The Crime Writer and the Convict

With his horn-rimmed glasses, bow tie, and mild manner, John Bartlow Martin looked more like a schoolteacher or a laboratory technician than a nationally known freelance writer, touted by his peers as “the ablest crime reporter in America.” He believed more in hard work than in talent, once commenting, “Hell, I’m just a reporter.” 

The Indiana-raised Martin had honed his observational skills as a gritty police, city hall, and rewrite reporter on the Indianapolis Times in the late 1930s. He escaped the endless grind of newspaper work and left Indianapolis for Chicago and a career as a freelancer, earning his living writing stories for such sensationalistic true-crime magazines as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime.

Although he never consciously set out to specialize in crime, Martin developed a fascination with the subject and attempted to treat cases with the seriousness they deserved. “Unlike some fact detective writers, I visited the scene of the crime and did other legwork so as to make my descriptive passages convincing,” Martin recalled. “I tried to get some of the flavor of Chicago itself into the stories, sometimes using Chicago dialect in the dialogue and the grim Chicago humor.” Crime became almost an obsession for him, and he went out of his way to “get mixed up in it,” including once, while on vacation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, tagging along with a sheriff and his posse searching for a convict who had escaped from prison.

Investigating criminal cases offered Martin an opportunity to write about people in crisis and their problems. Crimes, he discovered, did not happen by blind chance—something caused them. “Sometimes the matrix is social, sometimes psychological, most often both,” he said. “Writing about an individual criminal case, then, offers also an opportunity to write about a whole society. Crime in context.” As a freelance journalist, Martin examined the senseless slaying of a nurse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by three juveniles; the revenge killing of a crooked landlord by a distraught father who lost his children in a Chicago tenement fire; and the strange and dangerous life of an informant.  

Martin’s stories repeatedly garnered him the magazine industry’s highest honor at the time, the Benjamin Franklin Award, sponsored by the University of Illinois’s School of Journalism and the Society of Magazine Writers. His nonfiction focus on criminals and their effect on society predated the literary nonfiction work of such famous authors as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. “I am basically a serious person,” Martin told a reporter in 1960. “I don’t like to do frivolous stories.” 

Nothing, however, attracted as much attention, and involved him so deeply into a case, as when Martin interviewed and told the story of one of America’s most notorious killers—nineteen-year-old Nathan F. Leopold Jr., whose case with his partner, eighteen-year-old Richard Loeb, later inspired a host of fictional representations, including Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948). Martin wrote a multipart series on Leopold’s more than three decades in prison and later joined other literary luminaries, including Carl Sandburg, to advocate for the convict’s parole.

Martin told Leopold’s story of life behind bars for one of the country’s most popular magazines. In the 1940s and 1950s Martin had progressed from having his work in cheap true-crime magazines to being frequently featured in the “big slicks,” mass-circulation magazines printed on glossy paper. He formed a particularly close relationship with the editors at the Saturday Evening Post, owned and operated by the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

With a legacy stretching back to the days of Benjamin Franklin, the weekly Post had become a mainstay in middle-class American homes through the steady hand of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the son of a Boston minister, who set out, noted staff member Wesley Stout, to “interpret America to itself, always readably, but constructively.” He succeeded; from 1899 to 1936 the magazine’s yearly circulation increased from two thousand to more than three million. Lorimer discovered artist Norman Rockwell, whose idealized drawings of American family life were featured on more than 300 of the magazine’s covers. The Post also published fiction from such notable writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ring Lardner, C. S. Forester, John P. Marquand, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck. According to Martin, the magazine “was, in a few words, not unlike the network television that took away its audience—both frothy and serious.”

By the 1940s, with Lorimer gone, the Post had begun to depend less on fiction and more on nonfiction to satisfy it readers—a perfect situation for a writer such as Martin, as the magazine’s audience, as he described it, included “people that enjoyed westerns, mysteries, love stories, humor, sports, heavy fact, and everything else.”

