A Jazz Age Murder in Northwest Indiana: The Tragic Betrayal of Nettie Diamond

by Jane Simon Ammeson

Overview

Gold digging, adultery, and a slaying on Valentine’s Day, 1923, in this “juicy . . . page-turner” of a true crime story (Chicago Tribune).
 
It was a Roaring Twenties fatal attraction. Nettie Herskovitz was wealthy and widowed when she met Harry Diamond. The attentive, irresistibly sexy twenty-three-year-old suitor would become Nettie’s fifth husband. He was also a bootlegger, pimp, and first-class hustler who thought he’d wed a goldmine. What Harry found instead was a fiercely independent older woman who was nobody’s fool for long.
 
Then, on February 14, 1923, Harry tried to secure his inheritance by shooting Nettie four times, once at point blank range to the head. He blamed the crime on their teenage African American chauffeur. Harry might have gotten away with it, if not for one little oversight. Nettie wasn’t dead.
 
With its combination of sin, sex, high-society scandal, and even the interference of the Ku Klux Klan, the case against the movie-star handsome Harry Diamond moved beyond tabloid fodder to become the most sensational trial of the era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625850188
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	10/20/2018
Series:	True Crime
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	163
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jane Simon Ammeson is a writer specializing in history. Her work has appeared in national and international magazines and she has written numerous local history books, including Holiday World, Miller Beach, and Brown County, published by Arcadia Publishing. She was born and raised in Indiana Harbor and became interested in the story of Nettie and Harry Diamond when she learned that many of the people she knew when growing up had connections to this quintessential Jazz Age story.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

INTO THE NEXT CENTURY

I grew up in Indiana Harbor more than a half century after Nettie died and — as I would find out later — as a young child lived just a block from her best friend's house. It would be another forty years before I learned from my mother, at the time about ninety-four but still in good health and mind, that before she married my father, she'd dated a man I knew as Bernie Hurst.

My mother was from East Chicago, Hurst from Indiana Harbor. She didn't say how they met, but they would take the train to Indiana University together until the Depression. When money became tight, my grandfather decided he could only afford to send his two sons — and besides, girls would marry and didn't need to be educated for that. And so, my mother moved home and took a job. Bernie would continue, graduating and returning to Indiana Harbor, where he ultimately became my elementary school principal.

He gave my mother a ring, which she said she still had all those years later, though I never saw it. Ultimately, he decided he had to marry within his faith. My mother's story was startling enough, but then she added, in a rather offhand way, that Bernie's parents had been murdered near where the Palm Grove restaurant once stood. Hurst wasn't his real name, she continued. After the murder, they changed their last name.

That was so long ago, more than seventy years of my mom's life had gone by since, and she couldn't remember exactly what their last name had been — Hurshwitz, Hershcowitz, something like that.

Mr. Hurst, an avid tennis player (my mother's sport, too), the child of murdered parents? He had, I had always thought, shown much favoritism toward me, selecting me to be the nurse's aide when the school nurse wasn't available — I was a ten-year-old allowed to take temperatures, clean wounds and even send a child home because she or he seemed ill. I, of course, wanted to know more.

It was not an easy journey to discovery. I first used Google archives, searching for old newspapers, looking for stories about the murder. Because I didn't have the year, I had to search through the '20s, and because I didn't have the exact spelling, I had to search through many names. But I finally found a single line about the murder of a Nettie D. Herskovitz in Indiana Harbor in February 1923. Using the name and date, I called the Lake County Public Library in Merrillville, Indiana, and within three days, one of its research librarians had found over one hundred pages of old newspapers with stories about the murder.

It was a beginning of both learning about the case and also seeing how oral history challenges and changes what is written down. Mr. Hurst's mother had indeed been murdered, but Mr. Hurst's father wasn't murdered; he had died seven years earlier at the young age of thirty-one in a hospital in Chicago. His stepfather had died, not that year but the next, becoming the first person in Porter County to be condemned to death in almost ninety years and the only Jew ever to be executed in the state.

During my research, I would run across other twists on what really happened.

"She was shot by Lloyd and Bernie's father because she was having an affair with the black chauffeur," said Ardash Daronatsy, my sister-in- law's uncle, who had worked for Bernie's brother Lloyd for decades.

