Nathan Leopold Jr and Richard Loeb were sentenced on September 10th, 1924, to Life plus Ninety Nine years. After the verdict was read, both were taken back to the Cook County jail where they were put in the death cell to await transfer to Joliet Prison. The transfer finally occurred on September 11th. Leopold became 9306-D and Loeb became 9305-D.   The two were kept separated in Joliet, known as the "old prison". Leopold was assigned to the rattan factory, (rattan 2B)where his job was to weave chair bottoms. Loeb was assigned to the chair factory (Furniture 5), where he drilled holes for chair legs.    They were kept in different sections of the prison and did not see each other. Leopold's first impression of Joliet, from the outside at least, was of a "medieval castle on the Rhine". (Life Plus Ninety Nine Years) Indeed, the jail does bare resemblance to a castle- or a fortress.

Entering Joliet.

Once inside the prison, they were ordered to face a wall. Their handcuffs were then removed. They were led through a series of bared gates to the prison yard. Through the yard they came to another gate, and then a small building, which they entered. They were given prison clothes- a denim shirt,  khaki pants and work boots, and led to two separate totally dark cells; "court solitary". The Court Solitary cell as described by Leopold, was an 18 ft by 8 ft stone cell, with a tiny mesh covered soot encrusted window, a small cot, a stool and a bucket.

   The following morning, both prisoners were retrieved from their solitary cells, given back their "civilian" clothes, and led to a a barnlike wooden building, the Bureau of Identification. Photos were taken of each in their civilian clothes. After photos, they were led to the prison barber shop ,where their heads were shaved.

   Next they were led to another building. They were led to a series of showers and ordered to strip. Another inmate then removed all their body hair with a pair of barber clippers. They were then handed a bar of soap each and told to get in the shower. After the shower they were handed a stick with a gob of blue ointment on it, and told to rub the ointment into the skin under their arms and groins. They were then given their prison clothing and ordered to dress.

   Both Leopold and Loeb then looked at each other and burst out laughing.

   They were then photographed again. The two dapper youths whos appearance and wardrobe were described in the press with almost as much detail as the actual trial proceedings, became two common criminals in ill fitting uniforms.

They were led with other inmates into an auditorium, where "Defense Day" was celebrated, for the veiled purpose of giving the press a final chance to see their biggest story. Leopold and Loeb were then led to another building where a series of reporters had gathered. Neither spoke a word.

   "For several minutes we sat there like bumps on a log. I chanced to look down the table. Near the end, at some distance from us, sat one of the girl reporters who had covered our trial, a girl who later became a very well known columnist. She was holding her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbing audibly. The last thing in the world that would have occurred to me was that one of the ladies of the press. who made a living by pandering to the tawdry emotions of the public, could herself be deeply enough affected by the sight of Dick and me to be moved to tears. But there she was weeping, and her emotion was undeniably genuine."-Nathan F Leopold Jr. Life Plus Ninety Nine Years

   Nathan Leopold's prison life began in earnest that evening. He and Loeb were parted and Leopold was taken to the East wing of the prison, to his new home. His cell was 8 ft long and 4 ft wide. The floor, ceiling and walls were stone. The cell contained a double deck bunk, a wooden stool, a tin shelf, a tin bucket, and an unshaded light bulb.

   Every weekday Leopold awoke to the rap of the guard unlocking the cells. The prisoners would grasp their buckets and exit the cells, marching in a straight line. They emptied the buckets into a large open drain. They then rinsed the buckets in a large trough and emptied them again. One hung their bucket on a nail and then marched to breakfast.

   Leopold and Loeb did not see each other again until the Jewish New year, which the Jewish prisoners were allowed to celebrate.Ten days later they would see each other again for Yom Kippur.

   In May 1925, Nathan came down with apendicitus and was transferred to the new Prison at Stateville, as Joliet lacked an adequate facility for surgery. His appendix was removed and no effort was made to transfer him back to Joliet. The old prison had recently suffered an outbreak of measles. This may have been one of the reasons Leopold was permitted to stay. However, from what occurred later, it seems apparent the prison officials preferred to keep Leopold and Loeb in separate prisons.

