Newspaper barkers, pressing hard to sell their final editions, shouted out rival headlines from adjoining street corners. He would soon enter the courthouse and begin the most infamous murder trial of his long career.ĭarrow’s name, and those of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two nineteen-year-old killers he would defend, echoed around Mary. The lawyer’s reputation skirted redemption and ruin again as he immersed himself in yet another complicated defense. His fame was enshrined, but Darrow was revered and hated in equal measure. It was Darrow’s knack, and his fate, to be drawn to cases of such drama and dissent that they received saturation coverage across the country. The dusk framed her own trepidation as she went to meet the man she had loved so long.Ĭlarence Darrow was America’s greatest and most controversial criminal lawyer, a battered sixty-seven-year-old defender of the lost and the damned. And the farther she walked the more she lowered her gaze, as if willing herself to become invisible. Alone in the Loop on a summer evening, Mary Field Parton picked her way through the teeming streets, slipping quietly past the blurred faces and babbling voices. It seeped through the burnt orange and faded red streaks of a sky that softened the stone buildings towering over her. Hellfire Preachers and Biology TeachersĭARKNESS SPREAD slowly across a city in tumult. He had just as many friends in both places.ĩ. You see, Darrow didn’t believe much in either-but he always said he wouldn’t mind ending up in heaven or hell. But he could break your heart, if you were not careful, because he was often more concerned with saving comparative strangers than thinking of those who loved him most.
His compassion for the world was breathtaking. Darrow was the most intriguing yet strangely contradictory man I ever knew.
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