A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (28 page)

B
ecause Justice Townsend Scudder disliked the death penalty and the theatrical nature of criminal trials, he sought another judge to replace him when the Snyder-Gray case was put on his docket, but no one else with jurisdiction was available. Reluctantly, he took it on. Scudder was then sixty-one and a widower, a scholarly, patrician man with a European education and sonorous voice who’d graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1888, was elected to two terms as a congressman, and served thirteen years with the New York Supreme Court before returning to the private practice of law. In February 1927, his friend Governor Alfred E. Smith reappointed him to that court and Scudder was his first choice to succeed him in the governorship if Smith resigned to run for the presidency in 1928, as in fact he did. But ex-assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt would insert himself into the governor’s race, and Scudder would graciously
step aside, retiring from the judiciary in 1936, exhibiting his prized cocker spaniels in international dog shows, and only dying in 1960, at the age of ninety-four.

The first interviews of jurors—called “talesmen” in New York—took place on Monday, April 18th, 1927, just four weeks after Judd Gray, with murderous intent, journeyed down from the Onondaga Hotel in Syracuse to the Snyder home in Queens Village. In heat that reached as high as eighty-six degrees, Justice Scudder eventually examined three hundred ninety men before he found twelve talesmen who didn’t try to weasel out of jury duty with excuses like “dyspepsia” or “tenderheartedness” and could swear they weren’t influenced by the one-sided stories in the press. Because the accusation was that there was a conspiracy to commit murder, Justice Scudder crucially decided that the defendants would be tried jointly; hence the trial was not just
State of New York v. Snyder and Gray
but also
Snyder v. Gray
and
Gray v. Snyder.
Essentially each of the accused would be prosecuted twice, but the joint trial was felt to be advantageous for Judd since no Queens County jury had ever sent a woman to the Sing Sing “death house” and he could perhaps piggyback on that reluctance.

In defending their client, Judd’s attorneys would adopt the strategy of insisting that he was dominated by the hypnotic and overpowering will of a conniving, attractive woman who exploited his obliging nature, erotic desires, and other vulnerabilities; that she augmented her mastery of him by threatening to disclose Judd’s misconduct to his wife; and that he killed Albert Snyder in absolute obedience to Ruth’s wishes, a subservience born out of both infatuation and fear. Judd’s attorneys would argue that it was she who planned the crime and he but carried out her orders, even to the establishment of an “ironclad” alibi that located him in Syracuse at the time of the murder. Court proceedings, it was said, would make it evident that Mrs. Snyder had everything to gain in getting rid of
her husband, while Judd had nothing to look forward to beyond greater freedom in their trysts and lovemaking, which had never been interrupted and were not likely to be.

Ruth Snyder’s defense was established by attorneys Hazelton and Wallace just two days after the crime: she recanted a confession coerced from her on March 21st after more than sixteen hours of police grilling in which she was denied sleep or solace after the shocking, bloody, and devastating loss of the deceased. She would maintain that Judd was intent on murdering her husband, that she’d allowed him access to the house only in order to have it out with him and finally end the affair, and that she’d accepted the sash weight from Judd in the restaurant to get it out of his hands. Ruth’s attorneys would argue that she and Judd had often joked about her husband’s up-and-down health and the gladsome possibility of his accidental death, but that the thought of a homicide was the farthest thing from her mind. She’d had a change of heart that Judd had ignored. She would contend that Judd deliberately, solely, and secretly hatched the plan to kill Albert Snyder and, having done so, tied up the corpse, counterfeited a burglary and assault by fabricated Italians, and threatened to murder Ruth with Albert’s revolver unless she assisted him in the deception. She’d been scared enough to cooperate with Judd for a while, and then she cooperated with the detectives, giving them exactly what they wanted in the vain hope of being allowed to go home to a grieving nine-year-old daughter.

Judd Gray had lost weight and was almost spindly when he was handcuffed in his jail cell and huddled within a squad of bailiffs for the secret predawn walk to the courtroom. Earlier, Harry Folsom had brought him clothing from Judd’s East Orange home, so he was, as always, a Brooks Brothers model in a fine, dark, tailored
suit and owlish tortoiseshell glasses, his stern face soothed with Tabac aftershave and his ridged and furrowed walnut-brown hair gleamingly groomed with Brilliantine.

