Page:The plea of Clarence Darrow, August 22nd, 23rd & 25th, MCMXXIII, in defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on trial for murder.djvu/33

 for his law examination on it; numbers of them. These were still in existence. The State's Attorney got them; the typewriter could be identified without the machine at all. It was identified without the machine; all that was needed was to show that the same machine that wrote the ransom letter wrote the dope sheets and wrote the other letters.

No effort was made to conceal it through all these months. All the boys' friends knew it; the maid knew it, everybody in the house knew it; letters were sent out broadcast and the dope sheets were made from it for the examination. Were they trying to conceal it? Did they take a drive in the night time to Ann Arbor to get it, together with other stuff so that they might be tracked, or did they just get it with other stuff without any thought of this homicide that happened six months later?

The State says, in order to make out the wonderful mental processes of these two boys, that they fixed up a plan to go to Ann Arbor to get this machine, and yet when they got ready to do this act, they went down the street a few doors from their house and bought a rope; they went around the comer and bought acid; then went somewhere else nearby and bought tape; they went down to the hotel and rented a room, and then gave it up, and went to another hotel, and rented one there. And then Dick Loeb went to the hotel room, took a valise containing his library card and some books from the library, left it two days in the room, until the hotel took the valise and took the books. Then he went to another hotel and rented another room. He might just as well have sent his card with the ransom letter.

They went to the "Rent-a-Car" place and hired a car. All this clumsy machinery was gone through, without intelligence or method or rational thought. I submit,