A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  “Ho boy,” Haddon said, and turned to Harry. “Cherchez la femme.”

  “What is that? Is that French?” Harry asked.

  Judd interrupted. “The fact is I’m in deep trouble. Real deep. And I need your help.”

  Haddon’s face wrinkled with concern as he said, “Count on it, Bud.”

  “Had, I told you I was going to Albany to meet a lady.”

  “Oh yeah,” Haddon said. “That sweet morsel Momsie.”

  “Right. But there was a telegram for me, written in code, which advised me to continue on to her house in Queens.”

  Harry asked, “Am I adult enough to be hearing all this?”

  “Please, no jokes,” Judd said. “This is very serious. I did as I was told—the kitchen door was open—but while I was in the house, waiting for her, there was a burglary. Seemed like Italian thugs. Didn’t know what to do so I hid in the closet for I don’t know how long. Hours. Hiding behind the dresses hanging on the hooks as the Italians ransacked the house. But then the family got home from a party and got caught in the middle of it.”

  “The family?” Haddon asked. “Wasn’t she intending to see you alone?”

  Judd delayed his story as he considered amendments. Haddon and Harry watched him lift his highball and swallow some. Judd finally settled on, “There must have been some miscommunication. I could hear the ruckus from my hiding place. She was assaulted and her husband was slugged and bound. And I couldn’t do anything to help them.”

  “Why not?” Harry asked.

  Haddon intervened. “Well, for criminy sakes! Was he supposed to jump out of the closet? Wouldn’t the husband figure out Bud’s been having a fling with the wife?”

  “I guess so,” Harry said. “Caught between a rock and a hard place, you were.”

  “Cowardice was forced on me by the situation. I just hoped they weren’t too badly hurt. After things quieted down—golly, it must have been just about sunrise—I hightailed it out of there. Caught a bus to Grand Central Station and then the train to Syracuse.”

  Haddon frowned. “Were the husband and wife okay?”

  Judd had forgotten elements of his tale; he’d have to rehearse it some more. “Oh, sorry. I’m so ashamed to admit it that I left out the worst part. I huddled there in the closet until I heard not a peep in the house, then I screwed up my courage and investigated. The wife had fainted and her wrists and ankles were tied with clothesline, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. I thought it better to let her sleep, to let her think I hadn’t gotten there rather than to have to confess my fear and weakness. But I found the husband lying on his bed, unconscious, and maybe I got too close as I listened for a heartbeat because I got his blood on me. And then I ran out. Calling the police was out of the question. The jealous husband versus the philandering salesman caught in his house? I saw no way of defending myself against their accusations.” Judd watched their faces with interest as he finished his whisky.

  “Was there a heartbeat?” Haddon asked.

  “Well, I’m no doctor,” Judd said, and filled his own and his friend’s glass with more Scotch as he figured out the right thing to say. “A faint heartbeat, I think.” Harry finished his highball and held out his glass. Judd poured. “Seltzer?”

  “No, thanks,” Harry said.

  Judd raked his hair with his hand. “But what if the husband winds up dying from his injuries? Then it’s murder, and I’ll be the principal suspect, won’t I? Italian burglars will sound like some thugs I made up from whole cloth. Even if I’m just called in for questioning, my poor mother will be horrified, my wife and child humiliated, if not lost to me. I’ll probably be fired from my job. To be frank, I’m in such a fix that I have been entertaining thoughts of suicide.” Judd held up the half-pint of rye. “I have poisoned this. And I’m prepared to drink it.”

  Haddon exclaimed, “Shame on you for even thinking that!”

  Harry told him, “Calm down, Judd. You had a rough night, but it’s over now and who’s going to know you were there?”

  Judd put the flask on the desk and sank down on the chair with his head in his hands.

  “There’s my Bud. That’s better,” Haddon said. “Don’t get overheated. Aren’t there steps we can take to protect you?”

  Judd lifted his face. “But I hate involving you both.”

  “We’ve been in jams, too,” Harry said.

  Consolingly, Haddon asked, “Really, how can we help?”

  Judd smiled with soft pleasure in his high school chum’s friendship and with a full measure of disdain for his gullibility. “We need to destroy the evidence.”

