Read an Excerpt
The Trunk Murderess
Winnie Ruth Judd The Truth About an American Crime Legend Revealed at Last
By Jana Bommersbach
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 1992 Jana Bommersbach
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61595-266-3
Chapter One
The Last Train to Los Angeles It was such an ordinary Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona.
October 18, 1931.
The mere 48,000 residents who called Phoenix home were cashing in on a beautiful eighty-nine-degree day. October had always been, always would be, the favorite month in this desert "oasis." It meant the end of the four-month inferno of summer, with its persistent hundred-degree days and, even more intolerable, its three-digit nights. Ahead were eight months of glorious comfort—some of the nicest weather the country offered. The payback, as everyone always thought of it. No matter how bad the summers got—and with the invention of air-conditioning still a decade off, they were godawful—at least you were assured a beautiful winter. There wouldn't be a single hundred-degree day this October. None at all until the following June.
Most of the country soon would be fending off snow and freezing temperatures, but that kind of winter never came here. And that, everyone knew, was something to sell. For a decade the Chamber of Commerce had been marketing days like this to the country: "Phoenix, where summer winters," one slogan went. It was working. While the rest of the nation would forever remember 1929 as the year the stock market crashed, Phoenix would best remember it as the first year tourism meant $10 million for its economy.
Many were getting rich on tourism, though nobody had gotten rich when Phoenix sold its weather to health seekers, especially those with tuberculosis. "Lungers," they were commonly called. The ill still came, but as one local writer put it, "There is no rule against regaining one's health here, but it is not in the best taste to discuss it." The favorite winter visitors were "the elderly gentlemen who like to play golf all year around and the ladies of all ages who like to applaud them." Most rewarding were the tourists who came for winter and decided to put down roots. Chicago's chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr., had already invested $2 million building the Arizona Biltmore Hotel six miles out of town, a gem that would attract movie stars and kings. Wrigley liked Arizona so much he built the most lavish home in the state on a hill next to the hotel, known to this day as the Wrigley Mansion.
The kind of wealth Wrigley represented was new to Phoenix, but then, everything here was new. Arizona itself was the newest state, becoming the forty-eighth on Valentine's Day in 1912. Phoenix had emerged as the state's largest city only at the end of the First World War, in 1919. Now, barely twelve years later, people were already starting to talk of Phoenix as a "metropolitan city." Not everyone was happy with the changes. One local columnist offered little sympathy for those who weren't keeping up: "The oldtimer, pushed to the wall, looks on rather bewildered and not a little hurt. Once a year, on Pioneer Day, he parades down the street and sees on either side the outside faces watching him—gaping faces from Oklahoma, amused faces from Michigan, smug faces from Kansas, bored faces from New York. No doubt he feels embarrassed."
There's a cockiness in being the biggest, even if you're the biggest in a small pond, and Phoenix was polishing the attitude. As local historian Margaret Finnerty says today, "Phoenix was just a little farm town then, but people here were convinced it was the center of the earth." It was best to ignore the fact that Phoenix still had more blacksmiths than architects; people preferred to boast that there were already 130 doctors and 172 lawyers.
A total of 48,118 residents doesn't sound like much—especially when Phoenix today has nearly a million and has been the largest city in the Southwest since the 1960s. The best businessmen in 1931 could do was brag that it was "the largest city between El Paso and Los Angeles." They never mentioned that El Paso was over twice its size and L.A. outpopulated it by four times. What was important was that if you were going from one of those large cities to the other, both the road and the railroad took you through Phoenix. As the state's largest newspaper proudly gushed, about 2,000 new residents had moved here in just the last twelve months, which "unmistakably shows that Phoenix continues to make that steady progress which has characterized its growth from a frontier community to the capital of a great island empire."
Hyperbole aside, Phoenix was doing quite fine, even if the Great Depression had slowed things down.
Phoenix measured progress by what you could see on the surface: how many miles of paved roads, how many square miles within the city limits, how many "skyscrapers"—defined here as anything over four stories. Eighty-six miles of paved roads sounds skimpy, but it was three and a half times more than this town claimed just a decade earlier. In all, the city covered just over six square miles—neatly compact, with a trolley line that could take you almost anywhere you wanted to go. Those who had bothered to count—and undoubtedly the Chamber officials already had—knew this city could cover a total of 500 square miles if it wanted. Nobody ever dreamed it would get that big in six decades, but it was nice to know there was lots of empty desert out there if millions ever came.
