✉️ On the morning of May 21, 1924,
a ransom letter — neatly typed on a typewriter — was delivered to a mansion in the Kenwood district of Chicago. It demanded payment for the return of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, who had vanished the day before.
👓 Yet at the very hour that letter reached the mailbox, the boy had already been dead for nearly a full day, his body abandoned in a marsh on the city's outskirts. That same afternoon, a corpse was found in a drainage culvert at Wolf Lake, and a single pair of eyeglasses was recovered from the grass beside it. It was the longest day of one family's life — and the day on which two geniuses' "perfect crime" first began to crumble before the most trivial of clues.
The Experiment of the Übermensch retells this 1924 case — recorded in American criminal history as the "crime of the century," the Leopold and Loeb murder — as a work of crime fiction. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two young men raised in wealth, took Nietzsche's metaphor of the Übermensch — shaped by the philosopher to celebrate the elevation of the human spirit — and twisted it into its opposite. They came to believe that to the gifted few of superior intellect, neither law nor morality applied, and to prove that hypothesis they placed a child's life into a test tube.
This novel sets the morning of May 21 at its very center, tracing the boy's disappearance, the discovery of the body, the investigation that hunted a single pair of glasses, the confession of the two young men, and the trial that became a landmark of the movement against capital punishment in Clarence Darrow's defense.
⚖️ The question the work finally poses remains as alive today as it was a century ago: can intellect place a human being above morality? The answer was already known — to a pair of eyeglasses dropped in the grass, and to the date of May 21.
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