May 21, 1924: Leopold and Loeb gain national attention
Fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks is abducted from a Chicago, Illinois,
street and killed in what later proves to be one of the most
fascinating murders in American history. The killers, Nathan Leopold and
Richard Loeb, were extremely wealthy and intelligent teenagers whose
sole motive for killing Franks was the desire to commit the "perfect
crime."Leopold, who graduated from the University of Chicago at age 18, spoke nine languages and had an IQ of 200, but purportedly had perverse sexual desires. Loeb, also unusually gifted, graduated from college at 17 and was fascinated with criminal psychology. The two made a highly unusual pact: Loeb, who was a homosexual, agreed to participate in Leopold's eccentric sexual practices in return for Leopold's cooperation with his criminal endeavors.
Both were convinced that their intelligence and social privilege exempted them from the laws that bound other people. In 1924, the pair began to put this maxim to the test by planning to commit a perfect murder. They each established false identities and began rehearsing the kidnapping and murder over and over.
Loeb stabbed Bobbie Franks (who was actually his distant
cousin) several times in the backseat of a rented car as Leopold drove
through Chicago's heavy traffic. After Franks bled to death on the floor
of the car, Leopold and Loeb threw his body in a previously scouted
swamp and then disposed of the other evidence in various locations. In
an attempt to throw police off their trail, they sent a ransom note
demanding $10,000 to Franks' wealthy father.But Leopold and Loeb had made a couple of key mistakes. First, the body, which was poorly hidden, was discovered the next day. This prompted an immediate search for the killers, which Loeb himself joined. The typewriter used to type the ransom note was recovered from a lake and, more important, a pair of glasses was found near Franks' body.
When the glasses
were traced to Loeb's optometrist, police learned that the optometrist
had only written three such prescriptions. Two were immediately
accounted for and the third belonged to Nathan Leopold, who calmly told
detectives that he must have dropped them while bird hunting earlier in
the week. This explanation might have proved sufficient, but reporters
covering the case soon discovered other letters from Leopold that
matched the ransom note. When confronted with this evidence, Leopold and
Loeb both confessed.Clarence Darrow agreed to defend Leopold, and the trial soon became a national sensation. Darrow, who didn't argue the boys' innocence, directed one of his most famous orations against the death penalty itself. The judge was swayed and imposed life sentences. Apparently unsatisfied with the attorney's work, Leopold's father later reneged on his contract to pay Darrow.
In January
1936, a fellow inmate killed Loeb in a bloody razor fight in the
prison's shower. Leopold was released on parole in 1958 with help from
noted poet Carl Sandburg, who testified on his behalf. He lived out the
rest of his life in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1971.
************************************************************
May 21, 1932: Earhart completes transatlantic flight
Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh
became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the
Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart
becomes the first pilot to repeat the feat, landing her plane in
Ireland after flying across the North Atlantic. Earhart traveled over
2,000 miles from Newfoundland in just under 15 hours.
Unlike
Charles Lindbergh, Earhart was well known to the public before her solo
transatlantic flight. In 1928, as a member of a three-person crew, she
had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft.
Although her only function during the crossing was to keep the plane's
log, the event won her national fame, and Americans were enamored with
the daring and modest young pilot. For her solo transatlantic crossing
in 1932, she was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross by the U.S.
Congress.
In 1935, in the first flight of its kind, she flew solo from Wheeler Field in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California,
winning a $10,000 award posted by Hawaiian commercial interests. Two
years later, she attempted, along with copilot Frederick J. Noonan, to
fly around the world, but her plane disappeared near Howland Island in
the South Pacific on July 2, 1937. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca picked up radio messages that she was lost and low in fuel--the last the world ever heard from Amelia Earhart.**********************************
May 21, 1758: Lenape Indians abduct Mary Campbell from western Pennsylvania
On this day in 1758, 10-year-old Mary Campbell is abducted from her home in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, by Lenape Indians; she becomes an icon of the French and Indian War and backcountry experience.
After her abduction, Campbell lived among the family of Chief Netawatwees in the Ohio
Valley. In October 1758, the British and the Indians living in the
Ohio Valley, including the Lenape, signed the Treaty of Easton, which
temporarily brought peace to the Pennsylvania frontier, in exchange for
British departure from the region. In an attempt to maintain their
promise, the British created the Proclamation Line of 1763 prohibiting
settlement beyond the Appalachian watershed. However, the creation of
the infamous line failed to satisfy anyone. Euro-American settlers
wanted to maintain their western claims, and after eliminating the
threat of French military assistance for the Indians, the British
treated Indian requests for assistance with disdain. By 1763, western
Indians decided to unite their efforts and drive the British empire back
to the Atlantic in what would come to be known as Pontiac's War.
Mary Campbell was returned to a European settlement at age 16 in the
famous release of captives orchestrated by Colonel Henry Bouquet at the
conclusion of Pontiac's War in November 1764. At the end of a year of
dispersed fighting between western Indians, the colonist Bouquet and a
force of over 1,000 men managed to convince the allied Indian forces,
who faced a winter low on supplies, to surrender without an exchange of
fire.
Mary Campbell lived through the major turning points of late
18th-century America. She was a child taken captive during the imperial
competition between Britain and France, an adolescent among the Indians
as they attempted to reassert their rights to the American landscape
and a woman among colonists as they fought to free themselves of the
British empire. Mary wed in 1770 as colonial protests became violent
and gave birth to seven children as her home, Pennsylvania, was reborn
first as a state independent of Britain and then as part of a new
nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment