CRIME: Happy Romola Remus

“Ohio Justice” is a byword. The man who made it so, Bootlegger-Killer George Remus, last week put a final flourish to the saying by walking out of Ohio’s State Hospital for the Criminal Insane, a free man.

Last year George Remus, squat and muscular, got out of Atlanta Penitentiary after serving a short term for ‘legging. He had made millions, had been caught, had got out. He suspected one Franklin L. Dodge Jr., a onetime U. S. Prohibition agent, of conspiring with Imogene Remus, his wife, to get his money and his life. Mrs. Remus and Dodge were paramours, Remus said. So, the morning Mrs. Remus started for court to press her divorce suit, George Remus drove alongside her car in a Cincinnati park, chased her across the grass, shot her dead. He was allowed to act as his own lawyer in his murder trial. The trial became a disorderly farce. The jury acquitted him on the ground of temporary insanity. Committed to the asylum, Remus successfully appealed in Allen County for a writ of habeas corpus. What freed him finally last week was the Ohio Supreme Court’s four-to-three decision upholding the writ.

Killer Remus will shortly publish a book relating his prison and asylum impressions.

Romola Remus, daughter, announced: “I am the happiest girl in the world.”