Editor’s Note: This History Knox column is Part IV in a continuing series on Romy Cotell. Part I can be found at this link. Part II can be found at this link. Part III can be found at this link.
Early the morning of June 18, 1924, a patient in the Mt. Carmel Hospital in Columbus rang for the nurse.
The nurse on duty hastened to the room where the patient, a prominent judge, was resting.
He had entered the hospital a few weeks previously with a nervous breakdown. Though he had had a long and distinguished career, starting in Akron, and rising to an elected post on the Ohio Supreme Court, the judge’s world was plagued by political party infighting, health issues, and his own tendency toward depression.
Perhaps the ghost of past cases lingered as well.
The judge asked the nurse to help him to the bathroom. She carefully maneuvered the frail man, who looked much older than his 57 years, to the restroom. He thanked her, and she closed the door.
The nurse then heard the sound of the door being locked, which was not standard procedure. She waited, and listened.
There was a noise. The nurse wasn’t sure, but it almost sounded like he had raised the window. Perhaps he needed some fresh air.
There was another sound.
“Sir, is everything OK?” she asked.
After a pause, the judge replied.
“Yes, fine,” he said. “Thank you,” he added after a pause.
Then there was a sudden flurry of sound from behind the door. The nurse was startled, because it couldn’t possibly be what it sounded like. Then she heard a scream somewhere outside.
“Mr. Wanamaker?” she shouted, rattling the door. “Your honor?”
She put her shoulder into it and broke the wooden door open. The bathroom was empty, and the nurse could hear birds beyond the open fourth-floor window. She could also hear the sound of a commotion, a gathering crowd outside.
She rushed to the window and looked down.
Ohio Supreme Court justice Reuben M. Wanamaker was dead. That scene was the extraordinary end of Judge Wanamaker.
In 1896, he had just been elected as prosecuting attorney for Summit County when the triple murder took place on the Stone farm near Tallmadge.
The prosecutor was out to make a name for himself in his new job, and he wanted a conviction.
As he and law enforcement officials interviewed neighbors, family, and community members, it quickly became obvious whom they had to question. The Stones’ former hired man, Anson Strong, was the person everyone mentioned.
He was the man who screamed at Alvin Stone in the courtroom as he was being dragged out, that he would someday come back and kill Stone and his entire family.
This was the same Anson Strong who had served years for his crimes, and the same Anson Strong who had just been paroled from prison a couple of months earlier.
When officials caught up with Strong at his sister’s home in nearby Ravenna, they found that for some reason he had recently burned his coat, but his pants were still intact, and in the pants pocket, they found a ticket for the Tallmadge station from the very evening that the Stones and their hired man, Ira Stillson, had been murdered.
They arrested Strong for murder.
Prosecutor Wannamaker was pleased. Strong would not break under interrogation, but his behavior and comments were erratic. It would not be hard to convince a jury that this known criminal had executed his longstanding threat against Alvin Stone, and did just what he said he would do, only failing in his haste and sloppiness to execute the entire family.
And that’s where things should have remained.
Enter the first of several wild cards in this case.
George Wright was an acquaintance of the Stone family. A self-styled detective (with no actual professional credentials), Wright decided to join the throng of people at the Stone farmhouse, because he was a firm believer in the old canard that the criminal will always return to the scene of the crime to see what chaos he has created.
While there is a tendency for criminals to enjoy witnessing their scenes, the pretend detective was so convinced it was a natural law, he ruled out Anson Strong as a suspect simply on the grounds that the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t arrested him at the crime scene.
Wright lingered outside the Stone farmhouse for a couple of days, using his deductive brilliance to observe onlookers and decide at a glance whether or not they were suitable suspects.
It was on the second day that he identified one odd character, a teenage boy who kept returning again and again to the scene, gawking with a confused stare at the scene.
Finally the detective spoke to the boy, who identified himself as John Smith. The boy was shy, and apparently not too bright. He was obsessed with the details of the crime, telling Wright the details he had heard, and explaining that he used to work for the Stones.
As he listened, the detective watched the boy like a hawk. The nervous boy began to tremble – a sure giveaway!
