Bobby Franks
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Robert Emanuel "Bobby" Franks (September 19, 1909 – May 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 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 a heart attack in 1971.
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