The Story.
Ruth Judd was a nice, kind, caring woman who loved her two best friends fiercely. One night, she brought a gun to their house and they were never seen again until police pried open two terrible smelling, leaking trunks at the Los Angeles strain station.
In April of 1933, Ruth Judd was on death row, two weeks from being hanged for killing her two best friends. Her gallows had already been erected, the invitations to her execution sent out on fine, white card stock, bold with black engraved printing that announced the date and time of the event, signed personally by A.G. Walker, the warden of the Arizona State Prison.
She had one chance to escape the noose, and her lawyer, Howard J. Richardson, knew this. The state did not want to execute another woman; the last female execution was botched badly.
The convicted was a portly woman, and after the trap door released, she was decapitated accidentally, though this horror could have been predicted with the simple application of a basic physics formula. The head rolled into the audience and the public was horrified. The outcry was deafening. The state was not eager to bring another lady to the gallows. They wanted an out.
Richardson petitioned for an insanity hearing and got it, then traveled to Florence to see Ruth at the prison. He gave her paper and pen, and told her to write the truth of what happened that night when shots rang out from a Phoenix bungalow and she was the only one left alive inside in the morning.
She did. She wrote nineteen pages, and it took her two days. In careful, precise script, she documented everything that led up to the murders, the horrible night itself, and then the grisly aftermath. When she was done, she gave the letter back to Richardson, who then read it and quickly locked it up in a safe deposit box, where it didn't see the light of day until more than seventy years later.
Then Ruth Judd tried to swallow a razor blade in an effort to kill herself.
