One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page B

blonde hair was marcelled to perfection,” wrote one observer tartly, as if that alone confirmed her guilt. The Mirror dubbed her “the marble woman without a heart.” Elsewhere she was called “the human serpent,” “the ice woman,” and, in a moment of journalistic hyperventilation, “the Swedish-Norwegian vampire.” Nearly all reports dwelt on Ruth Snyder’s deadly good looks, but this was either delusional or selectively generous. By 1927, Ruth Snyder was thirty-six years old, plump, haggard, and worn. Her complexion was blotchy, her expression an iron scowl. Franker commentators doubted that she had ever been attractive. A reporter for The New Yorker suggested: “No one has yet satisfactorily analyzed the interest that attaches to Ruth Snyder.… Her irresistible charm is visible only to Judd Gray.” Gray, with his heavy round glasses, looked improbably wise and professorial, and much older than his thirty-five years. In photographs he wore an expression of perpetual startlement, as if he couldn’t believe where he now found himself.
    Quite why the Snyder murder attracted such a devoted followingwasn’t easy to say then and is impossible to say now. Plenty of other, better murders were available to excite attention that year, even without leaving New York. One was the Gravesend Bay Insurance Murder, as the newspapers dubbed it, in which a man named Benny Goldstein devised a plan to fake his own drowning in Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn, so that his friend Joe Lefkowitz could collect on a $75,000 insurance policy, which they would then split. Lefkowitz, however, made one significant change to the plan: he tossed Goldstein out of a boat in the middle of the bay rather than conveying him to a beach in New Jersey, as agreed. Since Goldstein couldn’t swim his death was pretty well assured, and Lefkowitz collected all the money, though he didn’t have long to enjoy it because he was swiftly caught and convicted.
    The Snyder case, in contrast, was clumsy and banal, and didn’t even hold out the promise of exciting courtroom revelations since both of the accused had already fully confessed. Yet it became known, without any sense of hyperbole, as “the crime of the century,” and exerted a most extraordinary influence on popular culture, particularly on Hollywood, Broadway, and the more sensational end of light fiction. The film producer Adolph Zukor brought out a movie called The Woman Who Needed Killing (the title was later toned down), and the journalist Sophie Treadwell, who had covered the trial for the Herald Tribune , wrote a play called Machinal , which enjoyed both critical and commercial success. (The part of Judd Gray in the Treadwell production was played by a promising young actor named Clark Gable.) The novelist James M. Cain was so taken with the case that he used it as the central plot device in two books: The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity . Billy Wilder made the latter into the artfully lit 1944 movie of the same name starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. This was the movie that created film noir and so became the template on which a generation of Hollywood melodramas were based. The movie Double Indemnity is the Snyder-Gray case but with snappier dialogue and better-looking people.
    The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn’t actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in 115of those cases no one was arrested. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent. Nationally, according to a survey made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—and it is notable that the best records were kept by insurers, not police authorities—two-thirds of America’s murders were unsolved in 1927. Some localities couldn’t even achieve that grimly unsatisfactory proportion. Chicago in a typical year experienced between 450 and 500 murders and managed to