Intellectuals Murdering People For Fun

True Stories and Other Murder Trials About Intellectuals Murdering People
For Fun.

In 1924, in Chicago, two rich students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed a neighbouring student, Bobby Franks, for fun. "If I was going to murder anybody I'd murder such a cocky, little son-of-a-bitch," Richard Loeb is famed for having told a news reporter. Nathan Leopold was a genius who spoke twenty eight languages. He also didn't recognise the difference between right and wrong because he believed that he was a Nietzschean Superman. And for Nietzschean Supermen the difference between right and wrong is not important.

Even today, more than eight decades later, the bizarre trial of Leopold and Loeb is of great interest to criminal psychoanalysts.

The real-life, 2007 murder trial of the Polish author, Krystian Bala, centres once again around the idea of bored intellectuals plotting murder as a
pastime. Some facts of this genuine case are that Bala's novel, Amok, contains descriptions of a gruesome murder, and that Polish investigators cannot believe that he, as the book's author, is also innocent of the crime.