One Summer: America, 1927

had been ransacked. It appears not to have occurred to either of them that it would be a good idea to make Ruth’s bed look slept in. Gray loosely tied Ruth around the ankles and wrists, and arranged her comfortably on the floor. In what he considered his most cunning touch, he left the Italian newspaper on a table downstairs, so that the police would conclude that the intruders were alien subversives, like Sacco and Vanzetti, the infamous anarchists then awaiting execution in Massachusetts. When everything was in place, Gray kissed Ruth goodbye, then caught a taxi into the city and a train back to Syracuse.
    Gray was convinced that even if he came under suspicion the police would be unable to prove anything because his alibi firmly placed him three hundred miles away in Syracuse. Unfortunately, Gray was remembered by a Long Island taxi driver to whom he had given a 5-cent tip on a $3.50 fare – even in 1920s money a nickel was a paltry show of gratitude – and who was now extremely eager to give evidence against him. Gray was tracked down to the Hotel Onondaga, where he professed astonishment that the police would suspect him. ‘Why, I have never even been given a ticket for speeding,’ he said and confidently asserted that he could show that he had been in the hotel all weekend. Unfortunately, not to say amazingly, he had thrown the ticket stub from his train journey in the wastebasket. When a policeman fished it out and confronted him with it, Gray swiftly confessed, too. Upon learning that Mrs Snyder was blaming him for everything, he hotly insisted that she was the mastermind and had blackmailed him into cooperating by threatening to expose his faithlessness to his loving wife. It was clear that he and Mrs Snyder were not going to be friends again.
     
    Such was the intensity of interest in the trial that no aspect of the affair, however tangential, was overlooked. Readers learned that the presiding judge, Townsend Scudder, returned home to his Long Island estate each evening to be greeted – and presumably all but overwhelmed – by his 125 pet dogs, which he then personally fed. Someone else noticed, and solemnly reported, that the ages of the jurors exactly added up to five hundred. One of Ruth Snyder’s lawyers, Dana Wallace, merited special attention for being the son of the owner of the Mary Celeste , the infamous cargo ship found drifting in the Atlantic in 1872, its crew mysteriously vanished. A journalist named Silas Bent made a careful measurement of column inches and found that the Snyder–Gray affair received more coverage than the sinking of the Titanic . Analysis and commentary were provided by a pack of celebrity observers, including the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, the playwright Ben Hecht, the film director D. W. Griffith, the actress Mae West, and the historian Will Durant, whose Story of Philosophy was currently a phenomenal bestseller, if not obviously relevant to a criminal trial on Long Island. Also present, somewhat unaccountably, was a magician who went by the single name of Thurston. Moral context was added by three leading evangelists: Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and John Roach Straton. Straton was famous for hating almost everything – ‘card playing, cocktail drinking, poodle dogs, jazz music, the theater, low-cut dresses, divorce, novels, stuffy rooms, Clarence Darrow, overeating, the Museum of Natural History, evolution, the Standard Oil influence in the Baptist church, prizefighting, the private lives of actors, nude art, bridge playing, modernism and greyhound racing’, according to one partial contemporary account. To this list he was now happy to add Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray; they couldn’t be executed fast enough as far as he was concerned. McPherson, more moderately, offered prayers and the hope that God would teach young men everywhere to think: ‘I want a wife like Mother – not a Red Hot Cutie.’
    The critic Edmund Wilson wondered in an essay why it was that so dull and unimaginative a murder excited such earnest attention, without pausing to reflect that the same question could be asked of his essay. To him it was largely another case of ‘a familiar motif’ – a ‘ruthless ambitious woman who commands the submissive male’. By almost universal consent, Ruth Snyder was held to be the guilty party, Judd Gray the hapless dupe. Gray received so much mail, nearly all of it sympathetic, that it filled two neighbouring cells in the Queens