A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  Governor Smith’s wife, Catherine, had collapsed with an appendicitis attack during their overnight at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel on Madison Avenue and 43rd Street, and reporters hung out in the lobby to harvest news about the illness. But instead, at six o’clock on Tuesday evening, they were invited up to the executive suite on the fourteenth floor and heard the governor read his decision on executive clemency. “The execution of this judgment on a woman is so distressing,” he read, “that I had hoped that the appeal to me would disclose some fact which would justify my interference with the procedure of the law. But this did not happen. I have searched in vain for any basis upon which my conscience, in the light of my oath of office, can approve, that I might temper the law with mercy.”

  But he found he agreed with the twelve jurors and the seven justices of the court of appeals; hence he denied the application for executive clemency, held up his hand to avoid further questioning, and then left to see his wife in the hospital.

  Hearing the news on Wednesday, Ruth emptied her Death House bank account and finished off five dollars’ worth of chocolate. Toiling hard at signing her name on some legal forms, she said, “I’m a thirty-two-year-old mother in the prime of life and they’re going to kill me. It don’t seem right. Oh, I’ll have to go. But I’m still so young and full of life, it’s a shame.”

  Six signatures had been required on the forms and she was so adrift from her authentic self that not one resembled the other. Ruth’s attorney told the press, “Mrs. Snyder looked like a dead woman. She touched my hand and she was cold as ice. Her face was red from crying. She had been lying down all day before I arrived.”

  Whereas Father George Murphy left the Queens County Jail for a final visit with Ruth in Sing Sing and told Mrs. Josephine Brown that he’d noticed the solace that was filling the erring daughter’s soul and bracing Ruth for the ordeal to come. “Why, she even smiled when I left. The beautiful, spiritual smile of those who have made peace with their Creator.”

  She’d written him instructions about her funeral. “Remember—only the most simple burial, no Mass, no inscriptions, very plain. I want to go out of this world as I came into it—just a poor soul.” She’d be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and her headstone would be engraved with her birth name: “May R. Brown.” She asked Father Murphy “to just say a few prayers over me before my clay is laid to rest” and noted, “I offered my Communion for Judd last Sunday—I have no hate in my heart, and I don’t think he has either.”

  Judd signed forms that finalized the transfer to Mrs. Isabel Gray of about seven thousand dollars in stocks and bonds and full equity in the house on Wayne Avenue. She would also be the sole beneficiary of his policy with the Union Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati and she would receive a check for twenty-five thousand dollars on January 13th. Isabel would stay on in Norwalk, Connecticut, volunteering for the Women’s Guild at Grace Episcopal Church and dying in 1957 at the age of sixty-five.

  Eight months of purchases of tobacco and incidentals had exhausted all but twenty-one dollars in Judd’s Death House bank account; he requested that fifteen dollars of it go for a first-class chicken dinner with all the trimmings for the ten remaining inmates on death row, and six dollars were given to Dixie Baldwin, a Negro, because he had no friends or family or funds for cigarettes. Upon hearing that, Dixie wept.

  Warden Lawes received twenty-five letters from women volunteering to die in place of Mrs. Snyder, a letter from a man who signed his name “The Jolly Roger” and threatened to kill Lawes if Ruth were executed, and another from a Washington group that called itself the Soul Mates’ Union and wanted Lawes to permit Ruth and Judd to sleep together on their final night alive.

  Judd woke at a quarter to nine, ate breakfast and read his Bible, and was examined by Dr. Charles Sweet. Since he seemed more reconciled and composed, Judd was told he would follow Ruth to the electric chair, the harder position. Judd wrote thank-you letters to those who’d helped him and eleven letters to Jane, one to be opened and read on each birthday until she achieved twenty-one. Hot tea was served as Isabel visited him; then Mrs. Gray and Mr. and Mrs. Harold Logan; and finally Attorney Samuel Miller. Arrangements were made for his burial in Rosedale Cemetery in East Orange, New Jersey. Judd’s mother told reporters he was “the sweet boy he’s always been. He’s not a real criminal. Circumstances just got the better of him.”

