The Trunk Murders

THE TRUNK MURDERS — THE COMPLETE THREE-PART SCRIPT

Forgotten True Crime — Episode 5 · Phoenix & Los Angeles · 1931–1998

PART ONE — "TWO TRUNKS FROM PHOENIX"

COLD OPEN — "THE FAVOR"

It's a Monday morning in October, 1931. Los Angeles.

Burton McKinnell is twenty-five years old, a student at the University of Southern California — a preacher's kid from Indiana working his way through school, living in a tumbledown cabin up a canyon road with a roommate and a stack of unanswered letters from home. This morning he's sitting in class, thinking about whatever a broke college kid thinks about in the second year of the Depression.

And then someone calls him out of the lecture hall.

His sister is here.

That doesn't make sense. His sister lives in Phoenix — four hundred miles of desert away. She has a job there, a little house, a husband somewhere between towns. But there she is at the curb: a slim young woman in a dark suit and one of those fashionable Eugenie hats, tilted just so. Pretty. Composed. Twenty-six years old.

Although — not quite composed. Burton knows her better than almost anyone, and something is off. She's excited, keyed up, talking a little too fast. She asks him to come away with her. It worries him. So he goes.

He notices her left hand. It's bandaged — wrapped from the fingertips all the way down past the wrist. He doesn't ask about it.

They get in his Ford roadster, and once they're clear of the campus she tells him what she needs. It's a small favor, the way she says it. Her trunks came in on the train from Phoenix this morning. They're waiting at the Southern Pacific station. She wants him to pick them up.

And then she wants him to drive them to the ocean... and throw them in.

Deep water, she says. Make sure it's deep water.

Burton is a lot of things, but he isn't stupid. He asks her why. Why would anyone ship their luggage four hundred miles just to sink it in the Pacific?

His sister gets angry. And she says the thing you never want to hear from someone you love:

"The less you know, the better off you'll be."

He's got five dollars in his pocket. She's got a bandaged hand and two trunks waiting at a baggage window. And somewhere behind her eyes is something he can't read and doesn't want to.

He does what brothers do.

He drives.

[MUSIC — cut to intro]

INTRO + DISCLAIMER

[MUSIC under]

Welcome to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.

Before we get into it, I want to take just a second to tell you what this show is. Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast — and I mean independent. There's no network, no studio, no staff. It's one man. I do the research, I write the episodes, I record them, I edit them, and I get them out into the world — every step of it. So if you enjoy what you hear today, the single best thing you can do is simple: share it. Tell a friend about the show. Post an episode on your social media. Leave a review wherever you're listening right now. It takes you thirty seconds, and for a show like this one, every little bit helps more than you know. Thank you for that — and thank you for being here.

Now — the usual reminder before we begin.

Everything you're going to hear in this episode comes from the historical record. In this case, that means the newspapers of October 1931 — the words of the people who were actually there, written down while it was all still happening. But here's the thing about newspapers: they get things wrong. Witnesses contradict each other. Reporters chase deadlines, not truth. And ninety-five years is a long time. So when I tell you what I believe happened, understand that's exactly what it is — my honest read of the record. Where the sources disagree, I'll tell you they disagree. And where we simply don't know... I'll tell you that too. In this story, "we don't know" is going to come up more than you might expect. That's not a flaw in the story.

That is the story.

One more thing. This case is big — big enough that, for the first time this season, we're telling it in two parts. This is Part One.

Let me set the scene for you. October, 1931.

America is two years into the Great Depression, and it is getting worse, not better. Banks are failing — the papers I pulled this story from are running column after column about closed banks right next to the crime news, receivers picking through the wreckage, depositors hoping to get twenty-five cents on the dollar. A steady job is a kind of miracle. Five dollars is real money. Hold onto that — five dollars is going to matter in this story.

And that very weekend — the same weekend our story turns — America loses its most famous man. Thomas Edison dies at his home in New Jersey on a Sunday morning in mid-October. By Wednesday, more than ten thousand people are filing past his casket, and at noon that day the city of Los Angeles stops — a full minute of silence for the man who invented the light bulb. I want you to picture that front page, because I've held it in my hands: Edison's funeral on one side... and on the other side, in letters two inches tall: HUNT WIFE AS FIEND IN TWO GIRL SLAYINGS.

The whole country dimmed its lights for Edison. And in the dark, somewhere in Los Angeles, a hundred and one detectives were hunting a twenty-six-year-old woman with a bandaged hand.

Los Angeles had seen manhunts before. Four years earlier the Hickman case had turned this city inside out, and the papers were already saying this hunt was bigger. Every hotel canvassed. Every ship searched. Every road watched.

They were hunting Burton McKinnell's big sister.

And to understand how it came to that — how a minister's daughter, a Sunday-school teacher from Indiana, ended up the most wanted woman in America — you need to know who Ruth was before October 1931. You need to meet her the way Burton knew her.

[MUSIC transition — Act 1]

ACT 1 — THE LITTLE SISTER

To know Ruth the way Burton knew her, you have to leave Los Angeles. Leave 1931 entirely. Go back to Indiana.

Burton and Ruth McKinnell were preacher's kids — and not the easy kind of preacher. Their father, the Reverend McKinnell, was a Free Methodist minister who spent forty years riding circuit through Indiana and Illinois, one small-town pastorate after another. Darlington. Olney. Towns where the church was the center of everything and the preacher's family lived in a glass house at the center of the church. Their mother had been in poor health for years — an invalid, the papers would later call her. It was a house of scripture and thrift and firm rules.

Ruth was born in Oxford, Indiana, at the end of January — a winter baby in a parson's house. And she grew up doing exactly what a minister's daughter was supposed to do. She taught Sunday school in her father's church. She went off to the Free Methodist college over in Greenville, Illinois. If you were drawing up a portrait of a good Midwestern girl in the early 1920s, you could have used Ruth McKinnell for the model.

But Burton knew another Ruth. The Ruth who chafed. She "always wanted a good time," he'd say — and in Reverend McKinnell's house, a good time was not on the schedule. She and her father quarreled. He was strict, Burton said — "like lots of ministers." And there was something else, something the family didn't have a name for. Ruth had a temper that could go somewhere frightening. Burton would describe it later, when everything had gone wrong, as fits of anger — the kind where his sister didn't quite seem like his sister anymore. And then they'd pass, and she'd be Ruth again: warm, funny, devoted to her family, writing her mama constantly.

Hold onto both of those Ruths. You're going to need them.

Now — when Ruth was about seventeen, a man came into her life. The record doesn't tell us how they met, and I won't invent it. What we know is who he was: Dr. William C. Judd. A physician. A veteran of the World War — he'd served as a lieutenant in the Army medical corps. Educated, established, respectable.

And more than twenty years her senior.

Think about that for a second. Ruth is a teenager who has never lived outside her father's parsonage. William Judd is a man in his forties who has been through a world war. And in 1924, in Darlington, Indiana, they were married. The bride was eighteen years old.

Whatever else that marriage was, it was a way out — out of the glass house, out of the small towns, out from under the rules. And it took her a long way out. Dr. Judd's work took the newlyweds south of the border, into Mexico — mining country, company towns, the kind of places that need a doctor and don't ask many questions. Ruth spent essentially her whole married life down there. Seven years. She learned the country; friends would tease her later about how proud she was of her Spanish cooking. She went into Mexico an eighteen-year-old preacher's daughter, and she came back a woman in her mid-twenties who had seen some things.

By 1930 the Judds had come back north, to the doctor's home ground: Phoenix, Arizona. And here's where the picture starts to develop a hairline crack — because in Phoenix, it was Ruth who had the steady work. She took a job at one of the city's big medical clinics, secretary to one of the physicians there. Typing case histories. Keeping the books. A trusted girl in a white-collar job while jobs were vanishing everywhere — remember, a paycheck in 1931 was a kind of miracle. Dr. Judd's work, meanwhile... came and went. Short postings. Out-of-town jobs. We'll get to why.

So: the summer of 1931. If you'd passed Ruth Judd on a Phoenix sidewalk — twenty-six years old, slim, well-dressed, a doctor's wife with a little house and a good job, a girl who wrote home to Indiana every single week, and whose last letter home said everything was well —

you would never have looked at her twice.

But four hundred miles away in Los Angeles, her little brother was getting letters too.

And Burton's letters said something else entirely.

[MUSIC transition — Act 2]

ACT 2 — THE LETTERS

Burton's cabin sat up Beverly Glen, in the hills above Beverly Hills — which sounds a lot fancier than it was. The papers would later call it a tumbledown shanty. He shared it with a roommate, another student, a fellow named Gerald Moore. And all through 1931, the mail kept coming up that canyon road from Phoenix.

Moore noticed something about those letters. Every time one arrived from Burton's sister, Burton went quiet. Dark. "He was depressed after each letter he received from his sister," Moore remembered. "I asked him what was up and he always replied that something was wrong — but he couldn't tell me what it was."

Something was wrong. And the remarkable thing is: we can read it for ourselves. Ruth's letters from that year survive — her letters to her husband, her letters to Burton, even her parents' letters about her. How they came to be public... is a story for later in this episode. For now, I just want you to hear her. Because this is Ruth in her own words, with nobody watching.

Here she is on the first of June, writing to her husband — she calls him "Doctor Billy" — while he's away in California:

"I hope that you are lonesome for me tonight... I got off the train and came home this morning and found Ann sick with a temperature of 102, and Sammy with a temperature of 101. I made them some orange juice... I sent her out some soup at noon... I got supper for the two sick girls tonight and did the dishes, and they are both quite sick. Ann couldn't eat a bit, just drinks lemonade — she craves lemonade."

Two names, there — Ann and Sammy. Girlfriends of Ruth's. At that point in the summer she was living with them, rooming in their place while the Doctor was off between jobs. Remember those names. For now, just notice what Ruth is doing: she is nursing them. Soup, orange juice, supper, dishes. And listen to how the same letter ends:

"I feel like crying tonight. It makes me nervous when you are not here. I have my window open next to the girls so I won't feel so bad. I am not afraid, but I miss you... I love you even if you are a very naughty boy. You are mine and I worry when you aren't right close to me."

That is not a woman at peace. That's a twenty-six-year-old writing please come home in every register she knows — and in between the lines, begging him to find work. In that same letter she's managing his job search for him: go see Dr. Moore in Pasadena, go ask the steamship lines if they need a ship's doctor. She's holding down her own job, doing the clinic's paperwork at night, and running her husband's life by mail.

By August, she has a little house of her own. And the letter she writes to Burton on August the eighth might be the saddest document in this whole story. The papers would eventually print it in facsimile — her actual typewritten page — and you can still read it today:

"Doctor and I have a scrap every few days. Last night he left for Bisbee... I will stay here until he makes enough to take care of me. I don't want to give up my job and then be broke again... I am all alone. I wish that mama could come out. I have a little house and am all alone. Why don't you come over next weekend?"

I am all alone. She says it twice in one page. Her husband is chasing month-to-month doctoring jobs in mining towns — fifty dollars a week when he can get it — and floating schemes about starting over in Mexico. And Ruth, the girl who married her way out of Indiana at eighteen, is writing her little brother: come visit me.

Burton didn't go.

And back in Darlington, their parents were reading between the same lines we are. At the end of September, the Reverend and his wife wrote Burton a letter that, knowing what's coming, is hard to read without a chill:

"Now tell us why Ruth sent for you. All about it... Is Dr. Judd at Carrie's yet? Or at Ruth's?... Is he trying to give Ruth trouble? Has he left her? Now it is best to tell us all about this affair, because Dr. Judd may ask us things, and we want to be prepared to know how to answer, to avoid trouble."

Has he left her. That's Ruth's own mother and father, three weeks before that Friday night on North Second Street, quietly asking each other whether the marriage was already dead — and getting their answers ready, to avoid trouble.

Burton wrote back exactly one line about it: "Ruth only was blue, and wanted to see me. She didn't know I was in school."

Blue. His sister was blue.

I want to be careful here, because it's easy to read the summer of 1931 backwards, knowing how October ends. A lonely wife, a failing marriage, money trouble — in 1931, that describes half the country. None of this is a crime. Most of it isn't even unusual. If Ruth Judd had lived and died quietly, these letters would have been thrown out with her estate, and no one would ever have called them evidence of anything except a hard year in a hard decade.

But she didn't live quietly. And so every line of these letters is going to get read again — by detectives, by reporters, by all of America — hunting for the moment it all turned.

The two names that keep appearing in them — Ann... and Sammy...

It's time you met them.

[MUSIC transition — Act 3]

ACT 3 — ANN AND SAMMY

Before we go any further into what happened to Ruth Judd's world, you need to meet the two women at the center of it. Burton never knew them. But by the summer of 1931, they were the closest thing his sister had to family in Arizona.

Everyone called them Ann and Sammy.

Sammy — Hedvig Samuelson — was a farm girl. Her parents worked the land outside White Earth, North Dakota, about as far from anywhere as America gets. She got out the way smart girls got out in the 1920s: teachers' college. She graduated from Minot in the summer of 1925 and went wherever the work was — a year in a little North Dakota town, two more in Whitehall, Montana. And then, in 1927, she did something genuinely adventurous. She took a teaching job in Juneau, Alaska.

And Alaska loved her. I mean that almost literally. Years later, the publisher of the Juneau newspaper would remember her in words you just don't hear about ordinary people. They called her "Sammy," he said. She was "a little gleam of sunshine."

In the fall of 1930, Sammy came back from a summer studying at the University of Chicago — broke, like everybody in 1930 — and a few weeks into the school year, she got sick. The doctor's examination didn't leave room for hope. Tuberculosis. A severe case.

Now, I want to stop on that word for a second, because in 1931, tuberculosis isn't a diagnosis the way we'd think of one. There are no antibiotics. There is no cure you can buy. There is only one prescription, and it's a place: somewhere warm, somewhere high, somewhere dry. Which is how a dying schoolteacher from North Dakota ends up bound for Phoenix, Arizona — the same reason thousands of "health-seekers" were pouring into Phoenix in those years. The desert air was the medicine.

But here's the part of Sammy's story I can't get over. She couldn't afford to go. So Juneau — the town she'd taught in for three years — raised the money. The people of Juneau passed the hat for their sick schoolteacher. "So we paid the expenses," the publisher said, "of both of them."

Both of them. Because Sammy didn't go alone.

At the hospital where Sammy was first taken there was a nurse — and by every account, not a woman you forgot. Agnes Anne LeRoi. Strikingly beautiful, people said. Dark-haired, small, poised. An X-ray technician by training, which in 1931 made her about as modern as medicine got. She was an Oregon girl originally — born Agnes Imlah, out of Tillamook — trained as a nurse in Portland in the twenties. She'd been married, at least once; the truth is, the record hands us more than one last name for Anne, and never quite explains them. She'd run a hospital in one Alaska town as superintendent. She had a life story with chapters in it, and some of the chapters are still missing.

What matters is this: when the town fund was raised and the doctors said Arizona, Anne LeRoi volunteered to take her. She wanted a fresh start herself, she said — she could find work in Phoenix and nurse Sammy at the same time. So in 1930, the schoolteacher and the nurse went south together.

And somewhere along the way, it stopped being a nurse and a patient — and became something more like devotion. They were, in the words of everyone who knew them, inseparable. They lived together. Anne worked days as an X-ray technician at a Phoenix clinic and cared for Sammy at home — Sammy, who spent most of her days in bed, still fighting. When Anne went home to Oregon that last summer to see her family, Sammy went with her. A doctor who knew them both put it simply: Anne was very devoted to Sammy. So devoted that — living in close quarters with her patient, month after month — Anne had contracted tuberculosis herself.

She kept it quiet. She kept working. And she was planning a future anyway — there was a fiancé, an engineer back east, writing her letters. She was going to be married.

By the fall of 1931, Ann and Sammy had settled into half of a duplex on North Second Street in Phoenix. And their circle included a bright, friendly young woman from the clinic where Anne worked — a doctor's wife, a secretary, fun at a luncheon, proud of her Spanish cooking.

Ruth.

Which brings us to Friday night. October the sixteenth, 1931.

That evening, a co-worker from the clinic — a young woman named Evelyn — came over to the duplex for dinner. Just three friends and a quiet night in. Anne changed into her lounging pajamas, pink silk. Sammy wore white pajamas with a little pattern on them. If that detail feels strangely intimate to know about two women from ninety-five years ago... remember it. There's a reason we know it.

Around a quarter to ten, Evelyn said goodnight. Both women walked her to the door. Anne's last words to her were about as ordinary as words get:

"I'll see you tomorrow."

Evelyn later swore there wasn't the slightest shadow over that doorway. No fear. No apprehension. Just... goodnight.

Forty-five minutes later, a neighbor named Jennie McGrath heard three shots.

And no one ever saw Ann or Sammy alive again.

[MUSIC — hard cut. Silence. Then transition — Act 4]

ACT 4 — THE FAVOR, IN FULL

Let's go back to where we started. Monday, October the nineteenth. Los Angeles. Burton at the wheel of his Ford roadster, his sister beside him, driving toward the Southern Pacific station to pick up two trunks and drown them in the Pacific Ocean.

Three days have passed since that Friday night in Phoenix. We're going to spend most of this episode inside those three days, but Burton doesn't know any of it. All Burton knows is that his sister showed up at his campus with a bandaged hand and a strange errand and told him the less he knew, the better.

They park. They walk in.

One thing to picture clearly, because it matters: Ruth has two kinds of luggage. The two big trunks came as checked baggage — they're in the railroad's custody, behind the counter. But she also stepped off that train carrying two small pieces by hand: a hat box, and a valise. Those are hers. Nobody's holding those. They're sitting in Burton's car.

Ruth hands her baggage checks to a clerk at the counter.

And here's a detail I couldn't make up if I tried: the baggage men recognize Burton. They nod at him. Because the Christmas before, broke and needing holiday work, Burton McKinnell had worked right there — in that baggage room, at that station. Of all the baggage windows in America his sister could have walked up to with those trunks... she chose the one where the men behind the counter knew her little brother by sight.

