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Labbe, Denise, c.1926- , and Algarron, Jacques, c.1930- , Fr. Denise Labbe was the daughter of a postman in the village of Melesse, near Rennes, Fr. After the Germans invaded in 1940, Denise’s father killed himself. She then diligently pursued her university studies at Rennes, and also worked as a secretary at the National Institute of Statistics there. She had numerous affairs and gave birth to a daughter named Catherine whom she left with her mother while she went to Paris to work for the Institute. There, she met 24-year-old Jacques Algarron, an officer cadet at the Saint-Cyr School and a devotee of Jean Paul Sartre and the Marquis de Sade. The intense, brooding Algarron had already fathered several illegitimate children of his own. “In the manner of Andre Gide,” he would say, “I offer you fervor.”

Algarron, who was himself born out of wedlock, compensated for his feelings of inadequacy by pretending to possess superhuman qualities. He tested Labbe’s devotion by ordering her to pick up strange men in the streets, and then take them back to the apartment she shared with him. Labbe made love to these men while Algarron hid in the closet. He then forced her to seek his forgiveness. “To merit my love, you must go from suffering to suffering,” he said. Algarron threatened to leave her unless she murdered two-and-a-half-year-old Catherine. He first broached the subject to her on Aug. 29, 1954.

Labbe obeyed. She tried to drop her daughter out a window, but a neighbor intervened. Then she threw Catherine into a canal, but a passerby rescued her in time. Then, on Nov. 8, 1954, Labbe drowned Catherine in a zinc washtub at her mother’s home in Rennes. “It takes courage to kill your own daughter,” beamed Algarron. Labbe confessed to the Rennes Police, describing her lover as a “cultist devil.” “You promised to marry me if I killed Cathy, but you threatened to abandon me if I did not kill her,” she sobbed. The pair were tried for murder at the Loiret-Cher Assizes in Blois on May 30, 1955. The jury returned a Guilty verdict but pleaded for mercy for Labbe, whom they believed Algarron had placed under a “spell.” She was sentenced to life imprisonment. Algarron received twenty years’ hard labor.

 

Lacroix, Georges (AKA: Roger Marcel Vernon; Mr. Georges), and Alexandre, Pierre Henri, prom. 1936, Brit. In the 1930s, London mobster Max Kassel, was known in the streets of Soho as “Max the Red” for his flame-colored hair. He was said to have immigrated from Latvia on a forged passport, but some insisted he was French-Canadian. Kassel was a drug trafficker and pimp with connections throughout Europe. In 1935, the 56-year-old Kassel was in debt, and his creditors were growing anxious, especially one who called himself Roger Vernon, but who was actually an escapee from Devil’s Island named Georges Lacroix. Lacroix, a pimp and a murderer, lived off his girlfriend Suzanne Bertron. Occasionally he arranged marriages for European women so they could stay in Britain. Bertron herself married an English seaman, William Naylor, to remain in the country and then abandoned him for Lacroix.

Lacroix had loaned Kassel £25 and was anxious to collect. Lacroix tried to collect at his apartment on Little Newport Street one night in January 1936. The two men quarrelled in Bertron’s presence, and Lacroix, feeling himself insulted, was even more determined. On Jan. 23, Lacroix summoned Kassel to Newport Street. Bertron’s maid, Marcelle Aubin, led Kassel upstairs, where Lacroix was waiting. The radio blared. From downstairs the maid strained to hear what was going on, but it was impossible. Suddenly she heard gunshots and a cry for help from Lacroix. Aubin ran upstairs, where she saw the two men struggling. Kassel had been shot, and was pleading for his life. He begged them to take him to the hospital, but they refused. “I’m going to die! Give me water,” he pleaded. Kassel made one last bolt for freedom, but was immediately captured and locked in the bathroom, where he died a few minutes later. Lacroix swore Aubin to secrecy and then telephoned his friend, Pierre Henri Alexandre, to ask his help in disposing of the body. He arrived around 4 a.m., and decided they should wrap the body in a rug and drive out of the city. They drove Alexandre’s Chrysler to the village of St. Albans and left the body by the side of the road. Henry Sayer, a local carpenter, discovered it five hours later.

Under Chief Inspector Frederick Dew Sharpe, Scotland Yard quickly learned the identity of the killers and issued warrants for their arrest, but Lacroix and Alexandre had fled to France. A legal dispute between the French and British governments made extradition impossible. The home secretary maintained that Lacroix was a British subject because he was Canadian-born. The French, on the other hand, insisted that Lacroix had escaped from Devil’s Island, and they maintained jurisdiction in the case. Lacroix and Bertron were tried for murder at the Assize de la Seine in April 1937. Bertron was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. Lacroix was found Guilty and sentenced to ten years at hard labor and twenty years exile from France. Alexandre received five years of penal servitude after trial in the British courts.

 

LaMarr, Harley, 1931-51, U.S. A mother’s simple request to her son carried with it a death sentence for a socially prominent Buffalo woman and her own son.

Harley LaMarr lived in a run-down section of Buffalo, N.Y., in 1950. On Jan. 8, 1950, his mother killed her second husband John Palwodzinski with a kitchen knife during a domestic quarrel in their apartment.

The 50-year-old mother pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to serve thirty years at the Bedford Hills Prison for Women. When LaMarr visited her in jail he asked if there was anything he could do. “Yes, bury Pa,” she said. This he agreed to do, but being jobless it was hard for him to pay for the funeral. He decided that the only sure way to bury his stepfather was to find someone to rob.

On Feb. 11, he set out to find a victim in the fashionable part of town, with an ancient hunting rifle that had been collecting dust under the eaves. He took public transportation to his destination with the gun hidden under his trench coat.

Lurking behind trees and bushes, LaMarr spotted his victim, Mrs. Willard Frisbee, wife of the sales manager for the Queen City Pure Water Company. LaMarr was most attracted to the flashy automobile she drove and her obvious wealth. Beyond that he knew nothing about her. At a stoplight, LaMarr bounded into the unlocked passenger side of her car and ordered the woman to keep driving. Frisbee, thirty-six, attempted to talk him out of his course of action and a struggle ensued, the woman apparently not frightened or intimidated. As she grappled with her abductor the gun accidentally discharged and she was killed.

The body was tossed in a ditch and young Harley discovered to his dismay that she had only $6. He ignored the fur coat and jewels. Police traced the bullets to a hardware store, and the identity of Harley LaMarr was established. He was arrested and confessed freely to the crime. On May 15, 1950, LaMarr was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death. He died in the electric chair at Sing Sing on Jan. 11, 1951, a little more than a year since his stepfather had been killed.

 

Lance, Myron, See: Kelbach, Walter.

 

Landru, Henri Desire (AKA: Bluebeard; M. Diard; Georges Petit; M. Dupont; M. Cuchet; Lucien Guillet; M. Fremyet; M. Forest), 1869-1922, Fr. Henri Landru was a mass murderer, a lady killer whose repetitious slayings, except for the manner of disposal, were uninspired and must have been wearisome for him, if, indeed, he slew the more than 300 women estimated by French police. The number of his victims positively known was ten women and a boy, but in all probability, this systematic killer murdered twenty to thirty people, almost all women. He, like Belle Gunness, his American counterpart, preyed upon lovelorn, middle-aged people. Those women with means who answered his enticing ads were charmed by Landru and readily succumbed to his magnetism and animal craving for sex, little realizing that this passionate, thickly-bearded, bald-headed lothario was planning their murders.

Little in Landru’s childhood and early life foretold the monster to come. The Paris-born Landru was educated at Ecole des Freres and received good grades. He went on to study at the School of Mechanical Engineering and was then conscripted into the army, serving four years and reaching the rank of sergeant. In 1893, while still in the service, Landru began an affair with his cousin, Mlle. Remy. When she became pregnant with his child, Landru married the attractive young girl. Upon re-entering civilian life in 1894, he obtained a job where he had to provide a deposit against goods he was to sell. He never got the goods and his employer decamped to the U.S., taking Landru’s deposit with him. This so embittered the 24-year-old Landru that he decided to turn crook himself. He opened a secondhand furniture store in Paris but concentrated on swindling schemes.

Landru was not a successful confidence man. He was arrested four times between 1900 and 1908, receiving prison terms that ranged between two years and eighteen months, all for various frauds. Shortly before the outbreak of WWI in 1914, Landru, using many aliases, began placing advertisements in newspapers, addressing them to lonely women reading the lovelorn columns. Though he remained married and had by then fathered another three children, Landru, unknown to his wife, advertised himself as a well-to-do bachelor looking for “proper” female companionship. Landru maintained a separate address for the assignations that resulted in this lovelorn scheme. He apparently enticed the women answering his ads to his bachelor’s residence and, after promising marriage and obtaining their money from small savings accounts or deeds to parcels of land or buildings, he murdered them and disposed of their bodies. The first such victim was 40-year-old Mme. Izore, who vanished into Landru’s arms in 1914, along with her dowry of 15,000 francs.

By this time police were looking for Landru for swindling an elderly couple out of their savings. Landru had disappeared, however, and with the coming of the war was able to assume other identities. What launched Landru into a career of murdering for profit is uncertain. The war, with its awful devastation and utter unconcern for human life, may have altered his otherwise reasonable perspectives. It was also suggested that he turned to this most atrocious form of making a living since his family ties had been severed by the deaths of his mother and father. It is also safe to assume that Landru, having failed miserably at lesser illicit schemes to make a dishonest franc, felt that he had nothing to lose in his lovelorn murder schemes.

In late 1914, Mme. Cuchet, a 39-year-old widow with a 16-year-old son, answered one of Landru’s ads, thinking him to be M. Diard, a successful engineer. Falling in love with Landru, the woman informed her family that she intended to marry him and asked that her parents, sister, and brother-in-law visit the man of her dreams at a villa he kept in Chantilly. The family, unannounced, went to the villa but found Landru absent. The inquisitive brother-in-law looked through a chest and found it crammed with love letters from other women, who had been answering his dozens of lovelorn ads. The brother-in-law denounced Landru to Mme. Cuchet, but the woman would hear no criticism of him and she and her teenage son moved away from her family to a small villa in Vernouillet where Landru joined her. The woman and boy vanished a short time later, in January 1915, as did Diard-Landru.

Opening up new bank accounts, Landru deposited about 10,000 francs, claiming he had received an inheritance from his father. The bankers, had they checked, would have realized how unlikely this story was since Landru’s father was a common laborer who had worked in the Vulcain Ironworks. In June 1915, Landru met through his ads Mme. Laborde-Line, a widow from Buenos Aires who moved out of her Paris apartment, telling the concierge that she was going to live in a villa at Vernouillet with a “wonderful man.” She was seen picking flowers in Vernouillet on June 26, 1915, and was never seen again. Landru later sold her securities and moved Mme. Laborde-Line’s furniture to a ramshackle garage he kept at Neuilly which he called his used furniture store. From here he sold off his latest victim’s household goods one by one.

Mme. Guillin, a 51-year-old widow who had just converted some insurance policies to 22,000 francs, answered one of Landru’s ads on May 1, 1915, later visiting Landru at his villa in Vernouillet and then moving there to ostensibly become Landru’s bride on Aug. 2, 1915. She too vanished and on Aug. 4, Landru moved all the furniture from the Vernouillet villa to his Neuilly garage and later cashed some of Mme. Guillin’s securities. Late in 1915, Landru, using the alias George Petit, forged Mme. Guillin’s signature to certain bank documents in order to withdraw 12,000 francs from her account in the Banque de France. When questioned about his actions at the bank, Landru coolly explained that he was Mme. Guillin’s brother-in-law and that she could no longer conduct her own business affairs since she had suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed.

Apparently, after having murdered Cuchet, Laborde-Line, and Guillin—juggling his time tables closely in the cases of the last two—Landru felt it was dangerous to keep his villa at Vernouillet. He moved to the village of Gambais, renting the Villa Ermitage from M. Tric in December 1915. He said his name was Dupont and that he was an engineer from Rouen. This was to be his murder headquarters for several years to come. A few weeks later, Landru enticed 55-year-old Mme. Heon to the Gambais villa. She was a widow whose son had been killed in the war and whose daughter had just died. Landru consoled her and promised marriage. She went to Gambais with him; after Dec. 8, 1915, Mme. Heon was seen no more. Landru’s neighbors noticed that the chimney at his villa belched black smoke at odd hours. He had purchased a new stove when he occupied the villa. This stove would be one of the chief exhibits at Landru’s murder trial years later.

A short time later, Landru again inserted one of his lovelorn ads in the Paris newspapers. It read:

Widower with two children, aged forty-three, with comfortable income, affectionate, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.

This ad was answered by yet another widow, 45-year-old Mme. Collomb, a typist who was living with a man named Bernard who had refused to marry her. Mme. Collomb had saved more than 10,000 francs, a tidy sum Landru covetously eyed. But before this lovesick woman succumbed to Landru’s persuasive ways, she insisted that he meet her family. He stalled but then reluctantly agreed to meet the woman’s relatives. Landru at the time was using the alias of one of his victims, Cuchet. None of Mme. Collomb’s relatives liked Landru and her sister, especially, found him odious and offensive. Mme. Collomb nevertheless went off with Landru to his Gambais villa and, after Dec. 24, 1916, was seen no more.

On Mar. 11, 1917, Landru’s youngest victim, Andree Babelay, went to see her mother. The 19-year-old girl who had lived in poverty all her life, told her mother that she had met a wonderful man in the Metro and that she intended to become his bride. Babelay accompanied Landru, who bought two tickets to Gambais and a single ticket returning to Paris. Andree Babelay was last seen alive on Apr. 12, 1917. The next victim was Mme. Buisson, who had been corresponding with Landru for more than two years. She was a 47-year-old widow with a nest egg of 10,000 francs. After announcing to her relatives her plans to wed Landru, she disappeared on Aug. 10, 1917. Her killer appeared in her Paris apartment with a forged note from Mme. Buisson, which demanded her furniture. This was taken to Landru’s second-hand furniture store, the Neuilly garage.

His next victim was Mme. Jaume, who had separated from her husband and gone to a marital agent who introduced her to Landru. Using the name Guillet, Landru soon took Mme. Jaume off to Gambais and her doom. She was last seen leaving her house in Rue de Lyanes with Landru on Nov. 25, 1917. Landru appeared in Paris a few days later and withdrew Mme. Jaume’s savings, 1,400 francs, from the Banque Allaume through forged documents. Mme. Pascal was next, a 36-year-old Landru had been seeing on and off since 1916. She had little money, but, like the young Babelay, she met his strong and almost incessant need for sex. Landru, using the alias of Forest, kept Mme. Pascal in a Paris apartment until he tired of her. He then took her to the Gambais villa on Apr. 5, 1918, where she, like her predecessors, went up in smoke.