The skyline represented the city's greatest pride. All the great cities had skylines. New York had just built the world's tallest structure, the Empire State Building, at an astonishing one floor per day. Nobody in Phoenix could even imagine a building 102 stories tall, but they were just as excited at their own emerging profile. Already seven buildings of over four stories graced the city, including the sixteen-story Westward Ho Hotel, which would remain the tallest until 1959. There had been parties and hoopla when each new building opened.
But if you asked most residents on this October Sunday in 1931 how they would describe their community, they'd have agreed with Chamber of Commerce promotions that Phoenix was "a city of homes, schools, and churches." It wasn't just a selling point, it was the city's priority list. And nobody apologized that all three were segregated by race.
Life revolved around family and home and a strict moral code that said a man was required to be faithful and productive for his family, a woman was to raise her children to be God-fearing and successful, and the kids were to stay out of trouble. Divorce was the most horrible admission that somebody wasn't following the script and "playing around" was scandalous. "I remember the old-timers telling us boys that if we were ever caught with a woman, we were to tell the judge she was having a fit and we were holding her down—we were told never to admit to anything," says Tom Chauncey, who was an eighteen-year-old boy this Sunday but would go on to become one of the city's most prominent businessmen.
Historians recall the time as being very socially stratified, very conservative, very uptight about propriety. On the surface, everything seemed to fit those requirements. Phoenicians found it both necessary and easy to ignore the ugly underbelly of their town, pretending there was no prostitution when it was a thriving cottage industry, pretending there was no political corruption when it was rampant, pretending men never strayed and women never wandered when it was an infamous tradition.
It wasn't hard to project a public face of strict morals when your scanty town could crow it had eighty churches. And as on all Sundays, they were filled this day. Episcopalians and Presbyterians were the "best" churches in town, counting most of the city's leading families as members. Anglo Catholics went to St. Mary's in the heart of downtown, which one day would be designated a Minor Basilica by Pope John Paul II. Mexican Catholics, tired of being relegated to the basement of St. Mary's, had recently built their own impressive church. There was one synagogue. The black Baptist churches were all in South Phoenix, the poor side of town.
From eight in the morning until eight at night, these places of worship were filled with parishioners thanking the Lord the depression hadn't hit here as hard as elsewhere.
Phoenix would feel the depression less than most American cities, would recover far quicker. The vast majority hadn't invested in the stock market—"speculation" was still considered a dirty word in these conservative parts—and the crash was so inconsequential to this community the local papers gave it little attention. Those with jobs were careful to keep them. There wouldn't be any raises; there'd be lots of pay cuts. But if belts were tightened, you could make out. Some found the imposed austerity good for the soul. As one local observer put it at the time, "Everybody has 'shortened sail,' in good nautical fashion, to meet the gale and as it lessens it won't hurt us to find ourselves wasting less, expecting less, needing less."
By October 1931, Phoenix was learning it couldn't just take care of its own and ignore the economic disaster that had hit so hard almost everywhere else. Many of these churches had already started relief funds and services for the thousands of "transients and hoboes" who came to Phoenix, hoping at the best for work, at the least for relief from winter cold. Some were Arizona copper miners thrown out of work when the state's chief export became worthless. Others came from across the nation. Local public and private welfare funds would be exhausted by 1932 and proud, independent Arizona would be forced to turn to the federal government for help.
But on this Sunday, that thought was still considered "socialistic." Arizona didn't like federal intervention and it didn't like outsiders. Its Community Chest leader had said just the week before that he didn't mind taking care of Phoenicians down on their luck, but "it is not within the province of the Community Chest to attempt to provide for the shiftless and unwanted from other states." Governor George W. P. Hunt would soon issue the same warning as the state's official stance on charity.
For outsiders looking in, Phoenix lived up to its "oasis" PR. Although it sat in the Sonoran desert, it was green and lush. Cottonwood trees were so thick on some streets they almost formed a wall. Elm trees created a green canopy over Central Avenue, the major north-south thoroughfare. Towering palms gave a tropical look. Rose gardens were found everywhere, mostly for personal satisfaction, although the Chamber of Commerce had once launched a campaign to challenge Pasadena, California, as the rose capital of the country. A network of water canals laid out centuries earlier by Indians who mysteriously vanished were still the basic network for delivering water throughout the area. That they doubled as swimming holes for youngsters was an added benefit. There was only one genuine Victorian home in the entire town, but many that were considered grand.
