Trials

February 29, 2004

Richard Loeb with his arm around Nathan Leopold.

Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were as unlikely a pair of cold-blooded murderers as ever appeared in U.S. history. Privileged, brilliant, and coddled, they conjured up the perfect crime – just for the hell of it – and then executed it quite imperfectly. Only Clarence Darrow's virtuoso courtroom performance saved these remorseless, self-styled "supermen" from being hanged.

by Denise Noe

In 1924, 18-year-old Richard "Dickie" Loeb and 19-year-old Nathan "Babe" Leopold of Chicago had reason to think of themselves as "superior" people who could easily outwit the ordinary folk who enforced the law. Both were exceptionally intelligent and had academic careers in which they skipped several grades. Loeb, with an I.Q. estimated at 160, had already graduated from the University of Michigan, to which he had transferred after a year at the University of Chicago, completing his B.A. degree in two and a half years. Likewise, Leopold was a child prodigy, entering the University of Chicago at age 14. When he graduated four years later, earning Phi Beta Kappa status, he was among the youngest graduates in the elite university's history. Leopold's I.Q. was estimated to be stratospheric: over 200. There was much else remarkable about Leopold. He had already studied 15 languages and spoke at least five fluently. He had also developed a strong interest in ornithology and had collected nearly 3,000 bird specimens. According to the website, "Nathan Leopold and Ornithology," the teenage Leopold "kept about 3,000 bird specimens in the third-floor study of his home . . . lectured on the subject at the nearby Harvard [Preparatory] School and taught, as an unpaid volunteer, a 'bird class' to girls from the University Elementary School." In October, 1923, Leopold delivered a paper on a rare songbird called the Kirtland's Warbler to the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Union."

November 27, 2006 updated 3/12/07

Emmett Till

The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 galvanized the fledgling civil rights movement like no other killing of a black by white racists before it. After an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Till's two killers, the case festered for 49 years until the U.S. Justice Department reopened it in 2004. In late February of 2007, a Lefore County, Miss. grand jury declined to issue any new indictments, effectively bringing the case to an abrupt and ignoble end. 

by Denise Noe

Mississippi Is Not Chicago

People in the Chicago neighborhood where Emmett "Bobo" Till lived knew the 14-year-old as an attention-getter. Despite the stutter left by a bout with polio in his infancy, he had a confident, even cocky, personality and relished pranks and jokes. In an interview that appeared in the PBS documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till, childhood acquaintance Richard Heard recalled how Emmett entertained his schoolmates one day in gym: "I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his navel and making his belly roll, waves of fat rolling and it just broke us up. The whole gym went crazy."

In early August 1955, Emmett's great-uncle, Moses "Preacher" Wright, traveled to Chicago from Mississippi and asked Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, if her son could spend the summer with his family. Wright also invited two of Emmett's Chicago cousins to come on the trip.

Mamie agreed to let Emmett go but worried about how he would behave in the South. Although Chicago was racially segregated, its racism was not of the Jim Crow stripe.

March 3, 2008 updated July 25, 2008

Marty Tankleff and Parents

After serving 17 years for the 1988 murders of his adoptive parents, Marty Tankleff's conviction was overturned by an appellate court in December, 2007. On July 1, 2008, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that he would not retry Tankleff.

by David Kirschner, Ph.D.

The Martin Tankleff courtroom saga may finally have come to an end. Tankleff, 36, was released from prison in December, 2007, after serving 17 years for the 1988 gruesome murders of his adoptive mother and father, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff, in their Belle Terre, L.I. mansion. An appellate court overturned his 1990 conviction, because of "new evidence," suggesting that somebody other than Tankleff might have committed the crimes; and on July 1, 2008, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that he would not retry Tankleff.

After an extensive five month investigation/review however, Cuomo did not exonerate Tankleff, stating that "although there is some evidence that the defendant Martin Tankleff, committed the crimes charged, after 20 years the evidence is insufficient to . . . prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did so. . . There was no sign of a break-in or of a robbery, and the defendant who was the only other person in the house, was unharmed. . . The defendant made vague but incriminatory statements to a family member and direct confessions to some fellow inmates in prison.

