The Insanity Plea

I promised a few more details about the life of George Remus here, before the presentation at the Price Hill Historical Society on October 7. Well, Remus was never arrested or charged with bootlegging, but he was convicted of tax evasion and spent a year in a federal penitentiary near Atlanta. Stories are that he had maid service and fresh flowers every day in this cell there. When he came back, he found that he had been betrayed by his wife, Imogen. She had taken up with the federal agent who had investigated him for tax fraud, and together they had sold the distillery and all the movable objects in the house. No one seems to know what happened to the money, but she filed for divorce, and on the day that the divorce became final—coincidentally, 82 years ago tomorrow, on October 6, 1927—Remus chased down her cab when it left the courthouse and shot her dead in Eden Park. He threw away the gun he used, and it was found the next spring near the gazebo during a children's Easter egg hunt. Remus served as his own defense attorney, and the prosecuting attorney for the city was Charles Taft, son of President William Howard Taft. Remus was the first lawyer to ever use a plea of insanity to successfully avoid being convicted on a murder charge. He was sent to a mental institution in Lima, but was out within a year, using evidence from his own trial to prove his sanity. When Remus was released from the asylum, he came back to the Cincinnati area and married again, living in relative obscurity in Northern Kentucky until he died in the 1950s. He is buried in a cemetery in Falmouth, Kentucky. But his fame lives on locally as well as nationally—was Remus the inspiration for “The Great Gatsby”? Tune in next time (I sound like an old radio serial, which reminds me, that would make a good subject for a blog) to find out more.