“You’ll End Up With a Bullet in Your Brain.” The Murder of Harry Rohm – 1930

“I told Harry Rohm that if he didn’t check his wild life with women he’d end with a bullet in his brain’” said Benjaman Lovenstein. Lovenstein spoke to a reporter from the Richmond Times-Dispatch in his home on Rosewood Avenue and said, “I told him months ago. It was my duty to tell him. He didn’t heed the advice and his end was no surprise to me.” Even more poignant than his lawyer’s unheeded warning, Rohm had sat in the same room just the day before, talking with Lovenstein about an automobile accident in North Carolina where Rohm was at fault. When Harry Rohm said goodbye to his lawyer that night and walked off on Rosewood Avenue, he had about one hour to live.

 

Harry Rohm (1884-1930), from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 5, 1934.

 

Both Rohm and his wife, Rosa, were born in Russia and immigrated to the United States. They were married in 1903 in Kiev, Ukraine, when she was 19 and he was 20. They had two children, Anne and Morris. Harry was characterized as an honest and successful businessman, dealing in wholesale leathers in a store at 414 East Marshall Street. Although he was Jewish, Harry was a loyal member of the Elks Club whose local chapter seems to have been more liberal than most regarding non-Christian members. He also donated to Zionist groups promoting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Harry enjoyed local fame for his behavior after a bankruptcy by hosting a dinner for all his debtors and leaving a check for what he owed each one of them under their plate.  “Harry Rohm was genuine,” said his lawyer. “He was just and generous in his business dealings. He could have had made no enemy from that standpoint.” However, Harry Rohm had one truly fatal flaw: “He was liberal and kind to his family, but seemed completely irresponsible when it came to woman companions. He couldn’t give them up.” After 25 years of marriage, Rosa was granted a divorce on the grounds of adultery in March 1929, only to marry Harry again less than a year later.

 

The tree-shaded 2400 block of Rosewood Avenue where Harry Rohm strolled home on his last evening in May 1930. The Editorial Board of the Shockoe Examiner decided to not publish the exact address in respect for the privacy of the current owners of the former Rohm residence.

 

On May 12 Harry walked home from his visit to Benjamin Lovenstein’s house, a block away from the Rohm residence on Rosewood Avenue. Both the lawyer and his wife were alarmed by Harry’s haggard and worried expression and twice during the discussion of his legal problems, tears welled up in Harry’s eyes. Rosa and her children were out that evening visiting friends, so Harry was alone in the house when he answered the doorbell some time before 11:00 PM. When Rosa and her daughter returned to the house later that night, they were horrified to find Harry sprawled face down in the front hall in a puddle of blood. He had been shot three times: one bullet had passed through his wrist as though his arm had been flung up in a vain attempt to shield himself from the inevitable, and the bullet lodged in his shoulder. The second shot was cleanly in the heart, knocking Harry down. The third shot appeared intended as a coup de grace, where the murderer carefully aimed at Harry’s ear as he lay on the floor with the bullet going completely through his head.

Richmond police flooded the scene after responding to Rosa Rohm’s frantic phone call and searched the house and neighborhood for a weapon. None was found, nor was there any sign of robbery. Harry had a fair amount of money in his pocket and nothing in the house was disturbed. His family all were able to account for their whereabouts when the murder occurred. No suspects in the crime were named. After Harry’s body was taken to Bliley’s funeral home, his bloody clothing was searched for clues. Neatly folded in Harry’s vest pocket were notes in a woman’s handwriting on a distinctive blue paper. “You are the only one I love, dear Harry, always,” read one note. “Don’t you think we had a nice time tonight, dear?” The second said, “I’m not going home yet, Harry dear, because I love you and don’t give a damn.”

Some theorized that Harry was the victim of a dispassionate professional hitman. However, his lawyer insisted that jealousy was the cause of a notorious womanizer. “Women had become an obsession with Harry Rohm,” said Harry’s chatty lawyer, Lovenstein. “He couldn’t give them up. An affair with some woman was the cause of his death, whoever did the killing.” Indeed, it was revealed that Harry maintained a cabin in Essex County as a location for his assignations and often drove there with a female companion. 

 

When not womanizing, Harry Rohm (on the right) enjoyed fishing the Chickahominy River. Here he is pictured with his buddies a year before his murder. Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 14, 1929.

