Gertrude Friedman had lived and worked at 330 Kaighn Avenue in Camden, New Jersey, for more than forty years, in rooms that served as both her apartment and her linoleum shop. She was fifty-eight. In September 1969 she was attacked there, beaten and raped, and her throat was cut. On September 11 the police arrested a thirty-eight-year-old junkyard laborer, Leroy Snyder, known as Duke, and charged him with her murder.
He was born in Camden on February 13, 1931, the fifth of seven children. The family came apart in the late 1930s, and he and his brothers were raised in several places, with grandparents and in institutions, before returning to Camden in the mid-1940s. In December 1949, at eighteen, he tried to strangle a woman with a clothesline and was jailed briefly; he was jailed again, for four years, after threatening two young women with rape. In 1969 he was on parole after a conviction for armed robbery.
He was held without bail. On July 2, 1970, still in custody, he was indicted for six more killings in the city, all committed between February 14 and September 8, 1969. The seven dead were six women and one man, and most of them were friends or acquaintances of his. All had been beaten or stabbed to death, and two of the women had been raped. The names of the other six are not given in the accounts consulted.
On July 10, 1970 he confessed to all seven. He said robbery was the motive in six of them and that he could not remember why he had killed the seventh. He pleaded no defense to seven counts of homicide, which under New Jersey law as it then stood meant the state could not seek the death penalty.
On July 16, 1970 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Local Camden sources describe three consecutive life terms that required him to serve forty-three and a half years before he could be considered for parole; other accounts say six life sentences. The judge, citing a court-ordered psychiatric report, called him a malignant psychopath and a threat to society and said he hoped Snyder would never be released.
He never was. He died in New Jersey State Prison at Trenton on October 1, 2001, at seventy, after thirty-two years in custody.