Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (36 page)

Afterward, Elston told reporters Truesdale had agreed to testify because “he adhered to an underworld code that you make a clean breast of things when capital punishment is involved.” “I’ve checked his story,” Elston said. “There are witnesses, we can verify it.”

Elston was now quietiy confident. Truesdale’s testimony, he believed, had made a huge impact on the jurors, turning Remus into the victim and Imogene into the executioner. The prosecution did its best to fight the tide, with evidence that relations between George Remus and Imogene had been far from idyllic long before Remus was released from jail, but their witnesses — Imogene’s daughter Ruth and Elizabeth Felix, a friend of Imogene’s — failed to shake the jury, in that they recalled instances of minor spats that occur among the most devoted couples. Ruth said Imogene had often been in tears after seeing Remus in Atlanta jail “because he had been brutal and unkind.” In the light of the earlier testimony, Felix’s claim that Imogene had been “morally irreproachable” was, to say the least, unconvincing.

Remus’s character witnesses had far greater impact. The most prominent was Clarence Darrow, the criminal lawyer whose brilliant
advocacy and showmanship had long turned him into a superstar. Slipping into his co-counsel role, Remus could not resist making the most of this, referring to Darrow as “the sage of the twentieth century. . . . How proud am I to know that this great humanitarian takes up his time to testify for me.” Judge Shook cut him short with a curt “That’s enough.”

Darrow praised Remus as a man and as a lawyer, and said he knew nothing of his investigation by a grievance committee of the Chicago Bar Association, but “if he was investigated, I would not regard an indictment as affecting peace and quiet.”

Taft did his best to turn Remus’s emotional outburst to the prosecution’s advantage. “Don’t you know he was known [in Chicago legal circles] as the weeping, crying Remus?” he asked. “I knew he was a very emotional fellow, somewhat unstable,” Darrow said.

Taft tried again. “Would you regard Remus as characteristic of a law-abiding citizen?” Elston objected, and the question was withdrawn.

The jury probably missed the point. In legal circles, Darrow’s anti-Prohibitionist views were well known, and almost certainly explained his presence in court.

Taft brought up Remus’s bootlegging past with another character witness, also a well-known Chicago attorney, Thomas S. Hogan. Again, his questions backfired.

Had Hogan been aware of Remus’s conviction on liquor charges? “That’s a moot question, whether it’s moral turpitude,” Hogan replied, anticipating Taft’s next question. “While I’m a dry myself I wouldn’t consider that a heinous offense against the law.”

Remus could not resist making himself heard. “The defendant has never hijacked liquor,” he told the court, “and the defendant has no apologies to make for having sold good liquor since 1919.”

At the close of the trial, Dr. E. A. Baber, superintendent of Cincinnati’s Longview psychiatric hospital and one of the panel of psychiatrists who had examined Remus, testified that he was sane. Remus subjected him to repeated questioning. It was “the peculiar situation of a man claiming insanity for his defense, cross-examining an expert on insanity” the
Cincinnati Enquirer
noted, adding that Remus “gave Dr. Baber some uncomfortable moments,” as when
Remus asked him: “Sanity is the reverse of insanity, is it not, Dr. Baber?”

B
ABER:
Yes.

R
EMUS:
Insanity is an abnormal condition of the mind, isn’t it?

B
ABER:
Not necessarily.

Elston delighted the audience with excerpts of some of the inane tests the panel had subjected Remus to. “Didn’t he say at the time that he was on trial for murder, and didn’t have time to bother with this nonsense?” he reminded the court.

Taft’s lackluster summing up differed little from the prosecution’s opening statement, though he did his best to portray “the weeping, whining Remus” as a cynical play-actor. He also reminded the jurors that Truesdale, a convicted felon, must have known that he was immune from prosecution. Under the Ohio state laws, it was not a punishable offense to conspire to commit a crime if no crime was subsequently committed.

