Tender Murderers Read online

  In this artist's interpretation from the 1940s, Beulah phones for help, while her lover slumps over, dead, in the background.

  Belva herself, dressed to the teeth, came to the opening of the 1926 play. “Sure, that's me,” she said, of Velma.

  Beulah May didn't make it to the opening. She'd had a mental breakdown after her third divorce, signed herself into a sanatorium under an assumed name, and died there of tuberculosis, a year later.

  The Movie

  Even though it was filmed in black and white, Ginger Rogers dyed her blonde locks orange for the role of the floozy flapper Roxie Hart in the 1942 film. The movie's snappy dialogue borrowed heavily from the original play, which in turn borrowed heavily from Maurine Watkins's own real-time articles and interviews with the celebrity murderesses. There was one fatal difference: post-code Hollywood simply couldn't make a film in which the killer, male or female, got away with it. Crime Doesn't Pay was the byword of the day. Never mind that fate stepped in for the real Roxie to make sure that she did eventually pay for her crime; Roxie Hart was a comedy that most certainly could not end with the heroine's death in a sanatorium. So the story was changed to make Roxie innocent! In the movie, it's Roxie's husband who shoots his wife's lover, but Roxie, a wannabe hoofer, is persuaded to take the rap because it'll make her famous and be good for her career.

  Rent the video, if you can find it, to see Ginger Rogers turn in a topnotch performance as the gum-snapping, wisecracking Roxie, and to see her dance, without benefit of Fred Astaire, a fabulous Black Bottom.

  Beautiful Beulah

  Winnie Ruth Judd

  “Count the Heads!”

  This much is agreed upon: On October 16, 1931, pretty, blonde, twenty-six-year-old Winnie Ruth Judd shot to death Anne LeRoi and Hedwig “Sammy” Samuelson, stuffed their bodies (one of which was dismembered) into two trunks and sent them by train to Los Angeles.

  The rest of the story depends on whom you want to believe: Winnie or the prosecution.

  In 1930, Winnie left her husband of four years and moved to Phoenix, Arizona, for her health. She had tuberculosis, and in those days Phoenix, with its dry hot air, was where you went for the cure. Anyway, her marriage was a shambles: her doctor husband was fat, balding, and twenty-two years older than she, his practice was a flop, and he was addicted to his own drugs. She found work as a medical secretary at a clinic, and took up with “Happy Jack” Halloran, an influential, well-to-do Phoenix businessman, who happened to also be married. She also took up with Anne and Sammy.

  Thirty-two-year-old brunette Anne and her roommate, twenty-four-year-old blonde Sammy, had met in Alaska, and moved to Arizona together because of Sammy's TB. Winnie roomed with them briefly, but after some typical roommate clashes–Winnie was a bit of a slob, the other two were neatniks–she moved into her own bungalow.

  Anne and Sammy were what in those days were called “party girls”–possibly also, according to newspaper reports, bisexual party girls and lesbian lovers. (The newspapers delicately called it “strange intimacies.” It was even hinted that Winnie might have been part of a lesbian triangle.) Whatever the truth, no one argues over the party girls bit. The girls threw shindigs in their studio duplex for various married Phoenix businessmen, one of whom was Happy Jack. The men would supply bootleg booze, and leave behind wads of dough. We can assume that what was played in that little duplex was more than simple games of Mah Jong. Winnie knew about Happy Jack's relationship with Anne and Sammy, but said nothing. After all, who was she to cast the first stone?

  Anyway, she loved Happy Jack. So much, in fact, that she even helped him get girls. Sometime during the week of October 15, 1931, Happy Jack told Winnie that he and his pals planned a deer-hunting trip to the mountains. Winnie introduced him to Lucille Moore, a pretty nurse who worked at her clinic. Lucille came from that part of Arizona, knew the terrain and animals, and would love to come along. Winnie must have guessed what would go on between Happy Jack and Lucille during that hunting trip. At any rate, Anne and Sammy did.

  On Friday night, October 16, Happy Jack was supposed to take Winnie out to dinner, but he stood her up. Annoyed, and with nothing else to do, she took the trolley to Anne's and Sammy's duplex, hoping to get in on a game of bridge. By the time she arrived it was getting late, and the roommates suggested she stay over; the trolley would soon stop running for the night, and in the morning she could go to work with Anne, who also worked at the clinic.

