A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  A doctor jotted on his notepad, Effeminate? and another jotted underneath that, Lying.

  Dr. Siegfried Block asked, “Tell me, in jail now, what are your fantasies?”

  “Sexual, you mean?”

  “Sexual or otherwise. You have so little to do, so much time on your hands. You must find yourself dreaming, remembering.”

  Judd exhaled smoke and crushed his cigarette out. “I haven’t got much of an imagination.”

  Instructed to reconsider some childhood memories that night in his cell and to write an account of one that seemed to be recurring and important, he turned in this recollection: I was just a child, about four. Awaking from sleep, I found myself on the sofa with my head in my mother’s lap. A fly is whirring around my face and she chases it away. She strokes my hair with her gloved hand. If I raise my head, Mother fans me quiet with a cardboard fan that has a beautiful girl pictured on it. She has very red cheeks, blue eyes, and yellow curls, and I fancied she was eating a heaped up plate of ice cream. It’s a hot day and my sailor suit is stiff. It pricks through my underclothes.

  At the end of the sessions, the panel voted that Henry Judd Gray was sane within the meaning of the law, but that liquor, Oedipal conflicts, and the sexual novelties to which he’d been introduced by Mrs. Snyder had hampered his judgment of right and wrong. Dr. Siegfried Block said of Judd, “I feel so sorry for him,” and Dr. Thomas Cusack commented, “If he’d just seen one of us for a while, none of this would have happened.”

  Seeing Mrs. Margaret Gray’s interview about her son, Mrs. Josephine Brown sought to uphold her daughter’s reputation by agreeing to have a few journalists to their spic-and-span corner house. She indicated Ruth’s flair for interior decorating and handicrafts and forced them to note that the kitchen’s white-enameled oven was so spotless it could have been new. “And you could eat off that floor.” She took them down to see Ruth’s neatly labeled fruit preserves and said, “Who puts up fruit anymore?”

  Walking into the music room, Josephine said the upright player piano needed tuning and Ruth wanted to have it fixed, but Albert had raged, “You let that piano alone, you buttinsky!”

  “She let it alone and stood back, trembling all over.”

  Josephine primly sat in the floral chintz armchair, illustrating, as one journalist wrote, “the humorous grimness of a kindhearted grandma.” She recalled for them in her Swedish cadence, “Al did not like to laugh. He had a bad temper. He thought she was foolish to laugh and be gay. And he was always working on something—so intense always. He seemed to be too occupied to play.”

  She looked off at a photo of the pretty, tomboyish Lorraine. “I think their love really died after the baby came. Mr. Snyder, he said she was just a lot of sickness and expense.”

  The joint Snyder-Gray first-degree-murder trial was originally slated to begin on April 11th, 1927, but that would have meant holding the hearings during Holy Week, so Justice Townsend Scudder, of the New York State Supreme Court, delayed the initial interviews of prospective jurors until after Easter.

  A Palm Sunday service for Protestants was held in the Queens County Jail on April 10th. Like Albert, Ruth was not a churchgoer, but with nothing much to do, she decided to attend, watching Judd throughout from the women’s side of the chapel and sneering at his full-throated reverence as he sang: “‘Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom, / Lead Thou me on! / The night is dark, and I am far from home, / Lead Thou me on! / Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant scene; one step enough for me.’”

  She’d brought out the best in the runt. And now he was Isabel-ling. Ruth then remembered a gay nineties song she’d heard as a girl—“She’s More to Be Pitied Than Censured”—and she giggled so hard and distractingly that she was forced to leave the chapel, humming the tune as she went.

  Yet she requested a visit from the jail chaplain that evening. The minister was home having dinner with his family, so she was sent the Roman Catholic chaplain of the Queens County Jail, Father George Murphy of the Brooklyn Diocese. He was an affable, overweight, fun-loving man with a gin-blossom nose and she liked him at once in spite of his off-putting black cassock and biretta. She wanted to tell him about her fresh discovery: that women gave men sex so they could get love, and men gave women love so they could get sex.

  “Well, yes,” Murphy seriously said. “That’s something of an old saw.”

  “Really? I just figured it out.”

  “Oh dear,” the priest said with a smile. “Too soon old and too late smart? We see that a lot in here.”

