Last August, Joseph Epstein reviewed For the Thrill of It, by Simon Baatz (The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 8, 2008). His opening paragraph struck a chord in me (after all, I'm a product of the University of Chicago):

"Living in Chicago breeds a taste for crime that derives from one of the city's richest traditions. In what other place, after all, is Valentine's Day associated  with a massacre? Every generation or so a maniac killer pops up within city limits: a college student kills and dismembers a 6-year old girl; a free-lance wacko who murders eight Filipina nurses; a householder who slays boys and inters them in his bungalow's basement. Such acts of hideous violence relieve the tedium of city officials regularly caught with their hands up to their elbows in the public till. But no crime has ever come close to stirring public interest in Chicago as did the 1924 murder of a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks by two students at the University of Chicago."

The murders to which Epstein refers above are: 1)William Heirens' murder of little Suzanne Degnan (he was also from the UofC), 2) Richard Speck's rampage killing of eight nurses at the University of Illinois in Chicago (Chicago's higher education doesn't look good, does it?), 3) part-time clown and full-time serial killer John Gacy, and, of course, 4) Leopold and Loeb, who were spared the electric chair by Clarence Darrow, a neighbor of theirs in the Hyde Park district of Chicago's South Side.

Did you know that Clarence Darrow was once tried for bribing a jury? Or that his law partner at the time, poet Edgar Lee Masters, testified as a character witness for him and then promptly resigned from the law firm and moved to New York? Or that Edgar Lee Masters wrote an epic-length poem about a murder investigation and a coroner's jury? The poem is The Doomsday Book (1920).