  It was when they all got to bed (drinking warm milk!) that the fur started flying. Anne started it: How could Winnie have introduced Jack to Lucille? Didn't she know that Lucille had syphilis and would give it to Jack? Anyway, Winnie was a tramp, and what would her husband think if he knew how his wife was carrying on with Happy Jack? Winnie fought back: Oh yeah? Well, everybody at the clinic, she said, knew that Anne and Sammy were nothing but lesbo-perverts.

  At a certain point, went Winnie's later testimony, she decided she'd had enough, and went to the kitchen to put her empty milk cup into the sink. Hearing a noise behind her, she turned, and there stood Sammy with a gun aimed at her chest. Winnie grabbed a bread knife from the counter, and the two women fought. She stabbed Sammy in the shoulder; Sammy shot her in the hand. Meanwhile Anne was hitting Winnie over the head with an ironing board, yelling for Sammy to “Shoot her!” Winnie got hold of the gun and shot them both dead.

  She threw on her dress and shoes and fled. The trolley was still running; she took it home and arrived there around 11:30, to find Happy Jack on her doorstep, drunk as a skunk. Not believing her hysterical report, he drove them back to the duplex to see for himself. She wanted to call the cops. After all, it had been self-defense. No way, Jose, said Happy Jack, he would take care of it, and she mustn't tell a soul.

  Winnie mopped the bloody kitchen floor, and Jack dragged a huge trunk in from the garage. She was to go home, he'd take it from there. The next evening, when Winnie met Jack back at the duplex, the bodies had been neatly stashed in the steamer trunk. He admitted that he'd had to “operate on” Sammy a bit, to get her to fit. His plan was to ship Winnie, along with the trunk, to Los Angeles, where he'd have a man meet her and dispose of the bodies. He got her a ticket for the Golden State Limited express train to Los Angeles.

  Immediately, everything went wrong. The deliverymen hired to lug the trunk to the train station told her it was too heavy; she'd have to separate the contents into two trunks. Jack had conveniently disappeared, and Winnie was left with the gruesome task of dumping bits and pieces of Sammy into another trunk. As Winnie described it, “I didn't lift (the body parts), I lowered them over the edge and they fell into the lower (trunk).”

  After distributing the various parts evenly in the two trunks, there remained only Sammy's legs. She stuffed them into her valise. The landlord and his son helped her get the trunks to the train, where she had to pay $4.50 extra because they still weighed too much.

  Of course nobody was there to meet Winnie on the station at Los Angeles, and when she phoned Jack she was informed that he was gone on a hunting trip. Meanwhile the two trunks, stinking to high heaven and leaking blood, were opened by suspicious railroad officials. Here's the description from the Los Angeles Examiner for October 20:

  In the larger one was the body of an older and larger woman.... In the body of (a) younger woman were three bullet wounds.... She had been stuffed into the smaller trunk, for the body had been severed by a keen-edged instrument–cut completely into three pieces, but the portion from the waist to the knee was missing!

  The missing parts were found that evening, still dressed in the remains of pink pajamas, stuffed into a valise and hidden behind the door of the lady's room in the train station.

  The newspapers ate the story up! Almost as soon as news of the gruesome discovery reached his desk, Los Angeles Examiner reporter Warden Woolard was on the phone to Detective Bill White for juicy details. How many bodies were in the trunk, he asked. White answered, “I dunno, it's just one helluvamess.” Woolar
d snapped, “Good God, Bill, can't you count the heads?”

  Headlines referred to Winnie first as “The Tiger Woman,” and “The Velvet Tigress,” then as “The Trunk Murderess.” That Sammy's body had been chopped up to fit in the trunk made her crime all the more titillating to the public, despite the fact that, if you think logically about it, chopping Sammy up didn't make her any deader than she already was.

  Newspaper artists didn't always get it right. This drawing, from a newspaper of the day, incorrectly shows Winnie shooting either Anne or Sammy in bed (the deed was done in the kitchen), and the grisly discovery in the trunk.

