American Monsters: Ruth Judd

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning. Kind of murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now.

0:11 Speaker 2: I'm Zevan Odelberg, and this is kind of murdery. Central to today's story is the question of whether a single woman, five foot tall and of weak constitution, with a bullet embedded in one of her hands, could, on her own, dismembered to adult women, shove them in trunks, drag those trunks out of the house, and get them to the train station. Sounds unlikely, But unlikely isn't the same as impossible. So now please join me as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may. Kind of murderies.

0:55 Speaker 2: The sun devils in the details, The bodies are in the trunks. Ruth Judd and the Phoenix Trunk Murders starts now.

1:15 Speaker 2: Winnie Ruth McKinnel, known simply as Ruth, was born in Oxford, Indiana, on January twenty ninth, nineteen oh five, to a stern Methodist minister and his wife.

1:25 Speaker 3: Ruth grew up to be a redhead who stood just five feet tall when she was only seventeen, she married a World War One veteran with an addiction to morphine. Doctor William C. Judd, who was nearly forty, moved Ruth to Mexico, where he tried to find work. His emotional and financial instability led to strain in the marriage, as did Ruth's own failing health. By nineteen thirty, the couple was living separately. By that time, Ruth was twenty five when doctor Judd eventually moved to Los Angeles. Ruth ended up in Phoenix, where she became a governess for a wealthy family.

1:59 Speaker 3: It was during the stint that Ruth meant John J. Hallarin, sometimes referred to as Happy Jack. At forty four years old, Hallarin was a successful businessman with many social connections. The story goes that the two would sit on the front porch and talk about their lives, building a deep connection until they developed a romance in spite of the fact that both were married. Ruth found a position as a medical secretary at the Grunow Clinic, where she met an X ray technician named Agnes Leroy, who went by Anne.

2:28 Speaker 3: Ruth also met Anne's roommate, head Vig Samuelson, a teacher who went by Sammy. Many sources speculate that the two women were romantic partners. Doctors had diagnosed Sammy with tuberculosis after she and Anne lived in Alaska. The duo then moved to Phoenix, hoping the dry climate would ease the symptoms of her illness. As fate would have it, Sammy and Anne were also acquaintances of Hallerin. In fact, the bungalow they rented belonged to him. As fate would have it. Huh, I can't help but guess that that was exactly as happy Jack would have it.

3:02 Speaker 3: He's got a lesbian couple and a young beautiful housewife on the run, all living in a bungalow that he owns. Sounds to me like he's setting up his own love nest, or maybe the cast of an adult film. The three new roommates, Ruth, Sammy, and Ann likely bonded over the fact that they were all working women earning money in a time when most women weren't. Ruth moved into Sammy and Ann's Second Street bungalow for a short time, but differences erupted between the group, prompting Ruth to move into her own apartment.

3:31 Speaker 3: Supposedly, all three women had romantic relations with Hallerin at some point, leading to some tension. On October sixteenth, nineteen thirty one, An invited Ruth to the bungalow to play bridge. Ruth had moved out about a week prior. According to one of the common theories, Ruth had plans to see Hallerin that night, so she initially declined. When Hallarin didn't show, Ruth went to the bungalow after all. Unfortunately, no clear cut story has emerged detailing the events as they an folded. Even Ruth's story changed over multiple confessions, letters, and retellings.

4:05 Speaker 3: There is one version of the story that is more compelling than the others. However, that's something we'll be getting into a bit later in the show. One story suggests that Ruth, Ann, and Sammy were hanging out when the group began to argue about Hallarin's affections. Sammy allegedly pulled out a twenty five caliber handgun, shooting Ruth in the left hand. Anne grabbed the nearby ironing board and beat Ruth with it. The problem with this story is that Sammy was apparently bed ridden due to her tuberculosis during this time, could she have really put up a fight over a gun?

4:36 Speaker 3: In another version of the story, Ruth, armed with a gun on a knife, appeared at the home in the middle of the night while both women were asleep. Phoenix police maintained the women had been shot in their beds. In fact, both mattresses were missing from the home they'd claimed. Only one mattress was ever found in a vacant lot with no bloodstains. What led to the argument that night stories differ. Some say Ruth was jealous that the other women had said actual relationships with Hallerin. Others believe Sammy and Ann were angry that Ruth had introduced Hallerin to a woman who allegedly had syphilis.

