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Man Killed In His Sleep
Queens Village, NY.
Ruth Snyder
Trapped in a loveless marriage, Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless and altogether irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her husband but that he die-and the sooner the better. No less miserable in his own marriage is Judd Gray, a dapper corset-and-brassiere salesman who travels the Northeast peddling his wares. He meets Ruth in a Manhattan diner, and soon they are conducting a white-hot affair involving rooms at the Waldorf Astoria, secret letters, clandestine travels, and above all Ruth’s increasing insistence that Judd kill her husband.
The two hatch a plan to rid her life of Albert forever. Ruth’s story unravels quickly, and the case becomes the talk of NYC. Tried together in 1927, Ruth and Judd are defendants of the highest notoriety and the city watches with baited breath. What follows is a thrilling exposition of a murder plan, a police investigation, the lovers’ attempt to escape prosecution, and a final reckoning for both of them that lays bare of what they have done.
In A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, author Robert Hansen recounts the Prohibition era killing of Albert Snyder, and has written and artfully constructed, an impossible-to-put-down story based upon the 1927 real case.
Hansen has also written Atticus, Mariette in Ecstasy and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.