But even with all this inner compulsion, weren’t they both persons of intelligence, exceptional intelligence? Could they not have seen where they were being driven?

“Look,” he said, “in both cases, the reports show us, the emotional age and the intelligence age are out of kilter. Even the psychological tests showed they were emotionally still children. What’s the emotional reaction of a kid of nine when he’s mixed up, baffled? He’ll strike out, blindly-”

“But it wasn’t blind killing. It was a long cunning plan,” I objected.

“Won’t a kid brood like that and plan? And then do something violently impulsive? They planned – and then picked up a kid impulsively.”

He read again of Artie’s moods, his depressions, his declaration that he had at times contemplated suicide. “The patient has some insights into his peculiarities and says that the question has often come to him as to whether he was ‘all there’. He states that during the past year he has felt different; he feels he cannot concentrate so well, that his memory is not so good, and that he cannot carry on conversations and small talk with others as formerly…

“In our opinion this tendency will continue and increase so that he will become more and more wrapped up in his world of fantasy and less and less in contact with his world of reality.”

For the family, the report was reassuring: “There is no reason to feel that the patient’s condition is of a hereditary nature or that it will be transmitted to future generations of his siblings or relatives. Neither is there any reason to feel that the family is responsible in any way for this boy’s condition.”

Willie was restless. Responsible. He tasted the word.

“According to you,” I said, “no one is responsible.”

“I didn’t say that.” He threw change on the table. “I suppose you think ignorance is no excuse?” We got up.

I was too excited to go to bed. I walked alongside the lake, ignoring all the entwined couples on the grass, in cars. And as I walked, there grew in me that peculiar elation that comes to us when we are young men, eighteen, twenty – that mystical sense of infinite creative connection to the universe, that winy sense of godlike power. And this, I then knew, was what that poor, tragic Judd must have felt at times, this elation, this intoxication with his own mental powers, and this was what he had confusedly expressed in his ideas that man was even more than God, that man conceived God and hence was greater than God. Each being in his own being was God. I felt the same thing in myself, and that night I felt even larger, larger with pity.

And then, when the exaltation was gone, and I was walking tiredly home, I found myself thinking of all Willie had said. There was much in it that could have meaning, and the tool had been explained – how else could you explain it? – and I had forgotten, in the rush of all the new ideas he had conveyed, that other hint he had given me a few weeks ago. The place of burial.

On the following Monday, the trial was to begin. Scrawled letters threatened to blow up the court building if anything but a hanging verdict was the result. Editorials screamed at the waste of public funds to provide a trial for such monsters, yet gloated over our noble sense of justice that insisted on a defence opportunity, even for them. But there were also higher expectations of the trial. Some of us, perhaps imbued by Judd, expected lofty and timeless discussions, as at the trial of Socrates.

By eight o’clock the pavement of the County Building was lined for a solid block with citizens who hoped to glimpse the killers as they were brought from jail. A special cordon of police had been stationed in the building entrance, and a constant series of arguments was in progress, with irate citizens, with blandishing women, with people using every means of subterfuge to get through.

Upstairs, I found the hallway to the courtroom packed solid. The victors in the battle for coveted admission cards were mostly friends, wives, and daughters of politicians. And there were the special visitors – visiting jurists, celebrities, big lawyers passing through Chicago on their way to a vacation – all of whom wanted a glimpse of the trial of the century.

And finally, the press. Nearly half the courtroom was filled with correspondents from abroad, from national magazines, from out-of-town papers. But there existed a higher category still. The select of the press were in the jury box. Thus we saw ourselves as the true arbiters; what we wrote was judgment.

Several in the press box were old familiars, on the case from its beginning. Mike Prager was there, sporting his belligerent sneer; Richard Lyman, of the Tribune, had naturally appropriated the foreman’s seat; the Tribune had added a “fancy writer” named Arthur Kramer, who sat alongside the box, where extra chairs had been placed. A dozen sob sisters were in court to cover the women’s angle. Certainly Artie evoked a hysterical tenderness in women. We heard it now in the corridor, a curious feminine shrieking and gasping, as the boys were pulled through the crowd; we glimpsed bare arms, hands reaching toward him, heard a few piercing girls’ voices above the others – “Artie!” “Artie, honey!”

Inside, the two sides had assembled. For the prosecution, there was Horn, looking ruddy, massaged, made fit for battle, low-set, a line-driver. Padua was on his left, handsome, a smiling ball-carrier. They were accompanied by Czewicki – a padded interference man, with his mountains of files and reference books – and a half-dozen others.

The other team was older-looking: Wilk, in his studied shabbiness, his clothes having the same rough, worn, softened look as his face; Ferdinand Feldscher, perfectly groomed, reasonable, shrewd, smooth; his brother Edgar, with his high forehead, his unlit pipe, his slightly poetic look that made one wonder what he was doing in a law court, in a murder case.

Then there were the representatives of the families: Artie’s brother James, who aroused sympathy, and his Uncle Gerald, leaning forward to whisper to the lawyers. On Judd’s side, father and brother sat together; sometimes Max was to be absent, and Judah Steiner would sit alone, a monumental Job, a figure that seemed, even within the crowded courtroom, removed by some invisible wall.

Directly behind sat two small men, Charles Kessler and his brother Jonas, their faces impassive. Judge Wagner was with them.

And so the prisoners were led in. Artie exchanged a puckish smile with his brother and uncle, while Judd cast a furtive glance toward his kin.

Then came the judge, in his black robe. Throughout the sweltering August Chicago heat, he was to retain in his black robe that look of being unaffected by weather as by any mere extraneous factor.

The case was called, and a representative of each side rose to state what it would attempt to show. Horn in person declared for the State that never in all the world had so cold, vile, and excuseless a murder been committed, and that the extreme penalty was inescapable in such a case. When Ferdinand Feldscher rose for the defence, it was simply to state that their efforts would be to present evidence in mitigation.

Horn called his first witness, the Polish worker who had found the body.

And then, for more than two weeks, there ensued a dull parade of circumstantial witnesses, the undertaker, various policemen, handwriting experts, the diver who had found the typewriter – all in endless detail proving the crime which the defence fully conceded. But there was method to it, for by having witnesses describe the blood, the body, by having teachers describe the innocent schoolboy, and by piling up evidence of the luxury in which the murderers had been raised, Horn was indeed proving aggravation, to counterbalance any mitigating evidence the defence might offer.