  “But also, men fantasize about sex all the time.”

  “Very true,” he said, and winked. “In my confessional experience.”

  “And women fantasize about romance.”

  “Yes.”

  “And looking for romance will get you in just as much trouble.”

  The jolly man exclaimed, “Oh, but I wish you could preach!” And he stayed with Ruth in the cell for an hour that night, instructing a little and telling jokes and treating their meeting like a party. She felt girlish again and begged him to return, which he did regularly each morning after he’d finished with the jailed Catholics that he called “the brethren.”

  On Holy Thursday he gave her the gift of a jet-black rosary, which he called, romantically, “a garland of roses,” and he included with the gift a folded paper on which he’d handwritten the words to the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be. But Ruth failed to make the connection with prayer and thought of the sixty strung beads as a pretty necklace, happily flaunting the rosary as the only jewelry she was allowed.

  Even so, the murder trial that would begin on April 19th so unhinged Ruth Snyder that she ignored the legal advice of Edgar Hazelton and Dana Wallace and on the seventeenth, Easter Sunday, she issued a screed about Judd Gray to a friendly journalist from the New York Daily Mirror. She’d scrawled it in pencil on a child’s school tablet, in handwriting so large she could only fit three or four words on each line. The journalist corrected Ruth’s misspellings and inserted so many fillips of his own that she was forced to practice the recitation before Easter’s pool reporters were invited to her jail cell.

  Too jittery to sit, she tilted into the jail bars as if she would soon faint and with shaking hands, fluent tears, and a tremulous voice Ruth read aloud: “I know now that Judd Gray is a coward, a low, cringing, sneaking jackal, the murderer of my husband, who is now trying to hide behind my skirts to try to drag me down into the stinking pit that he himself willingly wallowed in; to brand me as a woman who killed her husband.”

  She flipped a page. “I am a mother! I love my child and I loved my child’s father! God! Can you mothers and wives read this and appreciate the terrible, stifling ordeal I am going through at this time? Easter Sunday! Holy Week! I wish I was home with Albert and Lorraine. Oh, what a tragic difference a few months make.”

  With violence, she flipped another page. “Please, mothers and wives, abide with me in your thoughts. Do not think of me harshly. Your sympathy will not help me before the bar of justice, but it will comfort me to know that I am not an outcast in the eyes of the women of this world.”

  She closed the tablet and wrestled up a smile. “Will that do the trick?”

  Six reporters were still jotting their shorthand when a quicker woman asked, “Are you aware that female jurors are not allowed in a murder trial?”

  Half her face twitched. “You’re kidding.”

  The pool reporter said she wasn’t. New York law.

  Ruth flumped onto her jail cot with a hand over her eyes as if she were full of woe, but she heard a tiny squeak and childishly beamed as she looked to a far wall where a gray mouse’s head was dodging about in a food hunt. She kissed the air and the mouse cautioned forward to a smidgen of toast crust that she held out to him, even sitting back on his hind legs and craning his neck to get what she held just out of reach. Ruth smiled to the reporters. “My little pet,” she said. “See how he loves me?”
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  EIGHT

  THE WAGES OF SIN

  Because Justice Townsend Scudder disliked the death penalty and the theatrical nature of criminal trials, he sought another judge to replace him when the Snyder-Gray case was put on his docket, but no one else with jurisdiction was available. Reluctantly, he took it on. Scudder was then sixty-one and a widower, a scholarly, patrician man with a European education and sonorous voice who’d graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1888, was elected to two terms as a congressman, and served thirteen years with the New York Supreme Court before returning to the private practice of law. In February 1927, his friend Governor Alfred E. Smith reappointed him to that court and Scudder was his first choice to succeed him in the governorship if Smith resigned to run for the presidency in 1928, as in fact he did. But ex-assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt would insert himself into the governor’s race, and Scudder would graciously step aside, retiring from the judiciary in 1936, exhibiting his prized cocker spaniels in international dog shows, and only dying in 1960, at the age of ninety-four.

