Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  Fanny Adams

  Another very well-known name associated with Victorian murder is that of Fanny Adams, although this time she was the victim. Most people have used the expressed ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ on occasion, but how many actually know its origin.

  Fanny’s mother, Harriet Adams, had no reason to worry when her daughters wandered off to play with a friend on Saturday, August 24, 1867. Nothing much ever happened to disturb the rural tranquillity of Alton, Hampshire.

  Eight-year-old Fanny Adams and Minnie Warner wandered off down Tan House Lane accompanied by Fanny’s younger sister, Lizzie. Just as they were approaching Flood Meadow, they were approached by a man wearing a black frock coat, dark trousers and a light-coloured waistcoat. He offered Minnie three halfpence to go off and play with Lizzie and Fanny a full halfpenny if she would walk with him into the nearby village of Shalden.

  There was something creepy about the way the man looked at the girls and Fanny told him she didn’t want to go with him. Annoyed at the rejection the man promptly picked Fanny up and carried her to a nearby meadow well out of sight of the other children. By this time it was nearly 1.30 p.m.

  Lizzie and Minnie made their way home for tea at about 5.00 p.m. after having played all afternoon. As they passed one of the neighbour’s houses, a Mrs Gardiner leant over the fence and asked them where Fanny was. When the children told Mrs Gardiner about the man, the woman panicked, went to collect Fanny’s mother, and the pair ran up the lane in the direction the children had come from. When they got halfway up the lane they met the man that the girls had described and shouted at him: ‘What have you done with the child?’

  Keeping his composure, the man replied in a calm manner, ‘Nothing’, and continued to say he had simply given the girls some money to buy sweets, which was something he often did. He then told the women that when he had last seen Fanny she was fine and that he had watched her run off to join the other girls. The man explained that his name was Frederick Baker and that he was a clerk to a local solicitor, William Clement. The women said they were sorry for doubting him but they were worried because Fanny had not returned home. The two women were totally taken in by his composed manner and air of respectability and simply bid him farewell.

  When Fanny still hadn’t returned home by 7.00 that evening, Mrs Adams called on her neighbours to help her search for her daughter. When they found poor Fanny’s body lying in the middle of a hopfield, they were all sickened to their stomachs at the scene of carnage in front of them. It had been a sexually motivated assault that had turned into a frenzied butchery. In fact the attack had been so vicious that Baker had dismembered Fanny’s corpse – the severed head lay on two poles and had been deeply slashed from mouth to ear, her right ear had been cut off and both her eyes were missing. Nearby lay a leg and a thigh and it took several days for the police to find all of the remains that hadn’t been eaten by wild animals. Fanny’s eyes were later recovered in the River Wey.

  When George Adams heard of his daughter’s death he collapsed in grief and then reacted by taking his shotgun and heading off towards the hopfield where Fanny had been found. The neighbours, on seeing the glazed look in his eyes, decided to stop him and managed to prise the gun out of his hands.

  In the meantime, Frederick Baker was arrested at his place of work. As he was escorted back to the police station passing angry crowds that had gathered, he kept proclaiming his innocence. However, the twenty-nine-year-old clerk could not explain away the spots of blood on the wristbands of his shirt and on the front of his trousers. When the police searched him they found two small knives, one of them stained with blood, and Superintendent Cheyney was in no doubt that he had found the culprit. Cheyney locked Baker away in a cell while he went to check on his movement that afternoon.

  Witnesses confirmed that Baker had left his office just after 1.00 p.m. returning just before 3.30 p.m. They said he went out again until around 5.30 p.m. which was when Mrs Gardiner and Mrs Adams had seen him walking away from the hopfield. It would appear that he murdered Fanny at around 1.30 p.m. and then returned to the scene of the crime later the same afternoon to carry out further depredations on poor Fanny’s body.

