“Why is it you haven’t asked who was murdered?”
All through the night at the Syracuse police headquarters the interrogation continued, and Judd insisted on the fantasy that he’d stayed at the Onondaga all weekend. Around sunrise, Detective Lieutenants Martin Brown and Michael McDermott arrived by train from the Jamaica precinct house, took Judd into an office, and first confirmed that his rather feminine hand size matched the finger gouges on Albert’s throat, asked him if he knew Mrs. Snyder—he said he did, and that he loved her—then laid out all the reasons why his fiction didn’t fit the facts. But Judd held to it and even added to his lying by convincing them he’d graduated from Cornell University, Detective Brown’s alma mater.
Syracuse Police Chief Martin Cadin would say, “I’ve been in police work for over twenty years, and if he is guilty of this crime, he is the calmest individual I’ve ever come across.”
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Judd was told that Ruth had confessed and incriminated him, but Judd continued to deny that he’d committed the homicide. Haddon Jones was hauled in to testify about his Sunday evening with Judd, but he just idly worried the Elks club tooth hanging from the gold chain of his pocket watch and in fraternal loyalty offered nothing of value even though he could have been charged with conspiracy.
Acting like a bodyguard, Haddon was grimly on the left of Judd when McDermott and Brown took him into custody for the railway journey to New York City, and it was Haddon’s hand that hid Judd’s face from the hordes of reporters and photographers that swarmed them when they exited police headquarters.
Was it because it had been almost three in the morning that the detectives overlooked the contents of Judd’s hotel wastebasket? A chambermaid named Nellie Barnes heard about the hotel guest’s arrest when she got to work on Monday morning. She wisely collected the wastebasket when she cleaned 743, locked it in a closet of cleaning supplies, and then, at lunchtime, contacted police, who found in it cigarette butts and struck matches, a hotel envelope with Haddon’s penciled note, a Long Island Rail Road train schedule, an envelope with a Jamaica postmark that was addressed to Judd in Ruth’s handwriting, and the 8:45 a.m., Sunday, March 20th, Pullman ticket from New York City to Albany, with a coach connection to Syracuse.
Judd was on the same train to Grand Central Station by four o’clock and had been shown an afternoon Syracuse newspaper with the headline “MRS. SNYDER CONFESSES!” In Albany, Queens assistant district attorney James Conroy and Deputy Inspector Gallagher got on board and Judd heartily shook their hands, genially saying, “This is the first time I’ve been in the clutches of the law.” Judd joined their party in the dining car for supper, gleefully told ladies’-underwear jokes in his nervousness, and even grandly footed the bill for them. He was still treating his predicament as an incongruous misunderstanding and said, “We’ll all laugh over this someday.”
And then over coffee, Detective McDermott rocked back in his chair and told him, “Oh, by the way, Judd. Did you know we have the contents of your Onondaga Hotel wastepaper basket?”
Judd’s face whitened as he thought of what could be in there. “Mac, what did you find in that basket?” Hearing of those findings and realizing how they niftily connected the dots, Judd finally confessed, “Well, gentlemen, I was at that house that night.”
And thenceforward, as one journalist put it, “every syllable he uttered was gospel insofar as human fallibility allows.”
Alerted to a huge crowd waiting for their arrival at Grand Central Station, the police hustled Henry Judd Gray off the train at 125th Street and took him by car to the Long Island City Courthouse, where he was interviewed by the Queens County district attorney. Though he was just forty-six, Richard S. Newcombe seemed fatherly and old-fashioned, even Victorian, a short, deep-voiced, hand-wringing man who seemed to hurt when he spoke and whose hank of silver hair was woven over his head to give the faint illusion that he wasn’t in fact bald. Wincing as he did so, Newcombe went through the details of Ruth’s confession that seemed to match the evidence of the crime scene and that implicated Judd in the murder.
“She seems to have turned on you,” Newcombe said. “Had she sworn that she’d love you always?”
Judd then felt, he later wrote, the endless desolation of the soul, but all he could say was, “How did you know?”
With sadness, Newcombe said, “Well, it happens.”
Judd told his story as well as he could in his daze, signed the confession at four in the morning, and was hurried downstairs to be photographed and fingerprinted, then was shackled and escorted to the Queens County Jail through the flashbulbs, crushing onrush, and screamed questions of what he would call “the war maneuvers of the great American Press.”
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Ruth, too, was astonished by the gangs of journalists, photographers, and gawkers who followed her and her police cortege into the Queens-Bellaire Bank to reveal the Prudential life insurance policies and the other contents of her two safety deposit boxes and then to the Waldorf-Astoria, where she claimed the couple’s “honeymoon bag” and was recognized by the manager and staff as “Mrs. Jane Gray.”
There were eleven major newspapers in metropolitan New York and each seemed to consider the evolving Snyder-Gray case the crime of the century. And each paper would see its circulation double when Ruth or Judd was featured. So there were installments each day for the next few months and regular items through January 1928, and anything about them, their families, their “sordid love,” or their “brutal, cold-blooded murder” seemed a fair subject for discussion.
Even before Judd made it to New York City and then into the Queens County Jail, a news gatherer forced an entrance into Judd’s mother’s home in West Orange by claiming he was a Brooklyn homicide detective and boorishly demanding that a frail and frightened Mrs. Margaret Gray answer certain questions at once. Another journalist invaded the office of the principal of Washington Elementary School in East Orange on the 21st, insisting on an interview with Jane Gray, who was then ten. The girl was sent home without hearing why and found the family’s brick house on 37 Wayne Avenue was guarded by a contingent of police who were holding off a wide gang of shouting reporters.
Isabel finally appeased them that rainy Monday evening with a terse announcement that she read aloud from the front porch, requesting civility and privacy for the family and seemliness from the press corps, and saying she would not believe “the wild allegations about my husband’s treachery” unless he personally confirmed them.
She got the chance for that on the morning of Tuesday, March 22nd, when she visited Judd in the Queens County Jail. A Wednesday headline would read “WIFE AIDS KILLER.” She was wearing “a beaver coat of inferior quality” and a turban hat “that was not smart.” She seemed “cold and passionless” and “inclined to plumpness, not pretty, with no glamour or intrigue.”
In jail, she glared at the handcuffed man and asked, “Bud, did you do those things?”
Judd frankly said, “Yes.”
Isabel was steward to a jilted wife’s agony for a minute, and then she asked, “Did you sign a confession?” Judd nodded. “At four this morning.”
“Were you pressured to sign it?”
“No,” he said. “They have treated me like a gentleman.”
She became conscious that a great crowd of onlookers was being held in abeyance by the jailers and she spoke more softly, but she was overheard telling her husband, “Don’t forget all your friends are standing by you, even though we can’t understand why this tragedy has happened. You must have had liquor.”
Judd confided details to Isabel but he was aware enough of journalism to hide his mouth and hush his voice so he would be unheard.
After a while she stiffened a little and said in answer, “You asked me to see you. I am here. I intend, as your wife, to do my duty by you.”
Holding her hands, he said, “You can see me every day.”