The clerk doesn't hand over the trunks. Instead, he goes and gets the baggage master — a man named Andrew V. Anderson. And Anderson has been waiting for whoever owned these trunks. Why he was waiting — what had already happened in that baggage room before Ruth and Burton ever walked in — I'll show you in a few minutes. For now, all you need to know is what Ruth and Burton see: a courteous railroad man who will not give them their luggage.

Anderson asks her, easy as anything: what's in the trunks?

Clothes, Ruth says. Personal effects.

He tells her there's something wrong with them, and asks her to step back to the baggage room with him. And as they come up to the trunks, he asks her a question that is really not a question:

Do you smell anything?

She says no. But Burton is standing right there, and Burton can smell it. He'd describe it plainly: a terrible odor in the room. And something worse — something that looked like blood, seeping out at the seam of the bigger trunk.

Anderson asks her to open them. Right there, in front of him.

Ruth doesn't flinch. She just... doesn't have the keys. Her husband has them, she says. He's a doctor here in town. She'll go get the keys and come right back.

And then Burton speaks up — and I think this moment tells you everything about where his head is. He says: "Maybe it would embarrass her to open them. Can't we take them home, and you can see them there?"

Think about what he's doing. He's smelled the smell. He's seen the stain. And he's still reaching for the version of this where his sister just needs a little privacy. Where there's an explanation that isn't the one his body already knows.

Anderson says no.

So Ruth and Burton walk out — to telephone for the keys.

They never come back.

In the car, Burton can't hold it anymore. His sister's valise is sitting right there — the one she carried off the train herself, the one no baggage master ever had the power to hold. And while Ruth is beside him, he opens it.

Here is Burton, in his own words, the way he told it later — and I warn you, this is the hardest thing in this episode:

"What I saw nearly made me faint — nearly drove me insane. I knew then what was wrong, why she had acted so strangely. For in the suitcase... were the legs of a woman."

He got mad. He demanded answers. And his sister — the Sunday-school teacher, the girl who wrote home every week — hesitated, and then broke down, and said the sentence that will follow this case forever:

"Believe me. I was perfectly justified in what I did."

Not it wasn't me. Not I can explain. Justified.

What do you do? Honestly — sit with that for a second. You're twenty-five years old. It's 1931; there's no one to call, no lawyer on retainer, no script for this. It's your big sister in the passenger seat.

Burton asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to leave town — go back to Phoenix. He told her not to do anything desperate. She promised she wouldn't. And then she asked him the question she'd been building to all morning: did he have any money?

"I'd have given her five hundred dollars if I had it," he said. "All I had, though, was five."

Five dollars. I told you it would matter. In the second year of the Depression, a broke college kid hands his sister every cent he has in the world.

He pulled over on Broadway, in the thick of downtown. She gathered her things, stepped out of the roadster, and walked into the lunch-hour crowd.

"That's the last I saw of her."

Burton sat there in the traffic with the smell still in his clothes. He did not drive to a police station. I want you to notice that, and I want you to be honest with yourself about whether you're sure — really sure — you'd have done differently. He drove to Santa Monica. To his brother-in-law, the Doctor. To family.

Because somebody was going to have to say out loud what was in those trunks.

[MUSIC transition — Act 5]

ACT 5 — THE LONGEST NIGHT

Now I owe you an explanation. Why was Anderson already waiting for those trunks?

For that, we have to back up to Sunday night — to the overnight train out of Phoenix, somewhere in the desert dark between Arizona and Los Angeles. In the baggage car, among the ordinary luggage of ordinary passengers, sit two trunks. And at some point in the small hours, a sleepy baggageman walking the car notices something at the corner of the smaller one.

A dark trickle.

Now — here's what that man knew. Deer season. Every fall, hunters tried to sneak venison into Los Angeles by checking it through as baggage, and every fall, men like him caught them at it. He'd caught plenty. So he looked at that seeping trunk, and his mind reached for the ordinary explanation, the way all of us reach for the ordinary explanation. Contraband deer meat, he thought.

He took two red warning cards out of his pocket and wrote on them: "See Mr. Anderson before releasing these trunks. May contain deer meat."

And he tagged them — in the words of one newspaperman — the two makeshift coffins. Then he went about his work.

That's it. That's the whole hinge of this case. No brilliant detective, no lucky tip. A railroad man doing his job at three in the morning, wrong about what he'd caught, exactly right that he'd caught something. If he doesn't write those cards, the trunks are handed over Monday at noon, and by nightfall they're on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean — and Ann and Sammy simply never come home, two more people missing in a country full of missing people.

Hold that thought every time this story makes you angry. It came this close to being no story at all.

So. Monday, 7:45 a.m., the train rolls in. A woman in a dark suit steps down carrying a hat box and a valise, and hurries away. The trunks are wheeled into the baggage room; Anderson reads the red cards and tells his checkers: when the owner comes, come get me.

You've already seen what happened at noon.

When Ruth and Burton walked out "to telephone for the keys," Anderson followed them as far as the door, wrote down the roadster's plate number... and waited. One hour. Two. Shortly after three o'clock, he stopped waiting and called the police.

They opened the trunks in the baggage room that afternoon.

In the larger trunk was the body of a young woman. She had not been touched, beyond what killed her — a gunshot. She was wearing pink silk lounging pajamas.

Pink silk pajamas. The ones Anne LeRoi put on, Friday night, while her dinner guest was saying goodbye. That's the reason we know what they wore. Within a day, a young woman from a Phoenix clinic would tell detectives about a quiet dinner among friends — and her description of that ordinary, comfortable Friday-night outfit would become identification evidence.

The smaller trunk held Sammy. I'm going to give you the plain fact and move on, because the papers of 1931 did not move on, and I think we can do better than they did: Sammy had been shot too — and her body had been divided, so that it would fit.

There was no mystery about who these women were. The trunks were packed with the paper of two lives — bundles of letters, photographs, Christmas cards, birthday cards, diplomas, even Sammy's teaching contract. One reporter wrote that the detectives knelt on the baggage-room floor reading "the pitiful history of the two young women." Police wired Phoenix that evening, and Phoenix wired back two things: the girls on North Second Street had been missing for four days... and the name of the woman who had shipped two trunks out of the station on Sunday.

The plate number Anderson took led to a cabin at 2211 North Beverly Glen. Burton wasn't there. But detectives were already racing to a second address — a little house on Seventeenth Street in Santa Monica. Caroline Judd's house. And they walked through the door moments after Burton arrived — and found him mid-sentence, telling everything to his brother-in-law, Dr. William C. Judd.

The papers describe the Doctor's face that night as a gray mask. He answered questions, they said, "as though he was discussing the weather." No, he could not explain it. No, they were not separated — "We love each other," he said. His wife wasn't jealous of Ann and Sammy — "had no reason to be. They all seemed the best of friends." Was she insane? He shook his head. She had always seemed perfectly sane to him. Why, her last letter, just days ago, had been perfectly rational — she'd written that she was planning to go deer hunting with some friends.

Deer hunting. I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to let that sit next to those red cards for a minute.

Caroline broke down in tears and confirmed her brother's account; they held her overnight and let her go. The Doctor they kept. And Burton — Burton they grilled. Hour after hour, into the small hours of Tuesday, until at three in the morning police announced that the brother had cracked and told them everything: the campus, the station, the valise, the confession. She told me she had killed the women, he said. By the next day he was already trying to pull it back — "I have been misquoted," he insisted. "She is not guilty." You can decide for yourself which Burton to believe: the one shrieking the truth at 3 a.m., or the one who remembered, in daylight, that she was his sister. When they were done with him, detectives took him for what they gently called "a walk." The walk ended at the county jail. Material witness.

But the strangest discovery of that whole night came at eleven o'clock — and it didn't come from a detective.

A maid named Eula Berryman, working the women's restroom at Central Station, opened an unclaimed valise and hat box that had been checked through to Phoenix on the 6:45 evening train. Inside was part of Sammy's body.

And the gun.

Stop and do the arithmetic with me. At 12:15 that afternoon, that valise was in Burton's car. At 6:45 that evening, somebody checked it — calm as you please, at a staffed counter, in a station that by then was crawling with railroad men who had already found two bodies — onto a train bound for Phoenix. Which means that hours after she vanished into the Broadway crowds, while her description went out across the city... it appears Ruth Judd walked back into that station.

The reports from that night are tangled — some said she'd boarded the 6:45 herself, and police stopped and searched that train at dawn and found nothing. I'll flag it honestly: the record wobbles here. But the luggage is a fact. The gun came back to the station. The fugitive, wherever she was, had let go of the last physical evidence in her possession — and then dissolved into a city of more than a million people.

At nine o'clock that night, this message went out over the statewide police teletype — and listen to how formal a manhunt sounds when it's dressed for print:

"To all officers at all points: Arrest on suspicion of murder Mrs. Winnie Ruth Judd, an American, 27 years of age, 5 feet 6 or 7 inches tall, 125 pounds, fair complexion, blue-gray eyes, light brown hair, wearing a black-and-white dress and black hat."

Winnie Ruth Judd. There it is — the first time in this episode anyone has said her full name. Because that's the moment Ruth stopped being a sister, a wife, a secretary...

...and became a headline.

[MUSIC transition — Closing Thoughts]

CLOSING THOUGHTS + OUTRO

By Tuesday morning, the hunt for Winnie Ruth Judd was the biggest story in America — and the biggest manhunt Los Angeles had mounted since the Hickman case. Seventy-five plainclothes detectives went hotel to hotel through the city. A hundred men swept the dark canyon around Burton's cabin. Airports watched. Ships searched at San Pedro before they sailed. And when a day passed with nothing — no sightings, no trace — the police did something that tells you what they were starting to believe: they began patrolling the beaches. Combing the brush in the canyons. Peering into deserted cabins. They thought maybe she'd gone into the ocean after all — not with the trunks. Instead of them.

Her own brother thought so too. From the county jail, Burton told reporters: "I am afraid she has committed suicide. What else was there for her to do?"

And then — this is Burton, remember, the one who opened the valise, the one who heard "I was perfectly justified" from two feet away — he said the thing I can't stop thinking about:

"I hope she gets away. She was forced to do it, I know. The poor kid."

Sit with the distance between those two sentences. I was perfectly justified in what I did. And: the poor kid. Somewhere between them is the whole mystery of this case.

Here's my honest read, at the point where we're leaving this story. I've spent weeks in the newspapers of that one week, and what strikes me most is how little of it holds still when you press on it. The papers couldn't agree on which night the women died — the shots on Friday night, or the strange quiet Saturday that followed. They couldn't agree on the gun. They printed her age three different ways. The first arrest warrant out of Phoenix charged Ruth — and two people with no names, John Doe and Jane Doe, because the county attorney flatly did not believe a hundred-and-twenty-five-pound woman did all of this alone. The Los Angeles detectives, just as flatly, believed she did. Ninety-five years later, people are still having that same argument, and in Part Two you'll get to have it yourself.

Because understand what we don't have, as the lights go down on Part One. We don't have a motive. We don't have her side. We don't even really have her — three days of knowing this woman, and everything we've heard has come from someone else's mouth: her brother, her husband, a baggage master, a newspaper. The woman at the center has said exactly one full sentence in this entire episode.

Believe me. I was perfectly justified in what I did.

Next time, on Forgotten True Crime: the country asks the question you're asking right now — who is Winnie Ruth Judd? — and the answers start coming up out of the ground. A nine-year-old scandal from a little town in Illinois. A husband with a secret of his own that changes how you'll hear everything he's said. Ruth's private letters, splashed across front pages coast to coast. A fight between friends over a dying woman's medical care. A party the night before the murders that police could never quite explain — and a wealthy man's automobile, parked outside a little house where a lonely wife lived by herself.

And the answer to the question I know you have right now:

Did they find her?

[BEAT]

That's Part Two.

[OUTRO — standard]

If you have any information about this case, or a forgotten case you think deserves an episode, reach out at Section29.com. If you enjoyed this episode, remember what I said at the top — share it with a friend, post it, leave a review. It all helps this one-man show more than you know. And make sure you're subscribed, because you do not want to miss Part Two.

Until next time — this is Trevor with Forgotten True Crime.

Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.

[MUSIC out]

(Sections below get pasted in as they're approved in chat.)

PART TWO — "WHO IS WINNIE RUTH JUDD?"

COLD OPEN — "THE GIRL IN THE GUNNY SACK"

November, 1922. Calhoun, Illinois — a village down in the southern part of the state, a few miles up the road from a town called Olney.

A minister named M. E. Lawler walks out to his garage one morning.

There's a girl inside it.

She's wearing a gunny sack. Not a coat, not a dress — a burlap feed sack, pulled on over her head like a sweater. That's all. Her feet are bare, and they are in terrible shape.

They take her home to Olney and she tells them what happened, and the story comes out in pieces and it doesn't quite hold still.

She'd been visiting out in the country. Somebody came into her room in the night. Chloroform. She was put in a car and driven a long way — miles and miles, she says, though she can't tell them where. When she got away she got away with nothing at all. Not even her clothes. She found the sack somewhere along the way.

And then she walked. Two nights. Railroad tracks, in November, in bare feet, until she saw a garage with the door open and couldn't go any farther.

The town believes her. Or wants to. She gives them a name — a young man from Montezuma, Indiana — and they bring him all the way to Olney to stand in front of her, and it takes almost no time at all to establish that he had nothing to do with any of it.

And then his mother produces a letter.

It's from the girl. To her son. And in it, she writes to him about her baby. She tells him the child is his.

There is no baby. There was never a baby. There was never going to be one.

So the town settles on a word for her, and it's a word people used in 1922 the way we might now say someone was fragile, or highly strung — a real diagnosis, a doctor's word, and also a place to put a young woman when you have run out of other explanations.

Neurasthenic.

Her father is the pastor of the Free Methodist church in Olney. Before all this she'd been away at the Free Methodist college up at Greenville. She is seventeen years old.

And her name — before there was a doctor, before there was a Phoenix, before there was a station platform in Los Angeles on a Monday morning nine years from now —

her name is Winnie McKinnell.

[MUSIC — cut to intro]

INTRO + DISCLAIMER

[MUSIC under]

Welcome back to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.

Before we get into it, I want to take just a second to tell you what this show is. Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast — and I mean independent. There's no network, no studio, no staff. It's one man. I do the research, I write the episodes, I record them, I edit them, and I get them out into the world — every step of it. So if you enjoy what you hear today, the single best thing you can do is simple: share it. Tell a friend about the show. Post an episode on your social media. Leave a review wherever you're listening right now. It takes you thirty seconds, and for a show like this one, every little bit helps more than you know. Thank you for that — and thank you for being here.

Now — the usual reminder before we begin.

Everything you're going to hear comes from the historical record. In this case that means the newspapers of October 1931 — five of them now, from three cities, the words of people who were actually there, written down while it was still happening. But here's the thing about newspapers. They get things wrong. Witnesses contradict each other. Reporters chase deadlines, not truth. And ninety-five years is a long time. So when I tell you what I believe happened, understand that's exactly what it is — my honest read of the record. Where the sources disagree, I'll tell you they disagree. And where we simply don't know, I'll tell you that too.

I said last time that "we don't know" was going to come up more than you'd expect in this story.

I undersold it.

Now — I owe you a correction. At the end of Part One I told you this case was big enough that we were telling it in two parts. I was wrong. Since then I've gotten my hands on a lot more of 1931 than I had when I said that, and there is simply no honest way to fit what's left into one episode. So this is Part Two of three.

Here's where we left it.

Monday morning, October nineteenth, 1931. Two trunks come off the overnight train from Phoenix into the Southern Pacific baggage room in Los Angeles, and a baggage agent named A. V. Anderson notices a smell, and something dark seeping out of a corner. Inside those trunks are two young women — Agnes Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson, who everybody called Sammy. A twenty-five-year-old college student named Burton McKinnell had spent an hour and a half that morning helping his sister try to claim them, without knowing what he was carrying. And by that evening his sister had walked out of his car into the crowds on Broadway and vanished, and a police teletype had gone out across the state with her name on it.

Burton spent that night in a county jail cell, and he told a reporter: I hope she gets away. She was forced to do it, I know. The poor kid.

That was Tuesday.

What I want you to understand about the week we're walking into now is that it did not belong to the police. It belonged to the newspapers.

By Wednesday the Los Angeles Evening Express was printing photographs on page three that had been flown across the desert by airplane that same morning just to make the afternoon edition. Wire bureaus were filing from Portland and Boise and Juneau and a village in Alaska called Wrangell. Reporters knocked on doors in Salem, Oregon, and Lafayette, Indiana, and Evansville, and a farm town called Darlington — all of it in a single day, all of it about one family. That was the machine. And when a machine like that goes looking for who somebody is, it finds things.

And the country doing the looking was not in good shape. That same week the head of Bethlehem Steel stood up in front of the American Iron and Steel Institute and announced that business sentiment had turned, that the credit plan was working, that the Depression was over. On another page a law firm in Boston was holding a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Holbein painting as collateral against a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar note.

That's 1931. Everybody insisting things were fine, and nothing being worth what it used to be.

Part One ended at the sound of three shots and cut away. It never took you inside that house on North Second Street.

This one does.

[MUSIC transition — Act 1]

ACT 1 — THE MURDER HOUSE

Wednesday. Burton has been in custody since Monday night, and he still hasn't been charged with anything. Material witness. They question him, let him sit, question him again.

And four hundred miles east, in a quiet neighborhood in Phoenix, detectives are walking slowly through a little white stucco duplex on an unpaved street, and the house is telling them everything.

Start with what isn't there. In the back bedroom, one of the two twin beds is missing its mattress and its pillow. Just gone. And the neighbors remember something from Saturday morning, early — they'd smelled feathers burning. In the fireplace, detectives find a great heap of ashes.

