The Trunk Murderess Whose Gruesome Crime Captivated a Nation

The oldest murder story ever told isn't about a thief or a soldier. It's about two brothers, a simple farmer named Cain and his brother Abel. When Cain saw Abel receiving a favor he believed he deserved jealousy took root. And the first crime in human history wasn't committed by a stranger. It was an act of intimate, personal betrayal. The 1931 Ruth Judd shared an inseparable sisterhood with her best friends, Anne and Sammy. They worked together, lived together and tried to outrun the same hard times together. But when Ruth's desperate love for a man named Happy Jack felt threatened by Anne, that sisterhood cracked. And according to one later confession, she waited outside their window, letting jealousy guide her hand towards a devastating betrayal of her own. I am Harvigian, and this is Killer Stories. There were two Americas in 1923. The one, Banny and Alcohol, and the one finding increasingly creative ways to ignore that. The 20s were just starting to roar, young women were stepping into jobs, independence, and the kind of trouble your mother absolutely warned you about. When you Ruth McKinnell was 18 and looking forward to really living. As the daughter of a minister she'd grown up in a strict household. She was willing to work hard and it didn't hurt that everybody thought she was beautiful. There were so many possibilities, and then one day Destiny seemed to present itself. Winnie or Ruth, her preferred name, was at work when she glanced up over mounds of paperwork and locked eyes with Dr. William Judd. Sure, he was 23 years older than her, but he was a good man, and they loved each other. When they got married the next year, Ruth went on her first train ride and her first cross-country trip, she even got to travel to Mexico where William fell work. Her marriage began as one big adventure, but it wouldn't always be that way. Eight years later, Ruth is living in Phoenix. It's 1931, two years into the Great Depression, and America has traded its speakeasies for soup lines. To make matters worse, and less fun, prohibition is still an effect, and Ruth is all alone. That's not to say Phoenix is a nice because it's become a hotspot for tourism, especially for the rich crowd looking to play golf all year round. And Ruth is still married to William, but they hardly see each other. When they do, the marriage is, well, as Ruth puts it, repressed. She still has love for her husband, but there are a lot of things putting a strain on the marriage. Like the fact that she stays in Arizona while he moves around looking for work, or that he can't seem to hold down a job, or that he has a morphine addiction. Ugh, yeah, red flags anybody. Despite all this, Ruth puts on a happy face, and she tells people, times are tough. Everybody's struggling to make ends meet. And it makes sense for her to stay in Phoenix. The dry desert air is good for her tuberculosis. It's worth mentioning that tuberculosis was a disease that caused chronic cough and fatigue, but during this time, people learn to manage the symptoms and could live a relatively normal life, plus she never has difficulty finding work. Early on, Ruth lands a gig as a domestic worker for a wealthy family. And that's how she meets Jack Hellerin. And look, Jack's kind of a big deal in Phoenix, okay? He's a real homegrown success story. He's rich, well-connected, handsome, and well-liked. I mean, you don't earn a name like Happy Jack if you're a loser, okay, am I right? He also has a wife and three kids, but that doesn't stop him or Ruth from carrying on a secret affair. For Ruth, Jack is the antidote for her loneliness, and he offers her things she didn't even know she was missing, passion, and fun. She falls madly in love. He does not. And in some ways, he leads her on. He's the kind of guy who makes everybody he talks to feel like the most important person in the world, even when they're not. But Ruth isn't naive. She knows Jack sees lots of other women according to some accounts. She even sets him up with girls on occasion. And Ruth doesn't want to break things off with her own husband either. She just likes her spot as Jack's favorite mistress. She begins to fall apart once she meets her new best friends. In February 1931, Ruth is working at a health clinic when in walks a brand new co-worker. And Leroy. She's a few years older than Ruth, vivacious with personality to boot. And she's interesting. She just moved here all the way from Alaska, oh, okay girl, are you friends with the polar bears and, like, gold nuggets, like what's your story? And's impressive too. As a trained X-ray technician, she's probably the highest paid woman at their job. Ruth clicks with Ann and her best friend and roommate. Her name is Hedwig, Sammy Samuelson, and she met Ann back in Alaska. Like Ruth, Sammy has tuberculosis, so when Sammy got really ill and decided to move to Phoenix and followed along. The three of them become inseparable. Ruth and Ann work together six days a week and Sundays for the girls. They always get together, cook dinner, and listen to all time radio programs, which aren't all time it for them because they're new, because that's when they lift back then. They also love to throw parties for the girlfriends, but especially for wealthy men. Doctors from work, businessmen, country clubbers, playboys, which includes Happy Jack. Because hey, if you can find good booze during prohibition, you're pretty much always invited. Now, many a wise woman has said, "Play is gonna play." So Happy Jack flirts his way through every