Warbler than anyone else on earth. In October of that year he travelled to Boston to present a paper on the bird to the American Ornithological Society’s annual meeting.[4] It was an astounding achievement for an 18-year-old. For anyone else the respect and attention it gained would have been more than enough, but Leopold now cared more about impressing his college friend Richard Loeb.
