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EXECUTED DEAD GIRLS - RUTH SNYDER

Ruth Snyder

1895 - 1928

EXECUTED

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Ruth Brown wanted a good life. Ambitious, she went to work at age 13 as a telephone operator. On her own time, she took classes and studied hard, gaining employable business skills at shorthand and bookkeeping. She had dreams about marrying a Prince Charming.

When she went to work for Albert Snyder, the editor of Motor Boating magazine, Ruth thought she had met her soul mate. She was 20 in 1915 when she married him.

But Albert Snyder brought a rival into their marriage bed. Before marrying Ruth, Albert had been engaged for 10 years to Jessie Guishard and he still worshipped her. When Albert and Ruth moved in together, he kept a picture of Jessie on the wall of their home. Further, when Albert bought a boat, he named it after Jessie. Ruth objected. But Albert declared that Jessie was "the finest woman I have ever met."

Although this was not the marriage Ruth had dreamed of, she and Albert had a daughter, Lorraine, in 1918. With the advent of the "Roaring Twenties," Ruth broadened her horizons and became a Jazz Age party girl. Indifferent, Albert ("the old crab" as she referred to him) stayed home with their daughter in Queens while Ruth went out dancing.

In June of 1925 she met her Prince Charming: Judd Gray, a quiet New Jersey fellow, a 33-year-old corset salesman. They met on a blind date and began an affair. She would leave Lorraine in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and romp with Judd in his room.

Shortly thereafter, Ruth Brown Snyder planned to kill her husband.

But Albert Snyder did not die easy.

Ruth took out a $48,000 life insurance policy on Albert with a double-indemnity clause. Twice, she disconnected the gas while Albert slept and slipped from the house, but both times he awakened and saved himself from asphyxiation. Apparently, he never suspected his wife. Another time she closed him inside the garage door while the automobile's engine was running, but Albert survived. Then she started putting bichloride of mercury in his whiskey. But he survived again.

Finally in February 1927, Ruth convinced Judd to help her murder her husband. Gray hid in a bedroom closet and, when the Snyder's returned home, he hit Albert over the head with a sash weight. Albert struggled and begged for his wife to help him. But Ruth picked up the sash weight and hit her husband repeatedly until he slipped into unconsciousness. Then, Ruth chloroformed him and strangled him with picture wire.

After Albert Snyder was finally dead, Gray tied up Ruth. When the police arrived, she claimed they had been robbed and attacked by burglars.

Albert's body was found in the bedroom, tied hand and foot. He had been chloroformed, and his head bashed in. There were three bullets on the floor and a revolver on the bed. Picture wire was tied tightly around his neck. Money from his wallet was missing and, Ruth told police, so was her jewels. Unfortunately for Ruth, the missing jewelry was found tucked under her mattress.

In the police search of the house a bloody pillowcase was also found as well as a five-pound, bloodstained sash weight. Police found a $200 check in Ruth's desk made out to H. Judd Gray and a tie clip with his initials on the bedroom floor. They found his name, among 28 other men, in Ruth's little black book. They later found $90,000 in life insurance on Albert Snyder, including double indemnity clauses, in a safe deposit box registered in the name of Ruth Brown.

Judd hadn't played it too smart, either. When he left the scene of the crime he walked to a bus stop, asking a policeman how long before the next bus would come. He took the bus to Jamaica where he grabbed a taxi to Manhattan. The cabbie remembered Judd very well, he said, because of the crummy five-cent tip.

After the police falsely told Ruth that Gray had confessed, Ruth confessed. Hearing that Ruth had confessed, Gray confessed. But while both Ruth and Judd confessed to the crime, they proceeded to blame each other. Judd said that Ruth had hypnotized him with "drink, veiled threats, and intensive love." He claimed that Ruth had tied the wire around poor Albert's throat. All Ruth knew, she said, was that Judd went into the bedroom and came out again, saying, "I guess that's it."

In the popular view, Ruth was the stronger of the two. Damon Runyon thought Ruth was a babe. He described her as "a chilly-looking blonde with frosty eyes and one of those marble you-bet-you-will chins." Judd was seen as a wimpy fellow led around by his lover. He called her his "queen" and "my mommie." She referred to him as "lover boy." Damon Runyon wrote of Judd that he was "an inert, scared-drunk fellow that you couldn't miss among any hundred men as a dead set-up for a blonde, or the shell game, or maybe a gold brick – on trial for what might be called for want of a better name: the Dumb-bell Murder. It was so dumb!"

It took a jury only an hour and a half to convict them on May 9, 1927.

The day before the executions, Judd spent his time quietly reading the Bible. Ruth pounded on the bars of her cell and screamed her head off. She had been undergoing a Death Row conversion to Catholicism when a prison matron asked her if she was serious. Ruth answered, "Go to hell."

They were electrocuted one after the other at Sing Sing Prison on January 22, 1928. Judd's feet caught fire during his electrocution, but nobody remembers that. Instead, it is Ruth's three minutes in the hot seat that is burned into the public memory.

Thomas Howard, a news photographer, secretly wore a camera strapped to his ankle and just as the executioner pulled the switch on Ruth, he crossed his legs and snapped a picture. The photo would run on the front page of the New York Daily News.

Ruth was dubbed both "The Iron Widow" and "The Bloody Blonde."

James M. Cain incorporated elements of the Snyder-Gray case into his two novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

MACHINAL (1928) is a play written by early 20th Century playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell. It was inspired by the real life case of convicted and executed murderess Ruth Snyder. The play stands out as one that calls for a vast array of specific sound effects. Its 1928 Broadway premiere, directed by Arthur Hopkins, is considered one of the highpoints of expressionist theatre on the American stage. The story involves Helen who has had her entire life dictated by the people and machines around her. She follows the rituals that society expects of a woman, however resistant she may feel about them, and subsequently marries her boss, whom she finds repulsive. After having a baby with him, followed by an affair with a younger man who fuels her lust for life, she is driven to murder her husband. She is found guilty of the crime and meets her end in one of the deadliest of machines... the electric chair. Clarke Gable originally played the role of "Man" a.k.a. Richard Roe.

- From Wikipedia

HISTORICAL: Celebrity Wives Depression Era European Executed Porno Stars Starlets Western