  Walking to his pre-execution cell at the far end of the west wing, Judd was finally allowed to see and shake hands with the inmates with whom he’d shared eight months of incarceration, as at ease as a hard-used man finally heading into retirement. Some prisoners got misty-eyed, some bucked up his spirits. Even the guards had the husky voices of grim emotion when they spoke.

  Judd played handball with Father McCaffery in the exercise yard and won three of three games. At six he ate chicken soup, roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, celery, stuffed olives, and vanilla ice cream—a dinner he didn’t order; it was just the Death House “special.” Judd reflected that nine months ago he would have had whisky or gin throughout the meal and a cognac afterward, but now he topped off the dinner with only coffee and a cigar.

  A Mafia inmate named Vincent de Stefano, the prison barber, showed up to shave Judd’s face and a three-inch circle on his skull where the electrode contact would be.

  Judd asked, “Are you a drinking man, Vincent?”

  “Well, not in here.”

  “Then when you get out have a drink for me,” Judd said. “Raise me a jolly toast.”

  A prison attendant told the New York Times, “No man in the Death House has ever shown such quiet and dignified deportment as Gray.”

  Ruth woke at nine thirty that morning and was greeted with the erroneous gossip that a justice of the appellate court had granted a stay of execution so she could testify against the Prudential Life Insurance Company. She ate a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, orange juice, toast, and coffee, then was allowed to pace the vacant corridor for exercise, gladsomely singing popular tunes: “Ain’t She Sweet,” “My One and Only,” “’S Wonderful,” “Thou Swell.” Dr. Sweet was examining Ruth when Warden Lawes visited the cell, meaning to tell her the gossip was false but losing heart when he saw how happy she was.

  Mrs. Brown and Ruth’s brother, Andrew, were introduced to the Death House cell for the first time that afternoon and there was giggling, the fond exchange of good memories, and motherly instructions for taking care of Lorraine. Mrs. Brown kissed her daughter’s forehead with the expectation that she’d be released from the Death House soon. Ruth called to them as they walked out, “Look after my baby!”

  Mrs. Josephine Anderson Brown would reside with Andrew for a while, then revert to her maiden name and find her own home on Mahan Avenue in the Bronx, where she died of heart disease in 1939. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.

  Lawes left it to an underling to tell Ruth the bad news that she was to die that night. She fell facedown onto her cot, howling with tears, and ate little of the Spanish omelet that was the general fare for that evening and, in her case, was coated with morphine, to calm her.

  Hardly on speaking terms anymore, Edgar Hazelton and Dana Wallace were given the privilege of a final visit at seven that night. Hazelton was agitated later when he told reporters, “She is too far gone to know what she is doing. I never saw anything more terrible. I cannot describe her terror, her misery, her agony. I died a thousand times in the fifteen minutes we were with her. It was awful.

  “We sat down beside her. She was sitting with her head in her hands. All of us felt so bad that we didn’t say anything. Finally I said, ‘Have you asked God to forgive you?’

  “She said, ‘Yes, I have and He has forgiven me. I hope the world will.’

  “Then she put her head back into her hands. We sat there. Finally, embarrassed, she lifted her head and said, ‘Well, good-bye.’ “What could we do? We got up and left.”

  Wiping off tears, Dana Wallace illustrated the gulf between the attorneys by inter
preting the meeting differently. “She is bearing up and has made her peace with God. She is reconciled with the inevitable and said, ‘I bear no malice against the world or anybody in it.’”

  A matron was forced to shave a three-inch circle on the crown of Ruth’s head and both of them wept at the violation. Ruth wrote thank-you notes to all the matrons who’d watched over her. One matron would later say, “She was always a perfect lady. She wasn’t no trouble at all. She’d chat with us about our problems and such, acting like she had none of her own.”

  When Father McCaffery arrived she glanced at the clock, and he reconstructed their conversation in his own words, with Ruth telling him, “I have an hour and fifty-five minutes to live, Father John. I am terribly sorry that I have sinned, but I am paying dearly for it. Judd and I sinned together, and now it looks as though we’ll go together. If I were to live over again, I would be what I want my child to be—a good girl, really making the commandments of God a guide to a wholesome life.”

