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By Root 1104 0

records show, actually, in the Cook County (Chicago) Criminal Court and at the Harvard School, now the Harvard-St. George School, is the following: Shawn—then called Chon—and Bobby Franks were classmates at the Harvard School for Boys that year.” (He means schoolmates and not classmates since in the next sentence he states that Shawn was sixteen and Franks fourteen.) The nub of “the following” and the peg on which hangs the theory that Shawn-Chon was on the Loeb-Leopold murder list is: “They went over about six names, the first one of which was ‘William.’ The court records do not give the last name....They dropped the idea of ‘William’ only because they had a personal grudge against him and somebody might remember that.”

This looks fishy on the face of it. Wolfe or somebody he employed must have gone through the Harvard School classbooks since he prints young Shawn’s photograph from it, but he doesn’t say whether any other boys in the classes that included Shawn and Franks were named “William.” (Two were.) And if he did examine the court record, it is vague, even for his kind of research, not to tell whether the other potential victims were also identified only by their first names.

There may be clues to this reticence. The Clerk of the Cook County Criminal Court says no transcript of the trial record is on file there (though a stenographic record may exist on file), nor can he recall any reporter inquiring about one in recent years. There does exist, however, in the possession of an attorney connected with later developments in the case, a nine-volume transcript entitled “IN THE CRIMINAL COURT OF COOK COUNTY/AT THE JULY TERM, A.D. 1924/PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS VS. NATHAN LEOPOLD, JR., AND RICHARD LOEB/GEN. NOS. 33623-33624.” Six hours of searching for “William” through the 4,713 pages of the record yielded zero. The names of a number of what the defendants airily called “prospects” are given, including four students at the Harvard School, but none of them was named “William” and none of their last names, which were recorded in each case, was “Shawn” or “Chon.”

I deduce therefore, my dear Watson, that Wolfe has some other source. The only “William” I’ve found is in Maureen McKernan’s The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb (Plymouth Court Press, 1924). “In November, 1923...” she quotes, or seems to, from a report by two defense psychiatrists, Drs. Bowman and Hulbert, “[Loeb] was angry at a certain youth called William and...suggested they kidnap William for ransom, and incidentally kill him...They gave up the idea of kidnapping this particular person...[because he] was too large and strong, and they also knew that he would be out of town, away at school.” If this is Wolfe’s “William,” how can he also be his “little Billy Chon” whom Wolfe describes as neither big nor strong, and as being right in town attending the Harvard School? He gives Loeb-Leopold’s “specifications” as “a small and therefore manageable teenage boy, from the Harvard School, with wealthy parents...” which is tailored to order for young Shawn but sits loosely on Miss McKernan’s “William.”[3]

The Bowman-Hulbert Report, both as it appears in Volume 9 and as it is given by Miss McKernan, states that the November, 1923, “prospect” (whom she calls “William”) was picked because Loeb disliked him and was dropped because he was too big and was “away at school.” But Wolfe does not give those reasons, which would exclude Shawn; he gives another, which doesn’t: “They dropped the idea of ‘William’ only because they had a personal grudge against him, and somebody might remember that.” In his Cabinet at the Tribune, Dr. Wolfe (Ph.D., American Studies, Yale) has antisynthesized a great rich buzzing confusion of discordant tenses—the past is not congenial to him, and he keeps getting things mixed up—and fragments of data that don’t fit together. His “William” is a hippogriff, a cameleopard botched together out of two incompatible creatures: the definite, single “prospect” of the fall of 1923, six months before the murder, who was big, strong, nineteen,