Commenting on the public declaration for reporters later, Father Murphy said only, “I think Ruth has a deep and profound sense of repentance.”
NINE
AND IN DEATH I SHALL SMILE
The Great Mississippi Flood of May 1927, the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States, affected three-quarters of a million people, but as comedian Will Rogers was seeking to raise funds for the victims, he joked that the flood was ill-timed since it was vying for headlines with the Snyder-Gray case.
There was no decrease in public interest after the sentencing, and Ruth increasingly displayed a peculiar sense of what was actually occurring. On Monday, May 16th, as she was escorted out to the seven-passenger Cadillac that would convey her to Sing Sing, Ruth asked the jail matron she was handcuffed to, “Could we stop along the way? There’s a dandy roadhouse near Sleepy Hollow, and I’d like to order a lobster dinner.”
The jail matron frowned. “And hurt the feelings of the prison chefs? They’re probably cooking up a feast.”
It would be pork and beans.
Judd was tucked into the long black Cadillac that was just in front of Ruth’s. Sheriff’s deputies got in, and six blatting motorcycles with sidecars and rifled policemen took forward and flanking positions for the procession north to Ossining. But five thousand onlookers, most of them wives and mothers with a loathing for Mrs. Snyder, surged around the cars, screaming invective and striking the curtained windows and hoods, until police horsemen with nightsticks scared and injured and collided with enough people to guarantee an exit. Eleven cars filled with reporters followed. The Cadillacs raced across the Queensboro Bridge at forty miles per hour but on the Manhattan side were slowed by the enormous crowds shouting catcalls or just waiting for glimpses of the murderers. Crawling through a chaos that a hundred traffic cops couldn’t manage, the caravan eventually crossed Central Park and took Riverside Drive to the Henry Hudson Parkway.
Judd finished off a pack of cigarettes in the hour-and-twenty-minute journey north to Sing Sing and was relieved to hear he could buy more at the prison store. He still had the cash he’d stolen from Albert’s wallet. Spectators and newspapermen were outside the south gate of the penitentiary, but the Cadillacs were waved through, and for the first time in almost two months Judd felt freed of the hordes. There were inmates who ran alongside the car to look in, but a greater number were just walking around in the sun or playing a baseball game. Judd was handcuffed to a deputy sheriff, who said, “I hope you make the team,” and Judd told him, “Well, I was pretty good in high school.”
But in fact there would be no mingling with other prisoners for him.
Cells for those condemned to die were located in a building that was just five years old, contained its own kitchen and exercise yards, and was called by convicts “the slaughterhouse.” There were two wings of twelve cells each for men, a wing of three cells for women, an infirmary, and six cells in the pre-execution section that was called “the dance hall.” Autopsies were performed in “the icebox.”
Judd caught a fleeting glimpse of Ruth as she was received as the sole female prisoner at Sing Sing, and that was it. They never saw each other again.
She surrendered whatever she owned, including her wedding rings and Juicy Fruit gum; was watched as she took off all her clothing and showered; and then was weighed, measured, and examined by Dr. Charles Sweet, who certified that she was not diseased or contagious. Because shoes could function as weapons, she was given felt slippers to wear, and because she was the only woman incarcerated there, Warden Lewis Lawes supplied Mrs. Snyder with cotton stockings and calico housedresses rather than a prison uniform. Three matrons were assigned to guard Ruth in alternating eight-hour shifts. She was never alone. She’d written on a prison form that she was now Catholic, and Father John McCaffery was the first visitor to a cell with concrete walls, a washbasin and toilet, a plain table and chair, and a bolted-down cot with a straw-stuffed mattress.
McCaffery was contacted by a journalist later and asked what Mrs. Snyder was like, and he said, “Attractive, pleasant, and quite a cut-up.”
She was told her visiting days would be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, that she could go to the exercise yard for twenty minutes twice a day, that all mail would be screened, and that she could get writing materials but she’d have to return the pen to the matrons whenever she finished.