In 1918, Mme. Marchadier began corresponding with Landru, who was using the alias of Guillet. Mme. Marchadier owned a large house on Rue St. Jacques, but she had little money. Landru promised to buy her house from her but had little cash himself. He proposed marriage and, on Jan. 13, 1919, Mme. Marchadier left with Landru to go to the villa at Gambais. She brought along her two small dogs and both she and the dogs were seen no more after a few days. Landru later appeared in Paris, selling off Mme. Marchadier’s house and belongings.

Landru’s many victims left considerable relatives searching for vanished women. This proved to be Landru’s undoing. On Apr. 11, 1919, Mme. Lacoste, the sister of Mme. Buisson, one of Landru’s early victims, spotted Landru strolling down the Rue de Rivoli with a young, attractive woman on his arm. She followed Landru to a china shop where she pretended to examine items while overhearing Landru ordering some china and giving the name of Lucien Guillet and an address for the delivery of the china. Mme. Lacoste then went to police with this information and detectives returned to the shop and obtained Landru’s address on the Rue de Rochechouart. Here, on Apr. 12, 1919, officers found Landru living under the alias of Guillet with a 27-year-old clerk, Fernande Segret, who was planning to go off with Landru to his villa in Gambais. The intervention of the police undoubtedly saved her life.

In Landru’s pocket detectives found a black loose-leaf notebook which contained cryptic remarks about many of the women he had taken to Gambais. Landru was arrested and charged with murdering Mme. Buisson. He was then taken to the villa in Gambais where the gardens were dug up and the villa torn apart. Only the bodies of three dogs were found buried in the garden. The clothes and personal effects of all of Landru’s known victims and those belonging to many more unknown women were found in the villa at Gambais, but the bodies of his victims were nowhere to be found. Landru challenged the police, as he later did the court, to “produce your bodies.” He admitted to nothing and proved utterly uncooperative.

The stove in the villa was loaded with ashes and tiny bone fragments were found inside of it. The stove was removed to a Versailles court where, between Nov. 7-30, 1921, Henri Desire Landru was tried for murder. Police had found the voluminous correspondence Landru had maintained with 283 women and almost none of them could be located. Authorities were convinced that Landru murdered them all, but busy as he was in the murder-for-profit business, it would have been humanly impossible for him to have juggled that many romances and effected that many murders from 1914 to 1919, the known period of his killings. The press, of course, made much of this arrogant, strutting mass killer, aptly dubbing him “Bluebeard,” a name that had once been attached with terror to France’s all-time mass killer, Gilles de Rais.

The press obtained a copy of Landru’s notes, wherein he had systematically classified all those writing to him in response to his lovelorn advertisements. He had labelled each group of marital applicants:

1. To be answered poste restante.
2. Without money.
3. Without furniture.
4. No reply.
5. To be answered to initials poste restante.
6. Possible fortune.
7. In reserve. For further investigation.

It was believed that Landru drugged his victims into insensibility, then suffocated or strangled them. He then spent hours, even days, chopping the bodies into tiny pieces and exhaustively burning the remains, meticulously taking care not to leave any traceable remains. Landru’s defense attorney was the brilliant Maitre Moro Giaffery who found that his client agitated the court and defied the prosecution to convict him without the presence of bodies. Landru claimed that the whereabouts of his female friends was his business, that these women had been his clients, and he had been in the furniture business with them at one time or another.

The court was filled up with bulky exhibits during Landru’s lengthy and volatile trial. In addition to the stove, which sat ominously before the bench, a great deal of furniture was piled up in the courtroom, all items which Landru had filched from his victims. Meanwhile, Landru became a dark cause célèbre. Cartoons portrayed him in the newspapers and ribald songs about him and his lady killings were sung in Paris music halls. Reporters from around the world came to sit in court each day and write thousands of pages about the bald, bearded killer in the dock.

Moro Giaffery worked hard to develop a line of defense. The best he could offer was that his client was no murderer but a white slaver who had abducted the women in question and had shipped them to brothels in South America. The prosecution destroyed this theory with ridicule. Roared Prosecutor Robert Godefroy in derision: “What? Women who were all over fifty years of age? Women whose false hair, false teeth, false bosoms, as well as identity papers, you, Landru, have kept and we captured?”

“Produce your corpses!” shouted Landru, his usual refrain. He occasionally found time for jest. At one point, the presiding judge asked Landru if he were not an habitual liar. Replied Landru: “I am not a lawyer, monsieur.” He was brazen and bold to the point of shocking the court. When his notebooks with their incriminating but cryptic data were presented to him, Landru merely shrugged and then sneered that he was not obligated to interpret his codes for the court. He mockingly added: “Perhaps the police would have preferred to find on page one an entry in these words: ‘I, the undersigned, confess that I have murdered the women whose names are set out herein.’” It was then pointed out to Landru that his neighbors at Gambais had often complained about the putrid smell emanating from the smoke belching from the chimney of his villa. Landru ran a bony hand over his bald head, jerked his head upward and laughed menacingly, saying: “Is every smoking chimney and every bad smell proof that a body is being burned?”

The evidence that the prosecution did produce was enough to convince a jury of Landru’s guilt. He was convicted and sentenced to death. At that time, he smiled and bowed to the courtroom, which was packed with female spectators anxious to examine this strange little man. All were fascinated with the secret powers and persuasion he held over his female victims. Knowing this, Landru said, before leaving court for the last time: “I wonder if there is any lady present who would care to take my seat?”

France’s modern Bluebeard was arrogant and distant to the end. On Feb. 25, 1922, a priest entered his cell to give him religious comfort on this, the last day of his life. He asked the mass killer if he wished to make a last confession. Landru waved him away and then pointed to the guards who had come to escort him to the waiting guillotine. “I am very sorry,” he said, “but I must not keep these gentlemen waiting.” He then walked between his guards into the courtyard of the Versailles prison and up the stairs of the scaffold. His hands were tied behind his back, his legs were tied together, and his shirt was ripped off. Landru was then placed upon a plank and his head was placed upon the block. In seconds the blade of the guillotine descended with terrifying suddenness, decapitating him.

 

Lang, Howard, 1935- , U.S. Howie Lang offered a cigarette to his 7-year-old playmate, Lonnie Fellick, and then casually informed him: “That will be the last one you ever smoke.” In the presence of a third boy, 9-year-old Gerald Michalek, Lang threw Fellick to the ground and attacked him with a switchblade and a heavy stone in Thatcher Woods, northwest of Chicago. Satisfied that Lonnie was dead, Lang and his friend covered the body with leaves.

Howard Lang was only twelve years old when he murdered Fellick on Oct. 18, 1947. The young suspect attended classes at the Von Humboldt Grammar School on the city’s far northwest side. Lang had a 17-year-old girlfriend named Anna Mae Evans, who hid his blood-stained clothes. His defiant air surprised and shocked police officials. Lang giggled as he reconstructed the murder for Police Sergeant Robert Fisher. The three boys took a streetcar to the forest preserve and walked to Thatcher Woods. “Lonnie asked me for a cigarette and I gave him one, and then he said he was going to tell my mother that I took $10 of her money.” That’s when Lang noticed the thirty-five-pound concrete boulder imbedded in the ground.

Howard knocked Lonnie to the ground, stabbed him, and then crushed him with the stone. Gerald Michalek told police what happened next. “Howie told me to hold his legs or else I’d get it the same way. I thought Lonnie was breathing when we left but I was sure he’d die. I covered him with the leaves.”

The two boys went to the home of Ana Evans, who refused to believe the story. The next day, she and two older boys went to the forest to see for themselves. Anna took Lonnie’s blood-soaked clothes with her and hid them in the woods.

When the state’s attorney’s office received the evidence of the crime from Chicago police, a decision was made to prosecute the boy to the fullest extent of the law, despite the long-standing policy of the Illinois courts that prohibited criminal prosecution of offenders under the age of fourteen. Serious questions were raised about a child’s understanding of right and wrong. The police and the state’s attorney believed that Lang knew what he was doing and they pressed for a murder indictment.

The boy was eventually convicted, but the decision was reversed by the Illinois Supreme Court on Apr. 27, 1949. The ruling was handed down by Judge John Sbarbaro who explained that Lang was too young to be able to distinguish between right and wrong. As a result he was acquitted of all charges.

 

La Satira, See: Spinelli, Evelita Juanita.

 

Latham, James Douglas, 1942-65, and York, George Ronald, 1943-65, U.S. James Latham, nineteen, and George York, eighteen, escaped from the guard house at Fort Hood, Texas, on May 24, 1961, to “wage war against the world.” The two buck privates hated serving in the army under black officers. Latham and York were arrested by Utah state policemen on June 10 for the murders of seven people in five states.

Latham and York began their cross-country killing spree on May 26 in Baton Rouge when they assaulted Edward Guidroz, forty-three, of Mix, La. They left Guidroz in the road and made their escape in his pickup truck. Thinking the man was dead, the two soldiers continued east until they reached Jacksonville, Fla., where they strangled two vacationing Georgia women, 43-year-old Althea Ottavio and 25-year-old Patricia Anne Hewitt, who were playing a “lucky hunch” at the dog tracks on May 29. The two women were found near their abandoned car on June 7. They had been choked with their underclothing.

Racial hatred was their reason for killing 71-year-old John A. Whittaker of Shelbyville, Tenn., on June 7. After robbing the black man of his money, Latham and York shot him in cold blood. Whittaker’s body was found near the abandoned pickup stolen from the recovering Guidroz.

They drove into Illinois on June 8 where they robbed and killed 35-year-old Albert Reed of Litchfield, and Martin Drenovac, fifty-nine, of Granite City. They explained that they would not have killed Drenovac had he not tried to wrestle their gun away.

On June 8, Otto Ziegler, a 62-year-old man from Sharon Springs, Kan., became their sixth victim. Ziegler, who worked as a road master for the Union Pacific Railroad, was found shot to death off U.S. 40, three miles east of Wallace, Kan. He had pulled off the road to help York and Latham, who pretended to have car trouble. They ordered Ziegler to drive his pickup to a remote spot off the side of the road. After Ziegler turned over $51, York and Latham shot him as he leaned over to retrieve his discarded wallet. The killers left the body in the ditch and stole Ziegler’s red Dodge. “That was their fatal mistake,” Kansas police later recalled, “Three boys who were driving farm equipment on the road saw them get out of the truck and back into the car.” The pair drove through Cheyenne, Wyo., into Craig, Colo., where they stopped at a local carnival. There they met 18-year-old Rachel Marian Moyer, who worked as a maid at the Cosgriff Hotel.

York convinced Moyer to accompany them to California for the weekend, explaining they had to pick up a “prisoner.” The two men, going by the names Ronnie and Jim, left the carnival with Moyer shortly before midnight on June 9. Before reaching the highway, Moyer stopped at the Cosgriff Hotel to inform the night clerk of her plans. The next day, Moyer’s body was found on a deserted road south of Craig. She had been shot three times in the face and chest.

Sheriff Faye Gillette of Tooele County, Utah, issued an all-points bulletin for the arrest of the men driving the red Dodge, suspecting them of the Kansas murder. A roadblock was set up on U.S. 40 near Grantsville. Their car was stopped and in the glove compartment police found two revolvers. One had eight notches carved into the handle. Latham said they would have shot it out with police, but did not want to endanger their passenger, 21-year-old soldier Vincent Olson, who was hitchhiking to San Francisco. Colorado and Florida both lost their battles to extradite the teenage killers back to their states to stand trial. The two men were returned to Sharon Springs by agents of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation on June 14.

George York and James Latham had only one request to make of their captors: that they be executed together in the electric chair. The courts were unable to accommodate the request. The glib, defiant pair were convicted of murdering Otto Ziegler. On June 23, 1965, Latham and York were taken to the gallows in Lansing, Kan., where they were hanged.

 

Latimer, Irving, 186-1946, U.S. Irving Latimer, the son of wealthy parents, was born in 1866 in Jackson, Mich. At the age of twenty-three, Latimer, a handsome, well-educated young man, operated his own pharmacy. Since his father’s death two years earlier, Latimer had lived with his widowed mother. Latimer soon incurred substantial debt through mismanagement of his business or, more likely, through bad habits. In addition to owing the tax collector and about sixty creditors, Latimer had also borrowed $3,000 from his mother which was due on Jan. 31, 1889.

On Jan. 24, Latimer made one of his frequent “buying” trips to Detroit. Although Latimer usually stayed in the more elegant Cadillac Hotel, on this occasion, he registered at the second-rate Griswold. Late in the morning of Jan. 25, authorities told Latimer that his mother had been murdered the night before. Her badly beaten body, which had two bullet wounds to the head, was found in her bedroom. Neighbors noted that she had not let her dog out in the morning, and called police. The police initially assumed the crime to be a bungled burglary. But investigation revealed that none of the murdered woman’s valuables had been disturbed and no one had heard her dog barking in the night, though they did when they tried to rouse Mrs. Latimer the next morning.

While trying to locate Latimer, police chief John Boyle spoke to the boy Latimer had left minding the pharmacy. The boy claimed that Latimer had refused his request for the day off, saying that he had to be a pallbearer at a funeral in Detroit. Boyle finally located Latimer at the Griswold. When questioned about the funeral, Latimer explained that he had lied to his employee to avoid having to delay his trip. Finding Latimer’s responses unsatisfactory, Boyle began searching for witnesses who might disprove his alibi. A railroad conductor on the Michigan Central Railroad said he had picked up a passenger in Jackson at 6:20 on the morning of Jan. 25. The man demanded a sleeper, which he immediately closed himself into, and he left the train in West Detroit, ten or fifteen minutes before reaching downtown. From photographs supplied by the police, the conductor identified the man as Latimer. In Detroit, the Griswold’s night porter told police he had seen a man slipping out a side door of the hotel at about 10 p.m. on Jan. 24. The maid assigned to Latimer’s room reported that she had found it empty and the bed unused the next morning. She also saw a man she identified as Latimer entering the room stealthily fifteen minutes after she had checked it.

The case against Latimer grew When a barber near the hotel identified Latimer as the nervous young man who had come in for a shave between nine and ten on the morning of Jan. 25. When the barber pointed out to Latimer that he had blood on his coat, Latimer replied that he had a nosebleed. Finally, with the testimony of two conductors who had seen Latimer on the train going toward Jackson on the night of Jan. 24, Chief Boyle concluded that he had enough evidence to arrest Latimer for his mother’s murder.

Latimer hired two expensive lawyers with some of his inheritance from his mother’s estate. During the trial, he changed his story and admitted having come back to Jackson on the night of the murder. He explained that he had followed a prostitute named Trixy, whom he thought had boarded the Jackson-bound train. Despite his alibi and his attorneys’ efforts, Latimer was found Guilty. As there was no capital punishment in Michigan, Judge Erastus Peck sentenced Latimer to life imprisonment.

Four years later, Latimer, having proven an ideal prisoner, was serving a snack to prison guards on Mar. 26, 1893. He had prepared these snacks frequently, but this time he laced the food with prussic acid and opium. Although he claimed later that he had only intended to knock the guards out, one of them died. Latimer escaped but was captured and returned to prison three days later. Latimer once again became the ideal prisoner and gradually regained his privileges within the prison. In 1935, the governor of Michigan granted Latimer a release. Latimer was sixty-nine years old and had spent forty-six years in jail. He became a vagrant for five years until he was put into a state home for the elderly. Latimer died at the Eloise State Hospital in 1946 without ever confessing to his mother’s murder.

