The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd

The Trunk Murderess

The Trunk Murderess

Winnie Ruth Judd

The Truth About an American Crime Legend Revealed at Last

Jana Bommersbach

www.janabommersbach.com

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 1992 by Jana Bommersbach

First Trade Edition 2003

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003102489

ISBN: 978-1-59058-064-6 Paperback

ISBN: 978-1-61595-266-3 ePub

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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Dedication

To the special people who shaped my life

and taught me that truth must always be the goal:

my grandmothers, Rose Portner Bommersbach

and the late Magdalena Mary Schlener Peterschick;

my grandfather, the late Leo Bommersbach;

and my wonderful parents, Rudy and Willie Bommersbach.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Remembering Winnie Ruth Judd

Final Thoughts for the Second Edition

More from this Author

Contact Us

Introduction

October 16, 1931, was a bloody Friday night in Phoenix, Arizona.

In a quiet neighborhood of this quiet small town, nineteen-year-old pharmacy assistant Jack West lay in wait for two hours until his sweetheart came home from a secret date with a new beau. When eighteen-year-old Pearl Mills answered his insistent knocking on her front door, he chased her into her bedroom and stabbed her to death. Then he turned the knife on himself, inflicting a superficial wound.

Just a few blocks away in a simple duplex, twenty-six-year-old medical secretary Winnie Ruth Judd was spending the night, as she often did, with her two best girlfriends. The state of Arizona would charge that on this night, she was there to murder—to eliminate her competition for a married man all three women adored. She supposedly waited until her friends were asleep and then shot them to death in their beds. But the world wouldn’t know about the deaths of twenty-four-year-old Hedvig Sammy Samuelson and thirty-two-year-old Agnes Anne LeRoi for three days. Not until the horrifying discovery that their bodies—Sammy’s cut into pieces—had been stuffed into steamer trunks and shipped as Winnie Ruth Judd’s baggage on the train to Los Angeles.

Jack West spent two weeks in the headlines and twenty-three months in prison repaying society before he blended into obscurity.

Winnie Ruth Judd became a household name across America as Arizona made her pay with one of the longest sentences this country has ever seen: thirty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-two days.

This is her story.

Years before the country ever started wondering what happened to Amelia Earhart, it thought it knew everything that happened to Winnie Ruth Judd. Papers from coast to coast covered the gruesome story with the same prominence they gave to the sentencing of Scarface Al Capone and the rise of a young man in Germany named Adolf Hitler. Not since Lizzie Borden had a single name conjured up so much horror.

The Trunk Murderess.

The Tiger Woman.

The Blond Butcher.

That’s how the press labeled her in the thirties, when she was first convicted and sentenced to hang, and then declared insane and saved from the gallows by only seventy-two hours. That’s what they called her in the forties and fifties and sixties as she escaped with great regularity—first to the horror and then the amusement of the country—from the asylum that was her prison. That’s what they called her in 1971 when she was finally paroled, a sixty-six-year-old woman judged safe for society. That’s what they still call her today, a woman nearing ninety who is trying to live out her life quietly.

An open-and-shut case. So everyone thinks. Just as everyone thinks they know the awful things Winnie Ruth Judd did during the bedtime hours of that Friday night in 1931.

They said she was a cold-blooded killer.

They said she hacked up her best friend.

They said she was insane.

They said she acted alone.

Yet to this day—now sixty years after the fact—questions remain about just how guilty Winnie Ruth Judd was. Or exactly what she was guilty of doing. Or if she could have possibly done the deed by herself. Or if she ever was insane.

Whispers have persisted all these years that the Winnie Ruth Judd case was really Phoenix’s dirty secret.

A fresh investigation finds the rumors are true. It finds the story of Winnie Ruth Judd is really two stories: the one that history records, and what really happened.

But it’s not just the story of a puzzling crime that still fascinates. Or of extreme punishment. Or, as this investigation reveals, of some of the most bizarre twists ever seen in a murder case. It’s the story of a backwater town that would become one of America’s major cities. It’s the story of a moment in time—with its social taboos, its hysterical conventionality, and its concentrated political power—when this strange story could be orchestrated.

