A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  In jail, she glared at the handcuffed man and asked, “Bud, did you do those things?”

  Judd frankly said, “Yes.”

  Isabel was steward to a jilted wife’s agony for a minute, and then she asked, “Did you sign a confession?” Judd nodded. “At four this morning.”

  “Were you pressured to sign it?”

  “No,” he said. “They have treated me like a gentleman.”

  She became conscious that a great crowd of onlookers was being held in abeyance by the jailers and she spoke more softly, but she was overheard telling her husband, “Don’t forget all your friends are standing by you, even though we can’t understand why this tragedy has happened. You must have had liquor.”

  Judd confided details to Isabel but he was aware enough of journalism to hide his mouth and hush his voice so he would be unheard.

  After a while she stiffened a little and said in answer, “You asked me to see you. I am here. I intend, as your wife, to do my duty by you.”

  Holding her hands, he said, “You can see me every day.”

  She scanned the wolfish faces listening in and said, “That’s impossible. I can’t do that.”

  Judd hung his head, and when she stood, he stood. She suffered his kiss.

  With tears, she said, “I can’t understand it.”

  “I can’t understand it myself.”

  “And then,” it was written, “in an adjoining room, she gave herself over to his affectionate petting.”

  A few days later Isabel wrote him: I cannot go out. I haven’t the strength. I try to sleep, but that fails me and I stew and stew, hoping that my thoughts are just a nightmare. As I sit here the 91st Psalm is before me. Read it and you will know my thinking. I go over my life with you and look for any wrong that I have ever done. But there is none. I have tried to be a devoted wife and mother to you and dear Jane. And now I only have faint memories of the loving and kind husband you once were to me.

  Isabel was never on view again. Jane never again saw her father.

  Haddon Jones had still said nothing to the police, but after an hour’s grilling he was allowed to privately visit his friend in his jail cell. Crying, he asked, “Bud, did you do what they’re saying?”

  Judd answered, “Had, I did.”

  Haddon sighed with grief. “Oh, Bud. Why did you do it?”

  And Judd said, “I don’t know myself.”

  With the feeling that good old Judd would forgive him, Haddon then went to the district attorney’s office and was forthright about what he told them regarding his high school friend.

  On that Tuesday afternoon, Henry Judd Gray was herded through a formidable crowd for his preliminary arraignment in the police court in Jamaica’s town hall. Hundreds jammed Jamaica Avenue and some onlookers ascended the scaffolding on a construction site to watch through the tall courtroom windows as the infamous couple entered their pleas to the magistrate.

  Mrs. Ruth Brown Snyder was waiting there, in a green felt helmet hat, brown muskrat coat, flesh-colored silk hose, and green alligator pumps. She still wore her platinum wedding ring. With Ruth were some of the detectives who’d investigated the Sunday crime as well as her ill-matched defense team: Edgar Hazelton, a scholarly former municipal court judge with an interest in Republican politics, and Dana Wallace, a grandiose criminal attorney and confirmed alcoholic who’d studied drama at Yale. The lawyers soon grew to hate each other. Mrs. Josephine Brown had withdrawn ten thousand dollars from the bank for their retainer—her whole life savings—and she’d have lost it all if Wallace hadn’t refused his half of the fee for Lorraine’s sake.

  Judd’s attorneys would be Samuel Miller, a certified public accountant in his thirties, whose experience was in corporate and tax law, and the older William J. Millard, a Republican politico, former assistant U.S. attorney, and a close friend of the late president Theodore Roosevelt.

  Since Judd and Ruth last saw each other less than sixty hours had passed, so when he walked up beside his lover in the courtroom he instinctively held out his hand to her. She took it affectionately and they exchanged fleeting smiles. But then both recalled the coaching from their attorneys and faced forward. They would never touch again.

  Judd would have entered a guilty plea and been done with it, but he was being indicted for first-degree murder, for which a not-guilty plea and jury trial was required.

  Ruth’s side fervently contended that she was not guilty, that Judd Gray acted alone, and that, “She is being held on an alleged confession which she now repudiates on the grounds that it was made under duress and force.”