party, and usually whole wind up with Ruth at the end of the night, but not always. It seems like Ruth tries not to let this get to her, but then he gets a little too comfortable with both of her besties. In the summer of 1931, Ruth and Ann and Sammy fall on hard times, and contracts tuberculosis too, and has to travel home to rest. At the same time, Sammy's illness flares up. She usually relies on Ann to help her get by, but she's out of the picture. So Ruth steps up to care for her. When Ann recuperates and moves back to Phoenix, she gets another nasty surprise. Her job, which her boss promise would be waiting for her, has been given up to someone else. And so angry, she actually threatens to sabotage the X-ray machine, but Ruth talks her out of it. Very well hurt a patient doing that. Instead, Ruth convinces the doctor to bring Ann back on board. Now the trio seems tighter than ever, and they decide Ruth should just move in. I mean, they're always together anyway, so they might as well save money on rent. Why not make life a big gas night? Once they're living together, though, Ruth gets a front row seat to a real shit show. Because now she sees just how much time her boyfriend Jack is really spending with her best friends. It's a lot more than she realized, and they're even closer than she knew. The women have disagreements over regular roommate things like housekeeping, but according to Ruth Ann takes it out on her by using Jack to push Ruth's buttons. She openly flirts with Jack, and once he leaves, she laughs about how she only lacks him for his money. To Ruth Ann is talking about the man she's in love with. The only man she's slept with since marrying William, she can understand some random girl flirting with Jack, but her own friend. oh, Ruth's got just three words for Ann. Be. tray. oh. A couple of months later, Ruth moves out of Ann and Sammy's place. The distance seems to do their friendship. good. And pretty soon, they're back to throwing parties again. In fact, they're even talking about buying a house. together, girlies. Come on, but they never get around to it. One Friday night, while at the office, Ann invites Ruth over to play bridge. Ruth says she'll try, but she has a lot of work to catch up on. It's a white lie. She does have work, but it doesn't take her long to wrap things up before she heads home. The real reason she didn't want to go is because happy Jack plans to come over. Ruth sits quietly waiting for him until 9 pm. At which point, she's like, "Oh, well, if he thinks he can just come on over when he damn well, please, he won't find me here," and she hops on a trolley. A couple of minutes later, Ruth arrives at Ann and Sammy's apartment in just a few short hours, two of the women would be dead, and the other would be on the run. Do you often find yourself listening to things that are dark, eerie, or macabre in order to relax? Then join me over on the As The Raven Dreams podcast. New episodes several times a week, all of them chock full of the true, strange, and scary stories certain to help you sleep well. Available on Spotify or anywhere else you choose to listen to your podcasts. Even today, nobody knows for sure what happened in Phoenix on the night of October 16th, 1931. What we do know is that Ruth shows up at Ann and Sammy's apartment between 930 and 10 o'clock that night, and before the sun comes up the next day, Ann and Sammy are both shot in the head by Ruth Judd. She comes back later that day to move the bodies. She packs them both into two steamer trunks, the kind you'd pack to go on a long trip back in the day, and then she offers to pay her landlord and his son $1.50 to help her bring the trunks to the train station. She's heading to Los Angeles. When Ruth and her helpers arrive at the station, they can barely lift the trunks. They have no clue they're helping a killer dispose of the evidence. She even stiffs them on the $1.50 as it turns out the trunks are so heavy she needs that cash to pay an extra fee. A few people notice Ruth waiting on the platform not just because she could be mistaken for a movie star, but because she's acting suspicious as hell. She gets their hours early. When she talks, her voice has a noticeable tremble, and by the time her train finally arrives and the baggage handlers start to load the two trunks, they've started to smell. As Ruth and her luggage speed towards Los Angeles overnight, the trunks get worse. Now they give off that unmistakable stench of death, and one of them appears to be leaking. Now you may be thinking why doesn't somebody stop her right then and there or call the cops? Well, the thing is the baggage handlers are suspicious something dead is in those trunks, but apparently they've been having this problem a lot lately. Only not with murder victims would deer. Yep, I guess people would try to transport expensive deer meat with them on trains that this happened so often that the employees knew to look for it, and when they smelled that smell, they assumed it was venison. The next morning Ruth's train gets into LA. She's expecting to meet up with her little brother, Burton. He's studying at USC and Ruth sent him a last second desperate letter before leaving Phoenix. She only said she needed his help, but he's not at the station yet. While she waits, she leaves her carry on luggage in a bathroom. She wants to just grab the trunks, pick up her carry on bags, and go somewhere while Burton and her husband William figure out what to do next. But when Burton finally shows up, Ruth's plan starts to go south. The baggage agents start questioning her