The Snyder-Gray murder, as one crime writer put it, was a "cheap crime involving cheap people". Many considered it the low point in the history of the early 1900's but for those who lived in the thrill-hungry days of the "Roaring '20's", they devoured every sordid detail and made the otherwise mundane personalities of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray into infamous celebrities. In addition to murder, their second greatest crime was simply being stupid.

The events began quietly in 1925 when Ruth Brown Snyder, a discontented Long Island housewife, met a corset salesman named Henry Judd Gray while having lunch in New York. Ruth, 32, was a tall, blonde with solid good looks and a commanding personality. Judd Gray, 34, was short and almost instantly forgettable. He had a cleft chin and thick glasses that gave him a perpetual look of surprise. Despite the fact that they seemed to be polar opposites, sexual attraction flared between the two of them at their first meeting and they soon began a torrid affair. Ruth Snyder's husband, Albert, was the art editor of the magazine Motor Boating and was never home during the day. The adulterous couple only had the Snyder's nine year-old daughter, Lorraine, to contend with and the amorous pair would often meet at the Snyder's home while Lorraine was at school. On other occasions, the little girt would be left in a hotel lobby while her mother and her lover met upstairs. They met as often as possible and seemed unable to get enough of one another.

But Ruth Snyder soon changed from a sex-obsessed housewife to a woman with devious plans. Bored in her loveless marriage, she tried to convince Judd that her husband mistreated her and that he must be killed. Gray objected but Ruth continued to pester him with hints, suggestions and outright demands. She would playfully soften those demands with the terms of endearment that the two of them had created for one another. They often used baby talk in which Ruth was "Momsie" and he was "Bud" or "Lover Boy". Ruth's persistence so unsettled Gray however that he took to drink, consuming huge amounts of Prohibition liquor in an effort to settle his nerves. "Momsie" begged, argued and threatened but "Lover Boy" continued to refuse.

Finally, on Saturday, March 19, 1927 -- Judd gave in. It was a cold, raw day on Long Island and Gray spent most of the day drinking, trying to summon the courage to go through with the murder. He and Ruth had cooked up a plan that had him traveling by train to New York from Syracuse and then by bus to Long Island. When he arrived in Queens Village, where the Snyder's lived, he walked around for an hour, stopping under street lights to take drinks from his flask. It was almost as if he hoped to be spotted and arrested breaking the law. No one paid any attention to him though and finally, he had to enter the Snyder home. He came in through the back door, as he and Ruth had planned. The Snyder family was away at a party and would return late. Judd had promised to hide in a spare room, where Ruth had left a window weight, rubber gloves and chloroform -- all of the tools of murder.

The family returned around 2:00 am and Ruth opened the bedroom door a crack. "Are you in there, Bud, dear?" she whispered. She soon returned wearing only a slip and the two had sex with her husband asleep just down the hallway. Finally, after about an hour, Gray grabbed the window sash weight and Ruth led him to the master bedroom, where Albert Snyder slept with the blankets up over his head. The two of them stood on opposite sides of the bed and then Gray raised the sash weight and brought it down clumsily onto Snyder's head. The weak blow merely glanced off the man's skull and while stunned, he let out a roar and tried to seize his attacker. Judd became terrified and let out a whining scream: "Momsie, Momsie, for God's sake, help!"

Even though the pair believed they had planned well, their "robbery" was far from convincing to experienced police officers. All of the items that Ruth said had been taken by the mysterious burglar were found hidden in the house and detectives began to question her. Surprisingly, she gave it up almost at once and confessed but not surprisingly, she blamed everything on Judd Gray. He was found hours later, hiding in his Syracuse hotel room. He shrieked his innocence and insisted that he was not in New York. When confronted with the train ticket stub that he had carelessly tossed in the trash can of the hotel room though, he broke down and confessed. Like Ruth, he blamed everything on his accomplice.

By the time the case actually went to trial, the two former lovers were at one another's throats, each blaming the other one for the deadly deed. The trial became a media frenzy. Celebrities attended in droves, including mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart; director D.W. Griffith; author Will Durant; evangelists Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson; and many others. Sister Aimee even received a large sum from the New York Evening Graphic to write up a piece on the sordid case. Sister Aimee, who would be involved in a scandal of her own a year later, used her column to encourage young men to say "I want a wife like mother -- not a Red Hot cutie."

Both defendants had separate attorneys arguing for their innocence. Ruth's lawyer stated that her husband "drove love out from the house" by longing after a departed sweetheart. He also said that Gray had tempted her by setting up a $50,000 double indemnity insurance policy on Albert Snyder. She was a loving wife, her attorney insisted, and it was not her fault about the conditions in her home. He then put the "wronged woman" on the stand, wearing a simple black dress. She played the role of the suffering wife, tell of how her husband ignored her most of the time, except when taking her to the occasional movie. It had been she who had read from the Bible to daughter Lorraine and had made sure the little girl attended Sunday School. Her lawyer glossed over the Gray romance and Ruth justified their affair by saying that Judd had also not been happy at home. However, she claimed that it had been "Lover Boy" who had dragged her to speakeasys and night spots, where she had watched him drink himself senseless. She, Ruth swore, rarely ever touched a drink and never, ever smoked. Then she testified that Gray insisted that she take out the heavy insurance policy on her husband. "Once," she told the court, " he even sent me poison and told me to give it to my husband."

At this, the excitable Judd Gray began whispering to his lawyers. A short time later, he also took the witness stand and his attorney described Judd's situation as "the most tragic story that has ever gripped the human heart." The lawyer claimed that Judd was a law-abiding citizen who had been duped and dominated by a "designing, deadly conscienceless, abnormal woman, a human serpent, a human fiend in the disguise of a woman." He then added that  he had been "drawn into this hopeless chasm when reason was gone, mind was gone, manhood was gone and when his mind was weakened by lust and passion."

Judd played the victim when he took the stand, nervously glancing over at his elderly mother, who was sitting in the courtroom next to the actress Nora Bayes, who had come to watch the show. He testified that Ruth had tried to kill her husband several times, once putting knockout drops in his drink and when they failed, trying to gas him. "I told her that she was crazy," Judd said innocently, after testifying about how she had given Albert Snyder poison as a cure for the hiccups. It made the man violently ill instead. "I said to her that it was a hell of a way to cure hiccups," Gray added and told of two other times when Ruth tried to kill Snyder with sleeping powders.

Finally, Judd stated that it had been Ruth who had taken out the insurance policy on Snyder and it had not been his doing, or his idea, at all. He also described how she had struck the death blow on the night of the murder. At this, Ruth began to sob loudly in the courtroom and even the judge glanced in her direction. The jury was out only 98 minutes before coming back with a verdict of "guilty". Both defendants were stunned and even more so when they learned the sentence for their crime was death.

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