 

Nine days after the murder of Harry Rohm, the top officers of the Richmond Police Department, met with Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave E. Satterfield, Jr., telling the press that “Eliminating a maze of clues generated by Rohm’s reported attention to many woman, they have followed what they believe to be a well-designed course, and the result may be an arrest.” So imminent was the arrest of a suspect that the Richmond officials said they expected to announce it the very next day.

By the end of the following week, it was obvious that no progress had really been made. The mysterious notes in Harry’s pocket were never mentioned again in newspaper articles about the case. Frustrated in their search for the murder weapon and without any solid clues except for Harry’s now-famously checkered history with women, police drained the seven-acre Shields Lake in Byrd Park, only 200 yards from the Rohm home, thinking that was a logical place to dispose of a weapon. Detectives donned hip boots and sloshed around in the mud flats in the hope of discovering the murder weapon, but nothing was found. 

 

Shields Lake in Byrd Park was drained and searched for the gun that was used to shoot Harry Rohm.

 

The end of Harry Rohm was uncomfortably reminiscent of the death of Walter Raleigh Robins, another Richmond businessman who was gunned down in the front hall of his home four years earlier. The Shockoe Examiner examined this unsolved murder in 2024.  

By May 20, Richmond Police Chief of Detectives, Captain W. S. Wright announced that he was conferring with the Commonwealth’s Attorney and that the compiled evidence has been put in his hands, but still no arrest had been made. The Richmond Times-Dispatch noted that this “…indicates this is a mystery no longer; that detectives have good and sufficient reason to suspect someone as the murderer, but the necessity of the conference shows a possible doubt that the evidence so far unearthed is adequate for conviction.” 

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 4, 1930.

 

It wasn’t until early September that the police finally announced a break in the case: a gun had been recovered from a Richmond pawn shop, sent to a lab in Washington, and positively identified as the murder weapon and traced to its owner. “An arrest is expected in a few days,” predicted the police. On September 18, it was announced that enough evidence had finally been collected to present to a Grand Jury meeting in October. “Meanwhile, if the police can establish ownership of the pistol, there is little doubt but what an arrest will be made before the meeting of the Grand Jury,” maintained a Richmond newspaper. Instead, on October 5, Richmond officials were forced to admit even though they had the murder weapon in hand, they still didn’t have enough evidence to proceed to the grand jury. Who owned the gun or pawned it was not revealed. There were never any arrests in the murder of Harry Rohm, nor was anyone ever named as a principal suspect. 

 

The grave of Harry Rohm beside that of his wife, Rosa in Richmond’s Sir Moses Montefiore Cemetery.

 

The Elks club has an annual Memorial Service which is always set for the first Sunday in December, and among the roll of members who died in Richmond in 1930 can be found the name of Harry Rohm. Accounts of the hunt for his killer fell from the newspapers as Richmond moved into the Great Depression and the case of the murdered philandering businessmen was overcome by news of looming economic disaster. In 1934, a Richmond newspaper ran a series of articles about unsolved crimes under the title, “The Men They Didn’t Get.” The author of the series was highly critical of the Richmond Police, titling one article in the series, “Murderers, Robbers, Confidence Men Undetected Brand Richmond ‘Easy Pickings.’ Among the accounts of once-sensational robberies and murders in Richmond that were never solved was one titled, “Who Murdered Harry Rohm? Killer Still Evades Penalty.” The article revisited the circumstances of the case, sarcastically recounting all the occasions the police said they were on the verge of an arrest.

Rosa Rohm was still living with her son Morris in the house where her husband was murdered when she died in 1946. They must have daily crossed the front hall floor where Harry once lay face-down in a puddle of blood. Morris continued “H. Rohm & Co.,” a wholesale leather business at 311 North Second Street after his father’s death. Harry and Rosa’s graves, side-by-side in the Sir Moses Montefiore cemetery, signal nothing of their stormy relationship, the heartbreak and betrayal of an unfaithful spouse, let alone the searing memory of Harry’s violent death in the hands of a murderer that was never caught. Some of Richmond’s secrets will forever remain unknown, but somewhere out there, somebody once knew exactly what took place when Harry Rohm answered his doorbell on that May night in 1930.

 

-Selden