Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Roy D’Autremont turned out to be a left-handed lumberjack in his early twenties, 5'10'', 165 pounds, light brown hair, rolled his own cigarettes, very careful about his appearance. He also had not been seen since the train robbery—nor had his brother Ray or his other brother, Hugh.

  Arrest warrants were issued and a high-profile investigation followed, but enough time had passed to allow the D’Autremonts to establish themselves under new identities. They remained free men until 1927, when a sergeant in the United States Army identified Hugh D’Autremont as a soldier serving in Manila. From there they were able to find the brothers, working in a steel mill in Ohio. All three confessed, and were sentenced to life in prison. Roy went crazy in prison, and a lobotomy was performed on him in 1949. Hugh developed stomach cancer, and was paroled shortly before his death in 1958. Ray’s sentence was commuted by the governor of Oregon in 1972, and he lived peacefully, painting and writing, until his death in 1984.

  In the third week of February, 1927, as they lay abed in the Waldorf Hotel, Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray formed a plan to dispose of the lady’s husband.

  They decided on a sash weight.

  Ruth and Albert Snyder worked together in the art department of Motor Boating magazine. He was the art editor, fourteen years her senior; she was his assistant. They had a nine-year-old daughter, a house on Long Island, and a bad marriage. At 32, she liked to get out on the town. He didn’t. They fought. According to Ruth, Albert had threatened repeatedly to throw her out of the house.

  She was introduced to Henry Gray at a fashionable New York City restaurant. They violated the Seventh Commandment and the Eighteenth Amendment with equal energy. As Henry would tell it, he drank heavily almost every time they were together—in Kingston, in Schenectady, in Albany and Amsterdam, in Watertown and Syracuse, in Booneville and Gloversville, at the Snyders’ home in Queens Village. A traveling corset salesman, he knew every gin joint and cheap hotel in the Hudson Valley. She once arranged to make a ten-day trip with him, and try them out.

  She began to talk about offing the old man. Snyder was insured for a small fortune, with a double indemnity clause in some of the contracts. Henry kept saying it was up to her. She had tried several times to do the job, once with sleeping powder, once with bichloride of mercury. She tried gas; she tried tampering with the brakes. Nothing easy seemed to work.

  They decided on a sash weight. A window weight, you know; one of those heavy things that was used to balance a window. They had backup plans.

  On March 4 Henry went to an out-of-town hardware store, and bought a sash weight and some picture wire. He ventured out to Long Island on March 7, murder in mind; Mrs. Snyder sent him away, saying that the time was not right. (This incident provided the basis for the double images in one of the classic fictionalizations of the Gray/Snyder murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice.)

  On the evening of March 19, 1927, a Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. Snyder went to a party given by some neighbors. The hostess remembered that Mrs. Snyder had hardly anything to drink, but was careful to see that her husband was well lubricated. She had left the front door unlocked, and a side door as well, should that prove to be more handy. Gray hid in a spare bedroom.

  Ruth had left a small bottle of whiskey for him. He drank that, then looked around for more. He found another quart, and drank most of it.

  Sometime about midnight the Snyders came home. Albert fell asleep on his bed. Mrs. Snyder met Gray in the spare room, and kissed him. Gray set upon Snyder with the sash weight.

  Here their stories begin to part. Gray said that after he struck one or two initial blows, he passed the hardware to his woman, who belabored him with it. This was his term—she belabored him with the sash weight. She denied this. In any case, Mr. Snyder sat up in bed, and the three began a drunken, mortal combat. Gray had a handkerchief soaked in chloroform, which he pressed to Snyder’s face until the unfortunate man passed out. One of them put the picture wire around his neck and wound it tight, to ensure that he would not recover.

  Afterward they went downstairs and drank some more whiskey, and talked about the perfect crime. They pulled out some drawers and dumped stuff on the floors to fake a robbery. Gray walked to the railway station a little before dawn, where he caught a taxi back to Manhattan, leaving Ruth bound with tape. When her daughter came downstairs in the morning Ruth sent her next door to summon the police.

  The police had a million questions, seemed like obvious questions to them. How had the burglar entered the house? What were all these empty liquor bottles doing around, and isn’t that whiskey on your breath? Did he tie you up first, and then go commit the assault, or the other way around? Did you scream? Is that blood? What’s this railroad ticket we found in the spare bedroom? Was your husband insured? Where did the picture wire come from? Was the burglar carrying chloroform and picture wire with him?

  They had more questions for the neighbors. The neighbors had some stories to tell. Within hours, Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray were both under arrest, both singing like troubadours, and each blaming the other for the series of events which had swung tragically out of control.

  They were put on trial about a month later. It was probably the most publicized murder trial in American history up to that point, surpassing even the Hall-Mills case, setting a standard not to be unsettled until the Lindbergh baby trial. One hundred twenty newspaper reporters arrived on the first day of the trial, many of them with secretaries; there were also “novelists, preachers, playwrights, fiction writers” and miscellaneous celebrities. The case captured the imagination of New York theater crowd, and many of the most prominent actors, directors, writers and producers of the day attended the trial.