about the leaking trunks. By now, it's obvious to everybody that blood is seeping out of the corners. Again, the agents think they've caught her with a dead deer, so while they coily ask, "Hmm, do you guys smell anything strange?" Ruth plays dumb. She's like, "No, I don't smell anything." But Burton most certainly does, and his eyes go wide. He knows his sister isn't a hunter. She wouldn't be hauling a deer around, which means that it's not a matter of what is inside the trunks. It's a matter of who. When the agents refuse to release the trunks until Ruth opens them, she knows she's caught. She makes up a lie about needing to get the keys from her husband, and promise she'll be right back. But she never returns. That's when the agents get a bad feeling and call the police. A detective responds while he's on his way home for the day. He figures it'll be one last quick stop before he clocks out. But he takes one look at the state of the two trunks, and he knows that there is no deer inside. After picking the locks, the detective slowly raises the lid on the largest trunk, and finds Anne-Leroy inside curled up on her side. It's awful, a nightmare site, but it's nothing compared to what's in the second trunk. When that lid is pride-open, they find Sammy's head, torso, and one leg. She's been dismembered. The rest of her body is missing until later that night, when someone finds Ruth's carry-on luggage still hidden inside a bathroom. The suitcase she had carried with her contained the rest of Sammy's body. It seems safe to assume that Ruth never imagined she'd get caught so early on. Here's how I know. Inside, along with the bodies, the trunks are chock-full of evidence, photos, clothes, and even a diploma belonging to the victims. Detectives are able to ID them right away. Ruth hadn't stopped there. She'd also included the bullets that struck Anne and Sammy and a long knife. Presumably, the one she used to dismember her friend. Police also have a record of who bought train tickets, so it's not hard to zero in on Ruth Judd. But by then, she's vanished, and even her family doesn't know where she is. A week later, tired, dirty, and hungry, Ruth is done running. On Friday, October 23rd, she turns herself in. The first words out of her mouth are, "I had to shoot her." It's 1931, and goddess gowns aren't the only big trend, sensationalized journalism is also very much in fashion. There are some reputable sources out there, but for many newspapers, the motto is, "Hey, whatever sells a copy." So, it's no surprise that the Winnie Ruth Judd story dominates headlines. They brand her as the trunk murderous, and the blonde butcher. They run with salacious rumors about what went on at her house parties, and they portray all three women as, quote, "party girls." A 1930s euphemism for sex workers. Through an attorney, Ruth gives a statement to the bloodthirsty press. She claims she only shot her friends in self-defense. They argue she went to the kitchen, and Sammy came at her with the gun. She pulled the trigger first, and shot Ruth in the hand, and Ruth does have a wound to match her story. The bullet is still lodged in there a week later, and it's got a new friend. Gangrene. But her story raises more questions, like, if she shot her friends in self-defense, why does she mutilate the bodies? Why try to smuggle them to another state to get rid of them? Those actions wreak of something, and it ain't innocence. So, detectives think there has to be more going on. They can't find any evidence in the kitchen, so either Ruth did a really good job wiping down the crime scene, or her story isn't true. They realize something's missing from the apartment. In the bedroom, both of the mattresses are gone. And part of the carpet has been cut out. Turns out, the carpet was also stowed away in one of the trunks, and it was covered in blood. So, if she lied about where the shooting took place, could she also be lying about what really happened? Because a self-defense story sounds more plausible in a kitchen. In a bedroom with mattresses that are now missing, it seems more likely that this was a premeditated murder. That Ruth attacked her friends while they They were sitting or. lying down, maybe even asleep. The court of public opinion is ready to convict Ruth, but now it's up to the court to decide. Something surprising happens at her trial in 1932. Her defense team never argues self-defense. They don't even bring Ruth up on the stand to testify. Instead, they argue she's innocent by reason of insanity. But from the jury's point of view, it seemed like Ruth knew right from wrong. Otherwise, she wouldn't have tried so hard to cover up the crime after the fact. And the prosecution lays out a strong case that she'd planned the murder. So Ruth is found guilty and sentenced to death. Later that year, while on death row, Ruth is asked to give her version of events for the record. The story she tells is this. On the night of the murders, Ruth was invited to sleep over at her friend's apartment. But as they were all sitting around and gossiping and started an argument. The previous night, she saw Ruth with Jack and another woman. They knew from the clinic where they worked. As Ruth tells it, this woman loved hunting and Jack loved hunting. So they all went out together one night and Ruth introduced them. That was a problem for Ann. Not because she was jealous, but because she knew this woman was being treated at their clinic for syphilis. This was before penicillin, so it's still a dangerous STD. I have to assume that Ann assumed Jack would, you know, sleep