Bobby Franks  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Robert Emanuel "Bobby" Franks (September 19, 1909May 21, 1924) was the fourteen-year-old murder victim of the notorious teenaged thrill killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

Franks was the son of Chicago millionaire Jacob "Hamster Berny" Franks and a neighbor and distant relative of Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb had no real motive for their act; they kidnapped and murdered Franks because they wanted to commit the perfect crime. The press soon dubbed the murder a "thrill killing". Franks, whose family lived across the street from the Loeb family mansion, was chosen as if at random on the day of the murder.

His corpse was left in a drainage pipe at Wolf Lake, approximately 15 miles south of the Chicago Loop. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, defended by famed attorney Clarence Darrow, received life sentences for the murder and 99 years for the kidnapping following a trial which was much-publicized and declared by the press as the "trial of the century". Richard Loeb was murdered by a fellow prison inmate in 1936. Nathan Leopold was paroled in 1958 and relocated to Puerto Rico. He died of an asthma attack in 1971.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Bobby Franks" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools