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“Anything else?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Tell my jailers to have Kitty Kaufman here to marcel my hair. And I’d like a manicure, too.”
Judd was just one floor away. Like Ruth, he stayed on his jail bed. Asked if he’d sent a card or present to Isabel, he said, “She’s my wife, not my mother.”
“So no?”
“So no.”
“Then how about Mrs. Margaret
Gray then?”
“I shan’t repeat what I said in my note, but I did have sent an inspirational book: When the Days Seem Dark by Philip E. Howard. I found it … restorative.”
A reporter shouted, “Have you thought about the verdict?”
“Well, I don’t expect clemency.”
“Are you going to the chair, you think?”
Judd shrugged. “I’m not at all afraid of death now. Ever since I confessed my story to the world from the witness stand, I have found a deep tranquility.”
But his smile seemed more a wince.
On May 9th, the hot, seventeenth day of the trial, Attorney William J. Millard orated to the jury an old-fashioned summation in defense of Henry Judd Gray. With aching and melancholy, his hands in prayer at his chin, Millard gently regarded Judd, the courtroom, and the jury box. And then he gravely began to tell of the tragedy that had befallen “his friend,” first praising Judd’s biography, his happy life, his spotless reputation, and the “fires of the home hearth that were burning continually with love and devotion.” But then “suddenly in the month of June, nineteen twenty-five, a sinister, fascinating woman came across his path. Oh, gentlemen, what a catastrophe!”
Elderly-seeming, Millard fully reached out his hand to wag a finger at Ruth. “That woman, that peculiar creature, like a poisonous snake drew Judd Gray into her glistening coils, and there was no escape. Why, gentlemen, it was a perverse and alluring seduction. This woman was abnormal. Just as a piece of steel jumps and clings to a powerful magnet, so Judd Gray was subjected to the compelling force of that woman, and she held him fast. This woman, this peculiar venomous species of humanity, was possessed of an all-consuming, all-absorbing sexual passion, a rapacious animal lust, which seemingly was never satisfied.”
Ruth’s eyes were shut and her head was resting on her right hand as she pretended to doze through his peroration.
“She gradually trained her victim,” Millard said. “She employed every possible opportunity to satisfy his desires and ensnare him. And thereafter, after the indulgence which had been going on month after month, she held him enslaved, entrapped, her very own, as though she were acting through him, handling him like a human manikin. Whatever she wanted, he did.”
She bullied the postman, he said; she conned the insurance agent; she made a slave of Judd. All of it had been asserted many times; his sole addition was a reminder of the half-pint of poisoned rye whiskey that was discovered in Judd’s possession at his arrest. It was William Millard’s contention that Ruth had intended that Judd drunkenly drink the poison that night and die there in the house so that the crime scene could be construed as a murder/suicide. She would not have needed to ransack the house or hide anything; just a very few lies would have been necessary, not the heap that she’d piled up.
Attorney Dana Wallace presented the closing arguments in favor of Mrs. Snyder and gallantly noted that she was a damsel sandwiched between two prosecutions: that of the district attorney’s office and that of the attorneys for the codefendant, and she had been “put in one of the most unfair positions possible before an American court of justice.” Wallace scornfully looked at Judd as he said, “This miserable filth of the earth is allowed to sit here and make his squealing appeal for mercy, hiding behind a woman’s skirts to try to fool you.” Eventually Wallace would add “diabolical fiend,” “weak-minded,” “despicable creature,” “falsifier,” and “human anaconda” to his descriptions of the codefendant. But Judd just stared straight ahead as Wallace took three hours longer than Millard to say again and reiterate and hit twice more each point that William Millard had expressed in defense of his client, but altering the evidence to make Ruth, not Judd, seem the beguiled, helpless, infatuated victim of a criminal Svengali.
His defense failed to fit either the familiar history of the couple or the personalities that had been so vibrantly on display in the press and in the courtroom. And Wallace was so excessive in his demonstrations, even going so far as to jerk his coat off his shoulder and massage himself to imitate Judd soothing Ruth’s sunburn with cream, that an overheated and hostile courtroom audience laughed in ridicule, and Wallace shouted at the crowd, “Your titterings bespeak vacant minds. Such people should never be allowed to pass judgment on a defenseless woman.”
At no time did either defense team impugn Albert Snyder’s character or try to excuse their client by indicating he deserved the excess and finality of his punishment.
District Attorney Richard Newcombe very briefly rehearsed the state’s case against Mrs. Snyder and Mr. Gray, noting that it made no difference who invented the scheme to murder or actually committed the murder. They were equally and intricately involved. Even Judd’s excuse of intoxication was insufficient since each of his actions seemed so fundamentally clear-headed and well recollected. Mrs. Snyder, he reminded the jury, had held to one story for sixteen hours until she told Police Commissioner McLaughlin that she couldn’t lie anymore. She’d then made a confession in which she neglected to mention the extenuating circumstances she introduced in the courtroom, and now instead, under oath on the witness stand, she’d presented a third story, and it was this one she currently wanted the jury to believe.
“She, gentlemen of the jury, was like a wild beast in the jungle, crouching there and watching her husband sleep, waiting for the opportunity to strike with Henry Judd Gray. And together they came in and committed cold-blooded, atrocious murder. After Albert Snyder had been struck on the head, he rose up and there he saw in the act of killing him his own wife and her lover, Gray. God, gentlemen, think of that man’s thoughts and his sudden realization that he was being murdered by his own wife and her lover.”
Shortly after five on that hot afternoon, the jury was sent to a room where the twelve gentlemen slung off their jackets, hoisted the windows for air, and went over the judge’s instructions concerning the various degrees of murder. There was a ballot that went ten for, and two against, the verdict of homicide in the first degree. The jurors were not intellectuals. The reasoning code they lived by they called horse sense. They jawed about the case for a little longer and another ballot was taken. And just before seven, less than two hours after the jury retired, the foreman announced to the court, “The jury finds the defendants, Mrs. Ruth Brown Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Ruth and Judd were standing, but Ruth immediately fell back into her chair in shock and hid her face in her hands as she arched over, shrieking and quaking with sorrow. Judd tottered with his fists clenched but stayed upright, then fuddled in his navy blue suit-coat pocket until he found and extracted Jane Gray’s Sunday school worship aid A Child’s Book of Prayer. He swayed as he quietly recited what he read.
There was pandemonium in the courtroom as fifteen hundred people sought to get closer to the condemned couple, yelling at them, screaming curses, inviting sentiments and opinions, wanting just to touch them as a memento. Justice Scudder hammered his gavel and ordered Ruth and Judd sent out to the jail, but it took ten minutes before police could form an alley wide enough for passage through the wild and raucous crowd.
The New York newspapers had prepared front pages for whenever the presumptive guilty verdict was delivered, and just minutes after seven o’clock that night newsies were hawking extra editions on the streets.
Ruth halted her exit from the courthouse so she could tell reporters she would instruct Wallace and Hazelton to appeal the verdict. Seeing a grieving George Murphy, the jail’s Catholic chaplain, she lamented, “Oh, Father, I thought they’d believe me.”
Although he opposed capital punishment, Justice Scudder was required by New York law to sentence Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray to solitary confinement in Sing Sing penitentiary and to execution in the electric chair. Entering the courtroom, both Judd and Ruth were cautious to face forward lest their glances collide, but as they waited Judd overheard her joke with the bailiff: “This is my worst Friday the thirteenth ever.” And even Judd smiled.
Ru