Benjamin Rosenberg, Cuomo's chief trial attorney, concluded that making a case against Tankleff was no longer feasible. Legal technicalities and changes in the law would bar prosecutors from trying him in his mother's murder. Another factor in the decision not to retry Tankleff is the passage of time, resulting in "dimming recollections" of some witnesses and the deaths of others.

Cuomo also stated he had no plan to indict any of the possible killers Tankleff named, saying, "We have found no forensic evidence linking any of these persons to the murder."

March 29, 2009

Wrongly accused? Omar Raddad stands outside the courthouse.

French justice can be quite curious. After being pardoned but not exonerated in the murder of his employer, Omar Raddad risked being re-imprisoned by asking for a new trial to clear his name.

by Anthony Davis

Wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal, 65, lived alone in a luxury villa in the affluent village of Mougins, near Cannes on the French Riviera. On the morning of Sunday, June 23, 1991, she was relaxing beside her pool doing a crossword puzzle, her favourite pastime, when her friends and neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Koster called over the fence to invite her to lunch. She readily accepted.

At 1:30 p.m. Mrs. Koster, anxious that her friend had not yet arrived for the meal, telephoned but there was no reply. She was puzzled, but presumed that something had happened to prevent her from showing up.

Something had happened. The following day, June 24, Mrs. Marchal was found stabbed to death in the basement of her house. Written in blood on the inside of the door was the incriminating message Omar m'a tuer (Omar killed me).

Police immediately arrested Omar Raddad, 28, a gardener who worked part-time for Mrs. Marchal. Although he consistently denied killing his employer, he was charged and three years later, February 2, 1994, found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment.

A fairly straightforward case you might think. So did the police.

Updated Dec. 19, 2007

Belton Missouri

The story of Jeffrey Gardner, a young man sentenced to prison for shooting an abusive husband who was threatening his wife with a knife. After the printing of this story, the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, on March 2, 1999, overturned the conviction of Gardner -- who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the shooting.  Gardner was a boarder in the couple's home at the time of the shooting. On Dec. 7, 1999, the Missouri Supreme Court did overturn the appellate court opinion. Gardner is serving his sentence at the state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo. Click here to read the Missouri Supreme Court decision.

by J.J. Maloney

Carol Drummond could feel feel the noose tightening around her throat.

For more than five years the 38-year-old Belton resident had been stalked, threatened and vilified by the friends of Phillip Hancock, her late husband.

In August, 1991, Drummond called police after Hancock threatened her with a bayonet. In December, 1991, the 6-foot-2-inch Hancock hurled Drummond to the ground, breaking her collarbone because her dog had urinated on the floor. A judge ordered Hancock to stay away from Drummond.

Hancock then lived with a friend, Mark Lassince, until he made up with Drummond and moved back in with her, in January, 1992. Also living in the house were Jeffrey Wayne Gardner, an attractive, soft-spoken, 28-year-old boarder, and Jackie, the 8 year old daughter of Hancock and Drummond (she kept her own name after the marriage).

In the early afternoon of March 7, 1992, Hancock called the Belton police and talked with the dispatcher. Hancock wanted police to eject Gardner from his house. The dispatcher explained that, since Drummond was half-owner of the house, if she wanted Gardner to stay, there was nothing the police could do. Gardner asked if the police would come over and take Gardner's gun away from him. Hancock said he feared Gardner and Drummond would plant the gun on him, to get his probation revoked. The dispatcher said there was nothing the police could do about Gardner's gun, either. Hancock expressed bitterness, saying he was, "screwed, I don't have any rights."

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton Duel

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the most star-crossed political foes in U.S. history, joined together in 1800 to defend a man accused – and all but convicted in the court of public opinion – of the murder of his fiancée.

 by Doris Lane

If you stood on Greene Street, off Spring Street in SoHo, looked around and imagined the past, you might be able to picture Lispenard's Meadow of 1799. Not flat, like now, but gently hilly: A rural pleasure ground for strolling New Yorkers in summer; a vast ice-skating arena when the meadows froze over in winter.

Broadway then was a narrow country lane used to herd cows north from the city to feed at the grassy salt meadow. Spring Street, today lined with art galleries and expensive shops, was a path to the Hudson River. From the corner of Broadway and Spring Street, in 1799, there would not be a cobble-stoned street in sight. If you looked through the trees you could see the white country mansion of Aaron Burr, the New York lawyer soon to be Vice President of the United States.