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Reason First: The Ruthless Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray

Were these murderers bound by love or lust or just irrationality and purposelessness?

By Skyler SaundersPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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The fascination with the cases of murder will forever inspire painters, playewrights, novelists, screenwriters, and non-fiction authors. In a case like Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, the two culprits would inspire all of these artists and writers to paint the grim picture of a sour marriage and a forbidden tryst.

On seven occasions, Ruth Snyder had tried to kill her husband. One episode saw him waking up to the smell of gas like a sickly sweet perfume enveloping him. Despite the pungency and the power of the gas, Albert Snyder survived this attempt on his life. Other incidents involved poison but he kept going despite the attacks.

On Sunday March 20, 1927, Ruth and Gray would hatch the intricate plot to dispatch Snyder. The pair forced chloroform-soaked rags up his nose. They garrotted Snyder as he struggled to gasp for every bit of air. This time he perished.

Investigators quickly found that Ruth and Gray had staged the setting to look like a robbery. Gray even bound Ruth to make the appearance that she was a victim. Soon, the law enforcement officials would find items around the house that Ruth claimed had been stolen.

Before this all took place, Snyder took out life insurance policies that would equal to over a million dollars in modern money. Ruth’s ruthlessness spilled out into reality when she had made this decision. Her viciousness against her husband led the authorities to find both Ruth and Gray guilty of murder. They experienced the electric chair at Sing Sing in upstate New York on January 12, 1928.

This whole affair points to the unreason of the two murderers. By engaging in a relationship behind Snyder’s back stood as immoral but not illegal. Murdering him sealed their fate as two immoral and criminal persons.

Ruth has been immortalized on page, stage and screen. Her awful nature is emphasized, but what about her purposelessness? She could have made a happy home with Snyder. Instead she constructed her own nightmare and her last place to breathe remained in a death-inducing machine.

Gray remained a flimsy sort of male. He just went along with whatever plans that Ruth had concocted in her mind. The absence of a spine in Gray only emboldened Ruth. Her disgusting determination will always be analyzed by criminologists. Her wickedness will serve as the basis for investigating future cases where the woman murders her husband.

She will be the lightning rod to always be the example of how a woman doesn’t always just “snap.” Sometimes, over time the dissatisfied wife will do her damndest to see her spouse six feet deep. Like a killer in plain sight, one that Snyder woke up to all those years, Ruth played the role of the unhappy wife. But did that mean that she should have taken Snyder’s life? Of course not. Though not as widely received and recognized as it is today, divorce courts would have been at the couple’s disposal.

Ruth cast a long shadow on the idea of man and wife. Under this shadiness, Ruth engendered a sense that she could control the fate of Snyder. While she took his life, obviously she wouldn’t have to worry about living very long outside of a prison cell or of feeling course electrodes, in the end, pass through her body until she died.

With a proper philosophy and an appreciation for human life, Ruth could have lived a happy life with Gray. They could have lived out a life of romantic bliss that Ruth could not find in Snyder.

All of the energy in the evil that the two committed could’ve been applied to their disastrous love life. Sadly, this did not occur.

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About the Creator

Skyler Saunders

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