The Iron Widow
There is no very obvious connection between a wink exchanged between a pretty woman and a flirtatious young man, as they passed in the street, and the electric chair. Still, it is an interesting exercise to trace back to some apparently trivial cause a great or tragic event. And it was such an incident, casual and unpremeditated, that began for Ruth Brown Snyder the dreadful journey to the smoky cell.
Ruth Snyder had been about eighteen, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired beauty, when she married Albert Snyder, the art editor of a motor-boating magazine, whose secretary she had been.
Whatever glimpses of life and colour she had had before her marriage—and one may guess that young as she was there had been episodes—she was not of the type that settles down to a staid domesticity. In the years that followed her marriage her vitality and vivacity seem to have won her friends of both sexes. They called her “Tommy.”
Snyder, himself, was thirteen years her senior, and a man of different character. “Tommy” herself has drawn the contrast. “He was just the opposite to me. I am younger and like to have a good time. He likes to stay around the house, to fix it up, and dig in the grounds, and feed the birds. I like to go to parties and dances. I like hotel life, dinners, gay affairs. He has never liked them.”
To all appearances, a commonplace couple and a commonplace situation, these two people of different tastes and temperaments carried on for many years without any very serious differences showing to the world. They had a comfortable home, he had a good income, and in time a baby girl was born to them.
Snyder was an easy-going man. He was content that—within limits—she should go her way while he went his. The woman, a mixture of ice and fire, made no disclosure of her growing distaste for him. She had both character and intelligence, and was something of an actress.
There came a day when a man winked at her in the street. Quite likely other men had winked at her, and she may have responded as she did on this occasion, but they do not matter. From this incident an acquaintance sprang up, and some time afterwards she was introduced by her new friend to a man with whom he had business dealings.
This was Henry Judd Gray, a salesman of corsets, some thirty-five years old. He was a simple man, happily married, and living with his wife and child in a neat little suburban home. Probably no one like the dashing blonde had ever entered his life before.
The introduction was followed up. Presently the situation developed, and they became clandestine lovers. He had become infatuated with her. How far his passion was returned the reader must judge. She may have been deeply in love with him, or she may have been using him as a mere dupe. For behind the grim deed that was to come there was possibly a deeper, more sordid motive than that of illicit passion for this corset salesman. “Tommy” Snyder did not always wear her heart on her sleeve.
In fact, Mrs. Snyder had determined to get rid of her husband. She was tired of him—tired of even the frail bonds that his existence imposed on her. If he could die—preferably by violence, for the money to come from the insurance policy on his life was to be doubled if he met a violent end—she would be richer by some ninety thousand dollars, and free. She felt that the instrument lay to her hand. Gray the corset salesman, Gray the simpleton, Gray the plastic, was there to be moulded to her will.
When first she opened the project to him, he recoiled in horror. She was patient. Week after week, month after month, she used all the arts of sex, bent all her powers to break him to her purpose. She had accustomed him to drink, and while he was befuddled she whispered insidious and terrible urgings to him. There would be no risk. She would be free. It was all so simple. She had thought it all out.
It is always hard to believe that a pretty and attractive woman can be guilty of planned and ruthless murder. Yet criminal history has many such cases. Ruth Snyder had merely joined the infamous group which includes such women as Brinvilliers and Manning. She was a notable recruit.
Something over a year was spent in persuading Judd Gray. His scruples began to disappear. The poor weakling, at first terrified at the word murder, began to accept the idea that Albert Snyder should be put out of the way with equanimity. He was even prepared to discuss ways and means. The matter was talked over at many of their secret meetings.
A plan was at last decided upon. The imaginative mind of the woman had been at work, and she evolved a scheme that did credit to her inventive powers. It might have worked out, leaving the man and his mistress free from all suspicion had they known more about the methods of criminals and detectives than could be gained from the more melodramatic movies. The idea was to stage an attack which would look as though it had been committed by burglars. Snyder was to be killed, and his wife was to be found next day bound and helpless. Details of the plan were perfected.
One March evening, in 1927, Mr. and Mrs. Snyder, with their little nine-year-old daughter, went to a bridge party. Mrs. Snyder’s mother, who lived with them, was away. Judd Gray, who already possessed a key to the house, secreted himself in the mother’s apartment before their return. He was provided with a bottle of chloroform and some lengths of new picture wire. Also there was a bottle of whisky.