***

I first heard about Winnie Ruth Judd when I moved to Arizona in 1972 to work for the Arizona Republic, the state’s largest and then most politically powerful newspaper. Arizona history is filled with colorful characters that are part of American folklore—Geronimo, Cochise, Wyatt Earp, Father Kino, Zane Grey. In a morbid way, Winnie Ruth Judd was one of them. She belonged to that tiny sorority of women judged so heinous society said they deserved the ultimate punishment. In Arizona, she was only the third woman on the roster. The first, Dolores Moore, had been executed in 1865; the second, Eva Dugan, was hanged in 1930—beheaded actually, in a botched execution that led Arizona to abandon the noose for the gas chamber. It wasn’t until 1991 that the state added another woman to the exclusive group, sentencing to death Debra Jean Milke for having her four-year-old son killed on his way to see Santa Claus. The picture is similar across the nation: less than thirty-five women sit on death row today.

But the very first story I heard about Winnie Ruth Judd wasn’t about her heinous crime, it was about how she was framed.

Sensational cases have a way of taking on their own lore, especially juicy cases that hark back to a time when the social code was so strict women didn’t leave the house without wearing gloves and today’s thriving cities were just wide spots along bad roads. It’s far easier to imagine something sinister was at work than to believe a young beauty would hack up a rival.

Besides, this case was crammed with social taboos: a totally unacceptable love affair, the threat of deadly and incurable syphilis, snide rumors of lesbianism, outright declarations that these were party girls—the nice term used in the thirties for prostitutes. Add to that the widespread allegations that one of Phoenix’s most prominent businessmen was knee-deep in the crime—allegations widely reported in out-of-state newspapers, excused and dismissed by the press at home. Mix in the mysterious shadow of William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful newspaper publisher for the day, and the intervention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Winnie Ruth Judd case was not just another murder mystery. It was a slice of Arizona and America at a most vulnerable moment: exactly two years after the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, twelve years into the disastrous ban on spirits known as Prohibition, and a time when media excess would be forever defined and remain a constant embarrassment for every journalist who came after.

In the twenty years I’ve lived in Phoenix, I have never heard a single person say Winnie Ruth Judd got what she deserved. Instead, I’ve heard: She was covering up for somebody important; It was a powerful man who really was responsible, but you know how women were treated in the thirties; If the truth of this ever came out, it would ruin a lot of good ole boys. Every time her name came up, it was inevitably coupled with the question Do you think she really did it?

How could so many suppositions and questions still remain when the media had for so long presented this as a black-and-white case? Historical articles in Arizona journals recount the grisly crime and leave no doubt about what happened. Newspaper libraries from Los Angeles to New York maintain thick files that painstakingly provide every bloody detail. Modern books on sensational crimes invariably include a chapter on the horrible trunk murderess. Even the few sympathetic articles hold sympathy for her only because she was a minister’s daughter who went wrong.

So why did so many people in Phoenix act as though the city was hiding its dirty linen behind her skirts?

In 1987, I decided to find out. By then I was an investigative reporter and editor for New Times of Phoenix, one of the nation’s largest weekly newspapers. I’d spent years probing the political scene of Phoenix, so I knew how raw the politics of this town could be. I’d worked on a special project that reinvestigated the 1976 assassination of reporter Don Bolles—blown up at noon in a downtown parking lot by a car bomb—so I knew how the most outrageous of crimes could go unpunished in Arizona. I’d exposed a horrible cover-up of the death of a boy in the county jail, so I knew how official records could be distorted. If all these things happened in modern times, with a host of media eyes to inspect them, imagine what sins could have been committed in the old days, when one publisher dominated the communications system of this little town and police reporters were notorious for acting more like cops than journalists.