  A massive womanhunt finally ended when Winnie was found hiding out in, ironically, a mortuary. And when she was brought to trial, things really heated up. Winnie claimed self-defense. The prosecution said she'd killed the two women while they slept, in a fit of jealousy over their relationship with Happy Jack. As for lover boy himself, the Phoenix high muck-a-mucks protected their buddy as best they could. Although he was named in every other newspaper in America, the Phoenix papers simply referred to him as “Mister X.” Neither he nor Winnie were even called to the witness stand. And of course, the lesbian angle was brought up. At one point, the trial psychiatrist, after being told by Winnie that she loved both her husband and Happy Jack, asked her if she was polyandrous. She shot back indignantly, “There was nothing between those girls and me!”

  On February 8, 1932, poor Winnie was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

  But it didn't end there. The general public, from children who sold magazine subscriptions door to door to help her defense, to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, thought Winnie had been railroaded to protect a certain party. The petite, 100-pound woman, they felt, couldn't possibly have managed dismembering the bodies and squeezing them into a trunk all by herself. Eventually, thanks to the combined efforts of Sheriff John R. McFadden and prison warden A. G. Walker, Winnie won a Grand Jury hearing and then a sanity hearing. The sanity hearing opened on April 14, 1933, the day she'd been scheduled for death. She was ruled insane and committed to the Arizona State Mental Hospital for life.

  Winnie, the Escape Artist

  Winnie was an ideal patient at the funny farm, styling the hair and nails of her fellow inmates, and soon even beautifying the nurses, in return for a small payment. The only problem was, she kept escaping. Between 1939 and 1952, she escaped six times, staying out from only a few hours to six days. Finally, in 1962, she escaped a seventh time and remained free for almost seven years. She found work with a rich Oakland, California, family, caring for their aged mother. The family loved her, and when the old woman died (of old age!), they invited Winnie to stay on in a cottage on their property. That's where the police found her when they finally tracked her down through her driver's license.

  This time Winnie got world-famous attorney Melvin Belli to handle her defense. He lost his fight to avoid her extradition back to Arizona, but her sentence was finally commuted in 1971. Winnie walked out of the mental hospital a free woman, and returned to California, living quietly in Stockton under an assumed name, with Skeeter, her dog. On October 23, 1998, at the age of ninety-three, she died peacefully in her sleep.

  Some things, however, never change. Winnie's obituary in one newspaper was headlined, “Insane Murderess Dies of Old Age.”

  Jean Harris

  Integrity Jean and the Diet Doctor

  When Dr. Herman Tarnower, author of the bestselling Scarsdale Diet book, was shot and killed by a discarded lover, a large number of American women applauded. Many of them were feminists, who objected to the incessant message pushed by this and other diet books, that women must be slim at all costs. Others were women who had tried the diet.

  If you read his book and attempt to follow his diet, you soon get the impression that Dr. Tarnower, or Hi, as his friends called him, may have been a culinary sadist and fascist. It is not a pleasurable diet. One example is the between-meal snack he permits the reader: carrot and celery sticks only, with no sub-stitutions. Of course, it may never have occurred to him that a person could get so sick of carrot and celery sticks that she never wanted to see one again. Or, perhaps it didn't occur to him that raw broccoli, cauliflowerets, or radishes might provide low-calorie snacking and help prevent death from monotony. Or perhaps he felt contemptuous of the women struggling to lose weight by following his directions. At any rate, when one woman wrote to him, begging to substitute cauliflower and radishes for the omnipresent carrots and celery, his answer was the authoritarian, “Stick to the Diet as listed!”

  In the days following March 10, 1980, as the facts emerged of Hi's treatment of his dumped lover, and now killer, Jean Harris, it would seem that his sadism and fascism, and his contempt for women, went beyond the pages of his book.

  Jean Harris never fit the profile of so many other women who kill: she never grew up with poverty and poor education, she experienced no early marriage or teen pregnancy. Born in 1923 and brought up by well-to-do parents, she attended Smith College and graduated magna cum laude. Married, divorced, mother of two kids, she became a teacher, and by 1977, was headmisterss of the Madeira Girls' School, an expensive private girls' high school in Virginia. She had such high moral standards that her nick-name was Integrity Jean. She was twin sets and pearl necklaces, and well-coifed blonde hair. She had class. She was a lady.

