Only fools fall in love.

Maintaining boundaries with novel sources of information.

Aug 06, 2025

This is the fourth in a series on Commonwealth v. Russ. Prior installments are here, here, and here.

Oscar F. Russ was held for two days at the police station before his first court appearance on August 25, 1915. His parents were in the courtroom when he arrived, handcuffed, in jacket, tie and straw boater.1 His mother collapsed when she saw him.2

Oscar responded to questions, waived examination, and pled not guilty. Press reports describe him as “calm” or “cool,” during this hearing; it is unclear how much he understood what was happening, as he was unrepresented at the time.

Mr. Russ might have assumed he was going to be released; the day before, after all, the police had verified his alibi. He’d left Centre Street before 7:00 AM, and worked painting a house on High Street, in Brookline, until 5:30 PM.

Mr. Russ might not have been informed that the medical examiner had just released the results of the autopsy. The Boston Evening Transcript reported on this as follows:

On Monday evening Russ returned home from Brookline, where he had been working all day, and found his wife lying on the floor in the front room of their apartment, with a rope around her neck, her throat cut, and his razor lying on her breast.

At that time it was thought that Mrs. Russ had been dead no longer than an hour, and as the police were able to prove that her husband had been in Brookline all day, his innocence was supposedly established. Medical Examiner Magrath and Associate Examiner Waters, however, who performed the autopsy, find that at the time of her husband’s return to Roxbury Monday night, Mrs. Russ had been dead from six to twenty-four hours.3

The Boston Globe represented that they’d been given a tighter window — six to eight hours.4 The police also suggested, to the press, that they’d learned the couple’s home life was “not as pleasant” as they’d been led to believe.

After only forty-eight hours, the police had their theory. A contentious marriage. A jealous husband, who was the only suspect. And medical testimony to back it all up. If Emilie Russ died more than twelve hours before she was found, Oscar Russ was guilty.

Oscar Russ needed a lawyer.

Morris Katzeff was born into a Yiddish-speaking family in Riga, in what is now Latvia, on February 4, 1885.5 He emigrated to the United States in 1908,6 and began practicing law in 19147.

Mr. Katzeff likely spoke German — or possibly Latvian — well enough to communicate with Oscar, John, and Elizabeth Russ.8

Oscar and Morris were born in the same city, four years apart; emigrated to the United States, three years apart. Married two years apart. Both were fathers of young daughters. Zelda Katzeff was only eight months older than Vina Russ. Oscar and Morris were the same height,9 had the same build10, eye color11, and hair color.12

Despite the above, nothing in the papers, or the historic record, suggests that Morris Katzeff saw himself in Oscar Russ. Oscar Russ was working class. He’d always worked with his hands. Census records suggest that his family took in boarders. Mr. Russ’ mother charged him rent, when he lived at home, which he sometimes couldn’t pay.

By contrast, Mr. Katzeff was educated, middle-class to upper-middle13 class, interested in business, investing,14 real estate, and active in a number of causes.15 He was anti-lynching, pro-refugee, pro-immigration, and in favor of freedom of speech and association.

First mentions of Mr. Katzeff’s involvement in the Russ case appear in September of 1915. After Oscar’s arraignment in Roxbury District Court, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children initiated an action to have Vina adjudicated “delinquent” or “neglected,” which would permit the Commonwealth to take her into custody.16

Mr. Katzeff obtained a writ of habeas corpus to permit Mr. Russ to attend the hearings.17 Mr. Russ was allowed to hold and kiss his child; newspapers described this as a tearful reunion, and noted that Mr. Russ looked much worse than he had when arraigned in September.

But thirty-year-old recent graduate Morris Katzeff wasn’t the only attorney for Oscar Russ.

First chair at trial was Wendell P. Murray. Mr. Murray emigrated to the United States from New Brunswick at the age of two, in 1878.18 Mr. Murray first rose to prominence bringing suit on behalf of a fifteen-year-old orphan who was suspected of theft, interrogated, and strip-searched at school.

Desperately well-connected, Mr. Murray didn’t appear to practice criminal law, apart from this case. And, although Mr. Murray was mentioned far more frequently in the press, before and after this trial, than Mr. Katzeff, the coverage was about his clients. There’s less to say about him, almost: He lectured.19 He taught.20 He was a mason, perhaps. He might have been interested in spiritualism, or seances. He was against the death penalty.

Oh.

And he wrote a book.

Privately21 published in 1940, the forward describes the goal and aim of the book:

Morris Katzeff, Esq. and I […] acted as counsel for the defendant in the trial of Oscar F. Russ, charged with murder of his wife Emily. Although the form of this book is that of fiction, the facts recited are those appearing at the trial.

