Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  Ruth crawled her way upstairs and started banging on her daughter’s door. Lorraine opened her bedroom door to find her mother on her knees on the floor with a gag in her mouth, trying to speak. She removed the gag and Ruth told her to go as fast as she could to the neighbour’s house so that they could alert the police.

  Ruth and Judd thought they were home and dry and truly believed they had carried out the perfect crime. However, the police, who were used to visiting the scene of a burglary, were not convinced and said that something didn’t look quite right. Ruth had told the detective that she had been hit over the head by a tall man with a dark moustache and had been rendered unconscious, and yet there was no bump or even a bruise to show that she had been attacked. Her wrists and ankles had been tied so loosely that there wasn’t even a mark and, on top of that, there were no visible signs of forced entry which meant that the intruder must have had a key, or been let in by someone. Foolishly, the items which Ruth had said were missing, were found hidden under a mattress in one of the bedrooms and the sash weight, which was obviously the murder weapon, lay in the basement covered in blood. One thing the police did conceal from Ruth, however, was the fact that they had found a tie pin bearing the initials ‘J. G.’ on the floor of the room where Albert had been murdered. When the police looked in Ruth’s address book they found an entry under ‘G’ for a man named Judd Gray and the investigators asked her, ‘What about Judd Gray?’

  Ruth was shocked at hearing his name and stupidly replied, ‘Has he confessed?’ The police, who up until that moment had never heard of the man, bluffed and said that he had. As soon as she heard that, Ruth started talking and confessed, blaming everything on Judd. She admitted to helping Judd make the arrangements and ransack the house, but she said that he had been the one to wield the sash weight. Her confession even led the police to the hotel room in Syracuse, where they found Judd Gray sitting on the bed still a little worse for drink.

  When the police arrived to arrest him, Judd laughed at the accusation and said, ‘Ridiculous.’ However, he had been careless and thrown a train ticket into the rubbish bin in his hotel room and, when confronted with the evidence, he broke down and confessed. Just like Ruth he tried to blame everything on his accomplice, saying that he had been totally against killing her husband, but had gone through with it when Ruth had threatened to tell his wife.

  It didn’t take long for the newspapers to pick up on the story and soon the front page of each tabloid carried pictures of Ruth and Judd, along with the full story of their confessions. As the trial commenced Judd’s belief that Ruth had wanted her husband murdered so that they could be together was quashed, as it came to light that she had recently increased Albert’s life insurance policy to $100,000 and had been paying the premiums on the quiet. Ruth and Judd both had separate lawyers to fight on their behalf and throughout the trial they continued to apportion the blame on one another.

  Then it came to light that Ruth had tried to kill her husband on several other occasions. Twice by attempting to asphyxiate him by disconnecting the gas range, almost succeeding when she closed the garage door with the car engine still running and finally by poisoning his whisky – amazingly all without Albert being in the least bit suspicious. When the evidence was being given in court, Ruth sat with her face set in stone. Rudolph Valentino’s widow, reporter Natacha Rambova, wrote of Ruth Snyder: ‘There is lacking in her character that real thing, selflessness. She apparently doesn’t possess it and never will. Her fault is that she has no heart.’

  Ruth and Judd were both found guilty of Albert’s murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Appeals were filed but dismissed and Ruth Snyder was the eighth woman to be executed for murder in New York State. As the current surged through her body at 11.00 p.m. on January 12, 1928, a Daily News photographer uncrossed his legs and triggered a forbidden camera to take an unprecedented picture which appeared in the tabloids the following morning. It was a horrifying and graphic photograph which has become famous over the years, and which set a precedent for future executions whereby anyone entering the death chamber had to be thoroughly searched.

  No one bothered to take a picture of the pathetic figure of Judd Gray who went to his death just six minutes later.

  One footnote to add to this story is that the tie pin found on the bedroom floor bearing the initials ‘J. G.’ was in fact one given to Albert by his beloved Jesse Guishard – nothing to do with Judd Gray whatsoever.