There's a corner hacked out of the bedroom rug. Cut away with something, and taken. That's burned too, they think. On the wall near where the rug was torn, a few small spots of blood.

And here's the detail the detectives kept coming back to: there is almost no blood on the floor. A few scattered spots, nothing more. Which told them something specific and awful — that neither woman ever got out of that bed. That they were shot where they lay, and they didn't move again until somebody lifted them.

The neighbors heard it. Two screams, and then four shots, fast, one after another.

Although — hold on. Part One gave you three shots, because a woman named Jennie McGrath, who lived nearby, said she heard three. Now it's four, and two screams. And it will change again before we're done. Nobody in this case can agree on how many times a gun went off in a small house on a Friday night.

Now. Saturday night, about half past ten, a truckman named Richard Swartz gets a call to come out to that address. He works for a company called the Lightning Delivery Company. He brings the truck.

He gets there and the house is dark. Completely dark. He rings the bell, and keeps ringing it, and finally the door opens and there's a young woman standing in the doorway with every light in the place out behind her. She tells him she's giving up the flat and the electricity has been disconnected.

She takes him through a black bedroom and points at a trunk.

He can't lift it. He calls in one of his helpers — still can't. It takes three men. And while they're wrestling it he says the thing anyone would say. What have you got in here that makes it so heavy?

And she says: books.

They get it as far as the doorway and have to set it down for a second, and when the police come back through that house later, they find four spots of blood on the floor — one at each corner of where that trunk rested.

Swartz tells her she'll have to come down to the depot with him and settle the excess baggage charge. And out at the truck, he weighs it up and tells her flat: you can't check this on a ticket, lady. It weighs too much. His estimate — four hundred pounds.

So she tells him to take it to her house instead. And then she climbs up onto the truck and rides across town with them.

But before they pull away, there's this.

Locking the front door behind her, she leaves her keys inside. Swartz is a decent man about it — he pulls the screen off a bathroom window so she can climb back in and get them.

And she drops them a second time.

And to find them on the floor of a dark house, she reaches over and switches on the lights.

The electricity was never disconnected. She'd told him that ten minutes earlier. And she'd just proved it herself, in front of three men, in about four seconds — and Swartz says she got flustered, and hurried out, and never said another word about it.

He also mentioned, almost in passing, that when he was done handling that trunk his hands were sticky. He said he didn't think it was blood at the time.

In the medicine cabinet of her bungalow, detectives find two straight razors. Recently cleaned, both of them. One of them still has small dark spots on it.

And on the floor of that bedroom, in the blood, they find a diary. We'll come back to that. That one deserves its own room.

But the sentence that changes the shape of this whole case is the last one the detectives gave the papers that day. Because in their reconstruction, there are two people in that bedroom.

Ruth Judd — and a man.

A man she met at her bungalow that evening. A man who drove there with her, who fired with her, who did the rest of it with her, and who rode the trunk back and forth across Phoenix between eleven and midnight. He has no name. He never gets one. And he is the reason there was a John Doe on the warrant.

Now — remember what I told you at the end of Part One. The county attorney out of Phoenix flatly did not believe a woman that size did this alone. The Los Angeles detectives flatly believed she did. This is the day Phoenix stopped hedging and put a second person in that room.

With no evidence for him at all. Just the weight of the work.

And I'll be honest with you about something, because this is the kind of thing that made this episode hard to write. That same Wednesday, in that same newspaper, on two different pages, the Evening Express printed two completely different accounts of how those trunks moved. On page one, the trunk goes from her house to the murder house late Friday night and comes back in the small hours of Saturday. On page five, she tries to ship both bodies on Saturday, gets beaten by the sheer weight of the thing, and only then takes it home to repack.

Same paper. Same day. Two stories that cannot both be true.

Meanwhile the coroner in Los Angeles is telling reporters the body had been dead more than a week — and the county attorney of Maricopa County is publicly contradicting him, saying he's got witnesses who saw all three of those women alive at a party on Thursday night.

Four days in. Nothing holds still.

And that afternoon they came for Burton again — this time about a long coil of rope they'd found in his automobile. Their theory was that the rope was for lowering the trunks into the ocean, and the inspector of detectives said it out loud to the newspapers: we do not feel satisfied that the brother has told us everything he knows about this case.

They let him go that night. Him and Dr. Judd both.

But there was a condition. The two of them had to promise the authorities that they would do everything they could to deliver Ruth into custody before nightfall.

And that same day, Burton McKinnell stood in front of the press and publicly begged his sister to give herself up.

Three days after he'd said I hope she gets away.

[MUSIC transition — Act 2]

ACT 2 — WHO IS WINNIE RUTH JUDD?

By Wednesday there was only one question left in America, and every newspaper in the country was asking it in some form or another.

Who is this woman?

And I want you to understand how fast the answer came, because I don't think we give 1931 enough credit for this. In a single day — one day — wire reporters knocked on doors in Olney, Illinois. In Salem, Oregon. In Wrangell, Alaska, and Juneau, and Seattle. In Laguna Beach, and Portland, and Boise. In Lafayette, Indiana, and Evansville, Indiana, and a farm town called Darlington. Photographs were flown across the desert by airplane so they'd make an afternoon edition.

No internet. No telephone in half those houses. And inside of about thirty-six hours, they had taken a twenty-six-year-old woman's entire life apart and laid the pieces out on the front page.

So. Here is what the country learned that week.

She was born on the twenty-ninth of January, 1905, in Oxford, Indiana. Her father was a Free Methodist minister. Her mother was frail — she'd been frail a long time. And Ruth was the sort of girl who got sent away to the church's own college, up at Greenville, Illinois, because that's what a minister's daughter did.

And then there was that business in the garage at Calhoun, in November of 1922, that we opened this episode with. The reporters found that too, of course they did — an Associated Press man filed it out of Olney the same week. Nine years buried, and it took them about a day.

There's one word in that story I want to put back in your hand, because it's going to matter later: neurasthenic. Hold onto it.

By 1923 she was eighteen and she was working — and this is where the papers split on her, and I'll give you both because I can't settle it. One wire story says she was a student nurse at a hospital in Evansville. The other one, the more specific one, says she was working in the kitchen. In the kitchen of the Southern Indiana State Hospital for the Insane.

Which is where she met him.

Dr. William C. Judd was on the staff of that hospital. He'd come there from Illinois. He stayed about a year and then he moved on, and she kept working there after he left, and then she went to Lafayette and took a job as a telephone operator, and the girls at the exchange liked her — small, blond, pretty, seven months on the switchboard.

And then he came back for her.

They were married on the eighteenth of April, 1924.

Now. I want to give you the two numbers off that marriage record and then I'm going to stop and let you sit with them.

She was nineteen years old.

He was forty-one.

He'd been born in Gibson, Nebraska in March of 1883. He'd grown up in Salem, Oregon — his father was a well-known farmer in that county, his older brother was a county judge. He'd gone through medical school in Salem and then gone to Mexico, where he spent eleven years as the company physician for a mining outfit. He'd served in the Medical Corps in the World War and been shot through the right leg with a machine gun in the Saint-Mihiel offensive.

He had been married once before. That wife had died.

And when reporters asked him what kind of medicine he practiced, he told them: I specialize in nervous troubles.

Hold onto that one too.

Here's the marriage, as briskly as the newspapers had it. Los Angeles in '24, right after the wedding. Then four years in Chihuahua, Mexico — and somewhere in those four years, in his own words, Mrs. Judd became tubercular. They came back to California in 1928 because his health wasn't good and hers was worse. Six months in Santa Monica. She worked one Christmas season, and then her health gave out entirely, and she spent six months in a sanatorium up above Pasadena.

Then Phoenix. Where she got the clinic job, and he opened a practice, and — his phrasing again — he spent much of his time administering to her health.

That's the marriage the papers printed. A nineteen-year-old minister's daughter, a man twenty-two years older who had buried one wife, eleven years of Mexican mining camps, a lung disease, and a sanatorium.

And then there's one more story that turned up that week, out of a town called Bisbee, down near the border.

Back in August, Dr. Judd had taken a temporary job on the medical staff of the Copper Queen mine there. And a man who worked at a garage in Bisbee opened his newspaper, looked at Ruth Judd's photograph, and told police that woman looked an awful lot like a woman who had come to see him in August. She'd asked him a great many questions about Dr. Judd. She wanted to know where he went. She wanted to check up on his movements. And she was so insistent about it that the garage man eventually went and told the doctor that somebody had been around asking after him.

And the doctor, he said, thanked him profusely.

Now.

I've been telling you all of this the way the country got it — in fragments, off a wire, one dateline after another. But I want to stop for a second and tell you whose life this actually was, because it wasn't the country's.

In Darlington, Indiana, a reporter walked up to a very modest cottage at the end of a street and knocked on the door, and a seventy-one-year-old retired minister answered it.

That's her father. And what the reporters found in Darlington was a family in real, grinding poverty. He cut wood for his neighbors so that he and his invalid wife would have wood for their own fire that winter. His wife was already, in his words, suffering a nervous collapse. And when his son had written from California that summer that he might not be able to afford his last year of school, the old man's answer was that they could sell the house at auction — the house was everything they had — and send the boy whatever equity came out of it.

The reporter asked him about his daughter. And here's what he said, and I'd like you to hear it exactly:

"I am worried, of course, but I know that my daughter could not be involved in such an affair. Her early training at home and in the church would prevent her from doing such a thing."

That's the whole defense. That's a father with nothing else to offer.

And that same week, reporters drove up a canyon road outside Los Angeles to look at where the brother lived.

They wrote it all down. A narrow shack at the end of the road under heavy trees, boards gone red-brown, so weathered it blended into the hillside. Locally they called it the old Judd house. The living room, one reporter wrote, was little more than a dark, narrow box — an old couch, one chair, a desk. Sacking tacked over the outsides of the windows, so the daylight came through gray. Upstairs, two cots and a small table, no closet, and the two boys' clothes hanging on a rope strung between the rafters.

And on the floor of that room, and two more hung on the walls, were rag rugs.

His mother made them. In Indiana. And sent them out to him.

That's the house the newspapers were describing, room by room, to the entire United States, while officers went through the brush outside it looking for his sister.

Burton talked to a reporter that night. And it wasn't about Ruth at all.

"This will ruin me," he said. "All the work and hardship I went through to get my degree." And then he stopped, and the reporter wrote down that the young man had to shake off something rising in his throat before he could go on.

"My school days are over. I'll be ostracized on the campus. The publicity can never be lived down."

He was three weeks from finishing.

[MUSIC transition — Act 3]

ACT 3 — THE DOCTOR'S OWN FILE

Oregon. October twenty-first.

An Associated Press man walks into a state office and asks a question, and the answer he gets is four sentences long, and it goes out on the wire that afternoon to every paper in the country.

Dr. W. C. Judd — whose wife is being hunted for the trunk murders in Phoenix — had once been an inmate of the Oregon State Hospital.

He was committed out of Marion County. The records give the reason.

He was committed as a drug addict.

And it happened after he came home from France.

Now stop for a second, and let's go back over the last few days with that in your ears.

Because this is the man who has been talking. This is the man the reporters have been going to all week. He is the one who identified the bodies. He is the one who stood in a Los Angeles police station on Monday night with what one reporter called a gray mask for a face and answered every question they had — as though, the papers said, he was discussing the weather.

Were you separated? No. We love each other.

Was she jealous of those two women? No. She had no reason to be. They all seemed the best of friends.

Was your wife insane?

And he shook his head and said no. She had always seemed perfectly sane to him. Why — her last letter had been perfectly rational.

That man. Committed to a state asylum as a narcotics addict, discharged, and then hired on as the company doctor for a lumber outfit up on the Oregon coast, and then off to Mexico, and then eventually into a marriage with a nineteen-year-old girl, and then into a practice in Phoenix where — his words, remember —

I specialize in nervous troubles.

And now his letters.

Because police had a stack of them, letters he'd written to Ruth over the past year, and reporters got a look at what was in them.

In some of those letters he is urging his wife to exert a little self-control.

In another one he is talking about a mild narcotic she had apparently been taking. And what he writes to her about it is this:

"It will knock your nervous system to a fare-you-well if you don't cut it out."

And when detectives went through her little bungalow on Brill Street after she disappeared, they found what they were looking for. A partly used phial of sleeping tablets — containing, the police said, a habit-forming narcotic derivative.

So here's where we are.

A woman with a lung disease, married at nineteen to a man of forty-one who had himself been locked up as an addict, who advertised himself as a specialist in nervous conditions, and who spent much of his time —

again, his own description —

administering to her health. And by the autumn of 1931 she is taking something for her nerves and he is writing to her from out of town telling her to cut it out before it wrecks her.

I'm not going to tell you what to do with that. I'm going to tell you that every single word of it was in the newspapers by Thursday morning, and that her defense attorneys had not yet been hired.

And then there is the line in those letters that nobody has ever explained.

Somewhere in that correspondence, Dr. William C. Judd takes — and this is the reporter's phrasing, because the letter itself was never printed in full — the blame. For the entire situation. During the past year or more.

What situation?

That's it. That's all we get. A man taking responsibility, in writing, for something that had been going wrong for over a year, and not one reporter in America seems to have gone back and asked him the obvious question.

On Wednesday, Phoenix police announced that a grocery delivery boy named Harry Ruppelius had picked Dr. Judd's photograph out and said that was the man he saw at the LeRoi and Samuelson apartment on Friday afternoon.

Los Angeles officers went and pulled his employment records — he was working at an industrial hospital down on Santa Fe Avenue — and the records said Dr. Judd was at work in Los Angeles all day Friday. He denied being anywhere near Phoenix. And that appeared to be that.

Except.

Neighbors on Brill Street told police that on Friday morning a black Buick with California license plates pulled up in front of Ruth Judd's apartment. That a man answering Dr. Judd's description got out of it and went inside. That the car sat parked in front of that house all day and into the evening.

And that by Saturday it was gone.

[MUSIC transition — Act 4]

ACT 4 — THE MOTIVE MACHINE

By Thursday, Phoenix had a theory.

Jealousy, the chief of police said. Jealousy that started in an argument over medical treatment, and got fanned to an insane flame by competition over a mutual male friend. Possibly stoked by narcotics. That was the official answer, and every paper in America ran it.

I'm going to take that apart with you, piece by piece, because I've spent weeks with it and I don't think it holds. But before I do, you need to know who these two women actually were, because Part One didn't have room and the newspapers of 1931 didn't have the interest.

Hedvig Samuelson came off a farm in North Dakota.

She went to the little teachers' college at Minot, and a woman who sat in classes with her told a reporter that week that Hedvig was exceptionally bright and always among the honor students. She was beautiful — rich red hair, lovely coloring. And she was poor in a way you didn't have to guess at. She worked her way through by helping out in a cafeteria. Once, her friend passed her a note in class asking her to come out somewhere, and Hedvig scribbled the answer in the margin of one of her textbooks.

I haven't the cash.

She taught school for two terms and then she went north, to Juneau, Alaska, to teach. In the summer of 1930 she went down to study at the University of Chicago, and came back broke, and a few weeks into the school year she got sick.

The doctor examined her and it was immediately obvious. A severe case of tuberculosis.

Now — she had no money. None. And what happened next is the part I keep coming back to. The town of Juneau, Alaska raised the money to send her south. The publisher of the local paper was in on it. So was a wealthy man who owned theaters up there. They passed the hat for a young schoolteacher who was going to die if she stayed.

And the publisher, asked about her a year later, said this: "Sammy had returned from a summer's study at the University of Chicago. She was without funds." And then: "Sammy was a little gleam of sunshine."

And at the hospital they took her to, there was a nurse.

Agnes Anne LeRoi was from Portland — Agnes Imlah, before she was married. She'd trained in Seattle and Portland and taken graduate work in X-ray and physical therapy. She'd been superintendent of the hospital up at Wrangell. She had a divorce behind her and an adopted son back in Oregon, and people who knew her in Alaska described her as a strikingly beautiful woman.

She volunteered to take Sammy to Arizona.

She said she wanted to go anyway, and she thought she could find work down there and care for the patient at the same time. So Juneau paid for both of them, and the two of them left Alaska together.

Then, in Phoenix, Ann caught it.

Her family said so plainly. So did a doctor who knew them both. He said Mrs. LeRoi was very devoted to Miss Samuelson — and that she had contracted tuberculosis from constant association with her.

She nursed her, and it got into her lungs, and she was still nursing her.

And two months before the murders there was very nearly a different ending. Ann arranged to bring Sammy out to a hospital in Laguna Beach, California, run by a doctor she knew — her first husband's brother, as it happens. It was all set. And then he suggested she get a specialist's opinion first, and the specialist said no: keep her in the drier air of Phoenix.

That doctor told a reporter, the week they died, that if it hadn't been for that piece of advice, Sammy would have been in California, and the trunk murders would never have happened.

One more thing about Ann, and then we'll get to the theory. She was engaged. A traveling salesman out of Portland named Emil Hoitola. They were going to be married around Christmas.

And when detectives opened those trunks in Los Angeles and started going through what was packed in around the bodies, one of the things they found was a photograph of a nurse named Elsie Hart, who'd worked under Ann up in Alaska.

They took their pictures with them.

All right. The theory.

Piece one: the cat.

There was a young woman named Evelyn Nace who worked at the clinic with both Ann and Ruth. She's the one who ate dinner at that house on Friday night and left at a quarter to ten. And that week she told police the whole thing started over a cat.

Ruth had a cat. This is back when all three of them were living together. The cat got sick, and Ann said she was going to have it put down. And Ruth — in Nace's words — flew into a rage, said nobody was going to touch her cat, and called Ann every name she could think of.

And Miss Nace said it was that quarrel that started the petty arguments that ended with Ruth moving out of that house.

That's it. That's the origin story of the whole thing, according to the woman who knew all three of them.

A sick cat.

Piece two: the lung.