  When Cheyney searched Baker’s office the following day, he discovered a diary which contained a damning entry stating that he had killed a young girl. On the hopfield, a local painter by the name of William Walker had found a large stone covered with blood and hair, which had been used as the murder weapon. After the coroner had the unenviable task of viewing the gruesome remains of Fanny Adams, Baker was remanded in Winchester Prison to await the formal committal hearing. The hearing was held at Alton Town Hall on Thursday, August 29, before local magistrates. Baker maintained his innocence throughout but, because of the horrific nature of the crime, a large crowd had gathered outside the town hall and the prisoner had to be protected from the angry mobs wanting his blood.

  The trial took place at Winchester Assizes on December 5, and the jury only took fifteen minutes to return a guilty verdict. A crowd in excess of 5,000 came to see him hanged outside Winchester Prison, a large proportion of them being women. A large cheer went up as the noose tightened around Baker’s neck at 8.00 a.m. on Christmas Eve 1867.

  It just so happened that the case of Fanny Adams coincided with the introduction of canned meat stew to the ranks of the British navy. As the contents of the cans were largely offal, fat and connective tissue, as opposed to good cuts of meat, it became a joke to suggest that they were parts of ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’. In time, the phrase came to mean something of little value or nothing at all – Sweet F. A. So it was that black humour had immortalised the name of an unfortunate murder victim.

  Winnie Ruth Judd and Ruth Snyder

  The word ‘ruth’ means kindness, hence the word ‘ruthless’ meaning the opposite. This is the story of two Ruths who both turned out to be capable of murder, just like Ruth Ellis – Winnie Ruth Judd and Ruth Snyder. Both committed their heinous crimes in the USA in the early part of the twentieth century. Judd turned out to be insane and spent most of her life under lock and key in hospital. Snyder was found to be guilty of malice aforethought and duly went to the electric chair.

  Winnie Ruth Judd, known as Ruthie, was the twenty-six-year-old wife of a fifty-six-year-old doctor. The couple had moved to Phoenix in 1930 in the hope that the warm, dry climate would alleviate some of the symptoms of Winnie Ruth’s tuberculosis. However, the elderly doctor was unable to find work in Phoenix and left his bored wife behind while he went in search of employment in Los Angeles.

  In an effort to try and kill the boredom of being on her own, Winnie Ruth made friends with two young women who shared a room close to where she lived. A short while after the doctor left Phoenix, one of the young women was taken ill and decided to return to her home town of Oregon to recuperate. Winnie Ruth said she would move in and take the girl’s place.

  This worked well until the girl returned from Oregon and tensions started to mount. Winnie Ruth decided it would be prudent to move out and rent another apartment, and this proved to be a wise move as the three girls remained close friends. They often went out socialising and it wasn’t unusual for Winnie Ruth to spend the night with her two friends.

  However, her two friends were not the only people with whom she shared a bed. Even before her husband had left Phoenix, Winnie Ruth had started a torrid affair with a notorious playboy by the name of Jack Halloran. Despite the fact that Halloran was married with three children, it didn’t stop him visiting Winnie Ruth and her friends almost every night, often bringing friends and plenty of illicit alcohol with him.

  One evening a violent argument broke out and the two young room-mates were shot to death. Winnie Ruth panicked and left, heading back to her own apartment. She had only been back a few minutes when she heard Halloran’s car pulling up outside. Halloran was very drunk while Winnie Ruth was hysterical and he found it hard to understand exactly what she was saying. When he eventually made sense through the uncontrollab
le sobs, he took Winnie Ruth back to the girls’ apartment where he took care of the bodies. He told her to clean up the mess while he stuffed one of the girls’ bodies into a trunk. One fitted easily, but he had difficulty in closing the second trunk and consequently had to dismember the body.

  The following day, Winnie Ruth had regained her composure and returned to work as a receptionist, resuming her normal duties. When she had finished for the day, Winnie Ruth repacked the second trunk, putting some of the body parts into a suitcase to try and reduce the weight. Then she asked her landlord to arrange for the trunks to be taken to the local train station, explaining that they were full of medical books that her husband had asked her to send.

