In 1932, Ruth Judd killed two of her friends and stuffed them inside a travel trunk. Why was it so hard to believe in her guilt?
By Laurie Notaro
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I had never met the two stern-looking young women sitting across from me in the train car, but I knew who they were. Both were wearing in vintage dresses, pressed and perfect, their hair waved and smooth in the style of the 30's. The train, too, seemed to be old; the seats were wooden, and the car jostled terribly, causing a constant swaying and jerking motion that was relentless.
"You," one of the women said, pointing her finger harshly at me, "did not do us justice."
In agreement, her companion slowly shook her head.
"It's not that simple," I tried to say, but the woman with the pointed finger narrowed her eyes in anger.
"You could have helped us," she said sharply. "And you did nothing."
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"That's not true," I started to argue. "I do want to help you."
"You let her off the hook," the other woman, who had been silent up until now, said. "And she killed us."
"She got away with it all over again," the first woman said. "And we still can't do anything about it. We thought you would fix that."
I was humiliated. I felt an icy sheet of shame frost over me, as if I had been caught doing something horrible. These two women, Anne LeRoi, the bolder one, and her quieter companion, Sammy Samuelson, were murdered on the night of October 16, 1931. They were killed by their best friend, Winnie Ruth Judd, known as Ruth, each with a precise gunshot to the head. Both women were stuffed into trunks, Anne whole, Sammy dismembered, and loaded into the baggage compartment of a train travelling across the dry, brittle desert between Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Their bodies were discovered as blood leaked onto the platform of the Los Angeles Union Station, alerting porters that something awful was inside each trunk.
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I didn't wake up as much as I shot into in the darkness of my bedroom, feeling that Anne and Sammy had been right there. That dream followed me for days. It still bothers me.
In 2015, I went into the Arizona State Archives to research the case convinced that Ruth acted in self-defense, which was the lore that had followed the case around since 1931. She mourned for her dead friends for the rest of her life, referring to the crime as "my tragedy." In Arizona, Ruth was held up as the patron saint of injustice, convicted of a crime and sentenced to hang for a misunderstood accident.
Ruth was breathtaking, and not just in the beholder's eyes. She was a great beauty with kind eyes, a lovely smile and was always perfectly coiffed. On the day she surrendered—after five days on the run with barely any food, water and a bullet lodged in her hand that was turning gangrenous—she emerged in a fur coat, flawless finger-waved hair and a veil of sadness, a police officer flanking each arm. The coat was stolen, but everything else about her was perfect. Not a hair out of place or a tint of lipstick. She looked miraculous and ethereal, like a saint. The photo looked like a movie still.
Killers don't look like that, I remember thinking as I studied the photos. They are messy and cold, with twisted mouths and steel eyes. Aileen Wuornos. Griselda Blancos. Lizzie Borden. Genene Jones. They look hard, pinched, swollen, unperfect. Ruth didn't fit the model, the manner, the background. She was a minister's daughter, a doctor's wife. I knew it had to be self-defense.