5:08 Speaker 3: Regardless of how it happened, Sammy and Anne both died that night. Ruth dismembered Sammy's body, putting her head, torso and legs in one shipping trunk. Ruth put the upper portion of Sammy's legs in another box and stuffed Anne into yet another trunk. What happened after she'd trunked the corpses well. For the next phase of the story, I'm going to turn to a primary source article I found using my newspapers dot Com account. This from the Fort Worth Star Telegram, published on November one, nineteen thirty one, page eight.

5:40 Speaker 3: It's entitled Missus Judd spends first night in jail with complexion aids while law builds up case. Here we go. The strange murder story of Missus Judd came to light in Los Angeles on Monday, October nineteenth when baggage master Anderson of the Los Angeles Southern Pacific Railroad Station noticed blood oozing from two two trunks. He put the trunks aside and watched for the person calling for them. When a young and very pretty, red headed woman claimed the trunks, Anderson demanded that she opened them in his presence.

6:10 Speaker 3: She made the excuse that her trunk keys were at home and left the station. A baggage room attendant took the license number of the automobile in which a young man drove her away, and then the baggage master summoned police, who opened the trunks, finding the dead bodies of two women. In the larger trunk was the body identified by letters and personal belongings as that of Missus Leroy. The body was clothed in a pink nightgown and shot through the head. In a smaller hand trunk were dismembered portions of the nude body of Missus Samuelson, shot three times.

6:42 Speaker 3: A missing portion of Missus Samuelson's body, cut off from the lower abdomen to the knees, was recovered in still a third receptacle a suit case in the woman's restroom in the railroad station, tracing the license number of the automobile in which the woman rode away. A Los Angeles police on the night of October nineteenth arrested Burton J. McKinnell and doctor William C. Judd at the Santa Monica home of doctor Judd's sister, miss Caroline Judd, a school teacher. McKinnell admitted that he'd driven his sister, Missus Judd, to the railroad station, and that she left the baggage room greatly perturbed with him.

7:15 Speaker 3: When refused the trunks. She had asked me to throw the trunks in the ocean for her. McKinnel said, I knew there was something wrong. I asked her if there was a man or a woman in the trunks. She grabbed my arm and said, the less you know about it the better for you, McKinnel said, his sister got out of his automobile on a downtown Los Angeles street corner. He further said that he would decline to aid officers to arrest his sister, but issued a statement published in newspapers advising her to give herself up.

7:44 Speaker 3: Doctor Judd issued a similar newspaper plea to his wife, and when two days of widespread search produced no sign of the fugitive woman, doctor Judd retained a firm of attorneys and asked newspapers to print directions giving their telephone number and address so that his wife could call them up. Meanwhile, Los Angeles newspapers posted rewards of one thousand and fifteen hundred dollars for Ruth Judd's capture. On Friday, October twenty third, a call came through from missus Judd to attorneys Louis Russell, Richard Cantillone, and Milan Megdevitch.

8:15 Speaker 3: Arrangements were made by the lawyers to meet the woman, and the meeting was carried out that afternoon by husband, wife and attorneys in front of the Biltmore Hotel in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The attorneys took missus Judd to the undertaking parlor of Gus Alvarez, not four hundred yards distant from the courthouse, where officers directed one thousand men in a search for her. They hid her there while arranging with police to surrender her to custody. That evening, officers were directed to the undertaking rooms, and they rushed Missus Judd to police hospital, where a bullet was extracted from her left hand.

8:51 Speaker 3: She said the bullet had been fired into her hand by Miss Samuelson. Missus Judd then was removed to a hospital ward of the Los Angeles County jail. Missus Judd Judd at first gave a strange and at times highly incoherent account of the deaths of missus Leroy and Miss Samuelson and how she had wandered for four days while evading the murder searchers about Los Angeles. She hinted that she shot the two women to save her own life, and then became silent as to the dissecting and transporting of the bodies of her two former friends while the officers were trying to induce her to talk.

