Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray Trial: 1927

Within two hours, New York City's best detectives were on the job in the Snyders' fashionable home, which 44-year-old Albert Snyder, art director of Motor Boating magazine, had bought in the Queens suburb for his 32-year-old wife. The cops exhausted Ruth Snyder, questioning her through the day and into the night. When they told her the burglary was a fake, she indignantly replied, "What do you mean? How can you tell?"

"It don't look right," said a detective. "We see lots of burglaries. They aren't done this way."

The police explained. Mrs. Snyder said she had been hit on the head by "a tall man with a dark mustache" and knocked out for five hours, but she had no bruise or bump. Her wrists and ankles had been tied so loosely they bore no marks. Neither doors nor windows had been forced, so any intruder must have been let in. The missing jewelry had been found, under a mattress. Albert Snyder's revolver had been found on his bed, broken open at the breach but not discharged—a clumsy effort, the detectives said, to make it look as if he had resisted. And in the basement they had found a sash weight that was evidently the murder weapon.