  Dorothea Puente

  Some people will do just about anything for money! In the case of Dorothea Puente, life meandered for her in such a way that she was always impoverished and badly treated, so that she evolved into a criminal and a misandronist – a man-hater. This enabled her to prey on men as a source of income without any sense of remorse for her actions. She made something of a career of it, as she was sixty years of age when she eventually got caught in 1988, so prison became her comfortable retirement home.

  Dorothea was born into an extremely disadvantaged background in California. Her father and mother both died of alcoholism when she was four and six years of age respectively. When they were alive they had abused and neglected her, so that she had had to scrounge food from neighbours to stay alive. The term ‘cotton picking varmint’ might have been invented for her father, for he was indeed a cotton picker and also a good-for-nothing. After a spell in an orphanage she was taken in by some relatives who also lived in California.

  In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Dorothea married, but just when things were looking up, her husband died of a heart attack, leaving her destitute once more. Her solution was to forge some cheques in desperation, but she got caught and sentenced to her first stay in jail. Things weren’t going well, and they were set to get worse upon her release, some six months later. Her only option was a life of prostitution, as she had nothing else to offer by way of skills and qualifications.

  In 1952, she married for the second time, but for worse rather than better. Her new husband was a violent drunk who subjected her to violence for many years. As is so often the case with women of low self-esteem, she chose an aggressive man, mistaking his abuse for machismo and his shame for affection. In 1960, she fell foul of the law again, when she was arrested in a brothel and imprisoned again. No sooner had she been released than she was arrested and imprisoned once more for vagrancy, such was the vicious cycle of her life.

  By the mid-1960s Dorothea had had enough and attempted to cultivate a proper career for herself. She found herself a job working as a nurse’s aid in care homes for the elderly and disabled. She evidently made a success of it as she soon secured herself a position managing a boarding house for the socially disadvantaged. It seems that she had turned her own unfortunate life experiences into assets, in understanding the plight of the people in her charge. However, her mind had already been influenced by the advantages to be had from criminality.

  With her new-found public image of respectability, she realised that she was now in the perfect situation to continue with her wrongdoings unsuspected and unchecked. Her modus operandi was to steal the benefit payments of her boarding house customers. She did this by mothering them, so that they allowed her to look after their finances. She would then encourage them to get drunk and disorderly so that they got arrested and put in jail, and she could pocket the cash.

  Inevitably things got more complicated. When the boarders returned from jail they would make accusations, so Dorothea had to play a shrewd game to keep from being arrested herself. This was when she realised that killing them was the best solution all round. It removed the problem and allowed her to entice new boarders under her motherly wing. Also, they were invariably old with no relations, so no one noticed when they disappeared.

  In 1968, Dorothea took over a care home with sixteen bedrooms in Sacramento, California and got busy. Neighbours noticed that she had taken on a handyman, who would dig holes at all hours of the day and night, both inside and outside of the building. H
e was also seen pouring and levelling concrete pads that seemed to have no purpose. The handyman was a local drunk nicknamed ‘Chief’, to whom Dorothea had given shelter. Then one day, he was never seen again. However, Dorothea was such an innocent-looking and outwardly affable person that the curiosity of the neighbours didn’t develop into suspicion of any unsavoury behaviour, so she was never questioned by police about the matter.

  That didn’t mean that she was immune from run-ins with the law, however. By the mid-1970s Dorothea had taken to chatting up elderly drunks in bars so that she could steal their benefit cheques and cash them in by forging their signatures. The police caught up with her in 1976, arresting her on over thirty counts of fraud. Nevertheless, she continued to do the same thing as soon as she was free to do so. She was pushing fifty and old habits die hard.