  And so it was that they cooperated in packing a small black suitcase with the gray wool three-piece suit with its handprint of blood on the vest, Albert’s patterned blue shirt with its scissored buttonhole, and the bloodstained gray buckskin gloves that Ruth had worn. Then they got into their overcoats and hats and Judd held the black suitcase to his chest as the three rode in Harry Platt’s car to the Onondaga County Savings Bank Building on Salina Street. The night watchman took them up to the sixth floor. Harry’s insurance office was in room 641. There Harry got on his knees to snatch the clothing out of the suitcase and tightly bundle it inside brown shipping paper, tying it closed with twine. Haddon Jones was the tallest of the three, so it was he who lifted the empty suitcase onto the highest shelf in the office as Judd helped a huffing Harry to his feet.

  Early Monday morning, Harry Platt would take the package of bloodstained clothing down to the furnace room, where a janitor heaved it into the fire without inquiry about it. And during her lunch hour, Harry’s pregnant secretary would haul the suitcase to the Onondaga Printing Company, her husband’s job site, for incineration in that furnace. She later claimed she did not ask Mr. Platt why that was necessary.

  On Sunday night, Harry Platt ferried Haddon and Judd to Haddon’s house but floored the car even as Haddon was inviting him inside. Waiting for dinner, Judd entertained Haddon’s “two little rascals” by reading the Syracuse Post-Standard’s comics page, handling the ballooned dialogue in different voices, and after gin and sandwiches, Judd helped them with their Sunday school homework. Easter would be on April 17th in 1927 and he stunned Haddon and his children with the esoteric information that each year Easter occurred on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Judd faintly smiled at Haddon’s surprise. “I was a churchgoer once.”

  “Well,” Haddon said, “religion’s fine as long as you don’t take it too seriously.” Haddon couldn’t read Judd’s face. Was it sneering gloom or regret?

  Haddon’s wife put the children to bed and Haddon and Judd stayed up, forcing themselves to recall old times in their fraternity at William Barringer High School and finishing off a quart of London dry gin. Each avoided mention of the night in Queens Village. Around eleven, Judd was slurring his words and confessed he was hallucinating, with weird shapes like panthers crouching in the periphery of his vision.

  “How long have you been without sleep?”

  With sighing effort, Judd did the arithmetic. “Forty hours.”

  “We’d better get you to the hotel.”

  At eleven thirty, a taxicab driver collected Judd at 207 Park Avenue and conveyed him to the Onondaga Hotel and later told an investigator that his passenger was snoring soon after he snapped down the metering flag. Judd tore off his clothes as soon as he entered room 743, filled a water glass with whisky that he put within reach on the vanity, folded his tortoiseshell spectacles next to it, and got into bed in his underwear, falling asleep at once.

  Reporters had already filed their newspaper stories about the slain Motor Boating art editor, and Albert Snyder’s widow was getting ever more confused as forty-year-old police commissioner George V. McLaughlin cross-examined her. Around half past one o’clock in the morning, Detective Lieutenant Michael McDermott walked into the office with a notepad on which he’d written the name “Judd Gray.” McDermott crouched to whisper into McLaughlin’s ear and
the commissioner solemnly nodded, then held the notepad in front of Ruth and concentrated on her sleepy face as she read it. Soothingly, he asked, “Was this the man who killed your husband?”

  Ruth finally accepted that she was caught and asked, “Has he confessed?”

  The Syracuse Police Department received a cable from the Jamaica precinct house at 1:47 a.m., and acting on Mrs. Snyder’s information, three Syracuse detectives arrived at room 743 in the Onondaga Hotel at half past two.

  Judd woke to a hard and continuous knocking on his hotel room door and was so disoriented that he presumed he’d overslept and that housekeeping was there to collect his laundry. He switched on a light, hooked his spectacles over his ears, and fell toward the knocking in his drunkenness, finding three sour-looking men in the hallway. Cold eddied off their overcoats.

  “Mr. Gray?”

  “Yes.”

  A looming man held up his wallet so Judd could see a Syracuse Police Department badge. “I’m Detective Firth. The New York City Police Department seems to need you for questioning about a homicide.”