She cried, and to console her the Catholic chaplain said he’d work on Warden Lawes to permit Ruth to have the face powder and cold cream she’d requested, and that happened. She was no more than one hundred feet from Judd, but it may as well have been a continent. Each of them slept ten hours a day.
Judd had an easier time of it in the penitentiary. Even in solitary confinement, with other male prisoners within shouting distance he could converse about events in the world; read his Bible aloud for other hearers; call out his moves in a coded checkers game; consult on religious concerns with Reverend Anthony Peterson, the Protestant chaplain; and keep himself fit by playing handball with the priest in the exercise yard. Each night he wished “Good night” to the murderer in the cell next to him, and each morning he greeted him with a “Good morning.” The inmate, a lifelong criminal who’d killed the proprietor of an ice cream shop, called Judd “a hell of a nice fella.”
Each day Judd occupied himself with his voluminous correspondence: to Samuel Miller, the defense attorney who’d become a close friend; to Mrs. Margaret Gray; to Jane; to Isabel; to Haddon Jones; to high school classmates; and to members of his New Jersey country club, the Elks lodge, and the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State. On June 2nd his wife visited him for the first time since his arrest. She would do so just twice more. On late nights in the fall, he began a penciled memoir, Doomed Ship, dedicated “To My Faithful Little Mother” and edited by his sister, a book that would run as a serial with the Famous Features Syndicate and would be published by the Horace Liveright Company a few months after his death. Judd wrote in it: I cannot explain the mystery of being reborn in the Spirit. I can only tell you of the peace that surpasses all understanding. Perhaps you will say: how can a murderer expect to enter Heaven—one such as I am? Just by faith. I am a new creature—just-born again.
In 1927, Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first experimental electronic television pictures; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded; aviator Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis on the first solo, nonstop, transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, and an enormous ticker-tape parade was held for him on Fifth Avenue. The British Broadcasting Corporation was created, as was CBS. President Calvin Coolidge announced he would not run for a second term; Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for murder; the first movie with sound, The Jazz Singer, premiered; the New York Yankees and a “Murderer’s Row” that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party; the Holland Tunnel was constructed underneath the Hudson River, linking New Jersey to New York; the young Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong and the newly formed Red Army failed in their “Autumn Harvest Uprising”; and after nineteen years of production, the Ford Motor Company scrapped the Model T to introduce the Model A.
And Ruth Snyder stayed in the headlines, ever increasing circulation. Reporters noted that she used peroxide to bleach her hair; she read true-romance magazines; she spoke in Swedish whenever Mrs. Brown visited Sing Sing; she wasn’t allowed to wear the gorgeous dresses her mother brought from home, but she was allowed to “visit them” by hanging them in her cell; and that Ruth’s fun-loving cousin, Ethel Anderson, was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery after a death from tuberculosis that seemed to have been worsened by the strain of trial publicity.
At times Ruth seemed a madwoman, but she was examined and ruled sane by the Lunacy Commission. She rebelled and schemed and objected through her lawyers; or she fainted, she was hysterical, she fell into crying fits each night; or she giggled
with the matrons, she received Holy Communion on Sundays, she was visited each day by the warden’s wife and by Father McCaffery. She penned secret notes to the prison cook with each food tray return and he fell crazily in love with her, skulking by a kitchen window overlooking the exercise yard so he could kiss his hand and blow the kiss to her, ecstatic when she grinned and blew a kiss back.
Ruth inserted herself in the conflict between Albert’s brother and Mrs. Josephine Brown over the custody of Lorraine. The little girl was overjoyed when Granny Brown succeeded. Ruth lost the case against the Prudential Life Insurance Company that would have awarded Albert’s beneficiary ninety-six thousand dollars for his “accidental death.” Instead the company sent a check compensating Mrs. Snyder for all the premiums she’d paid, but on the advice of counsel she refused to cash it. She won a stay of execution in June, but then, on November 21st, Justice Irving Lehman of the New York Supreme Court announced that the seven-judge panel saw no reason to grant a new trial, commute either Mrs. Snyder’s or Mr. Gray’s sentence, or delay the court-ordered execution, and there was nothing else for Ruth to do but, in fury, fire her lawyers. Whom she rehired a few days later.