I’d already read several articles and books about the Winnie Ruth Judd case, and even with their she’s guilty as hell tone, things didn’t fit. This, coupled with all the stories I’d heard, made it obvious that the case needed a new look. If half the rumors were true, I thought, it would make a great story.

A journalist needs a news peg to justify a story, and the obvious peg here would be to finally get Winnie Ruth Judd to break her silence and talk. It would prove to be the hardest part of the entire investigation.

From just preliminary information, I knew Winnie Ruth Judd now called herself Marian Lane, was in her early eighties, and lived somewhere in California. If this case was ever to be reinvestigated, it had to be soon, while she and some of the other principals were still alive.

Her last Phoenix attorney, Larry Debus, wasn’t at all encouraging at first. He insisted she would never sit for an interview, just as she had refused all requests from journalists since he and famed California attorney Melvin Belli had gotten her paroled in 1971. Besides, she had no love for the media, Debus added. She just wants to be left alone, he told me. She’s afraid if she talks, they’ll come after her again because her parole specified she was never to tell her story.

That’s the point, I stressed. She’s never talked. She didn’t testify at her trial, and by the time she tried to speak, they said she was insane and who’d listen to a crazy lady? She’s stayed silent all these years, and if the curiosity about this case is ever to be satisfied, she has to talk. Debus, who owed me a favor for some forgotten reason, agreed to try because her case had always troubled him. She was the victim of small-town politics and a justice system that wasn’t just, he said. She deserved to be punished for the right crime. She wasn’t. It took three years before he was finally able to convince her to meet with me.

By the time I flew to Stockton, California, to visit her in February of 1990, I knew the rumors about her case held far more fact than fancy. I’d already started plowing through the boxes of files kept under seal by the Arizona Archives on the fourth floor of the state capitol building in Phoenix. I’d already interviewed people involved in the case who shed new light on what really happened. I’d already heard again and again an outpouring of sympathy for this woman who had been portrayed to the world as a murdering witch.

But as I sat in the comfortable living room of her apartment, I thought I had to be talking to the wrong person. The bright California morning had become an overcast afternoon before this grand-motherly woman ever mentioned the name of Winnie Ruth Judd. All that day, I was sure somehow lines had gotten crossed and my trip was a waste. This lady before me couldn’t be the awful trunk murderess.

It wouldn’t be the last time everything seemed out of kilter as I reinvestigated one of the nation’s most enduring and salacious murders. More than once along the way, the most outlandish allegation turned out to be true. I soon found I couldn’t discount anything. And I discovered that, like all legends, Winnie Ruth Judd was wrongly credited with many sins. She went around chopping up people, didn’t she? a Phoenix city council member asked me. She went on a killing spree, right? another friend offered, suggesting Phoenix had in Winnie Ruth Judd its own version of Bonnie and Clyde. One after another, middle-aged friends who grew up in Phoenix recounted how their parents had frightened them with threats that if they didn’t behave, Winnie Ruth Judd will get you. They remembered that when she escaped from the asylum—a total of seven times—they’d been kept indoors for fear of encountering the crazy killer. Children even had a jump rope rhyme about their fear. Most of the words are long forgotten, but somewhere in the ditty, they sang, …and she’ll chop you up to pieces.

***

In May 1990, I wrote a two-part series on my investigation for New Times. The series unleashed a flood of new information. Dozens of calls brought fresh leads and new people who’d been involved, revealing amazing pieces of the story.

Fortunately, Arizona archivists and librarians, recognizing the historical significance of this case, have carefully preserved enormous amounts of information. But they went far behind that, searching on their own for obscure sources that yielded unimagined treasures. Thousands of original documents—from personal letters and telegrams to internal memos and reports—were preserved under seal at the State Archives Office. During my research, archivists uncovered a long-forgotten box of files from a rural county that contained, to our astonishment and joy, a 1932 transcript of Winnie Ruth Judd telling the whole story to the county sheriff. This never-before-seen document provided minute details of both that deadly October night and its gruesome aftermath.