Sammy was dying, and there was a treatment. It was a real procedure in 1931 — you collapse the diseased lung, put it out of use, and let it rest. Serious, and sometimes it worked.

Ann wanted it done. So did a Phoenix physician. Dr. and Mrs. Judd were against it.

And the argument ran hot for weeks — with Dr. Judd out of town for most of it, which meant Ruth was carrying his side of it by herself, in that house, against the woman who loved the patient. And all through it, Sammy was in bed for most of every day.

And then Ruth moved out.

Now here's the thing I did not know until very late in this research, and it changes the shape of that fight completely.

Ruth Judd had tuberculosis.

She'd had it for years. Her husband said she became tubercular in Mexico. She spent Christmas of 1928, and then a whole summer in 1929, as a lung patient in a sanatorium above Pasadena. She weighed about a hundred pounds.

So that argument in that house was not a healthy woman meddling in a sick one's business. It was a woman who had lain in a sanatorium bed herself, married to a doctor, arguing about a disease she had survived, with the woman who was nursing the girl who hadn't.

Nobody in that argument was a bystander. Every single one of them had the same thing in their lungs.

Piece three: the parties.

The neighbors on Brill Street told police there'd been parties at Ruth's bungalow on three different evenings that week. Loud — a little bit loud, one of them said — and going until the early hours. And sometimes the whole thing would pick up and move across town to Ann and Sammy's place.

And several times that week somebody called the neighborhood drug store and had them send over ginger ale.

I'll leave that there. It was 1931. You can do the arithmetic on what the ginger ale was for.

Police also said that some of the people who came to those parties had been treated for drug use, and that there were other narcotics users involved in this case.

They never named a single one of them.

Piece four: Thursday night.

The last party was Thursday, the fifteenth of October — about twenty-four hours before the shots. And we have two descriptions of it, from two different sets of witnesses, and they do not match.

The neighbors say: two men and two women. Liquor bottles going round. It got quarrelsome somewhere around midnight, and then it went abruptly quiet.

But there was another woman there, and she talked to Phoenix police on the condition they never printed her name. And her version has three men in it.

She says she and Ruth and one of the men drove over to Ann and Sammy's apartment to collect the other two. And Ruth would not go in. Ruth sat in the car and asked them not to tell Ann and Sammy she was out there.

And when the men came out, Ann and Sammy walked them to the curb — and one of the men hung back for what the witness described as an affectionate parting.

And Ruth, sitting in the car the whole time, would not speak to them.

Five people or four. Three men or two. The county attorney, meanwhile, was telling reporters he had witnesses who put all three women at that party.

Somebody is wrong about a night that ended twenty-four hours before two of them were shot.

Piece five: the doctor whose name they wouldn't print.

In August, while Ann was up in Portland visiting her mother, Ruth wrote her a letter. And in that letter there's a man.

The Los Angeles Times printed the letter. And twice — twice — where his name should be, they printed a dash.

Dr. blank had driven Sammy over to the house one Sunday night. And Ruth writes: He hated to leave her, and frankly told me so the next morning.

And near the end of the letter she says to Ann: Why don't you write Dr. blank? He said rather sadly the other day that you had never written him a line.

That's a man with feelings for one of these women, or both. There was also a physician who drove Ann home from the clinic on the last Friday of her life, and who came under suspicion for a while, and I strongly suspect it's the same man.

We don't know who he is. A newspaper that printed a dead woman's private diary would not print this man's name.

Piece six: the automobile.

His name was J. J. Halloran. He was forty-two years old, he was a wealthy Phoenix lumberman, and he was married.

The neighbors had seen his car outside Ruth's house on several nights that week. And they'd seen him through the window.

They said he was displaying large sums of money.

Police questioned him — specifically about the liquor party at Ruth Judd's house the night before the killings. The Evening Express ran him on the front page under a headline calling him a murder playboy, promising orgies and weird loves, and underneath that headline was a story about four people, some bottles, and an argument that went quiet.

Halloran told the reporters he knew of no antagonism between those three women at all.

And nobody in 1931 ever asked the obvious question, so I'll ask it. In the second year of the Depression, what is a married forty-two-year-old lumberman doing counting out large sums of money in the front room of a rented bungalow, in front of a woman who was borrowing three dollars off her friends?

I don't know. Nobody followed it up.

Now. I want to give you three things that were in the papers that week, and I'm not going to tell you what they mean. I'd rather you sit with them a while, because we're going to come back to them.

The first is a detail Dr. Judd handed over without seeming to notice what he was handing over. Explaining why his wife had felt crowded in that house, he told reporters what the sleeping arrangements were. There were two beds in the bedroom.

And a third one out on an open-air sleeping porch.

The second is a sentence from a Phoenix doctor who knew all three of them, printed in the Los Angeles Times. He said that Ruth had several times displayed anger over the close friendship between the two victims — and at her own exclusion from their relationship.

Their relationship. His word.

And the third was found in that house, unfinished, tucked under the blotter on a desk. A letter Sammy was writing to her sister. She'd got as far as this:

"We are much happier by ourselves, as Ruth and Anne clashed on so many things, and their quarrels were sometimes violent."

Not Ruth and Sammy. Ruth and Anne.

And then, finally, there's Ann.

Because Ann wrote letters too — to her fiancé, in Portland, more or less daily. And when he came out of hiding, broken, in Boise, he handed the reporters a sheaf of them, and he picked one out.

The twenty-eighth of September. Three weeks before she died. Typewritten, and signed Anne.

"Ruth is leaving us in a few days. Dr. Judd is coming home, so she will take an apartment. It really hasn't worked out so well having three of us. We are very fond of her and she is a sweet girl, but there just seems to be a wrong number when one is used to living by oneself and just one other very congenial one."

That's the woman they said was hated. Writing about the woman who would kill her.

We are very fond of her, and she is a sweet girl.

No jealous rage. No feud. No mutual male friend, no cat, no lung. Just three people in a house that only ever fit two.

[MUSIC transition — Act 5]

ACT 5 — HER LETTERS, ON EVERY FRONT PAGE

Tuesday evening, the county attorney of Maricopa County got on an airplane in Phoenix.

He landed at Grand Central Air Terminal at five past seven and police escorted him downtown. He'd brought recent photographs of Ruth Judd, to go out on the state bulletins.

And he'd brought a small blue diary.

By the next afternoon, a reporter in Los Angeles had read it, and quoted it, and put it in the paper.

It ran from the first of January, 1930, to the fifteenth of October, 1931.

Here is what was in it.

For most of the first year, Hedvig Samuelson was in bed, and the diary is dark. She can't find anything to hold onto. A doctor had told her what she had and roughly what it meant, and she was somewhere in her twenties, and she was trying to work out how to be a person who was going to die soon.

In January of 1931 she seems to decide something.

On the fourth, she copies a verse into the book:

God made man frail as a bubble.

God made love, love made trouble.

God made wine, was it a sin —

That man took wine to drown trouble in?

And the reporter noted that all through those pages, here and there, Sammy took a little wine to drown her trouble in.

Two days later, the sixth of January:

"I am what I am. I shall do what I shall do, because of the Mendelian laws of heredity and the physical reflexes developed in my childhood."

That's a young woman in a sickbed, reasoning her way toward not being to blame for herself.

And on the seventh, she comes out the other side of it and writes down what she's decided to be:

"Now I am a hedonist — a follower of the doctrine that pleasure is the chief end of man."

Which sounds like a lot, until you read the plainer version she put in the same book:

"This is wisdom: to love, to live, to take what fate and the gods may give."

That's the philosophy. That's the whole thing. A girl who knew she was running out of time deciding that the correct response was to love people and enjoy her days.

It didn't always hold. Two weeks later, the twenty-first of January:

"One day is much like all the others — how can I fill these pages."

Now. The entries that matter.

The fifteenth of February, 1930 — six weeks into the diary — is three words long.

"Met Ann Leroi."

And exactly one year later, on the fifteenth of February, 1931, she goes back and marks the anniversary:

"Just think. Its been just a year since I met Ann. It seems that I knew her always."

The Judds first appear on the tenth of February, 1931. "Dr. and Mrs. Judd came over for dinner." And for months after that it's Mrs. Judd, formally, every time — until July, when Mrs. Judd quietly becomes Ruth.

And on the twenty-second of April, 1931:

"We moved into a darling place today. At 2929 North Second street. It was an event."

That's the address. That's the house.

The next day: "Ruth saw our new home today."

And then the entries run on through the spring and the summer and into the fall, and on Thursday, the fifteenth of October, 1931, Hedvig Samuelson wrote the last thing she would ever write.

"The biggest surprise. We were presented with a radio. It's wonderful."

I'm going to leave that there for a second.

The reporter who read that diary put one line of his own in the story, and it's the only sentence in this entire case where I think a 1931 newspaperman got it exactly right. He wrote that she had expected to lie in a grave.

Not in a little steamer trunk.

Now — what the papers did with that diary.

They ran it under headlines about weird loves. Los Angeles police said the diary hinted at unnatural intimacies. Phoenix police looked at the actual entries — the hedonism, a note under the heading behaviourism, a lot of quotations she'd copied out of books they later found in the apartment — and publicly said no, there's nothing conclusive in this, and dropped it.

And then a paper printed one sentence from a letter Sammy had written to Ann.

"After all, there is only you, my dear. I love you and I always will love you."

So here's my honest read, and it is a read, and I'll give you the arguments against it right after.

I think Ann and Sammy were a couple.

I don't think we will ever prove it and I don't think anybody in 1931 was capable of saying it out loud in a way that wasn't ugly. But look at what we have. A woman who volunteered to move thirteen hundred miles to keep another woman alive, and caught her disease doing it. A diary that says we moved into a darling place, and our new home. An anniversary marked for the day they met. A Phoenix doctor who knew all three of them telling a reporter that Ruth had been angry, more than once, about her exclusion from their relationship. And a house with two beds in the bedroom and a third one out on the porch.

And a dying woman writing to the person she lived with: after all, there is only you.

Now the arguments against, because they're real. Between women in 1931, I love you and I always will love you in a letter did not carry the weight it carries now — people wrote to their friends like that. It's one sentence out of a correspondence we will never see. And Ann was engaged to be married at Christmas.

Though I'd say this about the engagement. It was 1931. A woman was expected to have a husband coming. That expectation was not optional, and I don't think it settles anything.

And there's one more piece that cuts against the simple version, and I'm not going to hide it from you, because it's the piece that keeps me honest.

Police found a stack of letters that Ann had written to Ruth. Most of them from the summer, while Ann was up in Oregon and Ruth was staying in the house with Sammy. And the papers said every one of them spoke in endearing terms. One of them read:

"Ruth darling, I'll never thank you enough for all the things you've done for me, but both Sammy and I will love you always for them."

So it isn't a story about two women who loved each other and one woman they shut out and despised. All three of them were fond of each other. That's on the record, in their own handwriting. And something between them still went catastrophically wrong.

What I'd ask you to hold onto is just this. Whatever Ann and Sammy were to each other, it was the best thing in either of their short lives. And in October of 1931 it got printed in a newspaper under the word orgies, next to a photograph of the trunks.

I said in Part One that the papers of that week didn't move on, and that I thought we could do better than they did. This is the part I meant.

Now. The other half of the week's mail.

Because while a dead woman's diary was being read out in the papers, a missing woman's letters were being printed right alongside it — in facsimile. Photographed. Her actual handwriting, on a page you could buy for three cents.

The eighth of August. Ruth writing home. Her husband had taken a month's post at a copper company for fifty dollars a week; he was talking about going down to Mexico for work. And she writes the line the Express used for its headline — that she was alone now. And this:

"I will stay here until he makes enough to take care of me."

The twenty-eighth of September — this one from her parents, to Burton, and you've now met the people who wrote it. A retired minister and an invalid wife in Indiana, trying to work out from two thousand miles away what is happening to their daughter's marriage:

"Is Dr. Judd at Carrie's yet? Or at Ruth's? Is he trying to give Ruth trouble? Has he left her?"

Three weeks before the murders, her own family was privately writing to each other about whether her husband had walked out on her.

And then the last one.

It's dated Saturday the seventeenth of October. Which means — and I want to be careful here, because for a while the papers thought this letter was written moments before the killings — that it was actually written the morning after.

And it is about nothing at all.

She writes about her chores. She writes that she has gained a little weight since she left the girls. She mentions, in passing, that somebody took fifteen dollars of her money.

And then she writes this:

"I like Sue. She is a cute little tike. A very great deal like I used to be at her age."

We don't know who Sue is. Nobody ever found out. A child, probably. Somebody's little girl.

That is a woman writing an ordinary, chatty, slightly lonely letter home, on the morning after — and I'll say it plainly because the alternative is pretending — on the morning after two women died in a bedroom on North Second Street, with one of them in a trunk in her own house while she wrote it.

I don't know what to do with that letter. I've read it a lot of times now. It is either the coldest thing in this entire case, or it is a woman whose mind had come apart at the seams and was still going through the motions of being a daughter.

And in October of 1931, you could read it for yourself, in her own handwriting, in the afternoon paper, while she was still missing.

[MUSIC transition — Act 6]

ACT 6 — THE INQUEST THAT NAMED NO ONE

Friday morning, the twenty-third of October. Los Angeles.

A coroner's jury sits down to decide how two women died.

The first witness is Dr. William C. Judd. They ask him to identify one body — Hedvig Samuelson. He'd treated her for tuberculosis, he says. He'd known her seven or eight months.

They don't ask him to identify the other one.

That falls to a physician named Odell, who'd known Ann back in Portland. And he gives the jury her full name, the real one, the one underneath the name she used: Agnes Alexander LeRoi Smith. He tells them he examined both women about a year earlier, and that Miss Samuelson was tubercular then.

And Mrs. LeRoi was not.

Then they call the baggage master.

And A. V. Anderson — who by this point in the story feels like the only person in Los Angeles who did his job properly — tells the jury about Monday. He tells them the young woman was calm. Quiet spoken. He tells them she said her trunks contained only personal effects.

He tells them about the odor, and about what he saw seeping out of the corner of one of them, and that he would not release them without seeing inside.

And she told him she had no keys but she would telephone her husband and get them.

And she walked, unhurried, over to the telephone directory. And she stood there and studied it for a while. And then she came back and told him she couldn't find the number, and that she was going to go get the keys and return.

Anderson said she was cool and unruffled through the whole thing.

And then, from the witness chair, he pointed across the room at a young man sitting in the gallery.

"She was with that boy with the yellow hair."

Then they call a woman named Stella Conway, who worked at the station, and she tells the jury about the suitcase — the one Ruth handed over and never came back for.

She says the woman gave her name. Her real name. She says the woman spelled it out for her.

J - u - d - d.

And that she asked Mrs. Conway not to release that suitcase to anybody except herself, or her brother.

I want you to hold that against everything else you know about that Monday. She had already abandoned part of a body in that station. She was hours from vanishing into a crowd. And she stood at a counter and carefully spelled her own name for a stranger, and named her brother.

Then Burton testifies.

He tells the story again — his sister at the classroom door, the trunks, dumping them in the ocean. And he tells the jury what she said when he asked her why.

"I asked her right at the start why she wanted to do that, and she told me the less I knew the better."

And then he says: "That was sufficient for me, for I love my sister and had faith in her."

And asked what he intended to do now — with his sister missing, and hundreds of officers looking for her — Burton McKinnell told the coroner's jury that he would neither help nor hinder.

Then the jury goes out. And comes back.

And here is the verdict, in full.

That Mrs. Agnes LeRoi and Miss Hedvig Samuelson came to their deaths on October the sixteenth, from gunshot wounds fired by a person or persons unknown.

That's it.

They didn't name her.

The wire correspondent covering it noticed something else, too, and put it in his story: the verdict didn't even carry a recommendation that a search be made for Mrs. Judd. And he pointed out that in a case where the circumstantial evidence is strong, that recommendation is customary. It's what juries do.

This one wouldn't.

Every person in that room knew the name. Her husband had just testified. Her brother had just testified. The baggage master had pointed at her brother's hair. Her name had been on the front page of every newspaper in America for four days.

A person or persons unknown.

Now — I've thought about that a lot, and the likeliest explanation is the dullest one. The women died in Arizona. Los Angeles had the bodies but Phoenix had the crime, and there was a proceeding coming in Phoenix, and maybe a coroner's jury in California simply declined to reach across a state line.

Maybe. But I'll tell you what it looks like on the page. It looks like twelve people who had heard four days of the loudest story in the country deciding that they were not going to be the ones to write her name down.

And while that was happening in Los Angeles, out in Phoenix a sheriff named McFadden was talking to reporters, and what he said should have been the biggest story of the day.

"I am positive there was an accomplice."

And then:

"As a matter of fact, I can lay my hands on him in fifteen minutes."

He said the man had driven Ruth Judd home — two miles from the murder scene — at ten minutes past one on the Saturday morning. He said the man wasn't going to leave town. He said he was waiting for the county attorney to get back from Los Angeles, and then there might be an arrest.

Fifteen minutes. He knew who it was, he knew where he was, and he was waiting on a colleague's travel schedule.

And there was a new witness behind that. A Phoenix physician had come forward to say that on Friday night — at eleven o'clock, half an hour after those shots — there were two automobiles parked in the street, both of them facing that house.

He assumed they were couples. People parked. He didn't give it another thought.

Then an emergency call took him back out a little after one in the morning. And one of the cars was gone. And as he turned into the street, the other one switched on its headlights and drove away.

The sheriff's theory was that they were sentries. Posted by a narcotics ring, watching that house, ready to run in and give a warning.

And the drug story was getting harder that same day. Police had found two bottles of drugs in the dead women's home. They'd already found a small quantity in Ruth Judd's house — a drug, they said, of the kind used to taper off an addicted patient. And a Phoenix police captain announced that in his belief the two women had been rendered insensible by drugs before they were shot.

The deputy county attorney put it like this: "A person addicted to their use would do desperate things if his supply was threatened with elimination."