  In the early 1980s Dorothea took an apartment in the same street as the care home. This is when things started to really hot up. A woman called Ruth Monroe began sharing the apartment but was soon found dead from an overdose of painkillers. When the police questioned Dorothea she spun a story that Ruth had taken her own life because she had discovered that her husband, who was evidently estranged to her, was suffering from a terminal illness. The police bought the story, due to her charming front, and the matter was duly treated as suicide.

  Then, in 1982, Dorothea found herself in prison yet again. This time it was for theft. She had drugged a man named Malcolm McKenzie in her apartment and stolen his possessions. He duly went to the police to blow the whistle. While Dorothea was serving her time she developed a relationship by correspondence with a man named Everson Gillmouth. They set up home together immediately following her release, but love soon turned to hate and Dorothea ended his life.

  With his body to dispose of, she hired the services of a carpenter named Ismael Florez to do some work in her apartment. She then asked him to construct a wooden crate, which she apparently wished to use for storage. This was in fact true, the object to be stored being Everson Gillmouth’s corpse, which was why the crate looked rather like a coffin when it was finished. Having managed to hoist the cadaver into the crate and nail the lid down, she then asked Florez to deliver it to a storage depot. He obliged and set off with Dorothea and the crate. En route to the depot, however, Dorothea suddenly decided to jettison their cargo at a fly-tip by the side of the road. She told Florez that the contents were only worthless junk, so it wasn’t worth paying for storage. They dumped the crate and drove away.

  A month or so later, a fisherman noticed the coffin-shaped crate. Upon investigation he noticed the smell of death from within and put two and two together to make four. The police prized the lid off to find a badly decomposed man inside. Despite the material evidence of a murder or homicide, the police failed to identify the man or make any connection with Dorothea Puente. However, Everson Gillmouth’s relatives had been trying to get in touch with him and Dorothea had repeatedly told them that he had fallen too ill to contact them in person.

  Inevitably one thing led to another and the police arrived at Dorothea’s door. Had she told Gillmouth’s relatives that he had left her, then the police might have simply asked a few questions about his possible whereabouts and departed. But Dorothea had made the mistake of inventing his illness. In November 1988, two years after killing Gillmouth, the police discovered a body buried under Dorothea’s lawn. An extended search found a further six bodies and Dorothea found herself charged with murder. She was actually convicted of three murders and began serving two life sentences at the age of sixty.

  Dorothea Puente’s defence was that the men had all tried to rape her. It may have been true, given her relationship history and the way she enticed them in, but her motive was the want of money above all else. It has been claimed by some that the police made little effort to find more bodies following her conviction, because they saw that their work was done and had no incentive to spend police time unearthing the bodies of people who had not been missed in the first place. Consequently, criminologists have estimated that she may have disposed of as many as twenty-five people in total.

  Ruth Ellis

  Were it not for the fact that Ruth Ellis was the fifteenth and last woman to receive capital punishment in Britain, it is doubtful that anyone would know her name. After all, there can’t be many who know the name of the penultimate woman to receive the death penalty – Styllou Christofi – or the one before that – Louisa Merrifield. Ellis was a very petite woman who did her best to imitate the film star looks of Marilyn Monroe. She made the error of falling in love with a man – David Blakely – who turned out to be something of a cad.

  Ruth Neilson was born in Rhyl, in Wales, one of five children. She left school at the age of fifteen to work as a waitress and in 1941, right at the height of the Blitz, the family moved to London. When Ruth was seventeen, she became pregnant by a soldier and gave birth to a son, Andy, in 1944. The father was supportive, offering financial help until he had to return to Canada, leaving Ruth short of money and struggling. She decided to become a nightclub hostess, which paid significantly more than her previous jobs and she managed to support herself and her son until she met forty-one-year-old George Ellis in 1950. Unfortunately for Ruth, George was an alcoholic who became abusive when drunk. The relationship was doomed from the start, with Ruth being possessive and convinced that her husband was having an affair. When Ruth gave birth to Georgina in 1951, George refused to believe it was his and Ruth finally accepted the marriage was over and moved back home.