 

Laubscher, Miemie, prom. 1957, and van Jaarsveld, Jacobus Frederick, 1935- , S. Afri. When she became involved with a younger man, a married woman and her new lover eventually conspired to murder her drunkard husband, later blaming each other for the crime at their trials.

Miemie Magdalena Josina de Jager married Marthinus Johannes Laubscher, nicknamed Spokies, a car mechanic, in Zastron, South Africa, in 1950. Her husband-to-be promised to stop drinking before they wed, but resumed drinking shortly after their marriage. Children had no effect on him, and the couple grew increasingly unhappy as he physically assaulted his wife, piled up debts, and engaged with her in constant fights.

In 1956, Laubscher brought home a friend, 21-year-old Jacobus Frederick van Jaarsveld, another car mechanic, who frequently visited and often stayed over at the couple’s house on weekends. After about a year, Miemie Laubscher and van Jaarseveld began an affair, soon moving to nearby Senekal where they lived together. Laubscher went to the boarding house where his friend and wife lived and asked her to return to him. She refused and they decided to divorce, the husband insisting on having custody of their children. Various complicated negotiations followed, with van Jaarsfeld actually moving back in with the reconciled couple at the husband’s invitation. As the trio continued to drink and play musical beds, the situation led to a quarrel at a party during which Miemie Laubscher apparently tried to strangle her husband. On July 10 the wife actually went to her mother-in-law and told her she intended to kill her husband so she could leave him and take the children. The mother-in-law, shocked, understandably advised her to take the offspring and leave the husband alone.

The not-surprising conclusion of this triangle occurred when the drunken Laubscher disappeared on Aug. 1. His body, strangled with a belt from his wife’s raincoat, and his head bruised from a blunt instrument, was discovered by police on Aug. 9. Weighted with a heavy steel pulley, the corpse had been dumped into the Rusfontein Dam several miles from Bloemfontein.

Both van Jarsveld and Laubscher were charged with first-degree murder. Tried before Acting Judge-President of the Free State, Justice A.J. Smith on Oct. 14, 1957, at a Bloemfontein jury trial, van Jaarsveld was found Guilty of murder “with extenuating circumstances” and sentenced to a fifteen-year jail term, in part because of his age, 21 years. Two days later Laubscher was tried before a jury and Justice D.H. Botha. With the same verdict as her lover, Laubscher was given a twelve-year jail term.

 

Law, Walter W., 1905- , U.S. When 28-year-old New Haven Journal-Courier reporter Rose Brancato disappeared on July 5, 1943, authorities conducted a nationwide search believing her to be the victim of amnesia. The following January, however, they arrested 39-year-old Walter W. Law, the married father of three children, when he returned from his war production job in Sparrow Point, Md., for a weekend visit with his family. After forty-eight hours of questioning, Law broke down and admitted that he lured Brancato into the basement of the Wool-worth Building and then strangled her during an ensuing struggle. Law, who had met Brancato in the Woolworth Building where she did volunteer work, then placed her body into the firebox of a boiler without knowing whether she was alive or dead.

Law signed a written confession of the crime and reenacted it for police. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

 

Le Boeuf, Ada Bonner, and Dreher, Dr. Thomas E., d.1929, and Beadle, James, d.1929, U.S. In 1927, James Le Boeuf was a power plant superintendent in Morgan City, La. When Dr. Thomas Dreher began to pay Le Boeuf’s wife unwanted attentions, Le Boeuf reportedly threatened to kill the doctor. However, Le Boeufs wife and the doctor plotted to murder Le Boeuf. On July 1, 1927, Le Boeuf was shot to death. His body, though weighted at the neck and ankles with two railway irons, floated to the surface of Lake Palourde, where some boys spotted it. Police discovered that Le Boeuf and his wife had been seen together at the lake. Ada Le Boeuf and Dr. Dreher were arrested along with James Beadle, a handyman who worked for the doctor and who actually shot Le Boeuf. The three turned on each other, but they were all found Guilty. Beadle received a life sentence and Ada Le Boeuf and Dr. Dreher were sentenced to death. They were hanged at the St. Mary Parish prison on Feb. 1, 1929.

 

Ledbetter, Huddie (AKA: Lead Belly), 1889-1949, U.S. A Louisiana native, Huddie Ledbetter traveled the South, taking jobs as a laborer and a cotton picker. About 1918, he murdered a man in Texas during a fight over a woman, was convicted, and sent to prison. About 1925, after serving seven years of his term, Ledbetter sang his way free. Governor Pat Morris Neff pardoned Ledbetter after the prisoner sang his request. In 1930, Ledbetter was arrested again in Louisiana for stabbing six people in a dispute over some whiskey. He was convicted and sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary. In 1933, U.S. folk song authority John A. Lomax was searching for folk ballads and he discovered Ledbetter. Lomax helped win another pardon for Ledbetter and took the singer to New York. There he thrilled audiences with black spirituals, ballads, and work songs, singing in concert halls, night clubs, and on the radio. But once again, in 1939, he landed in prison. He stabbed Henry Burgess at a party in a New York rooming house and was convicted and sentenced to one year. Upon his release, Ledbetter resumed his singing career and, in 1949, died of a bone disease.

 

LeDoux, Emma (AKA: Emma Head; Emma McVicar), 1871-1941, U.S. Emma Head of Amador County, Calif., first married Charlie Barrett, who died in Mexico. Then she married Mr. Williams, who died under mysterious circumstances, leaving Emma a large sum from an insurance policy. In September 1902, she married Albert N. McVicar, but they separated and she worked as a prostitute.

On Aug. 12, 1905, she became the bigamous wife of Eugene LeDoux and the two lived with her mother in California. On Mar. 11, 1906, Emma met her estranged husband, McVicar, in Stockton, Calif., where the couple ordered a load of furniture to be sent to Jamestown, Calif. Shortly afterward, Emma called the store and tried to delay the shipment, but the furniture had already been sent. A few days later, she purchased morphine from a San Francisco doctor, and on Mar. 14 bought some cyanide from a pharmacy, saying she wanted to develop photographs. On Mar. 15, McVicar and his wife returned to Jamestown, where he worked as a timber man. But he quit his job on Mar. 21, saying he was going to work on a farm belonging to his wife’s mother. On Mar. 23, the couple traveled to Stockton, Calif., and Emma selected more furniture, sending it to LeDoux’s home. Sometime that night or the next day, she administered knockout drops and morphine to McVicar. On Mar. 24, she bought a trunk and ordered it delivered to her hotel. She also bought some rope and, at about 2 p.m., she had the trunk, which contained the body of her dying husband, delivered to the train station. The trunk was almost placed on a train bound for San Francisco, but since it bore no identification the trunk was sent back to the baggage room, where the baggage man and several others present noticed the peculiar odor eminating from within and called police.

Emma was arrested in Antioch, Calif., and her trial began Apr. 17. Convicted and sentenced to death, her hanging was delayed when the Supreme Court of California ordered a new trial in May 1909. Emma pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a life term in prison, and sent to San Quentin. She was paroled on July 20, 1920, but sent back to prison for parole violations on July 9, 1921. She was paroled a second time on Mar. 30, 1925, and married Mr. Crackbon, a rancher who died within two years. Her parole was yet again revoked, and in 1933 she was transferred to Tehachapi Women’s Prison, where she died in July of 1941.

 

Le, Barney, 1928- , U.S. On Apr. 29, 1942, Nickoli “Dick” Payne reprimanded his teenaged nephew, Barney Lee, because the boy had not finished his chores. The youngster was working on a ranch in the mountains of Monterey County, Calif. In retaliation, the 14-year-old Barney fatally shot his 36-year-old uncle. Barney was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in San Quentin where he was held in the prison hospital because officials believed that his integration with the prison population would deter his rehabilitation and, further, they had no legal right to transfer the boy to another institution.

 

Lee, John, 1945- , U.S. On Apr. 14, 1977, John Lee, an employee of a south suburban Chicago chemical plant, argued with another employee, 60-year-old Charles Kochenberg, after Kochenberg told Lee to finish some work. Following the dispute, 32-year-old Lee was suspended from the Stauffer Chemical Company. On Apr. 18, a disciplinary hearing was held at the plant, attended by the two employees, and management representatives John Kurzdorfer, William Good, and Thomas J. DeMarinis, and union representative Osborne Tinsley. After the meeting, Good told Lee that he would be notified of the outcome later. Lee got out of his seat and said, “You’ll tell me now.” He became more agitated, pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and shot Good in the head. Kochenberg and Tinsley escaped from the room before Lee fatally shot Kurzdorfer and wounded DeMarinis. Lee then fled in his car and, at about noon, turned himself in to Chicago police at the Englewood District Station. He was transferred to Chicago Heights and charged with murder and two counts of attempted murder. Lee pleaded guilty to the charges, was convicted, and sentenced to twenty to sixty years’ imprisonment.

 

Lee, Ludwig Halvorsen, 1889-1928, U.S. While walking his beat in Battery Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan, N.Y., on the morning of July 10, 1927, a policeman found a neatly wrapped bundle on a subway air vent containing a severed human leg. The wrapping paper came from a grocery store and was covered with penciled notations. The next day a 16-year-old boy discovered a second package, wrapped much the same way, on the front lawn of a Brooklyn Catholic church. It contained the decomposing remains of a woman’s torso.

Bundles were soon found all over Brooklyn—body parts without heads—making it nearly impossible to determine who the victims were. Police did know the two bodies were female, and that the wrapping paper had come from one of two grocery store chains: Bohack’s or the A & P. But to visit every single A & P and Bohack’s store in New York’s five boroughs seemed an insurmountable task; one the homicide squad did not relish. Before their search for the grocery store clerk who might have penciled the figures on the brown paper had begun, however, Alfred Bennett of Lincoln Place, Brooklyn, came forward to report the disappearance of his wife, Selma. Last seen on July 9, 1927, by the Bennett’s 19-year-old son, John, Selma Bennett disappeared after crossing her backyard to visit 76-year-old Sarah Elizabeth Brownell, who owned a rooming house on Prospect Place.

Detective Arthur Carey of the New York Police Department visited the rooming house that night. Met at the door by 38-year-old Ludwig Lee, a Norwegian immigrant who had lived there for two years, Carey immediately cusdiscerned the sickeningly sweet smell of rotting flesh. “I think you’re coming with us,” Carey said. After Lee had been taken to precinct headquarters, a man named Christian Jensen was intercepted as he entered Brownell’s rooming house. A long-time employee at a Brooklyn A & P, he had given wrapping paper to Lee.

A team of medical examiners found more body parts in the basement of the rooming house, including the head of Mrs. Bennett. By way of explanation, Lee said that Brownell had made repeated overtures to him, that he had finally consented to marry her, but then reneged, deciding instead to kill her and collect her $4,000 in savings. He was in the process of chopping Brownell’s body up, Lee continued, when Mrs. Bennett walked in. He killed her, too, to prevent his arrest. “It was a lot of work doing all that running around,” Lee said sardonically. After a short trial, he was convicted, and in 1928, electrocuted.

 

Lee, Maria Helena Gertruida Christina (AKA: Maria Helena Gertruida Christina van Niekerk), 1899-1948, S. Afri. Maria van Niekerk, the daughter of a South African family, was first married in 1915 at the age of sixteen. After two divorces, she married her third husband, 24-year-old Jan de Klerk Lee who died in 1941, apparently from tuberculosis. Within the next few years, she met Alwyn Jacobus Nicolaas Smith, took a job with Lennon Ltd., in Cape Town, and married C.J.B. Olivier. In June 1945, she shared a room in Cape Town with her lover, Smith, but she married Olivier early the following year.

After her fourth marriage, she persuaded Smith to move to Durban, and he stayed there from May to October, 1946. On Dec. 5, Lee divorced Olivier. Meanwhile, she had been stealing jewelry from her employers, and both Lee and Smith had profited from the sale of the stolen goods. After she was fired in early 1947, Lee became angry because Smith had bought a car and registered it in his name. He also lied to Lee, telling her that her mother had died, and she became enraged when she learned her mother was still alive. She apparently began poisoning Smith with arsenic in October 1946, administering larger and larger doses. The solicitous Lee attended Smith as he grew ill. She called a doctor in March 1947 and Smith recovered in the hospital. However, back with Lee, he again became ill and eventually died on May 2. After an autopsy revealed arsenic poisoning, Lee was arrested. She was held at Pretoria Central Prison and later transferred to Cape Town for her trial, which began Apr. 6, 1948. Lee was found Guilty on May 10, and was hanged on Sept. 17, 1948.

 

Lefebre, Jean-Marie, 1916- , Belg. On Jan. 9, 1956, the personal barber of General Emile Deisser visited his client in his Brussels home as usual. But instead of shaving the 87-year-old general, Jean-Marie Lefebre strangled him.

The general’s sister-in-law, Louise Marcette, witnessed the murder and just had time to telephone police before Lefebre strangled her with telephone wire. The 39-year-old killer then bashed the head of the 60-year-old housekeeper, Marie Foulon. He proceeded to search through the rooms for valuables. Then he walked out the front door. The police never arrived because they took down the wrong house number.

During the police investigation, someone who knew the housekeeper mentioned Lefebre and he was questioned. Police grew more suspicious when they found his fingerprints in rooms of Deisser’s house where a barber probably would not have gone. They also discovered that Lefebre had recently paid off his debts and sold several items. After further questioning, Lefebre confessed. To strengthen the highly publicized case, police reenacted the crime with the killer present, having driven him past angry and riotous mobs to the general’s house. Lefebre, forty, was tried in Brussels in November 1956. He was convicted on Nov. 28 and sentenced to death.

 

Lego, Donald R., 1933- , U.S. The last of seventeen victims killed in a string of murders, 82-year-old Mary Mae Johnson was stabbed and beaten to death in Joliet Township, Ill., on Aug. 26, 1983. A newspaper delivery man discovered her body later that day when he noticed she had not picked up her paper. He found her body in a living room chair. After receiving a tip from a tow-truck driver, police arrested Donald Lego. On Mar. 16, 1984, the 51-year-old Lego was convicted, and on Mar. 19 he was sentenced to death. Police said Lego was not a main suspect for the other murders in Will County.

 

Lehmann, Christa Ambros, 1922- , Ger. Christa Ambros was alone almost from the beginning. Her mother had been confined to Germany’s Alzey mental hospital; her father, a cabinetmaker, had remarried and severed his ties to his daughter.

In 1944 she married Karl Franz Lehmann, a tile setter with a medical deferment from military service, but by 1949 Christa Lehmann was preoccupied by her affairs with American servicemen stationed in Germany, and the marriage began to fall apart. On Sept. 17, 1952, Karl Lehmann died from what physicians diagnosed as stomach convulsions brought on by an ulcer. Two years later, on Oct. 14, 1953, Mrs. Lehmann’s father-in-law, Valentin Lehmann, died much the same way as his son.