  Weakly trying to buy time for his thoughts, Judd lied, “I don’t know what that word means.”

  “Homicide? It means murder. The City wants to question you about a murder.”

  The jocular corset salesman took over to say, “Fellas, the only thing I ever killed was a pint of liquor from time to time.”

  Another detective named Finocchio commented, “We got the joker in the pack, didn’t we?”

  Firth said, “You’ll have to come with us, Mr. Gray.”

  Entering the hotel room, Finocchio and Firth looked intently at everything, finding a gold Cross fountain pen in his overcoat and a Sunday New York Times on his desk, but forgetting to root through the wastepaper basket. A friendly older detective named Kerrigan watched Judd wash up and brush his teeth with Pep-sodent in the bathroom, and he leaned into the wall next to the closet as Judd dressed nattily and, because his suitcase was in Harry Platt’s office, crammed his hangered suits and shirts into his samples trunk.

  “Don’t you have luggage?”

  “I have to travel light.”

  Judd found the half-pint of rye that Ruth had contaminated with bichloride of mercury and slipped it into his suit-coat pocket.

  “What was that?” Detective Kerrigan asked.

  Judd winked. “Cough medicine.”

  “Well, I’ll have to confiscate it for now.”

  Handing it over, Judd watched as the detective unscrewed the cap and sniffed. Would he taste it next? Judd irritably said, “For God’s sake, don’t drink it. It’s poison.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Huh,” Detective Kerrigan said.

  At three in the morning on March 21st, a genial Henry Judd Gray was treating the interrogation as either a regrettable mistake or a lark, and he seemed so unlikely a threat to flee or inflict injury that he was not handcuffed as he was escorted outside to a waiting police car. Recalling that he hadn’t checked out, Judd gave one of them thirteen dollars for the hotel bill, and as the policeman went inside to pay, Detective Finocchio turned around in his front seat to ask, “You have a lot of friends and associates in New York City?”

  “Of course,” Judd said.

  “Why is it you haven’t asked who was murdered?”

  All through the night at the Syracuse police headquarters the interrogation continued, and Judd insisted on the fantasy that he’d stayed at the Onondaga all weekend. Around sunrise, Detective Lieutenants Martin Brown and Michael McDermott arrived by train from the Jamaica precinct house, took Judd into an office, and first confirmed that his rather feminine hand size matched the finger gouges on Albert’s throat, asked him if he knew Mrs. Snyder—he said he did, and that he loved her—then laid out all the reasons why his fiction didn’t fit the facts. But Judd held to it and even added to his lying by convincing them he’d graduated from Cornell University, Detective Brown’s alma mater.

  Syracuse Police Chief Martin Cadin would say, “I’ve been in police work for over twenty years, and if he is guilty of this crime, he is the calmest individual I’ve ever come across.”

  Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Judd was told that Ruth had confessed and incriminated him, but Judd continued to deny that he’d committed the homicide. Haddon Jones was hauled in to testify about his Sunday evening with Judd, but he just idly worried the Elks club tooth hanging from the gold chain of his pocket watch and in fraternal loyalty offered nothing of value even though he could have been charged with conspiracy.

  Acting like a bodyguard, Haddon was grimly on the left of Judd when McDermott and Brown took him into custody for the railway journey to New York City, and it was Haddon’s hand that hid Judd’s face from the hordes of reporters and photographers that swarmed them when they exited police headquarters.

  Was it because it had been almost three in the morning that the detectives overlooked the contents of Judd’s hotel wastebasket? A chambermaid named Nellie Barnes heard about the hotel guest’s arrest when she got to work on Monday morning. She wisely collected the wastebasket when she cleaned 743, locked it in a closet of cleaning supplies, and then, at lunchtime, contacted police, who found in it cigarette butts and struck matches, a hotel envelope with Haddon’s penciled note, a Long Island Rail Road train schedule, an envelope with a Jamaica postmark that was addressed to Judd in Ruth’s handwriting, and the 8:45 a.m., Sunday, March 20th, Pullman ticket from New York City to Albany, with a coach connection to Syracuse.

