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This Was
Not a Normal
Act
They pull the dead boy into the back seat, and wrap him in a blanket,
and this funeral car starts on its route.
If ever any death car went over the same route or the same kind
of a route driven by sane people, I have never heard of it, and I fancy
no one else has ever heard of it.
This car is driven for twenty miles. First down through thickly
populated streets, where everyone knew the boys and their families, and
had known them for years, till they come to The Midway Boulevard, and then
take the main line of a street which is traveled more than any other street
on the south side except in the loop, among automobiles that can scarcely
go along on account of the number, straight down The Midway through the
regular route of Jackson Park, Nathan Leopold driving this car, and Dick
Loeb on the back seat, and the dead boy with him.
The slightest accident, the slightest misfortune, a bit of curiosity,
an arrest for speeding, anything would bring destruction. They go down
The Midway, through the park, meeting hundreds of machines, in sight of
thousands of eyes, with this dead boy.
For what? For nothing! The mad acts of the fool in King Lear is
the only thing I know of that compares with it. And yet doctors will swear
that it is a sane act. They know better.
They go down a thickly populated street through South Chicago, and
then for three miles take the longest street to go through this city; built
solid with business buildings, filled with automobiles backed upon the
street, with street cars on the track, with thousands of peering eyes;
one boy driving and the other on the back seat, with the corpse of little
Bobby Franks, the blood streaming from him, wetting everything in the car.
And yet they tell me that this is sanity; they tell me that the
brains of these boys are not diseased. You need no experts, you need no
X-rays; you need no study of the endocrines. Their conduct shows exactly
what it was, and shows that this court has before him two young men who
should be examined in a psychopathic hospital and treated kindly and with
care. They get through South Chicago, and they take the regular automobile
road down toward Hammond. There is the same situation; hundreds of machines;
any accident might encompass their ruin. They stop at the forks of the
road, and leave little Bobby Franks, soaked with blood, in the machine,
and get their dinner, and eat it without an emotion or a qualm.
Your Honor, we do not need to believe in miracles; we need not resort
to that in order to get blood. If it were any other case, there could not
be a moment's hesitancy as to what to do.
I repeat, you may search the annals of crime, and you can find no
parallel. It is utterly at variance with every motive and every act and
every part of conduct that influences normal people in the commission of
crime. There is not a sane thing in all of this from the beginning to the
end. There was not a normal act in any of it, from its inception in a diseased
brain, until to-day, when they sit here awaiting their doom.