January 12, 1928—Her trial was sensational, so why
should her execution have been any different? And so, Ruth Brown Snyder—having washed down Chicken Parmesan with pasta Alfredo,
ice cream, two milkshakes, and a 12-pack of grape soda—was executed after her
lover, weak-willed corset salesman Henry Judd Gray, for their part in the murder of Snyder’s husband. This first
execution of a woman in New York’s Sing Sing in nearly 30 years was recorded on
film by a reporter, who covertly shot it with a miniature camera taped to his
ankle, with the indelible image of the woman strapped in the electric chair with a mask over her face displayed the next day for readers of the New York Daily News.
At another, earlier time, authorities might have
hesitated about executing a mother of a young child. But this 32-year-old Queens
housewife was a brassy, curvy blonde given to dancing and taking rooms for
afternoon sex at the Waldorf during Prohibition while her husband stayed home
minding their daughter. In short, in the court of public opinion, she was not just a flapper, but a flapper
who, given her age and way of life, should have known better. She had to be
punished, and was, for convincing Gray to kill her husband, Albert Snyder, the editor of Motor Boating Magazine (where she had
once worked as his secretary). The details--coming home late with her husband on the night of the March 1927 killing, having sex with her lover while her husband slept, then beating Albert with a dumbbell herself when Gray botched his first attempt at the hit--only increased animosity toward her.
The Snyder-Gray murder might have ended as simply an
entry in an encyclopedia of crime, except that two literary friends were
inspired by the case to write two of their more celebrated works. H.L. Mencken,
the cynical editor of The American
Mercury and columnist at the Baltimore
Sun, took the occasion of a review of Doomed Ship, Gray's posthumously published memoir, to draw ironic moral lessons from the case of the "Putty Man":
“Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the
virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play
with it and when to let it alone. Run a boy through a Presbyterian
Sunday-school and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life, for
once he slips he is ready for anything.”
Mencken’s column on the case was short, and it departed from his
usual subjects—politics, literature, music—but it went on to become among his
most appreciated works. One of his acolytes at the Sun and the Mercury,
James M. Cain, even helped create an entire literary genre when he was inspired
by the case to write Double Indemnity
(1936). In the pioneering example of roman noir, or hard-boiled crime fiction, he incorporated one of the most breathlessly
reported facts about the case—that Snyder took out personal injury insurance on
her husband for $50,000 and double indemnity in case of death—wove it into Cain’s
own personal knowledge both of selling insurance in his younger days and of
clandestine affairs, and produced a fast-moving novel of suspense that the public—and Hollywood—snapped up.
Billy Wilder’s 1944 adaptation of the novel is one
of the foundations of film noir, and the element that audiences found so
intriguing, just as tabloid readers had done more than a decade earlier—a femme
fatale leading a clueless lover to his destruction—would be incorporated down the years in
other films such as Body Heat and The Last Seduction.
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