Authors: Harold Schechter
Bestial (47 page)
Finally, the “Granite Woman” (as the tabloids would eventually dub her) decided to enlist her lover’s help. Though Gray was genuinely appalled when his “Momsie” first broached the subject, he was helplessly in her thrall. (The tabloids would brand him the “Putty Man.”) In the early hours of Sunday, March 20, 1927, they put their plan into effect.
Fortified with enough bootleg liquor to intoxicate a dray horse and armed with a heavy iron sash weight, Gray snuck into the Snyder home after dark, entering through a side door Ruth had left unlatched. When the victim was soundly asleep, Gray crept into the Snyders’ bedroom and brought the bludgeon down on the sleeping man’s head. The blow was so weak, however, that it only caused Albert Snyder to sit up with a roar and grab his assailant by the necktie.
“Momsie!” screamed Gray. “For God’s sake, help!”
Rushing to the bedside, Ruth grabbed the sash weight from her “Lover Boy’s” hand and delivered a crushing blow to her husband’s skull. Albert Snyder subsided onto the bed with a shuddering moan. For good measure, the assassins garrotted him with a wire and stuffed chloroform-soaked rags up his nostrils.
Putting the second phase of their scheme into action, the pair proceeded to ransack the house to make it look as if Snyder had been killed in the course of a break-in. They upended furniture, opened drawers, even ripped the stuffing out of pillows. Ruth wanted Gray to make off with her jewels but, for unexplained reasons, he refused. They settled for hiding her valuables under her mattress and stashing her fur coat in a bag inside her closet. Their clever idea for disposing of the bloody murder weapon was to rub it with ashes and stick it in Albert Snyder’s basement tool chest.
Though Ruth urged Gray to knock her unconscious, he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. Instead, he bound her wrists and ankles, gagged her with cheesecloth, and made off into the night.
A few hours later, at around 7:30 A.M., Ruth dragged herself
to her sleeping daughter’s bedroom and managed to rouse the eleven-year-old child, who immediately summoned help. Though Ruth stuck to her prerehearsed story, police were wise to her from the start. All the evidence was against her. Burglars are not known for knocking over armchairs and tearing open pillows in their search for booty. And Ruth’s claim of being knocked unconscious by the intruder failed to persuade the medical examiner, who was unable to detect a single contusion on her scalp. Her cause wasn’t helped when detectives turned up her “stolen” jewelry underneath her mattress, found the blood-stained murder weapon in her husband’s tool chest, and discovered a tie tack with the initials “J.G.” at the foot of Albert Snyder’s bed. The bumbling conspirators were in custody within twenty-four hours.
The Snyder-Gray case, which broke just a few months after the conclusion of the Hall-Mills murder trial, became an immediate cause célèbre, not only in America but throughout the world. Ruth Snyder instantly became the most reviled woman of her time—the Whore of Babylon in the guise of a buxom Queens housewife. The Snyder-Gray trial—attended by such Jazz Age celebrities as David Belasco, D. W. Griffith, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the Rev. Billy Sunday, Damon Runyan, Will Durant, and others—received almost as much attention as the Lindbergh flight and was rich in both lurid melodrama and coarse comedy, particularly when Ruth was on the stand. (In one memorable exchange, Assistant District Attorney Charles W. Froessel—trying to establish Ruth’s earlier affair with a man named Lesser—asked, “Did you know Mr. Lesser carnally?” “Yes,” Ruth replied. “But only in a business way.”)
Public sentiment was so inflamed against Ruth that after she and Gray were convicted and sentenced to death, every member of the Court of Appeals received a copy of the following postcard:
COURT OF APPEALS, QUEENS COUNTY JUDGES:
We will shoot you if you let that Snyder woman go free. She must be electrocuted. The public demands it. If she is not
done away with, other women would do the same thing. She must be made an example of. We are watching out.