with this woman. But Ruth insisted, no, they were just going to be hunting buddies. But now the cards were being laid out on the table and allegedly threatened to tell Ruth's husband, William, about her affair. And Ruth wasn't going to sit there and take it. She promised to tell Ann's boss about her plan to sabotage his X-ray machine, harm his patients and land him in trouble. Ruth even vows to tell everyone that Ann and Sammy are in a relationship, which wasn't actually true to her knowledge. But the stigma surrounding all of these things in the 1930s, sexuality, affairs, diseases was enough to ruin everybody's livelihoods. And according to Ruth, that's when she stood up and removed herself from the fight. She went to the kitchen, Sammy came after her and she killed them in self-defense. Yep, after all of that, Ruth sticks to the self-defense claim and she would until her dying day. Eventually, Ruth's husband helped move her off death row and onto a psychiatric hospital that she would famously escape from seven times. Once in 1962, she actually lived really under an assumed name for seven years. She was paroled in 1971 and lived to be 93 years old. But there are questions about this case that people still wrestle with to this day, such as, who helped Ruth get the bodies in the trunks? No official suspects were ever named as her accomplices. Even so, a lot of experts on the case were convinced she could not have moved Ann and Sammy on her own. See, Ruth was five foot five, Ann and Sammy were larger than her and Ruth wasn't exactly a weightlifter. She'd had tuberculosis most of her life, but somehow Ruth managed to move Ann into that steamer trunk and when Sammy wouldn't fit, she used a knife to dismember her. The cuts were so precise that investigators thought they were done by a medical expert, like Dr. William Judd. But he wasn't even an Arizona the night of the murders. So in most people's mind, that just left happy Jack. And sometimes Ruth was all too willing to suggest he'd conspired with her. She implicated Jack when she was on death row. Ruth claimed that after the murders, she took Jack over to the crime scene. Then she said it was his idea to move the bodies from the kitchen into the bedroom. It was his idea to put them in the trunks. Now a trial, the prosecution actually tried to prove that Ruth could have done all of this alone, that she wouldn't need the help of a, oh, for example, a secret boyfriend, but it does bear mentioning that the DA was a close personal friend of good old Jack Haloran. If Jack did help, why wouldn't he just drive the bodies out to the desert himself or get his powerful buddies to cover everything up? Not everyone's convinced he helped her at all. And the most compelling evidence that Ruth did act alone comes from two confessions written by Ruth. The first was found in a department store toilet. Yeah, so back when Ruth was hiding out in Los Angeles, she went to a department store where she used to work, she even slept in the furniture department section. Then she hid in a bathroom and wrote a confession letter to her husband. She told William that Jack had nothing to do with the crime, but then she decided not to send this letter. Instead, she flushed it down the commode, the toilet, which is how a very confused plumber found it days later. Guy can catch a break. The second confession was even more surprising because it was lost for decades. Every surface in the Arizona State Archives in 2014, after hiding out for who knows how long in a box of papers, they belong to one of Ruth's old lawyers. This confession was dated April 6, 1933, and it tells a totally different story. Ruth said she'd been in turmoil for days before the murders. She blamed Anne for always using Jack to taunt her. Ruth could forget her troubles during the day when she kept busy, but at night, she couldn't sleep. All she could think about was Anne kissing Jack and laughing at her face. So that night, she took a knife and gun and waited outside Anne and Sammy's apartment. She stood outside their bedroom window, listening to them talk. That's when Anne said she was going to tell Jack that Ruth tried to give him syphilis. For hours, Ruth waited outside. She listened as they turned in for the night and finally, Ruth crept inside and shot Anne in the head while she slept. She claimed she never wanted to hurt Sammy, but when she heard the gunshots, Sammy came running in and she took the gun away from Ruth. Ruth could remember clearly when the gun went off, but when it did, she knew Sammy had been shot in the head. And Ruth added this, she handled all the cleanup on her own. She tried for years to get this letter back, worrying it would hurt her chances of being paroled. Experts on the case take that to mean this confession is the most truthful. The book of Genesis tells us the first murder wasn't about greed or war. It was about two people who loved each other once and a moment when jealousy eclipsed everything else. Ruth Judd's story echoes those same shadows. Two friends she once called sisters. One night of anger, she claimed she couldn't control and in a lifetime spent, rewriting the truth, hoping one version, any version, might absolve her. But the tragedy of Cain and Abel is that only one witness survived. Only one voice remained to explain the unforgivable. And that's the story we're left with here too. Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast. New episodes release on Mondays. If you liked today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. 'Til next time, I'm Harvey B. Stay safe out there.