Most Anglo families lived in single-family detached houses with generous front and back yards. The crowded tenements of the East were unknown here; so were the cookie-cutter subdivisions that would one day dominate Phoenix. Stucco over brick was the favorite building material, and most houses would be considered "custom-made" by today's standards. Many had hardwood floors; almost all had fireplaces; a few even had basements, although that would never catch on. Almost everyone had a front porch, or at least a sleeping porch, where the night breezes provided relief from the summer heat.
On this typical Sunday, families gathered for a large dinner after church and then spent part of the afternoon reading the thickest paper of the week. The Arizona Republic, billing itself as "the State's Greatest Newspaper," was reporting that "Scarface" Al Capone had been convicted on five counts of tax evasion in Chicago. As the paper had been noting all week, Thomas Edison's health continued to fail and now doctors in West Orange, New Jersey, were saying the eighty-four-year-old inventor could die at any moment. Wire service photos showed Helen Keller visiting blind World War I veterans in France. President Herbert Hoover was bragging that he practiced the cost cutting he preached: The White House executive offices had spent only $113,694 in the first quarter of the fiscal year, down over $68,000 from the comparable quarter in 1930.
Closer to home, a front-page story reported that nineteen-year-old Jack West had been charged with murder for the slaying of his girlfriend on Friday night when she returned from a date with a new suitor. It was big news because, as Phoenix always prided itself, murder wasn't an ordinary thing here.
West was in the hospital recovering from the flesh wounds he'd inflicted on himself after killing eighteen-year-old Pearl Mills. The paper reported he had already confessed to county attorney Lloyd J. Andrews, admitting he was jealous because Miss Mills had thwarted his offers of marriage and had started dating someone new.
West recounted how he'd stalked her house on Thursday night and confronted her and the new beau when they returned from a dance. Then Friday night, he hid next to her house for two hours, waiting for her to come home. He chased her into her bedroom and fatally stabbed her once in the neck before turning the knife on himself.
West acknowledged he had been drinking heavily, first wood alcohol and then gin—both long outlawed by Prohibition.
The Jack West case was clearly premeditated, first-degree murder, the county attorney was saying, and the boy could expect to spend eight to ten years behind bars.
One of the most popular columns of the Sunday paper—"Little Stories of Phoenix Daily Life"—kept readers informed of who was going where and doing what. This day, the column was filled with reports of local businessmen heading north for the annual hunting season that had begun Friday morning—limit: one deer, one bear, two turkeys. And they learned that yet another bootlegger had been caught illegally "manufacturing intoxicating liquor."
Arizona had no more luck than the rest of the nation in enforcing the twelve-year-old ban on "demon rum," and although it officially supported the restrictions of the Eighteenth Amendment, liquor was both plentiful and common. Few here would mourn the repeal that was just two years away.
The downtown Fox Theater was advertising one of the first movies ever made in Arizona, The Cisco Kid, while over at the Orpheum Theater, twenty-four-year-old Barbara Stanwyck was starring in a forgettable movie entitled Illicit. The new Nash—"One car today has everything"—was offered by Miller Bros. Motors at from $795 to $2,025. "Correct hat styles for miss and matron" were on sale for $1.94. Men's dress shoes sold for $3.95. A five-pound ham cost 85¢. Cabbage was 4¢ a pound.
* * *
But this was no ordinary day for Winnie Ruth McKinnell Judd.
The twenty-six-year-old daughter of a minister didn't spend her morning at the Free Methodist Church, as she had done every Sunday of her life growing up in Darlington, Indiana. Actually, her church attendance had been spotty since she'd left home seven years earlier, the bride of a seemingly successful doctor twenty-two years her senior. But she didn't admit that in the long letters she regularly wrote home to her parents, who were finally thinking of retirement. It wasn't the only omission. Her letters were always cheery, always filled with promise that the setbacks would be overcome.
Dr. William C. Judd hadn't turned out to be the kind of provider his wife and her family had every right to expect. Forget the image of a nice family doctor who settled into a community, supplying his wife with a home and respectability. Dr. Judd instead found work as the doctor for American mining interests in Mexico, working for little money and whatever accommodations the firm provided. He changed locations often, never held any post for long. Eventually even these second-rate jobs disappeared for him. Ruth was skilled at explaining it all away without once letting on to the parents she adored that her husband couldn't keep a position because he was addicted to narcotics. It wasn't hard to make them believe the tough times were just what everyone else was experiencing in this depression. Most of the time, she believed it herself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Trunk Murderess by Jana Bommersbach Copyright © 1992 by Jana Bommersbach. Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
