A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

  But her attorneys did, so they called pretty, nine-year-old Lorraine Snyder to the witness stand, a girl without a father and, should the jury so choose, with a mother soon to die. Because of the jail’s rules, Ruth hadn’t seen her daughter since March 21st when she was arrested, and it was now May 3rd. She gasped with surprise when Lorraine’s name was called and she was so pleased to watch her filing into the courtroom behind the bailiff that Ruth couldn’t help smiling even as she wept. Ruth leaned toward Dana Wallace to say how pretty Lorraine looked in that wide-brimmed black hat and a just-bought black middy dress. And Ruth swiftly wiped her blurring tears away so she wouldn’t miss a second of the child’s testimony as Lorraine solemnly listened to Justice Scudder’s instructions.

  The court ruled that the girl would not be sworn, then requested she give her name and address. She avoided the faces of Ruth and Judd as she did so. Justice Scudder then said, “Just lean back in your chair and be comfortable and look at that gentleman at the other end of the table”—indicating Hazelton—“and do not look at anybody else. Just look right at him.”

  Hazelton strode away from Lorraine’s mother as he asked, “Lorraine, do you remember the morning your mother called you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was it daylight or dark?”

  “Light,” she said.

  “And how long after she called you did you go for help from the Mulhausers?”

  “Right away.”

  And that was all. She’d just been there to establish the existence of a child for the talesmen. Ruth ached for some contact with Lora, just the tiniest wave of hello, but not even a stray glance was exchanged as the nine-year-old was escorted out by the bailiff. She was not the only one in the courtroom crying when the door shut behind the girl and Samuel Miller interrupted the mood to say, “The defense calls Henry Judd Gray to testify in his own behalf.”

  Because of his wariness, his earlier slavish devotion to Ruth, his general neglect of the goings-on now, and his melancholy slump in his chair at the defendant’s table, reporters had depicted Judd as “inert,” “a scared rabbit,” “a putty man.” Playwright Willard Mack sneered that he was “a man, I am sure, who couldn’t put up a croquet set without help.” And Peggy Hopkins Joyce snidely compared him to “a bunch of dough that somebody forgot to knead.” But when called to the stand, Judd went with confidence, a fast stride, and an officer’s bearing. Well-tailored as always, he wore a dark, pinstriped, double-breasted suit, a white silk shirt, and a finely chosen tie. His face was jailhouse pale; his undulant, nut-brown hair was freshly cut; he surprised the courtroom with his baritone voice. Justice Scudder would much later reminisce that while Mrs. Snyder struck him as “frivolous and coarse,” the ever-obliging Gray “gave off the appearance of a divinity-school student.” Even cynical journalists soon were judging him as a pious and repentant gentleman, “well-educated, well-bred, well-mannered.” And he was Ruth’s opposite in that his testimony conformed not just to each item of his confession but adhered so closely to the police department’s established facts that the district attorney hardly interrogated him.

  Had it been possible to plead guilty, Judd would have done so and resolutely gone straight to the penitentiary, so there was no protection, censorship, or surprise in his recital, just minor clarifications, frequent forgetfulness, and an alcoholic’s wakened consciousness of how crazily intoxicated he’d generally been. Singer Nora Bayes would note with amazement after he testified, “There’s not that much liquor in the world!”

  Within the afternoon Judd and his defense attorney had gotten to the murder, and Ruth held her face in her hands, crying, as Judd recited his account of that night, and he saw his mother crying, too, and then Judd was done for and fell apart, and Samuel Miller was forced to ask for a recess.

  Even Willard Mack’s negative opinion was altered. Holding forth on the courthouse steps, he shouted, “I say to you that if ever human lips uttered the truth, this was the time.”

