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    A Jazz Age Murder in Northwest Indiana: The Tragic Betrayal of Nettie Diamond
    A Jazz Age Murder in Northwest Indiana: The Tragic Betrayal of Nettie Diamond
    A Jazz Age Murder in Northwest Indiana: The Tragic Betrayal of Nettie Diamond
    Ebook212 pages2 hours

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

    By Jane Simon Ammeson

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 1, 2015
    ISBN9781625850188

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      Book preview

      A Jazz Age Murder in Northwest Indiana - Jane Simon Ammeson

      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

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