[…]

The purpose of this book is to carry out the uncompleted task of obtaining due consideration of these facts; and it is hoped thus to establish the innocence of the accused and to clear him of the charge under which he has so long lain.

Holy shit, though.22

Though the facts recounted above may seem a little frothy, a little gossipy, a little soft, gathering demographic information on the attorneys for Oscar Russ served a practical purpose.

The procedural posture of the case meant that defense-friendly facts wouldn’t be recounted in the case report from the Supreme Judicial Court. Newspaper accounts were a bit mannered, and occasionally conflicting.

My search for information on the attorneys — and I also dug into the judges, the experts, and others — was for the purpose of reverse-engineering a sort of curriculum vitae for each. People talk about major cases. They write about them. My hopes were modest; perhaps scraps of identifiable matter in an academic paper, bits of transcript in an article, interview in an alumni magazine.

Not, by any means, a whole book.

But. Reservations. Caution. A novel is not a transcript. Or an academic paper. Or a public record or a scrapbook of newspaper clippings.

Public records, newspaper accounts, court documents — my bread and butter, really — have predictable inputs, and outputs, and known or discernable sources of information.

For example, when the Supreme Judicial Court issued its decision in Commonwealth v. Russ, the information in that decision came from briefs and an appendix consisting of transcripts or a summary of testimony23, possibly exhibits or descriptions of exhibits, and a docket sheet.

Appellate decisions can get facts wrong — they’re concerned with accuracy in the law, not whether the neighbor’s name was O’Donnell or O’Connor — but usually only about as wrong as they were presented by the attorneys, or the lower court.

Vital records, similarly, are the result of a known process, with predictable data sources. A marriage certificate is filled out by the officiant; names will be correct as reported, the date of marriage, the place24. Census data is the result of a census-taker going door-to-door and asking; number of occupants and relationships will be correct, ages only as accurate as reported by the informant. Names may be wildly misspelled, personal history jumbled.

Even newspaper accounts of trials, in the newsprint-dredged early twentieth century, were the result of a reporter physically sitting in a courtroom and listening. Matter might be incomplete, names misspelled, procedures misunderstood, but what was said and who was there, likely, will be broadly correct.

A novel, though. Privately published, twenty-four years after the fact. No clear data source. Mr. Murray could have been writing from his notes, or file materials, retained for decades; he could have been going off his own memory.

Reviewing even the forward, deviations from the record can be noted: Mr. Murray represents that he and Mr. Katzeff were hired in the winter of 1914-1915. This date is wrong. Emilie Russ died in August of 1915; he began representing Oscar Russ in September of 1915, and the trial was in February of 1916.

Flipping through the book, names have been changed. Emilie’s sister is given a slightly different surname, as have the upstairs neighbors.

Caution is required.

A rare book. Motivated by the need to right a wrong. Purporting to contain the facts as set forth at trial. Containing the rest of the story. You can’t ask me not to love it.

But I will do my best not to fall in love with it.

Case of Russ Continued for Hearing Until Wednesday, September 8. Boston Globe, August 25, 1915.

Id.

Russ Held For Murder, Boston Evening Transcript, August 25, 1915.

Will Present Evidence Today – Police Still Holding Russ on Suspicion. Boston Globe, August 25, 1915.

Later in life he’d occasionally give his birth year as 1887. If this was vanity, it bothers me none.

When Mr. Katzeff was born, Riga had a Jewish population sufficient to maintain a number of Jewish schools that taught in Russian, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. During Mr. Katzeff’s lifetime, many from Riga immigrated to the United States. Nearly all Jewish people remaining in Latvia were killed about one year after Mr. Katzeff’s death, in October and November of 1941.

It seems as if, during this era, it was common to start law school while practicing law, take the bar, then finish law school. Both Mr. Pelletier, the prosecutor, and Mr. Katzeff, the defense attorney, are reported to have passed the bar during school, and graduated later.

Riga, although part of the Russian Empire, was undergoing a transformation in the last decades of the 19th century. Germans, long a majority, in that city, began to move out; Latvians began to predominate. The Russ family’s primary language was German, per census records.

5’6

Medium.

Brown.

Black, or “Dark.”

Mr. Katzeff would file bankruptcy in 1936, four years before he died.

After the Russ trial, Mr. Katzeff took on other causes. He spoke out against lynching and in favor of immigration. See Protest Lynching at Great Meeting, Boston Globe, December 14, 1917; Immigration Law Opposed by the Jews, Seattle Union Record, August 27, 1921.

Public records suggest that Mr. Katzeff invested in real estate, and took an interest in reselling or selling the inventory and machinery of dissolved or dissolving businesses, even prior to law school.

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