Bury Me Deep (22 page)
Authors: Megan Abbott
Trying again, she felt a rushing in her mouth, like she might choke.
He looked at her, he waited, that bolt of lustrous hair, the violet nosegay on his suit. She fought off a fearsome wave of soft, broken memories of him and he, sensing it, raised his hand slightly, as if to reach for her own.
The sight of it filled her with fresh horror.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Marion,” he said. “In my way, I have.”
Something vaulted up inside her and she felt her body jerk forward, her hand plunging into her pocket and reaching for that pistol, which, in a dark blur before her eyes, was suddenly at the far end of her arm outstretched.
The thing jumped in her hand, the tiny Colt did, and it was only then that she knew she had fired it. A pierce in her ear and her hand had lifted so high, to the top of a thick column, a bullet wedging in the carved oak.
She spun around, gun in her hand, but the music screeched on and only a handful of men crushed right behind them could be bothered to lift their nuzzling heads from their girls, from their creamy follies. The sound of the gunshot, so thunderous in the Hussel Street living room, barely a whisper here.
Those who did see stood stock-still, one pink-faced man hissing excitedly,
It is she!
She thought they would descend upon her, but they saw the thing in her hand, they had heard it. They could scarcely believe their eyes.
“Marion,” she heard him say, and she looked at him, his face slipped to white. “Marion, no. Marion, no, don’t you see?” He looked anxiously at the clutch of men motionless, fear struck, not ten feet from them. “Marion, your husband’s sins, don’t make them your own.”
This was what he said to her. The feckless words whistling in her ear, and before she could think, her arm lifted again and she pointed this time at him, trying to rise, shirtfront showgirl-spangled. She felt the charge through her entire body as the bullet lacerated his knee, the crackling loud and victorious, the blood a glory shot.
He cried out and she had never heard such sounds from him, a dreadful bleat, and the men staggered back from them both.
It was all so stunning. She felt her body lifting, radiating. Looking around, she thought,
Have I bullets enough? I may shoot them all.
His eyes were so wide and his face lowered, sinking into the spray of violets on his lapel.
From somewhere in the din, a recognition of the sound, a drunken voice crying out, “They’ve got fireworks!” and another pulling a pistol of his own, waving it gleefully as if in some Wild West saloon.
She didn’t care, didn’t care at all. She held that gun and felt its heat in her hand. In ways old and churchlike she knew it was not right. But part of her felt shooting him in that dark, hollowed heart of his would be the rightest thing she’d ever done. Righter somehow than anything that could be done.
“Marion,” he said, voice slipping into her ear. “I know what I am. Believe it.”
It was his return blow and it landed. She felt it all. He was saying,
You knew me. You knew what I was. You ran toward it. Don’t forget how you ran toward it.
She thought of Everett, at the end, staring into the dank center of things, she thought how that descent must have felt, the softest curl of oblivion, the place he’d been trying to reach since he first took hold of the needle’s giddy bloom. Was that for her? To end and end and end?
It adds to truth a dream.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.” The weight of the gun in her hand, his sorrowful face, she felt herself sinking.
Something rattled in her, the blood memory of Ginny, face crumpled like shiny paper. She had done such things. She had seared and hammered and destroyed. She had turned herself into
such a dark thing, for him. To tear his sneer away with a hot bullet, would that redeem her now, redeem her lost friends, her direful, doomed husband?
Or would it only bury his sins, bury them with him?
And after, she would be lost to the abyss that would follow, which would swallow her. That black whorl of nothingness she now knew so well.
Fighting it, she thought of Mr. Worth, she imagined his furtive connivances, the gin-drenched whisper to the right reporters. He would not fail. It will be, she knew it. Tomorrow, the next day and for weeks to come, the newspapers will do their dance—
and they will, God help that butcher of mine,
she thought—and, with each screaming headline, all these men, these fickle, sad little gents with their hunger and their loneliness, will throw Joe Lanigan to the wolves to save their own skins. Beat back the blood, Marion, she told herself. Let these silk-coated confederates eat his black heart. It is their world. Let them to it.
She looked down at him, clinging to his shattered knee, the white of bone shining through the pants leg. He looked so small.
“Now it is your turn to watch me,” she said, looking once more into those lost, careless eyes of his. “There are levers, switches, keys and I know which way they all go.”
S
O FAST IT WAS,
so slight was she, the music still caroming and the frenzy of the party, the orgiastic throng…a man with red whiskers—Mr. Gergen, with a mustache now?—called out,
Stop her! Stop her!
But Marion was already pushing through the kitchen doors behind her and the dark alley beckoned forth.
S
HE WOULD GET HER MIND BACK,
her head on straight, her thoughts ordered, her heart thumping for something other than ardor and grief again. And when she did, this would all come storming back and she would feel the ponderous weight of everything, so fiercely it would knock the breath out of her.
But that time was not yet. And now all she felt was righteous and unbound.
Ten minutes later, by the tracks, a few yards from a pair of tramps, itching to lash on, she saw the freight train hurtling toward her.
There has to be something
, she thought, looking far off into the distance.
There is something.
The air was simmery hot, the engine whistle wailing inconsolably. She could hear the wheels sparking, coming on so hard. The tramps, they were kicking tin cans into the ravine and getting ready to run.
She would get on that train and they would not find her. They would not want to. And if they did, it mattered not. She was gone.
T
HIS NOVEL
is inspired by the true story of Winnie Ruth Judd, the “Trunk Murderess,” also known as the “Tiger Woman” and the “Blond Butcher.”
In October 1931, the bodies of two Phoenix women, nurse Agnes “Anne” LeRoi and her roommate, Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson, were found in a pair of trunks abandoned at Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. After a four-day manhunt, twenty-six-year-old Winnie Ruth Judd turned herself over to the police, claiming she had shot her two friends in self-defense after a violent quarrel in their home.
