'The Crime of the Century,' a Century Later

Smithsonian I laugh every time I hear an author say “crime of the century.” I’ve read that I can’t even tell you how many times. Kate Winkler Dawson is a journalism professor at UT Austin and the host of several true-crime podcasts.

“True crime” has been a very dirty phrase for a long time, because I think when we say “true crime,” a lot of times it feels like a cable network show that has cheesy re-enactments and there’s nothing going in depth into the part of society that we need to really pay attention to, and this crime illuminates. So my job is to elevate that to say true crime really can address issues that we haven’t talked about or ignored, and now we can draw people to that issue by telling a story that can end in a tragedy or, hopefully, in a triumph. What do you recall about the Leopold and Loeb case? I actually think Leopold and Loeb a “crime of the century” case, 1924.



We called Kate nearly 100 years to the day the Leopold and Loeb story began to unfold. This famous murder case involved two friends who were intellectually curious about committing a so-called perfect crime. The media followed the story closely, and today many still refer to its impact.

We’re in the middle of Prohibition, we’re approaching the Roaring Twenties, and you have an increase in crime thanks to Prohibition, of course, which is not the intention of Prohibition, but was an outcome. And we’re in Chicago, which is a hotbed for crime and a hotbed for, I think, a l.