That everything else included having Martin skillfully tackling such controversial subjects as segregation in the South, divorce, abortion, mental illness, and prison reform. “In publishing some of these stories,” he noted, “the Post showed considerable courage.” (For example, at the time Martin wrote about abortion it was illegal in every state and was “never mentioned in polite society; the newspaper still called it ‘illegal surgery,’ not abortion.”) Martin transcended the conventions of the fact-detective magazine genre in his crime articles for the Post, working to achieve his goal of placing each case in its social context. He avoided “the artifices, the false suspense and phony emotion,” of typical reporting about crime, and tried to preserve “the narrative value of the stories rather than transforming them into dry case histories.” What remained were powerful stories that eschewed any contrived suspense for “the suspense of fine inevitability,” he noted, the type of suspense felt by those attending prizefights.

In his work for the Post, Martin earned a deserved reputation as a meticulous collector of facts (one of his friends described Martin as “fact obsessed”) upon which to base his stories. “I spend at least as much time doing leg work as I do in writing,” he said. “Probably a great deal more. But I’ve a belief that the important thing in a piece is the cumulative impact of the facts themselves.” 

Although he never had any illusions about being “a Sir Galahad of the downtrodden,” and did not consider himself to be an investigative reporter out to right wrongs, sometimes Martin became personally involved in the stories he researched. In one case the friendships he had developed while living in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, placed him squarely in the middle of a case that had been one of the biggest news stories of the 1920s—the “thrill murder” on May 21, 1924, in Chicago of fourteen-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks by Leopold and Loeb, two young men from wealthy German-Jewish families and who had become friends while at the University of Chicago. Leopold and Loeb had kidnapped Franks as he walked home from school, bludgeoned him to death in a car (each blamed the other for the actual killing), stripped off his clothes, poured acid on his face and genitals to delay identification of the body, and dumped his body in a culvert. They also attempted to extort $10,000 in ransom from Franks’ father, informing him his son was still alive.

 

Local newspapers were quick to push the narrative that “some of the police and some persons close to the family believe the boy was the victim of a degenerate who sought to cloak his act and the boy’s presumedly [sic] accidental death by the demands for money.” (Franks, however, had not been sexually assaulted.) Before any deal could be struck, however, police discovered Leopold’s unique prescription eyeglasses near Franks’ body, and the duo were questioned, arrested, and charged with kidnapping and murder. Robert E. Crowe, the Cook County state attorney who prosecuted Leopold and Loeb, called the crime “the most cruel, cowardly, dastardly murder ever committed in the annals of American jurisprudence.”

Leopold and Loeb confessed to the crime and received a spirited defense at their sentencing from their attorney, Clarence Darrow, who sought mercy for his clients from Judge John Caverly. The defense employed psychiatrists who testified that Leopold and Loeb were troubled young men who had developed a unhealthy attraction to one another, with Leopold agreeing to participate in a variety of criminal schemes with Loeb in exchange for sex. (Caverly had women removed from the courtroom and had one of the psychiatrists whisper his testimony about Leopold and Loeb’s sexual acts into his ear so  reporters could not learn of the details, which only inflamed public belief  that the duo were sexual perverts.)

The judge decided against imposing the death sentence on the duo, instead giving them ninety-nine-year sentences for kidnapping and life sentences for  murder. “The court believes,” Caverly said, “that it is within his province to decline to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age. This determination appears to be in accordance with the progress of criminal law all over the world and with the dictates of enlightened humanity.” Still, the judge also urged that the state “never to admit these defendants to parole. . . . If this course is preserved in the punishment of these defendants it will satisfy the ends of justice and safeguard the interests of society.” 

Leopold and Loeb were taken to Joliet, Illinois, and locked up in the maximum security Old Prison, described as a “hell hole” by its inmates (they later both ended up at the nearby Stateville facility, a branch, like the Old Prison, of the Illinois State Penitentary). In 1936 Loeb was killed by a fellow inmate at Stateville, but Leopold, nineteen when incarcerated, survived and continually attempted to win parole. 