  Stateville was far different than Joliet. The cells had windows  that overlooked prairie land and each cell had  plumbing. There was a large yard the prisoners could use. The food was better, and served hot. And there was an element of freedom of movement that was not permitted at the old prison.

  Back at Joliet, Richard Loeb had come down with measles and was seriously ill for some time in June 1925. Leopold had every intention of telling Richard all about Stateville. But he was advised not to due to Loeb's illness. Word spread to the outside that he had "cracked up". He hadn't. But the public would always see what they wanted to see.  Loeb and Leopold met at the Jewish holidays. Leopold did not describe Stateville in glowing terms. Loeb looked a little weaker but seemed in good spirits. He had cell partners he liked and a job he enjoyed  He was promoted to yard clerk, a job that allowed more freedom of movement.

And so life went on, apart. Until  the summer of 1930.

Loeb was promoted again to the office of the deputy warden and would occasionally send cryptic verbal messages to Leopold via transferring inmates.

Summer of 1930, Richard decided to attempt to get transferred to Stateville, and of this, he sent word to Leopold, via the cryptic message transferree system. He intended to await a visit from his mother, who was at the Loeb estate in Charlevoix for the summer, before asking her help in speaking to the warden.

Loeb's transfer came in October, the same time Leopold was sent back to Joliet for disciplinary reasons. Richard was transferred to Stateville the day after Leopold was transferred to Joliet. They were allowed ten minutes together before Loeb departed.

It seemed the policy of keeping them in separate prisons was to continue.

Loeb worked in the greenhouse at Stateville, and was in line for a further promotion the six months later when Leopold finally managed to get transferred back to the new prison.

Ratione Autem Liberamur

"By Reason, However, we are Set Free"

"The fact that the initial letters are Dick's initials is no accident. The illustration for the cover is a silhouette of a man sitting at a desk with a book open before him. Our Spanish instructor, who was a talented artist, drew it. He had to mess up his original drawing several times before the perfect likeness of Dick he had drawn was just sufficiently blurred so that it wasn't too striking. Anyone who knew him would recognize it, but it was not too obvious. " -Nathan Leopold

   Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were reunited in prison in 1931, after seven years apart. The friendship resumed, and the two "interdigited" personalities behind bars, set about another planful adventure.

   Their goal this time was not a perfect murder, a kidnaping for ransom or a robbery. Instead, the two college prodigies planned to improve the limited school facilities offered to inmates in prison.

   This plan, like the plan to kidnap and murder a boy, was the brainchild of Richard Loeb, so says Nathan Leopold.

   The school situation, as it existed when Leopold and Loeb became interested, was a grade school for inmates. It ceased at eighth grade. The school was the prisoner's "work". They went to classes daily and celled with other pupils. However, nothing existed beyond the grade school level and Leopold and Loeb felt there was a need for a system that could provide high school courses to inmates ready to learn.

  The current system required an inmate to give up their present job- and any priveleges they might receive from it, for the sake of school. Leopold and Loeb's plan saw around this problem, by creating an in house correspondence school .Both had taken correspondence courses while they themselves were students. 

   The success of the prison school casts a  myriad of questions over the relationship of Leopold and Loeb. Clearly they were capable of horrible things, and yet, likewise were they capable of wonderful things that helped their fellow man. About the only thing one can say with any confidence, is that together they did extraordinary things.

   Leopold and Loeb collaborated on a Parole Prediction project

   While in prison, Richard Loeb re-wrote the English A curriculum for the inmate school and at the time of his death, was working on a History of the Civil War.  

    Many years later in 1951, in a letter to Helen Williams, a school teacher on the "outside" who assisted Leopold and Loeb in their organizing of the school, Leopold wrote of tutoring a young man in "English A of all things".