Mrs. Lehmann inherited her father-in-law’s exclusive apartment in Worms, Ger., where she often entertained her friend, Annie Hamann. A widow who lived with her 75-year-old mother, Eva Ruh, her brother Walter, and her 19-year-old daughter, Uschi, on the Grosse Fischerweide in the Old Town of Worms, Hamann associated with Mrs. Lehmann against her mother’s wishes. On Feb. 14, 1954, Mrs. Lehmann purchased five truffles from a chocolate shop and delivered four of them to friends. The fifth, earmarked for Ruh, she laced with the chemical insecticide E-605. First developed at the Bayer Works in Leverkusen by Gerhard Schroeder before the end of WWII, E-605 is virtually impossible to detect in the system. Upon receipt of the truffle, Ruh left it in the kitchen cupboard as a treat for her daughter. On Feb. 15, Hamann took one bite and dropped it to the floor. “It’s bitter,” she said, and then collapsed, suddenly blinded. When the doctor arrived, Hamann was dead; so was her dog, who had also sampled the truffle.

In his autopsy report, Professor Kurt Wagner of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Mainz, concluded that Hamann had been poisoned, but he was not sure what the poison was until he recalled reading about E-605. Even then, he had his doubts—there was no known use of E-605 as a poison—but then detectives did a background check on Mrs. Lehmann and had the remains of her husband and father-in-law exhumed.

Mrs. Lehmann was arrested on Feb. 19, as she left Hamann’s funeral. On Feb. 23, she summoned her father and a clergyman to her jail cell and confessed to filling the cream truffle with E-605. Her intention, she said, was not to murder Ruh, but only to make her ill. “By the way,” she added, “I also poisoned my father-in-law, and I killed my husband too.”

On Sept. 20, 1954, Mrs. Lehmann was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. As a consequence of her well-publicized trial, dozens of Germans—in some instances entire families—began ingesting E-605 to commit suicide and escape the bleakness of postwar Germany.

 

Lehnberg, Marlene, c.1955- , and Choegoe, Marthinus, 1940- , S. Afri. South African Marlene Lehnberg aspired to become a model and to marry Christopher van der Linde, a married man nearly twice her age. She began to harass the van der Lindes with telephone calls. In September 1974, she told Mrs. van der Linde that she was having an affair with her husband. Mrs. van der Linde knew this was not true, and dismissed the girl as a nuisance. Growing more desperate by the day, Lehnberg recruited 33-year-old disabled Marthinus Choegoe.

Lehnberg promised him her car, a radio, and sex if he would kill Susanna van der Linde. On the night of Nov. 4, 1974, Choegoe entered the van der Linde’s Cape Town residence and stabbed Mrs. van der Linde to death with a pair of scissors. Witnesses in the neighborhood recognized the man with a noticeable limp and police soon picked up Choegoe. He implicated Lehnberg, who denied any connection with the crime. But Choegoe produced a note from her which read: “If you think it will be better or quicker, then use a knife, but the job must be done.”

The letter convicted the killers. Tried in Cape Town in March 1975, the pair were found Guilty of premeditated murder. Lehnberg and Choegoe were both sentenced to die, but their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.

 

Lennon, John, See: Chapman, Mark David.

 

Leopold, Nathan F., Jr., 1906-71, and Loeb, Richard A., 1907-36, U.S. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were the products of immense wealth, two brilliant students who had been allowed to expand their personalities and intelligence at will without having to work or worry about money. They had, since early childhood, been given everything, and as a result, they indulged their fantasies as their parents had satisfied their childish cravings. These two University of Chicago students, brilliant by comparison to other youths their age, had proven themselves superior in all their pursuits. Leopold, with an estimated I.Q. of 200, had graduated from the University of Chicago at age eighteen, the youngest ever to do so. He spoke nine languages fluently and was an expert botanist and ornithologist. There was, however, little warmth in his home. Leopold lived in a loveless household. Money replaced affection. His father, Nathan Leopold, Sr., was a millionaire transport tycoon who assigned a governess to his son at an early age. Babe, as Leopold had been nicknamed, came under the supervision of a sexually disturbed woman who had the boy practice all sorts of sexual perversions with her, distorting his young mind.

The Leopolds noticed their son’s reluctance to associate with girls and they unreasonably placed him in an all-girl’s school to correct his attitude. The governess went with the boy, continuing to warp his sexual growth. Moreover, this strange situation caused Leopold to reject female companionship altogether. By the time Leopold graduated from college, his mother was dead and his father, as usual, compensated for the loss by showering his son with money. He gave his son $3,000 and sent him on a European tour. When Leopold returned he was given a new car and a $125-a-week allowance and then ignored. Leopold immersed himself in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, advocate of the superman concept. But the youth was anything but the physical ideal He was stoop-shouldered and undersized. He had an overactive thyroid gland and he was physically unattractive with huge, bulging eyes and a weak chin. He was a sexual deviate at age fourteen when he met Richard Loeb, another early-aged homosexual.

Loeb was later to fulfill Leopold’s concept of the superman. He was also the son of a millionaire, and like Leopold, had been spoiled with gifts and money since childhood. At thirteen, Loeb became Leopold’s sexual master and continued to dominate him until they sought what they considered the ultimate thrill, that of murder. Loeb was always the leader. He grew up a tall, handsome, and clever youth. He was a charming and captivating conversationalist. His father was a senior executive for Sears, Roebuck, and Co., and he bestowed a $250-a-week allowance on his son, a sum that amounted to twice that earned by most men during the early 1920s. Loeb also suffered from physical defects. He had a nervous tic, stuttered at times when nervous, and suffered fainting spells which had been interpreted as petit mal epilepsy. He often talked of suicide with Leopold, and his character, beneath the glossy charm he showed to others, was decidedly morose and fatalistic.

A graduate of the University of Michigan at age seventeen, Loeb believed himself to be an excellent detective, and his most passionate daydream was to commit the perfect crime. He often talked of this with Leopold, who encouraged his superman theories with such a crime. The two not only satisfied each other in their sexual liaison, but they fed upon each other’s egos and together believed themselves to be perfect human beings. The youths had two driving obsessions. With Leopold it was abnormal sex, and with Loeb, crime. Both were later termed by their own defense attorneys as “moral imbeciles.” It was Loeb who led the pair into active crime. At first Leopold resisted the idea, but Loeb perversely withheld his sexual participation until Leopold agreed to commit crimes with him. They signed a mutual pact in which both agreed that they would support the other’s needs.

This agreement had been signed when Leopold was fourteen and Loeb was thirteen and the youths embarked on setting fires, touching off false fire alarms, committing petty thefts, and vandalizing the homes of their wealthy neighbors. They spent months creating an elaborate system in which they could expertly cheat while playing bridge, the game of the rich and socially esteemed. They constantly argued with each other, but neither formed friendships with other children. The arguments grew violent and Loeb beat up Leopold on several occasions. Both boys threatened to murder each other someday. Loeb laughed at this idea, saying he would kill himself before Leopold could murder him.

When Leopold told Loeb that he would be going on an extended tour of Europe, Loeb proposed that they commit a spectacular crime before Leopold’s ship sailed. Leopold was reluctant but Loeb appealed to his lover by cleverly positing the idea as worthy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Leopold’s intellectual idol. Loeb wrote Leopold a note which read: “The superman is not liable for anything he may do, except for the one crime that it is possible for him to commit—to make a mistake.” This prompted Leopold to reconsider Loeb’s proposition. The most dangerous crime, the most serious crime, was the only type of crime that Loeb would consider and that, of course, was murder.

They would kidnap and kill someone, and then send a ransom note and collect money for a victim who was already dead, mocking the awful crime they meticulously planned to commit. They were utterly unconcerned with the identity of the victim, as long as that person came from wealthy parents who could afford to pay the ransom. Loeb took Leopold to his room and showed him a typewriter that he had stolen in November 1923 from the University of Michigan when he graduated. Since this typewriter could not be traced to them, Loeb reasoned, the ransom note could be typed on it. The next step was to obtain a car that could be used for the kidnapping. Both boys knew, of course, that their own cars might be identified, so they established fake identities which would enable them to rent a car. This element of their plan was elaborate, but it provided the youths with some dramatic play-acting.

One spring morning in 1924, Leopold, using the alias of Morton D. Ballard, checked into Chicago’s Morrison Hotel. He registered as a salesman from Peoria. He then went to the nearby Rent-A-Car agency and selected a sedan. The salesman asked for a reference and Leopold gave him the name of Louis Mason, along with a phone number. The salesman called Mason (who was really Loeb) who gave “Ballard” an excellent recommendation. Leopold then took the car around for about two hours and returned it to the agency, telling the salesman that he would pick it up later when he needed it. Loeb and Leopold had already used their aliases to open up bank accounts. They intended to deposit the ransom money in these accounts.

Several weeks before the crime, Leopold and Loeb had boarded the 3 p.m. train for Michigan City, Ind. Loeb brought along small parcels the size of those in which the ransom money would be paid and threw these parcels from the rear platform of the observation car at points selected by Leopold, open fields where Leopold had, months before, spent time studying birds. Returning to the car rental agency, Leopold obtained a car on May 20, 1924, and he and Loeb then drove to a hardware store on 43rd and Cottage Avenue. Here they purchased a chisel, a rope, and hydrochloric acid. All these were tools of murder. The rope was to be used to garrote their victim, the chisel to stab him in case he struggled too much, and the acid to obliterate their victim’s identity. The murderous pair debated the use of sulfuric acid before opting to use hydrochloric.

On the morning of May 21, 1924, Loeb wrapped adhesive tape about the handle of the chisel to allow a firmer grip. This, along with the rope and acid, were placed in the rented car, along with strips of cloth to be used to bind their victim, and a lap robe to cover the body. A pair of hip boots were also put into the car to be used in burying the body in a swamp the killers had previously selected. Both Leopold and Loeb each pocketed a loaded revolver, and Loeb carried the ransom note typed the day before. This note demanded $10,000 for the return of the victim, who they had no intention of returning. Neither boy needed the ransom money, but they had to make it appear that the kidnappers were lowly, money-craving underworld types, motivated by cash, not the “supreme thrill” they both sought. This element of the plan Loeb thought to be the most ingenious. Police, he told Leopold, always pinned their investigations on motive and worked backward; with the false clue of cash-hungry kidnappers planted, the police would never look for two respectable, well-to-do students. Never, he said.

The most bizarre aspect of these dark procedures was the fact that on the very day they planned to commit the crime, May 21, 1924, the boys had not yet picked out a victim. This cold indifference was the root of their inhumanity, their utter lack of moral code. They did not care about the human life they were about to take. The identity of their victim was of total unconcern to their clinical minds. The person to be killed was merely another element of their test to prove their own superiority. The victim was a number, a thing. Leopold and Loeb sat down and wrote out a list of possible kidnap victims. First they thought to kidnap and murder Loeb’s younger brother Tommy, but they dismissed the idea, only because both felt that it would be difficult to collect the ransom from Loeb’s father and that Loeb might arouse suspicion.

Little William Deutsch was then discussed. He was the grandson of multimillionaire philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. He, too, was eliminated since Rosenwald was the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and thus, Loeb’s superior. The Deutsch boy was simply “too close to home” for the murderous youths. Richard Rubel, one of their few friends, was also considered as a candidate for the kidnapping-murder. Rubel often had lunch with Leopold and Loeb, but he was dismissed after the killers concluded that his father was a tightwad and would probably refuse to pay a ransom for his son. What to do? The boys finally decided to pick a random victim in the neighborhood. They got into the rented car and cruised around a few blocks near Leopold’s home, focusing upon the young boys coming and going from the Harvard Preparatory School. This was an exclusive school which was attended by children of very wealthy parents.

As they drove, the killers casually discussed their problem. They agreed that they should select a small child since neither of them was strong enough to subdue a child with any strength. They stopped next to the Harvard School yard, spotted little John Levinson, and decided then and there that he would be their victim. But since neither knew the address of the Levinson family, they drove to a nearby drugstore and looked it up in the phone directory. They wanted to make sure that they would have the correct address in order to send the ransom note. By the time the pair drove back to the schoolyard, the Levinson boy was leaving. Leopold, who had brought along binoculars for the purpose of selecting a victim at some distance, spotted Levinson across the field.

Loeb drove at considerable speed around the block in order to catch up with their prey, but the Levinson child went up an alley and vanished. Frustrated, the pair drove about aimlessly, searching for a victim. As they drove down Ellis Avenue they spotted some boys playing. One of them was Bobby Franks, a distant relative of Loeb’s. “He’s perfect,” Loeb stated, telling Leopold that the Franks child came from great wealth, that the boy’s father, Jacob Franks, was a multimillionaire box manufacturer, and could certainly afford to pay the ransom for his child, one he doted upon. After parking the car at a curb, Loeb called 14-year-old Bobby Franks to the car. Loeb asked Bobby if he wanted to go for a ride.

“No thanks,” Bobby said. He looked at Leopold who gave him a long, hard stare. “I don’t know this man,” Franks said, pointing to Leopold. There was some apprehension in his voice. “Besides, I have to go home,” he said. Loeb persisted, telling Bobby that they would drive him home. He recalled playing tennis with the Franks boy and knew the child had an avid interest in the sport. Loeb then told Bobby that he had a new tennis racket he wanted to show him. The Franks boy got in the back seat of the car. Leopold remained in the front seat behind the wheel, driving and Loeb got into the back seat with Bobby Franks. Leopold drove northward as Loeb fondled the rope he intended to use to strangle Franks. He quickly discarded this idea as being too clumsy. He grabbed the chisel and with four lightning moves, stabbed the startled child four times. The helpless child fell to the floor, gushing blood from savage wounds to the head.

Leopold turned briefly while driving to look in the back seat to see the dying boy. He saw the contemptuous sneer on Richard Loeb’s face. Loeb had enjoyed killing the child and said so. Leopold winced at the sight of the blood and groaned: “Oh, God, I didn’t know it would be like this!” Leopold continued driving through heavy traffic. Meanwhile, Loeb ruthlessly tied up the child, stuffed strips of cloth in his mouth, and then threw the lap robe over him. Bobby Franks lay on the floor of the back seat of the sedan slowly bleeding to death. Leopold kept driving about aimlessly until dusk. He then parked the car and the boys went to a restaurant to get sandwiches. They were waiting for the cover of darkness before hiding the body at a site selected earlier. Leopold called his father and told him he would not be home until late that night.

The boys then got back into the car and began driving south. They stopped at another restaurant and ate a heavy meal, finding themselves famished, even though they had just eaten sandwiches. Outside, parked at the curb, the windows of the car open, the lap robe and the body of the Franks boy beneath it was open to the view of all passersby. This was another element of the contempt the killers displayed for the ability of anyone to detect their crime. It was Loeb’s belief that no one in the world cared about anyone else. He joked with the somber Leopold about the fact that anyone passing the car outside could lean through the windows and pick up the robe and discover the body. “But nobody will,” he said in a low voice. Both were wholly insensitive to the murder they had committed. They ate their way through a five-course meal, concerned only with completing the routines they had established for themselves.