In 1955, two years after a parole board had denied his request for release, Martin wrote a four-part series on Leopold’s years behind bars for the Post titled “Murder on His Conscience.” Martin said he had been inspired to write about Leopold because he wanted the answers to such questions as: “What happens to an intelligent man during thirty years in prison? How has Leopold spent his time? What has prison done to him? And what are his chances of ever leaving prison alive?” Although Leopold had committed a “terrible crime,” and Martin learned that he could be a “cold and forbidding character,” he remained to the journalist a human being, someone who “had to survive in prison, not an easy thing—brutal guards, dehumanized convicts, deadly deadly deadly monotony. And always the struggle to submerge himself in the vast mass of inmates, something he, being the famous Nathan Leopold, could never do.”

Martin drove from his Highland Park home to Stateville prison in late April 1954 to ask Leopold face to face “how he’d feel about my doing a serious piece or pieces about him.” It was not the first time the freelancer had been to the facility. Three years before he had written a three-part series on the Illinois State Penitentiary for the Post under the title “America’s Toughest Prison.” Although Stateville was far and away preferred by inmates over the Old Prison, it still was a place devoid of hope. “We deal with complete failures,” warden Joseph E. Ragen told Martin. “This is the end of the road.” Leopold had been mentioned in one of the articles about the prison, as Martin observed him teaching a Great Books course to inmates that discussed Machiavelli’s The Prince. Martin had also gotten to Ragen well, describing him as “a stern man and a just one. He is prison wise. He knows inmates as few men do. He has tried to help them as well as keep them.” The warden proved invaluable in allowing Martin access to Leopold, allowing him the privacy he needed when interviewing the inmate, including not having any guards present during their nearly two weeks together.

During his initial meeting with Leopold, Martin said that the inmate listened to him without expression as he outlined what he planned to do. “Then in his precise pedantic voice, he said he wanted to consult his lawyers, his brother, other advisers,” Martin recalled. About May 10 Martin received a telephone call from Ralph Newman, the proprietor of the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago and a close friend of Leopold’s brother, Mike, who had died in 1953. Newman said he represented Leopold and asked for a meeting. They met on May 13 and Newman told Martin that publishers had expressed interest in having Leopold write his autobiography, and novelist Meyer Levin wanted to do a fictionalized version of the notorious crime. Levin had met with the inmate at Stateville and, to his “surprise and discomfiture,” found that Leopold kept their talk away from matters related to his crime, indicating he did not want to jeopardize his chances at parole. Instead, Leopold concentrated on the financial aspects of any publishing deal, said Levin, including “percentages, film rights and syndication.”

Newman asked in his meeting with Martin if he intended to do a third-person article (and perhaps a book) under his byline, or whether he might want to do a first-person story under Leopold’s name. In either case, Leopold wanted compensation. Martin’s instinct had him preferring to write in the third person, as it had the advantage for Leopold that if it should ever become necessary to repudiate anything in the article, he could do so. If the Post, however, wanted a first-person account, Martin would be willing to collaborate with Leopold on one. “I said that as to money,” Martin wrote in a memo to Stuart Rose, a Post editor, “I would not give him [Leopold] any because I cannot afford to split story checks; therefore any money would have to come from the Post; and I said I didn’t know whether you’d want this badly enough to pay him anything or not. Newman asked me to find out and I said I’d prefer to talk first with either a member of the Leopold family or the family lawyer.”

On May 21 Newman arranged a meeting with Martin and two other men—William Friedman, the Leopold’s family lawyer, and A. G. Ballenger, Morris Paper Mills vice president and trustee of a fund established for Leopold by his father. The men discussed the possibilities before them, and Friedman, Ballenger, and Newman said they preferred a third-person story, which would leave Newman free to try and find a publisher for Leopold’s autobiography (released in 1958 as Life Plus 99 Years, which sold approximately 20,000 copies). “As for money, they repeated that Leopold wanted money,” Martin recalled. “They said he had none except his trust fund, which he can’t touch while in prison.” When asked by Martin why Leopold wanted to be paid, as he did not need it while incarcerated, Newman said that as “much as the money itself Leopold wanted the satisfaction of having earned some money.” Martin informed them that if any funds went to Leopold, the money had to come from the Post and the advisers should negotiate directly with the magazine on such matters, not with him.