  In 1953, Ruth became the manager of a drinking club called the Little Club, which was a favourite haunt with racing drivers. It was here that she met David Drummond Moffat Blakely, who was three years her junior. Blakely quickly moved into the flat above the club, despite the fact that Ruth was well aware that he had a reputation as being homosexual.

  Ruth and Blakely had a passionate and stormy relationship which often erupted into jealous fights. They fought over money, which Blakely blew on his playboy lifestyle, and over each other’s affairs. Ruth knew that Blakely had another mistress, while she had an older lover, Desmond Cussen, who hated Blakely with a passion. Fuelled by alcohol, their fights became more and more violent until Blakely caused Ruth to miscarry by punching her in the stomach during one of their frequent rows.

  Blakely was a motor engineer by trade but also had a passion for driving racing cars. Along with some friends Blakely decided to build his own car, The Emperor, which caused further arguments as he spent more and more time away from Ruth. Convinced that Blakely was having an affair with a nanny that his friends had recently employed, in a pique of jealousy she called Cussen and asked if he could pick her up.

  It was Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, and Ruth managed to persuade Cussen to drive her to Hampstead, where she waited outside the Magdala pub where she knew Blakely was drinking with a friend. Blakely came out of the pub at around 9.30 p.m. and Ruth called his name. Blakely chose to ignore her which infuriated Ruth and, taking a .38-calibre revolver out of her handbag, she fired a shot at him. She then followed him round the car and fired a second shot which caused him to collapse on the pavement. Then she stood over him and emptied the remaining four bullets into him as he lay wounded on the ground.

  When they heard the commotion, other drinkers came out of the pub to see what was happening. Ruth, still holding the smoking gun, was arrested by an off-duty policeman by the name of Alan Thompson and taken to Hampstead police station.

  During her interrogation, Ruth remained calm and gave a detailed confession. She appeared at a special hearing at Hampstead Magistrates Court on Easter Monday and was then remanded in custody of Holloway Prison to await her trial.

  At the prison she was kept in the medical wing where she was examined to see if she showed any signs of mental illness. The examining doctors found no evidence and deemed that Ruth Ellis was fit to stand trial.

  Her trial opened on Monday, June 20, 1955, at the Old Bailey in Court No. 1. Showing no signs of rem
orse, Ruth appeared in dock wearing a smart black two-piece suit and a white blouse. She pleaded not guilty and played on the fact that there had been some sort of conspiracy among Blakely’s friends to keep him away from her. When the prosecuting counsel asked her, ‘Mrs Ellis, when you fired that revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?’ she answered quite plainly, ‘It was obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him’.

  The jury retired and, not surprisingly, found Ruth Ellis guilty of murder after deliberating for only twenty-three minutes. To convict a person of murder it is necessary to prove two things – one that the person actually killed the victim and two that they intended to kill the victim. Clearly there was no doubt from Ruth Ellis’s previous answer that she was guilty of both.

  Ruth stood silent and impassive as Mr Justice Havers read out the sentence – death by hanging – to which Ruth replied with a smile, ‘Thank you’.

  The case caused widespread controversy and was no doubt in part responsible for the abolition of the death penalty. Petitions to save her life were turned down and, having spent just three weeks and two days in the condemned suite at Holloway, Ruth Ellis was taken to meet her maker. She was executed by Albert Pierrepoint on July 13, 1955, aged just twenty-eight.

  Although it has often been questioned whether Ruth Ellis deserved to die for her crime, there is no doubt that with the evidence presented to them, the jury had absolutely no option but to find Ruth guilty of murder.

  Sadly, Ruth’s death had many repercussions. Within weeks of her execution, Ruth’s eighteen-year-old sister died suddenly, reportedly from a broken heart. George Ellis, Ruth’s husband, became an alcoholic and hanged himself just three years later. Ruth’s son, Andy, suffered irreparable psychological damage and committed suicide in a rundown bedsit in 1982.