In 1927, in an effort to pick up some extra business, Nevada reduced its residency requirements for divorce from six months to three. The strategy worked beautifully; divorce cases in Nevada rapidly increased by a healthy 250%. It was a brisk business. One reporter noted that Reno’s famous “Judge George A. Bartlett is said to hold the national divorce mill record of 26 decrees signed in one day.”
A great many out-of-staters were attracted by Nevada’s newly offered “divorce package,” whereby spouses could travel from out of state – with children if they had any – and pay for services that would often provide the litigant with life-time alimony and custody of the children – with few questions asked.
When Mrs. Emma A. Warren tried out divorce court in California she failed to prove she had a bad husband or an unfit parent. So Mrs. Warren packed up daughter aged 7 and son aged 4 and fled to Reno, taking up residence in the infamous Hotel Riverside, preparing to give routine – and routinely tolerated – perjured testimony that she had moved there as a permanent resident and had not gone there just to finagle a one-sided court case.
When Van Court Warren, noted geologist, discovered his kids were missing he drove straight to the divorce mill, found his children with their nurse on a sidewalk in crowded downtown Reno, gathered them into his car, and drove off for their California home.
But Mrs. Warren had prepared for that, having hired one Fred Jackson, private detective, who was following the children at a 50 yard distance. As the automobile with its three occupants sped off Mr. Jackson let loose what Reno newspapers described as “a fusillade of bullets” at the fugitives. Luckily, boy, girl and dad, escaped puncture – and drove on to California. The divorce mecca’s police saw no good reason to criminalize the trigger-happy gumshoe for just trying to do his well-paid job.
Father, daughter and son reached home safely despite being briefly detained by California police near the border in response to phoned-in requests by the wife and her hired gun. Mrs. Warren however managed to win her divorce and custody case anyway without the presence of her homebody husband. The ex parte divorce was finalized in Reno on Feb. 28, 1928.
Four months later, California Judge Leon R. Yankwich declared the Warren divorce invalid on the grounds that Mrs. Warren had violated both California law and Nevada residency requirements by filing divorce in a state where none of the parties had ever been legitimately domiciled. It was the first ruling by a court in a home state relating to the new long-distance Reno divorce scheme. Judge Yankwith’s ruling upset quite a lot of people including, sad-to-say, a whole battalion of itchy Hollywood stars.