Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray were tried together in Queens in the spring of 1927 for the murder of her husband, Albert Snyder, in Queens Village on March 20 of that year. Both had admitted to police that they took part in a plan against him, and both spent the trial insisting that the other had done the killing. The jury convicted them both. Each was sentenced to death, the appeal to the state's highest court failed, the governor of New York refused them clemency two days before the date set, and on January 12, 1928, both were executed at Ossining.
The trial drew crowds that overflowed the Queens courthouse, and the case's hold on the public outlasted the defendants by decades.
She was born Ruth Brown in Manhattan in 1895. By the 1920s she was living in Queens Village, a district in eastern Queens.
Henry Judd Gray lived in East Orange, New Jersey. He traveled for a living, selling corsets for a manufacturer, and in East Orange he had the standing of a model citizen. He taught Sunday school and belonged to a country club and to the Elks.
Money was the thread the prosecution followed from the start. Three policies had been written on her husband's life, and together they would have paid her about $100,000. He did not know he held them. She paid the premiums herself, quietly.
The largest of the three, for $48,000, carried a double-indemnity clause, which paid extra in the event of a violent death.
Her husband died in Queens Village in the early hours of Sunday, March 20, 1927. It was Ruth Snyder who first gave police an account of what had happened, and it described an intruder, a stranger to the family.
The detectives who came that morning did not believe her for long. Her manner did not fit the story she told, and the details of her account did not hold together. Before long the inquiry had stopped looking for a stranger and was looking at her.
Under questioning she was asked about a man named Gray, and her own answer drew him into the case. Police questioned her through a day and a night, and Gray was traced to Syracuse, in upstate New York, where he was taken into custody.
His first answer was that he had been in Syracuse the whole night, and he had a hotel room to show for it. The room had been arranged for him by a friend, and the account did not survive the journey south. He was brought back to Jamaica, in Queens, and there he made his own statement.
Each now admitted joining in a plan against her husband. Each named the other as the one who had carried it out. Both were charged with his murder.
The two were indicted together and tried together at the Queens courthouse in Long Island City in the spring of 1927. A justice of the state Supreme Court presided. Thousands of would-be spectators were turned away at the doors over the course of the trial. Under New York law at the time, only men could sit on a jury, and the jurors who heard the case were men.
The defenses were built against each other. Gray's lawyers first raised the question of his sanity. Four psychiatric examiners who assessed him found him sane, and his defense turned instead to the claim that he had been dominated by his co-defendant. Ruth Snyder's lawyers argued that Gray had pressed her for money and had proposed the plan himself, and that she had tried to talk him out of it.
In a joint trial, each defendant's case became an accusation of the other. Ruth Snyder's statements to police had placed the killing on Gray. Gray took the stand late in the trial, wept as he testified, and swore that she had been the one who killed her husband.
Insurance on her husband's life was the motive the prosecution laid before the jury. Outside the courtroom, an informal panel of newspaper writers, six women and six men, reached its own verdict against her.
The jury found both defendants guilty of murder. In May 1927 the court sentenced Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray to death. She broke down when the sentence was pronounced. He received his in silence.
Both were taken to the state prison at Ossining to await the date the court had set.
Both convictions were carried to the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. By the last week of November the appeal had failed, and both judgments of death stood.
With the courts finished, the power to spare them rested with the governor alone. Applications for executive clemency were made on behalf of both. On January 10, 1928, the governor denied clemency to both.
Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray were executed at Ossining on January 12, 1928. She was 32. She was the first woman executed at the Ossining prison since 1899.
The central dispute of the case was never settled in open court in a way both defendants accepted. Each confessed to conspiring and each, to the end of the trial, said the other had done the killing. The jury's verdict made both responsible for murder without resolving which of their two accounts of the night was true.
Ruth Snyder's claims that Gray had first proposed the plan, and that she had tried to stop it, rest on her own statements. Gray's claim that he had been dominated by her rests on his. Neither claim was tested beyond the jury's verdict against both.
1895: Ruth Brown is born in Manhattan.
March 20, 1927: Her husband dies in Queens Village, Queens.
March 1927: Ruth Snyder is questioned by police and makes a statement to police; Henry Judd Gray is taken into custody in Syracuse and returned to Queens; both are charged with murder.
Spring 1927: Joint trial before a justice of the Supreme Court in Long Island City.
May 1927: Both are found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
November 1927: The appeal to the New York Court of Appeals fails and both judgments stand.
January 10, 1928: The governor of New York denies executive clemency to both.
January 12, 1928: Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray are executed at Ossining.