So on that one Friday you have a coroner's jury that won't say her name, a sheriff who says he could arrest her accomplice inside a quarter of an hour, two unexplained cars outside the house, and a police theory that the victims were drugged unconscious first.

And back in Los Angeles, two lawyers sat down with Dr. William C. Judd and had their photograph taken while they planned the defense of a woman who had not been arrested.

One of them was a former judge. The other was a criminal attorney named Richard Cantillon.

And Cantillon's last famous client had been William Edward Hickman.

Which — if you remember Part One — is the same case the newspapers had spent the entire week using as their yardstick. The greatest manhunt since Hickman. The comparison they kept reaching for, and the lawyer sitting at that table, turn out to be the same case.

They also let slip, at the inquest, that they weren't finished with Burton. Because it had come out that on Monday night — hours after he says he last saw his sister — Burton McKinnell had been going around the university trying to borrow money.

A music student named Russell Blake Howe remembered exactly what he said.

"If you ever wanted to help me, do it now. My sister has become involved in a horrible crime, and I need some money. Anything. Even five dollars."

Police thought he meant to take it to her.

And Burton, asked by reporters where he thought it was all going to end, said this:

"Unless she already is dead, I don't believe they'll get her, and I hope they won't. She's a clever woman, and as I've said before — she doesn't have any nerves."

He was wrong about all of it. Because as that inquest was breaking up, word reached the district attorney's office that a former federal prosecutor had called. He said he had reliable information about where Winnie Ruth Judd was.

And he said she was thinking about giving herself up.

[MUSIC transition — Act 7]

ACT 7 — DID THEY FIND HER?

For four days, the answer to where is she was: everywhere.

A cafe owner in Venice told police a woman answering her description had come into his place on Monday night and driven off with a man, and so officers went through every hotel in Venice. A woman was pulled in at El Cajon and questioned for an hour before a detective decided she wasn't Ruth Judd — she was twenty-two, she had twin babies back in Ohio, and she told the officers that if they hadn't been officers she'd have slapped their faces for suggesting it.

A hitch-hiker picked up outside Laguna Beach. Another one arrested at Rialto and released when she proved who she was. A nervous woman at a hotel in Patterson, held for investigators out of Modesto. A woman at a garage in Trenton, New Jersey, with a male companion who had California plates. A hotel clerk in San Diego who said a woman had asked him the way to New Mexico, so they wired every town between San Diego and El Centro.

Marshfield, Oregon, on a report she'd come in by airplane. Sacramento. Reno. Fresno. San Francisco, where the head of the detective bureau said they'd chase every tip because we can't afford to pass anything up.

A woman was taken into custody at the Westminster Hotel on South Main Street in Los Angeles, questioned, and let go.

And when a day went by with nothing, and then another one, the police did the thing that tells you what they had started to believe. They began patrolling the beaches. Volunteers went out and beat the brush in the canyons and looked into empty cabins.

They thought she'd killed herself.

Her father thought she should come in. From Indiana, the old minister asked her publicly to give herself up and disprove the charges.

Her husband went further. Dr. William C. Judd, sitting in police custody, was put on the radio — and he talked into a microphone to a woman nobody could find.

"I cannot believe that Ruth did this terrible thing alone. I want her to surrender, tell her story, and we will help her. I believe she had an accomplice — if she did this at all."

And Burton had already told the papers he hoped they'd never get her.

Then came Friday.

In the morning, twelve people in a Los Angeles courtroom listened to four days of evidence and declined to write her name down.

And that night, Winnie Ruth Judd walked in.

She gave herself up. And the first person from her family to reach her was not her husband and not her brother — it was Caroline Judd, her sister-in-law, a schoolteacher from Santa Monica.

And this small, exhausted woman who had been the most hunted person in America for four days threw herself into that woman's arms and sobbed.

"There, dear," Caroline said, patting her shoulder. "Why didn't you come to me right away? I'd have taken care of you."

And Ruth said: "Oh, I was so frightened. I ran and ran. I didn't know what to do — where to turn."

And her sister-in-law stroked her head and said: "Never mind. Let's not talk about it any more."

Afterward there's a photograph, and I've looked at it a long time. A very small woman in a fur collar, hemmed in on both sides by two attorneys she had met that day, and standing just behind her shoulder, half in shadow, the bald head of her forty-eight-year-old husband.

The greatest manhunt in the history of the American West. Hundreds of officers. Two states. Beaches and canyons and railway stations and steamship docks. Tips from New Jersey.

And it ended with her walking through a door.

Then they put her in a car and took her to the receiving hospital.

[MUSIC transition — Act 8]

ACT 8 — HER SIDE

She came in because of her hand.

That's the answer. Not the dragnet, not the radio, not the appeals. There was a bullet lodged in her left hand, between the index and the middle finger, and by Friday the wound had gone septic, and she was frightened of lockjaw. Doctors said afterward that the infection had set in and another day of neglect might have been very serious indeed.

The greatest manhunt in the history of the West did not find Winnie Ruth Judd.

Blood poisoning brought her in.

Now, where she'd been.

For four days she was in a vacant house in Los Angeles. That's all she'd say about it — in the city, she said, but not in Beverly Glen where my brother lives.

She was desperately hungry. And she would not risk going out for food.

But she did go out once.

She went out to a store, and she bought a pencil, and some paper. Because she wanted to get word to her husband — to stop him worrying.

And she wrote him a letter. And then she read in a newspaper that he'd been taken into custody for questioning, and she got frightened of what it might do to him if a letter arrived from her.

So she never mailed it.

It was still in her purse when she surrendered. Police took it off her and handed it to Dr. Judd, and reporters asked him what was in it, and he said he was not at liberty to say. He said he couldn't tell them any of the things she had told him since they'd met again, either. And then he said this:

"It is the most amazing story I ever listened to. But I can only tell a small part of it now."

Here's how the surrender actually happened.

She read her husband's appeal in the newspaper. That afternoon, from wherever she was, she picked up a telephone and called Richard Cantillon.

And her lawyers, wanting somewhere quiet where the police and the press wouldn't be waiting, told her where to meet them.

A funeral parlor. Alvarez and Moore, on the corner of Court and Olive.

So the story of how two women died was told for the first time by the woman who killed them, standing in an undertaking establishment, in broken sentences, to a former judge.

This is what she said.

"I had to shoot Sammy. I had to. Sammy shot me. I struggled with her — she dropped the pistol and I — I got it! I shot her. Then Agnes began hitting me with the ironing board, so I shot her, too."

And the fuller version.

She said she went to the bungalow that night and a quarrel started. Over something she began to say about Ann.

"Sammy got mad because of something I started to say about Mrs. LeRoi. She defended Agnes. We had words, and then she ran into the kitchen. When she returned, there was a pistol in her hand. She shot me as I ran toward her.

"Then we scuffled, dropped to the floor, and I got the pistol. Agnes hit me over the head with the ironing board, and I shot her too."

That's it. That's the defense of Winnie Ruth Judd, and it never fundamentally changed.

They took her to the hospital and a surgeon opened her hand and took the bullet out. It was a twenty-five caliber. And standing beside the operating table, wearing a white surgical smock somebody had given him, was her brother, stroking her head.

A reporter told him — right there, in the room — that she had just confessed to her attorney that she shot both women.

And Burton McKinnell said: "Whatever happened, her part must have been justified. And I expect to stick by her."

Now. The evidence.

There is exactly one piece of physical evidence in this entire case that supports her story, and I want to be very clear about where it came from, because it did not come from the defense.

The next morning, the deputy jail physician dressed her hand. He told reporters she might lose it — she had, he said, an even chance of saving it.

And he also reported what else he found on her.

Bruises on her upper arm that were, unmistakably, the prints of fingers. A hand locked in a rough grasp. And other small bruises scattered in many places on her body, of the kind you'd get from a fall, or from blows.

That's the county's own doctor. Not her lawyers.

And now everything else.

Arizona went at her story within twenty-four hours, and they went at it from four directions.

One. The autopsy. Both women had wounds in the temple — with the pistol held close enough to leave powder burns on the skin. That is not what a struggle on a floor looks like. That is not what being hit with an ironing board looks like.

Two. Her hand. The bullet had entered the palm near the base of the fingers and traveled up to lodge near the first joint of the index finger. And investigators said, flatly, that this was precisely the sort of wound a person could most easily inflict on herself.

Three. The bandages. They had nearly a dozen witnesses in Phoenix from the two days after the killings. Some had seen her with one hand bandaged. Some had seen her with the other hand bandaged.

And some had seen her with neither.

Four. The gun. Dr. William C. Judd identified the pistol found in that trunk as belonging to his wife. And the autopsy said that pistol fired the shot that killed Hedvig Samuelson.

But in Ruth's account, the gun that killed Sammy was Sammy's gun, taken off her in a scuffle.

The deputy county attorney called the plea inconceivable. The weakest defense she could have put forward. And he asked the question that hangs over all of it: if she were going only to remonstrate, why go late at night, and why take her pistol with her?

Which brings me to Halloran.

Because the day after she surrendered, a newspaperman walked into the county jail with a message. He'd just come back from Arizona, he said, and J. J. Halloran had asked him to pass something along.

Halloran wanted her to clear him. In connection with that visit — to Mrs. LeRoi's home, on Thursday night.

And Ruth Judd snapped back at him:

"Halloran couldn't have sent that message. He knows all about it."

The reporter asked if she had a message to send back. She said come back this afternoon, after I've talked to my attorneys, and I may.

Whatever she said to her attorneys that afternoon, we don't have.

And when the county attorney of Maricopa County was asked, that same day, whether he had any statement to make about J. J. Halloran, he said he had nothing to say.

And then he volunteered something nobody had asked him for.

"Halloran's a pretty good friend of mine."

That's the man prosecuting the case.

But the thing I keep coming back to is what the deputy county attorney said on that first day, without seeming to notice what he'd just conceded. He was explaining why the self-defense story couldn't stand up, and he put it like this.

"If her story of being wounded in the hand on the night of the murders prove to be true, it absolutely would preclude her having disposed of the bodies without the aid of an accomplice."

Read that again.

The prosecution is saying: either she is lying about the hand — or she did not do this alone.

In their own framing, there is no third option.

And ninety-five years later, that is still the entire argument.

There's one more thing from that Saturday, and then I'll stop.

A nurse came to change the dressing on her hand, and Winnie Ruth Judd — who had, four days earlier, put another woman into a steamer trunk in pieces — turned her face away and hid it in her arm rather than look at it.

Somebody asked if she'd lost faith in everyone.

"No," she said, "I've lost faith in everyone." And she turned her face to the wall.

And then, after a second, she turned back.

"No. That isn't true. I trust my husband, and I have faith in my attorneys. It's just that I can't talk. I can't answer any questions."

[MUSIC transition — Closing Thoughts]

CLOSING THOUGHTS + OUTRO

I want to leave you with two hands.

The first belonged to Hedvig Samuelson. When the coroner examined her, he found that she had been shot four or five times — and that one of those bullets had shattered the first finger of her right hand, as she reached out and grabbed at a gun.

The second belonged to Winnie Ruth Judd. A bullet in the left palm, taken out on an operating table in Los Angeles while her brother stroked her hair.

Two women in one small bedroom on a Friday night, and both of them came out of it with a wound in the hand. One of them lived.

I've been in this story for a while now, and here is my honest read at the end of Part Two.

I don't believe she did it alone. I'm not certain — I want to be clear that I'm not certain — but I don't believe it. And the reason isn't sentiment. It's that almost everybody who was actually there in 1931, standing in the middle of it, didn't believe it either.

A coroner's jury sat through four days of it and would not put her name on a piece of paper.

A sheriff in Phoenix said out loud that he could lay his hands on the accomplice in fifteen minutes. As far as anything I have been able to find, he never did.

Her sister-in-law visited her in the county jail the day after she surrendered, and when somebody said sympathetically how terrible those four days alone must have been, Caroline Judd said: "Oh, she was not alone." And then refused to say another word about it, and sent them to the attorneys.

Police went chasing a cleaner's mark that week — because the dress Ruth Judd surrendered in was not the dress she disappeared in. Somebody clothed her.

Two lawyers had their photograph taken planning her defense before she had been arrested.

And the prosecutor himself said that if her wound was real, she could not have moved those bodies without help.

And underneath all of that there is a man with no name, who was in that bedroom in the detectives' own reconstruction. There's a doctor whose name a newspaper would not print. There's a lumberman who was showing money through a window and who sent a message into a jail asking to be cleared. And there is the county attorney of Maricopa County saying, unasked, that the lumberman was a pretty good friend of his.

I don't know what all of that adds up to. But I don't think it adds up to one woman weighing a hundred pounds.

What I do know is this. Two young women who had been very poor, and very sick, and very kind to each other, died in a rented bungalow, and got shipped across a desert as freight. And within a week the country had read their diaries and their love letters in the afternoon papers.

And in a little town in Indiana, a seventy-one-year-old retired preacher put his house up for sale. It was everything he owned and he still owed six hundred dollars on it, and he did it so that he and his invalid wife could get to California before their daughter's trial. Two local newspapers started collections to help them.

And he told a reporter he was writing to Ruth, through the police, to give her some encouragement.

"We feel, and we want her to feel, that the law is her friend rather than her enemy."

Next time, on Forgotten True Crime. The fight over which state gets to try her. A trip back to Phoenix. And a courtroom in Arizona where the whole country finally gets to argue the question this case has been asking since the first trunk came off that train:

Did she do it alone?

[BEAT]

That's Part Three.

[OUTRO — standard]

If you have any information about this case, or a forgotten case you think deserves an episode, reach out at Section29.com. If you enjoyed this episode, remember what I said at the top — share it with a friend, post it, leave a review. It all helps this one-man show more than you know. And make sure you're subscribed, because you do not want to miss Part Three.

Until next time — this is Trevor with Forgotten True Crime.

Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.

[MUSIC out]

(Sections below get pasted in as they're approved in chat.)

PART THREE — "AN IDLE GESTURE"

- ✅ Cold Open — "The Faces in the Crowd" (Phoenix, Oct 30, 1931)

- ✅ Intro + Disclaimer (standard blocks; recap; Rodgers' trap stated up front; the Depression "mostly psychological")

- ✅ Act 1 — The Bargain (the fight traded away; the fifty hours; the four unwatched days; the cesspool)

- ✅ Act 2 — Two Complaints (the pregnancy hint; Judge Ice; the Doe count; the two-trial plan; the two-month gap)

- ✅ Act 3 — The Room (the fight at the door; the lucky dress; the family; Halloran named; the Knox question)

- ✅ Act 4 — The State's Case Comes Apart (Wagner; Harrison and Goss; the kitchen; Nora Smith; no motive)

- ✅ Act 5 — The Letter Changes Sides (Moore and Lepker; "Mrs. Buckley"; the typed copy; the hand never argued)

- ✅ Act 6 — Her Mother, and the Sheriff (the oath about the child; the pursuit into the ante room; the laugh)

- ✅ Act 7 — Less Than Three Hours (she never speaks; the verdict; the handkerchief explained; the suicide watch)

- ✅ Act 8 — "Sit Down, Mrs. Judd" (the room waits for a name; Kleinman and the pardon board; "I was shot first—"; Florence; the prayer)

- ✅ Act 9 — "An Idle Gesture" (CUT 2026-08-01 from 21 min to 8 min — full version preserved as the Section29.com web extra)

- ✅ Closing Thoughts + Outro (the four motives; Rose Mofford; Marian Lane; the three Fridays)

- ⬜ Music + Sources

THE WITHHOLDING SCHEDULE

Planted early, paid off late — do not break these:

1. THE HANDKERCHIEF. Show her twisting it in every courtroom scene from Act 3 onward. Never comment on it. Act 7 reveals what it was: "a stereotyped movement which the defense claimed was a symptom of dementia praecox" (Article #115). The listener will have been watching the defence's exhibit for half an hour without knowing.

2. THE MAN AT THE LUMBER OFFICE. The cold open ends on Halloran declining to come. He is then absent from the whole trial except as a name her own lawyer puts into the record (Article #106). Act 8 tightens it to breaking — a packed courtroom comes to hear her name him at her sentencing and she never goes near him (#117). Act 9 is where he finally appears — and where a judge frees him because he believed her. He never takes an oath anywhere in this story: both sides subpoenaed him at the murder trial and neither called him (#120).

3. WHETHER SHE SPEAKS. Set up in Act 3 (the defence tells juror W. N. Knox it intends to keep her off the stand). Never resolved until the verdict has already come down.

4. THE MISSING PARTS OF HEDVIG SAMUELSON. Mentioned once, flatly, in Act 1 — men dragging a cesspool while the crowd waits (Article #97). Never returned to. The file has no answer and neither should the script.

RULES CARRIED FORWARD

- Every beat traces to an Article #. Appendix A is not an Article #.

- No mid-narrative self-corrections. Use the better version silently; log it in section notes.

- Do not state: her age; her hair colour; her eye colour; the victims' ages; her father's age or initials beyond "H. J."; where Sammy and Ann met.

- Do not resolve the Oct 16-night / Oct 17-morning fork. Both sides argued it at trial and the file cannot settle it. Neither could they.

- Trevor trims scaffolding. Draft leaner on connective tissue than feels safe.

- Sign-off never changes: "Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved."

SECTIONS

COLD OPEN — "THE FACES IN THE CROWD"

[COLD OPEN — no music]

She had been in the car since twenty minutes to ten the night before.

Five cars had left the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles. Somewhere out past Westmoreland the sheriff took the wrong road, and by the time they found the highway again there were only three. Two carloads of newspapermen were simply gone, somewhere in the California desert, in the dark.

She was tubercular. She did not travel well.

They stopped for breakfast at Yuma at twenty past ten in the morning, and she told a reporter she was deadly tired.