Each weekend New Yorkers had been permitted tours of Sing Sing, but when the numbers swelled from half a dozen to three thousand because of the notorious pair, Warden Lawes halted the practice. Each Sunday in the summer and fall of 1927, Queens Village neighbors complained about the stream of motorists cruising by the Snyder residence, seeking a gander at Lorraine or her grandmother, some even installing themselves on the lawn with box lunches until police were called in. At last the throngs were too much and the house in Queens Village was sold at a loss to an old German husband and wife who were unaware of the property’s infamy.
Lorraine would move with her grandmother to the home of Ruth’s older brother, Andrew, in the Bronx and enroll in a Westchester County boarding school run by Ursuline nuns—exactly the school Albert had stolidly rejected in 1925. She would grow up to be a pretty young woman, happily marry at age twenty, and find a serene anonymity in her husband’s last name. Judd’s daughter Jane would do much the same. Each would live a very long and very private life.
The New York Daily Mirror ran a contest awarding “$25 each day for the best letter telling why Ruth Snyder should NOT be executed” and an equal amount for “why she SHOULD.” Almost no men thought she should die in the electric chair. Almost all women did.
Although in November 1927 she was aged ten, Lorraine purportedly wrote a letter to Santa Claus, requesting that he “bring my darling mother home to me for Christmas. That’s all I want. I’m so lonesome without her.” Hundreds of wrapped presents from those who ached for the girl soon filled her room.
The Snyder case went to Governor Al Smith, who would not rule on it until January and whose reluctance to execute a woman was well known. Mrs. Brown surprised him with a visit in Albany, barging into the governor’s office and begging for mercy not for Ruth but “for the child’s sake.” The governor was cordial and respectful but stated, “I feel for you with all my heart, Mrs. Brown, but we must remember that there are many other daughters, sons, fathers, and mothers in prison. All cannot be released.”
Another avenue was taken by Ruth, who sought the outrage and sympathy of the general public, and financial help for Mrs. Brown, by slashing out a wild, disjointed, and schizophrenic harangue: My Own True Story—So Help Me God! The circulation of the New York Daily Mirror increased by one hundred thousand copies over each day of its serialized run. To establish authenticity, the editors photographed and reprinted the strange first page of the original manuscript that Ruth’s mother had smuggled out, but that facsimile also illustrated the dash-happy, large-lettered handwriting of a crazed and fanatical woman who seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown: “Judd Gray talks!—about ‘the big brown bug’—he ‘put out of its misery’—does (he)—J. G.—ever think back of RUTH BROWN’S BUG he ‘put out of its misery?’”
Albert Snyder was a “brown bug”? That helped her cause?
The Daily Mirror finally tidied Ruth’s prose for readability, but the excitement, confusion, and cockeyed view of what took place in the last year still screamed through: “Don’t the ‘outside’ believe ANYTHING I tell? I did all in my power to stop J. G. without telling my husband.”
She said Judd “would fall in love with anything he could use to advantage.” She claimed, “In order to keep Isabel from telling my husband of our affair, I had to buy her luxuries her husband couldn’t give her, including garments from his job, and because I couldn’t supply her demands she was going to tell my husband!”
Oh God! Where is there any fairness? Where? …
Even tho he confessed to the killing of my husband, why did the WHOLE WORLD believe EVERYTHING he told as “THE TRUTH”? I admitted “the truth” in my unlawful love affair, yet none DID believe me when I said, “I DID NOT KILL MY HUSBAND.” Why was my word doubted? Why? Because J. G. handed the public the same suave talk that took me completely off my feet and fed me up on the biggest lot of bunk, yet we POOR FOOLS love them just the same. …
I just had the misfortune to give my love to a cur—I was only as bad as he made me. …
MY ADVICE TO MEN AND WOMEN, YOUNG AND OLD, IS READ YOUR BIBLES AND PRAYERBOOKS!…
PRAY and have FAITH! For the reward of FAITH is the signature of the Lord Jesus Christ written in your hearts. For Christ’s signature is recognized in the Bank of Heaven. You want to go there, don’t you? …
[Editor: Ruth Snyder’s mood suddenly changed at this point in the writing of her amazing narrative and almost as an anti-climax, she wrote the following:] Please thank the kind people of the outside world for their beautiful cards and letters. Many beautiful books have come, too. Poetry—Elbert Hubbard’s works—Bibles—prayer beads—hankies—many, many thanks.