  A public viewing of Albert Snyder was held on the first floor of his home, just below his bedroom, on the night of March 22nd. Mrs. Josephine Brown took care of the arrangements. The shining coffin was made of dark oak; his facial injuries were concealed with cosmetics; his high shirt collar and tie hid the traces of his strangulation. Ruth said she was inconsolable over a judge’s refusal to let her attend, but hundreds of others did go there, including the staff of Motor Boating magazine, the Shelter Island Yacht Club, the Queens Village Democratic Club, and his friends at the Flatbush Bowling Alley. The funeral eulogy that night was given by Reverend Everett Lyons of the Queens Village Dutch Reformed Church. Albert had dismissed churchgoers as hypocrites, but he’d vaguely known Lyons because Lorraine sometimes went to Sunday school there.

  A half mile of cars followed the hearse on Wednesday morning when Albert Snyder’s remains were laid to rest in the Schneider family plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth. Afterward, Albert’s sisters Mamie and Mabel were interviewed and each talked about him as the soul of kindness. “He was always gentle and considerate. She wasn’t of his class or educational level, but he loved Ruth so much that he protected her from everything, even the mildest criticism. And he never complained about her constant gallivanting.” C. F. Chapman, the publisher of Motor Boating magazine, called Albert “one hundred percent he-man; quiet, honest, upright, ready to play his part in the drama of life without seeking the spotlight.”

  Judd seemed just the he-man’s opposite as he was mercilessly described with variations on “a meek-looking Lothario,” “a weazened little corset salesman,” “an inert scare-drunk fellow,” “a sissy,” or “just a sap who was kissed and told on.” There were articles that wrongly claimed Judd was raging in his cell, shouting out Bible passages, insanely striding from one wall to the other, or that, seeking to kill himself, he’d tried to inveigle a jailer into getting the “cough medicine” that was taken from him in Syracuse, only to be told the poisoned half-pint of rye whiskey had been locked away in the evidence room.

  His face in a photograph was analyzed by the phrenologist Dr. Edgar C. Beall, who alliteratively noted that “the narrow temples declare he is neither methodical, mathematical, musical, mechanical, nor mercantile. To his mind, life is a lottery or a matter of chance. He is therefore, by instinct and habit, a gambler. Gray is a voluptuary, greedily drawing honey from the deep-throated calyx of illicit joy.”

  Of Ruth Snyder’s photos, Beall wrote that “the element of conjugal fidelity is practically nonexistent. She is endowed with an exceptionally voluptuous nature, the demands of which are ceaseless, imperious, and utterly beyond control. A shallow-brained pleasure seeker, she is accustomed to unlimited self-indulgence, which at last ends in an orgy of murderous passion and lust, seemingly without parallel in the criminal history of modern times.”

  On the Wednesday afternoon of Albert’s burial, Ruth held her initial press interview with three carefully chosen female reporters whose written questions where submitted to Edgar Hazelton hours earlier. Just before the overmanaged sit-down, some excluded male reporters strolling a hallway caught Ruth getting her picture taken and overheard the photographer offer sympathy for her loss. To which she shrugged with an “Oh well.” And when he hinted that dabbing a handkerchief to her eyes would give the public fitting evidence of her grief, she grinned widely and then flirtatiously warned him, “Don’t you da
re get a shot of me laughing.”

  Edgar Hazelton had selected stunningly innocuous questions that Ruth could answer with a confidence and poise that finally seemed a kind of narcissism. Even then she was pretty, but she seemed rather dowdy in the jail’s overlarge gray smock and with flyaway hair and purplish welts of sleeplessness under her crazily electric eyes. She spoke in that lilting, sexy, silken voice of a great variety of things: of Lorraine; of her canary, Pip, and her fondness for animals; of her intent, when freed, to become a stockbroker; and of gifts she’d been given at Christmas. The jail breakfasts, she told them, were oatmeal, prunes, toast, and black coffee. She hated wearing this unflattering jail gown; it made her look like a fat fishwife. She said she took up with Judd “only after Albert Snyder eliminated love from the house.” About what had happened, she felt “terribly, awfully sorry.” Of Judd, she said, “I love him still, in spite of all he has done.” About confessing to murder, she said, “I don’t know what I was saying when the police got that statement from me. I was so tired that I would say yes to anything they asked me. I deny absolutely any part in the crime.” Contradicting herself just a little later, she added, “Any consideration, affection, or love I ever had for Judd Gray has turned to hate because of his cruel and barbarous murder of my poor husband and because he tried to entangle me in it.”

