SING SING PRISON, OSSINING, NY — The woman they called “Ruthless Ruth” is dead. Ruth Snyder, 33, who conspired with her corset-salesman lover to bludgeon her husband to death in their Queens Village home, was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison at 11:06 tonight. But the true horror of this night will not end with her death.
A photograph exists. Against all prison regulations, against every wall of security and protocol, a camera captured the precise moment her body convulsed with 2,000 volts of electricity. And that image has already reached the front pages of tomorrow’s newspapers.
The execution of Ruth Snyder was never going to be an ordinary 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. She was the first woman put to death in New York’s electric chair since 1899. She was the first woman sentenced to die in the state in nearly three decades.
And she was, in the words of the tabloids that chronicled her every move, a “granite woman,” a “blonde fiend,” a “vampire” whose sexual hold over a weak-willed man drove them both to murder. Tonight, the sensationalism reached its inevitable and grotesque conclusion. As her body shook and jerked against the leather straps, a small camera strapped to the ankle of a Chicago Tribune photographer captured the image that will define this case for as long as anyone remembers it.
The photograph is grainy. It is the work of a reporter named Tom Howard, who had hidden the camera in his trouser leg, the lens peeking through a buttonhole he had cut in the fabric. He pressed the shutter release he had run down his sleeve just as the current surged through Ruth Snyder’s body.
The resulting picture shows a woman strapped to the chair, her face obscured by a black leather mask, her body contorted by the force of the electricity. It is not a pleasant image. It is not meant to be.
It is, perhaps, the most gruesome photograph ever printed on the front page of an American newspaper.
This moment has been building for nearly a year. The story began, as so many of these stories do, with a marriage gone wrong. Albert Snyder was an art editor for Motor Boating magazine, a man who loved the sea and the outdoors.
He was 32 when he met Ruth Brown, a 19-year-old telephone operator with blond hair and mischievous blue eyes. She was a self-described “self-respecting girl” who refused his advances until he proposed marriage. He agreed to change his Germanic surname from Schneider to the more American-sounding Snyder.
They married in 1915. It was a mistake from the start.
Albert still mourned his first fiancée, a woman named Jessie Guishard who had died of pneumonia before they could marry. He wore a tiepin with her initials. He named his sailboat after her.
And in the living room of their Queens Village home, he hung a large portrait of the dead woman. Ruth grew to hate that portrait. She removed it repeatedly.
Albert forced her to rehang it every time. The marriage deteriorated further after the birth of their daughter, Lorraine, in 1918. Albert did not want children.
He complained that childbirth had ruined his wife’s figure.
By 1925, Ruth was attending parties without her husband, earning the nickname “Gay Tommy” from her friends. At a Swedish restaurant called Henry’s, she was introduced to a slender, bespectacled corset salesman named Judd Gray. He was 32 years old, a married father, a churchgoing member of the Elks, and, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary man.
He was also a “mama’s boy” who called Ruth “Mommy” and “Mama” during their 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. They met regularly at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where they registered as Mr. and Mrs.
Gray and kept a suitcase stocked with pajamas, brushes, cards, and condoms.
Over time, their talk turned to murder. The two would blame each other in the aftermath, but the plot that emerged is undisputed: Gray purchased chloroform, a sash weight, and picture wire on a trip to Kingston. He delivered the items to Ruth with instructions to 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 her husband’s drink so he could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him.
On the night of March 20, 1927, Gray slipped through an unlocked side door of the Snyder home while Albert, Ruth, and Lorraine were playing bridge at a neighbor’s house. When the family returned, Ruth put her daughter to bed and met her lover in the guest bedroom.
What happened next was a brutal, bungled struggle. Albert Snyder did not die easily. He woke and fought for his life against two assailants.
Gray struck him with the sash weight. Ruth struck him too. They tried chloroform.
They tied his hands with a towel. They tied his feet with a necktie. And finally, Ruth Snyder wound picture wire around her husband’s throat and pulled until he stopped breathing.
Then they staged the scene to look like a burglary, scattering furniture and leaving a scrap of Italian newspaper as a false clue. They tied Ruth to a chair and placed cheesecloth in her mouth.
The ruse lasted less than a day. Police arrived the next morning after little Lorraine ran to a neighbor’s home crying that her father was dead and her mother tied up. Detectives found the scene suspicious almost immediately.
A burglary, they noted, would have taken the jewelry that was found hidden under the mattress. A burglary would not have left a check for $200 made out to Judd Gray in the dead man’s bankbook. A burglary would not have left a letter from Gray addressed to “Hello Mama” arriving in the morning mail.
Within days, both lovers were in custody, each confessing and each blaming the other.
The trial was a circus. Spectators packed the courtroom to see Ruth, dressed all in black, and Judd, in his three-piece pinstriped suit. The prosecution called them equal co-conspirators.
Ruth’s lawyers portrayed her as a victim of her husband’s obsession with a dead woman and Gray’s silver tongue. Gray’s lawyers portrayed him as a weak man utterly dominated by a sexually insatiable woman, a “poisonous serpent” who drew him into her coils. Both defenses invoked gender stereotypes to save their clients.
Neither worked. On May 13, 1927, the jury found both guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced both to death.
Ruth spent her final months in the death house at Sing Sing, converting to Catholicism and writing her memoirs for the New York Daily Mirror. She warned other women against adultery, writing that she wished they could “see what I done for myself through sinning.” Her mind unraveled as the execution date approached.
She received 164 offers of marriage from men who hoped for a reprieve. No reprieve came. Gov.
Alfred Smith, a Catholic himself, was unlikely to extend mercy to a co-religionist and face charges of favoritism.
At Sing Sing, tradition holds that the most distressed prisoner goes first. Ruth Snyder was led to the electric chair at 11:06 tonight, supported by matrons, her legs failing beneath her. She screamed “Jesus have mercy on me” when she saw the chair.
As the black mask was placed over her face, she prayed for her executioners: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” Then the current hit her. And Tom Howard’s hidden camera caught it all.
Judd Gray followed at 11:16, walking to the chair with sweat pouring down his ghost-white face, reciting the Beatitudes until the electricity silenced him.
The photograph has already been wired across the country. It will greet millions of Americans with their morning coffee, an image of death so raw and so uninvited that it will reignite the debate over capital punishment for years to come. Some will call it journalism.
Others will call it an obscenity. But no one who sees it will forget it. Ruth Snyder, the woman who plotted to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her husband so she could collect $90,000 in insurance money and live happily with her lover, is gone.
But her image, seized in the final seconds of her life, will live forever. This is the first photograph of an execution by electric chair in American history. It is a moment no one asked for, but now that it exists, it cannot be unseen.
