Jana Bommersbach - The Trunk Murderess

The Trunk Murderess

The Trunk Murderess

Winnie Ruth Judd

The Truth About an American Crime Legend Revealed at Last

Jana Bommersbach

www.janabommersbach.com

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright 1992 by Jana Bommersbach

First Trade Edition 2003

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003102489

ISBN: 978-1-59058-064-6 Paperback

ISBN: 978-1-61595-266-3 ePub

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Poisoned Pen Press

6962 E. First Ave. Ste. 103

Scottsdale, AZ 85251

www.poisonedpenpress.com

To the special people who shaped my life
and taught me that truth must always be the goal:
my grandmothers, Rose Portner Bommersbach
and the late Magdalena Mary Schlener Peterschick;
my grandfather, the late Leo Bommersbach;
and my wonderful parents, Rudy and Willie Bommersbach.

Contents

October 16, 1931, was a bloody Friday night in Phoenix, Arizona.

In a quiet neighborhood of this quiet small town, nineteen-year-old pharmacy assistant Jack West lay in wait for two hours until his sweetheart came home from a secret date with a new beau. When eighteen-year-old Pearl Mills answered his insistent knocking on her front door, he chased her into her bedroom and stabbed her to death. Then he turned the knife on himself, inflicting a superficial wound.

Just a few blocks away in a simple duplex, twenty-six-year-old medical secretary Winnie Ruth Judd was spending the night, as she often did, with her two best girlfriends. The state of Arizona would charge that on this night, she was there to murderto eliminate her competition for a married man all three women adored. She supposedly waited until her friends were asleep and then shot them to death in their beds. But the world wouldnt know about the deaths of twenty-four-year-old Hedvig Sammy Samuelson and thirty-two-year-old Agnes Anne LeRoi for three days. Not until the horrifying discovery that their bodiesSammys cut into pieceshad been stuffed into steamer trunks and shipped as Winnie Ruth Judds baggage on the train to Los Angeles.

Jack West spent two weeks in the headlines and twenty-three months in prison repaying society before he blended into obscurity.

Winnie Ruth Judd became a household name across America as Arizona made her pay with one of the longest sentences this country has ever seen: thirty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-two days.

This is her story.

Years before the country ever started wondering what happened to Amelia Earhart, it thought it knew everything that happened to Winnie Ruth Judd. Papers from coast to coast covered the gruesome story with the same prominence they gave to the sentencing of Scarface Al Capone and the rise of a young man in Germany named Adolf Hitler. Not since Lizzie Borden had a single name conjured up so much horror.

The Trunk Murderess.

The Tiger Woman.

The Blond Butcher.

Thats how the press labeled her in the thirties, when she was first convicted and sentenced to hang, and then declared insane and saved from the gallows by only seventy-two hours. Thats what they called her in the forties and fifties and sixties as she escaped with great regularityfirst to the horror and then the amusement of the countryfrom the asylum that was her prison. Thats what they called her in 1971 when she was finally paroled, a sixty-six-year-old woman judged safe for society. Thats what they still call her today, a woman nearing ninety who is trying to live out her life quietly.

An open-and-shut case. So everyone thinks. Just as everyone thinks they know the awful things Winnie Ruth Judd did during the bedtime hours of that Friday night in 1931.

They said she was a cold-blooded killer.

They said she hacked up her best friend.

They said she was insane.

They said she acted alone.

Yet to this daynow sixty years after the factquestions remain about just how guilty Winnie Ruth Judd was. Or exactly what she was guilty of doing. Or if she could have possibly done the deed by herself. Or if she ever was insane.

Whispers have persisted all these years that the Winnie Ruth Judd case was really Phoenixs dirty secret.

A fresh investigation finds the rumors are true. It finds the story of Winnie Ruth Judd is really two stories: the one that history records, and what really happened.

But its not just the story of a puzzling crime that still fascinates. Or of extreme punishment. Or, as this investigation reveals, of some of the most bizarre twists ever seen in a murder case. Its the story of a backwater town that would become one of Americas major cities. Its the story of a moment in timewith its social taboos, its hysterical conventionality, and its concentrated political powerwhen this strange story could be orchestrated.

***

I first heard about Winnie Ruth Judd when I moved to Arizona in 1972 to work for the Arizona Republic, the states largest and then most politically powerful newspaper. Arizona history is filled with colorful characters that are part of American folkloreGeronimo, Cochise, Wyatt Earp, Father Kino, Zane Grey. In a morbid way, Winnie Ruth Judd was one of them. She belonged to that tiny sorority of women judged so heinous society said they deserved the ultimate punishment. In Arizona, she was only the third woman on the roster. The first, Dolores Moore, had been executed in 1865; the second, Eva Dugan, was hanged in 1930beheaded actually, in a botched execution that led Arizona to abandon the noose for the gas chamber. It wasnt until 1991 that the state added another woman to the exclusive group, sentencing to death Debra Jean Milke for having her four-year-old son killed on his way to see Santa Claus. The picture is similar across the nation: less than thirty-five women sit on death row today.

But the very first story I heard about Winnie Ruth Judd wasnt about her heinous crime, it was about how she was framed.

Sensational cases have a way of taking on their own lore, especially juicy cases that hark back to a time when the social code was so strict women didnt leave the house without wearing gloves and todays thriving cities were just wide spots along bad roads. Its far easier to imagine something sinister was at work than to believe a young beauty would hack up a rival.

Besides, this case was crammed with social taboos: a totally unacceptable love affair, the threat of deadly and incurable syphilis, snide rumors of lesbianism, outright declarations that these were party girlsthe nice term used in the thirties for prostitutes. Add to that the widespread allegations that one of Phoenixs most prominent businessmen was knee-deep in the crimeallegations widely reported in out-of-state newspapers, excused and dismissed by the press at home. Mix in the mysterious shadow of William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful newspaper publisher for the day, and the intervention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Winnie Ruth Judd case was not just another murder mystery. It was a slice of Arizona and America at a most vulnerable moment: exactly two years after the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, twelve years into the disastrous ban on spirits known as Prohibition, and a time when media excess would be forever defined and remain a constant embarrassment for every journalist who came after.

In the twenty years Ive lived in Phoenix, I have never heard a single person say Winnie Ruth Judd got what she deserved. Instead, Ive heard: She was covering up for somebody important; It was a powerful man who really was responsible, but you know how women were treated in the thirties; If the truth of this ever came out, it would ruin a lot of good ole boys. Every time her name came up, it was inevitably coupled with the question Do you think she really did it?