“But also, men fantasize about sex all the time.”
“Very true,” he said, and winked. “In my confessional experience.”
“And women fantasize about romance.”
“Yes.”
“And looking for romance will get you in just as much trouble.”
The jolly man exclaimed, “Oh, but I wish you could preach!” And he stayed with Ruth in the cell for an hour that night, instructing a little and telling jokes and treating their meeting like a party. She felt girlish again and begged him to return, which he did regularly each morning after he’d finished with the jailed Catholics that he called “the brethren.”
On Holy Thursday he gave her the gift of a jet-black rosary, which he called, romantically, “a garland of roses,” and he included with the gift a folded paper on which he’d handwritten the words to the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be. But Ruth failed to make the connection with prayer and thought of the sixty strung beads as a pretty necklace, happily flaunting the rosary as the only jewelry she was allowed.
Even so, the murder trial that would begin on April 19th so unhinged Ruth Snyder that she ignored the legal advice of Edgar Hazelton and Dana Wallace and on the seventeenth, Easter Sunday, she issued a screed about Judd Gray to a friendly journalist from the New York Daily Mirror. She’d scrawled it in pencil on a child’s school tablet, in handwriting so large she could only fit three or four words on each line. The journalist corrected Ruth’s misspellings and inserted so many fillips of his own that she was forced to practice the recitation before Easter’s pool reporters were invited to her jail cell.
Too jittery to sit, she tilted into the jail bars as if she would soon faint and with shaking hands, fluent tears, and a tremulous voice Ruth read aloud: “I know now that Judd Gray is a coward, a low, cringing, sneaking jackal, the murderer of my husband, who is now trying to hide behind my skirts to try to drag me down into the stinking pit that he himself willingly wallowed in; to brand me as a woman who killed her husband.”
She flipped a page. “I am a mother! I love my child and I loved my child’s father! God! Can you mothers and wives read this and appreciate the terrible, stifling ordeal I am going through at this time? Easter Sunday! Holy Week! I wish I was home with Albert and Lorraine. Oh, what a tragic difference a few months make.”
With violence, she flipped another page. “Please, mothers and wives, abide with me in your thoughts. Do not think of me harshly. Your sympathy will not help me before the bar of justice, but it will comfort me to know that I am not an outcast in the eyes of the women of this world.”
She closed the tablet and wrestled up a smile. “Will that do the trick?”
Six reporters were still jotting their shorthand when a quicker woman asked, “Are you aware that female jurors are not allowed in a murder trial?”
Half her face twitched. “You’re kidding.”
The pool reporter said she wasn’t. New York law.
Ruth flumped onto her jail cot with a hand over her eyes as if she were full of woe, but she heard a tiny squeak and childishly beamed as she looked to a far wall where a gray mouse’s head was dodging about in a food hunt. She kissed the air and the mouse cautioned forward to a smidgen of toast crust that she held out to him, even sitting back on his hind legs and craning his neck to get what she held just out of reach. Ruth smiled to the reporters. “My little pet,” she said. “See how he loves me?”
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EIGHT
THE WAGES OF SIN
Because 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.