"His father shot his mother," Babs Cohen Fishman told me.

But it was my suppositions about Nettie that were most off mark. I had supposed from the newspaper articles that it was a classic account of a lonely older widow marrying a young cad who only wanted her for her money. But it turned out that wasn't the whole story either. I don't know if Nettie was lonely, but she certainly wasn't gullible. She had Harry Diamond sign what was then called an ante-nuptial right before they married on January 31, 1920. She was educated beyond most women of her time — earning a pharmacy degree at the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York, which would become part of Columbia University the same year she graduated. The requirements for that year's graduates included courses in commercial pharmacognosy, materia medica, chemical analysis, experimental inorganic and organic pharmaceutical chemistry and toxicology. In the long list of graduating seniors in the class of 1904, only 9 were women — Sarah Rosenblatt, Bertha Lopez De Victoria, Noe Rene Hirsch, Carollyne Glass, Allison Androvette, Wilma Backman, Rose Wilkes, Leonie Marculescu and Nettie. Interestingly, 2 of the women, Marculescu and Wilkes, had preceptors with the same last name, indicating a family relationship. Indeed, in 1900, the state of New York led the United States in female pharmacists, with 140 registered to practice in that profession out of a total of 1,900.

According to Jennifer McGillan, archivist at Columbia University's Health Sciences Library, in order to receive her diploma, Nettie had to be twenty-one, be of good moral character and have had four years of practical experience with a person or persons qualified to the business of dispensing pharmacy (aka her preceptor), though she would have received credit for time spent in the labs at the school as well. She also had to attend two full courses of lectures.

Greg Higby, PhD, RPh, executive director of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, referred to A History of the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York, written in 1929 by Curt P. Wimmer, a professor of pharmacy, where it stated:

A diploma will not be delivered to anyone who has not attained the age of twenty-one years and has not had at least four years' practical experience where drugs, medicines and poisons were dispensed and retailed and prescriptions compounded. The time spent in the laboratories of this College will count as a part of this practical experience. To those who have not had the requisite experience, nor attained the age of twenty-one years, a certificate of examination will be issued, to be subsequently exchanged for the diploma when all the necessary conditions have been fulfilled.

This means that though Nettie did graduate in 1904, she may not have been awarded a diploma until later.

Of the grandchildren I spoke to, none was sure of Nettie's maiden name, though they thought it was probably Sachs. That was the name said to be her maiden name in news reports and in the list of graduates from the College of Pharmacy of New York in 1904, and on Lloyd's wedding certificate, he gives Sachs as his mother's maiden name and her parents' country of origin as Romania. Her family knew nothing about her parents or even where she came from. Several thought she came from New York, possibly emigrating from Eastern Europe — probably Russia or Lithuania. Another said that she had immigrated to Houston to care for the child of a doctor whose wife had died in childbirth and then moved to New York. In the 1910 census, taken on April 22, when she and Sam were living with Pearl, who was just seven months old, in Indiana Harbor, she listed both of her parents as emigrating from Romania. She also said that her marriage to Sam was her first, she had no other children (could Sam not know of Edward and Noah?) and her age was twenty-two.

No one I talked to seemed to know the date of birth, and even her contemporaries gave different ages. Harry testified that she was twenty- nine; her tombstone says thirty-nine; her death certificate says she was thirty-three, having been born on May 1, 1889; and most newspaper accounts say she was forty-two. Searching ship manifests and other documents using May 1 (figuring a woman may fib about her birth year but not her birth month and day), I found no Nettie D. Sachs whose background matches the clues she left behind. And besides, if, as her very, very last will says, Edward Sachs was a son from a previous marriage, then Sachs might not have been her maiden name but the last name of another husband.

To make it even more confusing, one of her husbands, Louis Joshua Zauderer, told reporters in 1908 that Nettie was fifteen when she married him in 1902. That means she might be the Nettie Sachs, age four, listed in the 1892 New York census. Other family members were parents, August and Amelia, and siblings Elsie, age six; August, three; and one- year-old Florence. But again, a problem arises — a newspaper article says her mother's name was Mary, and her death certificate lists Mary Sachs as her mother as well. Or she could have been the Nettie Sachs who lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and was sixteen in 1900. That might fit, as she and Zauderer — he was born and raised in New York — moved there after she graduated, and an article about their divorce says that her son Edward lived with Nettie and her mother, Mary Sachs, in St. Louis.