Sheriff McFadden had a reputation for fast driving. He had expected to make Phoenix by ten. But the road out of Yuma was full of automobiles — hundreds of them, people who had driven out from towns along the line and parked to watch her go by — and it took him more than an hour to cover the thirty miles to Wellton. He stopped and telephoned ahead. He wasn't going to make it before one.

They reached Phoenix at twenty minutes to three.

There were four or five thousand people around the city and county building. Deputies had strung ropes along the driveway an hour early. The crowd was in good spirits — the paper called them light-hearted and wise-cracking — and when one man shouted "My God, mister, are you going to hang her?" there was a burst of laughter, and the crowd gave way, and the big black sedan came down Jefferson Street and turned in toward the criminal division of the sheriff's office.

They jeered her.

And this is the part I keep coming back to.

She got out of that car deathly pale, and she looked at them. Not past them. The reporter who was standing there wrote it down: she looked searchingly into many faces.

She was looking for someone.

There had been men at those parties. Wealthy men, married men, men whose names the county attorney's office had admitted it did not dare connect to any of this — the men the newspapers had started calling the play boys. She had been seen in one of their cars, four days before her friends died, sitting outside their house because he had promised her they wouldn't know she was there.

She looked into four or five thousand faces on the thirtieth of October, 1931.

Not one of them had come.

Across town, J. J. Halloran — wealthy Phoenix lumberman, the man that city called Happy Jack — was at his lumber company office. A reporter reached him there and asked what he made of her coming back.

He said he had no interest in her return, other than the normal interest of any citizen.

[TITLE / MUSIC]

INTRO + DISCLAIMER

[MUSIC under]

Welcome back to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.

Before we get into it, I want to take just a second to tell you what this show is. Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast — and I mean independent. There's no network, no studio, no staff. It's one man. I do the research, I write the episodes, I record them, I edit them, and I get them out into the world — every step of it. So if you enjoy what you hear today, the single best thing you can do is simple: share it. Tell a friend about the show. Post an episode on your social media. Leave a review wherever you're listening right now. It takes you thirty seconds, and for a show like this one, every little bit helps more than you know. Thank you for that — and thank you for being here.

Now — the usual reminder before we begin.

Everything you're going to hear comes from the historical record. In this case that means the newspapers of 1931 and 1932 — more than a dozen of them now, from a dozen different cities, the words of people who were actually there, written down while it was still happening. But here's the thing about newspapers. They get things wrong. Witnesses contradict each other. Reporters chase deadlines, not truth. And ninety-five years is a long time. So when I tell you what I believe happened, understand that's exactly what it is — my honest read of the record. Where the sources disagree, I'll tell you they disagree. And where we simply don't know, I'll tell you that too.

This is Part Three. This is the last one.

Here's where we left it.

Friday night, October twenty-third, 1931. After four days that half the police in two states could not account for, Winnie Ruth Judd walked into a funeral parlor at Court and Olive in Los Angeles and gave herself up to her own attorneys, because her husband had asked her to in the newspaper. They took her to a receiving hospital, and a doctor took a twenty-five caliber bullet out of her left hand, and her brother stood beside the table in a white surgical smock and patted her head.

And then she talked. For the first time since the trunks came off that train, she talked — and what she said was that Sammy shot her first, that she got the gun away, and that Agnes came at her with an ironing board.

Arizona spent the next twenty-four hours taking that story apart.

Now. Something I want you to hold onto going into this one.

Two weeks after those trunks were opened, a deputy county attorney named Rodgers said something out loud that the state of Arizona has never taken back. He said that if the wound in her hand was real — if a bullet really did go through it that night — then it absolutely would preclude her having disposed of the bodies without the aid of an accomplice.

Their words. Not mine.

Which means the state of Arizona spent the winter of 1932 in a very strange position. They were about to prosecute a woman for a murder they did not believe she committed alone. Her own lawyers were about to argue that she couldn't have done it alone. The sheriff had said on the record that he could put his hands on the man in fifteen minutes.

And the only person in that entire courtroom who insisted she had no help at all —

— was her.

Everything else in this episode happens on top of that.

One more thing about the world she came back to. That winter, the governor of the Federal Reserve bank in Kansas City stood up and told the country that the business barometer had turned upward, and that a depression-weary nation had thrown off the yoke of a distressing situation which was — and I want to get this exactly right — mostly psychological. On the same page, wheat, which a few weeks earlier had fallen to prices last seen in Elizabethan England, was being hailed as a saviour, because it had climbed all the way to sixty-three cents a bushel.

That page ran on the third of November, 1931.

It's the same page where they printed that Winnie Ruth Judd had been charged with murder.

[MUSIC transition — Act 1]

ACT 1 — THE BARGAIN

I want to back up four days, because the story of how she got into that car is better than the drive was.

When Part Two ended, she was in a cell in Los Angeles and Arizona wanted her. That should have been a fight. Her attorneys had a writ of habeas corpus signed by a superior court judge that could hold her in California until the third of November. Arizona had extradition papers moving north, and the governor of Arizona said he'd sign them the moment they reached his desk. Los Angeles said the hearing would be inside forty-eight hours. The papers had her out of the state by Wednesday at the latest.

And on the twenty-seventh of October her lawyers did an about-face and announced they would fight every single move — that they'd found an error in the Arizona paperwork, and that the moment California's governor signed, they'd drag the whole thing in front of a court.

Which, incidentally, they had to go find. Governor Rolph was in a hospital. His executive secretary approved the papers in Sacramento and then physically carried them to San Francisco so a sick man could sign them at his bedside.

So: writ in hand, error found, a fight promised.

Two days later it was over.

On the twenty-ninth of October a lawyer nobody in this story had ever heard of — Paul Schenck, out of Los Angeles — announced that he would not continue the fight against extradition. That night she was signed out of the Hall of Justice. The formality took a moment. At nine o'clock Schenck and her husband came out of the jail hospital, and behind them came Sheriff McFadden and the Maricopa County jail matron, and at twenty minutes to ten the cars pulled away.

One of the last people to put her arms around her at the elevator was another inmate — Daisy De Voe, who had been Clara Bow's secretary until the newspapers were finished with her.

Now. Why did the fight just stop?

Five days later, in Los Angeles, Paul Schenck told the Associated Press exactly why. And I'm going to read you what he said, because the phrasing matters.

"When it was mutually agreed Mrs. Judd should go to Arizona with these two officers, and that extradition matters, habeas corpus proceedings and other legal moves that might have been made should be dismissed, I was given to understand she would not be made the target for lengthy questioning, nor subjected to unnecessary embarrassment."

There was a deal.

She didn't lose the extradition fight. She sold it. She gave up the writ, gave up the hearing, gave up every card she had — in exchange for an understanding about how she'd be treated when she got there.

And then Schenck said what he'd found out since.

"Now I find from reports that they expect to question my client for fifty hours, or until they break down her self-defense story, that they expect to have her go to the scene of the murders and re-enact the killings, and half a hundred other things."

Fifty hours.

And take her back into that house, and have her act it out.

He named the two men he said had broken it — the county attorney, Lloyd Andrews, and the sheriff, McFadden. The same sheriff who'd just driven her across the desert. And he got on a train to Phoenix that night.

Andrews called it ridiculous. He denied she'd been harassed and molested. He denied anybody had gone back on anything.

He did not deny that promises were made.

Neither of them ever did.

So that's the car. That's what she was riding in — a woman who had traded away her last legal protection for a promise, being driven overnight through the desert by one of the two men her lawyer said had broken it.

And when they got to Phoenix, they put her in the county jail, and for four days nobody saw her.

Not a reporter, not a photographer, not the public. From that Friday afternoon until the following Tuesday she does not appear anywhere in the record. When she finally came out, the papers noted it — her first public appearance since her return.

I want to be careful here, because I don't know what happened in those four days and neither does anybody else. Nobody has ever printed an account of them. What I can tell you is that her attorney had publicly warned, before she ever crossed the state line, that Arizona intended to question her for fifty hours.

And that there are exactly four days there where nobody was watching.

One more thing about the afternoon she arrived — and then I'll leave it alone.

While the crowd was gathering out on Jefferson Street, waiting to jeer at her, there was a crew of investigators two miles away at the house on North Second Street. They were working at the cesspool.

They were looking for the internal organs of Hedvig Samuelson, which were missing.

They had been missing for two weeks. They are still missing now.

[MUSIC transition — Act 2]

ACT 2 — TWO COMPLAINTS

Before we get to the courtroom, there's something she said back in Los Angeles that I've been carrying around.

Four days before they drove her out, one of the papers explained to its readers what she was going home to. Arizona, it said, plays no favorites. And then, almost as an aside — a woman was hanged there less than a year ago.

The next day, in the county jail hospital, some of the other women heard her talking. Not to a reporter — to them. And what she said was:

"They might hang a woman in Arizona. But I don't think they'd hang a mother, do you?"

She had begun hinting that she might be pregnant.

The authorities knocked it down within hours. They pointed out that when she was a young girl in Illinois she'd claimed she was about to become a mother when she wasn't, and that she had a habit of telling people she was a mother when she wasn't. Lloyd Andrews said he'd have her examined the moment she was back in Phoenix.

So she knew. She knew Arizona hanged women, because one of them had been hanged the winter before. And within a day of finding out she was going back there, she was floating a reason they might not hang her.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, rival newspapers were in a bidding war for her story.

On the third of November, they brought her before a justice of the peace named Clarence E. Ice.

The two wire services in that room could not agree on what they saw. The United Press said she was deathly pale and appeared near collapse. The Associated Press said she sat there with trembling lips and shaking hands. They agreed on one thing: she could not stand up. Her attorneys asked the judge to let her stay in her chair while the charges were read.

He allowed it.

Then they read her two of them.

The first complaint charged Winnie Ruth Judd with plotting and executing the murder of Agnes Anne LeRoi, on or about the sixteenth of October.

The second complaint charged Winnie Ruth Judd — and John Doe — and Richard Roe — with the killing of Hedvig Samuelson.

I want to make sure that lands.

On the day the state of Arizona formally accused her, it accused her alone of killing Agnes. And it accused her and two unnamed men of killing Sammy.

Sammy is the one who was dismembered. Sammy is the one whose body they were dragging a cesspool for.

The accomplice wasn't a rumor anymore, or a sheriff talking to reporters. It was written into a charging document with a case number on it.

She was ordered held without bail.

And Andrews — before she ever walked into that room — had already told the press how he intended to use it. There would be two trials, if he needed two. The first would be for the murder of Agnes LeRoi. And a second trial, for the murder of Hedvig Samuelson, would follow in the event a verdict of first degree murder with the death penalty is not obtained in the first trial.

Read that again.

Not in case she was acquitted. In case the jury convicted her of something that didn't hang her.

The county attorney of Maricopa County had a second capital murder case loaded and waiting, in case the first one failed to kill her.

Two days later the defense won something.

Herman Lewkowitz — a Phoenix attorney, newly on the case — went to superior court and got an order allowing him to go inside the house on North Second Street. Andrews filed a petition to have that order dissolved. He argued the court had no jurisdiction, because the charges hadn't reached superior court yet.

Judge Phelps denied him. Andrews gave notice that he'd take it to the Arizona Supreme Court.

And I want you to sit with the shape of that for a second, because it's a small thing that tells you a lot.

Two days earlier, her lawyer had gone to the newspapers saying Arizona intended to walk his client through the murder house and have her act out the killings.

And now the county attorney was in court, fighting to keep her attorney out of that same house.

They wanted her in there. They didn't want him in there.

He went anyway — walked through the murder bungalow and through her own apartment, while the appeal was still just a notice. And on his way out he mentioned to a reporter that the defense didn't intend to present anything at all at the preliminary hearings.

And then the record goes quiet.

I want to be honest with you about that, because I don't like gaps and I'm not going to paper over one. From the fifth of November, 1931 until the seventh of January, 1932, I have nothing. Two months. The preliminary hearings, whatever became of that John Doe complaint, the Phoenix inquest, the fifty hours — all of it happened somewhere in there and none of it is in front of me.

When the record picks her up again, it's four sentences on page nine of the Los Angeles Times.

Two state psychiatrists — Dr. Claud Bowers of Los Angeles and Dr. Joseph Catton of San Francisco — today examined Winnie Ruth Judd, who will go on trial the nineteenth for the slayings of Mrs. Agnes LeRoi and Miss Hedvig Samuelson.

Two things in that.

The first is the date. The nineteenth of January.

The second is the word state. Those weren't her doctors. Those were the prosecution's — sent in twelve days before trial to have a look at her mind.

Which tells you the prosecution already knew what was coming.

[MUSIC transition — Act 3]

ACT 3 — THE ROOM

They fought at the door.

Not metaphorically. The Associated Press man was standing there and he wrote it down — spectators fought hand to hand and toe to toe at the courtroom entrance as they struggled to reach seats. Faces were scratched. Clothing was torn.

Judge Speakman was supposed to call the case at nine-forty. At nine-forty the deputies still couldn't get the witnesses seated. They put the newspapermen out of the room while the bailiffs tried to establish some kind of order.

She came in a little before ten, walking between two deputies.

And here the two wires disagree again, and I'm going to give you both, because I think the disagreement is the truer picture. The United Press man saw a woman who had lost considerable weight since her last court appearance, with large hollows under her eyes. The Associated Press man, in the same small room on the same morning, saw a woman who appeared much less frail than she had in October.

They agreed on one thing. She was calm.

She was wearing a dark blue dress.

I'm going to tell you about that dress now, because the story attached to it is one of those things that sounds invented and isn't.

The week before her trial opened, another woman had stood trial in that same Phoenix courtroom — a young woman named Billie Baker, charged with manslaughter. And Winnie Ruth Judd, from a cell in the county jail, had lent Billie Baker a dress to wear to court.

Billie Baker was acquitted.

And so when it came time for her own trial — for her life — Judd wore that same dress. She called it her lucky dress. It was the only one she wore in that courtroom.

Her father came in behind her.

He'd been in Phoenix a while by then. Back in October his neighbors in Darlington, Indiana had raised his train fare with a benefit movie and a basketball game, and he'd said he'd travel out when she was called to trial. He came. And while he was waiting, the retired Free Methodist minister had been preaching in Phoenix pulpits — telling congregations that he had no hope of getting his daughter released. Only of helping to save her soul.

He followed her into the courtroom, leaned across the counsel table, and kissed her. She squeezed his hand and held his eyes for a moment.

Then he turned and left the court.

Her mother did not enter the room.

Her brother Burton stayed until they finished reading the formal charge, and then he walked out too.

Her husband stayed all session. He sat beside her and reached over now and then to pat her shoulder.

It was established at the outset that the state would ask the supreme penalty. Death by hanging.

And her attorneys had three answers to that, in order, and they were going to make all three.

First: that she did not commit the murder.

Second: that if she did, she shot in self-defense.

And third: that she was insane when it happened.

That's not me arranging it for effect — that's how they laid it out to a reporter. She didn't do it. And if she did it, it was self-defense. And if it wasn't, she was mad.

The insanity plea was the one they cared about. And they went at it before a single witness was called — Lewkowitz asking a prospective juror whether, if a reasonable doubt appeared in his mind as to the sanity of this defendant, he would hesitate to vote not guilty.

Rodgers objected. Twice. Schenck stood up and said: all we have to do is raise reasonable doubt — the burden then devolves upon the state to remove such doubt.

Judge Speakman sided with the defense.

First point of the trial, and the defense took it.

Then Lewkowitz asked a prospective juror a different question. He asked him whether he was acquainted with J. J. Halloran.

That was the first time Halloran's name came officially into the case. Three months of him being a car outside a house, and a message into a jail cell, and a man at a lumber office with no particular interest — and the first time his name is in that record, it's her own lawyer, on day one, asking twelve strangers whether they know him.

That's not an accident. That's a map of where they were going.

They took the jury out of the men of Maricopa County. A bookkeeper. A clerk. A machinist. A dairyman. A carpenter. One man neither side bothered to ask about. The first two took fifty-five minutes to seat.

Most of them were church members. Middle-aged. Married men with families.

A minister's daughter, on trial for killing two women over what would be said about her to a married man — in front of twelve married churchgoing men.

The dairyman's name was Henry J. Aden, and when the defense asked him about insanity as a defense, he told them exactly what he thought of it.

"It will have to be proven to me. I would not go by any cheap excuse of insanity to pull anybody out of trouble."

Judge Speakman asked him whether he'd follow the court's instructions anyway. Aden said he would.

And the defense accepted him.

Two more things about that first week, and then we'll go to the evidence.

The first is that there was a man sitting in a chair directly behind her.

His name was Dr. George Stephens, and he was a psychiatrist, and he was the superintendent of the Arizona State Hospital for the Insane. He'd been subpoenaed by the defense. And all through the morning session he sat at her back and made copious notes on how she behaved in that room.

The second is what she did with her hands.

When her own lawyers were questioning the jury panel, she let her attention wander. But when Rodgers stood up and started asking each man in turn whether he had any prejudice against capital punishment — she started working at her handkerchief. Twisting it. And glancing sideways at her husband.

They watched her face too. Reporters were watching for one thing in particular, and on the second day they got their answer and wrote it down:

She did not change the expression of her face when the name of Halloran was injected into the proceedings.

And then at the recess, after two jurors had been accepted, she curled up in her chair with one foot underneath her, and smiled at her husband while the photographers' flashbulbs went off around her.

One more question, from that first day, that I want you to keep.

While the defense was examining the very first juror they accepted — a man named Knox — Lewkowitz asked him this:

"Should the defendant not take the witness stand, would you still have the same thoughts you have now in regard to this case?"

Knox said it would make no difference to him at all.

Nobody in that room commented on it. It went by in a line of newsprint.

But her lawyers had just told a juror, on the first morning of a capital trial, that they were not planning to let her speak.

[MUSIC transition — Act 4]

ACT 4 — THE STATE'S CASE COMES APART

Here's the thing nobody expects about this trial.

