Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century

Overview

This drama-doc takes you back in time to the most shocking and surprising murder cases in history. Our presenter, Nicholas Day, guides us into into the world of the killer as we see how police ingenuity and early forensics helped bring them to justice. Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb usually referred to collectively as Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy students at the University of Chicago who in May 1924 kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. They committed the murder – characterized at the time as "the crime of the century”– as a demonstration of their ostensible intellectual superiority, which, they thought, enabled them to carry out a "perfect crime" and absolve them of responsibility for their actions.