At the Maricopa County Court Records Office, the evidence box on the case still includes the actual bullets that killed Anne LeRoi and Sammy Samuelson. All the original police reports are still there, including interviews with potential witnesses who were ignored as the case went to trial. At the Pinal County Historical Society are records of Winnie Ruth Judd’s life at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, and of the insanity hearing that saved her from the gallows.

Even more telling are the vivid memories. I interviewed over one hundred people, including the last living juror at her murder trial and the last living member of the grand jury that sought mercy for her. Neither had ever spoken to a reporter about the case before. I found the last woman to see the victims alive. I found the woman who was run out of Phoenix because she talked too much to the police about the prominent men who had befriended Winnie and the victims. I found people who’d heard the most remarkable things over the years and were anxious to talk to someone who would listen and believe. Family members of major players in the case were generous in sharing their memorabilia, including vast amounts of information that never showed up in any official file.

I took much of the information to experts for help. Hugh Ennis, a retired Phoenix police captain with thirty years’ experience, helped me review the police reports for what they did and, suspiciously, did not show. One of the nation’s most respected forensic experts, Dr. Heinz Karnitschnig, reviewed the autopsy reports and pictures—pictures never seen by the public because they were too gory even for the press of the thirties. A former chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Jack D. H. Hays, reviewed the trial transcripts and appeals.

And I talked at length with Winnie Ruth Judd, getting not only the first interview in twenty years but the most complete interview she has ever given. She graciously insisted I stay with her at her apartment in early 1990. I stayed for three days, and we talked all day and twice long into the night. She shared with me secrets she’d never told anyone, memories she preferred to forget. Later, we had dozens of phone conversations. We talked until she begged that she couldn’t bear to talk anymore.

Then there are the people who even now—sixty years later—still won’t discuss what they know. Former Arizona governor Rose Mofford, whose fifty-year tenure in Arizona politics has left her extremely well connected, said no way would she discuss the case, even though she has known Winnie Ruth Judd since the 1940s. Former U.S. senator Barry Goldwater refused repeated requests for an interview, relaying the message, You tell that girl to leave that alone.

What could be so awful so long after the fact that it must still be shielded?

That’s what this book is all about.

Winnie Ruth Judd speaks at length—finally. So do the official records. So do all the people involved in the case. So do the massive newspaper files from across the country. So do the bits and shreds of evidence pieced together from thousands of sources—some never uncovered before. They are all quoted directly or used to reconstruct dialogue and scenes.

The story they tell shows history was wrong about Winnie Ruth Judd.

Chapter 1

The Last Train to Los Angeles

It was such an ordinary Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona.

October 18, 1931.

The mere 48,000 residents who called Phoenix home were cashing in on a beautiful eighty-nine-degree day. October had always been, always would be, the favorite month in this desert oasis. It meant the end of the four-month inferno of summer, with its persistent hundred-degree days and, even more intolerable, its three-digit nights. Ahead were eight months of glorious comfort—some of the nicest weather the country offered. The payback, as everyone always thought of it. No matter how bad the summers got—and with the invention of air-conditioning still a decade off, they were god-awful—at least you were assured a beautiful winter. There wouldn’t be a single hundred-degree day this October. None at all until the following June.

Most of the country soon would be fending off snow and freezing temperatures, but that kind of winter never came here. And that, everyone knew, was something to sell. For a decade the Chamber of Commerce had been marketing days like this to the country: Phoenix, where summer winters, one slogan went. It was working. While the rest of the nation would forever remember 1929 as the year the stock market crashed, Phoenix would best remember it as the first year tourism meant $10 million for its economy.

Many were getting rich on tourism, though nobody had gotten rich when Phoenix sold its weather to health seekers, especially those with tuberculosis. Lungers, they were commonly called. The ill still came, but as one local writer put it, There is no rule against regaining one’s health here, but it is not in the best taste to discuss it. The favorite winter visitors were the elderly gentlemen who like to play golf all year around and the ladies of all ages who like to applaud them. Most rewarding were the tourists who came for winter and decided to put down roots. Chicago’s chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr., had already invested $2 million building the Arizona Biltmore Hotel six miles out of town, a gem that would attract movie stars and kings. Wrigley liked Arizona so much he built the most lavish home in the state on a hill next to the hotel, known to this day as the Wrigley Mansion.

