A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion
Read A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion Online
Authors: Ron Hansen
Tags: #Trials (Murder), #Historical, #Nineteen Twenties, #General, #Ruth May, #Historical Fiction, #Housewives - New York (State) - New York, #Queens (New York, #N.Y.), #Fiction, #Women Murderers - New York (State) - New York, #Trials (Murder) - New York (State) - New York, #Gray, #Husbands - Crimes Against, #Housewives, #New York (State), #Literary, #Women murderers, #Husbands, #Henry Judd, #Snyder, #Adultery, #New York
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ron Hansen
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First Scribner hardcover edition June 2011
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011005571.
ISBN 978-1-4516-1755-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-1757-3 (ebook)
To Bo
A
WILD SURGE
OF
GUILTY PASSION
Chapter Three: Mr. & Mrs. Gray
Chapter Five: Someone to Watch Over Me
Chapter Six: The Murder of Albert Edward Snyder
Chapter Seven: The Endless Desolation of the Soul
Chapter Eight: The Wages of Sin
Chapter Nine: And In Death I Shall Smile
ONE 
S
he woke to a slow thudding on her bedroom door. She was Lorraine Snyder, aged nine. She’d wasted Saturday night with her parents at their friends’ card party and she’d gotten home only after two o’clock Sunday morning. It was now just over five hours later. March 20th, 1927. She fell asleep again, and then she heard a louder thudding and her mother called in a muffled way, “Lora. Lora, it’s me.”
She got up, slumped over to the door, found it mysteriously locked from the hallway, and opened it with a skeleton key that was hanging on a string.
Ruth Snyder was lying on the hallway floor in a short green satin nightgown that was hiked up to her thighs. She’d been softly drumming the door with her head. White clothesline was wrapped many times around her ankles, and her wrists were tied behind her back.
Lorraine screamed, “Mommy! What happened?” She knelt to free the man’s handkerchief that gagged her mother’s mouth, and she heard Ruth say, “Don’t untie me yet. Go over and get Mrs. Mulhauser.”
Harriet Mulhauser was filling an electric coffee percolator from the kitchen tap when she heard the front doorbell ring. The pretty blonde girl from across the street was there on the porch, still in her sailor pajamas and slippers. Wide-eyed and frightened and breathless. “My mother needs you,” she said.
Mrs. Mulhauser found a Snyder house that seemed to have been ransacked, with sofa cushions on the floor, curtains yanked down, and books and silverware strewn. Upstairs she found Mrs. Snyder helplessly lying on the south end of the hallway floor, still tied up. As Harriet knelt to unknot the ropes, Ruth told her in a frantic, disjointed way that the house had been burglarized. She’d gotten whacked on the head by a giant Italian thief and she’d fainted. She had no idea what happened to Albert. Would Harriet check to see if he was all right?
Mrs. Mulhauser looked to the north end of the hallway, where the door was ajar. She felt it improper to go into a bedroom with the husband still in it, and there was something too eerily quiet there. She even thought she smelled something foul. She sent Lorraine to get her husband.
Louis Mulhauser was in his gray wool church-service suit and getting the Sunday
New York Times
from the front sidewalk when he saw the Snyder girl running to him.
“We need you,” she said. She was crying as she took him by the hand.
The Snyder house had been constructed by the same real estate firm and was just like his. Upstairs, Mrs. Snyder was still on the floor and sagging into the hug of his wife. Yard-lengths of clothesline were at Ruth’s bare feet. Although her face was not wet, she made crying sounds.
“Look in on the mister,” Harriet solemnly said, and turned Louis with a tilt of her head.
Louis went alone into the master bedroom. Clothing was scattered and the contents of upended drawers were heaped on the floor. A jewelry case seemed to have been looted. There was a strong chemical smell and Albert Snyder was in his flannel nightshirt and lying mostly on his chest in the twin bed closest to the door. His head seemed arched back in agony and was turned away from the entrance. His wrists were tied behind him with a white hand towel, and his ankles tied with a silk necktie. A .32-caliber revolver was beside his back; his flipped-open wallet had been flung near a bureau. Mr. Mulhauser sidled around between the twin beds to see a horrible, florid, lifeless face that still seemed to be straining away from a chloroformed blue bandana of the sort that farmers used. Albert’s head had been gashed more than once and his pillowcase was sodden and maroon with his drying blood. Worms of chloroformed cotton plugged his nostrils and a fist of chloroformed cotton bulged from his mouth. And a gold mechanical pencil had been used to twist a tourniquet of picture wire so tight around his neck that it furrowed into the skin.
When Louis Mulhauser exited the bedroom, Ruth Snyder was still lying on the floor and snuggling Lorraine as she petted the girl’s hair. “It’s bad,” he said. “I’ll go call the police.”
“Oh
no
!” Ruth screamed. “Albert! Darling!” She seemed to want to go to her husband but Lorraine could feel she was holding back and she finally just stayed as she was and squeezed her daughter even closer. The girl had never heard her father called “darling.” He was not the darling kind.