  She then wrote a note to Judd Gray, its contents undisclosed. Judd was delighted and immediately wrote a farewell to Ruth. “I am very glad,” he told Reverend Peterson. “I had hoped she would forgive me. I hope God will forgive the both of us.”

  Remarkably, Judd found the time to jot the final six pages of Doomed Ship, recalling much of what transpired that day and faintly hearing the inmates choiring for him “The Pilgrims of the Night”: “Rest comes at last; though life be long and dreary, / The day must dawn, and darksome night be past; / All journeys end in welcomes to the weary, / And heaven, the heart’s true home, will come at last. / Angels of Jesus, angels of light, / Singing to welcome the pilgrims of the night.”

  And at last I am sure of Christ, Judd wrote. I will be free. I have bought this all with my own coin and paid with my body. Deep in my heart creeps in that peace of Eternity, that peace that only God can give. It is like laying my head on a cool and restful pillow. And in death I shall smile.

  An old, cadaverous, white-haired electrician for the New York State prison system was also, since 1926, its executioner. Robert Elliott was famous enough to have been called on to officiate at the Massachusetts execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, but he had never electrocuted a lady and would have to watch her jerk against the restraints as he regulated the voltage. Too little electricity and she’d fry painfully but not die; too much and she’d hideously incinerate, her brain as charred as a fist of coal. Elliott would be paid $150 for the execution, but he’d told a reporter, “I hate like hell to do this job. I hope it ends capital punishment in New York State.”

  Tabloids had contended that Ruth wanted to die in the black silk lingerie she kept in Josephine’s cedar chest and in the black silk dress she’d often worn to house parties with Albert. But she in fact wanted no reminders of the high and footloose times that she felt had gotten her there. After arriving in the pre-execution cell, she asked McCaffery to fetch the Blondex shampoo she’d left behind, and then she was watched by a matron as she cried in the shower and washed her hair. Ruth put on sky-blue panties, ink-black hosiery, and a coarse green skirt that hung to her knees, but she was instructed to have nothing on above the waist for facility in listening for a heartbeat. She dipped her feet into felt carpet slippers, then got into a heavy black smock that was like the housecoat she wore when she cleaned. The only vanity she indulged was looking into a rectangular mirror and raking her wet hair back with a comb to hide the tonsure of an hour ago. She did not even put on her Shalimar perfume.

  Father McCaffery was in his black cassock when he was invited back to the cell. Yoking his neck with a purple stole and sitting beside her on a cot, he hunched forward to hear Ruth’s final, hushed confession of sins. The confessor was overheard saying, “There’s nothing as lonely as dying. Even Jesus felt abandoned on the cross.” Ruth was blessed in absolution and anointed with holy oil. She knelt to receive the Host of viaticum. And then McCaffery stood at the cell entrance to recite in Latin the Office of the Dead. Within a few minutes, John Sheehy, the principal keeper, was there to tell them, “The hour has come.”

  Ruth felt her legs weaken but she was held upright by the matrons. She hated it that she could not halt the tears. She was gently urged into the corridor that was called “the last mile,” and she managed to stagger forward, saying over and over again, “Jesus have mercy on me.” She cradled a large crucifix.

  Even though it was cold and late at night and there was really no spectacle to witness, a great crowd had formed outside Sing Sing’s main gate, where four rifled prison guards were stationed. Children straddled their fathers’ shoulders; some teenagers shinnied up trees; journalists sat on the running boards of their cars, desultorily smoking cigarettes as they waited for the flare that would signal the first death. Some people tramped through a field of snow to watch ice float by on the dark Hudson River.

  Zoe Beckley wrote for the same Famous Features Syndicate that was serializing Judd Gray’s memoir, and she was the sole woman who’d volunteered to witness the executions. She told Warden Lawes she wanted ever so much to see Mrs. Snyder die, however she felt a conflict of interest concerning Mr. Gray. She therefore told the warden she would have to leave when Judd was escorted in, but Lawes wouldn’t permit that, hence she was replaced by a man.

  And so it was that when Ruth entered the execution chamber she was greeted by the silence and scrutiny of twenty male reporters, four male physicians, some sullen prison guards, Warden Lawes and his assistants, and with Father McCaffery still reciting Latin prayers beside her. All told, there were forty-one men. Albert’s sister had called Ruth “man crazy” and now she was overwhelmed by them, with only the matrons for sisterly company.