THE PUBLIC
The public got its wish. Shortly after 11:00
P.M.
on Thursday, January 12, 1928, Ruth went to the chair, followed eight minutes later by Gray. As it happened, one of the witnesses, a
New York Daily News
reporter named Thomas Howard, showed up at the execution with a small camera secretly strapped to his ankle. Casually crossing his leg, he waited until the executioner threw the switch, then released the shutter button with a cable that ran down his pants leg. The resulting photograph, a blurry shot of Ruth Snyder’s body stiffening as the current coursed through it, was featured on the front page of the
Daily News
, becoming the most infamous picture in the history of tabloid journalism.
So all-consuming was the public’s obsession with the “Granite Woman” and her hapless “Lover Boy” that, in spite of Earle Nelson’s own notoriety, his death was barely noted by the U.S. news media. The “Gorilla Man’s” hanging had been completely overshadowed by the two most highly publicized and eagerly anticipated executions of the twentieth century.
In Canada, however, the situation was different. Though the electrocution of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray was frontpage news even in Manitoba, the “Gorilla Man’s” death was the main story of the day. Indeed, the Nelson case would continue to stir the passions of Winnipeggers for several weeks after his execution.
Immediately after the hanging, the Reverend Father Webb, acting on behalf of Lillian Fabian and Mary Fuller, claimed Nelson’s corpse and arranged for its transportation to a funeral home called Barker’s, where, after receiving the usual ministrations, it was laid in an open gray coffin and displayed in the parlor chapel. Affixed to the coffin, at Lillian Fabian’s request, was a small brass plaque engraved with the dead man’s real name, Earle L. Ferral.
Within a short time, word had spread throughout the city that the “Gorilla Man’s” corpse was available for viewing.
By 6:00 P.M., more than 1,000 people had gathered at the funeral home. Special constables were dispatched to the scene to maintain order. It was almost midnight before the last of the curiosity seekers filed past the coffin.
By eight the next morning, Saturday, January 14, 1928, a fresh crowd had assembled at Barker’s, eager to get a final glimpse of “the man whose crimes had repulsed the world” (as one reporter wrote). A front-page article about the viewing appeared in that morning’s edition of the
Manitoba Free Press
. “Never before in the history of Winnipeg has such widespread curiosity been manifested by the public to view a criminal’s body,” the article stated.
Reading the newspaper at his desk that morning, Attorney General W. J. Major was deeply distressed by this report. Summoning Deputy Attorney John Allen to his office, Major vented his feelings in the most emphatic terms.
Allen immediately repaired to his office and telephoned Mr. Barker to convey the attorney general’s displeasure at the “revolting practice.”
“I am only giving the public what it wants,” Barker protested.
“Surely you must understand that you have no such right,” Allen said firmly. “The body does not belong to you. It belongs to Nelson’s estate, and I feel certain that if his wife were here, she would not permit this ghoulish exhibition.”
“That may well be the case,” Barker acknowledged.
Allen’s tone grew stern. “Are you, perchance, charging the public any money for an opportunity to view the body?”
“I resent that question,” Barker huffed.
“I am sure you do. But you still haven’t answered it.”
Barker indignantly denied that he was charging an admission fee.
“Mr. Barker,” said Allen, “the attorney general and I will expect you to prevent the public from viewing Nelson’s body. Otherwise, the police will be sent to your premises at once.”
After reporting this conversation to Attorney General Major, Allen telephoned Chief Constable Newton. Within minutes, a special contingent of constables was at Barker’s. This time, however, the police were there not to keep the
crowd under control, but to disperse it. By noon, the morbid show had been shut down for good.
The incident, however, continued to reverberate. For the next two weeks, the city’s newspapers were swamped with letters from outraged citizens, decrying the “awful show that was made of the notorious Nelson.” A typical example appeared in the January 18 issue of the
Winnipeg Tribune
:
To the Editor:
Sir,—Can it be possible that the authorities allowed the body of the notorious criminal who was hanged last week to be made a sordid show of here? Can this be allowed in Canada?
Of course, a lack of Christian feeling and fine breeding can do a great many unheard-of things. But that the body of a criminal should be treated rather as that of a hero is a blot on our city which should not be allowed to pass without protest.