  There was an announcement that the pathological details of Judd’s sexual liaisons with Ruth were expected to be so shocking and revealing that ladies would be barred from the courtroom. But in a joint conference with the attorneys, Justice Scudder interrogated the relevance of that line of questioning, and there seems to have been an agreement, because in cross-examination the next day, Dana Wallace focused solely on the murder. Demeaning the codefendant whenever he could, Wallace even requested that Judd get up and demonstrate exactly how he’d held the sash weight high over his head in both hands in order to gash in Albert’s skull. Afterward, Ruth’s attorney noted, “You had not the same emotions just now as you had yesterday.”

  “No, sir,” Judd said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Was that because you were preparing yesterday under direct examination to be emotional at just that time?”

  “It was not, sir, no.”

  “So the recital for your attorney brought tears to your eyes, but the actual enactment from your memory brought none, is that right?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, no, sir.”

  Wallace let that go and scoured his notes. “Will you tell us, so that we won’t have to rehearse it all, when was the first time you heard Mrs. Snyder propose getting rid of Mr. Snyder?”

  “In January nineteen twenty-six.”

  “And from that time on it was discussed very often, wasn’t it?”

  “A number of times, yes, sir.”

  “And in fact, to use your own expression, she kept hounding you with it, is that right?”

  “That is true, sir.”

  “And told you of the attempts on his life that she made?”

  “She did, sir.”

  “Although you have recited many attempts, as she told you, to destroy her husband, as a matter of fact Albert Snyder was alive up to the time when you first entered the room, wasn’t he?”

  “He was alive then, yes, sir.”

  “In other words, no harm came to him of a serious nature until you became an accessory, is that it?”

  Wallace would continue along that line to illustrate that it was Judd, not Ruth, who governed the relationship and sought the death of his rival, and it was he who orchestrated the particulars of the murder plot. But Judd did not veer in his testimony. Character witnesses then spoke on Judd Gray’s behalf, including next-door neighbors and lingerie buyers—though no one from Benjamin & Johnes—and at five the court adjourned.

  Sunday, May 8th, was Mother’s Day, and so there was the inevitable photograph of Lorraine signing a card for her Mommy, and as the ever-solemn Mrs. Josephine Brown cooked dinner the reporters wanted her feelings about the probable outcome of the trial. “I have no idea what the jury will do,” she said as she mashed potatoes. “Men are so strange.”

  Some journalists who’d sentimentally watched Lorraine testify at the trial felt they needed to nudge and nag Ruth about the anguish she must have been feeling in not having her daughter around for the grand occasion of Mother’s Day. She said she’d eaten roasted chicken and spaghetti that she’d gotten from Roberto Minotti’s Italian restaurant, which was in the neighborhood. She wouldn’t divulge who bought it, and she otherwise gave them very little, just stayed on her cot and gently smiled when she saw her pet mouse scooting around, but she did finally stand at the jail bars to read aloud the telegram she’d be sending Mrs. Brown.

  “‘Mother’s Day Greeting,’” she read. “‘I have many blessings and I want you to know how thankful I am for all that you have done for me. Love to you and kiss Lorraine for me. Ruth.’”

  “Anything else?” a reporter asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Tell my jailers to have Kitty Kaufman here to marcel my hair. And I’d like a manicure, too.”

  Judd was just one floor away. Like Ruth, he stayed on his jail bed. Asked if he’d sent a card or present to Isabel, he said, “She’s my wife, not my mother.”

  “So no?”

  “So no.”

  “Then how about Mrs. Margaret
Gray then?”

  “I shan’t repeat what I said in my note, but I did have sent an inspirational book: When the Days Seem Dark by Philip E. Howard. I found it … restorative.”

  A reporter shouted, “Have you thought about the verdict?”

  “Well, I don’t expect clemency.”

  “Are you going to the chair, you think?”

  Judd shrugged. “I’m not at all afraid of death now. Ever since I confessed my story to the world from the witness stand, I have found a deep tranquility.”

  But his smile seemed more a wince.