Martin also met with Levin, who had been working on his novel since the previous fall, and the two men reached an understanding, with Martin indicating “that since his book was a novel and was based on Leopold’s early life, and since my piece was fact and was about Leopold’s prison life—his would end where mine began—I saw no conflict between the two.” Levin told Martin he had considered giving up his novel to help Leopold with his autobiography, and Martin said it was up to the inmate’s family to choose a collaborator, if any, for him. Levin published his book, Compulsion, to critical and popular acclaim in 1956, selling more than a hundred thousand copies, winning a special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and having it turned into a play and film. (Leopold eventually sued Levin and those involved in the book and movie for unjustly appropriating his “name, likeness, and personality for profit,” seeking $2.97 million in damages. In 1970 the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Leopold’s claims.)

Leopold finally agreed to cooperate with Martin without direct compensation from the Post, but the inmate would get half of the sale of any subsidiary rights and had “absolute veto over factual errors,” Martin noted, as well as the ability to object to matters of interpretation. “He and his advisers concluded that he would cooperate with me because they thought I knew something about prisons and crime,” Martin continued. Leopold’s advisers, in addition to being men of substance in Chicago, presented special problems for Martin, as some of them were “friends of ours who belonged to the Jewish community of Highland Park. We saw them at dinner parties, some were involved in Fran’s ACLU or in liberal Democratic affairs . . . some had grown up with Leopold himself, and their parents had been friends of his parents.”

Martin started to work full time on the subject on June 18, 1954, spending a week consulting documents in Chicago pertaining to the Leopold and Loeb trial. Memories of the 1924 crime were still painful ones in Chicago’s Jewish community, but Leopold’s family made the evidence “available to me, the first time they had done so, they tell me,” Martin reported to Post editors. “They—his relatives and lawyer—say that I’ve had full access to everything, and am the only one who has.” He bolstered his research by taking two weeks at Stateville to  interview Leopold alone with no guards in a compact room where the parole board usually held its hearings. “There is a window in a room, barred,” Martin noted. “The room is small and bare. There is a desk and a couple of chairs. Just through the window you can see the inside of the prison wall.” 

The writer and the inmate met two times a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. “Obtaining material of the sort I wanted was patently impossible in the visiting room, and Ragen allowed us privacy,” Martin noted. At lunchtime Leopold ate in the regular inmate dining room, while Martin had his meals with Ragen. In his talks with Leopold, which marked the first time that the inmate had spoken freely and at length to any reporter, Martin found him to possess “insight and perspective on himself to a degree unusual in people generally, and extraordinary in somebody who has been imprisoned for so long.”

For his Post articles, Martin had to contend with a variety of issues, including the inmate’s fears that a recapitulation of his crime might endanger his chance at parole, worries from Leopold’s family about how the homosexual relationship between Leopold and Loeb would be handled, and the Post’s squeamishness about the issue and its unwillingness to include an outright plea for the inmate’s parole in Martin’s final installment. Leopold even wrote Martin from prison expressing his fears that the article “would do me incalculable harm. It will also make living under my present circumstances very difficult. You do not, I know, want to hurt me, especially since you realize what an enormous stake I have in the matter. Knowing that you are a good guy, I’m sure you wouldn’t want that on your conscience.” All parties were finally able to iron out any difficulties, and, after the entire series had been published, an elderly neighbor of the Martins who had known Leopold’s parents, now both deceased, told the writer his effort had been “the first fair and understanding story she had ever read about him.”

As best as he could, Martin downplayed Leopold and Loeb’s homosexual relationship, stating in one of the articles that Leopold was “in no sense a ‘true homosexual,’” and that his prison record included “not a single homosexual episode during his thirty years’ incarceration.” In his discussion about the issue in his personal correspondence with Post editor Ben Hibbs, Martin noted that in his original manuscript both Leopold and his family objected to the handling of his homosexuality, believing it was mentioned too often and could be misleading to the reader. Martin told Hibbs that Leopold had denied having homosexual experiences in prison, and his record, and Ragen, supported his contention. “This, however,” Martin wrote, “merely means that he has not operated in prison regularly either as an aggressive sodomist or passive ‘prison girl.’ I would not go so far as to say of him, or of any other man imprisoned 30 years, that not once has he obtained release from sexual tension through homosexuality.”

