Winnie Ruth Judd - Phoenix, Arizona
N 33° 28.912 W 112° 04.250
12S E 400512 N 3705222
On October 18, 1931, Winnie Ruth Judd boarded a train with her trunks, and shocked a nation.
Waymark Code: WM94MM
Location: Arizona, United States
Date Posted: 06/28/2010
Views: 25
Winnie Ruth Judd, the Trunk Murderess, was an American medical secretary living in Phoenix, Arizona who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a 1931 trial marked by sensationalized newspaper coverage and suspicious circumstances. Her crime spawned debate over capital punishment.
In 1931, Judd lived at 2929 N 2nd St in Phoenix, Arizona with 2 roommates. All 3 of them were attracted to the same man: Jack Halloran, a businessman. After a fight, at approximately 10:25 p.m., October 16, 1931 two young women were shot to death with a .25 caliber handgun fired by their former roommate, 26-year-old Winnie Ruth Judd. A plan was devised to hack the bodies into pieces so that they would fit neatly into shipping trunks for tidy disposal earning her the moniker "The Trunk Murderess".
Two days later, she took the train to Los Angeles with those trunks. You can only imagine the horror of that find. While police were called in to check out the trunks at the request of the railroad, Judd's brother had dropped her off somewhere in Los Angeles, and she disappeared. She hid out until she surrendered to police in a funeral home the following Friday, October 23rd, 1931.
The case made headlines across the country. Judd came to be called names such as "Tiger Woman" and "The Blonde Butcher". The case itself came to be known as "The Trunk Murders." Judd was tried and convicted for the murder of only Agnes LeRoi and not her other roommate. She was sentenced to be hanged on February 8, 1932. An appeal was unsuccessful. The death sentence was repealed after a ten-day hearing found her insane. She was sent to Arizona State Mental Hospital on April 24, 1933.
That was not the end for Winnie Ruth Judd. She escaped seven times, once for 6 and a half years of freedom as a maid in San Francisco. She was eventually paroled and released on 22 December 1971. Judd moved back to Stockton, California. In 1983 the state of Arizona issued her an "absolute discharge," meaning she was no longer a parolee. She died 23 October 1998 at the age of ninety-three.
A later investigation and book by Phoenix investigative journalist Jana Bommersbach suggests that Judd was never guilty of murder but self defense or perhaps not even of killing them at all. It is speculated by some that Judd was covering up the crimes of others, including Jack Halloran. None of this has been proven.
For me, the hard part was finding the infamous crime scene. There are 2 addresses listed on sites devoted to Winnie Ruth Judd: 2929 N 2nd S and 2947 N 2nd St. Most sources suggest that it was in number 2929, and that house has long since been torn down. One source says that the LA Times ran a photo of the home just a few days after the murders and it could never have fit on number 2929 lot. (See black and white photo on this waymark.) It appears that after WW II, house numbers in various neighborhoods were changed, including the Judd home. The crime scene, according to that source, is in the home located on the northeast corner of Second and Catalina streets. This is number 2947 N 2nd St. (Or 209 E Catalina according to yet another source, which is the address of the other half of the duplex.) That makes more sense than the duplex fitting on a tiny lot at 2929 N 2nd St. Certainly the home at 2947 N 2nd St looks like the old photo of the Judd home.
Date of crime: 10/16/1931
Public access allowed: no
Fee required: no
Web site: [Web Link]
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