A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“Uh-huh. Getting rid of my husband was a regular subject with him.” She then said that was the reason she intended to end the relationship, but that Judd had warned that if she “ever stopped going with him he was going to tell the world what kind of shameless woman I was.”

Hazelton then invited Ruth to say how she’d acquired the sash weight, and she told him that it was in a package Mr. Gray had given her at Henry’s Restaurant. She’d thought the package contained just a rolling pin that Benjamin & Johnes was marketing as a flesh reducer, but she later found in it the sash weight and a note in his handwriting that read: I’ll be there Monday night to do the job.

She’d hidden the sash weight in the cellar. When Judd arrived on the 7th, he’d said he was there “to finish off The Governor,” but she’d objected, “Judd, you’ll do no such thing!”

She said he’d then decided to return on Thursday, Albert’s bowling night, “and get him in the garage,” but Judd got cold feet and instead left on his sales route, heading first to Buffalo. She received a bulky letter from him with instructions to give Albert the enclosed sleeping powders before the Snyders left for the March 19th party at Milton Fidgeon’s house. She washed the powders down the kitchen sink. But her worst fears were realized when she got home from the Saturday-night party and found Judd in Mama’s room. She whispered that she’d see him later because she wanted to tell him their love affair was over. Waiting twenty minutes, until she was certain her husband was sleeping, she went back to Judd, who kissed her.

“I immediately felt the rubber gloves on his hands, and I said, ‘Judd, what are you going to do?’ And he became semi-mad to think that things hadn’t gone as he’d planned.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘If you don’t let me go through with it tonight, I’m going to get the pair of us.’ And he then had my husband’s revolver, and he said, ‘It’s either he or it’s us.’ I grabbed him by the hand and took him downstairs to the living room.”

She claimed they’d talked there for quite a while as she pleaded with him to get thoughts of murder out of his mind, “and in my excitement I said things that probably enraged him.” She excused herself to go upstairs to the bathroom and then “I heard this terrific thud.” She ran down the hallway and found Judd straddling Albert, hitting him with the sash weight.

Hazelton seemed honestly in suspense as he asked, “What did you do?”

“I ran in and grabbed Mr. Gray by the neck, pulled him off, and in wrestling with him he slugged me to the floor, and I fainted. I remember nothing else until I came to again and saw my husband lying there under a pile of blankets. I was hauling them off and—”

She stooped forward, shaking, and wept for a minute.

The courtroom went silent.

Judd fleetingly glanced up at her, then gazed at his shoes. A heavy old jailhouse matron walked up to hug Ruth into calm.

Justice Scudder watched Ruth and finally told Hazelton, “You may proceed.”

“Yes, sir,” Ruth’s attorney said, and asked, “When you came to, was Gray in the room?”

She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief as she answered no. She was trying to pull the blankets off her poor husband’s head when Judd came running into the room, shouting, “Are you trying to undo what I’ve done?” She was roughly hauled by him into Josephine’s room and there he said, “I have gone through with it, and you have to stand just as much of the blame as I have.” And then he told her, “We can frame up a burglary. We will both get out of it.”

“I had no hand in that murder at all,” Ruth told her attorney, “but I knew then I was in the mix-up, and I just had to sit and listen as he made up the lies I told the detectives all that Sunday.”

“Were you afraid at that time?” Hazelton asked.

“I was heartily afraid. I saw what a terrible mess he had made of things and I couldn’t see my way out other than doing what he asked me to do.” She helped him to ransack the house and she let him gag her and tie her hands and feet with rope.

“Why did you let him do that?”

“Because I was afraid if I did not go in with what he asked me to do that he would finish me that night.” The court adjourned.

Reporter Damon Runyon wrote of Ruth that night: “In the main she was as cold and calm sitting there with a thousand people staring at her as if she were at her dinner table discoursing to some guests. She kept her hands folded in her lap. She occasionally glanced at the jury, but mostly kept her eyes on Edgar Hazelton. If she is the cruel and cunning blonde fury that Gray’s story would cause you to believe, you would expect her to be calm. But if she is the wronged, home-loving, horror-stricken woman that her own tale would imply, her poise is most surprising.”

Ruth’s testimony took three days to complete and filled 345 pages of stenographic transcript as she was cross-examined both by Judd’s attorneys and the attorneys representing the people of the state of New York. She stayed still and seemed relaxed, only toying with her rosary necklace or shaking her head when she answered “no,” but otherwise seeming self-possessed and even graceful as she responded to the heated objections and hectoring of the lawyers.

She formally recanted whole pages of her March 21st confession. She said she’d kept the sash weight in the cellar because “I didn’t want to have it anywheres around.” She didn’t throw it away “because I felt it should go back to Mr. Gray, inasmuch as he gave it to me.” She didn’t warn her husband of danger because, “I thought I could talk Judd Gray out of it.” She left the kitchen door open that Saturday night because “I was going to have it out with Judd that I did not want to have him around me anymore.”

She was fuddled or evasive about the insurance policies she’d taken out, but she smiled when it was determined she paid the premiums from a joint checking account that Albert could have examined at any time. She denied ever attempting to poison or asphyxiate her husband. She denied scheming to murder him. She went into her mother’s room that Saturday night to simply reason with Judd Gray.

An attorney for the prosecution inquired, “And the first thing he did was to kiss you?”

“Yes.”

“And you kissed him?”

“Yes.”

“Knowing or believing, whatever you want to say, that he was there to kill your husband?”