  Judd was on the same train to Grand Central Station by four o’clock and had been shown an afternoon Syracuse newspaper with the headline “MRS. SNYDER CONFESSES!” In Albany, Queens assistant district attorney James Conroy and Deputy Inspector Gallagher got on board and Judd heartily shook their hands, genially saying, “This is the first time I’ve been in the clutches of the law.” Judd joined their party in the dining car for supper, gleefully told ladies’-underwear jokes in his nervousness, and even grandly footed the bill for them. He was still treating his predicament as an incongruous misunderstanding and said, “We’ll all laugh over this someday.”

  And then over coffee, Detective McDermott rocked back in his chair and told him, “Oh, by the way, Judd. Did you know we have the contents of your Onondaga Hotel wastepaper basket?”

  Judd’s face whitened as he thought of what could be in there. “Mac, what did you find in that basket?” Hearing of those findings and realizing how they niftily connected the dots, Judd finally confessed, “Well, gentlemen, I was at that house that night.”

  And thenceforward, as one journalist put it, “every syllable he uttered was gospel insofar as human fallibility allows.”

  Alerted to a huge crowd waiting for their arrival at Grand Central Station, the police hustled Henry Judd Gray off the train at 125th Street and took him by car to the Long Island City Courthouse, where he was interviewed by the Queens County district attorney. Though he was just forty-six, Richard S. Newcombe seemed fatherly and old-fashioned, even Victorian, a short, deep-voiced, hand-wringing man who seemed to hurt when he spoke and whose hank of silver hair was woven over his head to give the faint illusion that he wasn’t in fact bald. Wincing as he did so, Newcombe went through the details of Ruth’s confession that seemed to match the evidence of the crime scene and that implicated Judd in the murder.

  “She seems to have turned on you,” Newcombe said. “Had she sworn that she’d love you always?”

  Judd then felt, he later wrote, the endless desolation of the soul, but all he could say was, “How did you know?”

  With sadness, Newcombe said, “Well, it happens.”

  Judd told his story as well as he could in his daze, signed the confession at four in the morning, and was hurried downstairs to be photographed and fingerprinted, then was shackled and escorted to the Queens County Jail through the flashbulbs, crushing onrush, and screamed questions of what he would call “the war maneuvers of the great American Press.” />
  Ruth, too, was astonished by the gangs of journalists, photographers, and gawkers who followed her and her police cortege into the Queens-Bellaire Bank to reveal the Prudential life insurance policies and the other contents of her two safety deposit boxes and then to the Waldorf-Astoria, where she claimed the couple’s “honeymoon bag” and was recognized by the manager and staff as “Mrs. Jane Gray.”

  There were eleven major newspapers in metropolitan New York and each seemed to consider the evolving Snyder-Gray case the crime of the century. And each paper would see its circulation double when Ruth or Judd was featured. So there were installments each day for the next few months and regular items through January 1928, and anything about them, their families, their “sordid love,” or their “brutal, cold-blooded murder” seemed a fair subject for discussion.

  Even before Judd made it to New York City and then into the Queens County Jail, a news gatherer forced an entrance into Judd’s mother’s home in West Orange by claiming he was a Brooklyn homicide detective and boorishly demanding that a frail and frightened Mrs. Margaret Gray answer certain questions at once. Another journalist invaded the office of the principal of Washington Elementary School in East Orange on the 21st, insisting on an interview with Jane Gray, who was then ten. The girl was sent home without hearing why and found the family’s brick house on 37 Wayne Avenue was guarded by a contingent of police who were holding off a wide gang of shouting reporters.

  Isabel finally appeased them that rainy Monday evening with a terse announcement that she read aloud from the front porch, requesting civility and privacy for the family and seemliness from the press corps, and saying she would not believe “the wild allegations about my husband’s treachery” unless he personally confirmed them.

  She got the chance for that on the morning of Tuesday, March 22nd, when she visited Judd in the Queens County Jail. A Wednesday headline would read “WIFE AIDS KILLER.” She was wearing “a beaver coat of inferior quality” and a turban hat “that was not smart.” She seemed “cold and passionless” and “inclined to plumpness, not pretty, with no glamour or intrigue.”