  On May 9th, the hot, seventeenth day of the trial, Attorney William J. Millard orated to the jury an old-fashioned summation in defense of Henry Judd Gray. With aching and melancholy, his hands in prayer at his chin, Millard gently regarded Judd, the courtroom, and the jury box. And then he gravely began to tell of the tragedy that had befallen “his friend,” first praising Judd’s biography, his happy life, his spotless reputation, and the “fires of the home hearth that were burning continually with love and devotion.” But then “suddenly in the month of June, nineteen twenty-five, a sinister, fascinating woman came across his path. Oh, gentlemen, what a catastrophe!”

  Elderly-seeming, Millard fully reached out his hand to wag a finger at Ruth. “That woman, that peculiar creature, like a poisonous snake drew Judd Gray into her glistening coils, and there was no escape. Why, gentlemen, it was a perverse and alluring seduction. This woman was abnormal. Just as a piece of steel jumps and clings to a powerful magnet, so Judd Gray was subjected to the compelling force of that woman, and she held him fast. This woman, this peculiar venomous species of humanity, was possessed of an all-consuming, all-absorbing sexual passion, a rapacious animal lust, which seemingly was never satisfied.”

  Ruth’s eyes were shut and her head was resting on her right hand as she pretended to doze through his peroration.

  “She gradually trained her victim,” Millard said. “She employed every possible opportunity to satisfy his desires and ensnare him. And thereafter, after the indulgence which had been going on month after month, she held him enslaved, entrapped, her very own, as though she were acting through him, handling him like a human manikin. Whatever she wanted, he did.”

  She bullied the postman, he said; she conned the insurance agent; she made a slave of Judd. All of it had been asserted many times; his sole addition was a reminder of the half-pint of poisoned rye whiskey that was discovered in Judd’s possession at his arrest. It was William Millard’s contention that Ruth had intended that Judd drunkenly drink the poison that night and die there in the house so that the crime scene could be construed as a murder/suicide. She would not have needed to ransack the house or hide anything; just a very few lies would have been necessary, not the heap that she’d piled up.

  Attorney Dana Wallace presented the closing arguments in favor of Mrs. Snyder and gallantly noted that she was a damsel sandwiched between two prosecutions: that of the district attorney’s office and that of the attorneys for the codefendant, and she had been “put in one of the most unfair positions possible before an American court of justice.” Wallace scornfully looked at Judd as he said, “This miserable filth of the earth is allowed to sit here and make his squealing appeal for mercy, hiding behind a woman’s skirts to try to fool you.” Eventually Wallace would add “diabolical fiend,” “weak-minded,” “despicable creature,” “falsifier,” and “human anaconda” to his descriptions of the codefendant. But Judd just stared straight ahead as Wallace took three hours longer than Millard to say again and reiterate and hit twice more each point that William Millard had expressed in defense of his client, but altering the evidence to make Ruth, not Judd, seem the beguiled, helpless, infatuated victim of a criminal Svengali.

  His defense failed to fit either the familiar history of the couple or the personalities that had been so vibrantly on display in the press and in the courtroom. And Wallace was so excessive in his demonstrations, even going so far as to jerk his coat off his shoulder and massage himself to imitate Judd soothing Ruth’s sunburn with cream, that an overheated and hostile courtroom audience laughed in ridicule, and Wallace shouted at the crowd, “Your titterings bespeak vacant minds. Such people should never be allowed to pass judgment on a defenseless woman.”

  At no time did either defense team impugn Albert Snyder’s character or try to excuse their client by indicating he deserved the excess and finality of his punishment.

  District Attorney Richard Newcombe very briefly rehearsed the state’s case against Mrs. Snyder and Mr. Gray, noting that it made no difference who invented the scheme to murder or actually committed the murder. They were equally and intricately involved. Even Judd’s excuse of intoxication was insufficient since each of his actions seemed so fundamentally clear-headed and well recollected. Mrs. Snyder, he reminded the jury, had held to one story for sixteen hours until she told Police Commissioner McLaughlin that she couldn’t lie anymore. She’d then made a confession in which she neglected to mention the extenuating circumstances she introduced in the courtroom, and now instead, under oath on the witness stand, she’d presented a third story, and it was this one she currently wanted the jury to believe.

