Compulsion

Novelist Meyer Levin covered the Leopold-Loeb trial as a student reporter and, some 30 years later, returned to the subject - and the reporterīs perspective - in novelized form in Compulsion, published in 1956. Fiction allowed Levin to project himself inside the heads of the murderers (Leopold was still alive and in prison at the time), to explore elements in their behavior - such as their homosexual tendencies - not easily confronted at that time. The novel transforms Leopold and Loeb into Judd Steiner and Artie Strauss, their victim into Paulie Kessler and their defense attorney into Jonathan Wilk. Levinīs novel is in two parts, "The Crime of the Century" and "The Trial of the Century." It explores the reasons the young men chose to commit a "perfect" crime - a crime that was otherwise meaningless - and it dramatizes the remarkable summation by their attorney that saved them from the gallows.

Interestingly, the publication (and subsequent film adaptation) of Compulsion angered one person - Nathan Leopold, who had been an exemplary and even heroic prisoner, and was paroled in 1958, after Erle Stanley Gardner and Carl Sandburg testified at his parole hearing. (Loeb, who had become surly and violent in prison, was murdered there in a knife fight in 1936.) Leopold was offended by the novel and film, and he sued both Meyer Levin and the filmīs producer Richard Zanuck for invasion of privacy. The case dragged for over a decade; when it was decided in 1970, Leopold was ruled to be a public figure and not entitled to the protection of privacy. He died the following year.

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