  She looked to Edgar Hazelton and asked, “Should I say that I’m innocent?”

  His pince-nez shone white in the sunlight as he nodded.

  She took a hundred words to say she was innocent, and she concluded, “I ask every mother, every daughter, and every wife to withhold judgment until she has heard it all, and I am sure they will find some sympathy, some consideration, some understanding for me in this terrible sorrow which is mine.”

  In fact, the judgment against Ruth as well as Judd only worsened. An editorial noted, “Lust—stark, blind, cruel lust in hideous form—was the motive for the shocking Snyder murder. No more heinous crime has occurred in the annals of American criminology.” And Cornelius Vanderbilt III wrote the next morning: “The instinct of motherhood, the desire of a father to shield his child from harm, common sense, any feeling of decency toward a loving mate were all swept away before a wild surge of guilty passion.”

  Ruth was at first described as a “headturner,” “a wowzer,” “a beautiful blonde, five feet seven inches tall” with “China blue eyes crackling sparks.” But almost immediately women loathed her and soon she’d even lost some attractiveness to men, becoming for journalists just “the faithless wife,” “the blonde fiend,” “the Viking vampire,” and “the spider woman,” or, in more highbrow publications, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Mata Hari,” and “the quintessential femme fatale.” She was felt to have an air of “burning ice,” “iron unconcern,” and an arrogance that was masquerading as injured dignity. Damon Runyon, who covered the trial for the William Randolph Hearst paper American, called Ruth “a chilly looking blonde with frosty eyes and one of those marble, you-bet-you-will chins.” One paper even preposterously stated that she was reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “the philosophers blamed for so many student suicides.”

  Even after the damning interview was published, Judd defended Ruth, saying, “She is a pure woman, a perfect woman, and I won’t say anything against her. She is a woman any man would like.” Evidence of that came when Judd’s attorneys found no less than fifteen mooning men, generally policemen or Coney Island “beach sheiks,” who’d been in the gay and gorgeous Tommy’s thrall, if not her arms.

  Because most of those paramours were married, they never visited her in jail, and because Lorraine was underage, Ruth celebrated her thirty-second birthday on Sunday, March 27th, with just Josephine and her lawyers. Mrs. Brown had baked a twelve-egg, “heavenly angel food” cake that the jailers had ravaged with a pencil to ensure no tools of escape were concealed inside it. But even the butchery of a dessert delighted Ruth. She beamed and bounced on the jail cot like a child before shutting her eyes to blow out the flames on imaginary candles. Edgar Hazelton smiled and asked what she’d wished for, and Ruth said, “Liberty and justice for all.”

  Dana Wallace teetered as he squeezed up a ball of cake and filled his mouth and fell down in a hard-backed jail chair, intoxicated and tired.

  Like a good hostess, like Emily Post, Ruth told Hazelton and Josephine, “Oh please, everybody. Eat up. Eat and be merry.”

  After coolly wishing May a happy birthday, Josephine felt permitted to scoop up a handful of cake, for there were no forks, then sucked the goo from her fingers. Hazelton slouched against the jail bars with folded arms and an ankle crossed, kindly evaluating his client.

  She told him, “Al and I were going to have the grandest birthday party last night. Loads of company. Liquor already bought. Al was selecting his favorite music for the Victrola, but I insisted on some more popu—”

  “Mrs. Snyder, please,” Hazelton said. “I’m not the jury.”

  She stared at him with concerned innocence and for some reason she recalled heat misting the bathroom mirror as she lifted a tiny Lorraine from the sink, and carrying the towel-swaddled infant, fresh from the bath and fragrant, her small head bobbing against Ruth’s brassiere and then finding a tiny thumb. And Hazelton was looking at her as she told him how she’d linger by Lorraine’s bed and love her child as she slept. Tears rose in Ruth’s eyes in a slow, tidal way, and then her face reefed and she folded over toward her gray-smocked knees and rocked as she cried, “Oh, why isn’t my baby here? Don’t they know how much I need her? Don’t they see what I’ve done for her? She’s my oxygen!”