9:23 Speaker 3: A woman attendant in a Broadway department store on Saturday, October twenty fourth brought about the recovery of a torn letter twelve pages long, which Missus Judd had written and thrown down a drain pipe in the store. The letter, for the first time revealed the cause of her fatal quarrel with the two victims, that being an argument the three women had after Missus Leroy became angry with Missus Judd in Phoenix on the night of Friday, October sixteenth, because Missus Judd had introduced a nurse who was ill to JJ Jack halleran wealthy married Phoenix lumberman who'd given presents to all three women.

9:59 Speaker 3: This, of course, being the nineteen thirty's newspaper way of referring to what I mentioned earlier, the fact that Leroy and Samuelson were angry with Judd, who allegedly introduced hallerin to another woman, this ill nurse who had syphilis. Okay, back to the paper. Preliminary hearing on the first of the murder accusations probably will take place within two weeks. Although Missus Judd was brought here on extradition papers charging only the murder of Missus Leroy, the second Phoenix warrant claiming the murder of Miss Samuelson was served yesterday when she crossed from California to Arizona soil.

10:37 Speaker 3: The case would go to trial with much fanfare and lurid coverage by William Randolph Hurst's papers and Winnie Ruth. Judge would be found guilty of first degree murder. On February eighth, nineteen thirty two. Judge Speakerman ordered Ruth to die by hanging, and she was sent to prison in Florence, Arizona, to await her execution, which was scheduled for February seventeenth, nineteen thirty three. She raised an appeal, which was unsuccessful, but then just three days before she was scheduled to be executed, Ruth's behavior became so erratic that she managed to convince the prison warden that she was insane, and after a ten day hearing that found her mentally incompetent, her death sentence was overturned on March thirtieth, nineteen thirty three.

11:26 Speaker 3: She would ultimately be sent to the Arizona State Asylum for the Insane on April twenty fourth, nineteen thirty three, but between the end of the hearing on March thirtieth and when she was sent to the hospital on April twenty fourth, crucial clues to the truth of our story would be revealed. Ruth hired a new attorney named H. G. Richardson, and on April first, nineteen thirty three, she had Richardson file an appeal with the Arizona Superior Court, requesting a new trial based on her criminal trial attorney Paul Shank's failure to claim self to de fire defense on Ruth's behalf, or to allow her to take the stand in her own murder trial.

12:04 Speaker 3: After filing the appeal and asserting self defense, Richardson asked Ruth to write him a confidential letter explaining the whole truth of the murders so that he could build a new defense on her behalf should the appeal to the higher court be approved. Ruth wrote that letter to Richardson on April sixth and April eighth, but nearly everything in it contradicted the story Ruth had just told him, on which he'd subsequently included in his appeal to the Superior Court. The week before, Ruth had persuaded her new attorney to help her claim self defense, but then she confided in him that she'd meant to kill Anne and cut up Sammy herself.

12:43 Speaker 3: After he read it. HG. Richardson locked Ruth's quote first and only confession unquote letter away in a safety deposit box, where it remained for the next sixty eight years. The contents of the confession would not be revealed until two thousand and two. Later, on the same day that she completed her confession letter, Ruth Judd tried to take her own life by swallowing a razor blade. Perhaps she thought that attempting to kill herself would bolster an insanity plea if self defense failed, or perhaps it was because someone else now knew the real version of events.

13:19 Speaker 3: So what was that quote real unquote version. Well, let's hear it from the trunk Murderess's own penn dated April sixth, nineteen thirty three. I am writing the absolute truth of this case in full confidence that you will use it as you see fit in your best judgment. Mister Richardson, I have full confidence in you and trust you. This is my first and only confession of the case of the homicide of Anne Leroy and head Big Samuelson. Anne was used to the world. I truly was not. Jack Hallerin was the only man I'd gone with since my marriage.

13:54 Speaker 3: I was ashamed of things I'd done. I could not openly compete with her. I was married and ashamed to Day after day she lorded it over me, always smiling and fresh and sweet, well knowing she was hurting me with her taunts. Many evenings, Anne would kiss Jack and caress him in our presence, and after he was gone, gloat over not caring a thing for him, but merely working him for money. It was not what Jack did, but the continual taunts made by Anne which drove me beside myself. I could not stand the taunts.