She also illustrated the damp wit of a vaudevillian, writing, “I always wanted an electric heater, but my husband was too stingy to buy me one. Now I guess I get my wish.”
Researching the seven previous executions of women in New York, Ruth’s attorneys discovered that all were married with children. The majority were hanged, but the first woman to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing, in 1899, was Mrs. Martha Place, who’d jealously hurled acid into her pretty stepdaughter’s eyes, then suffocated her, and then stove in her husband’s head with an ax. Theodore Roosevelt was governor then and rejected pleas for clemency by saying, “To interfere with the course of the law in this case could be justified only on the ground that never hereafter, under any circumstances, should capital punishment be inflicted on a murderess.”
So Ruth’s attorneys realized there were no precedents to help them when on January 5th, 1928, a clemency hearing was held in the executive chamber of Albany’s Capitol Hill. Edgar Hazelton and Dana Wallace escorted Mrs. Josephine Brown into a formal room whose walls were faced with rich mahogany and the hanging portraits of New York’s governors. Then District Attorney Newcombe and his assistants walked in, followed by Judd’s attorneys, Mrs. Margaret Gray, and Judd’s sister Margaret.
The governor sat behind a grand ceremonial desk, took off his glasses, and heard Millard’s plea: “I am aware that the mob is calling for vengeance, the same mob that cried, ‘Crucify him!’ I know the yelping of these human coyotes will not affect your decision. I know you will treat this case with Christ-like sympathy and I beg you to commute the sentence of these two sinners to life imprisonment.”
District Attorney Newcombe’s rebuttal was little more than a jaunt through the facts as brought up in the trial, saying he’d conducted a conscientious examination of the case and found no extenuating circumstances, and that this “revoltingly brutal crime” was the result of connivance, premeditation, and wanton greed for Albert’s insurance money.
A psychiatric defense was offered, but Governor Smith interrupted, saying, “There’s something abnormal about anyone who commits murder. Stay off this psychiatric stuff. Stick to the law.” r />
Quoting Saint Paul, Hazelton recited, “‘The letter of the law killeth, but the spirit of the law giveth life.’”
“Well, the New York legislature says different,” Smith said, “and that’s a later authority than Saint Paul and the one which I am sworn to uphold.” And soon after that the governor proclaimed the clemency hearing was over.
Warden Lewis Lawes announced the execution would be carried out on the night of Thursday, January 12th, and twenty journalists and four medical doctors were selected by lottery to act as witnesses.
Reporters went up to Norwalk, Connecticut, where Isabel and Jane and Mrs. Kallenbach were hiding out in the home of a wealthy banker and friend who held off the scribes by telling them, “Mrs. Gray has nothing to say. Her nerves are shattered, she is prostrate on a bed upstairs, and she has no desire to make any comment.”
Mrs. Josephine Brown was treated to a restaurant dinner by a couple of reporters and she obligingly told them, “She knows she must die, that it’s useless to hold on to hope any longer. Ruth is very blue, but she’s taking it better than I would. She has been a very brave girl.”
Even more journalists than were at the trial now headed up to Ossining to cover the execution. The one hotel there, the Weskora, had burned down just a week earlier, so they were forced to stay in the town’s only boardinghouse, where the room rates were jacked up so high that some took children’s bedrooms in homes or paid to sleep on a sofa. Extra telegraph wires were run along Dunstan Avenue from Ossining to the prison; a ramshackle hot dog stand near the main gate was rented for fifty dollars and changed into an office with its own wire hookup for the New York Daily News; office telephones in the town were leased for a dollar a minute.