  Mrs. Brown softly patted her daughter’s back in a there-there gesture but contradictory emotions would not let her speak.

  Ruth bolted upright on her cot and fiercely shouted at Hazelton, “Cruel and unusual punishment, denying me Lorraine! You tell them! Cruel and unusual! I’m her mother!”

  Hazelton tugged up Dana Wallace’s left elbow and Wallace’s head jerked from his doze.

  She screamed, “Are you listening to me?”

  Hazelton ignored her as he helped Wallace struggle up from his chair. “Well, we’ll be going now. We just wanted to wish you the very best on your birthday.”

  “Are you representing Judd Gray?” she demanded.

  “Emphatically no.”

  “You do as I say then.”

  And Hazelton smiled as he repeated, “Emphatically, no.”

  She wrote a poem:

  Just a thought of cheerful things,

  Things I used to know.

  Joys that loving—mothering brings,

  Watching Lorraine grow.

  Years, Oh, ages—long ago

  Happiness was mine.

  Oh, I loved my family so,

  Now all I do is pine.

  With Mrs. Isabel Gray, Mrs. Kallenbach, and Jane all hiding out in Norwalk, Connecticut, the newspapers again sought out Judd’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, as the not-Ruth of the day. She was sixty but seemed much older, a frail, white-haired, cultivated, sorrowful woman whose selflessness, loyalty, and piety were treated as an instructive contrast to Mrs. Snyder.

  Mrs. Gray invited a freight truck full of reporters out to Judd’s sister’s house in West Orange and gave them coffee and still-warm macaroons from the oven as she talked about how Buddy loved reading as a boy and was an excellent student and athlete who would have gone on to college and medical school were it not for the pneumonia he caught in high school. She petted her white Pomeranian Nicky in her lap as she spoke, also, of the jobs Bud had held, the good deeds he’d done, that “he was not what I would call a drinker.” “Bud’s home life was ideal,” she said. “Isabel and he never quarreled. They had a fifty-fifty arrangement in which they were both equal in their home.”

  She was asked if she still loved her son and she said, “The Judd Gray of today is a boy I don’t understand. But one I must help. He must be brought back. I am trying to reach through this strange personality and …” Quavering, her
tragic eyes flooding with tears, she broke off that sentence and could not go on.

  Quietly offering their sympathy, the reporters excused themselves from the home and only on the jouncing ride back to the City did one scour his notes and find that she’d referred to “Buddy” as “my son,” “my precious boy,” and “my darling boy.” She said she’d urged Judd always to be manly, but she’d never once called him a man. And he was thirty-four years old.

  Judd Gray was forced by his counsel to have an X-ray taken of his skull to see if there was a medical cause for the crime; then he was interviewed by a panel of four alienists to find out if he was sane. Included in their tests was his giving a vial of blood for analysis, walking a chalk line, and spinning until he fell. Psychiatry was still in its infancy. And then he was seated in a chair opposite four other chairs, and Doctors Cusack, Block, Leahy, and Jewett closely scrutinized the criminal. Judd chain-smoked as he was questioned and joked whenever he could, but after fifteen minutes he excited their interest by unself-consciously revealing that Ruth’s nickname for him was Loverboy and his nickname for Ruth was Momsie, and that he felt hypnotized and helplessly dominated by her.

  “Was there any pleasure for you in that?” one alienist inquired.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Having Mrs. Snyder in control of you? Compelling you one way or another?”

  “I guess.”

  Another asked, “Why? Why do you guess?”

  “Well, we were together for twenty-one months.”

  Three alienists made notations as Dr. Thomas Cusack inquired, “But what is it that interests or excites you in the opposite sex?”

  Judd looked away and was silent for a long time, giving it so much rumination that the alienists weren’t convinced of his candor when he finally said, “I am attracted to females not by their beauty or sheer physical enticements so much as by their neatness and intelligence.”