14:26 Speaker 3: I just went crazy. Those taunts kept me awake. I could not sleep. I cried. I even prayed. I wrote my parents to please come to me. I was losing my mind. Wild ideas kept me awake. I took sleeping sedatives luminol. Luminol is barbituous, a stronger precursor to xanax or valiant. I wrote my doctor that my nerves were breaking. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I loved Anne still, but those taunts. I would take more medicine to quiet my nerves. Cried to please get things off my mind. To sleep. Never did I have the slightest dream of hurting Sammy.

14:59 Speaker 3: She simply never entered my mind except to get Anne stopped those taunts so I could sleep. Nothing more did I think of. I took the gun and a knife. How I would do it? I was not sure, but I had no intention of harming Sammy. Jack was as intimate with Sammy as Anne. But it was Anne's cruel taunts that haunted me. And it seems that by cruel taunts, she's talking about Anne laughing and saying that she's only with Jack for the money and doesn't actually care for him. There's nothing more specific about what those taunts might have been.

15:29 Speaker 3: All right, back to Ruth's story. I hid in the house next door. Anne and Sammy returned to the bedroom after they retired. I went to the back door, laid the knife and my shoes outside the door. Then I crept in the unlocked front door. I sat down on the couch in the same dark room and soon fell asleep, clutching the gun. I awakened Sammy had gone to the bathroom. That insane desire that power led me on. I started for Anne. My stomach was turning inside out, really twitching jumping out of me outside a tremor, but my stomach jumping like convulsions.

16:02 Speaker 3: I retreated, curled up and went to sleep again. Oh and again and again all night. I don't know how many times Sammy kept going to the bathroom. I started for the bedroom and then retreated each time. So exhausted, I immediately went to sleep. Morning, I heard the milkman. Sammy went to the bathroom again. I started to call to her, tell her I was there. I really did. Then I began shaking inside and remembered what I had come to do. So this time I crept past the bathroom door shot Anne. It was a low shot.

16:31 Speaker 3: Sammy called, what fell? Anne? I was hurrying past the door. Sammy came out and demanded to know what was the matter. I was limp. She completely took the gun from my hands. I was non resistant. I said, Sammy, I am crazy. I have lost my mind. Give me that gun and I will blow my brains out right here in this door. She held the gun and said, you get out of here right this minute. I then picked up the knife and went back after her. With the knife. As I grabbed for the gun, I stabbed her in the shoulder, the fight with Sammy in that breakfast room door, her own finger on the trigger when the shot went through her chest.

17:02 Speaker 3: Our fight is all about, as I have always related, she shot me through the hand as I grabbed for the gun. The gun jammed. We fell to the floor, struggled, and I finally got the gun and shot her. And in my wild state, I really do not remember where in the head. I pulled Sammy into the bathroom, I cleaned up the floor. I pulled in the trunk from the garage. It was now about six thirty or seven am. I tugged and pulled, and finally got ann from the bed into the trunk. Now it doesn't sound possible, but this all took about two hours.

17:30 Speaker 3: I left for the office. I'd pulled the trunk with Anne's body into the living room, but the trunk was unlocked. Sammy was on the bathroom floor all day Saturday. This all happened in the morning. I stayed in my office until four pm. I then took the bag home with me, with the gun, the knife, the pajamas in a dress. I fed my cat and went back to the twenty nine to twenty nine North Second Street house. At around six pm. I really had nothing definite in my mind, no plans made. In fact, except for an irresistible impulse to get an I had no other plans.

18:01 Speaker 3: I entered the house through the bathroom window, getting a chair from next door to climb in. I pulled the trunk back into the hall and tried to lift Sammy into it, but that was utterly impossible. I couldn't lift her. She was too heavy, her body was stiff. I then got two cheap knives from the kitchen and severed her body into portions I could lift. I was hours doing this, and then inch by inch pulling the trunk back into the living room. The baggage man, after taking the trunk to the truck, informed me it was too heavy to ship as baggage.

18:32 Speaker 3: I told them to take the trunk to eleven thirty Brille Street then, which they did. I also left the mattress from Anne's bed, rolled up right there in front of these baggage men a second street. Blood soaked in the living room. Sunday noon, I started getting ready to go to Los Angeles again. I transferred portions of Sammy's body to the smaller trunk and suitcase. Then I washed the gun in the laboratory. While it was under the water, a bullet remaining in the gun went off and the leads smashed in a sheet, which part of it I threw in the toilet and the other went down on the basin.