At nightfall, the killers got back into the car and drove to an area called Panhandle Tracks at 118th Street. Here a swamp drained into an open culvert and this was the spot they had selected as the burial site for their victim. Loeb got into the back seat of the car and checked the Franks boy. “He’s dead,” he announced proudly. He then stripped the boy of his clothes and poured the acid over the child’s face to mar his features and prevent identification. While Loeb was performing this monstrous task, Leopold was slipping into his pair of hip boots. He then took the child, walked to the culvert, and stuffed the body into the pipe. It was difficult work and Leopold removed his coat. As he did so, he made the one mistake that would spoil the so-called “perfect crime” he and Richard Loeb had so carefully planned. His glasses fell from the pocket of his coat. Moreover, he believed that he had thoroughly hidden the body of their victim, but in the darkness he failed to notice that a small, naked foot protruded from the drainpipe. He grabbed his coat and went back to the car.

The boys then parked the car near a large apartment building. They noted that the back seat and the lap robe were stained with Bobby’s blood. They abandoned the car and then burned the robe in a vacant lot. They went to Leopold’s house and there burned all of Bobby’s clothes, except the metal he had been wearing, his belt buckle and class pin. They typed the Franks’s address on the envelope of the ransom note and then left, driving to Indiana where they mailed the note and buried the class pin, belt buckle, and shoes of Bobby Franks. They then drove back to Chicago and Leopold called Jacob Franks, who had been worried ever since his child failed to come home that afternoon. Leopold told Franks: “Your boy has been kidnapped. He is safe and unharmed. Tell the police and he will be killed at once. You will receive a ransom note with instructions tomorrow.” Without allowing Franks to respond, Leopold hung up. The boys then made themselves drinks and played cards until past midnight in Leopold’s room, working out the final details of their “perfect crime.”

A ransom note signed “George Johnson” was delivered to Franks the next day. It demanded that Franks pay $10,000 for the return of his child, the payment to be made in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. The bills were to be placed in a cigar box and this box was to be wrapped in white paper and then sealed with wax. Franks would receive more instructions at 1 p.m. that day, the note stated. Franks had by then notified the police through his lawyer of his son’s kidnapping. The police were told that the Franks wanted no publicity in fear that the kidnappers would murder their child, as the anonymous caller had threatened.

Meanwhile Leopold and Loeb had second thoughts about the bloodstains in the rented car. They retrieved it, drove to the Leopold house, and parked it in the family garage. Sven Englund, the Leopold family chauffeur, noticed the boys scrubbing down the back seat of this car. When he asked them about it, they told him that they had been drinking wine in the back seat of the car, borrowed from a friend, and had spilled wine on the seat. They were merely trying to remove the stain before returning the car to their friend. Englund, who had been berated and humiliated by both Leopold and Loeb over the years, would later prove his lack of affection for Leopold by staunchly maintaining that Leopold’s own car never left the family garage on the night of the Franks murder, rebuffing Leopold’s claim that he and Loeb had been using Leopold’s car that night, cruising for girls.

The typewriter on which the boys wrote the ransom note bothered Loeb. Even though it was an item stolen the previous year, he feared its discovery. Leopold drove through Jackson Park slowly while Loeb tore the keys from the typewriter and threw them into a lagoon. He threw the dismantled typewriter into another lagoon. By then it was time to contact Jacob Franks once more. Loeb boarded a train en route to Michigan City. He went to the observation car and, at the writing desk of this car, left a note addressed to Jacob Franks in the telegram slot of the desk, behind many forms. He wrote on the envelope: “Should anyone else find this note, please leave it alone. The letter is very important.” Loeb got off the train at 63rd Street to be met by the waiting Leopold. Apparently, the boys intended to inform Franks that the note was on the train and have the victim’s father personally retrieve it. However, Andy Russo, a train worker, rummaged through the forms in the telegram slot looking for a piece of paper to write on and found the letter addressed to Franks. Russo personally delivered the letter to Franks the next morning.

By this time, however, Jacob Franks knew that his little boy was dead. A member of a train crew working alongside the culvert where the body had been hidden spotted the boy’s foot sticking from the drainpipe and the corpse was quickly removed and identified by one of the Franks family. The newspapers were given the full story and huge headlines announced the brutal murder. A massive, widely publicized manhunt for the ruthless killers ensued. Scores of suspects were picked up, hustled into police headquarters, and grilled. Leopold and Loeb quickly realized that no ransom would ever be paid and that their perfect crime had serious flaws. Leopold grew silent and morose. He kept to his room, staying out of the limelight. Richard Loeb, however, revelled in the manhunt and played amateur detective. He approached police officials searching through his neighborhood for clues and offered his sleuthing services.

Loeb babbled his crime theories into the ears of detectives and followed them about during their investigations. To one he remarked: “If I were going to pick out a boy to kidnap or murder, that’s just the kind of cocky little son-of-a-bitch I would pick.” The detective took a long, long look at Richard Loeb and then encouraged him to talk further, inviting the arrogant self-appointed sleuth to accompany officers on their quest for the killer. Such conduct on the part of killers was not uncommon. In this instance, Loeb’s voluntary aid to the police was spawned by his desire to present himself as a suspect and still outwit them. It was all a game, a challenge to Loeb, who felt himself superior to the “dumb coppers” who bumbled about looking for a killer who was right beneath their noses, secretly jeering at them.

Then the “bumbling” police began to make discoveries that unnerved Loeb. Loeb’s stolen typewriter was found in the shallow waters of the Jackson Park lagoon and the keys to it were found in another lagoon. Then the bloody, tape-wrapped chisel was found. The most startling discovery was that of Leopold’s glasses. The police traced the horn-rimmed glasses to the manufacturer, Albert Coe and Co. Officials at the firm reported that the glasses were unusual, the frames being specially made for only three people. One pair belonged to a lawyer who had been visiting Europe for some time. The second pair was owned by a woman and she was wearing them when police arrived to interview her. The third pair had been sold to Nathan Leopold, Jr., dear friend of Richard Loeb, the boy who had been dogging the footsteps of investigating detectives, the self-appointed Sherlock Holmes of Chicago.

Richard Crowe, the shrewd, tough state’s attorney for Cook County, had Leopold brought into his office for questioning. He showed him the glasses and asked him if they were his. Leopold said no, his were at home. Crowe sent Leopold back home with two detectives but thorough searching of the Leopold home failed to produce the glasses. Then Leopold was told that the glasses had been found near a culvert at 118th Street, and Leopold, thinking fast, told Crowe that he often went to that area for his bird-watching studies. Crowe was hesitant to charge Leopold, initially believing that he was a victim of circumstance. He came from incredible wealth and his social position was lofty. There was no reason Crowe had to believe that Leopold had anything to do with the killing of Bobby Franks. Yet he had Leopold interrogated by two detectives who kept questioning him about his glasses and his whereabouts on the night of the murder.

Leopold first stated that he could not recollect what he was doing on the night of May 21, 1924, but he later said that he and his friend Richard Loeb had been driving around looking for girls and picked up two attractive girls named Edna and Mae. He could not remember their last names. The four of them, Leopold insisted, had gone to a Chinese restaurant on the South Side and had dinner on the murder night. Leopold then said that he and Loeb had been drinking gin out of a flask and that he did not want to talk about his outing with Loeb and the girls because Loeb’s father strongly disapproved of drinking and he did not want his friend Loeb to get into trouble.

He said he did not know the murdered boy, but was acquainted with his family. He admitted to reading “everything I could find” about the murder in the local papers. He also said that he had seen photos of the glasses found at the murder site but he never believed them to be his own, which he had lost near the spot some time earlier. Leopold stressed his ability to buy anything he wanted, implying he had no need to kidnap anyone to obtain ransom money. “My father is rich,” he said. “Whenever I want money, all I have to do is ask for it. And I earn money myself teaching ornithology.”

Crowe realized that, despite Leopold’s high social position, he was a primary suspect in the killing of Bobby Franks. He ordered Leopold taken to a comfortable room in the LaSalle Hotel and questioned further. Crowe also ordered Richard Loeb picked up and taken to another room in the same hotel. He was also to be questioned to see if his statements contradicted Leopold’s. They did. Loeb insisted that on the murder night he was at home. He had not gone anywhere with Leopold. He said nothing of the two girls. No one but Crowe and a few high-ranking police officials really believed that either boy was guilty of the Franks murder. Newspaper reporters who knew the boys were allowed to interview them and felt they were innocent, caught in a web of circumstantial evidence.

Both boys remained calm and freely talked to reporters and the police. They were officially under arrest, but they were not formally charged. They were held as “guests” of the city while the lengthy interrogations went on. Their families did nothing to free them, believing that the youths would soon be released and that the questioning was merely a matter of routine. Crowe continued to play the fatherly host to the boys. He even took them to the posh Drake Hotel where they leisurely ate an expensive dinner for which the city paid $102, a lavish sum for those days. For Crowe it was money well spent. One reporter later claimed that he interviewed Leopold who modestly displayed “his superior education.” The reporter was so impressed with the calm demeanor of Leopold that he asked a psychiatrist friend to interview Leopold, which he did. The psychiatrist later stated that “this boy certainly had no part in the murder.” The psychiatrist later denied having made any such statement.

Leopold made himself look cooperative at every turn. He said to one reporter: “I don’t blame the police for holding me. I was at the culvert the Saturday and Sunday before the glasses were found and it is quite possible that I lost my glasses there. I’m sorry this happened only because it will worry my family. But I’ll certainly be glad to do what I can to help the police.” It was apparent that Leopold was enjoying the limelight shed upon him by the press. He pontificated on art, literature, politics, sports, and especially philosophy, as if giving lectures, pointing out that he favored such writers as Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche, but he added: “I won’t add Socrates, for I never thought such a lot of him.” Loeb adopted the same kind of superior air. For sheer arrogance and bluff, their equal had never been seen.

Their family members believed that the police were merely using the boys to see if they had information that might lead to the identification of the real killer. Nathan Leopold, Sr., said: “While it is a terrible ordeal both to my boy and myself to have him under suspicion our attitude will be one of helping the investigation, rather than retarding it…The suggestion that he had anything to do with this case is too absurd to merit comment.” Loeb’s father had been ill for several weeks and made no comment from his sick-bed but Mrs. Loeb coolly told a reporter: “The affair will so easily straighten itself out.”

While the police were politely interrogating the boys, two newspaper reporters, Al Goldstein and Jim Mulroy, of the Chicago Daily News, conducted their own dogged investigation, interviewing dozens of persons, chiefly the friends of Leopold and Loeb. One of them, Arnold Maremont, told Goldstein that he was a member of a legal study group to which Leopold belonged. The group met once a week to write “dope sheets” to prepare for examinations. Maremont stated that several of these meetings were held in the library of the Leopold mansion. He recalled that Leopold usually had a large Hammond typewriter which the group used to prepare the “dope sheets.” But in one meeting Leopold produced a small portable typewriter that was used to type some “dope sheets.”

Maremont had some of these sheets typed on the portable typewriter which Loeb had stolen in 1923. Goldstein and Mulroy took these pages to H.P. Sutton, an expert working for the Royal Typewriter Company. Sutton compared the “dope sheets” and the ransom letter and pronounced that they were one and the same. When confronted with this, Leopold still held onto his nerve, saying that the typewriter belonged to Maurice Shanberg, who had brought the typewriter to the study group. Shanberg denied this allegation angrily and then Leopold, thinking quickly, stated that another student friend, Leon Mandel, owned the typewriter. Mandel was in Europe. Then Leopold said that the typewriter was still somewhere in his house. Another thorough search in the Leopold home failed to unearth the typewriter. Of course, the typewriter was the one found in the Jackson Park lagoon.

More and more evidence mounted against the boys. Sven Englund, the Leopold chauffeur, was brought in for questioning. Englund told Crowe that Leopold, contrary to Leopold’s claim, had not used his red Willys-Knight car on the night of the murder. Leopold had insisted that he had been driving this car around that night with Loeb and two girls in it. Crowe turned to one of his aides and exclaimed: “God damn it! I think we got them!” He then ordered Richard Loeb into his office and Loeb was confronted with this new evidence. When he heard that Englund had insisted that he had been working on Leopold’s car on the murder night, trying to fix its noisy brakes, and that it never left the garage, Loeb’s face went ashen. He slumped in his chair and found it difficult to speak. Finally, he said: “My God! He told you that?” He asked for a cigarette and then let out a brief, low-voiced curse.

Leopold, in another room, was faced with the same evidence given by Englund. He remained passive and silent. “There were no two girls in that car, were there, Nathan?” one of his interrogators said, “Just one little boy, Bobby Franks. Why don’t you come clean and get it off your conscience? Your alibi about driving around with Dickie Loeb and those girls is exposed as a lie by your family chauffeur.” Leopold merely smiled, proving his superiority to such police tactics.

Loeb, on the other hand, had lost his composure as the questioning went on into the early morning hours of the day after the boys had been picked up. He trembled and was visibly shaken with each new question that pointed to his guilt. Crowe studied him for some time, realizing that though he was the leader of the pair he was the weaker of the two and his veneer of bravado and haughty airs had evaporated. He showed all the signs of a trapped animal. Crowe then decided to bluff with the more stoic Leopold. At 4 a.m., he walked into the room where Leopold sat calmly puffing on a cigarette and said: “Well, your pal has just confessed, told us the whole story.”

A sneer passed Leopold’s face: “Do you think I’m stupid. I’m not going to believe that. Anyhow, it’s impossible. There’s nothing to confess!”

Crowe had all the evidence and more. His men had tracked down the rented car used in the murder and then traced its user to the Morrison Hotel. The car rental agent and employees at the hotel identified a photo shown to them by detectives as that of Morton D. Ballard, the young man who had rented the car and had checked into the hotel. Crowe walked back and forth in front of Leopold, saying nothing. He then stopped and slowly removed his glasses, wiping the lenses meticulously as he stared down at Leopold, who stared back at him.

Crowe then slipped the glasses into the breast pocket of his coat, much in the manner Leopold claimed he had done before losing his glasses at the culvert area. Leopold smiled slightly at the ploy, but his smile faded when Crowe began to talk quietly. Said Crowe: “What about your getting the other automobile at the Rent-A-Car Company because your car was red and too conspicuous? What about the false identity at the Morrison Hotel? What about waiting in hiding on Ingleside Avenue for Johnny Levinson to appear? Your friend says you planned the kidnapping. He says you were the one who killed Bobby Franks.” Leopold crushed a cigarette angrily into an ashtray and then nervously lit another. He realized that only Richard Loeb could have provided the information Crowe had related. He had not, but Crowe had pieced this information together from various statements the boys had made to their interrogators.