Remus came into his own on December 19 with an emotional summing up. “Here before you stands Remus the lawyer. In the chair there [gesturing] is Remus the defendant, charged with murder. Remus the defendant does not desire any sympathy or compassion in any shape or form whatsoever. If you feel the defendant should go to the electric chair, do not flinch. The defendant will not flinch. He stands before you in the defense of his honor and the sanctity of his home.”
²

Thanking the judge for his “fairness and squareness,” Remus reminded the jury that insanity [Dr. Baber notwithstanding] in his opinion was “nothing more than the abnormal condition of the mind.” He also reminded the court that Franklin Dodge, “that ace of the Prohibition department, that deuce with women, that moral leper, this human parasite with whom County Prosecutor Charles Taft traveled the country” had not been called on to testify. He made a final crack at prosecutor Basler (“Look at his profile and say whether it has the look of hypocrisy?”), ending with a reference to the Volstead Act, “... one of the greatest criminal and legal abortions of all time. Why, but for the act, the defendant would not have been here!” Whatever the outcome, Remus told them, “Ithankyou. Happy Christmas to you.”

Elston’s summing up was equally passionate, but on a different note.

Was there ever a woman in history, in fiction, who treated a man worse or more shamefully than Imogene Remus? Was there ever a woman who had less reason for doing so? And yet they say he was in a normal state of mind, that October 6 when he had the faith of a little child. . . . Turn him loose for Christmas. Bring peace of mind to the man who has suffered the tortures of hell for more than two years. We are not asking for mercy, we say this man is not guilty.

Just before the jury retired, on December 20, Judge Shook took the unusual step of reminding them that outright acquittal would be “against the law,” but the jury was almost certainly more receptive to his ambiguous acknowledgment of Imogene’s behavior. “The law,” Shook went on, “does not justify one person taking the life of another because the latter may be of a bad character.”

As reporters later ascertained, their verdict was determined within two minutes, on a single ballot, but the jurors stayed out for three hours after informing the judge they had come to a decision, enjoying a long, celebratory lunch — aware that the bulk of the press would not be back in the courtroom until four P.M. As a juror later told the
Cincinnati Enquirer
, “We felt: let’s go out and give him a Christmas present. He has been persecuted long enough.”

“We find the defendant not guilty on the sole ground of insanity,” Harry G. Byrd, the jury foreman, announced, to wild cheering, when the court reconvened. “That’s American justice!” Remus shouted. Surrounded by reporters in the hubbub that followed, he extended his “deepest appreciation” to the jury, the court, the prosecutors, the sheriff and jailer. “God knows what is in my heart at the moment. The rest of my life I will dedicate to stifle the insult that is upon our statutes, known as the National Prohibition Act.” Had there been no Prohibition law “to fill the coffers of a class that seeks and practices only venality,” he would not have been in court in the first place, he said.

There was a party in his cell suite that night, attended by Elston, his close circle of friends, his daughter Romola, and two of the jurors.
The following day, the jury presented a unanimous petition to Judge Shook, asking him to free Remus, “if possible, in time for Christmas.” A furious Judge Shook promptly ordered them to apologize to the court, which they did. But for a long time afterward, at Taft’s instigation, they remained under investigation for improper conduct, facing possible jail sentences.

Remus’s troubles were not over either. Taft told the press that despite the verdict, which had been “a gross miscarriage of justice . . . , [we] are not through with all the angles in this case.”

A more skillful behind-the-scenes manipulator than prosecutor, Taft worked relentiessly to have Remus committed for life to an insane asylum. He successfully petitioned for a “lunacy hearing” before a probate judge. Remus was confident he would emerge a free man. Had not a panel of psychiatrists, chosen by the prosecution, proclaimed him sane?

But Taft also persuaded two members of the panel to change their minds. A Dr. David A. Wolfstein now determined that Remus was “ruthless, reckless, selfish, eccentric — the kind of man who takes the law into his own hands. . . . He has shown he can be dangerous.” Over Dr. Baber’s objections, the judge ruled that a two-to-one opinion was sufficient to have Remus confined to the Lima insane asylum. On January 6,1928, an ambulance took a strait-jacketed Remus to the dreaded Kentucky “prison-hospital.”