The kind of wealth Wrigley represented was new to Phoenix, but then, everything here was new. Arizona itself was the newest state, becoming the forty-eighth on Valentine’s Day in 1912. Phoenix had emerged as the state’s largest city only at the end of the First World War, in 1919. Now, barely twelve years later, people were already starting to talk of Phoenix as a metropolitan city. Not everyone was happy with the changes. One local columnist offered little sympathy for those who weren’t keeping up: The oldtimer, pushed to the wall, looks on rather bewildered and not a little hurt. Once a year, on Pioneer Day, he parades down the street and sees on either side the outside faces watching him—gaping faces from Oklahoma, amused faces from Michigan, smug faces from Kansas, bored faces from New York. No doubt he feels embarrassed.

There’s a cockiness in being the biggest, even if you’re the biggest in a small pond, and Phoenix was polishing the attitude. As local historian Margaret Finnerty says today, Phoenix was just a little farm town then, but people here were convinced it was the center of the earth. It was best to ignore the fact that Phoenix still had more blacksmiths than architects; people preferred to boast that there were already 130 doctors and 172 lawyers.

A total of 48,118 residents doesn’t sound like much—especially when Phoenix today has nearly a million and has been the largest city in the Southwest since the 1960s. The best businessmen in 1931 could do was brag that it was the largest city between El Paso and Los Angeles. They never mentioned that El Paso was over twice its size and L.A. outpopulated it by four times. What was important was that if you were going from one of those large cities to the other, both the road and the railroad took you through Phoenix. As the state’s largest newspaper proudly gushed, about 2,000 new residents had moved here in just the last twelve months, which unmistakably shows that Phoenix continues to make that steady progress which has characterized its growth from a frontier community to the capital of a great island empire.

Hyperbole aside, Phoenix was doing quite fine, even if the Great Depression had slowed things down.

Phoenix measured progress by what you could see on the surface: how many miles of paved roads, how many square miles within the city limits, how many skyscrapers—defined here as anything over four stories. Eighty-six miles of paved roads sounds skimpy, but it was three and a half times more than this town claimed just a decade earlier. In all, the city covered just over six square miles—neatly compact, with a trolley line that could take you almost anywhere you wanted to go. Those who had bothered to count—and undoubtedly the Chamber officials already had—knew this city could cover a total of 500 square miles if it wanted. Nobody ever dreamed it would get that big in six decades, but it was nice to know there was lots of empty desert out there if millions ever came.

The skyline represented the city’s greatest pride. All the great cities had skylines. New York had just built the world’s tallest structure, the Empire State Building, at an astonishing one floor per day. Nobody in Phoenix could even imagine a building 102 stories tall, but they were just as excited at their own emerging profile. Already seven buildings of over four stories graced the city, including the sixteen-story Westward Ho Hotel, which would remain the tallest until 1959. There had been parties and hoopla when each new building opened.

But if you asked most residents on this October Sunday in 1931 how they would describe their community, they’d have agreed with Chamber of Commerce promotions that Phoenix was a city of homes, schools, and churches. It wasn’t just a selling point, it was the city’s priority list. And nobody apologized that all three were segregated by race.

Life revolved around family and home and a strict moral code that said a man was required to be faithful and productive for his family, a woman was to raise her children to be God-fearing and successful, and the kids were to stay out of trouble. Divorce was the most horrible admission that somebody wasn’t following the script and playing around was scandalous. I remember the old-timers telling us boys that if we were ever caught with a woman, we were to tell the judge she was having a fit and we were holding her down—we were told never to admit to anything, says Tom Chauncey, who was an eighteen-year-old boy this Sunday but would go on to become one of the city’s most prominent businessmen.

