The truck murderess

Winnie Ruth Judd

Jealousy is all too easily disguised behind an innocent face like the face of a passenger on the train to Los Angeles in 1931. She was beautiful, she was sweet, she was pleasant, she was nice she was kind of everything, you'd think a little minister's daughter would be. Her name is Winnie Ruth Judd, she arrives in a new city with a few pennies in her pocket and a suitcase full of secrets. Then, they start discovering that the trunk is bleeding. When the trunk is opened, America will be left reeling. This is the biggest sensational case in the entire country. Papers all over the nation are writing about this unbelievable situation. The trunk, the bloody trunk. I mean who is this woman, who is this enigma, who is this trunk murderess. It was frantic, no one knows the tale of Winnie Ruth Judd, better than writer Jana.

She had every right to believe she would have a white picket fence, and a nice little life. That's not the way it turned out. Phoenix Arizona, one night in 1931. Roommates, Agnes Anne Leroi and Hedvig Samuelson are in the mood to entertain tonight. Their guests include 26 year old Winnie Ruth Judd. She was one of the young ladies around town, who was a medical secretary and became involved with some very influential political people. In Arizona Winnie is having an affair with married businessman Jack Halloran. They called him happy jack and he was I guess the man about town maybe a playboy. Jack is well-connected in Phoenix and likes to mix business with pleasure. Jack Halloran was a tall good-looking Irish guy who could take his booze and his women in great big doses. He was also a lumbermen he owned a Lumber Company in town, he was on the Chamber of Commerce, he was on all the city commissions. This was a dandy man, a handsome as can be and he liked to party.

However, Winnie isn't the only one with eyes for Jack Halloran and apparently all three of these women were crazy about this guy. They all were trying to wheel themselves into the best position. There was a disagreement between these three young ladies probably over the affections of Jack Halloran. It's a disagreement that will turn deadly. Jealousy is the most common motivator of murder. Criminal profiler Candice DeLong has seen envy explode into homicide all too often. Jealousy can drive people to violent extremes, because it cuts them to their core and it hurts, and the only way the person can stop the pain is to destroy their rival. The next night Winnie pays the girls a visit on a Friday night, it was a very hot Friday night, unseasonally warned. When she had gone over to have dinner with Anne and Sammy, their friendship has soured. They start fighting and they're fighting over Jack.

They were going on and on, this incredible verbal battle and at that point everything got very deadly. Sammy tried to shoot me and when she grapples with her and they struggle and the gun goes off Winnie is shot in the hand. She grabs the gun and in the course of that she actually shoots Sam and when she says that she took the gun and shot it and realized that her two friends were dead. Winnie Judd has suddenly become a murderer. What happens next will brand her a monster. Phoenix Arizona 1931. The lives of two women have ended tonight and the life of a third has changed forever. Her friends are dead at the end of a matter of five minutes of going in to talk to them. They're dead, 26 year-old Winnie Ruth Judd has killed her friends in an argument over a man. Now, her thoughts turn to the problem of what to do with their bodies.

Union Station Phoenix, a pretty passenger boards the train for Los Angeles. She checks the luggage. Gets on the train. She only has a few pennies for a tip, for the porter. She obviously has no money. She can barely afford the ticket to LA. Winnie Judd has spent all night packing in a desperate attempt to conceal her crimes. The police surmise that she cut the bodies up and put them in trunks. She aims to dump the bodies in the Pacific Ocean when he arrives on the train. All day and all into the next night to Los Angeles. She gets there and the trucks are unloaded, her plan is about to come undone. The smell would have been overwhelming. Now, the big thing here is that those bodies were cut up, particularly when there is a cut through the abdomen, when a loop of bowel is severed, all the bacteria that is present in that bowel is immediately out very rapidly. So the whole process of putrefaction and decomposition is gonna proceed at a much more rapid rate.

Mr. Danza here is this trunk that's bleeding and the bad guy thinks it's contraband deer meat. She asked you a couple of questions, is this your luggage? Yes. Because apparently that was a big smuggling issue between Arizona and California in those days and he wants the trunk open. Winnie knows her secret is seeping out. She leaves never to return. Eventually they forced open the bag. He sees a woman's head. The police catch Winnie Ruth Judd a week later, convicted of murder she's confined to a mental hospital for the next 40 years. Some believe justice has been served, others are not so sure. There was a distinct effort to make sure this woman was convicted and put away. They called her the truck murderess, they called her the butcher, they said she was a cold-blooded killer. She'd cut up her best friend, they gave her one of the longest sentences in the history of the country, 38 years 11 months and 22 days.