The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder‪.‬

In the wee hours of March 20, 1927, Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, brutally murdered her husband, Albert Snyder, while her nine-year old daughter slept across the hall. The pair bludgeoned Albert with a sash weight, strangled him with picture wire, stuffed chloroform-soaked cloth in his nose, and then set about ransacking the house to make it look like a burglary. As a finishing touch, Judd tied up Ruth and left her in the hallway where she would claim she had been attacked by two "giant ltalians." (1) The cover-up was sloppy, however, and police suspected Ruth from the beginning. She confessed quickly, then recanted and laid the blame on Judd, who, when captured, admitted his role entirely, but accused Ruth of being the mastermind. The case immediately made front page news across the country--quiet, unsuspecting Albert, art editor at Motorboat magazine, had been slain in his own bed in a peaceful, New York City suburb, by his own wife and her lover, a corset salesman--the story was a gold mine for the press. Within a month, the trial was underway and the public watched breathlessly as it raced from start to finish in just three weeks. Over the protests of both defense attorneys, New York prosecuted Ruth and Judd together, forcing each to take the stand and viciously testify against the other. Thirty-two at the time of the murder, Ruth was accused of growing bored with Albert, fourteen years her senior, and attempting to kill him on several previous occasions. She had also tricked Albert into signing a double indemnity insurance policy on his own life shortly before the murder. The all-male jury debated only an hour and forty minutes before finding both Ruth and Judd guilty. All summer and fall, the reading public followed the pair as they appealed the verdict, lost, then desperately pleaded their case before Governor Al Smith. When he denied their appeal for clemency, Ruth and Judd died minutes apart in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison on January 12, 1928.