  Winnie Ruth herself then went to the station and boarded a Union Pacific train to Los Angeles, after first checking the trunks onto the baggage car. She carried the suitcase containing the body parts and kept it by her side during the journey. What she hadn’t allowed for was the heat on the train and during the 400-mile journey the trunks in the baggage car started to give off an offensive odour. Added to this the baggage handler noticed a liquid oozing from the trunks which looked like blood, so when they arrived at Los Angeles station, he decided to report it to the station agent. When Winnie Ruth went to fetch the trunks, the agent refused to release them and asked for the key so that he could see what was inside. Winnie Ruth told the agent that she would have to go and get the key from her husband, and promptly disappeared. When the agent forced the trunks open he was appalled at what he saw; all he had expected were some carcasses from an illegal hunting trip.

  Winnie Ruth was found four days later sitting on a couch in a mortuary and a posse of heavily armed policemen escorted her back to Phoenix to await her trial. As she stepped back onto the streets of Phoenix, over 20,000 people lined the streets anxious to catch a glimpse of the now notorious murderess. The landlord of the apartments where the two girls had been murdered, made his own profit out of the crime by selling tickets to visit the scene of the crime.

  The press had a field day and Winnie Ruth became dubbed as the ‘Trunk Murderess’. She was tried for the murder of only one of the women – the one that hadn’t been dismembered – and was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. She was moved to the state prison in Florence to await her execution, but the warden petitioned to have a sanity hearing and she was ultimately saved from her fate. Just seventy-two hours before her scheduled hanging, Winnie Ruth was pronounced insane and taken to the Arizona State Hospital where, according to records, she became a model prisoner.

  Amazingly, she managed to escape from the hospital five times and in 1952, on her last spell of freedom, she returned when the administrator promised that she could appear before a grand jury. Her evidence regarding Halloran’s involvement in the crime was so convincing that the jury recommended that her death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.

  Ten years later, she walked out of the State Hospital once again and made her way to Northern California. She became the companion to a wealthy doctor and his wife, and managed to elude capture for a further six and a half years.

  Winnie Ruth Judd was released just before Christmas 1971, having spent forty years of her life in confinement. She returned to Phoenix in the 1990s where she lived under the assumed name of Marian Lane. She died peacefully in her sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-three.

  Ruth Brown Snyder was a discontented housewife who went looking for excitement, but I don’t think her search for thrills was meant to end up with her being executed in Sing Sing’s electric chair. Ruth was married to Albert Schneider, an art editor on the magazine Motor Boating. Albert was a conservative character who loved fishing and the outdoor life and had had one great love in his life, Jesse Guishard. Unfortunately Jesse had died of pneumonia before he could walk her down the aisle, and Albert had made his home a shrine to his ex-fiancée. He adored his mother and was prepared to do anything for her, but he felt at the age of thirty-two that life was slipping him by.

  Albert met Ruth when she was working as a telephone operator for a call centre. Albert had lost his temper with her when she failed to connect him to the number he requested, but regretted his outrage as soon as he had slammed the receiver down. To try and make amends he visited the call centre and asked to see the operator with whom he had lost his temper, and was taken aback when he was faced with the tall, blonde young woman with the sweetest smile. Smitten by Ruth, Albert started to meet her when she finished work and soon the couple were dating. However, Albert was frustrated as Ruth would not give in to his repeated sexual advances, but she told him she was a virgin and intended to stay that way until she became a bride. Eventually, possibly through frustration and loneliness, Albert asked Ruth to marry him. Ruth quickly accepted but said she had one request and that was that he change the spelling of his name to Snyder, as she felt it had more of an American ring to it. Albert agreed and the wedding went ahead.

  Right from the start the marriage had its flaws. Not just because of the couple’s age difference, but also because of Albert’s refusal to remove any of Jesse’s pictures and belongings from his house. Ruth found it hard living in the shadow of his past love and she was starting to find life a little dull to say the least.

