All Terrain Thinking

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Wonderful strange stories from around the world

Two more for "Old Sparky"

By David Cocksedge

TENSION SPREAD through the town of Ossining , New York , on the freezing cold night of Thursday 12 January 1928. The last act in a lurid drama of sex and murder was about to be written. It had been a crime that symbolized the giddy age of boom and prohibition during the 'flapper era' of the 'Roaring Twenties.' Ruth Snyder and her former lover, Henry Judd Gray, were to be executed for the murder of Albert Snyder.

Along Durstan Avenue , leading from Ossining to the crenellated, guard-towered Sing Sing prison, residents in the houses asked neighbors for the latest news. Outside, darkness had long since descended on the ice-sheeted Hudson River , and knots of people began to drift along the street, seeking vantage points in the hills overlooking Sing Sing. There they stood and talked together in low voices or prayed - and they waited.

They waited for a flicker of light from the prison windows. For the glow of illumination shining through the prison bars to dim once, then once again. This is all that they would be able to see. But those shuddering of lights would mean that a woman and a man had died in the armed monster that was the electric chair at Sing Sing. This invention of deadly modern state retribution went by an oddly deceptive nickname - "Old Sparky".

Inside the prison, twenty newspapermen sat in long, pew like rows in the garish-bright execution chamber. They faced the Chair, and the Chair faced them, its straps dangling like the loose tentacles of a waiting octopus. At precisely 11.03pm (23.03 hrs), a soft shuffle sounded in the corridor, a door opened, and three figures stepped into this room dedicated to death. The woman in the middle was the living offering to the Chair, and the women on either side of her were prison matrons. Slowly, they steered the victim through her final steps.

All eyes were on the central figure, but the woman who was assisted to the Chair was an utter stranger to the pressmen. This was no perfectly marcelled blonde with china-blue eyes and an alluring, almost child-like face. This was a human wreck. This creature looked more like a great-grandmother than a femme fatale. Ruth Snyder had gone from a beauty to a hag in a few short months. It was as if the grotesque of a fun-house mirror had somehow come to life. This was a woman whose pretty blonde hair had turned to grey, and across whose ravaged face the straw-like wisps straggled in wild disorder. 'My God! They've made a mistake', thought the reporters together. 'They have got the wrong woman here!' But they were wrong. This wretched creature before them was indeed the fun-loving Mrs. Snyder who had assisted in the murder of her husband for financial gain.

The woman was seated in the chair and the Catholic chaplain of Sing Sing stood beside her. A wild, insane light glared from her eyes. She was murmuring something to herself over and over. The reporters strained to hear. What was she saying? And then they understood. She was whispering, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." It was the words of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary .

Four guards swiftly fastened the straps confining arms, legs and chest. The electrodes were strapped tight, and the mask, a football helmet with a deadly electrode pressing against the back of the skull, was fitted to her head.

Then one of the matrons stepped back from the Chair. She was supposed to stand facing the victim, but the horror of the moment forced her to turn aside. She took a few uncertain steps and clutched the wall for support. Behind her, Ruth Snyder murmured again, "Father, forgive them…"

In a chamber behind the Chair, a switch was thrown. Electric current hummed, cutting short the sentence forever. The body of the woman in the Chair leapt in a convulsive arch as if it would burst its confining straps. Her knuckles showed brick red. Her left hand twisted backward and upward, writhing to escape the imprisoning strap, and the index finger turned back and stiffened as if in pointing accusation at herself.

At this instant, a newsman sitting in the front row made an almost imperceptible move. He was twelve feet (3.6m) from the Chair, in a direct line with the spot where the matron should have been standing. But she was not there, and his view of the hideous drama being enacted was unobstructed. To this man, the chance wrought by human compassion was vital. Quickly, he hitched up his left trouser leg, aimed his exposed ankle directly at the Chair, reached inside his coat, and pressed a photographer's rubber bulb. The action triggered a tiny camera attached to his aiming ankle. In a split second, the shutter of the camera fired, the pants leg dropped to shoe-top length again, and the man sank back in his seat. The man was Thomas Howard of Pacific and Atlantic Photos, an ace photographer who had been imported from the Midwest and accredited as a reporter to get him into the death chamber for the New York Daily News. Now he was gambling that he had snapped an incredible (and forbidden) Death House picture.