Historians recall the time as being very socially stratified, very conservative, very uptight about propriety. On the surface, everything seemed to fit those requirements. Phoenicians found it both necessary and easy to ignore the ugly underbelly of their town, pretending there was no prostitution when it was a thriving cottage industry, pretending there was no political corruption when it was rampant, pretending men never strayed and women never wandered when it was an infamous tradition.

It wasn’t hard to project a public face of strict morals when your scanty town could crow it had eighty churches. And as on all Sundays, they were filled this day. Episcopalians and Presbyterians were the best churches in town, counting most of the city’s leading families as members. Anglo Catholics went to St. Mary’s in the heart of downtown, which one day would be designated a Minor Basilica by Pope John Paul II. Mexican Catholics, tired of being relegated to the basement of St. Mary’s, had recently built their own impressive church. There was one synagogue. The black Baptist churches were all in South Phoenix, the poor side of town.

From eight in the morning until eight at night, these places of worship were filled with parishioners thanking the Lord the depression hadn’t hit here as hard as elsewhere.

Phoenix would feel the depression less than most American cities, would recover far quicker. The vast majority hadn’t invested in the stock market—speculation was still considered a dirty word in these conservative parts—and the crash was so inconsequential to this community the local papers gave it little attention. Those with jobs were careful to keep them. There wouldn’t be any raises; there’d be lots of pay cuts. But if belts were tightened, you could make out. Some found the imposed austerity good for the soul. As one local observer put it at the time, Everybody has ‘shortened sail,’ in good nautical fashion, to meet the gale and as it lessens it won’t hurt us to find ourselves wasting less, expecting less, needing less.

By October 1931, Phoenix was learning it couldn’t just take care of its own and ignore the economic disaster that had hit so hard almost everywhere else. Many of these churches had already started relief funds and services for the thousands of transients and hoboes who came to Phoenix, hoping at the best for work, at the least for relief from winter cold. Some were Arizona copper miners thrown out of work when the state’s chief export became worthless. Others came from across the nation. Local public and private welfare funds would be exhausted by 1932 and proud, independent Arizona would be forced to turn to the federal government for help.

But on this Sunday, that thought was still considered socialistic. Arizona didn’t like federal intervention and it didn’t like outsiders. Its Community Chest leader had said just the week before that he didn’t mind taking care of Phoenicians down on their luck, but it is not within the province of the Community Chest to attempt to provide for the shiftless and unwanted from other states. Governor George W. P. Hunt would soon issue the same warning as the state’s official stance on charity.

For outsiders looking in, Phoenix lived up to its oasis PR. Although it sat in the Sonoran desert, it was green and lush. Cottonwood trees were so thick on some streets they almost formed a wall. Elm trees created a green canopy over Central Avenue, the major north-south thoroughfare. Towering palms gave a tropical look. Rose gardens were found everywhere, mostly for personal satisfaction, although the Chamber of Commerce had once launched a campaign to challenge Pasadena, California, as the rose capital of the country. A network of water canals laid out centuries earlier by Indians who mysteriously vanished were still the basic network for delivering water throughout the area. That they doubled as swimming holes for youngsters was an added benefit. There was only one genuine Victorian home in the entire town, but many that were considered grand.

Most Anglo families lived in single-family detached houses with generous front and back yards. The crowded tenements of the East were unknown here; so were the cookie-cutter subdivisions that would one day dominate Phoenix. Stucco over brick was the favorite building material, and most houses would be considered custom-made by today’s standards. Many had hardwood floors; almost all had fireplaces; a few even had basements, although that would never catch on. Almost everyone had a front porch, or at least a sleeping porch, where the night breezes provided relief from the summer heat.

On this typical Sunday, families gathered for a large dinner after church and then spent part of the afternoon reading the thickest paper of the week. The Arizona Republic, billing itself as the State’s Greatest Newspaper, was reporting that Scarface Al Capone had been convicted on five counts of tax evasion in Chicago. As the paper had been noting all week, Thomas Edison’s health continued to fail and now doctors