On Monday, October 19, 1931, the baggage clerk at Los Angeles’ Southern Pacific station pried open a large black shipping crate that had been leaking fluid onto the concrete floor. Complaints about the smell had been mounting for hours. Inside, he found what would put a single woman’s name on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America. The crates had been sitting unclaimed since the previous night, when they arrived aboard the Golden State Limited from Phoenix, Arizona.
One held the intact body of a woman. The other contained the dismembered remains of a second woman, distributed between the crate, a tan suitcase, and a hatbox. By the time police arrived, the passenger who had checked the luggage had vanished into the city. Her name was Winnie Ruth Judd, and the trail she left behind led straight back to a small rented house on North Second Street in Phoenix, where three young women who had once been friends had spent an evening playing cards.
Winnie Ruth McKinnell was born in Oxford, Indiana, in 1905, the daughter of a Methodist minister. At seventeen, she married Dr. William C. Judd, a World War I veteran more than twenty years her senior who struggled with a morphine addiction stemming from his war injuries.
Their marriage was unstable, marked by frequent moves and unreliable income. By 1930, the couple was living mostly apart. Seeking relief from tuberculosis, Ruth—as she was known—came to Phoenix, drawn by the dry desert air. She was twenty-five years old.
She found work as a nanny for a wealthy family and rented a room in a boarding house. Through her employers, she met their neighbor, John J. “Happy Jack” Halloran, a 44-year-old married co-owner of a lumber company and one of Phoenix’s wealthy playboys. Their affair began on Christmas Eve 1930.
Ruth was lonely. Her husband was undergoing treatment at a veterans’ facility in Prescott, far from her Indiana home and everything familiar. Halloran was known for making a lonely woman feel like the only person in the room, and his gray Packard became a familiar sight on North Second Street. Eventually, Ruth took a job as a secretary at the Louis Grunow Memorial Clinic at the corner of Ninth Street and McDowell Road.
There she met two other women: 27-year-old Agnes Anne “Ann” LeRoy, an x-ray technician from Oregon who had been divorced twice, and her roommate, 24-year-old Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson, a quiet, well-liked woman from North Dakota who had moved from Alaska after contracting tuberculosis. The three women became friends. They played cards in the evenings, received visitors, and built small lives around each other in a city of just over 48,000 people. Ruth even lived with LeRoy and Samuelson for a time before moving back to her own nearby apartment after disagreements arose.
The exact nature of those disputes was never fully documented, but the friendship survived. What strained it beyond repair was Jack Halloran. All three women, according to varying accounts, were connected to him and his circle in ways that became a source of tension by autumn 1931. In the private parlors of Phoenix, women like these were sometimes called “summer wives”—women kept company by married men whose wives retreated to cooler places during the brutal heat.
On the evening of Friday, October 16, 1931, Ruth Judd arrived at the house on North Second Street. She had been invited. Accounts of what followed differ, and they have differed ever since. What is undisputed is that Leah Ray and Hedwig Samuelson were shot and killed that night, Ruth sustained a gunshot wound to her left hand, and Ruth alone walked out of that house.
The bodies were not discovered for two days. No one entered the small house until Monday evening, October 19, by which time the primary evidence had already left Arizona. On Sunday, October 18, Ruth appeared at Phoenix’s Union Station with her left hand bandaged. She boarded the night train to Los Angeles, accompanied by luggage that contained the bodies.
She had purchased two black shipping crates the day before. With the help of her landlord, she had the crates transported to the station, claiming they contained books. Ruth took the train to Los Angeles and was met by her brother Burton McKinnell, a junior at USC who had no idea what his sister’s luggage contained. When the baggage clerk flagged the leaking crates, the initial suspicion was smuggled venison, a common problem on westbound trains.
An agent marked the crates for inspection and asked Ruth for the key. She claimed she didn’t have it and left the station. After police opened the crates, Ruth surrendered to Los Angeles authorities on October 23, wearing, as was widely reported, a fur coat taken from a sanitarium. She was flown back to Phoenix to face a murder charge.
The case against her was substantial. Ballistic evidence linked the . 25 caliber bullets recovered from the victims to a pistol owned by Judd. Autopsies showed the women had been shot at close range—LeRoy in the head, Samuelson multiple times, with powder burns indicating the gun had been fired from inches away.
