Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb were two wealthy students at the University of Chicago who in May 1924 kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Robert Franks in Chicago. They committed the murder—characterized at the time as "the crime of the century"—as a demonstration of their perceived intellectual superiority, which, they thought, rendered them capable of carrying out a "perfect crime", and absolved them of responsibility for their actions.