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

Jane Simon Ammeson

Jun 2015 · Arcadia Publishing

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.

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.