Leopold began to confess and Crowe had a court stenographer take down his statements. He then marched into the hotel room where Loeb sat and played the same game. Loeb nodded slowly and then he began to confess, detailing the murder of Bobby Franks. The killers’ stories matched in every detail except one. Each said that they were driving the car when Bobby Franks was killed and that the other did the actual murder. Most authorities later determined that Loeb was the actual killer. Their conclusion was based upon Loeb’s statements; he described in exact detail how Leopold killed the Franks child while Leopold could only offer slight information on how many times the boy was stabbed and how the rags had been stuffed down his throat to prevent his crying out. Both were nevertheless charged with murder. When the boys were first brought together after their confessions, Loeb said to Leopold: “We’re both in for the same ride, Babe, so we might as well ride together.” Leopold turned to a detective and repeated his claim that Loeb was the killer. Loeb, hearing himself denounced by his best friend, sneered and turned to Crowe, saying: “He’s only a weakling after all.”

The fathers of these merciless killers realized that their sons were headed straight for the electric chair. They also knew one man might save them from that fate, Clarence Darrow, the greatest criminal attorney of the day. Darrow knew immediately that he had no hope of freeing the boys. Their guilt was completely established. They were also so unsavory that he could not make appeals on behalf of their inhuman characters. He took on their defense for only one reason. It offered an opportunity for him to attack the concept of government-sanctioned execution. “While the State is trying Loeb and Leopold, I will try capital punishment,” he declared. He wisely chose to abandon a jury trial and plead his clients Guilty before Judge John R. Caverly. Darrow knew Judge Caverly to be fair-minded and exceptionally conscientious and he played to Caverly’s sensitivities regarding the taking of human life.

For thirty-three gruelling days, Clarence Darrow put on one of the greatest and most dramatic performances ever seen in a U.S. courtroom. His tireless assault on capital punishment remains a classic argument to this day. He fought with all his strength and intellectual powers. He also exhausted every ounce of his emotion to save two boys he himself had branded as guilty. Darrow’s summation was stunning. He ended with: “I am pleading for the future…I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men, when we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth living and that mercy is the highest attribute of man…If I can succeed …I have done something for the tens of thousands of other boys, for the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood…”

Judge Caverly was deeply moved by Darrow’s appeal. He also stated that Illinois had never executed boys of the age of Leopold and Loeb, and having that precedent, sentenced both youths to life imprisonment for the murder of Bobby Franks and ninety-nine years each on the charge of kidnapping. Clarence Darrow had achieved the impossible. He had saved the lives of two youths who had, in everyone’s mind, been destined for the electric chair.

Darrow’s fee was reported to have been $1 million but he had difficulty in obtaining the one and only payment he did receive, $30,000 paid by Nathan Leopold, Sr. Leeb’s father reportedly paid not a red cent. Jacob Loeb disowned his son, Richard, after the sentence and died a few months later. When Leopold finally paid Darrow, he handed him his check and then said to Darrow with the same kind of arrogance displayed by his son: “The world is full of eminent lawyers who would have paid a fortune for a chance to distinguish themselves in this case.” With that he walked wordlessly from the offices of the man who had saved his son’s decidedly worthless life.

Leopold and Loeb were sent to the Northern Illinois Penitentiary at Stateville, outside Joliet. Though Judge Caverly had stated in his deliberation that both boys were to be kept separate for the rest of their lives, this order was immediately ignored once the boys were put behind bars. They were placed in cells separated only by one other cell. The “Fun Killers,” as the press had dubbed them, were allowed desks, filing cabinets, and their own private libraries. Their cells, which were on a special wing, were left open at night so they could visit each other.

Leopold and Loeb were separated from the rest of the prisoners and given special meals, often catered from restaurants, in the officers’ mess. Both youths were permitted to walk freely outside the prison where Leopold kept a garden. They washed in the officers’ shower and they were provided with bootleg liquor and even narcotics for which they were charged $1 a shot. Visitors were allowed to see the boys at all hours and at any time, in total disregard of prison rules. Leopold and Loeb could make phone calls at any time from a phone in the prison storeroom. They had plenty of money to bribe the guards and officials to continue living lives of relative comfort.

Richard Loeb was the worse offender of the two. While Leopold retreated into books and his garden, Loeb sauntered about the prison, selecting any young prisoner he admired and then foisting his homosexual attentions on them while guards ignored his vile sexual assaults. In 1936, Loeb was attracted to a young prisoner, James E. Day. Loeb accosted Day in the library on one occasion and said that he loved him and that Day should “be broad-minded and be nice to me.” Day, disgusted at such behavior, pushed Loeb away. But Loeb insisted that Day respond to his affection. Day later stated: “I never had a peaceful day. He was always after me. I became desperate. I had to get him off my back. I was looking for the right day.”

The day occurred on Jan. 28, 1936. Day was in the shower alone and Loeb entered, stripping and then trying to assault Day. Loeb brandished a razor and barked at Day: “Do as you’re told! Keep your mouth shut and get your clothes off” Day pretended to go along with the idea but then, when Loeb was off guard, Day kicked him in the groin and the two men struggled for the razor. In the fight Loeb slashed Day several times until Day wrenched the razor away from him and used it to slash Loeb fatally. Loeb staggered naked from the shower, walking down a corridor before falling into the arms of another convict.

Loeb had been slashed fifty-six times. He was rushed to the prison hospital where his mother visited him within hours. Leopold was brought to his bedside and held his hand. Loeb said to his partner in murder: “I think I’m going to make it.” He died a few minutes later. When Clarence Darrow was informed of Loeb’s passing, he remarked: “He is better off dead. For him death is an easier sentence.” Nathan Leopold continued to be the star boarder at the penitentiary until his parole on Mar. 13, 1958. He said at a press conference: “I am a broken old man. I want a chance to find redemption for myself and to help others.” To that end he traveled to Puerto Rico where he worked as a laboratory technician in a small church. He later met Tudi Feldman Garcia de Quevedo, a widow who owned a flower shop. The man who planned the “perfect crime” married her in 1961.

Leopold then wrote a book, Life Plus 99 Years. At a press conference connected with the book’s release, Leopold was asked about the murder of Bobby Franks. He replied: ‘The crime is definitely still the central part of my consciousness. Very often it occupies the forefront of my attention, and I can think of nothing else. More often, it is not the center of my attention, but it always is present in the background.” It was the same kind of mannered, cautious statement that Leopold had made when he was first confronted with his awful guilt by police in 1924. Bobby Franks, three decades after his death, was a thought in the mind of Nathan Leopold, where the victim had been an idea in Nathan Leopold’s mind in 1924. Nothing really had changed. For all the posturing of remorse and rehabilitation, Leopold still observed his crime and his long-dead victim as a distant intellectual entity, not as a flesh-and-blood young boy whose life he and the equally perverted Richard Loeb had snuffed out in the exercise of their “perfect crime.” Nathan Leopold, Jr., had gone on to live out a life. Bobby Franks had perished at age fourteen, slaughtered by two beasts who feared only the failure of their own mad schemes.

 

Levin, Seymour, 1932- , U.S. Seymour Levin was a serious-minded youth whose interest in chemistry drove him to commit murder. The bespectacled 16-year-old attended the Oak Lane Country Day School in Philadelphia, and his father owned a dry goods store in nearby Toms River, N.J.

Levin met 12-year-old Ellis Simons on a street comer the night of Jan. 8, 1949. He struck up a conversation with the younger boy, and asked him whether he was interested in chemistry. According to Levin, “We walked to my home. I showed him my chemistry set in the bathroom. He said it was a cheap set and I got mad and told him to get out of the house.”

Levin told police that Simons threatened him with a knife and there was a brief struggle. Levin reached for a pair of sharp scissors and repeatedly stabbed him until he was dead. “I went out and got a couple of aspirins, I returned and then I saw blood. After I saw the blood I drew a complete blackout,” he said.

Investigators later surmised that the assault was sexually motivated. Simons’ partially clad body was tied with rope and placed behind the family’s garage in the Wynnefield section of Philadelphia. It was discovered the next day. The police arrested Levin on a murder charge after they retrieved the fatal weapon from the bathroom.

On Mar. 17, 1949, Seymour Levin was found Guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment by Judges James Gay Gordon, Gerald F. Flood, and Eugene Allesandron, who issued a solemn warning against parole officers who might be inclined to free the boy at some future time. After examining Levin, psychiatrists determined that he was psychopathic, but not insane. The original sentence of life in prison was eventually commuted by the governor with the recommendation of the Pennsylvania Board of Prisons. Levin served a minimum sentence of twenty-eight years and five months before receiving his parole from the Pittsburgh Community Service Center on June 10, 1977.

 

Lewis, Al Junior, prom. 1976-77, U.S. On Nov. 10, 1976, Al Junior Lewis walked into a classroom at Burt Elementary School on Detroit’s West Side and shot Bettye McCaster five times in the head in front of twenty-nine first- and second-graders. The 45-year-old school teacher, who had taught at the school less than three weeks, was Lewis’ estranged wife. His trial for murder took place in May 1977. Ten students testified at the two-day trial, with three students identifying Lewis as the killer. He was found Guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced on June 27 by Judge Patricia Boyle to life in prison at hard labor. She recommended that Lewis not be paroled.

 

Lewis, Harry, c.1926-49, Brit. Needing money in the early morning of Dec. 26, 1948, Harry Lewis entered the Marylebone, England, apartment of Harry Saul Michaelson. Lewis searched about and found some loose change and a wallet before the 50-year-old commercial artist awoke and called out. To make a clean escape, Lewis grabbed a metal tubular chair and struck Michaelson over the head twice, then fled and caught a taxi. Michaelson staggered from his apartment and alerted the porter who called an ambulance. At the hospital, a complicated brain operation was performed, after which Michaelson died on Dec. 27.

The bloodstained chair was inspected by fingerprint expert Superintendent Frederick Cherrill of Scotland Yard. Prints from the chair matched those on file for Lewis, who already had a criminal record. On Jan. 19, 1949, Lewis was arrested and charged with murder. He confessed to the burglary that went awry, but protested that he had not meant to kill Michaelson. The one-day trial at the Old Bailey was before Lord Chief Justice Goddard on Mar. 9. Defense counsel for Lewis attempted to prove that it was the operation that killed Michaelson, not the defendant. A surgeon from St. Mary’s Hospital, where Michaelson died, claimed that the victim would have died no matter what. This assertion was substantiated by pathologist Dr. Donald Teare. Goddard informed the jury that a verdict of murder, not manslaughter, was to be returned if they found Lewis guilty. The jury found Lewis Guilty, but recommended mercy. Lewis did not receive mercy from the judge or the Home Secretary, and was hanged on Apr. 21, 1949.

 

Ley, John (AKA: Thomas John Ley), 1879-1947, and Smith, John Lawrence, prom. 1946, Brit. John Ley’s mental instability was evident long before he was arrested in connection with the notorious “Chalk-Pit Murder” of 1946. Ley served as minister of justice in New South Wales, Aus., until his career was ended by a bribery charge and the suspicious deaths of two business associates whose disappearances advanced his interests. Then, in 1929, Ley returned to England and was soon followed by Maggie Brook, a 47-year-old widow with whom he had been having an affair. Although the affair ceased being sexual sometime in the late 1930s, the couple remained close.

Ley, extremely jealous of Brook, accused her on June 12, 1946, of having an affair with her son-in-law, with whom she was staying during her daughter’s hospitalization. Brook denied the accusation. Ley contacted Brook’s son-in-law, inviting him to tea with Brook at Ley’s home in Beaufort Gardens. The son-in-law declined when he learned Brook knew nothing about the invitation. Ley took out his jealousy on 35-year old John McMain Mudie, a barman who had lodged in the same house as Brook. Ley tried tricking Mudie into revealing his supposed involvement with Brook by sending him checks requiring her countersignature. Mudie, who had moved to a new address and had no idea where Brook was, returned the checks to Ley.

In November 1946, Ley hired chauffeur John William Buckingham, Mrs. Bruce, and carpenter John Lawrence Smith to participate in what he described to them as the kidnapping of a blackmailer. Bruce, for her part in the plot, met Mudie, and posing as a wealthy woman, hired him to tend bar for a party in her home. On Nov. 28, Bruce and Buckingham’s son drove Mudie to Ley’s home, where Bruce let him in and then drove away. Once Mudie was inside, Buckingham and Smith seized him, threw a blanket over his head, and bound him with a rope. Buckingham was then paid and dismissed by Ley. At this point either Ley or Smith, or both, severely beat Mudie and then strangled him.

Mudie’s body was taken to a nearby chalk pit, where Walter Coombs discovered it half-buried two days later. When the body was identified and the police searched Mudie’s rooms, they found letters relating to his dealings with Ley. The police soon arrested Ley, Smith, and Buckingham, and charged Ley and Smith with murder. Buckingham, who had gone voluntarily to Scotland Yard two weeks after the discovery of Mudie’s body, was not charged.

Ley and Smith stood trial together beginning on Mar. 19, 1947. The trial took place at the Old Bailey before Lord Goddard, chief justice. The prosecutors were Anthony Hawke and Henry Elam. Walter Monckton defended Ley and Derek Curtis Bennett defended Smith. Both men pleaded not guilty and Ley claimed to have never heard of Mudie. Ley and Smith were found Guilty and were sentenced to death. However, on May 5, after a psychiatric examination, Ley was found insane and sent to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. He died there on July 24, 1947, of a meningeal hemorrhage. Smith’s sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.

 

Liao Chang-Shin, prom. 1945, China. Liao Chang-Shin, an innkeeper in Changshow, a small Yangtze River port, did not think it was strange that, between April and July 1945, so many people disappeared from the small town.

Confronted by police, Liao and his accomplice, Hsui Chang-shan, confessed to robbing and killing seventy-nine people, most of them guests at his inn. The men were given the death penalty after admitting that they had averaged about a murder a day.

 

Lincoln, Warren, d.1941, U.S. In the early 1900s, Warren Lincoln was a brilliant court attorney and a skilled gardener. His wife’s domineering physique and personality overshadowed Lincoln, leaving the meek man with one retreat: his sweet pea garden. Then his brother-in-law Byron came for dinner, made himself at home in the Lincolns’ Aurora, Ill., bungalow, and transformed Lincoln’s beloved greenhouse into a gym. It was in 1922, when his tyrannical relatives bought themselves extravagant Christmas gifts with money from Lincoln’s garden account, that the man cracked.

First, Lincoln typed phony letters from an imaginary lover to his wife, took them to town, and showed them to an understanding bartender. Lincoln counted on the bartender to be outraged and loose-lipped. Soon the whole town heard rumors of Mrs. Lincoln’s sordid affair. Lincoln returned home, cried on his gardener’s sleeve, and told him he planned to order the couple away. He marched into the house. From outside, the gardener heard screams of accusation and protest. The scene was staged so that the hired man could overhear. No one was surprised when the siblings were gone the next day.

