A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (32 page)

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.”

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.

Governor Smith’s wife, Catherine, had collapsed with an appendicitis attack during their overnight at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel on Madison Avenue and 43rd Street, and reporters hung out in the lobby to harvest news about the illness. But instead, at six o’clock on Tuesday evening, they were invited up to the executive suite on the fourteenth floor and heard the governor read his decision on executive clemency. “The execution of this judgment on a woman is so distressing,” he read, “that I had hoped that the appeal to me would disclose some fact which would justify my interference with the procedure of the law. But this did not happen. I have searched in vain for any basis upon which my conscience, in the light of my oath of office, can approve, that I might temper the law with mercy.”

But he found he agreed with the twelve jurors and the seven justices of the court of appeals; hence he denied the application for executive clemency, held up his hand to avoid further questioning, and then left to see his wife in the hospital.

Hearing the news on Wednesday, Ruth emptied her Death House bank account and finished off five dollars’ worth of chocolate. Toiling hard at signing her name on some legal forms, she said, “I’m a thirty-two-year-old mother in the prime of life and they’re going to kill me. It don’t seem right. Oh, I’ll have to go. But I’m still so young and full of life, it’s a shame.”

Six signatures had been required on the forms and she was so adrift from her authentic self that not one resembled the other. Ruth’s attorney told the press, “Mrs. Snyder looked like a dead woman. She touched my hand and she was cold as ice. Her face was red from crying. She had been lying down all day before I arrived.”

Whereas Father George Murphy left the Queens County Jail for a final visit with Ruth in Sing Sing and told Mrs. Josephine Brown that he’d noticed the solace that was filling the erring daughter’s soul and bracing Ruth for the ordeal to come. “Why, she even smiled when I left. The beautiful, spiritual smile of those who have made peace with their Creator.”

She’d written him instructions about her funeral. “Remember—only the most simple burial, no Mass, no inscriptions, very plain. I want to go out of this world as I came into it—just a poor soul.” She’d be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and her headstone would be engraved with her birth name: “May R. Brown.” She asked Father Murphy “to just say a few prayers over me before my clay is laid to rest” and noted, “I offered my Communion for Judd last Sunday—I have no hate in my heart, and I don’t think he has either.”

Judd signed forms that finalized the transfer to Mrs. Isabel Gray of about seven thousand dollars in stocks and bonds and full equity in the house on Wayne Avenue. She would also be the sole beneficiary of his policy with the Union Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati and she would receive a check for twenty-five thousand dollars on January 13th. Isabel would stay on in Norwalk,
Connecticut, volunteering for the Women’s Guild at Grace Episcopal Church and dying in 1957 at the age of sixty-five.

Eight months of purchases of tobacco and incidentals had exhausted all but twenty-one dollars in Judd’s Death House bank account; he requested that fifteen dollars of it go for a first-class chicken dinner with all the trimmings for the ten remaining inmates on death row, and six dollars were given to Dixie Baldwin, a Negro, because he had no friends or family or funds for cigarettes. Upon hearing that, Dixie wept.

Warden Lawes received twenty-five letters from women volunteering to die in place of Mrs. Snyder, a letter from a man who signed his name “The Jolly Roger” and threatened to kill Lawes if Ruth were executed, and another from a Washington group that called itself the Soul Mates’ Union and wanted Lawes to permit Ruth and Judd to sleep together on their final night alive.

Judd woke at a quarter to nine, ate breakfast and read his Bible, and was examined by Dr. Charles Sweet. Since he seemed more reconciled and composed, Judd was told he would follow Ruth to the electric chair, the harder position. Judd wrote thank-you letters to those who’d helped him and eleven letters to Jane, one to be opened and read on each birthday until she achieved twenty-one. Hot tea was served as Isabel visited him; then Mrs. Gray and Mr. and Mrs. Harold Logan; and finally Attorney Samuel Miller. Arrangements were made for his burial in Rosedale Cemetery in East Orange, New Jersey. Judd’s mother told reporters he was “the sweet boy he’s always been. He’s not a real criminal. Circumstances just got the better of him.”

Walking to his pre-execution cell at the far end of the west wing, Judd was finally allowed to see and shake hands with the inmates with whom he’d shared eight months of incarceration, as at
ease as a hard-used man finally heading into retirement. Some prisoners got misty-eyed, some bucked up his spirits. Even the guards had the husky voices of grim emotion when they spoke.

Judd played handball with Father McCaffery in the exercise yard and won three of three games. At six he ate chicken soup, roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, celery, stuffed olives, and vanilla ice cream—a dinner he didn’t order; it was just the Death House “special.” Judd reflected that nine months ago he would have had whisky or gin throughout the meal and a cognac afterward, but now he topped off the dinner with only coffee and a cigar.