The stage was set for the next act of the grim tragedy. When the family returned, Snyder went immediately to bed. Mrs. Snyder gave one meaning glance into the room, where a sinister and trembling figure was waiting, and then put the child to bed, and retired to sleep with her husband.
The minutes passed slowly. She lay by his side till his breathing showed that he was safely asleep. Rising softly, she crept, in her night attire, like a modern Lady Macbeth, to where Judd Gray was waiting with tingling nerves. Into his hands she thrust a murderous sash-weight, which she had brought up from the cellar in readiness. It was now or never, she told him. There was the whisky, if his resolution needed strengthening. She, herself, did not drink. She needed no stimulant, this woman of iron.
The thing was done. The first blow struck by the unnerved Gray was so light that, although it stunned the sleeping man, it did not satisfy the woman. She seized the sash-weight, and herself wielded it. (“Infirm of purpose; give me the dagger.”) Cotton wool soaked in chloroform was pressed against the unconscious victim’s mouth and nose. The picture wire was bound tightly round his throat. His hands were tied behind his back.
Then, perhaps, again to the whisky bottle for Gray. There was still much to do, for all the circumstances of robbery—according to the moving pictures—had to be arranged. Finally, Mrs. Snyder was tied up, and Judd Gray stole away—back to his home in Syracuse and his sleeping wife and child.
It was little Lorraine Snyder, her small child, who found Mrs. Snyder at half-past seven the next morning lying in the passage outside her bedroom. The woman’s ankles and wrists were secured with picture-wire. A neighbour, hastily called, released her, and, carrying her into the bedroom, found there the dead body of her husband. Mrs. Snyder screamed at the sight of the dead man.
There was an artistic incoherence in her story, but she had it all pat. Awakened about half-past two in the morning by some sound outside her room, she had gone to investigate. She was immediately attacked by two dark men with heavy moustaches. She fainted, and knew no more until she was found by her daughter.
To this tale she held when the police came. The hard-headed detectives from the central office, however, were more than a little doubtful. Even a hurried glance at the house had told them several things.
The thieves were supposed to have fled through a side door. The key was on the floor. Why should they have bothered to have taken it out?
Some of the rooms were in calculated disorder, and the cushions had been taken from couches and chairs and thrown about. Why, the detectives asked themselves, should professional thieves have done this? What would they expect to find under chair seats?
Snyder had been hit twice with some heavy instrument. Why should professional thieves have worried about putting the wire round his throat? If their object had been to silence him, surely they could have made certain by striking him again with the original weapon?
It was Carey of the Homicide Bureau who noticed a small piece of soiled cotton waste caught on the dead man’s moustache. He diagnosed chloroform at once, and it may be said that his opinion was later confirmed at the post-mortem. The wire, the chloroform, some heavy weapon had all played their part in the crime. Would thieves in a hurry have gone to all these pains to kill a man?
On the bed was Snyder’s revolver and some cartridges. Would thieves have left them there? Nearby there was a blue handkerchief and a corner torn from an Italian newspaper. Why? The little child said that the wire about her mother’s wrists was comparatively loose. Wouldn’t desperate murderers have seen to it that she should have no chance to free herself? Add to this that Mrs. Snyder had told them that she lay in a dead faint from the time she was attacked till she was found by her daughter—about five hours—and it will be understood why the detectives were more than dubious about the robbery.
So it was that they took Mrs. Snyder away while the investigation of the house proceeded. The whisky which had been liberally used was found. A few questions showed that Mrs. Snyder had shown no indications of drink when she was found. Who, then, had been at the bottle? A hint was provided when a cancelled cheque signed by her was discovered. It was for two hundred dollars, was made out to H. Judd Gray, and bore his endorsement.
Clearly Mrs. Snyder had to be made to “come clean,” and the American detectives used their own methods to persuade her. What those methods were is indicated by the former Deputy-Inspector Carey:
She was taken to the precinct station house, questioned by the District Attorney, and later by Police Commissioner McLaughlin. For hours she sat stolid, refusing to answer questions. She was incensed that anyone should suspect a woman of her respectability . . .
Mrs. Snyder was sitting in a small office silent and sullen. Suddenly the door opened. A young man looked in.
“Why, hello, Ruth,” he smiled.
“Oh, are you—?” she started to reply, greatly surprised to see him. He whispered to her something that was never disclosed. The veil of respectability fell. The man knew a great deal of the woman’s past, hidden chapters. She weakened. Her stolidity vanished. For the best part of a night she sat in that little room revealing the details of how she had murdered her husband. At first she denied that she had been aided by an accomplice. Then, finally, she admitted that a man had helped her to kill her husband.