Lincoln went too far when, six weeks later, he staged a fight from which he emerged bloodied and bruised, and which revealed a misplaced business card from Milo Durand, private detective, Chicago. Aurora police chief Frank Michels wanted answers. Lincoln said he wanted to be left alone.

So Michels investigated on his own. First, he tracked down the “love letters” from Mrs. Lincoln’s alleged boyfriend, and found Lincoln’s recently sold typewriter. A defective “e” on the typewriter was evident on Mrs. Lincoln’s purported love notes. Next, Michels went to the Chicago shop that printed the business cards for Lincoln’s private detective. Employees there described Lincoln, who ordered the cards supposedly to play a trick on a friend.

When Detective Michels confronted Lincoln with his evidence, the man confessed that the bodies of his wife and brother-in-law were buried in quicklime in his greenhouse. Lincoln mistakenly believed that quicklime would destroy his victims’ remains, and that hearsay alone would not convict him. But the detective found two well-preserved heads in the flower boxes, easily identifiable as Byron and Mrs. Lincoln. What Lincoln thought was quicklime was actually slaked lime, which preserves rather than destroys. He was found Guilty of murder and sentenced to life in the Joliet Penitentiary. He died there in 1941.

 

Lippart, Joseph, prom. 1976, U.S. Joseph Lippart, a truck driver, and his 29-year-old wife Betty Lippart lived in Gaithersburg, Va., next door to the Childress family. At a pool party, Betty became attracted to 17-year-old Kenneth Childress. The two had an affair until Joseph found a love letter to Kenny in Betty’s handwriting. Joseph confronted Kenny’s parents and threatened to kill him if the affair continued. The Childresses attempted to stop the affair by grounding Kenny and taking away his car, but Kenny skipped school to see Betty.

One morning Joseph woke with stomach pains. He begged Betty to take him to the hospital but she refused and told Joseph she was going next door. Joseph grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from under the bed and fired both barrels into Betty’s chest. He then called the police and told them what happened, saying “I’ll be sitting in front of my house and I’ll surrender peacefully.” Lippart was tried in the Montgomery County Circuit Court and found Guilty of second-degree murder. Judge John Mitchell sentenced Lippart to twenty years in prison, but suspended all but eighteen months of the term, making him eligible for parole after only four-and-a-half months in prison.

 

Little Red, See: Starkweather, Charles.

 

Lock Ah Tam, 1872-1926, Brit. Lock Ah Tam was born in Canton, China, in 1872 and emigrated to England as a sailor in 1895 where he soon established himself as a leader of the Chinese community. His business prospered, and as leader of the Koch Mai Tong, a worldwide Chinese Republican society, he functioned as Sun Yat Sen’s ambassador. Lock also represented a Hong Kong-based sailor’s union, and established a sailor’s club in Liverpool. He married a Welsh woman, Catherine Morgan, with whom he had three children, a son Lock Ling Tam and two daughters, Doris and Cecilia. Lock Ah Tam was known for his generosity and sweet temperament, and the English police often consulted him when there were problems involving the Chinese community.

Lock Ah Tam was playing billiards in his Liverpool club just before the Chinese New Year in 1918 when he was caught in a brawl involving several drunken Russian sailors. One of the sailors struck Lock Ah Tam on the head with a pool cue. He recovered from the injury, but those around him noticed a distinct change in his personality. He became despondent and unpredictable, and was prone to fits of violence, especially after he had been drinking. But Lock Ah Tam insisted that liquor did not affect him because he added salt to his whiskey. His business deteriorated, and after a particularly heavy loss in a shipping venture, he declared bankruptcy in 1924.

On Dec. 1, 1925, Lock Ah Tam hosted a party in honor of the twentieth birthday of his son, who had recently returned from his studies in China. The occasion seemed to bring out the best in Lock Ah Tam. He was loving to his son and hospitable to his guests. But after the last guests had gone, he went into a rage, viciously berating his wife. When Lock Ling Tam realized the state his father was in, he left the house to get the police. Then, Lock Ah Tam loaded a shotgun and a revolver and, one at a time, shot to death his wife and daughters, 18-year-old Cecilia and 20-year-old Doris. Immediately afterward, Lock Ah Tam called the police and calmly told them what he had done.

Lock Ah Tam’s trial was held in February 1926 before Justice Mackinnon at the Chester Assizes. His defense attorney, the renowned Sir Edward Marshall Hall, never denied that his client had committed the murders, but insisted that he had done so while in a state of ‘unconscious automatism’ brought on by a fit of epilepsy. Hall said to the jury, “I do not suppose that if you were to search the tragedies of the Greek poets you would find anything more poignant than this tragedy…Some minute happening in the brain caused a change for which none of us can account. It turned a man—a mild, loveable, peaceable man—into a raving madman.” Lock Ah Tam’s hapless plea of insanity was found to be inconceivable by the fact that he called police moments after the murders and confessed in a totally rational manner. The jury took only twelve minutes to find Lock Ah Tam Guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death and he was hanged.

 

Loeb, Richard A., See: Leopold, Nathan F., Jr.

 

Lonelyhearts Killers, See: Beck, Martha Julie.

 

Lonergan, Wayne, 1918- , U.S. Born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1918, Wayne Lonergan was incorrigible as a child, spending time in and out of juvenile reformatories. He arrived in New York City in 1939, and worked as a bus driver at the World’s Fair.

One night, as he lounged about the lobby of a hotel in Gramercy Park, Lonergan met William Burton, a member of the elite sophisticates known as the “International Set,” who had inherited a fortune from his father, a German brewer. Burton and his teenage daughter, Patricia, had fled Europe to escape the impending war. They were living a life of ease in the sumptuous Ritz Towers when Lonergan entered the picture. Burton took a special interest in the handsome young Canadian, and set him up in his own apartment and provided him a generous expense account. There were rumors that Burton and Lonergan were engaged in a homosexual relationship.

Patricia fell hopelessly in love with Lonergan. In October 1940, William Burton died, and Lonergan, rather than return to the work-a-day world, decided to pursue Patricia. Mrs. Lucille Burton, Patricia’s mother, who had stayed in France until December 1940, tried to keep Patricia away from Lonergan. But on July 30, 1941, Patricia eloped with Lonergan.

With her income of $25,000, Patricia supported the whims of her bisexual husband, who enjoyed their swanky apartment on 51st Street. When a son was born to the couple in April 1942, Patricia’s desire to stay home and care for the child put a damper on Lonergan’s extravagant lifestyle. A year later, the couple separated and Lonergan joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but often visited Patricia and his son in New York.

On the night of Oct. 24, 1943, Elizabeth Black, the Lonergans’ nursemaid, and Peter Elser, an old friend of Patricia’s, concerned that Patricia had not come out of her room all day, broke into her room and found her naked body sprawled on the bed. She had been bludgeoned and strangled to death. Dr. Milton Helpern, deputy medical examiner, concluded that Patricia had been struck repeatedly with an onyx-inlaid brass candlestick, then choked. The night before, Patricia had gone out with a man named Mario Gabelline, but neither Gabelline nor Captain Elser emerged as prime suspects.

Wayne Lonergan was notified in Toronto of Patricia’s death. He agreed to return to New York for questioning. He was the investigators’ prime suspect, but it would have been difficult to extradite him without hard evidence. Back in New York, Lonergan’s interrogation lasted eighty-four hours, after which he finally broke down and confessed to the murder.

As a New York psychiatrist explained at the trial, Lonergan was a psychopathic personality. The prosecution pointed out that Patricia had cut him out of her will after deciding to divorce him. The arraignment in February 1944 resulted in a mistrial. On Apr. 17, 1944, he was convicted of second-degree murder. Wayne Lonergan was sentenced to thirty years in prison, of which he served all but nine years before being paroled on Dec. 2, 1965, and subsequently deported to Canada.

 

Longhi, Luigi, 1954- , Den. “I never intended to kill her,” claimed Luigi Longhi, the shampoo-and-strangle murderer from Padborg. “But suddenly she went limp and I realired she was dead.” Longhi, a 29-year-old unemployed truck driver, was arrested for the strangulation murder of a German hitchhiker. Doctors who examined him determined he had never engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman and possessed a sexual obsession about shampooing women’s hair. He claimed that more than a dozen women in the Padborg area allowed him to wash their hair. At the age of ten, Longhi frequently stole shampoo bottles and wigs. As he grew older, he persuaded and forced women to submit to his hair washing—though he never criminally assaulted his victims.

On May 30, 1981, Longhi picked up a German hitchhiker, Heike Freiheit, at the Danish-German border. He talked her into allowing him to shampoo her hair and they went to his apartment. After the first shampoo, they both fell asleep. When he woke, he felt the urge to shampoo her hair again. Longhi bound and gagged Freiheit so she could not resist him and proceeded to shampoo her hair. When he ran out of shampoo, he began using cottage cheese, honey, and salad dressing. He then ripped her clothes off “because I wanted to see how she looked naked.” When Freiheit attempted to summon help by drumming the floor with her feet, he placed a noose around her neck and tightened it. She died of asphyxiation. Unsure of what to do, Longhi stuffed the body behind a wall in his apartment and threw some lime on it. Much later, while insulating the roof, a workman found the body and notified police. Longhi was arrested and charged with murder. At his trial he pleaded not guilty, but was sentenced on Mar. 11, 1983, to psychiatric confinement for an indefinite length of time.

 

Los Angeles Slasher, See: Greenwood, Vaughn Orrin.

 

Lowenstein, Allard, See: Sweeney, Denis.

 

Loy Yeung (Leung Hing), b.1896, U.S. Wong Gee, a prosperous Chinese rancher, lived six miles northwest of Fairfield, Calif., a small town between San Francisco and Sacramento. Hundreds of Chinese immigrants with little understanding of U.S. customs lived and worked on Wong’s Bryan ranch. One of them, Loy Yeung, was a professional tong man believed to have been hired by Chinese gangs to kill Wong Gee.

The 32-year-old Loy lived in a squalid shack near Suisun Creek. He did odd jobs for the wealthy rancher, whose family lived more than a mile away from the decrepit Chinatown enclave. Loy Yeung used opium and was deeply resentful of Wong Gee and his children. In June 1928, he attacked Nellie Wong, the rancher’s 16-year-old daughter. When the father learned of this, he discharged Loy Yeung, warning him never to show his face near the camp again.

Loy stayed away until Aug. 22, when he returned to Fairfield armed with a rifle, a hatchet, and a club. He ran through the complex assaulting and maiming other Chinese. He then visited the home of Wong Gee, where he killed the rancher’s wife and three of his children, leaving Nellie near death. Two other daughters escaped the murderer by crouching inside a second floor closet.

After Loy left the house, he set out for the camp in search of Wong Gee. Along the way he killed two more Chinese who were working in an orchard. By this time the camp was in an uproar. Loy found Wong Gee in the main building of the colony. He chased him into the basement and shot him. By the time he was finished, Loy Yeung had killed ten people. He escaped in a car and avoided police barricades blocking the main roads to Sacramento.

After an all-night search by sheriff’s deputies, Loy Yeung was captured the next morning in the loft of a chicken house in Grass Valley. Sheriff Jack Thornton found the suspect asleep. When asked the reason for his rampage, Loy shrugged his shoulders and said that his enemies were trying to poison him. Authorities suspected that his drug dependency or his connections to the Tong gangs of San Francisco led to the slaughter.

 

Lucas, Arthur, prom. 1961, Can. Police found Therland Crater shot to death in the front hall of a duplex on Kendall Avenue in Toronto on Nov. 17, 1961. Carolyn Ann Newman was lying dead, slashed in the throat, on a bed upstairs with a ring beside her. Two Detroit women who were brought to the Toronto police station under suspicion of prostitution identified the ring as belonging to Arthur Lucas, who was arrested in Detroit the day after the murders. The murder weapon—a revolver—was found lying on the Burlington Skyway bridge and was linked to Lucas via serial numbers and a description of the firearm. Lucas was convicted of the murders, and hanged in December 1962.

 

Lucas, Henry Lee, 1937- , and Toole, Ottis Elwood, 1947- , U.S. The child of Virginia prostitute Viola Lucas—a double amputee—Henry Lee Lucas never knew his father and was often forced to remain in the same room while his mother entertained her clients. By his early twenties, Lucas and his mother had moved to Michigan, where he met a 16-year-old girl he intended to marry. Viola Lucas, however, upon meeting the girl, so ridiculed her that Lucas stabbed his mother to death that night while she slept. For her murder, he began his first life sentence in 1960 in a Michigan prison.

Freed by the parole board in 1975, Lucas pleaded with officials not to release him. He knew he was going to kill again, and before leaving the city he did just that, beginning a spree that would leave 300 people dead in seven years, a claim by the killer thought to be wildly exaggerated by police. Traveling west from Michigan, Lucas dumped his victims on secluded prairies, in deserts, and in mountain canyons. He later claimed to have strangled, stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, and suffocated them. When he had time, he dismembered his victims alive or filleted them in a style of torture first used by Native Americans.

While dining at a Florida soup kitchen, Lucas met Ottis Toole, a serial killer with a proclivity for homosexual slaughter and pyromania. Although both schemed to murder the other, they instead teamed up, realizing what they could accomplish together. Lucas and Toole soon became lovers and traveled cross-country, practicing their brand of ritualistic abduction and torture. Preying indiscriminately on both men and women, they blazed a trail of terror across seventeen states.

The couple eventually enlisted the help of Toole’s nephew and abducted his 9-year-old niece, Freida “Becky” Powell. The foursome traveled around the country for several months as a family and Lucas made Becky his common-law wife, although he vowed not to have sexual intercourse with the girl until she turned fifteen. Eventually the family broke up. Lucas and Becky continued their nomadic life while Toole and his nephew remained in Florida, where Toole would soon abduct from a shopping mall and kill 6-year-old Adam Walsh. Years later, Walsh was the subject of the made-for-television movie Adam.

Lucas and Becky settled in Stoneburg, Texas, where they lived with Pentecostal preacher Stanley Shane. Shane’s next-door neighbor, 80-year-old Katherine Rich, would be Lucas’ next victim, but afterward he thought better of further activities in so small a town. Instead he devoted more time to Becky. After having intercourse with her for the first time, Lucas stabbed her in the chest and didn’t realize he had killed her until he found bloodstains on his shirt. Returning to the field where her body lay, he began talking to the corpse. That is where police found him on June 11, 1983, taking him into custody on an illegal weapons charge.

In the Montague County Jail, Lucas confessed to the murder of Rich and began reciting the long list of crimes he had committed since his release from prison in 1975. In return for a seventy-five-year sentence, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Rich. By the time he appeared in court for murdering Becky he had confessed to twelve other homicides. Found Guilty once again, Lucas continued his confessions, implicating Toole, who was currently serving a twenty-year sentence in Florida’s Raiford penitentiary for arson.