  The case was, essentially, the Amy Fisher affair of its time. As in the Amy Fisher case, two lovers had an inconvenient spouse who became the target of violence. As in the Amy Fisher case, there was no real mystery to be resolved; the case appealed more as a soap opera than as a puzzle. The “mystery” of Snyder/Gray was in sorting out the charges and counter-charges of the culprits, the chronology of villainy, the balancing of blame between two people neither of whom was clothed by a wisp of innocence.

  The jury deliberated less than two hours, and sentenced them both to the electric chair. They were executed on January 12, 1928. A newspaper reporter—one of twenty witnesses selected from 1500 applicants—smuggled in a tiny camera, strapped to his leg, and took a picture of Ruth Snyder at the moment the electricity surged through her.

  James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, a popular novel that became the basis of another classic film noir, was also based very directly on the Snyder/Gray case. Damon Runyon covered the trial for King Features Syndicate. He wrote brilliantly, at the peak of his powers, though on occasion his descriptions seem over the top. His articles about the trial were put together by Richard Glyn Jones for the 1987 anthology Solved (Famous Mystery Writers on Classic True-Crime Cases), and these provide the most readable account of the crime that is, or might be, still in print.

  No other crime has been so often retold and re-invented by Hollywood. The 1981 film Body Heat, although a seventh-generation copy of the original, bears an unmistakable debt to the Snyder/Gray phenomenon. Ruth Snyder was not quite a beautiful woman, but she was handsome; a movie star could play her. Judd Gray was not quite William Hurt, but he suited the part of the rogue lover. That frantic, bloody struggle in the middle of the night, a small girl asleep in a nearby room—that was everything the movies made it out to be, and something awfully more.

  The four most famous crimes of the 1920s, in order of their contemporary news coverage, were 1) the Snyder/Gray case, 2) the Hall/Mills case, 3) the Loeb/Leopold “Thrill Killing,” and 4) the Sacco and Vanzetti case. I have nothing to say about Loeb and Leopold, and perhaps you’ll forgive me for skipping that one. There was also the Scopes Monkey Trial, but … that’s not a real crime story.

  Setting aside Sacco and Vanzetti, there is something fantastically lightweight about these stories
. It is not that America lacked serious crime. Organized crime was dramatically more organized in 1929 than in 1920. There were 72 mob murders in Chicago in 1928. On February 14, 1929, seven men were lined up against a wall and gunned down in a garage in Chicago—the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In New York City Albert Anastasia organized Murder, Inc. It has been estimated that in their ten years of operation Murder, Inc., killed 400 to 700 people.

  Those were serious stories, but I am trying to write here about the serious consequences of the trivial events, the tabloid stories. Tabloid stories have been around at least since 1700 and are omnipresent around us today, but in some sense they reached their apogee in the 1920s, culminating, of course, in the Lindbergh case in the early 1930s. It was the golden age of something horrible. All of the big cities in 1920 had multiple daily newspapers. These newspapers competed with one another to nakedly exploit horrific human tragedies for their own profit.

  The great crime stories of the 1910–1920 era were vitally connected to the struggle for the nation’s soul. They had to do—almost all of them—with rich against poor, with labor against capital, with radicals against the establishment, with the South against the North, with the pacifists against the militants at the time of the Great War, with immigrants against natives. By 1922, somehow, most of that had simply vanished, at least from the crime stories. Looking back on it from 90 years later it seems almost like a miracle, as if all of these rifts were somehow suddenly healed by the nation’s prosperity. Things somehow jumped into packages. Labor split off from radicalism; fiery labor agitators were replaced by tough labor union professionals. Crime became organized and professional and horribly lethal, while “journalism” learned to package and market cheap, tawdry stories of cheating wives and spoiled rich kids who murdered for fun. The bomb makers and the bomb throwers were brought under control, not to resurface until the 1990s. I wish I could tell you what happened to America in 1921, but the truth is that I do not understand it, and I haven’t seen the evidence that anyone does.

  XIII

  The descriptions given to police in criminal investigations could be sorted into six levels.

  A Level One description is a description that would eliminate 90 to 99% of the population, but might include 1 to 10%.

  You may ask why we start at 90%. If it doesn’t eliminate 90% of the population, it’s not even a description. Just saying “it was a black female” … that eliminates 90% of the population, since only about 7% of the American population is black females. Just saying “it was a tall young man” eliminates 90% of the population, since only 50% of the population is male, 70% of the males are either children or men too old to reasonably be described as “young men” and only half of the remaining men can reasonably be described as “tall.”

  A Level One description is of use to the police in certain limited situations, given some other information. Suppose, for example, that a crime is committed by a tall young man in a parking lot, and we can surmise that it may have occurred in a dispute over a parking space. If the police can get a record of the cars in the parking lot, they can find those cars belonging to tall young men. It might give them ten candidates to have committed a crime, rather than fifty.

  In general, however, a Level One description is of little or no use in a police investigation, and there is almost no such thing as a situation in which a Level One description is helpful in a trial. A Level One description would include 100 to 1,000 people, even in a small town of 10,000.

