1927 headline display newspaper RUTH SNYDER to DIE in ELECTRIC CHAIR for MURDER

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1927 headline display newspaper RUTH SNYDER to DIE in ELECTRIC CHAIR for MURDER - inv # 1H-209SEE PHOTO----- COMPLETE, ORIGINAL NEWSPAPER, the Baltimore News (MD) dated Jan 7, 1928.This newspaper contains a prominent bold banner headline (on the first 3 pages) and many photos with news that RUTH SNYDER (and her co-conspirator lover Judd Gray) were to DIE in the SING SING ELECTRIC CHAIR for the murder of her husband .Great display newspaper on the Ruth Snyder / Judd Gray murder sentence, a major love triangle / murder case of the 1920's.Ruth Brown Snyder (March 27, 1895 -- January 12, 1928) was an American murderer . Her execution , in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison , for the murder of her husband, Albert, was captured in a well-known photograph.In 1925, Snyder, a housewife from Queens Village, Queens , New York City , began an affair with Henry Judd Gray, a married corset salesman. She then began to plan the murder of her husband, enlisting the help of her new lover, though he appeared to be very reluctant. Her distaste for her husband apparently began when he insisted on hanging a picture of his late fiancée, Jessie Guishard, on the wall of their first home, and also named his boat after her. Guishard, whom Albert described to Ruth as "the finest woman I have ever met," had been dead for 10 years.According to Judd Gray, Ruth had made at least seven attempts to kill her husband, all of which he survived. On March 20, 1927, the couple garrotted Albert Snyder and stuffed his nose full of chloroform -soaked rags, then staged his death as part of a burglary. Detectives at the scene noted that the burglar left little evidence of breaking into the house; moreover, that the behavior of Mrs. Snyder was inconsistent with her story of a terrorized wife witnessing her husband being killed.Then, the police found the property Ruth claimed had been stolen--still in the house, but hidden. A breakthrough came when a detective found a paper with the letters "J.G." on it (it was a memento Albert Snyder had kept from former love Jessie Guishard), and asked Ruth about it. A flustered Ruth's mind immediately turned to her lover, whose initials were also "J.G.," and she asked the detective what Judd Gray had to do with this. It was the first time Gray had been mentioned, and the police were instantly suspicious. Gray was found upstate, in Syracuse . He claimed he had been there all night, but eventually it turned out a friend of his had created an alibi, setting up Gray's room at a hotel. Gray proved far more forthcoming than Ruth about his actions. He was caught and returned to Jamaica, Queens and charged along with Ruth Snyder. ( Dorothy Parker told Oscar Levant that Gray tried to escape the police by taking a taxi from Manhattan to Long Island , which Levant noted was "quite a long trip." According to Parker, in order "not to attract attention, he gave the driver a ten-cent tip.")Snyder was imprisoned at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York , about 30 miles north of New York City. Her prison cell there would in the future also be used to hold Eva Coo and "Lonely Hearts killer" Martha Beck .The trial at the Long Island City Courthouse was covered by such figures as Peggy Hopkins Joyce , Mary Roberts Rinehart , Aimee Semple McPherson , D. W. Griffith , Damon Runyon , Will Durant and, a year before her own death from cancer , Nora Bayes . Runyon disparaged the crime's status as a clever attempt at a murder--he nicknamed it "the dumb-bell murder case" because "it was so dumb!"Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray turned on each other, contending the other was responsible for killing Albert Snyder; both were convicted and sentenced to death . Snyder became the first woman executed in Sing Sing since 1899. She went to the electric chair only moments before her former lover. Her execution (by " State Electrician " Robert G. Elliott ) was caught on film, by a photograph of her as the electricity was running through her body, with the aid of a miniature plate camera custom-strapped to the ankle of Tom Howard , a Chicag... read more

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