January 28, 1936.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had breakfast in Richard's cell the morning of January 28th, as they did most every morning. Breakfast consisted of some sweet rolls purchased from the prison commissary. The day was cold. While they sat and ate, James Day stopped by the cell and had a roll with them. He got up to leave and told Richard that he'd see him around noon.

Leopold and Loeb spent the morning correcting lessons. They discussed a new algebra course. Richard remarked that nothing exciting ever seemed to happen.

At 11:30 AM Richard picked up clean underwear and a towel and said he was going to go take a shower. Leopold returned to his own cell and began working on the algebra course.

Richard Loeb's Cell At 12:20 Leopold heard from a prisoner returning from the dining room that Richard was badly hurt and had been taken to the hospital.

"I grabbed my hat and coat and started out of the cell house. The door had just been locked. The guard was jittery; he didn't think he could let me out on his own authority. I was all excited, too, and I insisted he call the deputy or the warden, do something. He tried, but the warden had gone to the hospital. A couple of lieutenants came in and went to Dick's cell and started to shake it down. I was wild."

Leopold convinced on of the civilian school supervisors to escort him through the gate. "Just as I was debating whether I could kick the gate in, I caught sight of Father Wier hurrying in from the front. I hailed him and asked him to get permission for me to come in."

Richard lay on the table unconscious and surrounded by doctors. He had an ether mask on his face and was breathing through a tube in his windpipe. He was covered with razor cuts. Every time he breathed a gush of blood would rise up from his throat.

Richard Loeb died at seven minutes to three.

The doctors left, and Leopold and an inmate nurse washed Richard Loeb's still bleeding body and stitched up some of the cuts. At last they covered him with a sheet.

"But after a moment I folded the sheet back from his face and sat down on a stool by the table where he lay. I wanted a long last look at him."

After a while some men came in and carried Richard Loeb's body away in a basket.

"I felt like half of me was dead."

Richard Loeb had gone to an officer's washroom that contained a toilet, sink and tub shower. It's use was allowed by the 19 prisoners that worked on the prison school. James Day, who had stopped to have a roll with Loeb and Leopold earlier that morning, had slashed Richard Loeb over 50 times and killed him.

The bathroom lay 20 feet west of the main dining room, where Day had been headed for lunch when he stepped out of line, and into the bathroom. After the killing, Day gave this statement;

Warden Ragen in the Bathroom where Loeb was attacked "After four months of being friendly with him, he offered to get me a job in the office. I refused. He said he would do anything I wanted for friendship's sake....

"About June 1935, we walked into the library one day, and he told me he had something he wanted to say to me- something important. I was sitting on a chair close to a radiator, and he came and sat on the radiator and started to tell me how much our friendship meant to him; that he probably never would get out for the rest of his life, and that during the preceding months there had grown up in him another feeling than just friendship. He asked me not to get mad but to be broad minded. He said there had been others, but that they had been paroled and they wrote him letters once in a while. He told me that I would never have to worry about anything. He told me he got ten dollars a week from his brother and half of it would be mine if I would do as he said. I told him that he was a double crosser and not a friend, and that I thought he was my friend, and that he was only a dirty skunk, and that I was through with him. I started to get up. He put his arms around my waist...

"He pleaded that I should not get mad. I jumped up, causing him to fall to the floor...

"After that he would stop me when I was alone- reminded me he got me my job and that he could get it taken away, that he could speak to someone up front."

Day goes on to describe the crime.

"After dinner he came to my cell and told me he was on his way to take a bath and if I wanted to talk to him I could see him in the bathroom." Once supposedly in the bathroom, Richard locked the door behind them.

"I was talking- don't remember what I was saying- when he turned around and got between me and the door with a razor in his hand he had taken out of the bundle. I knew the door was locked. Loeb said, 'Get your clothes off before I start in on you.' I was afraid- the thought struck me I should watch a chance to do something. I stepped under the shower. He took two steps toward the sill of the shower and I kicked him in the groin. He slashed at my face downward and missed by inches. When he fell I hit him on the back of the neck with my fist-and the hand in which he had the razor hit the sill and the razor fell. We fell to the floor together. I got the razor and slashed at him and the blood flew in my face as he locked his arms around me....