“And is this the man?” he asked her, showing the cancelled cheque which had been cashed by H. Judd Gray.
“Yes, he helped me,” she replied.
That was the beginning of the end. In a short time Gray was tracked and arrested. There was a dramatic session at police headquarters, which lasted something over six hours. According to Gray, he was subjected to an almost incessant stream of questions by detectives, and even threatened with violence, till he broke down and confessed to his part in the crime.
That their confessions had been extorted by “third degree” methods was declared by both of them at a later stage. Mrs. Snyder, indeed, repudiated many of the details she was said to have given.
It was at the trial, which lasted for nearly a fortnight, that the sobriquet “the iron widow” was fastened on Mrs. Snyder. In a black dress of fashionable cut, with dainty shoes and silk stockings, she listened, with white set face, without any change of demeanour, while the fight to save her life went on. Only on the tenth day, when her little daughter was mentioned, did her composure fail her, and she broke into tears. Gray, wretched and dejected, sat with his eyes fastened to the floor, and appeared utterly unaware of what was happening.
In the witness-chair Mrs. Snyder gave her final version of the grim business. On the night of the murder, she said, she had expected Gray to be at her home to meet her. She had found him waiting in her mother’s room. When her husband had gone to bed she joined him.
“He kissed me,” she said, “I felt his hands clad in rubber gloves, and asked, ‘What are you going to do?’ He said, ‘If I do not rid myself of him to-night, I shall end the pair of us.’
“I took Gray downstairs and thought I had dissuaded him.
“I went upstairs to the bathroom, and then heard a terrific thud. I ran in and saw Gray beating my husband. I struggled to pull him off. Then I fainted. The next thing I saw was my husband huddled in a blanket.”
At this point she once more gave way. Sobbing bitterly, she explained that she tried to extricate her husband from the blanket until Gray forced her away from the body.
Every device that could avert or delay justice was resorted to by the lawyers for the defence. But all efforts were in vain. The inevitable verdict was followed by the inevitable sentence. The case was carried to appeal, and the verdict was confirmed. Then, indeed, did “Tommy” Snyder, the sometime gay and debonair pleasure-seeker, the “iron woman” who had played so determined a part in her husband’s murder, the blue-eyed blonde who had been so frigidly composed in court, almost give way to despair. Almost, but not quite. It had been seventeen years since a woman had been executed in New York. Surely the law would not exact the supreme penalty from her? The Governor of the State would surely exercise his prerogative of mercy.
That faint hope vanished a few days before the date fixed for the execution. Governor Smith refused to interfere. “I had hoped,” he wrote, “that an appeal to the executive for clemency would disclose some facts which would justify my interference with the processes of the law, but this has not happened. I have searched in vain for any basis which my conscience, in the light of my oath of office, would approve, and on which I might temper the law with mercy.”
A last desperate and dramatic effort for a respite was made by an application to a Supreme Court judge to grant an injunction delaying the execution until Mrs. Snyder had given evidence in a lawsuit arising out of her husband’s insurance. This was, in fact, granted, but was overruled as illegal by the Attorney-General.
The terrible last scene was enacted on January 12, 1928. Mrs. Snyder had sent a last letter to some relatives a little before. Passages from it ran:
“I don’t want anything but the simplest of everything, only I ask that Father Murphy shall say a prayer for me before I am laid away . . . I would like to have had my baby with me when the time comes. Could I ask you again, before I’m called, either to adopt Lorraine for me or else have mother adopt her. . . . This is my last
letter, Andrew; bear up and help mother to bear her heavy burden . . . Remember, only the simplest burial. No Mass, no inscription, and all very plain. I want to go out of this world as I came into it, just a poor soul.”
The executions were fixed to take place at Sing Sing at eleven o’clock at night. Strange to British ideas were the elaborate arrangements made for viewing and reporting the last scene. There were a number of official “witnesses,” four doctors, and twenty reporters, besides the ordinary officials. At a “soft drinks” parlour, some distance from the prison, fifty telegraph wires had been installed for the use of the newspaper men.
The spectators had scarcely seated themselves at the benches provided for them in the cream-coloured room when Ruth Snyder was brought in from her cell ten feet away.
Swiftly she was strapped in the electric chair by her four guards. Her hands clenched as she cried hysterically, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
The switch was turned on.
A minute or two later Gray was brought in. He was repeating the Beatitudes after a priest when he was electrocuted.
—G.D.