  The first interviews of jurors—called “talesmen” in New York—took place on Monday, April 18th, 1927, just four weeks after Judd Gray, with murderous intent, journeyed down from the Onondaga Hotel in Syracuse to the Snyder home in Queens Village. In heat that reached as high as eighty-six degrees, Justice Scudder eventually examined three hundred ninety men before he found twelve talesmen who didn’t try to weasel out of jury duty with excuses like “dyspepsia” or “tenderheartedness” and could swear they weren’t influenced by the one-sided stories in the press. Because the accusation was that there was a conspiracy to commit murder, Justice Scudder crucially decided that the defendants would be tried jointly; hence the trial was not just State of New York v. Snyder and Gray but also Snyder v. Gray and Gray v. Snyder. Essentially each of the accused would be prosecuted twice, but the joint trial was felt to be advantageous for Judd since no Queens County jury had ever sent a woman to the Sing Sing “death house” and he could perhaps piggyback on that reluctance.

  In defending their client, Judd’s attorneys would adopt the strategy of insisting that he was dominated by the hypnotic and overpowering will of a conniving, attractive woman who exploited his obliging nature, erotic desires, and other vulnerabilities; that she augmented her mastery of him by threatening to disclose Judd’s misconduct to his wife; and that he killed Albert Snyder in absolute obedience to Ruth’s wishes, a subservience born out of both infatuation and fear. Judd’s attorneys would argue that it was she who planned the crime and he but carried out her orders, even to the establishment of an “ironclad” alibi that located him in Syracuse at the time of the murder. Court proceedings, it was said, would make it evident that Mrs. Snyder had everything to gain in getting rid of her husband, while Judd had nothing to look forward to beyond greater freedom in their trysts and lovemaking, which had never been interrupted and were not likely to be.

  Ruth Snyder’s defense was established by attorneys Hazelton and Wallace just two days after the crime: she recanted a confession coerced from her on March 21st after more than sixteen hours of police grilling in which she was denied sleep or solace after the shocking, bloody, and devastating loss of the deceased. She would maintain that Judd was intent on murdering her husband, that she’d allowed him access to the house only in order to have it out with him and finally end the affair, and that she’d accepted the sash weight from Judd in the restaurant to get it out of his hands. Ruth’s attorneys would argue that she and Judd had often joked about her husband’s up-and-down health and the gladsome possibility of his accidental death, but that the thought of a homicide was the farthest thing from her mind. She’d had a change of heart that Judd had ignored. She would contend that Judd deliberately, solely, and secretly hatched the plan to kill Albert Snyder and, having done so, tied up the corpse, counterfeited a burglary and assault by fabricated Italians, and threatened to murder Ruth with Albert’s revolver unless she assisted him in the deception. She’d been scared enough to cooperate with Judd for a while, and then she cooperated with the detectives, giving them exactly what they wanted in the vain hope of being allowed to go home to a grieving nine-year-old daughter.

  Judd Gray had lost weight and was almost spindly when he was handcuffed in his jail cell and huddled within a squad of bailiffs for the secret predawn walk to the courtroom. Earlier, Harry Folsom had brought him clothing from Judd’s East Orange home, so he was, as always, a Brooks Brothers model in a fine, dark, tailored suit and owlish tortoiseshell glasses, his stern face soothed with Tabac aftershave and his ridged and furrowed walnut-brown hair gleamingly groomed with Brilliantine.

  Looking up at the Queens County Courthouse from the sidewalk, Judd asked a friendlier bailiff about its architecture and was told the building was in the English Renaissance Revival style. But it was in fact a rather garish, four-story jumble of red brick and limestone, with paired Ionic columns holding up balconies on each side of its high, arched entrance. Inside, Judd and his squad of guards noisily trudged up a grand marble staircase with intricate black ironwork that zigzagged up to oak-paneled hallways. And then they were in a majestic, third-floor courtroom with a forty-foot ceiling, Jersey cream wall facings, heavy dark oak furniture and high-backed pews, and a magnificent skylight of green and orange stained glass that sketched a flaming torch and the scales of justice. Judd was told that Cecil B. DeMille shot the trial scenes for his 1922 movie Manslaughter there.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Judd said. “Leatrice Joy starred in it, right?”

  A bailiff seemed affronted by his calm. “You do know why you’re here?”

  “It’s just that I was recalling how Miss Leatrice Joy began the bobbed hair craze.”

