Leopold & Loeb

The impact of the trial on the principals was very severe. Nobody close to the case would ever be the same afterwards.

Both Judge Caverly and his wife immediately checked themselves into a hospital to recover from the enormous strain and exhaustion of the trial. When he returned to the bench, he arranged to hear only divorce cases. "My health has been sapped," he told reporters.

Jacob Franks died a few years later and never recovered from the grief of losing his youngest son. Flora, Bobby's mother, who was delusional after her son's death and during the trial, did eventually recover her wits. She eventually remarried after her husband's death.

Jacob Franks

Albert Loeb, who had been invalided by a severe heart attack before his son's crime and spent the entire trial trying to stay alive at his country estate in Charlevoix, died a month after his son was sentenced. He never saw his son after he had been arrested in May.

Nathan Leopold's father died of heart failure in 1929. Shame and sorrow had driven him from his home in Kenwood. Two of his sons changed their last names to rid themselves of the family scandal.

Clarence Darrow went on to one more big case: the Scopes "Monkey" trial where he defended a Tennessee schoolteacher for teaching evolution. The "silver-tongued" orator, William Jennings Bryan, was his opponent.