AllFreeNovel
Share Us
tragic eyes flooding with tears, she broke off that sentence and could not go on.
Quietly offering their sympathy, the reporters excused themselves from the home and only on the jouncing ride back to the City did one scour his notes and find that she’d referred to “Buddy” as “my son,” “my precious boy,” and “my darling boy.” She said she’d urged Judd always to be manly, but she’d never once called him a man. And he was thirty-four years old.
Judd Gray was forced by his counsel to have an X-ray taken of his skull to see if there was a medical cause for the crime; then he was interviewed by a panel of four alienists to find out if he was sane. Included in their tests was his giving a vial of blood for analysis, walking a chalk line, and spinning until he fell. Psychiatry was still in its infancy. And then he was seated in a chair opposite four other chairs, and Doctors Cusack, Block, Leahy, and Jewett closely scrutinized the criminal. Judd chain-smoked as he was questioned and joked whenever he could, but after fifteen minutes he excited their interest by unself-consciously revealing that Ruth’s nickname for him was Loverboy and his nickname for Ruth was Momsie, and that he felt hypnotized and helplessly dominated by her.
“Was there any pleasure for you in that?” one alienist inquired.
“How do you mean?”
“Having Mrs. Snyder in control of you? Compelling you one way or another?”
“I guess.”
Another asked, “Why? Why do you guess?”
“Well, we were together for twenty-one months.”
Three alienists made notations as Dr. Thomas Cusack inquired, “But what is it that interests or excites you in the opposite sex?”
Judd looked away and was silent for a long time, giving it so much rumination that the alienists weren’t convinced of his candor when he finally said, “I am attracted to females not by their beauty or sheer physical enticements so much as by their neatness and intelligence.”
A doctor jotted on his notepad, Effeminate? and another jotted underneath that, Lying.
Dr. Siegfried Block asked, “Tell me, in jail now, what are your fantasies?”
“Sexual, you mean?”
“Sexual or otherwise. You have so little to do, so much time on your hands. You must find yourself dreaming, remembering.”
Judd exhaled smoke and crushed his cigarette out. “I haven’t got much of an imagination.”
Instructed to reconsider some childhood memories that night in his cell and to write an account of one that seemed to be recurring and important, he turned in this recollection: I was just a child, about four. Awaking from sleep, I found myself on the sofa with my head in my mother’s lap. A fly is whirring around my face and she chases it away. She strokes my hair with her gloved hand. If I raise my head, Mother fans me quiet with a cardboard fan that has a beautiful girl pictured on it. She has very red cheeks, blue eyes, and yellow curls, and I fancied she was eating a heaped up plate of ice cream. It’s a hot day and my sailor suit is stiff. It pricks through my underclothes.
At the end of the sessions, the panel voted that Henry Judd Gray was sane within the meaning of the law, but that liquor, Oedipal conflicts, and the sexual novelties to which he’d been introduced by Mrs. Snyder had hampered his judgment of right and wrong. Dr. Siegfried Block said of Judd, “I feel so sorry for him,” and Dr. Thomas Cusack commented, “If he’d just seen one of us for a while, none of this would have happened.”
Seeing Mrs. Margaret Gray’s interview about her son, Mrs. Josephine Brown sought to uphold her daughter’s reputation by agreeing to have a few journalists to their spic-and-span corner house. She indicated Ruth’s flair for interior decorating and handicrafts and forced them to note that the kitchen’s white-enameled oven was so spotless it could have been new. “And you could eat off that floor.” She took them down to see Ruth’s neatly labeled fruit preserves and said, “Who puts up fruit anymore?”
Walking into the music room, Josephine said the upright player piano needed tuning and Ruth wanted to have it fixed, but Albert had raged, “You let that piano alone, you buttinsky!”
“She let it alone and stood back, trembling all over.”
Josephine primly sat in the floral chintz armchair, illustrating, as one journalist wrote, “the humorous grimness of a kindhearted grandma.” She recalled for them in her Swedish cadence, “Al did not like to laugh. He had a bad temper. He thought she was foolish to laugh and be gay. And he was always working on something—so intense always. He seemed to be too occupied to play.”
She looked off at a photo of the pretty, tomboyish Lorraine. “I think their love really died after the baby came. Mr. Snyder, he said she was just a lot of sickness and expense.”
The joint Snyder-Gray first-degree-murder trial was originally slated to begin on April 11th, 1927, but that would have meant holding the hearings during Holy Week, so Justice Townsend Scudder, of the New York State Supreme Court, delayed the initial interviews of prospective jurors until after Easter.
A Palm Sunday service for Protestants was held in the Queens County Jail on April 10th. Like Albert, Ruth was not a churchgoer, but with nothing much to do, she decided to attend, watching Judd throughout from the women’s side of the chapel and sneering at his full-throated reverence as he sang: “‘Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom, / Lead Thou me on! / The night is dark, and I am far from home, / Lead Thou me on! / Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant scene; one step enough for me.’”
She’d brought out the best in the runt. And now he was Isabel-ling. Ruth then remembered a gay nineties song she’d heard as a girl—“She’s More to Be Pitied Than Censured”—and she giggled so hard and distractingly that she was forced to leave the chapel, humming the tune as she went.
Yet she requested a visit from the jail chaplain that evening. The minister was home having dinner with his family, so she was sent the Roman Catholic chaplain of the Queens County Jail, Father George Murphy of the Brooklyn Diocese. He was an affable, overweight, fun-loving man with a gin-blossom nose and she liked him at once in spite of his off-putting black cassock and biretta. She wanted to tell him about her fresh discovery: that women gave men sex so they could get love, and men gave women love so they could get sex.
“Well, yes,” Murphy seriously said. “That’s something of an old saw.”
“Really? I just figured it out.”
“Oh dear,” the priest said with a smile. “Too soon old and too late smart? We see that a lot in here.”
