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. Part IV can be found at this link.
No sooner had Romy Cotell confessed to the triple murder of Alvin and Serena Stone and their hired man Ira Stillson, then he recanted.
Claiming the confession was gained under duress during a “sweat box” interrogation, Cotell said that he was innocent and could never do such a thing.
One can only imagine how many newspaper readers across Ohio read that and rolled their eyes.
Here, they surely thought, was another bad man trying to weasel his way out of the justice that was due to him. After all, what were the odds that he was really innocent?
The runaway’s father and brother from upstate New York said the 17-year-old was incapable of such violence. But the Summit County prosecutor said the boy was a sexual pervert, no?
Well, every criminal case is its own universe. Many people started to have doubts and a begrudging sympathy for Cotell began to emerge.
This scenario took place when the public learned of Cotell’s tragic family life of poverty, loss, abandonment, and abuse.
It all resulted in him running away to Ohio, where he fell into a world of trouble.
Moreover, opinions began to change when one of Romy’s elementary school teachers was interviewed for a court deposition. It was a remarkable story.
The teacher, W. J. Allyn, noted that the boy had a strange tendency to at times go completely blank and unresponsive. A few seconds, or sometimes minutes, later he would suddenly click back into conversation, apparently unaware that he had been “gone” just moments before.
Allyn added that he regarded the boy as a “freak,” and became alarmed that the boy’s skull was changing shape!
Allyn began taking weekly measurements of the circumference of the boy’s skull. To his shock, over the next months, the boy’s head expanded in size, particularly bulging along his forehead.
In his newspaper interview, the administrator neglected to indicate if the family was advised or if any medical treatment was sought. But as the school year went along, the boy’s skull stabilized, and the matter was apparently dropped.
What this astonishing story suggests is that Romy Cotell was suffering some sort of infection within his cranium, one that likely was warping his young skull and pressuring his brain. That scenario resulted in the absence seizures where he went blank.
In retrospect, it seems highly likely that Romy’s mother’s young death might be related.
Consider this possibility: What if Romy’s mother Florence had been ill with a venereal disease when she gave birth to her twin sons?
This could have passed the infection on to both of the babies. When Florence and the other twin, Remulus, died just a year or so later, it could be that both succumbed to the infection.
Romy, slightly stronger, survived it, but continued to be plagued by it. Considering the descriptions of Romy during the Stone farm murder investigations, it seems possible that he was still fighting it in 1896.
His poor, hard-scrabble life had done little to help him overcome these health issues. These new details swayed some people at first.
Reporters noted that in the early stages of arrest, Cotell seemed incapable of understanding how serious the situation was, smiling and talking about returning to work on the Porters’ farm.
After a week or so, though, the seriousness of his situation and the looming possibility of the death penalty sank in, and Romy become lonely and despondent.
That’s when the new wrinkle appeared.
A woman showed up at the jail identifying herself as part of a prayer group that wanted to help support the troubled young man. Romy thought this might be a good thing, as he had been rethinking what he stated was his previous atheism.
He was realizing that he might need some help to escape this scrape, so he welcomed the woman’s prayers.
And pray she did. She would enter Romy’s cell in the Summit County jail and spend hours talking and praying with him, bringing him gifts of flowers and tobacco.
She would sit beside him, and put her arm around him, holding him in a way he had almost never been held.
She would run her fingers through his hair and tell him that he was safe with her. She would whisper in his ear and tell him that she understood how difficult his life had been, and that he could tell her anything.
She suggested that even if he did those awful things, she would understand, and she would never leave him, never stop holding him and caressing him….
That’s how Romy Cotell managed to make his second false confession to the Stone farm murders.
The woman was, of course, not a prayer group member at all, but a self-styled detective from Cleveland named Marian Archer, who decided that she could nail down this criminal’s confession once and for all.
By giving him the emotional support and sensual excitement the boy had rarely, if ever, received, Archer was able to get him to confess all over again.
The news was explosive, and it sealed public opinion against Romy Cotell. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
Due to a legal technicality, though, the conviction was overturned.
In his second trial, Cotell was again found guilty by a jury, though the capital punishment fervor of the first trial had cooled.
This time, he was sentenced to life in prison and sent to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus.
He was isolated in the ward for prisoners in need of protection from the general population. There he remained for several years.
An interesting interview with a guard at the Pen appeared a few years later, in which the guard stated that he didn’t understand the talk about Romy Cotell’s health during his trial, because to him the young man seemed perfectly normal and intelligent.
Those were terms that had never been used for Romy before. What was going on?
My theory is this: By being isolated from potential bullying and harm, Cotell may actually have found prison beneficial.
Instead of living on the streets, he now had a stable, predictable home where he would receive regular meals and medical treatment.
Could it be that prison actually saved Romy Cotell’s life from the chronic infection that had threatened to kill him as it killed his mother and brother?
With a solid foundation and sufficient nutrition, he was able to kick the infection, and stabilize as a person both physically and mentally.
For the first time in his life, he was able to flower, and feed his intelligence with reading and conversation.
On the other hand, prison may have nearly killed him again. One of the chronic dangers of institutional settings are illnesses that sweep through the resident population and staff.
Vernon. (Image source: Wikipedia.)
In this way, Romy came down with a potentially even deadlier illness than the infection with which he entered prison: Tuberculosis.