The current to the Chair was cut off. Doctors stepped forward, and applied their stethoscopes to the woman's chest. "I pronounce this woman dead," said one doctor. It was 11.06 pm. The crowds waiting outside the prison had seen the lights flicker and dim - just once.

Attendants wrestled the limp, sack-like victim from the Chair. The body was placed on an autopsy table and wheeled into an adjoining room. Then the Chair was made ready to receive its next guest.

The door at the corner of the execution chamber opened again. A short, slightly built man with wide, mobile lips and a cleft chin strode into the room. He had abundant curly-brown hair, and his myopic eyes were dark. Without attendants, he walked boldly to the Chair, and sat down. He looked up into the face of the clergyman who had accompanied him, and then he actually smiled - a gentle, scared, but trusting smile. Then he gazed about him wonderingly as the guards strapped him in.

The helmet and death mask were lowered into position, and the guards stepped back. Again electric current hummed. Again the body in the Chair arched in final agony. But this time the victim did not fight. There was no writhing of the limbs, no frantic, horrible effort to escape. Instead, the man's hands clenched down, gripping the heavy oak arms of the Chair tighter, as if welcoming this instrument of final release. The current rose and fell; rose and fell again. At exactly 11.14 pm, "Old Sparky" had claimed his second victim. Henry Judd Gray was dead, executed by the state for murder.

Newsman who had witnessed the two executions stumbled from the scene and cars took them a thousand yards away from the prison to the Hudson View Inn, where telegraph wires had been run into an improvised press headquarters. But Thomas Howard raced away in a car with two motorcycle escorts directly down the highway to New York City . At the Daily news building the film from his ankle camera was rushed feverishly through the darkroom. A picture emerged, and was etched on a sensitized zinc plate. Then the presses whirred, with dramatic words to back up Howard's horrific image. Howard had used a wide-angle lens so that most of the image in the frame would be in focus. Before one o'clock copies of New York 's greatest tabloid newspaper hit the streets with a full-page picture of Ruth Snyder dying in the electric chair. It was a picture of a woman from whose body electricity was blasting the last spark of life. It was a picture that conveyed to millions the ultimate horror of those last moments in Sing Sing, when Ruth Snyder had ended her short life.

A storm soon rose and thundered about the heads of the editors of the News. Publication of the picture was denounced as a vile and nauseating violation of elementary human decency. The ethics of the thing were discussed at length in press and pulpit. The News editors retorted that they had carried out to the letter prison instructions to record only what they saw. If the picture was revolting, they said, so too was the spectacle it faithfully reproduced. Revulsion against the photograph itself was accompanied, in many quarters, by revulsion against the whole idea of capital punishment.

Even today, this most controversial of modern newspaper pictures stamps the Snyder-Gray murder case in public consciousness as one of the most sensational crimes to be committed in the USA. Recollection of the cast of characters in the drama has dimmed with time, but the memory of that picture remains.

It all started in April 1925, when Mrs. Snyder (29) first met Henry Judd Gray (35), a witty, fun-loving traveling salesman who lived in Jersey . Her much older husband, Albert Snyder (59), was an old-fashioned type who did not much enjoy going out to parties and generally having fun outside the family home. In Gray, Ruth met a kindred spirit, and they soon formed a very intimate relationship. Unknown to Albert Snyder and Gray's own wife, they frequently met for love trysts at the Imperial Hotel in Manhattan and at the Waldorf-Astoria, where they registered as Mr. and Mrs. Henry Judd Gray.

In November 1925 Mrs. Snyder took out two insurance policies on her husband. If he died by accident or by assault from housebreakers, she stood to inherit 96,000 US dollars, an astronomical sum in those days. Then she set about persuading her lover that it would be in their interest to kill her husband, and make the deed look like a robbery with murder. Thus manipulated, Gray eventually agreed, then purchased chloroform and a sash weight with which to subdue and then bludgeon Mr. Snyder to death. They planned to carry out this evil act on the night of 19 March 1927.