And who were her other husbands besides Zauderer, Herskovitz, Diamond and possibly a Mr. Sachs? In 1902, a Nettie Sachs was divorced by her husband Henry Sachs in Evansville. They had been married for a year but lived together for less than a month as she would not, he claimed, fix him even one meal. In the summer of 1918, at age twenty-nine (or so she said), she married Dr. Sol Golden in Chicago. Three years later, she married Harry Diamond in Waukegan, Illinois, using the last name Herskovitz and saying she was a resident of Chicago and twenty-three years old (Harry was twenty-two and must not have been good with math or he would have figured that meant she had graduated from pharmacy school at age seven). I would find some answers but not as many as I would have liked. She remained elusive — more so than other people in her life. Finding the history of Sam, Harry, Anna and many others was easy, but Nettie seemed to have appeared around the turn of the twentieth century with no traces of her life before.

As I poked and probed through file cabinets full of dusty papers and old land records with handwritten entries, I soon found that Mr. Hurst and my mother's romance wasn't my only connection to Nettie. No contemporaries of Nettie were still alive, but I called people who would have been just one generation removed, hoping that they might have heard a tidbit of her story.

I found the phone number for Babs Cohen Maza, who had been my fourth-grade teacher at Washington Elementary, and in our conversation learned she was the granddaughter of Anna Cohen Fishman. Pearl Herskovitz, Sam and Nettie's eldest child, had lived with Anna after her mother's death, and Lloyd and Bernie had stayed there as well, though Bernie, at least, had lived with other relatives too. And in another odd twist, Anna's home was just around the corner from my Grandma Simon's four flat where my family and I had lived until I was eight years old. Both buildings still stand.

Babs remembers Pearl as beautiful, smart and delightful. She was aware that the Hurst children were orphans and that there had been a murder, but she didn't know more than that — the story she had heard was that Nettie's husband had caught her cheating and shot her. Years later, when Babs taught at Washington Elementary when Bernie was the principal, she said he never mentioned those younger years at Anna's house. She recalls him being strict and exacting, while I recalled him as almost uncle-like. Lloyd, Babs told me, was always friendly and would refer to their younger days together. But Bernie was a closed book. He also seems to have been somewhat restless in his teens. His daughter mentioned that he'd moved about between homes, and there was another mention that he had briefly run away. The concept of Mr. Hurst as a rebel was a distinct contrast to the presentation he made to the staff and students at Washington Elementary — dressed in his tweed jackets, always poised and, in my memory, looking like the perfect English gentleman. But of course, he wasn't; he was a Romanian American born in Indiana Harbor.

Shifts in time were disguising some of the facts. The Herskovitz children didn't change their name to Hurst until much later. Yearbooks from Indiana University show that Bernard and Cecil were still known by the last name Herskovitz during their time in college. Mr. Hurst's parents weren't both killed by gangsters as my mother thought; Sam was already dead. It was just Nettie traveling on that industrial road near the Cudahy Dutch Cleansing Plant on the old Cline Avenue.

There were other threads tying the past to the present. My father, Dan Simon, went to school with the Herskovitz children; he served on the student council with Lloyd. He would have graduated with Pearl, only his parents sent him away, along with my uncle Charles, to a private high school where many Romanian boys went back then. My dad grew up on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Herskovitz family had property one street over on Block Avenue and owned pharmacies close by on Michigan Avenue. Sam Herskovitz was Romanian, and it's not a stretch to think that my grandparents, who spoke Romanian much easier than English, would have taken their children to a Romanian doctor who practiced nearby and bought medicines and other sundries at a store owned by a fellow countryman as well.

Maybe Nettie and Sam bought milk from my grandparents' dairy. Indeed, it could have been my father, leading the horse-drawn milk wagon through the streets of Indiana Harbor, who delivered it to them. But these are things I will never know. And I must be content with finding out as much as I can from old records in courthouses, newspaper accounts, archives and fading memories.

Of course, my dad would have heard the story — most likely spoken about among the Romanian immigrants who congregated at the Transylvanian Hall, the social and cultural center on Pennsylvania and Washington Avenues. Articles about it might have appeared in the Romanian newspaper my grandmother read every day. But my dad had died at age eighty-eight, and by the time my mother told me the story, he had been gone for eight years.

