The Perfect Crime | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS

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Outstanding presentation of one of the most iconic cases in American judicial history. American Experience never disappoints. Rest In Peace, Bobby Franks.

I keep wondering why people expect more out of people who are privileged, educated, or have any celebrity. I've not found ANY of these factors to make anyone special or with more sense.

The fact that one of those men tasted freedom ever again is despicable.

After all this time we have no greater understanding of what happened. Except we know-what we have always known-is that rich people don't wind up on death row.

Poor Bobby Franks. What kind of proof of superiority is it to murder a defenseless child? And they didn't even get away with their "perfect crime." Heartless and disgraceful.

Evil is not new. Nor is injustice, and privilege. We keep producing predators because we celebrate them. The victims are tossed aside, and forgotten. The killers achieve infamy, which is what they want.

So Leopold served just 24 yrs of his 'life imprisonment plus 99 yrs' prison term. How does life + 99 get whittled down to 24? That's not justice.

American Experience never fails to make us think. Well done.

In cases such as these, it baffles me as to why Darrow and the judge failed to take into consideration Bobby Frank’s lost life and the grief of his family. Bobby wasn’t given a choice of life or death by those two horrific murderers, so why should they have been given the option to live?!

The bigger irony is that during the same time in America lynching, rapes, and hangings were regularly attended often without a trial. The Barbary of those people was never evaluated, given a Freudian excuse, nor explained away by their unnatural, unloved upbringing too.

Back in the late ‘80s, I wrote my first term paper in middle school about this case. It was fascinating to read the newspaper reporting of the time.

"Darrow's motion was so groundbreaking that no one had ever heard of it before." Um, that's what groundbreaking is.

I have liked the "American Experience" series since the mid-1980s, and these hour-long episodes of incidents that made national headlines are the perfect vehicle for getting adults talking and reading about history again. B/W period photos and film footage have an unexpected potency in documentary as "apparent truth" that make me want to reapply myself to my own research. BTW, Orson Welles played the Darrow-like attorney defending Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman in "Compulsion" (Fox, 1959), about as close to a Hollywood portrayal of this case as there is available.

My grand parents knew the Loeb family from summers in Charlevoix, Michigan. The murder reveals a treacherous duo, at once unhinged to the moral universe and untethered to civilization itself.

I love American experience, they always put together a fantastic piece of work

Two "geniuses" & the perfect crime. Terrible. Heartbroken for poor Bobby. One of those times I hope for people like these two to recieve a special reward in the afterlife. As always the American Experience is one of the best documentary programs around.

This is the percursor to the affluenza defense

These guys remind me of Bryan Koghberger right down to interest in crime and the arrogance of thinking you are too smart to be caught and then leaving an essential piece of physical evidence at the scene of the crime. Disgusting psychopaths, all of them.

in 1924, this was known as a shocking and incomprehensible crime.  In 2024, it is known as Thursday.