Plagued by the deadly lung infection, Cotell was awarded trusty status, and judged responsible enough to be given an unusual option: to become a patient at the state tuberculosis hospital in Mount Vernon.
Finally, that’s how Romy Cotell, convicted triple murderer, came to be transferred to Knox County around 1912.
It is true that many people would have been alarmed and thought that the state was taking an unnecessary risk by putting a convicted murderer in an unsecured facility.
Yet a movement had already begun to grow over the years to overturn Cotell’s conviction.
Among those who believed Romy Cotell was not capable of murder were the guards and administrators who dealt with the smart, friendly boy on a daily basis.
But to end Romy’s sentence, it would take someone to lead the legal charge.
Remarkably, the lawyer who led the charge was one very close to Romy Cotell: his brother Jay.
Coming from the same impoverished background, Jay carried enormous guilt about not being able to protect and guide his brother.
Jay felt that if he could have stopped Romy from running away, his life would have turned out differently.
Therefore, he saw it as his duty to rescue his brother from prison. Jay went to law school to become a lawyer with the sole goal of getting his brother’s sentence overturned or at least commuted.
Once Jay had joined the bar and began filing legal papers, he found that he had a formidable opponent: Reuben Wanamaker, the prosecutor who had originally convicted Romy.
Wanamaker, now one of the most prominent judges in Ohio, went out of his way to file legal briefs advising against any change in Romy Cotell’s conviction, even attending parole hearings to physically impose his opinion on the parole board.
But as the years went by, Wanamaker’s supporters began to evaporate. More and more people pointed out how many details in Cotell’s supposed confessions didn’t match the known details of the case.
But plenty of circumstantial evidence did, however, point to Anson Strong, the man originally arrested for the murders.
While chief witness Flora Stone had been convinced by Wanamaker’s fervor to testify against Cotell, some sources claim that she later expressed doubts Romy was the perpetrator, admitting that she had seen a moustache and whiskers beneath the mask the intruder wore.
Cotell had neither, though Strong did.
Jay Cotell continued doing everything he could to bring about change.
Finally, when the state parole board met in 1914, Reuben Wanamaker declined to attend the hearing. With the Ohio Supreme Court Justice’s influence removed, the board voted to release Cotell from the Mount Vernon institution.
It is interesting to note that the legal system never overturned Cotell’s conviction, and Anson Strong died before any movement could be made to make him answer for the crimes.
The board decided to simply release Cotell and be done with the case.
That’s how a Mount Vernon newspaper reporter came to spring the news of Romy’s parole to him on June 2, 1914, before official channels had made it known.
Cotell dropped his watch in shock, shattering it. But within a few hours, he was being driven to the train station, a free man.
First, he tried returning to upstate New York, and, then, living with his brother in Chicago.
Unfortunately, both climates proved too difficult for a man who was still laboring with tuberculosis.
Finally, Romy moved to the dry climate of California, where he worked the rest of his life, first on farms, and then as a landscaper.
One evening in 1948, he sat down at his kitchen table to eat supper, and died in his chair before touching the food. He is buried in Tulare, California.
Is there ultimately any real chance that Romy Cotell was obsessed with Flora Stone and killed her family to get to her?
I don’t think so. I think he was fascinated by her, and, perhaps, by her femininity, not because he wanted to be with her, but more likely because he wanted to be her.
The key evidence that drove Reuben Wanamaker’s irrational case was finding Cotell wearing Flora’s underwear.
In Wanamaker’s eyes, that made Cotell a “pervert,” and a pervert — in his eyes — was capable of any kind of monstrosity.
But was Cotell truly a dangerous deviant, or simply someone who would fall today under the general LGBTQ umbrella?
Further proof comes from upstate New York where a newspaper article from the time of his return states that Cotell was always known as “a woman-hater.”
What does that mean?
Literally, it suggests a misogynist, but no other evidence points us that way.
Rather, I suspect it means that he had no interest in women whatsoever, because his true attraction was toward men.
Likewise, there is no indication that Romy’s interest in the deceitful female detective, Marian Archer, was sexual.
Rather, he just seemed overjoyed to have anyone hug him and treat him with kindness.
At the very least, “woman-hater” might suggest that Romy had developed a serious distrust of
women because of his experiences with Flora Stone and Marian Archer.
But I think it’s more than that.
Studies by queer historians have shown that Reuben Wanamaker appears to have had a real hang-up about what he called “perverts,” repeatedly arresting and prosecuting people who didn’t conform to his narrow definition of acceptable sexuality.
Methinks the gentleman did protest a little too much. One can’t help but wonder if Wannamaker was yet another of those politicians who proves guilty of the very things he’s always attacking.
Could his depression and ultimate suicide have been driven by his own deeply denied desires?
At this late date, we’ll never know for certain. But this case does show many signs of having been a miscarriage of justice driven by personal prejudice.
One caveat, though, remains.
Though remote, there is a practical possibility that even someone as gentle as Romy Cotell could, in theory, have been so distorted by a brain infection, that he could actually erupt in iolent acts that he would later barely be able to recall or comprehend.
It’s unlikely, but it’s not impossible.
A tiny chance remains that Romy Cotell could actually have been just the monster Reuben Wannamaker thought he was, and that this monster disappeared after the young man’s health stabilized.
I have to say that I don’t think this is a likely scenario.
But there’s just enough doubt to make a chill run down my back when I think about this case.