  A Level Two description is a description that excludes 99 to 99.9% of the population, but includes somewhere between one person in a hundred, and one person in a thousand. A Level Two description is often of some use in a police investigation, but is still of very limited use in earning a conviction. Suppose, for example, that the person running from the scene is a black teenaged male, short and very overweight. That’s a Level Two description. Black Americans are 12–14% of the population. Teenagers are something less than 20% of that, thus 2–3% of the entire population. Half of those are male. Divide that by half again, to represent those who are shorter than average, and by half again, to represent those who might plausibly be described as overweight … you’re in the middle of the range, 1% to .1%. But at the same time, there are too many short, black male teenagers for the police to identify them all and question them all.

  Suppose that you know that the crime was committed by a white male about 30 years of age, short, in very good condition, with a moustache and acne. Again, that’s a Level Two description. About 40–45% of the population is white males. Roughly 10% of those are people who could plausibly be described as “about 30 years of age,” so that gives us 4–5% of the total population. Probably half of those are in good condition, so that is, let us say, 3% (we always estimate on the high side). Something less than half of those are men with moustaches, and something less than half of those have acne. You’re probably talking one person in 300, one in 500, who could meet that description.

  That gives the police somewhere to start, but again, you can’t really convict someone of a crime because he matches a Level Two description. On the 100-point scale that I outlined before, matching a Level Two description might be counted for one point. It’s there and you can consider it, but … it’s not really anything.

  Why are we doing this, you might ask? It is my experience, reading crime books, that people don’t think clearly about this issue. I have often seen cases in which the police got carried away with the fact that someone matched a Level Two description, and used that as a basis to start building a case around a suspect. I have occasionally seen cases in which there were very good descriptions of a suspect, which nobody paid any attention to because, apparently, nobody stopped to think through the issue of “How specific is this description?” I have often, in crime books, seen very good descriptions dismissed by the writer as loose or general descriptions. It seemed to me that it might be useful to sort descriptions into “Levels of specificity” in order to think more clearly about descriptions.

  A Level Three description, then, would be a description that excludes 99.9 to 99.99% of the population, but includes between one person in a thousand and one person in ten thousand. These would be examples of Level Three descriptions:

  • Suspect was described as a Caucasian male, 50 to 55 years of age, tall, athletic, blue eyes, gray hair, driving an older model pickup truck.

  • Suspect was described as a Caucasian female, 20–23 years of age, brown hair, brown eyes, about 5'7'', large breasted, extremely attractive, piercing in the nose and large tattoo on lower back.

  • Suspect was described as a Hispanic female, 45 to 50 years of age, extremely short, somewhat overweight, perhaps 4'11'' and 130 pounds, bushy eyebrows, wears glasses, blue painted fingernails.

  She wears glasses and paints her fingernails, but what if she switches to contacts and pink paint?

  Some elements of a description are “hard,” meaning that they can’t readily be changed, and some are “soft,” meaning that they can easily be altered. It’s a Level 3 (Soft) description, or a Level 2 (Hard) description, meaning that it’s a Level 2 description based on the things that can’t easily be changed.

  A Level Three description is often of some value to police, and is sometimes of real consequence in a trial. Still, a person can’t reasonably be convicted of a crime because he or she matches a Level Three description. On a 100-point scale, matching a Level Three description is perhaps worth 3 to 5 points toward a conviction.

  A Level Four description is a description that would exclude 99.99 to 99.999% of the population, but might still include between one person in ten thousand and one in a hundred thousand. These would be examples of Level Four descriptions:

  • Male Caucasian, 40–45 years of age, 5 foot 2 to 5 foot 5, thin, long, sandy-colored hair, large glasses, large, square face, smokes cigarettes. Looks a little like John Denver.

  • African-American male in his 20s, average height, muscular build, shaved hea
d, several gold teeth, gold earring in left ear, prominent scar on his neck. Very deep voice with perhaps a trace of a Jamaican accent.

  A Level Four description should be enough, in most cases, to bring the police to your door, but should not be enough to convict you, absent other information. If there’s a Level Four description of a criminal and you match the description, that’s probably 20% of what is needed to convict—thus, 20 points on a 100-point scale.

  A Level Five description is a description that would exclude 99.999% of the population or more, and would include one person in 100,000 or less. A Level Five description can be built out of a long string of elements such as those above, but more often contains one element that is fairly unique—a missing finger, a tattoo of a horse, a white streak in the hair, one green nipple, something like that. I remember reading a story about a basketball player who tried to hold up a grocery store in a small town in the Midwest, wearing a mask, and was recognized by the clerk.

  “Leonard?” asked the clerk.

  “How’d you know it was me?” asked the puzzled post player. He was seven foot tall.

  Even a Level 5 description, by itself, isn’t or shouldn’t be enough to convict you of the crime, but it puts you on the defensive. If you match a Level Five Hard description, you’re going to need an alibi.

  A Level Six description is a description that applies to only one person. Your fingerprints are a Level 6 description. Your DNA is a Level 6 description. If you are seen at the crime scene by a person who knows you and recognizes you, that’s a Level 6 description. A Level 6 description is an identification.

  A police investigation, in many cases, starts with a Level One or Level Two description, and tries to build onto it until it becomes a Level Six description, a positive identification.