The following day, a rambling letter written by Mrs. Judd to her husband, Dr. William Judd, was found in the drainpipe of a Los Angeles department store where Mrs. Judd had been hiding in the days following the murders. “I’m wild with cold, hunger, pain, and fear now, Doctor darling,” the letter’s closing lines read, “if I hadn’t got the gun from Sammy she would have shot me again. Forgive me…. forget me. Live to take care of me, [illegible] as I am sick, Doctor, but I’m true to you. I love you. The thots [sic] of being away from you set me crazy. Shall I give up? No, I don’t think so. The police will hang me. It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defense. Love me yet, Doctor.”
The shocking nature of the crimes set against Winnie Ruth Judd’s blond angelic looks made the case irresistible to the public and popular press. Headlines screeched, “‘Hungry for Love’ Her Notes to Mate Show,” “Gay Revels Revealed, Narcotics Hinted
in Killing,” “Mind Inflamed by Drugs Blamed in Trunk Murder” and “‘Had to Fight,’ Slayer Cries.”
A sensational three-week trial ensued. The prosecution claimed Mrs. Judd had murdered her two friends in cold blood as they slept in their beds, and dismembered one of the bodies in order to fit them both into a pair of packing trunks for transport to Los Angeles. Their account appeared to contradict much crime scene evidence as well as Ruth’s own injuries, including a bullet wound in her hand. Still, Mrs. Judd’s defense attorneys, believing the fix was in among Phoenix authorities, were already planning for an insanity plea. In February 1932, Winnie Ruth Judd was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
The intervention of Sheriff John R. McFadden, however, brought a dramatic turn of events. Winnie Ruth Judd, who had not been called to testify at her own trial, divulged to the sheriff further details of the events surrounding the murders, including the involvement of a popular and influential Phoenix businessman.
A hearing was convened by grand jury request, finally permitting Mrs. Judd to tell her story. She recounted a harrowing argument with her two friends that became so out of control that Sammy Samuelson threatened her with a gun: “[Sammy] had the gun pointed right at my heart. And Sammy used to take spells…and she would look—oh, she didn’t look like herself at all…and she had the gun pointed right at my heart, and I grabbed the hand with the gun.” A struggle ensued and the gun went off, wounding Mrs. Judd and killing both Miss Samuelson and Mrs. LeRoi. Mrs. Judd went on to claim that the crimes had been concealed and the dismemberment arranged by one J. J. “Happy Jack” Halloran, one of the town’s civic leaders and Mrs. Judd’s rumored lover. She said that Halloran persuaded her that she must not go to the police. “Why, he scared the life out of me,” she told the court. “He told me not to call my husband or the police. I must not
mention this to anyone, that he would take care of this himself.” She added, after her arrest, he promised her if she kept quiet about his role, she would be protected.
T
HE GRAND JURY
ultimately requested that the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles commute Mrs. Judd’s death sentence to life imprisonment, claiming it was manslaughter, not premeditated murder. At the same time, the jury indicted Jack Halloran as an accessory to murder.
In a bizarre twist, however, Halloran’s attorney made the case that the state, by putting Mrs. Judd on the stand as a witness, proved a prima facie case of self-defense. Halloran’s lawyer successfully argued that no murder meant Halloran could not be an accomplice either. The judge agreed and Halloran was set free.
Then, despite the grand jury’s findings, the Board of Pardons and Paroles denied any commutation of Mrs. Judd’s sentence.
A mere three days before her scheduled execution, Mrs. Judd was granted a sanity hearing. Declared insane, she escaped the hangman’s noose and was transferred to the Arizona State Hospital for the Insane in Phoenix, which would be her home for the next thirty years. Her husband remained steadfast in his support of his wife until his death in 1945.
Over the years, Mrs. Judd escaped seven times from the hospital, the last escape in 1963 lasting more than six years, during which time she took on a new identity, as Marian Lane, working as a beloved servant for a wealthy San Francisco family.
In 1971, Winnie Ruth Judd was judged sane by medical examiners and released on parole. She died at the age of ninety-three in 1998.
O
VER THE YEARS
, I’ve returned to the Winnie Ruth Judd case many times. Again and again, I wondered what might have happened to her if those trunks had not been found so quickly, if she had returned to confront her betraying lover, if circumstances had been such that she could have put her survival skills (so in evidence in her multiple escapes) to the test rather than surrender to questionable authorities. After reading
Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murders
(1973) by J. Dwight Dobkins and Robert J. Hendricks and Jana Bommersbach’s
The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd
(1992) and press coverage of the murders in the
Los Angeles Times
archives and elsewhere, I began to reimagine Winnie Ruth Judd’s story, with a different final act.
In doing so, I had to make some choices in terms of how much I should deviate from history or, in this case, history, lore and legend and the many blurry spaces in between. After all, the “true story” of what happened between Winnie Ruth Judd, Anne LeRoi, Sammy Samuelson and Jack Halloran on that long-ago October night remains a mystery. There are those who believe Mrs. Judd was responsible for both deaths, pointing to her history of emotional problems. Many believe her self-defense story. Others claim that Halloran murdered both girls, convincing his lover to take the rap for him and promising, with his connections, she would never go to prison. By the time she realized she was being set up, it was too late.
With no definitive answers, I invented my own. I began with the basic foundation of fact and rumor, and navigated an imaginary path forged by the elements of the story that so captivated me, most especially the powder keg at the center of the case: the various attachments, triangles and jealousies between the three women and the one man, all of whom depended, in ways small and large, emotional and economic, on one another.