  “She, gentlemen of the jury, was like a wild beast in the jungle, crouching there and watching her husband sleep, waiting for the opportunity to strike with Henry Judd Gray. And together they came in and committed cold-blooded, atrocious murder. After Albert Snyder had been struck on the head, he rose up and there he saw in the act of killing him his own wife and her lover, Gray. God, gentlemen, think of that man’s thoughts and his sudden realization that he was being murdered by his own wife and her lover.”

  Shortly after five on that hot afternoon, the jury was sent to a room where the twelve gentlemen slung off their jackets, hoisted the windows for air, and went over the judge’s instructions concerning the various degrees of murder. There was a ballot that went ten for, and two against, the verdict of homicide in the first degree. The jurors were not intellectuals. The reasoning code they lived by they called horse sense. They jawed about the case for a little longer and another ballot was taken. And just before seven, less than two hours after the jury retired, the foreman announced to the court, “The jury finds the defendants, Mrs. Ruth Brown Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  Ruth and Judd were standing, but Ruth immediately fell back into her chair in shock and hid her face in her hands as she arched over, shrieking and quaking with sorrow. Judd tottered with his fists clenched but stayed upright, then fuddled in his navy blue suit-coat pocket until he found and extracted Jane Gray’s Sunday school worship aid A Child’s Book of Prayer. He swayed as he quietly recited what he read.

  There was pandemonium in the courtroom as fifteen hundred people sought to get closer to the condemned couple, yelling at them, screaming curses, inviting sentiments and opinions, wanting just to touch them as a memento. Justice Scudder hammered his gavel and ordered Ruth and Judd sent out to the jail, but it took ten minutes before police could form an alley wide enough for passage through the wild and raucous crowd.

  The New York newspapers had prepared front pages for whenever the presumptive guilty verdict was delivered, and just minutes after seven o’clock that night newsies were hawking extra editions on the streets.

  Ruth halted her exit from the courthouse so she could tell reporters she would instruct Wallace and Hazelton to appeal the verdict. Seeing a grieving George Murphy, the jail’s Catholic chaplain, she lamented, “Oh, Father, I thought they’d believe me.”

  Although he opposed capital punishment, Justice Scudder was required by New York law to sentence Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray to solitary confinement in Sing Sing penitentiary and to execution in the electric chair. Entering the courtroom, both Judd and Ruth were cautious to face forward lest their glances collide, but as they waited Judd overheard her joke with the bailiff: “This is my worst Friday the thirteenth ever.” And even Judd smiled.

  Ru
th took none of the sentencing seriously. She grinned at Justice Scudder’s gloom when he announced the death penalty, and she tickled a jail matron’s side as she was escorted from the courtroom. She told the New York Times, “This is just a formality. I have just as good a chance now of going free as I had before the trial started.”

  But Judd stood ramrod straight as he heard Justice Scudder announce the same sentence, and when his attorneys sought to console him he justified the extremity of his punishment by tranquilly quoting Saint Paul’s “Epistle to the Romans.” “You have heard, haven’t you, gentlemen, that ‘The wages of sin is death’?”

  Walking back to 1 Court Square, he paused on the jailhouse steps for photographers and reporters to herd around him and then, so all could hear, shouted out his handwritten statement: “I am one of the sterling examples of what whiskey, lust, and sin will ultimately condemn one to. I have seen so many pitiful cases here as an inmate of this jail as to what liquor and improper intimate relations will exact in retaliation that it makes me more than anxious to urge my fellow men to see the shining light of God as our only true salvation.”

  Whether it was because of a religious awakening of her own, because of Father George Murphy’s general friendliness to her, or because she was craftily alert to Governor Alfred E. Smith’s Catholic faith, Ruth invited the priest to her jail cell, reminded him that she was a nonpracticing Lutheran, and announced her intent to convert to Catholicism.