The dismemberment of Samuelson was immediately a matter of intense interest. According to later researcher Jana Bommersbach, there were indications that Judd lacked the surgical skill to dismember a body, and physically she may not have been capable of lifting the corpses. This observation, never definitively resolved, fueled decades of speculation about whether someone else—someone with medical knowledge and greater strength—had been present that night or returned later. The investigation itself was compromised from the start.
By the time a formal forensic examination was conducted, the crime scene had been visited by numerous people. Neighbors and reporters were allowed inside. A mattress was found missing from the house, another was discovered discarded in a vacant lot without traces of blood. No explanation was ever given for why either mattress had been moved.
The day after the discovery, the property owner ran advertisements in Phoenix newspapers offering tours of the three-room house for ten cents a person, attracting hundreds of curious visitors. Ruth’s trial began on January 19, 1932, in Maricopa County. Presiding was Judge Howard Speikman. The prosecution was led by Lloyd C.
Andrews, and the state chose to try Judd only for the murder of Ann LeRoy. The dismemberment case against Samuelson was considered too sensitive and complicated to present to a jury. No second trial ever took place. The state argued that Judd had acted with premeditation, that the relationships among the three women had deteriorated over weeks, and that they had fought over Halloran’s affections.
Halloran himself attended the trial every day, silent, never called as a witness, watching from the gallery. The most anticipated moment of the trial never happened. Ruth Judd never took the stand. Her defense argued insanity, but did not raise self-defense in the record.
Legal scholars would question that decision for decades. The jury convicted Judd of first-degree murder on February 8, 1932. Judge Speikman sentenced her to death by hanging, scheduled for February 17, 1933. Four jurors later signed affidavits claiming they had voted for the death recommendation only after a fellow juror persuaded them it was the best way to ensure Judd’s cooperation in identifying any accomplices.
Two appeals based on jury misconduct were filed. Neither succeeded. Ruth Judd was never executed. A ten-day hearing found her mentally unfit, and she was committed to the Arizona State Asylum for the Insane on April 24, 1933.
For those who had followed the case closely, the reaction was a complicated mix of relief and unease—relief that a woman would not be hanged, but anxiety that the full truth of what happened on North Second Street might now slip from public view. Jack Halloran was indicted by a grand jury as an accessory to murder on December 30, 1932. During her testimony, Judd told the court, “I am going to be executed for something Jack Halloran is responsible for. He is responsible for all I am going through.
He is guilty of anything I am guilty of. ” The judge released Halloran on January 25, 1933, calling the state’s case contradictory and describing any further attempt to try him as a futile gesture. Though formally cleared, Halloran gradually lost his business partners and social standing in Phoenix. He died in 1976.
Ruth remained at the Arizona State Hospital, though she escaped six times between 1933 and 1963. In 1952, she fashioned a rope from rags and climbed down from a third-floor window. In her final escape in October 1963, she used a key to the hospital’s front door given to her by a friend. She made her way to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lived as a resident housekeeper for a wealthy family under the name Marian Caine.
She was not found for more than six years. She was returned to Arizona on August 18, 1969, and released on parole on December 22, 1971, after Governor Jack Williams commuted her sentence. In 1983, Arizona issued a full pardon. In 2014, a 19-page handwritten letter from Ruth to her attorney, dated April 1933, was discovered in the Arizona State Archives.
In it, she described herself as solely responsible for the killings, writing that she had planned and carried out the murder of LeRoy and killed Samuelson when she walked in and found what had happened. Researchers have interpreted the letter in different ways—as a confession, as a strategy, or as the act of a mind pushed beyond clarity. Winnie Ruth Judd returned to Phoenix a few years before her death. She died on October 23, 1998, at the age of 93—exactly sixty-seven years to the day after she had surrendered to Los Angeles police in 1931.
Former governor Rose Mofford, who had known her in later years as a quiet worker in the hospital corridors, said, “She found her peace. ”
The single-story house, now numbered 2947 North Second Street, still stands in Phoenix. A local attorney purchased it in 2015, saving it from demolition. The Grunow Memorial Clinic, where three young women once worked side by side, stood at the corner of Ninth Street and McDowell Road for decades before the city grew past it.
What actually happened among three women in that small house on a warm October evening remains unresolved. The archives hold the nineteen-page letter, bound and indexed, written in fading ink.