1905-1936

Taking readers back to 1924, this shocking true crime story follows two eighteen-year-old college students who kidnapped and murdered a child they both knew, their trial, and how a renowned defense attorney enabled them to avoid the death penalty.

How did two teenagers brutally murder an innocent child...and why? And how did their brilliant lawyer save them from the death penalty in 1920s Chicago? Written by a prolific master of narrative nonfiction, this is a compulsively readable true-crime story based on an event dubbed the "crime of the century." In 1924, eighteen-year-old college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb made a decision: they would commit the perfect crime by kidnapping and murdering a child they both knew. But they made one crucial error: as they were disposing of the body of young Bobby Franks, whom they had bludgeoned to death, Nathan's eyeglasses fell from his jacket pocket. Multi-award-winning author Candace Fleming depicts every twist and turn of this harrowing case--how two wealthy, brilliant young men planned and committed what became known as the crime of the century, how they were caught, why they confessed, and how the renowned criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow enabled them to avoid the death penalty.

The infamous 1920's St. Valentine's Day Massacre involved a fight between gangsters. In the complicated underworld of Al Capone's Chicago, Jack McGurn is really Vincent Gebardi, a coldly efficient killer. Louise May Rolfe is his wife. As Jack/Vincent was being hunted as the perpetrator of the killings on St. Valentine's Day, his life was examined in minute detail by the press, and the couple's excesses and extremes define the Prohibition era in America.

Presents a detailed account of the murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924, the arrest of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, their trial, and imprisonment.