They Killed for Kicks.

• Author: SCHAUMBURG, RON

A 1924 case posed the question: Should teen murderers be executed?

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 21, 1924, 14-year-old Bobby Franks was walking home after umpiring a school baseball game. A dark-blue car pulled up with two young men inside. Bobby recognized them, because they all lived in the same wealthy Chicago neighborhood. He got in and the car drove away.

That evening, a man telephoned Bobby's home and told his mother that the boy had been kidnapped. The next morning a neatly typed letter arrived. The kidnappers demanded a $10,000 ransom.

But Bobby was already dead. His head had been smashed. His naked body had been shoved head first into a pipe beneath a railroad track in a remote section of the city.

Bobby Franks's murder horrified the nation. Journalists called it the "crime of the century." His killers, it turned out, were rich, smart, and smug, and they had done the deed coolly for kicks. Also, they were teenagers themselves, just a few years older than Bobby.

The case led to a historic test of the law's harshest punishment: the death penalty. The question before the court: If teenagers commit murder, should they be put to death?

On May 22, workers discovered the boy's body. They also found a pair of eyeglasses, which detectives soon traced to Nathan F. Leopold Jr. Leopold, a whiz kid with a genius IQ, was 19, but already a college graduate and a law student at the University of Chicago. He told police he had lost his glasses during a bird-watching trip with his best friend, Richard Loeb.

Police then talked to Loeb, just 18 years old and also a graduate student. But the boys' alibis didn't match. Under questioning, the two soon confessed. They had kidnapped and killed Bobby for the sheer thrill of it.

The details of the story filled newspapers across the country. The killers were the handsome, pampered sons of Chicago millionaires. Intellectually brilliant, Leopold and Loeb believed that normal rules didn't apply to them. And their relationship was intense. They had stolen cars and set fires together and had had some sexual contact with each other.

But what shocked people most was the killers' cool detachment in carrying out the murder and their utter lack of remorse. Psychiatrists who interviewed the pair learned that they had chosen their victim at random and killed him as a bizarre experiment. The New York Times reported,

Leopold is an experimenter in human emotions, his examiners are reputed to believe. He wanted to kill...