Elston promptiy appealed for a habeas corpus writ on the grounds of illegal confinement, and to the Ohio Supreme Court, while Remus — for all his alleged emotional instability — displayed singular resilience in Lima, soon becoming a hero to the warders there. As reported in the
Cincinnati Post
on January 28, “Wife-slayer George Remus saved the life of a hospital guard who had been overpowered by a giant negro patient.”

An appeals court was now convened to review the case, and a fresh panel of six psychiatrists again submitted him to extensive tests, which he passed with flying colors. “Remus is sane beyond a doubt,” said Dr. Shelby Mumaugh, a former Longview consultant. “He is not a psychopath.” “I wish I had his brain,” said Dr. W. L. Neville, a Florida specialist.

Two Lima officials disagreed. A supervisor told the appeals court that Remus had “recently violated standing orders.” His offense was
“having in his possession a book on insanity.” Lima’s superintendent, W. H. Vorbau, in frequent touch with prosecutor Sibbald, cited as evidence of Remus’s insanity “his persistent refusal to wear underwear.”

A more insidious attempt to brand him as insane was disclosed by the
Cincinnati Post
. Prosecutor Sibbald, sent by Taft to Lima to argue in favor of his continued incarceration, intended citing Franklin Dodge as witness at the new hearing — almost certainly to provoke Remus and cast his sanity in doubt. Cornered, Sibbald admitted as much. “We want to see how Remus acts when he meets Dodge” he was foolish enough to admit to the
Post
. Dodge denied his visit had anything to do with the Remus case. He was only in Lima to sell distributors an automatic cigarette lighter whose patent he had acquired, he told the press. The judge decided Dodge’s presence was not relevant to the case.

The hearing did not go Sibbald’s way. Remus was the calm, dispassionate one, refusing to rise to the prosecutor’s bait, and the judge ended up reprimanding Sibbald for his “intemperate language.” In many respects, his cross-examination of Remus was a rehash of the murder trial, with Sibbald embarking on a scathing, interminable review of Remus’s past, alleging he had always had criminal tendencies. He conspicuously failed to prove his case, succeeding only in antagonizing the court — and revealing his anti-German bias. Remus came across as an archetypal example of the new American in search of the American Dream — a compulsive workaholic and a loving, caring son, as Remus’s old mother, seventy-eight, speaking in German through a translator, confirmed. (She had been called as a witness on the spur of the moment after Sibbald alleged that, after becoming rich, Remus had neglected his family). On March 30, the court declared Remus sane.

Taft did not give up even then. Invoking “irregularities,” he announced he would appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court to get the decision annulled. A motion for a new trial was denied, but the Ohio Supreme Court took an inordinately long time to make up its mind while Remus appealed for release from what he described as “this dumping- ground of hell. “

Finally, on June 20, 1928, he arrived at Cincinnati’s Union Station, a free man at last. A small crowd of well-wishers, including some members of the jury, was there to greet him. So were Elston and
Conners. He looked tanned and fit from his work on the Lima farm, and seemed no worse for his six months there. “I shall remain in the city where people have been so kind to me,” he told the
Cincinnati Post
.

Remus never returned to boodegging, and never salvaged his fortune. He sold the Price Hill mansion (it was later pulled down), married Blanche Watson, his former secretary, and tried — but failed — to make another fortune, first in patent medicine, then in real estate.

His death, on January 20, 1952, was the occasion for a series of obituaries recalling a fabulous era. In 1995, the Cincinnati Historical Society staged a Remus exhibit. Among the memorabilia: a photograph of the party he gave to celebrate the opening of his $125,000 swimming pool, with Imogene — the glamorous bathing belle — demurely by Remus’s side, and the revolver he used to kill her.

W
hile Remus remained in Lima “criminal lunatic” hospital awaiting the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision on his sanity, a medical controversy of another type gripped America: for the first time, the Volstead Act was being blamed for huge numbers of deaths from poisoned liquor.