The state of Arizona had a confessed killer. It had two bodies shipped across a state line in her luggage. It had a woman who had admitted, in print, under her own name and for money, that she shot both of them.

And its case fell apart in its own hands.

It started with the doctor.

The prosecution called Dr. A. F. Wagner — a veteran autopsy surgeon out of Los Angeles — to describe in detail what had killed Agnes LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson. Ordinary, necessary, prosecution testimony.

Then the defense got up to cross-examine him, and asked him about the dismemberment.

And Wagner told them that it would have been almost impossible for Sammy's body to have been taken apart the way it was, except shortly after she was killed.

Now — I want to slow down here, because you've been carrying this with you for two episodes.

Since the moment those trunks came open in October, the dismemberment has been the thing nobody could explain. She never explained it. Not in the mortuary. Not in ten handwritten pages torn up in a department store rest room. Not in the statements she sold to the newspapers. The coroner didn't explain it. The men dragging that cesspool couldn't find enough of Hedvig Samuelson to explain it.

And on that morning in January, her lawyers picked it up and used it as a weapon.

Because if it had to be done immediately — and if she was only in that apartment for the short time one of the state's own witnesses had put her there — then she did not have time to shoot two women and take one of them apart.

Not alone.

The papers reported that the defense counted two victories out of that cross-examination. The first was the time. The second I'll come back to, because it's the stranger one.

Then came the blood.

A police detective named McCord Harrison testified that he had found bloodstains on the floor and on the baseboard near the head of Agnes LeRoi's bed.

That's the state's whole theory, right there, in one sentence. Because what the prosecution intended to prove was that Agnes LeRoi was shot to death as she slept in her bed — and that Sammy, too, was shot in her bed, although only after she'd been woken by the sound of the gun that killed her roommate.

Sit with that a second. That's the version Arizona was selling to twelve men. Agnes never woke up. Sammy woke up to the sound of Agnes dying, and was shot anyway, in her bed.

Harrison was also asked about the kitchen. He said he saw no stains in the kitchen.

Then the defense cross-examined another state witness, Dr. Goss.

And Dr. Goss admitted that he had found some bloodstains in the kitchen. Near the sink.

Now. Why does a spot of blood by a sink matter more than anything else in this trial?

Because of what she wrote.

In those ten pages she tore up and left in a department store in Los Angeles, before she was caught, before she had a lawyer, before anybody had told her what to say — she described how it started. And she did not describe two women asleep in their beds.

She wrote: the next morning all three of us were yet in our pajamas when the quarrel began.

And: we were in the kitchen just starting breakfast.

One state witness said there was no blood in that kitchen. Another state witness, made to answer under cross-examination, said there was.

I'm not going to tell you which of them was right, because I don't know, and neither do you, and neither did that jury. What I can tell you is that in the entire record of this case — in a hundred and fifteen newspaper articles across four months and a dozen cities — that is the only piece of physical evidence that points toward her version of events instead of theirs.

And it came out of the prosecution's own witness.

By this point a pattern had set in, and the wire reporters had noticed it.

The state called Wagner, and Wagner gave the defense the dismemberment.

The state called Goss, and Goss gave the defense the kitchen.

And then the state called a nurse named Nora Smith, to prove something that should have been devastating.

Smith testified about telephone calls. The day after the two women died, she said, Winnie Ruth Judd rang her office and asked to have it opened. And then rang back an hour later — and this time said she was Agnes LeRoi, and that Mrs. LeRoi would not be at work that day.

That's the state's case for consciousness of guilt. That's a woman covering up.

And her lead attorney, Paul Schenck, announced that he was going to call Nora Smith back as a witness for the defense.

Because his argument was this: anyone who would telephone the same person twice within an hour, and seriously pretend to be two different people — one of them a woman she had just killed — was not sane.

They didn't fight that testimony. They took it.

The call that was supposed to hang her became the call that was supposed to save her.

On the twenty-fifth of January, a United Press correspondent sat down and wrote a sentence about the state's case that I still find remarkable, given who he was writing about.

The state, so far, has failed to prove motive, has not placed Mrs. Judd at the scene of the crime at the time it was committed, and its witnesses have continually been turned to favor the defense of insanity.

No motive. Not placed at the scene at the time. And its own witnesses working for the other side.

The state had promised a motive in its opening statement. It had been hinted that jealousy over a man was behind it — but as of that morning, the paper wrote, there was nothing to substantiate that. The furthest Arizona had gone was to say a motive would be shown, and that ill feeling had existed between Mrs. Judd and the two victims as long as five weeks before the murders.

Ill feeling. Five weeks.

And here's what makes that hard to sit with. We know the motive. You know it. It's in her own handwriting, printed in a Los Angeles newspaper three months before that trial began — the nurse she introduced to the men at those parties, and Ann and Sammy telling her that if she went hunting they would tell Jack Halloran what she'd done.

She'd written it down. She'd repeated it to the psychiatrists.

And the state of Arizona, prosecuting a woman for her life, went eleven days without putting any of it in front of the jury.

Which is when Lloyd Andrews stood up and produced two women nobody had been expecting.

[MUSIC transition — Act 5]

ACT 5 — THE LETTER CHANGES SIDES

The first of them was a nurse named Lucille Moore, and what she had was an evening.

She'd met Winnie Ruth Judd on the first of September. And on the evening of the fifteenth of October — the night before the state says the women died — Judd and a man came to her home and asked her to come out with them. She had never met the man before.

The man was Jack Halloran.

They drove to 2929 North Second Street. And before they got there, Moore testified, Ruth asked Jack to remember that he had promised not to let Anne and Sammy know she was in the car.

He said he would remember.

He went into the house alone.

And Moore, sitting out there in the dark with her, watched Anne come to the window and look out.

Then Ruth turned to her and said: What do you think of Jack?

Moore said: I think he's very nice.

And Ruth said — and this is on the trial record, in a nurse's mouth, in front of twelve men — He is nicer than that. I think he is perfectly grand.

Halloran came back out of the house. He wasn't alone. He came out with two other men — a Mr. Ryan, and a Mr. Townsend.

And Ruth Judd took him to task, right there, for letting the women in that house know she was sitting outside in his car.

Jack. You promised they wouldn't know I was here.

He said: Oh, forget it.

The second woman was stranger.

Her name was Mrs. A. R. Lepker, and she was the only surprise witness the state produced in the entire trial. She'd met Judd twice — once in July, when Judd was visiting the sick at a Phoenix hospital, and again in August at the clinic.

And this is what she told the court:

Until after this trouble I didn't know she was Mrs. Judd. I knew her as Mrs. Buckley.

She'd been using another name.

Mrs. Buckley, Lepker said, had talked to her about her boy friend. His name was Jack. Jack was going to Los Angeles, and then coming back to Phoenix for a day, and then going east for two weeks — and she said she was indeed glad he was going.

And then Lepker said Judd told her she got so angry with Sammy and Jack sometimes that she thought she would go crazy.

Herman Lewkowitz cross-examined her for a long time and got nowhere. He finally demanded that she explain how Jack Halloran's name had come up between two women who barely knew each other.

I don't know, she snapped.

That's all — get off the stand, he said.

And then Lloyd Andrews stood up in front of the jury with the letter.

The stained fragments of it. The ten pages she'd torn up and pushed into a lavatory in a department store on Broadway in Los Angeles, that the building engineer — a man named Carl Riley — had found and carried to the police.

And Andrews read it aloud to twelve men. The reporter in the room wrote that he read it haltingly.

It was addressed to her husband. It called him darling. The paper described it as a rambling document. In it she said she believed they were going to kill her. She described making herself pack the bodies, telling herself over and over that she had to, or she'd be hung.

And she wrote: My left hand is about shot off.

Now.

Six days earlier, the state had been fighting to get that letter admitted, and the defense had been working to have every one of her so-called confessions disbelieved.

And on this morning, when the county attorney stood up to read it to the jury, Herman Lewkowitz did not object.

He offered to help.

He told the court he had a typewritten copy of it in his own files, and he offered to hand it to the jurymen so they could follow along.

The offer was accepted.

Think about what that means. Her own attorney, at her capital murder trial, made sure that twelve men each got a clean readable copy of her confession.

Because a rambling document isn't a confession anymore. A rambling document is an exhibit.

The most damning thing Winnie Ruth Judd ever wrote had changed sides.

The state rested at three minutes to eleven in the morning.

And I have to tell you what it never got to.

In all of it — every witness, every exhibit, eleven days — the state of Arizona never addressed the wound in her hand.

They established that a twenty-five caliber shell had been found in her apartment, and another in the baggage with the bodies. That's it. The bullet that a doctor had dug out from between her index and middle fingers in a Los Angeles receiving hospital, the wound their own deputy county attorney had said would absolutely preclude her having disposed of the bodies without the aid of an accomplice — the prosecution rested a capital case without putting a word of it to the jury.

It came in sideways instead, through other people.

The caretaker at the clinic saw her hand bandaged on the morning of the seventeenth of October. Asked which hand, he said he didn't remember.

But a rancher from Wickenburg named Mike Kerkes, and his daughter Stella, had come into that clinic that same morning, and they were certain. It was her left hand. It was bandaged.

And Kerkes told the court what she'd said about it.

She said her hand was burned up.

That's the first explanation Winnie Ruth Judd ever gave anyone for the wound in her left hand. Not a bullet. A burn.

Andrews kept more than thirty witnesses in reserve for rebuttal. They rested anyway.

The defense moved for a directed verdict of acquittal. Judge Speakman overruled it.

And then the defense waived its opening statement entirely — no speech, no preview, nothing — and went straight to its first witness.

A neighbor. A man named Henry Behoteguy, who lived near the house on North Second Street.

And what the defense wanted out of him was the clock.

Behoteguy testified that he heard two shots and screams from that house at about six o'clock in the morning — on the seventeenth of October.

Morning. The seventeenth.

Which is exactly what she had written in the letter that they had spent eleven days trying to discredit — and that they had just handed to the jury in a clean typed copy.

On cross-examination, Rodgers walked Behoteguy backwards. Had he heard disturbances at that house before? He had. Were the sounds that morning similar to what he'd heard before? They were. And hadn't he told an investigator something else about them?

He had.

He'd told an investigator it might have been a screen door slamming.

[MUSIC transition — Act 6]

ACT 6 — HER MOTHER, AND THE SHERIFF

The defense called her mother.

I want you to understand what that took.

On the first morning of the trial, when her father came in and kissed her across the counsel table — her mother did not come into the room. She stayed outside. Back in October, when the neighbors in Darlington were raising the train fare, the papers described her as an invalid. An elderly woman, not well, who had come two thousand miles to a courthouse and could not make herself walk through the door.

On the twenty-sixth of January she walked through it, and she sat down in the witness chair, and the reporter in the room wrote that she was grey-haired and that she was striving to save her daughter from the gallows.

And here is what they asked her.

They asked her whether Winnie Ruth Judd had ever had a child.

She said no.

They asked her whether her daughter had ever adopted a child.

She said no.

That's it. That's the testimony.

You have to know what's underneath it. In those ten pages she wrote in hiding, she'd confessed something she said she had never told anyone — that ever since she was seven years old she had been telling people she had a baby. At seven she told her school her mother had had one. At sixteen she said she was pregnant when she wasn't, and staged a kidnapping around it, and let a boy be arrested for it. In Phoenix she told people she had a little boy, and showed them a photograph of her husband holding somebody else's baby and said it was her son.

I don't know what possessed me, she wrote, but every so often I tell that lie. So I'm crazy on that line.

And so on a Tuesday in January, in a packed courtroom in Phoenix, Arizona, her mother took an oath and told twelve men that her daughter had never had a child.

Not as a mother defending her. As evidence. To help prove that the woman she raised was insane.

And while she was sitting in that chair, doing that, her daughter walked out of the courtroom.

She had a pretext for it. The reporter doesn't say what. She got past the jail matron and out into the corridor, and the corridor was full of sheriff's deputies, and she called back to her brother —

Get my lawyers! Sheriff McFadden is telling witnesses what to say!

They brought her back in. She came through the door, and turned on her heel, and went straight back out, her body shaking.

The matron went after her. She told her — the paper says peremptorily — I'm going out there again. And she slipped past her.

She found McFadden in the hallway. And when he moved off she went after him — followed him into an ante room off the judge's private chambers, with the matron behind her, and she spat it at him:

You're trying to hang me. You've been telling witnesses what to say about me.

He didn't answer her. He walked through into the judge's chambers and shut the door, and left the matron to quiet her down.

The paper described her, standing there: white-faced. Fiery-eyed.

Afterward, jail attendants told reporters that she'd been getting hostile toward the sheriff for several days. And the reporter noted, almost in passing, that this was the second outbreak since the trial began.

I don't have the first one. I've looked. Whatever happened the first time, it isn't in front of me. So I'm telling you that there was one, and that I can't tell you what it was.

And then she came back into the courtroom, and she laughed.

Not a small laugh. The Associated Press man watched her sit down next to Dr. George Stephens and start talking — animatedly, he wrote, gesturing with her hands and her shoulders, her eyes sparkling — and she threw her head back and laughed.

He wrote that it was the first display of hearty laughter she had shown since the trial began.

Now hold the whole thing in your head at once.

Her mother is in the witness chair, under oath, telling a jury that her daughter has never had a child, so that a jury might believe her daughter is out of her mind.

Her daughter has just chased the sheriff of Maricopa County into a room off the judge's chambers, screaming that he is trying to hang her.

And then she comes back, and sits down beside the superintendent of the Arizona State Hospital for the Insane — the man the defense has subpoenaed, the man who has been sitting behind her for a week making notes on how she behaves — and she throws back her head and laughs.

I'm not going to tell you what that was.

I don't know whether that was a sick woman, or a frightened one, or a performance, or all three at once. Twelve men were about to decide the same question, with a great deal less information than we have, and they were going to do it in under three hours.

[MUSIC transition — Act 7]

ACT 7 — LESS THAN THREE HOURS

The defense finished. And Winnie Ruth Judd never took the stand.

I want to mark that, because it went by so quietly you could miss it.

On the very first morning, before a single juror had been seated, Herman Lewkowitz had asked a man named Knox whether it would change his thinking if the defendant did not testify. Knox said it would make no difference to him at all. Nobody remarked on it. It ran as one line of newsprint on the nineteenth of January.

And that was the plan, and the plan held.

The woman at the center of the biggest murder story in America did not speak at her own trial for her life.

Everything the jury knew about her, they knew because somebody else had said it. Her mother. Her employer's caretaker. A rancher from Wickenburg. A nurse who'd gone for a car ride with her. A woman who knew her as Mrs. Buckley. Two detectives who disagreed about a kitchen. A county attorney reading her own torn-up letter out loud, haltingly, while her own lawyer handed the jury a clean typed copy of it to follow along.

She sat there and let all of it happen.

They gave it to the jury on the eighth of February.

The jurors were out for less than three hours. Judge Speakman had already gone home; when word came, he drove back to the courthouse to take the verdict, and it was read a little before half past nine at night.

Guilty of murder in the first degree.

And the penalty fixed at death.

Winnie Ruth Judd was going to hang.

Afterward, the foreman talked to reporters. His name was George B. Thompson, and the paper called him a serious young man, and he explained how it had gone in that room.

Six ballots.

On the first ballot, all twelve of them voted her guilty. That was never in question, not for one man, not for one minute.

The second ballot was about the degree — and that came back ten to two for first degree murder and the death penalty.

Four more ballots. And on the sixth, it was unanimous. Death.

So the four extra rounds weren't about whether she'd done it. They were about bringing two men around to hanging her.

And then Thompson said something else, and it is the single strangest fact in this entire trial.

He said that at no time did the question of the defendant's sanity enter the consideration.

At no time.

The chief defense plea was insanity. Her attorneys had pleaded with those men that she was insane whether she committed the crime or not, and that she should be sent to an asylum for life. The state had shipped in two psychiatrists from California to examine her twelve days before the trial. The superintendent of the Arizona State Hospital had sat behind her for three weeks taking notes. Her mother had come off her sickbed and sworn an oath about a child that never existed.

And twelve men talked it over for under three hours and never brought it up once.

She showed nothing.

That's what everyone in the room noticed, and it's what the reporter led with. She showed no emotion as the verdict was read — just as she had all the way through, when things were breaking the worst possible way for her, she appeared not to realize the significance of the event.

Her husband was sitting beside her. He reached over and patted her shoulder, gently, the way he had every day of that trial.

She paid no attention to him. Or to anybody else.

She just went on twisting her handkerchief, and staring around Judge Speakman's courtroom.

Now. That handkerchief.

You've been watching her do that since the first morning. Fingering it during jury selection. Wrapping it around her left hand all through the day the state rested. Twisting it while a jury told her she was going to be hanged.

Every reporter in that room had been writing it down for three weeks as a nervous habit.

It wasn't a nervous habit.

The United Press man who covered the verdict put it in one clause, almost as an aside, and it re-reads the whole trial:

She continued to twist her handkerchief, nervously — a stereotyped movement which the defense claimed was a symptom of dementia praecox.

Dementia praecox. It's the term they used in 1932 for what we would now call schizophrenia.

Her lawyers had been showing that gesture to the jury. It was an exhibit. Every time she sat in that chair and worked at that piece of cloth, her defense was pointing at it.

And the jury never discussed her sanity at all.

Her husband was the only member of her family in the room when they read it.

Her father — who had crossed the country on money his neighbors raised at a benefit basketball game, who had been standing up in Phoenix pulpits saying he had no hope of getting his daughter out, only of saving her soul — was not in court.

Her mother, who eleven days earlier had sworn that oath for her, was not in court.

Burton isn't mentioned at all.

Only the husband. The one who had been selling her story to the newspapers since October, who had bought the clothes she wore into that courtroom with the money. He patted her shoulder, and she didn't look at him.

A reporter asked Dr. Judd what he thought of the verdict. He wouldn't give an opinion. He made a hopeless sort of gesture at the questions, and he said:

What could I say?