The authorities should have seen to it that this man’s remains were sent as speedily and quietly as possible to his relatives in the United States. It is to be hoped our mayor will prohibit any further copying of sordid, morbid fashions in this city in the future. I hope many protests will be sent by our citizens and societies so that such a blot can never besmirch our British city again.
“DISGUSTED CITIZEN”
Many other letters objected to the hanging itself, condemning the practice as a “relic of the Dark Ages” and urging that, as one citizen put it, “some other, less barbaric method be found. If a murderer resorts to the most terrible way of killing his victim or victims, is it becoming to the State to pay him back in savage kind? I do not think so. Kill the murderer, if the state so decrees, but electrocute him, or shoot him; almost any method, save the brutality of hanging with all its attendant gruesomeness.”
By the time these letters were published, however, the corpse that had prompted them was long gone from Canada. Placed in a metal-lined box and loaded onto a train at the Union depot, the plain gray coffin had departed from Winnipeg
late Saturday afternoon, one day after the execution. “Back over the long trail which he left strewn with death and misery” (in the words of one reporter), the “Gorilla Man’s” body had been carried by rail to his birthplace, San Francisco.
There, in the early morning hours of Sunday, January 15, 1928, it was received by Lillian Fabian and Mary Fuller, Earle Leonard Ferral’s only mourners.
†
The versions of Earle Nelson’s life found in most histories of American crime aren’t entirely trustworthy (they often have him born in Philadelphia, raised by an old, fanatical aunt, and married to a lovely young woman). The best brief account of his case appears in L. C. Douthwaite’s classic study
Mass Murder
(New York: Henry Holt, 1929), published just one year after Nelson’s execution.
To reconstruct the “Gorilla Man’s” cross-country murder spree, I relied primarily on the following newspapers: the San Francisco Chronicle, the
Santa Barbara Daily News, the Portland Oregonian, the Seattle Times, the Kansas City Star, the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit News, the Buffalo Courier Express, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Manitoba Free Press, the Winnipeg Tribune, and the New York Times
.
My descriptions of the 1920s were likewise drawn from newspapers and periodicals of the era, as well as from assorted social histories, including the following: Frederick Lewis Allen,
Only Yesterday
(New York: Harper & Row, 1931); Ann Douglas,
Terrible Honesty
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); James H. Gray,
The Roar of the Twenties
(Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978); and Paul Sann,
The Lawless Decade
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1957).
For information on specific subjects (such as the San Francisco earthquake, Harry Houdini, the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” the horrors of the Great War, the quasiscientific theories of Cesare Lombroso, and the Snyder-Gray and Hall-Mills cases), I consulted the following: William Bronson,
The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959); Milbourne Christopher,
Houdini: The Untold Story
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969); L. Sprague de Camp,
The Great Monkey Trial
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968); Paul Fussell,
The Great War in Modem Memory
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Martin Gilbert,
The First World War
(New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man
(New York: Norton, 1981); John Kobler,
The Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1938); and William Kunstler,
The Minister and the Choir Singer
(New York: William Morrow, 1964).
I owe special thanks to a number of people in Winnipeg and elsewhere in Canada for their help and generosity. Foremost among these is Larry Halcro, who graciously shared his own extensive knowledge of the case, gave me access to his private collection of Nelson papers, and assisted me in tracking down some obscure but vital information. I am also grateful to Professor Alvin Esau, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba, who provided me with a mountain of material, including a complete trial transcript and other legal documents, that proved indispensable.
Others to whom I am indebted include: Cameron Harvey of the Archives of Western Canadian Legal History; Janet Murray of the National Archives of Canada; Gerry Berkowski, Peter Bower, and Nancy Stunden of the Provincial Archives of Manitoba; Annie Vialard of the Winnipeg Medical College; Ab Brereton; and Mary Shelton, daughter of Dr. Alvin Mathers.
As has been the case with every book m this series, I received significant support from my friend and researcher Catharine Ostlind. My thanks also to Mike Wilk for his usual, unhesitating generosity, to John E. Vetter, and to Nancy Ferrara.
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