“I started when I was fourteen,” Lucas said of his first murder, the strangulation death of a woman who refused to have sex with him. During the next year he directed officers to more than 200 murder sites in thirty states. By 1984, he had confessed to 360 deaths. It is believed that Lucas himself was not responsible for more than a dozen or so murders. He attributed his ability to recount the deaths with such accuracy to God, who he had said recently appeared in his prison cell on a beam of sunlight.

By June 1984, Lucas had been convicted of five murders and sentenced to death for the slaying of a female hitchhiker near San Angelo, Texas. Twenty-one murder charges were pending in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington, and an additional 113 slayings nationwide had been laid at his doorstep. Today, Lucas awaits execution on Death Row in Texas.

 

Ludke, Bruno, 190-44, Ger. German mass-murderer Bruno Ludke had slipped through the hands of the Nazi police more than once. In fact, several innocent men had been executed for murders that he committed. When the truth was discovered, Ludke was quietly done away with and his file became “classified.”

Born in 1909, Ludke was a murderer by the time he was eighteen. He confessed to strangling and knifing eighty-five women to death between 1928 and 1943, and then having sex with the corpses. The police had apprehended Ludke once before and, on orders from SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, he had been sterilized. Undeterred, Ludke kept killing until he was finally caught, on Jan. 29, 1943, having sex with the body of his latest victim in a wood outside Berlin. When brought before the magistrate by Kriminal Kommissar Franz, Ludke recounted a long list of past murders, but pointed out that, under Paragraph 51 of the Nazi criminal code, mental defectives could not be indicted for murder. The Nazis faced a political embarrassment and a legal dilemma. But they found a solution. Bruno Ludke was remanded to the custody of Viennese doctors, to be used as the subject of laboratory experiments. He died from a fatal injection on Apr. 8, 1944.

 

Luetgert, Adolph Louis, 1848-1911, U.S. The infamous sausage vat murder of 1897 disgusted the residents of Chicago’s North Side for many years. For a time those who lived near the Luetgert factory at Hermitage and Diversey refused to eat its sausage, believing that it might contain bone fragments of its owner’s deceased wife.

Adolph Louis Luetgert immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1870s. He was a powerfully built German who tried his hand at farming, then tanned animal hides for a living, before settling in Chicago to become a sausage maker. He was a thrifty, hard working entrepreneur whose business prospered in the North Side German neighborhood known as Lakeview. Luetgert’s first wife died, leaving behind one child. In the 1880s he married his second wife Louisa Bicknese of Kankakee, Ill., who was unable to satisfy his seemingly insatiable sexual tastes. Luetgert had a variety of lovers during his marriage, including his wife’s maid Mary Simering, a long-time mistress named Mrs. Christine Feldt, and a barkeeper, Mrs. Agathia Tosch, whose establishment was located near the sausage factory.

Whatever fascination this hulking, middle aged businessman held for these women can only be surmised. It is doubtful that any of them ever dreamed of the day they might become the third Mrs. Luetgert, for the sausage maker was on his way to bankruptcy by 1897. Though unable to meet his supplier’s costs, Luetgert convinced his business partner William Charles to expand their operation, because someday Luetgert believed that he would become America’s reigning sausage king. Before that could happen though, he had to reconcile his domestic relations, Louisa was about at the end of her rope with her husband’s endless tomcatting. During one angry confrontation, Luetgert grabbed her throat and nearly choked her to death. At the last minute, fearing that the neighbors were watching, he let her go. But more heated quarrels and angry denunciations were to come.

Luetgert’s plot to murder his wife unfolded on Mar. 11, 1897, when he purchased 325 pounds of potash and fifty pounds of arsenic from the wholesale drug firm of Lor Owen & Company. On Apr. 24 Luetgert ordered an employee, Frank Odorowsky, to take a barrel of potash from the shipping room to the factory basement. “This is strong stuff, this potash,” he warned Odorowsky. “Be careful not to burn yourself.” Odorowsky ground up the potash into small pieces, then he and Luetgert placed it in the vat and turned up the steam until it boiled over. A week later Luetgert sent his night watchman, Frank Bialk, to a drugstore to purchase a bottle of celery compound. When he returned, Bialk found Luetgert standing near the door leading to the main factory. The door had been barricaded. Luetgert sent Bialk back to his post without further explanation. Later that evening he again sent the watchman on an errand, this time to purchase a bottle of Hunyadi water, while he tested the steam valves under the middle vat.

Nothing unusual happened until late that night, when a woman named Emma Schiemicke would later recall seeing Luetgert leading his wife by the arm down the alley in back of the factory. He would remain there until two the next morning grinding his wife into tiny pieces.

When Bialk came in the next day, he asked “Should I go out under the vat?”

“Bank the fires at fifty pounds of steam pressure,” Luetgert replied.

Bialk did so, but he was puzzled by the sticky, unpleasant, glue-like substance that covered the floor. Bending down for a closer look, he could not help but notice what appeared to be bone flakes. It did not occur to him that it might be something other than animal offal, and he went on with his work.

Odorowsky was another who noticed the slime, bringing it to Luetgert’s attention. “Don’t say a word Frank, don’t say anything about it and I’ll see that you have a good job as long as you live,” Luetgert told him.

The waste material was scraped off the floor and flushed down the sewer. Larger chunks were placed in a barrel and dumped by some railroad tracks. Next day, Louisa’s brother Diedrich Bicknese came to Chicago for a visit, but the maid told him that Louisa never returned home for dinner the night before. When Bicknese asked Luetgert about this, he simply said that she had left on the first and not returned home yet.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Bicknese demanded.

“I don’t want a scandal,” Luetgert replied. “I paid five dollars to two detectives to find her.”

Bicknese went to Kankakee to look for his sister but found no trace of her. Returning to Chicago in a state of near panic, he contacted Captain Herman Schluetter of the Chicago Police Department.

Schluetter, one of the sharpest criminal investigators in the history of the department, called Luetgert in for questioning. “You made a vigorous appeal to me to find a lost dog for you not long ago,” he said. “Why did you not report the absence of your wife?”

Luetgert replied that he believed she would come back soon, but in the interest of avoiding a scandal he was keeping matters quiet. Schluetter let him go, but ordered his men to drag the river. When nothing turned up the captain visited the factory on May 7 to question Bialk and Odorowsky. They sparked his interest with a description of the greasy slime and the running water leading into the middle vat. He returned on the fifteenth to conduct a thorough examination of the basement, where he made a shocking and gruesome discovery. The middle vat was half-filled with a brown liquid. Using a gunny sack as a filter, the detectives trapped all the solid matter. They found several pieces of bone, and a wedding band bearing the initials “L.L.” established that Louisa was not off visiting her relatives in Kankakee. Luetgert maintained that the bones were those of an animal, which were very common in his line of work, but under analysis the bone matter was found to be human.

At Luetgert’s subsequent trial, the prosecution was quick to point out that Luetgert had spent a considerable amount of money to purchase potash—what possible use could he have for this material, if he was making soap as he had earlier claimed? The most damning evidence against him came from the various women who had been lovers. Agatha Tosch recalled that on the day of Louisa’s disappearance Luetgert was drinking beer in her saloon, proclaiming “I am as innocent as the southern skies!” between sips of beer. Luetgert’s secret love letters to his favorite girlfriend, Christine Feldt, were read aloud in the courtroom. She said that Adolph had entrusted her with $4,000 for “safe-keeping” shortly before Louisa disappeared.

Luetgert was found Guilty and sentenced to life largely on circumstantial evidence. He went to prison steadfastly protesting his innocence. He swore that Louisa would return someday to prove that the courts and the police were wrong, but she never did, and he died in the Joliet State Penitentiary in 1911.

 

Lukens, Albert B., 1883-1956, U.S. In 1940, Albert Lukens was hired as a janitor at the North Hill Methodist Church in Akron, Ohio. Church officials forgave his criminal past, which included an indictment for first-degree murder in the 1899 slaying of Mrs. Julia Stiegler of Cincinnati, and gave the quiet, gray-haired man a chance.

Ruth Zwicker, a 24-year-old substitute music teacher in the Akron public school system, would occasionally stop by the church on weekends to practice the piano. Lukens sometimes watched her playing while he cleaned the third floor. He never said much to her until Apr. 12, 1941, when he cautiously walked over to the piano and asked her for a kiss. “I thought for a moment that she was going to kiss me but the next thing I knew she gave me a slap, which I probably deserved,” Lukens later said, not knowing exactly what possessed him to make such a request. Ruth Zwicker stepped back from the piano and, according to Lukens, came at him in a rage. He grabbed her wrist, and in the ensuing struggle she fell backwards, hitting her head on the piano.

Albert Lukens panicked. His wife was on her way upstairs and Ruth Zwicker was unconscious. Lukens ran into the hall to prevent his wife from entering the piano room. He returned to the room about fifteen minutes later to find that Ruth still had not moved. Lukens shook her violently. “Snap out of it!” he pleaded, but there was no response. He decided to conceal the crime. Lukens’ friends in Akron knew nothing about the thirteen years he spent in the Ohio Reformatory for killing Julia Stiegler.

“I was satisfied in my own mind that she was dead when I carried her down the stairs to the boiler room,” Lukens later explained. He placed the corpse in the coal bin, where it remained till the next morning, Easter Sunday. When Ruth did not return home that night, Arthur Zwicker, her father, searched the sixty-two room church building. Lukens led him through the rooms calmly.

The next day Albert Lukens put the corpse into the blast furnace. He got the idea from a magazine article about cremation. Church employees noticed that the furnace was kept going for four days, despite warm, pleasant weather. It seemed strange at the time but nothing was said. For the next week, as the janitor went about his work, teams of Boy Scouts searched the land near the Cuyahoga River. Detectives I.J. Davis and Harry Kimerer focused on the church.

On Apr. 18, the police went back to the boiler room. This time they found charred remains in the ash box of the furnace. Dr. William Sassaman of the Hamann Museum of Human Anatomy and Comparative Anthropology at Western Reserve University Medical School identified 234 bone fragments taken from the ash box as human. Dental porcelain and jewelry were also found.

Lukens confessed to the crime, but insisted Ruth’s death was accidental, and that all he wanted from her was a kiss. Indicted for first-degree murder, Albert Lukens pleaded not guilty before a packed courtroom on Apr. 22. Jury selection for what was then described as the “most shocking crime in the history of Summit County’ began on Sept. 4 in the Common Pleas Court after the defendant’s request for a change of venue was denied. The trial started the next day in the courtroom of Judge Walter B. Wanamaker.

Defense attorneys charged that Lukens was kicked and choked by two detectives during his interrogation. Their claims of police brutality were corroborated by witnesses who noticed bruises on Lukens following his interview with the police. The state maintained that the injuries were self-inflicted with a blunt object, possibly a shoe.

The jury of nine men and three women deliberated Lukens’ fate for nearly thirty hours. On Sept. 18, 1941, they returned a verdict of Guilty with a recommendation for mercy. Judge Wanamaker spared Lukens the electric chair, but sentenced him to life in prison at the Ohio Penitentiary. The verdict was a dreadful surprise to Lukens, who expected to be acquitted. For Arthur Zwicker, the decision was equally disappointing. “I think he should be sentenced to the chair,” he said.

Lukens’ appeal for a new trial was denied. He was taken to prison on Sept. 22, where he remained until his death on July 27, 1956.

 

Lusk, Grace, b.1878, U.S. There was a venomous streak in Grace Lusk that her married lover, David Roberts, failed to detect when he began his affair with her in the spring of 1917. To Dr. Roberts of Waukesha, Wis., Grace Lusk was just one of his many casual lovers. “I did not deceive her or lead her on,” he sobbed. “Other women have thought they cared for me, but I was married and they knew their liking for me would come to nothing permanent. So the affairs usually faded away.”

This time, though, the philandering physician got more than he bargained for. One day Mrs. Roberts confronted Lusk. She told her about an earlier affair that had ended disastrously for the mistress. “I suppose you know about the girl who died in an attic room after an operation, after she had been too interested in my husband?” Mrs. Roberts said. Grace Lusk allowed Mrs. Roberts to have her say, but when she became too personal, Lusk pulled out a 25-caliber handgun and fired two shots into Roberts’ chest. Lusk then turned the gun on herself, but managed to inflict only a superficial wound.

Grace Lusk was found Guilty of second-degree murder on May 29, 1918. The insanity defense failed her, and she was sentenced on June 19 to life at the Waupun Penitentiary. As she was led screaming from the courtroom, she tried to attack Prosecutor D.S. Tullar, screaming, “You lied! You lied my life and my love away!” In jail, she reaffirmed her love for Dr. Roberts, and prayed to God to send him back to her. In 1923, the governor of Wisconsin pardoned Lusk.

 

Lyles, Anjette Donovan, 1917- , U.S. Housewife, mother, and restaurant proprietor Anjette Lyles of Macon, Ga., experimented with black magic. In the spring of 1958, her bizarre hobby implicated her in murder when her young daughter Marcia became ill. Lyles’ two previous husbands and one mother-in-law had died under mysterious circumstances. The police were alerted to the possibility that Lyles was a poisoner by an anonymous letter from the Lyles’ family cook, Carrie Jackson.

It was too late to save Marcia’s life. Arsenic was found in her body and in the exhumed bodies of the two husbands. Lyles suggested that Marcia had ingested the poison while playing doctor and nurse. At the trial, prosecutors maintained she committed the murders for the insurance money. She was found Guilty and sentenced to death but state psychiatrists determined that she was insane. Anjette Lyles was committed to the State Hospital in Milledgeville, Ga.

 

Lyons, Lewis W., 1849-1905, U.S. In 1895, Lewis W. Lyons was jobless and his wife had left him when he was arrested for stealing a diamond stickpin from Dan S. Carroll. After a week in the New Orleans jail, Lyons was released on $500 bail. Two weeks later when the case came to trial, the plaintiff admitted that Lyons had had nothing to do with the disappearance of the pin and Lyons was discharged. Angered, he then decided to sue Carroll and the two detectives who arrested him, and hired U.S. District Attorney J. Ward Gurley to represent him.

They lost the case as well as a subsequent appeal. Lyons became increasingly incensed at the injustice he perceived had been done to him and developed a persecution complex which now focused on Gurley. In 1901, he sent a second to Gurley’s office to challenge him to a duel. Although Gurley apparently considered the request, he later refused it as unreasonable, given Lyons’ reason for asking and the fact that duels were seldom fought anymore. Lyons wrote numerous letters to Gurley and confronted him in person on at least one occasion. His resentment and anger grew rather than dissipated over the next few years. On July 20, 1903, he arrived at Gurley’s office with a pistol and a quantity of cyanide in his pockets.

After patiently waiting his turn, Lyons went into Gurley’s office. Nothing out of the ordinary was heard from the office until Lyons shouted out and fired three shots. He then rushed into an adjoining office where he shot himself in the head. Gurley died immediately but Lyons survived. The trial began in New Orleans on Nov. 11, 1903, and after eight days Lyons was found Guilty of murder. He appealed for a new trial and was retried on Feb. 6, 1904. Again found Guilty, he was hanged at Parish Prison on Mar. 24, 1905.