Seeing the boy’s backward manner and his shaking hands, the detective combined that with what he knew of moral science and came to what was in his mind an inescapable conclusion.
Pale, pasty skin, unwashed hair, mumbling manner, shaking hands: these were the symptoms of a moral pervert! Wright knew he had to strike quickly.
“I know what you do,” he said to John Smith.
The boy was startled that the man had interrupted.
“W-w-what to you mean?” the boy stuttered.
“Your dull eye, your shaking hands,” the detective said. “Those are clear signs. You touch yourself while you have impure thoughts, don’t you?”
He further accused the boy of being obsessed with the youngest Stone daughter, and his perversion was what had driven him to murder. The boy was so shocked and upset, he could hardly speak, then began falling all over himself with apologies before he rushed away from the scene and returned to the Porters’ farm.
George Wright was exultant. The bumbling cops had arrested the wrong guy, and with his shrewd analytical intelligence, he had found the real killer.
He attempted to speak with investigators on the scene, but they ignored him. Early the following morning, he telephoned Prosecutor Wannamaker’s office and finally got through to a sympathetic ear.
Wannamaker was very interested in what this self-styled detective had to say.
If there was one thing that he regarded as more important than anything else, it was delivering on his campaign promise to rid Summit County of perverts, a theme which he knew resonated with voters, and one which bothered him personally.
He decided they’d have to at least question John Smith.
At the Porter farm, investigators demanded to speak to the boy. Edward Porter said that the boy had never left his house the evening of the murders, and he knew so, because he was up with insomnia.
But that wasn’t good enough.
There was a dark stain on the boy’s pants, and he was just as nervous as they were told he would be.
It was time to interrogate him.
Before leaving the Porter farm, the detectives did a strip search of the boy, and that’s where Prosecutor Wannamaker realized that he had just struck gold.
When they forced the nervous, shaking boy to remove his clothes, they found something that changed everything. Beneath his work clothes, John Smith was wearing a very unusual article of clothing.
He was wearing the missing pair of Flora Stone’s underwear.
Wannamaker instructed the county investigators to put 17-year-old John Smith through the “sweatbox” treatment. For six hours, police detectives took turns grilling the boy relentlessly at the Stone farmhouse, where he had been shown the bloody crime scenes.
At 6 p.m., John Smith broke, with an uncertain confession. When the detectives insisted that they knew he did it, he finally gave in.
“If I did it, I don’t know it,” Smith said.
He also helpfully added that while he didn’t think he did it, he’d gladly stay in jail until they found the real murderer. He also confessed that his real name was Romie Cotell, and that he was from Turin, New York.
Satisfied that this cross-dressing sexual deviant was the true perpetrator, Wannamaker released Anson Strong from prison.
Strong returned to his sister’s house, where she had to have him removed a few days later because he was raving about being persecuted by sheriff’s deputies, which he claimed were crawling out of the walls and clawing at him.
Wannamaker was unimpressed, because now he had a pervert to prosecute.
Never mind that Romie Cotell quickly retracted his confession and said that the cops threatened him to get the confession.
Never mind that Cotell was smaller than the man Flora Stone described.
Never mind that when investigators asked her if the killer could have been “John Smith,” Flora replied that she didn’t think so.
She said that the voice sounded familiar, but the intruder was more massively built than John Smith.
Wannamaker was unmoved, and suggested that Flora should think it over, because there was now evidence that the young man was a pervert. Wannamaker hated the people he regarded as sexual deviants, and he was going to throw the book at this one.
Romie’s family from upstate New York was contacted after the boy’s true name came out.
His father and brother said they would come as soon as they could raise the money for train tickets.
They said there must be some terrible misunderstanding. Romie was a shy and quiet boy, no that sort of monster who could do these sorts of crimes.
When it further came out in the press that Romie’s confession didn’t even match up key details in the case until investigators corrected and coached him on what to say, public opinion started to turn in favor of the unlikely suspect.
Or at least it did, until he confessed again.
Thanks to Kristin Rodgers, Collections Curator, Medical Heritage Center, Health Sciences
Library, The Ohio State University.