  Judd was escorted into an oak-paneled side room and given a doughnut and coffee. And his conversation shifted to other movies and musical revues over his nervous three-hour wait for the first session.

  The Queens County courtroom was meant to accommodate two hundred fifty people, but even during jury selection there were half that many just in credentialed reporters, with fifteen hundred more viewers jammed in so tightly that the acoustics worsened, and so for the first day of the trial a Long Island broadcasting company outfitted the room with microphones and loudspeakers—the first time that had ever been done in a court.

  Sitting right behind Judd and in front of the rows of journalists and the wide courtroom railing were the Gray family, including Judd’s plump sister Margaret and her husband Harold Logan and Judd’s mother, the haggard Mrs. Margaret Gray, who hitched her chair so she could fix a smoldering glare on Ruth. Also initially in the audience were his employers, Alfred Benjamin and Charles Johnes, and a few of their staff; Manhattan lingerie buyers; Elks club members from Orange; and friends from the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State, plus Haddon Jones and Harry Platt, who would be witnesses for the prosecution. Isabel, Jane, and his mother-in-law stayed in Connecticut.

  Mrs. Josephine Brown also was missing, having chosen instead to stay home with her granddaughter. But sitting behind Ruth in the courtroom were her familiars: Kitty Kaufman, Harry Folsom—still a friend to both defendants—and Ruth’s frail, tubercular cousin Ethel, whose divorce from Patrolman Ed Pierson had been finalized in the Bronx Supreme Court. Kitty, Harry, and Ethel would never be required to testify since both the prosecution and the defense sought a tidy narrative with none of the puzzling contradictions and tangents of real life.

  Ruth was no longer a sylph. Though some journalists would still write of her beauty and shapeliness, others exaggerated her ordinariness, for the inactivity of jail had caused her to gain weight, she’d not seen a hairdresser in a month, and she was forced to manicure her nails with matchsticks. She wore on the first day of the trial Shalimar perfume and the chic, all-black outfit she’d bought at Bloomingdale’s for Albert’s funeral: the patent-leather pumps, sheer hose, a Jeanne Lanvin silk dress, as well as the jet-beaded rosary with a silver crucifix that s
he wore as a necklace. Father George Murphy chose not to correct her and each morning as she walked into the courtroom he would wink or offer a thumbs-up to gladden her spirits.

  Because of the risk of disorder and pandemonium in an overburdened courtroom, off-duty policemen were given free admission, a lot of them still friends of Tommy, not a few of them drunk by noon. And there must have also been in that audience at least some of those satyrs who thought they knew what they wanted and sent the jailed dominatrix one hundred sixty-four proposals of marriage.

  But the focus of attention was often on the hundreds of celebrities who attended the trial. It was a hot-ticket item and generally only the famous or connected got inside. The eleventh Marquis of Queensbury, in morning coat and spats, and his wife Cathleen were regulars. Composer Irving Berlin was there and was vexed to hear that Ruth and Judd had adopted his song “Always” as theirs. Arriving in a limousine from his mansion on Long Island was D. W. Griffith, the American director of more than five hundred silent films, including Intolerance and The Battle of the Sexes. Griffith thought there could be a thrilling melodrama in the trial, as did theater owner and producer David Belasco, who affected the soutane of clergy as the self-anointed “Bishop of Broadway” and thought of Ruth as “passionate and misunderstood and not nearly as bad as she’s made out to be.” The Telegram engaged Will Durant, the author of the surprising bestseller The Story of Philosophy, to contribute opinions because his book was, inconceivably, a favorite of Ruth’s. The Evening Graphic ironically countered Durant with the sly humor of vaudevillian Jimmy Durante. Actress and playwright Mae West had just been released from ten days in jail for Sex, the risqué Broadway farce that was shut down for indecency, and now she was assigned to act as a commentator on the Snyder-Gray case by the National Police Gazette. Short-story writer Fannie Hurst was hired for the length of the trial, as was Maurine Dallas Watkins, the playwright of Chicago, which was about two “jazz babes” who became murderesses. Accompanying Watkins was comedienne Francine Larrimore, who created the role of Chicago’s Roxie Hart, and stated in the play, “I’m so gentle, I couldn’t harm a fly.” In a pretrial interview, Ruth had stunned reporters with the variation, “Kill my husband? Why, I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”