One Summer: America, 1927

that, for instance, Ruth Snyder on the night of the murder had received Judd Gray in a blood-red kimono – special editions were rushed into print, as if war had been declared. For those too eager or overcome to focus on the words, the Mirror provided 160 photographs, diagrams and other illustrations during the three weeks of the trial, the Daily News nearer 200. For a short while, one of Gray’s lawyers was one Edward Reilly, who would later gain notoriety by defending Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial, but Reilly, who was a hopeless drunk, was fired or resigned at an early stage.
    Each day for three weeks, jurors, reporters and audience listened in rapt silence as the tragic arc of Albert Snyder’s mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown. She was thirteen years his junior and not notably attracted to him, but when, after their third or fourth date, he offered her a gumball-sized engagement ring her modest defences crumbled. ‘I just couldn’t give up that ring,’ she explained helplessly to a friend.
    They were wed four months after they met and moved into his house in Queens Village. Their period of wedded bliss was a short one even by the standards of ill-fated marriages. Snyder longed for a life of quiet domesticity. Ruth – who was known to her intimates as Tommy – wanted bright lights and gaiety. He infuriated her by refusing to take down photographs of a previous sweetheart. Within two days of the wedding she revealed that she didn’t actually like him. And so began ten years of loveless marriage.
    Ruth took to going out alone. In 1925, in a café in Manhattan, she met Judd Gray, a travelling salesman for the Bien Jolie Corset Company, and they began a relationship. Gray made an unlikelyvillain. He wore owlish spectacles, weighed just 120 pounds, and called Ruth ‘Mommie’. When not engaged in lustful infidelity, he taught Sunday school and sang in a church choir, fund-raised for the Red Cross, and was happily married with a ten-year-old daughter.
    Increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage, Ruth tricked her unsuspecting hubby into signing a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause providing nearly $100,000 in the event that he met a violent end, and she now doggedly dedicated herself to making sure he did. She dosed his evening whisky with poison and whisked it into his prune whip (a feature of the affair much dwelt on by reporters). When that failed to slow him, she added crushed sleeping pills to the concoction, gave him bichloride of mercury tablets on the pretext that they were a healthful medicine, and even tried gassing him, but the unwitting Mr Snyder proved obstinately indestructible. In desperation, Ruth turned to Judd Gray. Together they devised what they conceived to be the perfect murder. Gray caught a train to Syracuse and checked into the Hotel Onondaga, making sure that plenty of people saw him, before slipping out a back way and returning to the city. While he was away he arranged for a friend to go to his hotel room, muss the bed and otherwise make it look as if the room had been occupied. He also left the friend with letters to mail after his departure. His alibi thus securely in place, Gray travelled to Queens Village and presented himself late at night at the Snyder house. Ruth, sitting up in the kitchen in her soon-to-be-famous scarlet kimono, let him in. The plan was for Gray to creep into the marital bedroom and smash in Snyder’s skull with a sash weight that Ruth had placed on the dresser for the purpose. Things didn’t work out quite as planned. Gray’s first blow was timidly experimental, and served only to wake the intended victim. Confused but considerably enlivened at finding a strange, small man leaning over him and tapping him on the head with a blunt instrument, Snyder cried out in pain and grabbed Gray’s necktie, choking him.
    ‘Mommie, Mommie, for God’s sake help!’ Gray croaked.
    Ruth Snyder seized the sash weight from her floundering lover and brought it forcefully down on her husband’s cranium, stilling him. She and Gray then stuffed chloroform up Snyder’s nostrils and strangled him with picture wire, which she had also laid in. Then they turned out drawers and cupboards all over the house to make it look as if it