19:00 Speaker 3: From here, I think most everything has already been known, And the everything that's already been known is what you heard earlier from the newspaper about her arrival in Los Angeles and the discovery of the bloody contents of the trunks, as well as her being on the lamb from the law, her eventual capture and incarceration, and of course trial. Ruth was sent to the Arizona State Asylum for the Insane on April twenty fourth, nineteen thirty three. There she became quite popular, styling patients hair and befriending guards.

19:33 Speaker 3: And although Ruth was meant to spend the rest of her life at the hospital, four walls could not keep Ruth inside. Over the course of her stay, Ruth escaped from the Arizona State Hospital seven times. In fact, she had a key to the front door. Now remember the confession letter that I just read. While thanks to Richardson's safety deposit box, no one ever knew that that letter existed until it was donated to the collection of Arizona State University in two thousand and two. No one, no one ever knew well Winnie Ruth Judd knew, and leading up to a parole hearing in nineteen fifty three, she wanted that letter back in the worst way.

20:16 Speaker 3: In fact, that is probably the most damning proof that Ruth's April sixth and April eighth letter is more than just another crazed confession. It isn't so much what she wrote in the letter, it's the amount of time she spent trying to get it back. In a half a dozen letters written between June and November of nineteen fifty three and now on file at the Arizona Historical Society Archives in Tucson, Ruth pleads with H. G. Richardson's widow, Fern, to return the incriminating letter to her. In nineteen fifty three, Ruth was preparing, after twenty years, for a new sanity hearing.

20:51 Speaker 3: Should she be found sane, Ruth knew she'd be taken back to Florence Prison, after which she could appeal her case, and she hoped be sent home with time served. A twenty year old letter in which she confessed to her attorney that she'd killed her friends had cut up one of their bodies unassisted by another person, would mess up her plans for freedom, said Ruth. It is so important to have everything ready if my sanity hearing comes up this month, she explains in the last of the letters. In each she implores missus Richardson to bring the documents to her personally or allow her brother to come pick them up, explaining her intention to destroy anything in Richardson's file that she quote might not need unquote.

21:29 Speaker 3: She is insistent that neither her new attorney nor anyone else see the letter. Despite six letters from Ruth and one from her new attorney requesting the return of the confession, Berne Richardson did not comply. Ruth's insanity was not overturned, and she returned to her Many remember seven escape attempts. During Ruth's last escape in nineteen sixty two, she made it all the way to northern California and established a new identity as Marian Lane. There she stayed for seven years and began to work as a housekeeper and caregiver.

22:01 Speaker 3: According to some accounts, Ruth worked for a wealthy woman who left her some money upon her death. Upon her return to Arizona in nineteen sixty nine, Ruth hired a famous San Francisco criminal defense attorney, Melvin Belly, and an Arizona criminal defense attorney, Larry Debis, to handle her case for parole. In spite of the fact that the Arizona Governor, Jack Williams, agreed to release Ruth if the entire ordeal went over in a hushed manner, Belly held a press conference in which he boldly and quite publicly called for her release.

22:31 Speaker 3: As a result, Debas fired Belly. Ruth spid for parole was successful, and she moved to stock in California after her release, and in nineteen eighty three she was released from parole. Winnie Ruth Judd finally died in nineteen ninety eight of natural causes at her home in Sunny Slope, California. She was ninety three. By then, she was known as Marian Lane, and most people who knew her true identity chose to believe her long ago story about killing her friends in self defense. And of course, she died four years before anyone would have been able to see her quote one and only unquote confession letter said a friend named Jerry Lukawitz of Ruth's last days, she was a little old lady, but she was still gorgeous.

23:17 Speaker 3: When I visited her in Sunny Slope. She was always beautifully dressed, with her hair coifed. She said something once about how she was sorry she wasn't going to live long enough to see the day when people would finally stop remembering Winnie Ruth Judd, the Phoenix Trunk Murderess until next time. I'm Zevanodleberg, and this has been kind, murdery