The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury by Sean O'Connor

Author:Sean O'Connor [O’Connor, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

For many, Ruth was the object of erotic fascination; while on remand she received 164 offers of marriage.13

The trial began on 18 April 1927 and lasted a monumental eighteen days, with fifty-eight witnesses giving their testimony. Three hundred and ninety potential jury members were examined before the final twelve men were sworn;14 women would not serve on juries in New York until 1937.15 The trial was the sensation of its day and inspired a flourishing business in counterfeit tickets to the courtroom, with spectators paying up to $50 for a seat. Hundreds of miniature sash weights mounted on stickpins were sold outside the courtroom as mementos for ten cents each. Justice Scudder had to remind the press and public that there were to be ‘no photographers in the courtroom. No Minors or picnics.’16 The trial, though, became a national circus and was attended by journalists, celebrities and Broadway playwrights in search of inspiration or titillation.17 A journalist for the New York World, James M. Cain, who attended the trial, famously translated it into a new, hard-boiled style of fiction in Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Perhaps most curiously of all, the trial was attended by Maurine Dallas Watkins, a reporter on the Chicago Tribune who had covered the infamous Leopold and Loeb trial, which had taken place in Chicago in 1924. She had also written a play based on two other unrelated murder trials in Chicago the same year. Two married women, Beulah Annan18 and Belva Gaertner,19 were each accused of murdering their lovers. Both were ultimately acquitted but inspired Watkins’s satire on the idea of American justice seen through the prism of the entertainment industry. This play, originally entitled The Brave Little Woman, went on to be a great success in the Broadway season of 1926, retitled Chicago and starring Francine Larrimore as the murderous heroine, Roxie Hart.20 Belva Gaertner, by then a celebrity in her own right, attended the opening night, pretty much confirming Watkins’s uncomfortable thesis that murder was box office and murderers were stars. In the play, Roxie observes, ‘I’m so gentle I wouldn’t harm a fly.’ Before her trial opened, Ruth Snyder precipitated a near riot by announcing, ‘Kill my husband? Why, I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’21 As if this blurring of fact and fiction weren’t enough, Larrimore attended Ruth Snyder’s trial together with Watkins, watching the latest instalment of real-life drama unfold before going on to play Roxie Hart that evening in the theatre.

Throughout the trial Judd Gray was depicted as an ordinary Joe seduced by a rapacious and immoral woman:

That woman, that peculiar creature, like a poisonous snake, like a poisonous serpent, drew Judd Gray into her glistening coils, and there was no escape. That woman. Just as a piece of steel jumps and clings to the powerful magnet, so Judd Gray came within the powerful compelling force of that woman, and she held him fast gentlemen. This woman, this peculiar venomous species of humanity was abnormal; possessed of an all-consuming, all-absorbing sexual passion, animal lust, which seemingly was never satisfied.

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