Looking up at the Queens County Courthouse from the sidewalk, Judd asked a friendlier bailiff about its architecture and was told the building was in the English Renaissance Revival style. But it was in fact a rather garish, four-story jumble of red brick and limestone, with paired Ionic columns holding up balconies on each side of its high, arched entrance. Inside, Judd and his squad of guards noisily trudged up a grand marble staircase with intricate black ironwork that zigzagged up to oak-paneled hallways. And then they were in a majestic, third-floor courtroom with a forty-foot ceiling, Jersey cream wall facings, heavy dark oak furniture and high-backed pews, and a magnificent skylight of green and orange stained glass that sketched a flaming torch and the scales of justice. Judd was told that Cecil B. DeMille shot the trial scenes for his 1922 movie
Manslaughter
there.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Judd said. “Leatrice Joy starred in it, right?”

A bailiff seemed affronted by his calm. “You
do
know why you’re here?”

“It’s just that I was recalling how Miss Leatrice Joy began the bobbed hair craze.”

Judd was escorted into an oak-paneled side room and given a doughnut and coffee. And his conversation shifted to other movies and musical revues over his nervous three-hour wait for the first session.

The Queens County courtroom was meant to accommodate two hundred fifty people, but even during jury selection there were half that many just in credentialed reporters, with fifteen hundred more
viewers jammed in so tightly that the acoustics worsened, and so for the first day of the trial a Long Island broadcasting company outfitted the room with microphones and loudspeakers—the first time that had ever been done in a court.

Sitting right behind Judd and in front of the rows of journalists and the wide courtroom railing were the Gray family, including Judd’s plump sister Margaret and her husband Harold Logan and Judd’s mother, the haggard Mrs. Margaret Gray, who hitched her chair so she could fix a smoldering glare on Ruth. Also initially in the audience were his employers, Alfred Benjamin and Charles Johnes, and a few of their staff; Manhattan lingerie buyers; Elks club members from Orange; and friends from the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State, plus Haddon Jones and Harry Platt, who would be witnesses for the prosecution. Isabel, Jane, and his mother-in-law stayed in Connecticut.

Mrs. Josephine Brown also was missing, having chosen instead to stay home with her granddaughter. But sitting behind Ruth in the courtroom were her familiars: Kitty Kaufman, Harry Folsom—still a friend to both defendants—and Ruth’s frail, tubercular cousin Ethel, whose divorce from Patrolman Ed Pierson had been finalized in the Bronx Supreme Court. Kitty, Harry, and Ethel would never be required to testify since both the prosecution and the defense sought a tidy narrative with none of the puzzling contradictions and tangents of real life.

Ruth was no longer a sylph. Though some journalists would still write of her beauty and shapeliness, others exaggerated her ordinariness, for the inactivity of jail had caused her to gain weight, she’d not seen a hairdresser in a month, and she was forced to manicure her nails with matchsticks. She wore on the first day of the trial Shalimar perfume and the chic, all-black outfit she’d bought at Bloomingdale’s for Albert’s funeral: the patent-leather pumps, sheer hose, a Jeanne Lanvin silk dress, as well as the jet-beaded
rosary with a silver crucifix that she wore as a necklace. Father George Murphy chose not to correct her and each morning as she walked into the courtroom he would wink or offer a thumbs-up to gladden her spirits.

Because of the risk of disorder and pandemonium in an overburdened courtroom, off-duty policemen were given free admission, a lot of them still friends of Tommy, not a few of them drunk by noon. And there must have also been in that audience at least some of those satyrs who thought they knew what they wanted and sent the jailed dominatrix one hundred sixty-four proposals of marriage.

But the focus of attention was often on the hundreds of celebrities who attended the trial. It was a hot-ticket item and generally only the famous or connected got inside. The eleventh Marquis of Queensbury, in morning coat and spats, and his wife Cathleen were regulars. Composer Irving Berlin was there and was vexed to hear that Ruth and Judd had adopted his song “Always” as theirs. Arriving in a limousine from his mansion on Long Island was D. W. Griffith, the American director of more than five hundred silent films, including
Intolerance
and
The Battle of the Sexes.
Griffith thought there could be a thrilling melodrama in the trial, as did theater owner and producer David Belasco, who affected the soutane of clergy as the self-anointed “Bishop of Broadway” and thought of Ruth as “passionate and misunderstood and not nearly as bad as she’s made out to be.” The
Telegram
engaged Will Durant, the author of the surprising bestseller
The Story of Philosophy,
to contribute opinions because his book was, inconceivably, a favorite of Ruth’s. The
Evening Graphic
ironically countered Durant with the sly humor of vaudevillian Jimmy Durante. Actress and playwright Mae West had just been released from ten days in jail for
Sex,
the risqué Broadway farce that was shut down for indecency, and now she was assigned to act as a commentator on the
Snyder-Gray case by the
National Police Gazette.
Short-story writer Fannie Hurst was hired for the length of the trial, as was Maurine Dallas Watkins, the playwright of
Chicago,
which was about two “jazz babes” who became murderesses. Accompanying Watkins was comedienne Francine Larrimore, who created the role of
Chicago
’s Roxie Hart, and stated in the play, “I’m so gentle, I couldn’t harm a fly.” In a pretrial interview, Ruth had stunned reporters with the variation, “Kill my husband? Why, I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

The oft-married celebrity Peggy Hopkins Joyce wrote maliciously about Ruth and Judd for the New York
Daily Mirror,
as did Samuel Shipman, whose play
Crime
was still running and whose leading lady, Sylvia Sidney, joined him in the courtroom. The magician Howard Thurston was a continuing presence, as was Ben Hecht, the screenwriter and novelist who was called “the Shakespeare of Hollywood.” Actress Olga Petrova generously posed for a host of photographers in front of the Rolls-Royce that oozed her there. Evelyn Law of
The Ziegfeld Follies
also found attendance a fine way to get noticed, as did so many other theater people that their general seating area was called “the Actor’s Equity Section.”

Wearing an odd Buster Brown necktie was the Reverend John Roach Straton, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, the first hellfire preacher to broadcast his Sunday sermons over the radio and the man who would campaign against the Catholic Al Smith as the presidential “candidate of rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Revivalist Billy Sunday skeptically looked in on the trial one day, and in nightly columns for the
Evening Graphic,
evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson railed against “Sex Love,” “demon alcohol,” “red-hot cuties,” and the multiple sins and vices on exhibit in the trial.

It was mid-April and getting hot in that third-floor room, but flashy ladies still displayed their sealskin coats and muskrat furs. They carried opera glasses. And though playwright Willard Mack would negatively review the trial—“The plot is weak. The
construction is childlike. The direction is pitiful. The principals are stupid”—each performance was standing-room only.

Justice Scudder introduced the situation and accusations for the jury on the first morning, noting that the defendants were jointly on trial for the crime of murder in the first degree, that each was presumed to be innocent, that the burden of proof could never shift from the prosecution to the accused, and if the jury entertained a reasonable doubt of guilt, both must be acquitted. And then Justice Scudder critically indicated that “if two persons with malice aforethought and with a deliberate and premeditated design join hands to kill a third person, and accomplish the act, the law does not concern itself as to how much of the act of inflicting death was done by either one; the fact that they both participated in any degree makes them equally guilty.”

Stout, short, silver-haired Richard Newcombe calmly presented the government’s strong case against the couple in just thirty minutes, deftly organizing details and chronology and giving evidence that the murder was premeditated by noting that Henry Judd Gray initially intended to kill Ruth’s husband on March 7th. “Whether it was an act of Providence that left that poor devil, Albert Snyder, to live a few more weeks I don’t know, but the crime was not consummated that night.”

Employment of that vaguely salacious phrase—“consummated that night”—was not accidental. Adultery and homicide were linked throughout the trial. One journalist quoted Shakespeare’s
Pericles
in writing, “‘One sin, I know, another doth provoke; murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.’” Judd had admitted exchanging “caresses” with Ruth before and after she strangled Albert, and because a full three hours were exhausted between the killing and Judd’s getaway, it was gossiped that they had engaged in congratulatory intercourse when Albert’s body was not yet cold. The district attorney hinted at that in his opening statement by
noting the three-hour gap and saying they could only have been filled with “planning and conceiving and scheming and God knows what else—I don’t
want
to know.”