There's one more thing from that night.

The matron walked her back to her cell, and afterward said that Mrs. Judd changed not at all.

And Sheriff McFadden — the man she had chased into the judge's ante room thirteen days earlier, screaming that he was trying to hang her — was so unsettled by how little she reacted to being sentenced to death that he went and found Judge Speakman, and the two of them talked it over, and he put a guard on her cell.

To stop her killing herself.

The state of Arizona had just decided to hang Winnie Ruth Judd, and the sheriff of Maricopa County spent that night making sure she stayed alive long enough for them to do it.

He told the reporters what she said to him on the way down.

All she said to me was goodbye. And she didn't do it a bit different than she did on other occasions when I took her to her cell.

[MUSIC transition — Act 8]

ACT 8 — "SIT DOWN, MRS. JUDD"

[MUSIC out]

The jury had been unanimous. Six ballots, and on the sixth every man in that room voted to hang her.

That is what the foreman told the newspapers on the night of the eighth of February.

Then seventeen days went by, and on the twenty-fifth they brought her back into Judge Speakman's courtroom to be sentenced.

The room was full.

It was full because a report had been going around Phoenix that Winnie Ruth Judd had decided to tell everything.

And I want you to sit with what that phrase meant in that city, in that week.

It did not mean she was going to confess. Everybody already believed she'd done it — twelve men had just said so. Tell everything meant one thing and one thing only.

It meant a name.

The deputy county attorney had said back in October that if the wound in her hand was real, it absolutely would preclude her having disposed of the bodies without the aid of an accomplice. The state had charged John Doe and Richard Roe alongside her for the murder of Hedvig Samuelson. Her own lawyers had built their entire defence on the argument that she could not have done it alone.

Everyone in that room believed there had been somebody else in that house.

And now she was under sentence of death, with nothing left to trade and nothing left to lose, and the word in Phoenix was that she was finally going to say who.

So the courtroom was packed.

There's a formality that comes at the end of a criminal case. The court asks whether there is any legal cause why sentence should not be pronounced upon the defendant. It is not really an invitation to speak. It's a procedural box. The lawyer says no, and the judge reads the sentence.

Her attorney, Herman Lewkowitz, told the court there was no legal cause why sentence should not be pronounced.

And then Winnie Ruth Judd stood up.

She had sat in that courtroom for six weeks. She had not testified. She had not been cross-examined. The jury had condemned her without ever hearing her voice.

Her own lawyer had just declined the last word on her behalf.

She took it anyway.

"I have this to say," she said.

And here is what she said. This is the United Press man's transcription, printed in newspapers across the country:

"Mr. Kleinman — a juror — went into the jury room calling me names. Vulgar names. Saying, 'I have a friend on the pardon board. If we sentence her to hang, she'll talk.'"

Judge Speakman's gavel crashed.

Now — take that apart, because she said it fast and it went by fast and it is one of the ugliest sentences in this entire case.

She is accusing a man who sat on her jury of two things. The first is that he stood in that jury room and called her vulgar names. The second is worse.

I have a friend on the pardon board.

She is saying that a juror told the other eleven men that the death sentence wouldn't stick. That he personally knew somebody with the power to undo it. That they could put a rope around her neck and it would not actually be a rope — it would be a lever.

If we sentence her to hang, she'll talk.

That is not a jury deciding a punishment. By her account, that is a jury deciding on an interrogation technique, on the assurance of one of its own members that the sentence was reversible.

The gavel came down.

"Mrs. Judd," the judge said. "I have every sympathy for you. But we cannot have a discussion of these matters. If you have anything to say based on the record, I will hear you."

And I want to be fair to Howard Speakman here, because he is not being cruel in that moment. He is telling her the truth about where she is standing. He can only hear what is in the record. And nothing she wanted to say was in the record — because for six weeks she had said nothing that could go into it.

She began again.

"Neither of those girls were murdered. They weren't shot in the bedroom. There was no evidence of premeditation. There was no blood in the bedroom—"

Listen to what she went after.

Not the men. Not the parties. Not Halloran. She stood up at her own sentencing and went straight at the forensics — and she went at the exact place where the state's case had been softest. The state's chemist had found bloodstains in the kitchen. The state's physician described the bedroom. Where those women were shot was the one thing that trial never settled, and she knew it, because she had been sitting there listening to every word of it with a handkerchief in her hands.

"Mrs. Judd, we can't discuss those matters. If there is anything in the record—"

"All right!" she cried.

The reporter wrote that the spectators leaned forward.

"I was shot first—"

"Neither girl was murdered—"

"Sit down, Mrs. Judd!"

And that was all of it.

Four words. I was shot first. That was the entire defence of Winnie Ruth Judd, spoken out loud in a courtroom for the first and only time, seventeen days after twelve men had already decided she was going to hang for it.

The wire man wrote that her face fell back into the expressionless white mask it had worn all through the trial, as she sank into her seat amid the clatter of gavels.

And then the sentence was read to her. All of it. The full formula, the old words, the ones they don't shorten.

That you be hanged by your neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.

She stood and listened to that, the reporter wrote, calmly gazing about the courtroom, as though the words did not sentence her.

The judge denied the motion for a new trial, and was immediately served with notice of appeal.

The execution was set for May.

But here is the thing about that hearing — the thing the United Press man put right at the top of his story, before any of the quotes.

He wrote that the spectators were more startled by what she did not say than by her semi-hysterical words.

The whole city had come to hear her name the man.

And she talked about a juror, and about blood in a bedroom, and she never came anywhere near him.

Not once.

They took her to the state penitentiary at Florence and put her on condemned row, with a guard on her twenty-four hours a day, so that she could not take her own life before the state of Arizona could take it for her.

Her first night in that cell, she said one thing.

"Oh, I don't like it here!"

Her mother and father were in Arizona for all of it. During the trial they had come to her in the corridor of that courthouse and put their arms around her, and a reporter who watched it wrote that she answered them with a pleased, absent smile — but never with any indication that she sensed their misery.

Her father is a retired minister. I told you in Part Two how he got to Arizona: his neighbours in Darlington, Indiana, put on a benefit basketball game and raised the money for his train fare. And I told you what he did with the weeks of his daughter's trial. He stood in Phoenix pulpits and told congregations that he had no hope of getting her released. Only of helping to save her soul.

On the twenty-sixth of February, 1932 — the day after the sentencing — he walked into a condemned cell at the Arizona State Prison.

And his daughter burst into tears the moment he came through the door.

He prayed with her. One line at a time. He said it, and she said it back after him. She had not prayed publicly since the killings.

She wept when they left.

The woman who did not change her expression when twelve men told her she was going to hang, cried when her mother and father walked into the room.

Two days later that story went out over the wire, and the paper that ran it gave it a headline that I'm going to read to you exactly as it was printed, and then I'm going to stop talking for a second.

Winnie Ruth Judd is learning to cry.

[MUSIC transition — Act 9]

ACT 9 — "AN IDLE GESTURE"

[MUSIC out]

She had not spoken at her own trial.

Not one word. Her lawyers had told the very first juror they picked that she wouldn't, and she didn't, and twelve men sentenced her to death having never once heard her voice.

On the twelfth of December, 1932, the Supreme Court of Arizona affirmed the conviction and the sentence. Twelve assignments of error, every one of them rejected.

A new date was set. The seventeenth of February, 1933.

And that is when Winnie Ruth Judd started talking.

At the end of December she sat down in front of a grand jury and told them what the papers were calling her whole truth story. She said she killed both of those women herself. Alone. In self-defense. She said nobody helped her do it.

But she said that men came into it afterward — at the problem of two bodies in a house, and the problem of getting her out of Arizona.

On the thirtieth of December, 1932, that grand jury indicted Jack Halloran.

Not for murder. He was charged as an accessory — a man who knew a killing had happened and hid it. Maximum penalty, five years.

He posted three thousand dollars bond and was out the same afternoon. Reporters caught him walking out of that courtroom. He was described as tight-lipped, and he gave them two words.

"It's true."

And in January of 1933, at his preliminary hearing, the state's star witness against Jack Halloran was the woman the state had already condemned to death.

She took that stand on the seventeenth, and she did not stop.

She put him in that house. She said he came in through the kitchen door ahead of her, that he said "My God, Sammy," that he felt that girl's pulse and picked her up and laid her on a bed, and that he pulled down the window blind with a bloody left hand. She said he told her a trunk would do it. She said he told her not to tell anybody — not even her husband — and that he'd take care of everything.

She said he never came back.

And she said a mattress went missing out of that house — the one he'd laid Hedvig Samuelson on.

"I wish that mattress would be brought in here," she told that courtroom. "It would have cleared me at my trial. There were no bloodstains at the top of it. I would have shown no one was shot in bed. The bloodstains were in the center."

That was her whole defense. And she was telling a room full of people that the proof of it was a mattress, and that the mattress was gone, and that the man she said took it was sitting eight feet away from her.

He laughed at her from the counsel table. It's in the wire copy.

I'm not going to take you through the rest of it here, and I want to tell you why.

It went on for days. She screamed at the judge. She accused Halloran of signalling her answers from across the room. She said, out loud, in an open courtroom, in front of reporters, that she was telling the honest to God truth — and that she was telling what she intended to write down and take with her to God when she killed herself.

That was thirty-one days before the date Arizona had set to hang her.

There is far too much of it to put in this episode, and it is too good to butcher. So I've put all of it up on the website — the full account of what she said on that stand, in her own words, with the sources.

Section29.com.

Go read it. It's worth your time.

Because here is what happened to it.

Jack Halloran did not take the stand. Not once, in any proceeding, in this entire case.

His lawyer did the talking — a man named Frank O. Smith, who used to be a judge himself. And the argument Smith made is the reason this episode exists.

He said: look at the state's own witness. Winnie Ruth Judd has just testified, under oath, that she killed those two women in self-defense.

If she killed them in self-defense — then no crime was committed.

And if no crime was committed, there is nothing for Jack Halloran to be an accessory to.

He asked the court to dismiss.

On Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of January, 1933, court convened unexpectedly early. Only a handful of spectators were in the room. Mrs. Halloran stood at her husband's side.

And Judge J. C. Niles gave his decision, and I'm going to read you what he said, because it is the strangest paragraph in this entire case.

"The state's case was inconsistent. I tried to reconcile the evidence presented. The theory of self-defense was borne out by the witness, Mrs. Judd."

Stop there for a second.

A judge of the state of Arizona, sitting on the bench, said out loud that he believed her.

That is the only time in this entire record that any official of that state ever said so. The jury didn't. The trial judge didn't. The Supreme Court had written, six weeks earlier, that there was no slightest evidence of self-defense.

And Judge Niles looked at the same woman and said the theory was borne out.

And then he kept going.

"Corroboration was most unsatisfactory. In view of the circumstances, if I should bind the defendant, Halloran, over to superior court it would be an abuse. Trial in superior court would be an idle gesture and an expense to the taxpayers of this county."

"Therefore, in view of the evidence in connection with the motion, the order of the court is that the complaint is dismissed, and the defendant discharged."

An idle gesture. And an expense to the taxpayers.

Halloran kissed his wife.

The wire reporter wrote it exactly like that — affectionately kissed his wife when the judge pronounced him a free man.

Then he made a statement.

"I am very pleased with the result of this case. This unfortunate happening occurred fifteen months ago. The evidence has shown I was not connected with the tragedy, nor with any circumstances connected with it."

This unfortunate happening.

And Frank O. Smith, on his way out — his client discharged, the case over — said this:

"The true story of the slayings has not yet been told. It will probably be made known in due time."

He didn't say his client was innocent.

He said the story wasn't finished.

Let me lay out where that leaves everybody.

Arizona had spent fifteen months insisting that Winnie Ruth Judd was a sane, calculating woman who murdered two friends and lied about self-defense. It sentenced her to hang on exactly that basis. Its Supreme Court affirmed it in December.

And when she finally opened her mouth, the same story that could not save her from the gallows was good enough to walk Jack Halloran out the door.

She was too much of a liar to be believed by the people trying her.

And too believable, apparently, to convict the man she named.

She was too guilty to be believed, and he was too innocent to charge.

That was Phoenix, on the twenty-fifth of January.

Sixty miles southeast, at Florence, on the same afternoon, the warden of the Arizona State Prison gave an order about her cell.

A. G. Walker put her under guard twenty-four hours a day.

Not to keep her in. To keep her alive.

"Extra precaution will be taken for the next few weeks," the warden said, "until Mrs. Judd's state of hysteria, caused by her testimony at Halloran's hearing, calms down."

She had twenty-three days left.

[MUSIC transition — Closing]

CLOSING THOUGHTS + OUTRO

[MUSIC under]

Twenty-three days after Jack Halloran walked out of that courthouse, Winnie Ruth Judd was supposed to hang.

She didn't.

A judge found her insane, and instead of a rope she was sent to the state hospital.

And I want to note something about that, quietly, because it's the kind of thing that only shows up if you've been reading these papers in order.

The superintendent of the state hospital was Dr. George Stephens.

He is the man who sat in a chair directly behind her through her murder trial, subpoenaed by her own defense, making copious notes on how she behaved in that room. He came to look at her in January of 1932.

She was delivered to him a little over a year later.

She would be there forty years.

And she left that hospital six times without permission. One of those times she walked to Yuma, along the old Southern Pacific tracks — the same railroad that had carried those two trunks to Los Angeles.

The last time, she was gone for seven years.

She went to the San Francisco Bay Area and became a live-in maid for a family who had no idea who she was, and from 1962 to 1969 she was a woman named Marian Lane.

They found her and brought her back to Arizona. A Phoenix attorney named Larry Debus got her paroled in 1971.

And she kept the name. She was Marian Lane for the rest of her life.

Now — I want to tell you about a woman named Rose Mofford, because she is, as far as I can find, the best witness anybody has on what became of Winnie Ruth Judd after the newspapers stopped writing about her.

In 1940, Rose Mofford was a nurse at the Arizona State Hospital.

Forty-eight years later, she was the Governor of Arizona.

And what she remembered was this. That Judd cooked for the other patients. That she cut their hair. That she looked after a child with hydrocephaly.

She had been a nurse when she went in. She went back to nursing.

"She found her peace," Mofford said.

A friend of hers in Sun City, a man named Kenneth Cain, said she never seemed bitter about spending most of her life locked up. "She was always thinking of somebody else, never herself. That's the kind of lady she was."

And Larry Debus — the man who finally got her out — said this: "She was bigger than life. But she literally had her life taken away from her."

She spent her last decade in Phoenix. In the city that condemned her. Still living under the name she took when she ran.

And in all that time, she rarely spoke about the case.

Sixty-seven years, and nobody could agree on why she did it.

The prosecutors said jealousy. The newspapers said jealousy, and they were still saying it in her obituary. Her own trial never proved a motive at all — the state rested without one. The Arizona Supreme Court read that letter and concluded she shot Agnes LeRoi to stop her from talking. And the letter itself says the whole thing started over a nurse and a hunting trip.

Four authorities. Four answers.

She died on a Friday.

The twenty-third of October, 1998, in her sleep, at a friend's house in Phoenix. She was ninety-three years old.

The Associated Press put it on the wire that weekend, and the name they gave her in the headline was the same name they gave her when she was a young woman getting off a train under guard.

Trunk Murderess.

Sixty-seven years, and that was still what she was called.

Her body didn't stay in Arizona. Her friends sent her back to California to be buried.

She made that trip one more time.

And here's the last thing.

She surrendered on the night of Friday, the twenty-third of October, 1931 — she walked into a funeral parlor at Court and Olive in Los Angeles and gave herself up.

She died on Friday, the twenty-third of October, 1998.

Sixty-seven years. To the day — and to the day of the week.

Here's my honest read, and it's the same one I've had since about the fourth week of reading these papers.

I don't know whether Winnie Ruth Judd killed those two women in self-defense. I don't think anybody knows. There is one — one — piece of physical evidence in this entire record that supports her version of that night, and it's a smear of blood by a kitchen sink that one of the state's own witnesses admitted to on cross-examination while another one denied it.

But that isn't actually the thing that keeps me up.

The thing that keeps me up is that almost nobody involved in this case ever believed she was alone in that house.

The sheriff said he could put his hands on the man in fifteen minutes. The county attorney charged two unnamed men alongside her. Her own lawyers built a defense on the argument that she couldn't have done it by herself. And she stood up at her own sentencing and told a judge that a man on her jury had gone into that jury room saying that if they sentenced her to hang, she'd talk.

And when she finally said it — when a woman under sentence of death sat on a stand for three days and named him — a judge ruled that trying him would be an idle gesture.

The only person in this entire story who ever insisted that Winnie Ruth Judd acted alone was Winnie Ruth Judd. And by the time she stopped insisting it, the state had made itself incapable of hearing her.

And there is still one thing nobody has ever explained.

On the afternoon she came back to Phoenix, while five thousand people stood on Jefferson Street waiting to jeer at her, there were men two miles away dragging a cesspool behind that little stucco duplex on North Second Street.

They were looking for parts of Hedvig Samuelson.

They did not find them. Nobody ever has.

Two young women went to Arizona to get well. Agnes LeRoi had come down from Oregon. Hedvig Samuelson had taught school in a village in Alaska, and she was so sick she could barely walk when she got here. They rented a bungalow and put a radio in it and made friends, and the worst thing the Phoenix police ever had to say about that house was that the radio played too late.

Ninety-four years later, we know the name of the woman who killed them, and we know the name of the man she said helped her, and we know what a jury foreman had for breakfast, practically.

We don't know where the rest of Hedvig Samuelson is.

That's the case.

If you have any information about this case, or a forgotten case you think deserves an episode, reach out at Section29.com. If you enjoyed this episode, remember what I said at the top — share it with a friend, post it, leave a review. It all helps this one-man show more than you know. And make sure you're subscribed, because there's always another one.

Until next time — this is Trevor with Forgotten True Crime.

Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.

[MUSIC out]