In the first part of the series, Martin explored Leopold’s early life, his intense friendship with Loeb, the incidents leading up to their infamous crime, and Leopold’s early years behind bars. “The hardest thing about being in prison is just doing time,” Leopold told Martin. “Being idle, doing nothing constructive, nothing that means anything.” The convict even considered taking what he called “a parole off ten-gallery,” prison parlance for committing suicide by jumping to his death. 

For a short time Leopold attempted to deal with the crushing monotony of his life behind bars by teaching fellow inmates, which he did for a time four evenings a week, giving lessons in reading writing, and simple arithmetic. When newspapers published articles about these classes, however, the warden received letters from the public that Leopold “wasn’t fit to teach others,” and the classes were canceled. “It the first of many occasions when Leopold felt that his notoriety prevented him from receiving fair treatment in prison,” Martin wrote.

With his classes ended after only three weeks, Leopold turned to other matters over the years to keep his mind occupied, including studying semantics, helping rebuild the prison’s library after a riot, and establishing a correspondence course for inmates. The death of Leopold’s father on April 4, 1929, and his own years behind bars caused him, finally, to think about the full ramifications of his crime—the pain he had caused his family and others. “It was the first time I ever was honest to God sorry,” he admitted to Martin. “Regretful, remorseful. It had taken five years for it to sink in.” Leopold almost never talked directly about the Franks murder, and, when he did broach the subject with Martin, the writer noted that it was hard for the inmate to do so and he became nervous, running his hand rapidly through his thinning hair. He finally told Martin:

"Here is something I had been present at [Franks’ murder]. I had helped take a  human life. And it bothered me a great deal. Remorse at what I’d done became  really oppressive. I resolved to try and do something in the way of active expiation. Very general ideas—it ties up with my work in the library and helping the cons. Sure they were cons, but they were human beings. I suppose really all the things have amounted to nothing but making mental mud pies. But at least I could kid myself that I was doing some good. It had a palliative effect on my remorse feeling."

Later, Leopold and his former partner, Loeb, undertook a project that, as Martin said, “amounted to a great deal more than mud pies,” when they established in 1933 and ran a high school correspondence school at Stateville that thousands of inmates around the country took advantage of to improve themselves. “This is one thing that was organized of the cons, by the cons and for the cons,” said Leopold. “It meant a lot to the fellows.” After Loeb’s killing by a fellow inmate in 1936, however, Leopold “dwelt in limbo,” Martin reported, until 1944, when he became one of hundreds of inmates to volunteer as a test subject during World War II for a U.S. Army study of potential new drugs to combat malaria. “It became the most fascinating thing I was ever connected with,” Leopold said of the study. “Before I knew it, I was working twenty hours a day at it.”

Although the inmates involved in the program said they had volunteered because they sought to help the country’s war movement, Leopold did tell Martin there were other motives involved. “I wanted to do my part,” Leopold said. “And here was a chance to do myself some good; I knew nobody was going to hate cons for this, and there might be a reward.” (Doctors involved in the study, however, later downplayed any claims by Leopold that he played a major role in the project.) In 1949 Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson commuted Leopold’s ninety-nine year sentence to eighty-five years, which made the inmate eligible for parole on January 10, 1953, three years and eight months earlier than normal. “But since the governor left the life sentence undisturbed,” Martin pointed out, “he by no means guaranteed Leopold’s release—unless Leopold was paroled, he would die in prison.”

According to Martin, inmates who worked or celled with Leopold thought highly of him, but to those who did not his personality seemed forbidding. “He [Leopold] is inclined to be opinionated, stubborn, literal-minded, humorless, tactless,” said the writer. “He seems to need, for reasons of his inner security, to assert himself, to win his arguments. He is formal, detached, correct, precise, legalistic.” Martin presented an even-handed evaluation of the pros and cons on whether or not to parole Leopold, pointing out his crime resulted from a situation that would never occur again. “Leopold thinks he has been rehabilitated in spite of prison, not because of it,” Martin wrote. “Leopold’s prison career is surely one of the most unusual on record.” In his Post article Martin made sure to emphasize that it was hard to imagine “a more hideous, heartless murder than that of Bobby Franks,” and highlighted the young boy’s promise and the suffering of his parents. “The murder case, however, has been tried,” Martin wrote matter of factly. “The judge chose to impose sentences from which, under Illinois law, Leopold can be paroled.”

