A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (27 page)

Mrs. Brown softly patted her daughter’s back in a
there-there
gesture but contradictory emotions would not let her speak.

Ruth bolted upright on her cot and fiercely shouted at Hazelton, “Cruel and unusual punishment, denying me Lorraine! You tell them! Cruel and unusual! I’m her
mother!”

Hazelton tugged up Dana Wallace’s left elbow and Wallace’s head jerked from his doze.

She screamed, “Are you listening to me?”

Hazelton ignored her as he helped Wallace struggle up from his chair. “Well, we’ll be going now. We just wanted to wish you the very best on your birthday.”

“Are you representing Judd Gray?” she demanded.

“Emphatically no.”

“You do as I say then.”

And Hazelton smiled as he repeated, “Emphatically, no.”

She wrote a poem:

Just a thought of cheerful things,
Things I used to know.
Joys that loving—mothering brings,
Watching Lorraine grow.
Years, Oh, ages—long ago
Happiness was mine.
Oh, I loved my family so,
Now all I do is pine.

With Mrs. Isabel Gray, Mrs. Kallenbach, and Jane all hiding out in Norwalk, Connecticut, the newspapers again sought out Judd’s mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, as the not-Ruth of the day. She was sixty but seemed much older, a frail, white-haired, cultivated, sorrowful woman whose selflessness, loyalty, and piety were treated as an instructive contrast to Mrs. Snyder.

Mrs. Gray invited a freight truck full of reporters out to Judd’s sister’s house in West Orange and gave them coffee and still-warm macaroons from the oven as she talked about how Buddy loved reading as a boy and was an excellent student and athlete who would have gone on to college and medical school were it not for the pneumonia he caught in high school. She petted her white Pomeranian Nicky in her lap as she spoke, also, of the jobs Bud had held, the good deeds he’d done, that “he was not what I would
call a drinker.” “Bud’s home life was ideal,” she said. “Isabel and he never quarreled. They had a fifty-fifty arrangement in which they were both equal in their home.”

She was asked if she still loved her son and she said, “The Judd Gray of today is a boy I don’t understand. But one I must help. He must be brought back. I am trying to reach through this strange personality and …” Quavering, her 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.”

“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?”

   EIGHT