For Valley true crime fans, the story of Winnie Ruth Judd, aka “The Trunk Murderess," is Phoenix’s claim to infamy.
The grisly details of Judd’s crime are widely known: in 1931, she killed her two best friends, Anne LeRoi and Sammy Samuelson, stuffed their bodies in a pair of trunks, and rode with them on a train to Los Angeles. Judd was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but she was determined to be mentally unsound and sent to an asylum. Over the years, she tried repeatedly to escape the asylum, before finally being paroled in 1971. She lived her last years quietly back here in Phoenix.
The story of the "Trunk Murders" has been the subject of various sensational books, articles and podcasts over the years. But now, Laurie Notaro, author of “The Murderess,” has a different version of the story to tell.
For her new novel, Notaro spent years poring over previously unknown oral histories and interviews given by Judd, in an attempt to capture a more nuanced portrait of the woman behind the crimes. Notaro dedicates a significant portion of her book to Judd’s first-person account of her life, from her difficult youth in Indiana to her tortured relationship with her husband.
Among other things, Judd was convinced she’d given birth to a son who was subsequently taken from her — an incident that may or may not be true.
Notaro joined The Show to discuss the novel, reading a passage where Judd recalls the moments after her son’s birth.
Full conversation
LAURIE NOTARO: “I had never felt that way before in my life and I never will again. We were bound together, lashed as one with strings of ferocity, devotion and elation. In those moments when I first held him, there was nothing I couldn't do. I had the power to vanquish anything. I was almighty and indestructible. And he gave me that. I would give him my love, keep him happy and deliver him to the world.”
SAM DINGMAN: I got chills when I read that section of the book, and I am a person without a uterus. Like the experience that she is describing it. It's not something I will ever have. And it was particularly powerful in this case because the book is very careful, I think, about the question of whether or not this baby actually exists, which makes it even more compelling to read that sequence because one way of looking at it is that she has the ability to convince herself that these are the feelings that she would be having if the baby was real.
NOTARO: Well, you remember, I'm not a mother either. You know, I, I don't have children but I do know her passion for wanting children. And I tried to feel the way that she would feel. That she had finally gotten to that point in her life where what she wanted to become in her life had finally happened.
DINGMAN: That makes a lot of sense that, this idea that she viewed having a child as, as the thing she wanted most in the world she tells us in, in that section. And so in the immediate aftermath of this scene, when the baby she believes herself to have had disappears, it does not leave a lot of question in the, in the reader's mind about how somebody who'd just gone through that and felt this, these emotions that deeply might spin out.
NOTARO: Yeah. Some people believe she was schizophrenic. I don't. I believe that she was bipolar, experiencing manic episodes caused by stress and then exacerbated by, in the latter episodes, by drugs and alcohol. And there is no help for her. And as a result, people died.
DINGMAN: That seems like a good segue to talking about her husband who she mostly refers to in the book as doctor. And this, I have to say, Laurie, was one of the most unexpectedly moving parts of the story for me because I have personal experience with being in a, in a relationship with somebody who is a survivor of trauma.
And one of the things that is so difficult about it is that there's this part of them that you just can't know. You will never understand it. But you feel the tangible effects of it in your lived experience with them all the time. And there are ways that you realize you can't trust them no matter how much they try to assure you that you can. And we see this play out between Ruth and her husband over and over again. I had the sense reading the book that you were very interested in that dynamic between the two of them.
NOTARO: I was because he would be ritually fired again and again, they were constantly moving and she was constantly having to, to start over. You know, he was almost 20 years her senior when they got married, she was 19, he was close to 40. It isn't until her honeymoon that she finds out that he's an addict. He does not trust her with that information until she is locked in. And then he tells her we can never have children and that devastates her.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and it also means that there are vast stretches of time when they just can't be together because he is dealing with his addictions. So he sends her to Phoenix ostensibly because it's going to be good for her recovery from tuberculosis. But it seems like implicitly it's also because he knows he can't take care of her.
And the result of that is she's just completely adrift in this burgeoning city where she doesn't know anybody and she's forced to trust kind of everybody that she meets. And that leads her to the character of Jack Halloran, who, without giving anything away, ends up playing a really deleterious role in her life.
NOTARO: Yeah, he feeds on her.
DINGMAN: And it's related to this phenomenon that you describe in the book of summer wives. Was that a real phenomenon?
NOTARO: Oh, absolutely. Men of means who had families would send their wives and children up to Prescott and Flagstaff for the summer. So they wouldn't have to suffer in the heat. So that left these men like Jack Halloran as a kind of like a bachelor, where he was out to play the field. And Ruth, she was in love with him. Jack Halloran and I think was a miracle for her. This is probably the first love affair she had really ever had. And that's really important for this story.
As my friend Robert Palis said, who had investigated the story before I did, he told me in an interview I did with him, this whole thing never would have happened if Jack Halloran had not told Ruth that he loved her.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, with that in mind, as a note to close on, I wonder if you could read me one more passage, it's on page 101 and it really sticks out to me. It comes early-ish in the book and while most of the book is from the point of view of one or the other of the characters, this part isn't. And I, and I had the sense this, this is coming from you as a writer. And it's the paragraph that begins, “contrary to popular belief.”
NOTARO: I will tell you beforehand that this is one of my favorite passages in the book and I was asked several times to remove it. People didn't understand, yeah, they did not understand the connection. And then I said, whoever gets it gets it.
“Contrary to popular belief, the most populous plant life in the desert of Phoenix is not a cactus, not a prickly pear, ocotillo or saguaro.
It is the creosote bush, a large scraggly thing with short waxy leaves that reflect sunlight and blooms ordinary yellow flowers that are not unsimilar to St. John's Wart or any other invasive weed. Its appendages conserve water under drastic circumstances, allowing it to compete aggressively with other plants for resources. And it almost always wins.
It thrives with the most meager conditions because it doesn't require much to survive. Whatever genome it was at the creosote descended from it was stock that was brutal, forceful and undiscerning. It is basic. It will steal from its neighbors, break them down and forge on to bloom, unremarkably.”