  Oak church pews for the witnesses had been hauled up from the chapel, but otherwise the wide room was stunningly white except for some silver pipes and silver radiators. Six frosted wall lamps increased the glare, so that Ruth was shading her eyes when she finally noticed the wide oaken chair on its rubber mat. And there was nothing to do but shriek in such a high-pitched way that some reporters held their ears. She would have fallen like a child in a tantrum without the matrons holding firm.

  Saying, “Jesus, have mercy on me, for I have sinned,” Ruth tottered forward as if she’d soon faint but was guided around and gently pushed down onto the rubber seat. McCaffery took the crucifix from her and completed the rite of extreme unction as each upper arm and wrist was buckled to the wooden chair with a leather restraint. Ruth’s black stockings were rolled down to her ankles and each ankle was restrained. She was belted in at the chest and waist. She wildly glanced around at a civilization frankly staring at her fear. Waiting for her to die. She fought to breathe as a strapped black leather mask with just a slit for the nose and mouth was fitted over her face so her head could be fettered against a rubber headrest and so the viewers would not have to see her face in its horrible constrictions. A sea sponge that was soaked in salt water and contained a circular mesh of fine copper wire was inserted into the crown of a leather football helmet, Ruth’s wet hair was parted to expose the shaved occiput of the skull to the electrode, and the helmet was fitted on, the chin strap cinched. She softly said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and another electrode was attached to Ruth’s shaking right calf to complete the electrical circuit.

  All the attendants stood back.

  Cameras were prohibited, but an overly ambitious photographer named Thomas Howard, who’d lied that he was a journalist, was sitting in the front row with an Ansco Memo Miniature taped to his ankle. Raising his trouser cuff and gripping the inflated bulb for the shutter in his front pocket, Howard waited.

  Robert Elliott stood in his alcove, his hands on the electrical controls, and looked through window glass at Warden Lawes.

  Lawes was just watching an overhead clock until it was exactly eleven.

  Ruth was praying, “Jesus, have mercy on me, Jesus, have—”

  She could not finish the sentence because Lawes nodded and the e
xecutioner slammed the switch that closed the electrical circuit. Ruth’s body heaved up but was held fast by the restraints. Howard snapped his photo and was paid an extra one hundred dollars. It would be headlined “DEAD!” on the front page and be judged one of the Great Moments in News Photography.

  The high voltage instantly shocked Ruth into a coma and paralyzed her heart muscles, but Elliott maintained the current for five seconds more until he felt certain that the skin temperature had crossed the threshold of 140 degrees, when the central nervous system would be destroyed. Elliott shut off the current and Ruth’s body relaxed. With folded arms, Lawes considered the floor.

  Ruth’s hands clenched in an involuntary muscular reaction. Ruth’s flesh was fried a scarlet red.

  Elliott forced up the switch again and two thousand volts coursed through Ruth, and again she surged up against the restraints. There was a crackling sound. Her hair caught fire and faint smoke trails floated up from the helmet. She relaxed when Elliott shut off the current, and then, erring on the side of caution, he hit her with the electricity again for a full minute.

  Dr. Sweet went forward and took off the helmet and mask. Ruth had shut her eyes but the current had caused the rictus of a smile, and foam slid from a corner of her mouth. Sheehy held up a towel to hide Ruth’s naked breasts from the witnesses as Sweet searched for a heartbeat with his stethoscope. Dr. Harold Goslin searched too and shook his head. Another doctor did the same.

  Dr. Charles Sweet shouted out, “I pronounce this woman dead.”

  It was 11:04 p.m., Thursday, January 12th, 1928. A red flare was shot up into the heavens to alert the reporters outside the penitentiary.

  Attendants walked forward to carefully hoist the electrocuted body onto the gleaming white enameled bed of a gurney cart. The housedress smock was not just for modesty; it kept the helpers from being burned by her scorching-hot skin when Ruth’s corpse was lifted from the chair. She was wheeled into the white-tiled morgue, “the icebox,” and Principal Keeper Sheehy went down to the west wing to tell Henry Judd Gray it was time.