On the morning of 20 March, neighbors found Albert Snyder lying on the bed of his Queen's Village, Long Island home, his head battered beyond recognition. They had been alerted to the tragedy by ten-year old Lorraine Snyder, who had woken up to find her mother bound and gagged, lying outside the bedroom door. When Ruth Snyder was released from her bondage she claimed that she and Albert had been asleep when an intruder - a large Italian-looking man with a moustache, she said - had knocked her unconscious, dragged her out of bed and tied her up. He had then killed Mr. Snyder.

There was some superficial evidence of a robbery attempt, but there was no injury to Ruth and also no sign of a forced entry to the house. Mrs. Snyder also told police that some valuable jeweler was missing, presumably stolen by their attacker. But then it was discovered underneath her mattress. And when doctors examined Albert Snyder's corpse they discovered that what at first had looked like a simple bludgeoning was in fact a carefully calculated murder. In addition to the head wounds, a length of wire had been tied so tightly around the victim's neck that it was buried deep into the skin. Also chloroform-soaked wads had been forced into his nostrils and mouth. And he had put up quite a struggle before he died.

When police discovered evidence linking Ruth to Henry Judd Gray, she admitted that she was having an affair with him. Detectives questioned Gray, who also admitted the liaison, but denied any part in the murder of her husband. Playing a tough game, detectives told Ruth that Gray had confessed and blamed her for the killing. The ruse worked: Ruth now made a statement in which she admitted conspiring with Judd Gray to murder her husband, but stressed that she played no active part in the crime. Gray now made his own actual admission, insisting that they had murdered Albert Snyder together. He added, pathetically, "She had this power over me." On 23 March both Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray were charged jointly on counts of first-degree murder.

The trial began on 25 April 1927 in the Queens County Courthouse in Long Island City amid much media hysteria. The courthouse was packed to the rafters, and hundreds milled in the corridors outside, listening to the courtroom drama on special speakers rigged for the occasion. The prosecutor was District Attorney Richard S Newcombe who addressed an all-male jury of twelve New Yorkers.

During the 15 days of the trial, Gray made a full confession in evidence and under cross-examination. He stated that Mrs. Snyder had left a side door open for him to enter her house on the fateful night, and he had waited there in a spare bedroom until she returned with her husband from visiting relatives at 1.55am. He had waited for Mr. Snyder to fall asleep before entering the room; but had bungled his first attempt to kill his victim. Drunk on brandy, he had not hit Albert Snyder hard enough with the sash weight and the man had awakened and fought off his attacker. Mrs. Snyder had then joined him in subduing her husband with chloroform and then strangling him with wire, which she looped around his neck and then tightened by turning a pencil. When they had completed the deed, he and Ruth burned their bloodstained clothes and scattered clothing and furniture around to make it look as if a robbery had taken place. He had then bound and gagged his lover, and left the premises just before 6am.

Ruth Snyder's defense lawyers strenuously denied this version of events, but the jury did not believe them, especially after taking note of the summing up of Supreme Court Justice Townsend Scudder. The jury retired to consider its verdict at 5.18pm (17.18 hrs) on 9 May 1927. At 6.56pm (18.56) the foreman, William E Young, stated that they had found both defendants guilty of murder in the first degree. Gray's face went white with shock whilst Ruth Snyder shrieked and then collapsed in the dock, sobbing hysterically.

A picture can tell a thousand words, we are told. And the single, frozen image can be much more powerful than any moving picture. The horror of the Vietnam conflict was graphically illustrated by the photo of Saigon Police Chief Nuygen doc Loan holding a revolver to the head of a Viet Cong prisoner and pulling the trigger during the 1968 Tet Offensive. There is also Nic Utt's 1972 picture of a naked six-year old Vietnamese girl, running down Highway One as her body burns with napalm. Howard's shot of the last second of Ruth Snyder's life in 1928 was a journalistic first - however repugnant the subject matter. He captured the awful judicial vengeance of the State of New York on one of its citizens for the crime of murder. It was "Old Sparky" at work.

(Research: 'The girl in the death cell' by Fred J Cook, 1936, and 'The encyclopedia of women killers' by Brian Lane, 1992).

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