The State of Illinois turned down Leopold’s parole in 1953, but granted him a rehearing, to be held in 1958. Martin upon the request of Leopold’s attorney, Varian B. Adams, wrote a letter in June 1957 to new Illinois governor William G. Stratton outlining the reasons why the inmate should be paroled., “In my opinion, Leopold is a good parole risk,” Martin wrote Stratton. “He has a good record in prison. He will not be cut adrift without resources if paroled. And so on—judged by these and other standards set up in the parole predictability tables ordinarily used by parole boards, including, I believe, yours, he rates as a good risk.” Of course, Martin added, parole for any inmate, no matter the crime, entailed some risk, and releasing Leopold would not be popular with the public. “Leopold’s case is the sort that challenges parole to reach its greatest heights. . . . It would be an act of considerable courage,” wrote Martin. “It would identify your [Parole] Board as moving courageously in step with progressive penological thought, as government in Illinois has and should.”

Martin also appeared before the five-man parole board at a hearing in early February 1958 to testify on Leopold’s behalf, along with Reverend Eligius Weir, former Catholic chaplain at Stateville; Paul M. Robinson, president of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago; Doctor Marvin Sukov, psychiatrist and University of Minnesota professor who had been Leopold’s supervisor in a prison clinic; Sandburg; and others. Martin told parole board members that neither the coroner nor the judge at the original trial had, in spite of tabloid newspaper reports to the contrary, found any evidence that Franks, the murdered boy, had been sexually assaulted, and that during all his time in prison, Leopold had never been cited by a guard for any homosexual activity.

Chicago legend Sandburg urged the board to make history and pardon Leopold. “Those who won’t like it are those who believe in revenge,” he said. “They are the human stuff out of which mobs are made—passion ridden.” Leopold’s attorney, Elmer Gertz, who had replaced Adams, later said that Sandburg may have rambled a bit in his testimony, “but in the swell of words one could sense something magnificent.” It was clear to him, said the attorney, that the parole board was impressed by the poet’s testimony, “deeply moved, in fact.” The board voted to parole Leopold, and a newspaperman later told Martin it had been his testimony that had spurred the board’s action, as it took its members “off the hook for paroling a ‘sex criminal.’”

After being freed from prison on March 13, 1958, after serving thirty-three years, six months, and two days, Leopold left the country to work as a medical technician at a Church of the Brethren hospital in Castaner, Puerto Rico. While living there he married, and, after the five years of his parole restriction expired, traveled the world, earned a master’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico, and worked as a social services investigator for the Puerto Rico Department of Health. “I really wanted to become a doctor,” he told a reporter who tracked him down in 1963, “but I’d be sixty-two by the time I could start practicing medicine. I couldn’t afford that much time—not with two coronaries and diabetes.” He died on August 29, 1971. “Few men lived lives like his,” said Martin.

As for Martin, his series on Leopold won him the Benjamin Franklin Award in 1955 in the category for the article best depicting a person, living or dead. He also received the Franklin honor the next year for his articles in the Post on life inside an insane asylum in Ohio and in 1957 for a series on segregation (“The Deep South Says Never”). By that time he had become involved in another passion—politics—serving as a speechwriter on both of Democrat presidential candidate Stevenson’s campaigns in 1952 and 1956, as well as those of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey, and, finally, George S. McGovern.

Martin also served in the John Kennedy administration as U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic and taught courses in advanced writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. In his later years Martin, who died from throat cancer in 1987 and was posthumously inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 1999, spent more and more time on the one thing that had always been his salvation—writing. It always seemed to be on his mind, even when he was engaged in some of his favorite pastimes—hunting and fishing. In the long hours of silence waiting for fish or game to appear, Martin noted, “Almost automatically, in my mind I form sentences, an idea or a snatch of description; then rearrange the words, then revise them inside my head again and again.”