Queen City Crime: Salacious testimony from 1929 murder trial kept at UC rare books library

The hook: Tucked inside of a seemingly typical-looking library on the University of Cincinnati campus is a small, tattered booklet containing the transcripts of one of Ohio’s most salacious 20 ^th century trials. Between its faded covers is a tale of an illicit affair, tawdry sex and the downfall of an Olympic competitor.

It’s titled “The Murder of Theora Hix and Trial of Dr. James H. Snook,” and back when it was hot off the presses in 1929, it was a bestseller on the streets of Columbus, Ohio – where the shocking trial took place – and beyond. Today, it resides in UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library , an appointment-only section of the Blegen Library.

The people: James Snook was a revered professor of veterinary medicine at Ohio State University with an Olympic past: He’d competed as a member of the U.S. Olympic pistol team (yes, that’s still a thing ), winning a gold medal in the men’s 30-meter team military pistol event in the 1920 Olympics in Belgium.

After his Olympic gold, Snook continued to pistoleer as a hobby but focused his career on veterinary medicine, even inventing tools for his trade – including his most famous, a small surgical device to help in the neutering and spaying of dogs and cats. The device, called a Snook Hook, is still used today.

He was a married father in his early 40s when he met Theora Hix, a coed enrolled at the university. She was the daughter of Melvin Hix, a school principal and textbook author, and Joanna, a homemaker who’d viewed her daughter as a gift from God when, after years of not being able to conceive a child, she welcomed her first and only baby at the age of 41.

Teddy, as Theora was nicknamed, was an exceptionally bright student who flew through undergrad at Ohio State before entering its College of Medicine. She met Snook not by taking one of his classes, but rather by joining a paid stenography pool to make extra money. Because Snook wrote a lot, he often tapped the stenography pool to take notes and dictation. Soon, Hix caught his eye.

The relationship: One rainy day, Snook spotted Hix and a friend of hers walking outside so he offered the duo a ride. A week later, he offered Hix alone a ride in the country. They seemed an unlikely pair: Snook was a buttoned-up, staid-seeming professor, while Hix was more outspoken and ahead of her time. In an era when women comprised about 4% of American physicians, she was pursuing a medical degree. And while she was quiet and studious, she also had views on sex that couldn’t be reprinted in newspapers then – and would spare The Enquirer some outraged letters by not detailing them today.

Instead, here’s a sanitized overview: Hix was single and sexually active. On its own, that wasn’t unusual for the 1920s – about half of the women enrolled in college at the time admitted in polls that they were sexually active – but Hix was more experimental and open about her views than average.

After a few weeks of flirtation, Snook and Hix began a years-long affair. The professor even rented a room where the two could meet without raising suspicion.

The gruesome discovery: Hix shared a Columbus apartment with two roommates who were also sisters, Alice and Beatrice Bustin. While Hix didn’t share much about her personal life, the sisters at least knew that she was supposed to come home after a date with an unnamed beau June 13, 1929.

When she didn’t show, they weren’t immediately worried. By the next afternoon, however, they were concerned enough to report her missing at a police station.

Soon after, two teenage boys happened upon what appeared to be a bundle of fabric in the weeds at the New York Central Railroad rifle range, where they’d gone for target price. As they drew closer, they realized the bundle was the body of a woman wearing a high-end brown dress with a white collar. They fetched police, who turned over the body to discover the woman’s head had been crushed by what appeared to be a ball-peen hammer. Her throat had also been slit.

Police at first zeroed in on a past boyfriend of Hix’s, a man named Marion Meyers who had proposed marriage and been heartbroken when Hix laughed at the request. Meyers had an alibi and insisted he could never have inflicted the types of wounds Hix endured, but he gave police important information: the name of another of Hix’s lovers, whose entanglement with a student would ignite a nationwide scandal.

The confession: At first, Snook denied knowing Hix beyond having met her through the steno pool. But the police pressed, and soon came more details: Snook admitted he’d had a three-year affair with Hix, who was 24 when she died. Still, he maintained he had nothing to do with her death.

Then a woman stepped forward who said she recognized Snook and Hix from photos of them that ran in the newspapers. She’d known them as a married couple who paid weekly for a rented room from her. Snook admitted to renting the room but again said he had nothing to do with his lover’s murder.

That’s when the prosecutor, John J. Chester Jr., did something that would endanger a conviction nowadays: He ignored Snook’s pleas for his attorney and beat him, leaving red welts on each of his cheeks. Still, Snook didn’t confess. It was only after multiple beatings, and upon learning that Ohio State University had fired him for having an affair with a student, that Snook signed a full confession.

“I took a very strong liking to the girl, but I do want it understood that ours was not a silly little love affair,” Snook said. “I still love my wife and baby and want to see them happy.”

Snook said the affair had begun as a frivolity but evolved into an obligation he resented. The night Hix died, he’d told her that he planned an upcoming trip with his wife and baby. Hix demanded he cancel the trip, but he refused. He said her reaction was startling. She screamed, “Damn you! I’ll kill your wife and your baby! I’ll kill you, too!”

She reached for her purse, in which Snook knew she sometimes kept a handgun he’d given her as a gift. He was sure she was about to shoot him, he said, so he grabbed a ballpeen hammer inside of his car and bashed her repeatedly in the head.

As she staggered from the car, he realized she was too injured to survive but yet still alive, so he said he took a pocketknife and slit her throat, taking care to cut both her jugular vein and carotid artery to ensure a quick death.

The trial: Big-name reporters from the nation’s top newspapers and wire services arrived in Columbus to cover the so-called “Trial of the Century.” Snook took the stand and described his sex liaisons in such detail that newspapers deemed the testimony unfit for print.

The public clamored for those details, and a court stenographer knew a moneymaking opportunity when he saw one. He compiled the courtroom testimony from the trial into a soft-cover book and sold it at newsstands. Most copies were seized by angry protesters and police, but a few copies remain, including one on the UC campus.

The jury in Snook's trial took less than half an hour to find the professor guilty of murder. He spent his last day alive with his wife, sharing with her his final meal of fried chicken, lamb chops, mashed potatoes and ice cream. He was executed Feb. 28, 1930.

This case was featured in Amber Hunt's book " Crimes of the Centuries: The Cases That Changed Us." Hunt is host of the podcast Crimes of the Centuries and co-founder of the Grab Bag Collab podcast network.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Queen City Crime: Salacious testimony from 1929 murder trial kept at UC rare books library