  When at last she fell pregnant, Ruth felt everything would change and that perhaps Albert would become the loving husband and father she had hoped for. However, she was in for a shock when she told her husband the good news. Albert was most displeased and told her quite bluntly that he had never wanted children and when baby Lorraine was born, she drove a deeper wedge between the couple.

  In 1923 the Snyders settled in a substantial house in Queens Village, New York City. Ruth decided that she wanted to get out and socialise and invited her mother to come and stay so that she had someone to mind Lorraine. She started to attend parties and soon became a popular dinner guest with her witty talk and laughter. It was at one of these social occasions that she met a corset salesman by the name of Judd Gray. The couple were complete opposites – Ruth, now thirty-two, was tall, blonde and very good looking with an outgoing personality, whereas Judd was short, with a cleft chin, thick-lensed spectacles and, one could say, instantly forgettable. Despite these differences, there was a sexual attraction between them and it wasn’t long before Ruth and Judd embarked on a torrid affair, despite the fact that Judd was supposedly happily married with children.

  Albert, who was never at home during the day, left the way open for Ruth to fulfil her passions while her nine-year-old daughter, Lorraine, was attending school. She started to invite Judd round to her house and when that wasn’t convenient they had their illicit liaisons in a hotel, leaving Lorraine to sit and wait for her in the downstairs lobby or ride up and down in the hotel lifts to pass the time. It would appear that Ruth and Judd could not get enough of each other and they would go to any means to spend time together, with Ruth playing the dominant role.

  Soon the affair was not enough for Ruth and she started making outrageous accusations about her husband to Judd. She accused him of treating her badly and tried to convince her lover that Albert had to be disposed of. When Judd recoiled in disgust at her suggestions, Ruth would use her womanly ways to talk him round to her way of thinking. However, Ruth went too far with her persistence and she drove her lover to drink, until he spent much of his time inebriated on large amounts of Prohibition liquor. Judd continued to refuse to go along with her plans, that is until Saturday, March 19, 1927, when he had simply had enough and decided to give in.

  They devised a plan, which they thought would be foolproof (but which turned out to be foolhardy), to murder Albert. Judd caught the train from Syracuse to New York and then took a bus to Long Island, and walked to where the Snyders lived in Queens Village. He had been drinking for most of the day, but his nerves still got the better of him and he hung around outside the house for a long time before daring to go in. He eventually plucked up the courage and entered through the back door, as previously arranged. Ruth,
Albert and their daughter Lorraine were out attending a party, and Ruth had told Judd to go and hide in the spare room until they returned later that night. Inside the room Judd noticed that Ruth had laid out the ‘tools of their trade’ – a heavy sash window weight, a bottle of chloroform and a pair of rubber gloves.

  Judd heard the front door open and looked at his watch in the light coming from a crack in the door. It was two o’clock in the morning. He heard the family go upstairs and a little while later, after Albert had retired to bed and she had settled Lorraine in her own room, Ruth went to the spare room wearing only a very flimsy petticoat. Ruth kissed her lover eagerly and the pair made love while her husband and daughter slept peacefully in their beds. They lay for a while together, then Ruth jumped up and grabbed the window weight, beckoning for Judd to follow her. She led him down the hall to the master bedroom where Albert was asleep, his face hidden by the bedclothes. Ruth stood on one side of the bed, while Judd took the other, and as Ruth pulled back the covers Judd brought the weight crashing down on Albert’s head. However, the blow was so weak that it simply glanced off the side of his head and Ruth was forced to grab the chloroform to render her husband unconscious as he tried to grab his attacker. As soon as he stopped struggling she grabbed the weight from her bungling lover and brought it down with full force on Albert’s skull.

  When they had carried out their deadly deed, the couple went downstairs and had a drink while discussing the final part of their plan. Firstly, they knocked over a few items and opened a few cupboards in an effort to fake a robbery and then Judd tied Ruth loosely by the wrists and ankles and placed a gag in her mouth. Then Judd left, but stupidly asked a policeman what time the next bus was back to Long Island.