Optical connections: How glasses caught a killer

This is the story of what is commonly referred to as the twentieth century’s first ‘trial of the century’; a story of two cold-hearted killers, one of the most famous defence attorneys in American legal history and the chance discovery of a simple pair of spectacles that led to the murderers’ conviction.

The setting is Chicago, 1924, in the affluent neighbourhood of South Greenwood, only a block away from where Barack Obama’s residence now sits, on the favoured south side of the city. In that suburb lived two wealthy families. Each had a teenage son as brilliant intellectually as their personalities were troubled. For all their anti-social tendencies, it is generally accepted that it was only as a result of their meeting and forming of a complex relationship that such a heinous crime of premeditated murder could have been committed.