by Megan Abbott
THE GRAND JURY ultimately requested that the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles commute Mrs. Judd’s death sentence to life imprisonment, claiming it was manslaughter, not premeditated murder. At the same time, the jury indicted Jack Halloran as an accessory to murder.
In a bizarre twist, however, Halloran’s attorney made the case that the state, by putting Mrs. Judd on the stand as a witness, proved a prima facie case of self-defense. Halloran’s lawyer successfully argued that no murder meant Halloran could not be an accomplice either. The judge agreed and Halloran was set free.
Then, despite the grand jury’s findings, the Board of Pardons and Paroles denied any commutation of Mrs. Judd’s sentence.
A mere three days before her scheduled execution, Mrs. Judd was granted a sanity hearing. Declared insane, she escaped the hangman’s noose and was transferred to the Arizona State Hospital for the Insane in Phoenix, which would be her home for the next thirty years. Her husband remained steadfast in his support of his wife until his death in 1945.
Over the years, Mrs. Judd escaped seven times from the hospital, the last escape in 1963 lasting more than six years, during which time she took on a new identity, as Marian Lane, working as a beloved servant for a wealthy San Francisco family.
In 1971, Winnie Ruth Judd was judged sane by medical examiners and released on parole. She died at the age of ninety-three in 1998.
OVER THE YEARS, I’ve returned to the Winnie Ruth Judd case many times. Again and again, I wondered what might have happened to her if those trunks had not been found so quickly, if she had returned to confront her betraying lover, if circumstances had been such that she could have put her survival skills (so in evidence in her multiple escapes) to the test rather than surrender to questionable authorities. After reading Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders (1973) by J. Dwight Dobkins and Robert J. Hendricks and Jana Bommersbach’s The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd (1992) and press coverage of the murders in the Los Angeles Times archives and elsewhere, I began to reimagine Winnie Ruth Judd’s story, with a different final act.
In doing so, I had to make some choices in terms of how much I should deviate from history or, in this case, history, lore and legend and the many blurry spaces in between. After all, the “true story” of what happened between Winnie Ruth Judd, Anne LeRoi, Sammy Samuelson and Jack Halloran on that long-ago October night remains a mystery. There are those who believe Mrs. Judd was responsible for both deaths, pointing to her history of emotional problems. Many believe her self-defense story. Others claim that Halloran murdered both girls, convincing his lover to take the rap for him and promising, with his connections, she would never go to prison. By the time she realized she was being set up, it was too late.
With no definitive answers, I invented my own. I began with the basic foundation of fact and rumor, and navigated an imaginary path forged by the elements of the story that so captivated me, most especially the powder keg at the center of the case: the various attachments, triangles and jealousies between the three women and the one man, all of whom depended, in ways small and large, emotional and economic, on one another.
The characters that emerged bear many surface similarities to their real-life counterparts but are ultimately fictions. Like Marion Seeley, Winnie Ruth Judd was left in Phoenix by her doctor husband, William Judd, whose drug addiction led him to work for a mining company in Mexico. Dr. Seeley’s fate, however, diverges wildly from that of the real-life Dr. Judd’s, although it is inspired by his paternal loyalty to her. Like Louise Mercer, Anne LeRoi was a nurse at the same clinic where Winnie Ruth Judd worked and various details of her employment are the same. Jack Halloran was, like Joe Lanigan, married with children and was a successful businessman and pillar of the community, but the rest is pure fiction. Ginny Hoyt, other than the tuberculosis she shares with Sammy Samuelson, is an invention. Press reports delineating the contents of Miss Samuelson’s diary, however, include excerpts from the poem “The Teak Forest,” which appears at the beginning of Part Four, as well as various song lyrics and verses throughout the novel.
Because we have only Mrs. Judd’s accounts of the murders themselves and because her recollection of Anne LeRoi’s death has always been dim, this novel’s version of those events is heavily imagined. Many of the details leading up to the murders, however, draw extensively from Winnie Ruth Judd’s accounts, from interviews, testimony and her late-in-life conversations with author Jana Bommersbach. For instance, one of the precipitating factors in the women’s fight that Friday night was Anne LeRoi’s and Sammy Samuelson’s anger that Mrs. Judd had invited a new nurse at the clinic out for an evening with Jack Halloran, at Halloran’s suggestion. The accusations the women made (e.g., that the nurse had syphilis) are drawn from Mrs. Judd’s accounts, as is Ginny’s sudden rage.
Finally, the question of how the women’s bodies ended up in those famous trunks that so captivated public attention draws on Mrs. Judd’s account that Mr. Halloran told her Sammy Samuelson’s body had been “operated on.” According to at least one source, the doctor rumored to have carried out the dismemberment appeared at the prison in which Mrs. Judd was being held after her trial, “drunk as a skunk, waving his hat around and yelling he was the only man alive who knew the truth about the Winnie Ruth Judd case.” A few months later, in June 1932, the doctor died of a heart attack.
The story of Winnie Ruth Judd, Anne LeRoi and Sammy Samuelson is actually a hundred stories or more. Researching it, I came upon so many “side” tales, moments large and small, that lingered with me. Moments like this small, haunting story that appears in The Trunk Murderess:
Virginia Fetterer, the daughter of an Arizona legislator, recalled to the author a long-ago New Year’s Eve in the late 1930s when she came upon Happy Jack Halloran, Mrs. Judd’s betraying lover, at the Adams Hotel in downtown Phoenix.
It was a night of jubilation, with street bands, and “everyone wandered around drinking and dancing and visiting with friends in a town where everybody knew everybody.” Ms. Fetterer and her friends approached the Adams Grill, the hotel bar, and Halloran and his friends were coming out:
Somebody asked [Halloran] a question, like if he could take care of a problem. And he was bragging that, sure, he could fix it. Then he said—I can’t recall his exact words, but it was to the effect that if you knew the right people, you could fix anything in this town. He laughed and said that Winnie Ruth was out in the state hospital paying for what he’d done. He was bragging about it. Then, she said, a drunk Jack Halloran staggered away.*
*The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd by Jana Bommersbach, Scottsdale, Ariz.: Poisoned Pen Press, 2003.