Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [115]
In part, Gaylen’s fascination with criminals was simply the pose of a smart, rebellious youth, adopting decided antiheroes as a way of setting himself apart from the easy values of the culture around him—a common-enough stance among certain young people in the 1950s and ’60s. In particular, Gaylen liked to talk about the idea of the perfect crime, much the same way that another kid might talk about setting a new sports record, or another might dream about writing a great book or great music. Gaylen kept reading his books of poetry, but he also started bringing home books about famous crimes—such as the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. Gaylen was thrilled by the case, and he talked about it often. At the peak of Colonel Lindbergh’s fame, somebody sneaked into his Hopewell, New Jersey, mansion and stole his twenty-month-old son, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The kidnapper left behind a note, demanding fifty thousand dollars in exchange for the boy’s return. Lindbergh paid the ransom, but the child was not returned. A few weeks later, the baby’s body was found in a grove of woods not far from the Lindbergh home. He had been dead since the night of the kidnapping. There was a famous trial—of Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant caught in possession of some of the ransom money—and there was also a famous execution. Four years after the kidnapping, Hauptmann was electrocuted in the electric chair at New Jersey State Prison, while souvenir hawkers sold models of the chair and replicas of the kidnap ladder to cheering mobs outside. But the mystery and appeal of the case did not die with Hauptmann, and to many observers, something felt unfinished or unsolved about the whole affair. After studying the case, Gaylen became convinced that Bruno Hauptmann died an innocent man—that some other party had committed the kidnapping and murder and had gotten away with it. Gaylen studied the details of the case for weeks and weeks, like an aspiring artist studying a masterpiece, trying to understand or assimilate the genius in the pattern of the work.
Gaylen was also intrigued by the infamous Leopold and Loeb case. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two brilliant University of Chicago students who had come from families of great wealth and status. Both were fascinated with Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman, and both had been subjected to intense acts of sexual abuse at early ages. In 1924, Leopold and Loeb talked a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks into entering their car. Loeb stabbed the boy to death in the back seat with a chisel. The two college students then had dinner, and later that night they stripped the dead boy of his clothes, poured acid on his face to prevent his identification, and buried him in a drainpipe, near a Chicago swamp. They went on to demand a ransom from the boy’s worried parents. The idea had been to commit a perfect crime, an outrageously offensive act that could not be solved, though they ended up leaving several telltale clues. The idea also was not to feel anything about the deed—to murder the child without compunction or guilt. It was this last aspect of the Leopold-Loeb story that intrigued Gaylen the most. “They didn’t want to feel a thing about what they did,” he told me once. “They thought they were superior men, and that superior men had a right to kill weaker people for the pleasure or experience of killing.”
When I was younger and Gaylen used to talk to me about these infamous crimes—or when he disclosed that the first girl he ever fell in love with was actress Patty McCormack, because of her performance as little Rhoda, the child who blithely killed anybody who got in her way in The Bad Seed—I would