  But inside, Jean had been unraveling for years. Shortly after her divorce in the mid-1960s, she had met Herman Tarnower, and the two quickly became an item. In 1967, he proposed to Jean, giving her a diamond ring worth $35,000. But within the year, he backed out of their betrothal—he just wasn't the marrying kind, he told her. Jean accepted that they would never marry, and their relationship continued. They traveled to exotic places together: Hawaii, Bali, Singapore. Soon, however, Jean understood something else about Hi: he was sleeping around, he would always have other women in his life. But she loved Hi and was willing to accept that. The other women didn't matter to Jean, as long as she stayed the number one woman in his life.

  What all these women saw in Hi Tarnower is beyond me. Born in 1910, he was much older than them, balding, and just plain ugly. In a satiric article written after he was killed, National Lampoon magazine described him as looking like a squid. People who knew or had met him described him as charming, but it's hard to imagine Hi's charm being reason enough to go to bed with him.

  Nonetheless, Hi was living the life of a medical Hugh Hefner, and in trying to accept his lifestyle Jean was growing depressed— except that she didn't realize she was depressed. She thought she was just tired. In fact, she felt more and more exhausted as their relationship progressed, and the Good Doctor prescribed medicine for her: a drug called Desoxyn. Desoxyn is actually a brand name for methamphetamine–speed. Doctor Hi had been keeping Jean on speed, with a little Valium on the side, since at least 1978.

  The biggest cause of Jean's depression was Hi's secretary receptionist, Lynne Tryforos. Around 1974, Lynne, younger than Jean, became a rival for Hi's affections. Soon, when he traveled with Jean, Hi would leave his itinerary with Lynne. When Jean wasn't spending the night with him, Lynne was. When Jean showed up, Hi would simply move Lynne's things out of the closet. When Lynne came over, he'd hide Jean's things. Nevertheless, once Lynne found Jean's clothes, and slashed them. And during a trip to Paris in 1977, when Jean and Hi returned to their hotel room, Hi left a letter from Lynne on the floor, where Jean could find it, and on the mantel, he left a pair of gold cufflinks, inscribed, “All my love from Lynne.”

  Did Hi make sure they found each other's possessions? Did he derive a sadistic pleasure from the torment both women must have felt? Did he enjoy being fought over? You bet he did! And they did fight over him. Jean began receiving anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night. In return, she started phoning Lynne and screaming at her. Lynne changed her unlisted phone number five times, but somehow Jean always found it. On New Year's Day 1979, Lynne actually paid for an announcement on the front page of
the New York Times, reading, “Happy New Year, Hi T. Love always, Lynne.” Jean's caustic comment was, “Why don't you suggest she use the Goodyear Blimp next year? I think it's available.”

  By March 1980, Jean Harris had finally become undone. There was trouble at the Madeira Girls' School: pot paraphernalia, pots seeds and stems, had been found in the possession of four students. “Integrity Jean” insisted on expelling them, even though they were about to graduate. There was a student demonstration protesting her ruling. She received angry letters from the girls' parents, and even a critical letter from a young student whom Jean held in high regard.

  Jean grew more and more insecure. The previous year, a professional evaluation group hired by the school had recommended her dismissal. She was not rich, and the strong possibility of being fired was almost more than she could cope with, on top of Lynne shoving Hi's infidelity in her face. Not only that, but she had run out of her prescription “medicine.”

  The last straw for Jean was a dinner planned by the Westchester County Heart Association for April 19, at which Hi, whose diet book was now number one on the New York Times bestseller list, would be the honored guest. He had invited both women to the dinner (why couldn't they see how much he enjoyed playing them against each other?), but neither would sit at the head table with him. Jean would sit with friends, while Lynne got to sit at a table that was closer to Hi. Jean, who had helped Hi by editing his book, found this insufferable. She deserved to sit next to him! She composed a letter to Hi. The letter, which became known as the Scarsdale Letter, clearly shows Jean's rage–she refers to Lynne as “your adulterous slut” and “your whore”–but much more disturbing is the masochism she displays: