A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (31 page)

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.

Ruth 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.

Commenting on the public declaration for reporters later, Father Murphy said only, “I think Ruth has a deep and profound sense of repentance.”

   NINE   

T
he 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.