Murderess!: The Chilling True Story of the Most Infamous Woman Ever Electrocuted

This is a must read book for all true crime novel enthusiasts. The time is the 1920's and it proves that there is "nothing new under the sun". Lust, greed, and murder for money has been around for a long time. The only difference is: These people were executed quickly.

Murderess! is the first book about the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray case, a classic murder from the 1920s that has been wrongly forgotten. I had read about this case in other true crime anthologies, but no one had expanded it to book-length until now. Ruth Snyder (the murder victim was her husband, Albert, killed in 1927) and Judd Gray are a classic example of two people who came together with literally disastrous consequenses. She was a bored housewife and he was a traveling sales rep for a corset company. They met in a restaurant and began an affair that was intense, passionate, and, for her husband, deadly. The New York City press had a field day with this case, dubbing them "The Granite Woman and Her Putty Man." That seems mostly accurate, although even after reading and re-reading this book I cannot apportion blame for the murder or even state whose idea it was originally. This is not the author's fault; these two people were very intertwined and during their affair it's hard to determine where one ended and the other began. They each tried to shift all of the blame onto the other at trial, of course(it didn't work). The press, especially the New York City papers, play a large role in this book, because most of the information is taken from press accounts. I can't really fault the author for this, as the case is so old, and he states that the New York Times published the entire trial transcript! Both Snyder and Gray, their lawyers, and their families played to the media, and this information is very interesting and seems very current. Overall, a superior first true-crime book and well worth reading. Incidentally, this case was the inspiration for James M. Cain's classic crime novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. I hope Mr. Margolin writes more true crime!