Loeb got the razor away from me then and got on top of me, holding me by the throat. Something told me I was going to die if I didn't get out from under. I got him off me, I don't know how. The razor was in my hand when I got up.

Loeb swung at me, half laughing, and hollered: "So you can fight when you have to?"

..."My whole body was red. I put on Loeb's shirt. I thought it was mine. People were running. Excitement, a disturbance. The captain came and I gave him the razor."

In Warden Ragen of Joliet, author Gladys Erickson wrote the following regarding the Death of Richard Loeb;

When Ragen took over at Stateville, Loeb and Day were cell mates in Cell House C. Loeb had been receiving an allowance of fifty dollars a month from his family. Since Day had no income, Loeb supplied him with such luxuries as cigarettes, candy and food. They had had several arguments over the division of Loeb's "groceries" after Loeb had shared his supplies with a number of other inmates who had no cash.

Loeb was one of those hit hardest when Ragen rook all money out of circulation and decreed that each inmate could spend a maximum of three dollars (later raised to five) a week in the prison commissary. This rule left Loeb with barely enough buying power to supply his own needs, and the squabbles between the two increased until Ragen moved Day out of Loeb's cell. This had taken place about six weeks before the fatal stabbing.

After the murder, Ragen's inquiry indicated that Day had continued to demand his ration of cigarettes and other luxuries from Loeb, but Loeb had refused. Their last known argument had taken place two weeks before the killing. Apparently Day had borrowed the razor to take revenge on Loeb for his refusal.

The warden went over the prison records of the two men and saw that Day was marked as a potentially dangerous inmate, with a long punishment record. Loeb, on the other hand, had a clean record; he had been placed in Grade A, the top rating that can be given, six months after his arrival in prison, and had remained in that grade through the years...

James Day was charged with the murder of Richard Loeb and brought to trial in a Will county court in June 1936. There were no witnesses to the attack itself, but Day had mobilized half a dozen inmates who appeared as "character" witnesses in his behalf. Several of them told the story of how Loeb had bewildered Day and a number of others by describing in lavish detail the baths of ancient Greece and Rome. These lurid vocal tours ended, according to the witnesses, with propositions for immoral activity.

Day told the court that he had been invited into the shower by Loeb. When Loeb made indecent proposals to him, he resisted. Loeb pulled out the razor, which Day took away from him after a struggle. He said that Loeb was slashed during the struggle and in self defense.

His lawyers assured the jury that Loeb had wielded unlimited influence over fellow inmates for a long period of time and also told it that if it find Day guilty the jury would be "rebuilding the Walls of Sodom and Gomorrah."

Warden Ragen was called to the stand and asked only three questions: his name, how long he had been warden, and whether or not he had seen the actual attack. Then the jury retired and eventually returned with a verdict of "not guilty".

This verdict astounded Ragen, prison officers, and even inmates. While no one held Loeb up as an angel, most believed that Day's defense had been fabricated, that he had planned the attack on Loeb, and that revenge had been his motive. However, at the time of the trial there was no evidence to show or to prove that Day had had the razor in his possession prior to the killing.

I wasn't until two years after the murder that Ragen was able to get Bliss, who had been Day's cell mate at the time of the killing, to admit that he had passed him the razor half an hour before the slaying.

When Day was returned to the prison after the acquittal, the warden recommended to the Director of the Department of Public Safety that all the good time he had to his credit be forfeited, on the grounds that he had been in posession of a contraband item and also for other violations already in his jacket. Day would have been eligible, under his ten year sentence, for discharge after serving a minimum of six years and three months. With his good time canceled, he would have to serve out the entire ten years."

Richard Loeb's body was cremated at Oak Woods cemetery in Chicago's South side. There is no marker. His ashes were retrieved by family members in July, 1936.

Neither Nathan Leopold, nor Richard Loeb have a burial site.

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