Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

SO FAST IT WAS, so slight was she, the music still caroming and the frenzy of the party, the orgiastic throng… a man with red whiskers—Mr. Gergen, with a mustache now?—called out, Stop her! Stop her!

But Marion was already pushing through the kitchen doors behind her and the dark alley beckoned forth.

SHE WOULD GET HER MIND BACK, her head on straight, her thoughts ordered, her heart thumping for something other than ardor and grief again. And when she did, this would all come storming back and she would feel the ponderous weight of everything, so fiercely it would knock the breath out of her.

But that time was not yet. And now all she felt was righteous and unbound.

Ten minutes later, by the tracks, a few yards from a pair of tramps, itching to lash on, she saw the freight train hurtling toward her. There has to be something , she thought, looking far off into the distance. There is something.

The air was simmery hot, the engine whistle wailing inconsolably. She could hear the wheels sparking, coming on so hard. The tramps, they were kicking tin cans into the ravine and getting ready to run.

She would get on that train and they would not find her. They would not want to. And if they did, it mattered not. She was gone.

THIS NOVEL is inspired by the true story of Winnie Ruth Judd, the “Trunk Murderess,” also known as the “Tiger Woman” and the “Blond Butcher.”

In October 1931, the bodies of two Phoenix women, nurse Agnes “Anne” LeRoi and her roommate, Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson, were found in a pair of trunks abandoned at Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. After a four-day manhunt, twenty-six-year-old Winnie Ruth Judd turned herself over to the police, claiming she had shot her two friends in self-defense after a violent quarrel in their home.

The following day, a rambling letter written by Mrs. Judd to her husband, Dr. William Judd, was found in the drainpipe of a Los Angeles department store where Mrs. Judd had been hiding in the days following the murders. “I’m wild with cold, hunger, pain, and fear now, Doctor darling,” the letter’s closing lines read, “if I hadn’t got the gun from Sammy she would have shot me again. Forgive me…. forget me. Live to take care of me, [illegible] as I am sick, Doctor, but I’m true to you. I love you. The thots [sic] of being away from you set me crazy. Shall I give up? No, I don’t think so. The police will hang me. It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defense. Love me yet, Doctor.”

The shocking nature of the crimes set against Winnie Ruth Judd’s blond angelic looks made the case irresistible to the public and popular press. Headlines screeched, “‘Hungry for Love’ Her Notes to Mate Show,” “Gay Revels Revealed, Narcotics Hinted in Killing,” “Mind Inflamed by Drugs Blamed in Trunk Murder” and “‘Had to Fight,’ Slayer Cries.”

A sensational three-week trial ensued. The prosecution claimed Mrs. Judd had murdered her two friends in cold blood as they slept in their beds, and dismembered one of the bodies in order to fit them both into a pair of packing trunks for transport to Los Angeles. Their account appeared to contradict much crime scene evidence as well as Ruth’s own injuries, including a bullet wound in her hand. Still, Mrs. Judd’s defense attorneys, believing the fix was in among Phoenix authorities, were already planning for an insanity plea. In February 1932, Winnie Ruth Judd was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

The intervention of Sheriff John R. McFadden, however, brought a dramatic turn of events. Winnie Ruth Judd, who had not been called to testify at her own trial, divulged to the sheriff further details of the events surrounding the murders, including the involvement of a popular and influential Phoenix businessman.

A hearing was convened by grand jury request, finally permitting Mrs. Judd to tell her story. She recounted a harrowing argument with her two friends that became so out of control that Sammy Samuelson threatened her with a gun: “[Sammy] had the gun pointed right at my heart. And Sammy used to take spells…and she would look—oh, she didn’t look like herself at all…and she had the gun pointed right at my heart, and I grabbed the hand with the gun.” A struggle ensued and the gun went off, wounding Mrs. Judd and killing both Miss Samuelson and Mrs. LeRoi. Mrs. Judd went on to claim that the crimes had been concealed and the dismemberment arranged by one J. J. “Happy Jack” Halloran, one of the town’s civic leaders and Mrs. Judd’s rumored lover. She said that Halloran persuaded her that she must not go to the police. “Why, he scared the life out of me,” she told the court. “He told me not to call my husband or the police. I must not mention this to anyone, that he would take care of this himself.” She added, after her arrest, he promised her if she kept quiet about his role, she would be protected.

THE GRAND JURY ultimately requested that the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles commute Mrs. Judd’s death sentence to life imprisonment, claiming it was manslaughter, not premeditated murder. At the same time, the jury indicted Jack Halloran as an accessory to murder.

In a bizarre twist, however, Halloran’s attorney made the case that the state, by putting Mrs. Judd on the stand as a witness, proved a prima facie case of self-defense. Halloran’s lawyer successfully argued that no murder meant Halloran could not be an accomplice either. The judge agreed and Halloran was set free.

Then, despite the grand jury’s findings, the Board of Pardons and Paroles denied any commutation of Mrs. Judd’s sentence.

A mere three days before her scheduled execution, Mrs. Judd was granted a sanity hearing. Declared insane, she escaped the hangman’s noose and was transferred to the Arizona State Hospital for the Insane in Phoenix, which would be her home for the next thirty years. Her husband remained steadfast in his support of his wife until his death in 1945.

Over the years, Mrs. Judd escaped seven times from the hospital, the last escape in 1963 lasting more than six years, during which time she took on a new identity, as Marian Lane, working as a beloved servant for a wealthy San Francisco family.

In 1971, Winnie Ruth Judd was judged sane by medical examiners and released on parole. She died at the age of ninety-three in 1998.

OVER THE YEARS, I’ve returned to the Winnie Ruth Judd case many times. Again and again, I wondered what might have happened to her if those trunks had not been found so quickly, if she had returned to confront her betraying lover, if circumstances had been such that she could have put her survival skills (so in evidence in her multiple escapes) to the test rather than surrender to questionable authorities. After reading Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders (1973) by J. Dwight Dobkins and Robert J. Hendricks and Jana Bommersbach’s The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd (1992) and press coverage of the murders in the Los Angeles Times archives and elsewhere, I began to reimagine Winnie Ruth Judd’s story, with a different final act.

In doing so, I had to make some choices in terms of how much I should deviate from history or, in this case, history, lore and legend and the many blurry spaces in between. After all, the “true story” of what happened between Winnie Ruth Judd, Anne LeRoi, Sammy Samuelson and Jack Halloran on that long-ago October night remains a mystery. There are those who believe Mrs. Judd was responsible for both deaths, pointing to her history of emotional problems. Many believe her self-defense story. Others claim that Halloran murdered both girls, convincing his lover to take the rap for him and promising, with his connections, she would never go to prison. By the time she realized she was being set up, it was too late.