The Indiana Harbor of Nettie's time was different from the Indiana Harbor that I grew up in. But both are now gone, the vibrancy of its boomtown ambience when Nettie moved there and the established prospering mill town of my day having given way to abandoned factories, businesses and homes. Some places remain, though, that both Nettie and I would remember. Anna Cohen Fishman's home at Grand Avenue still stands and looks solid and attractive. So does my grandmother's four flat and the East Chicago City Hall where Harry was incarcerated. But for the most part, the bright explosion of a city born of railroad and steel is now just a shell, though the mills still operate but no longer employ tens of thousands of people.

The city of East Chicago was incorporated in 1893, the same year as the great Columbian Exhibition on the South Side of Chicago. It was called the Twin City, with East Chicago (its western section) separated from the area known as Indiana Harbor by a vast rail yard that served as the rail gateway to Chicago and the Little Calumet River. It was in Indiana Harbor where steel mills stretched along the beachfront for shipping materials such as ore, iron and steel up through the Great Lakes and, depending on how far they were going, to the Mississippi River or the St. Lawrence Seaway. In between, near the river, is an area of Indiana Harbor called Calumet, where Sam and Nettie lived and owned a drugstore.

Lovely homes lined many of the streets and encircled, on three sides, Washington Park with its greenhouses, zoo, tennis courts, playground and swimming pool.

Now that my mother is gone, I've looked for the ring from Bernie Hurst she said she still had tucked away, but I can't find it though she left all her jewelry to me. It would be one more connection to Nettie and her life and death.

CHAPTER 2

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

WITNESS TELLS OF WOMAN'S PLEAS IN MURDEROUS ATTACK: MRS. DIAMOND, FRIEND SAYS, OFFERED HER HUSBAND EVERYTHING SHE OWNED

— Indianapolis Star, February 15, 1923

With blood streaming out of her mouth, nose, eyes and ears, Mrs. Nettie Diamond told, while lying in a bed in Mercy Hospital, of her entreaties to her husband to let her live and she would give him all she had.

"Anna, can you imagine it?" Diamond asked her best friend Anna Cohen Fishman, who had hurried to the hospital as soon as she heard of the shooting. "Harry shot me. I know I am going to die and I want you to take care of the children. Anna, I made my will two weeks ago and here I am."

Fishman, who had known Nettie since the latter had moved to Indiana Harbor with her husband Samuel Herskovitz, had arrived at the hospital around 4:00 p.m. just as Nettie was brought down from the operating room and stayed by her side until almost midnight.

"It was about five-thirty when she waked up and the nurse asked her if she knew who was at her bedside and she said, 'Yes, it is the dearest friend in the world, Anna.'"

Bleeding from a hemorrhage caused by the ether given to her during the operation, Nettie also had a clot of blood caught in her throat, preventing her from talking until it was removed. But then, once again, Nettie made her statement to all in the room—one so crowded that Fishman couldn't remember all the names of the people there. The ones she did recall were Pearl; a nurse; Dr. Frank Townsley; Dr. Yarrington, one of the surgeons who had operated on her earlier that day; and Mrs. Bertha Buchstaber, a widow who had been staying at Anna's before moving to Cleveland, according to the paper. Just a few days earlier, Anna had hosted a goodbye party for her friend, and Nettie had attended. Also there was Harry's sister Lena, who listened to Nettie as she, in Anna's words, "kept talking and telling that Harry had shot her."

"She wanted me to take care of her children and take care of everything else," Fishman told the judge. "She was afraid she was going to die, and she wanted someone to take care of everything."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Jazz Age Murder in Northwest Indiana"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Jane Simon Ammeson.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgements,
1. Into the Next Century,
2. Last Will and Testament,
3. Purloined! Missing Money, Jewels and Clothes,
4. Her Dying Breath,
5. Valentine's Day Drive,
6. The Men in Her Life,
7. What's Mine Is Mine,
8. The Klan Comes to Indiana,
9. Driving Mr. Diamond,
10. Her Mother's Daughter,
11. In His Own Words,
12. The Fight for Harry's Fate,
13. Harry's Last Days,
14. What Remained,
Bibliography,
About the Author,