A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

She claimed again that she’d been almost strangled and hit over the head by a burglar, but like Dr. Hansen, he could find no contusions of the skull, no bruising of the throat, no injury of any kind. She said the attack probably occurred around two thirty in the morning, that she’d then “conked out,” and that she woke up five hours later, gagged and with her wrists and ankles tied with clothesline.

“Had you been drinking?”

She shook her head. “I have a hard time handling alcohol. I get sick.”

“Had you been sexually molested?”

She hesitated, then said, “No.”

“Are you a smoker?”

“No.”

“Was your husband?”

“Cigars sometimes. Why?”

“It helps the police.”

She got a worried look.

“You fainted?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And were out for five hours?”

She nodded, but uncertainly. And then she smiled with perfect teeth in a perfectly lovely way, as if she’d just noticed how handsome and intriguing and gallant he was. With a softer tone that he crazily thought of as smooth and sweet as butterscotch, Ruth said, “You seem extra curious about that.”

And he found himself wanting to help her out. “Well, it’s unprecedented, Mrs. Snyder,” the medical examiner said. “You faint, you fall down, blood flows into your head again, and you generally wake up within five or ten minutes.”

She had the look of a child learning. “Still, that’s what happened.”

“And then what?”

She said she’d scooted along the floor to get help from Lorraine.

Dr. Neal found no chafing on the skin

of the wrists or ankles where the presumably snug clothesline bindings had been. And he was surprised to find that yard-long lengths of quarter-inch rope had been wrapped four times around the ankles as if she were a movie damsel in distress.

“Are there any more questions?” she asked.

And now it was he who was defensive. “Yes,” he said, “but not from me.”

Seeming about to swoon, Ruth said, “I have to lie down now. I’m emotional and exhausted.”

The head of the investigation was New York City Police Commissioner George V. McLaughlin, a hale, hearty, fashionably dressed Irishman of forty, who would soon leave elective office to become a banking executive with the Brooklyn Trust Company. He got upstairs just before noon and peeked into Lorraine’s room to view Mrs. Snyder just as Dr. Neal was leaving.

“She’s a looker, isn’t she?” McLaughlin said, and Dr. Neal seemed embarrassed.

Walking into the master bedroom, the medical examiner showed McLaughlin how a blunt instrument had caused two lacerations above the right ear on Albert Snyder’s head and a laceration on the skull near his cowlick. A hand or hands had caused seven abrasions on his neck as he was choked; he seemed to have been socked in the nose; he was suffocating on chloroform; and common picture wire had been used to strangle him.

“So what actually caused his death?” McLaughlin asked.

“The choice is yours. Either suffocation, strangulation, or even blunt-force trauma. The assailants were thorough.”

“A lot of wasted effort if you just want to kill a guy. And the loaded thirty-two-caliber on the bed. Why would burglars leave a gun behind?” And then McLaughlin looked at the photographer. “You get all your shots?”