From #1 New York Times bestselling author Laurie Notaro comes a haunting true-crime novel about Winnie Ruth Judd, one of the twentieth century’s most notorious and enigmatic killers.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Laurie Notaro’s The Murderess, which is out October 8th 2024.
It’s October 1931. When Winnie Ruth Judd arrives at the Los Angeles train station from Phoenix, her shipping trunks catch the attention of a suspicious porter. By the time they’re pried open, revealing the dismembered bodies of two women inside, Ruth has disappeared into the crowd.
The search for, and eventual apprehension of, the Trunk Murderess quickly becomes a headline-making sensation. Even the Phoenix murder house is a sideshow attraction. The one question on everyone’s How could a twenty-six-year-old reverend’s daughter and doctor’s wife—petite, pretty, well educated, and poised—commit such a heinous act on two people she’d called “my dearest friends in the world”? Everyone has their theories and judgments, but no one knows the whole truth.
What unfolds in this gripping work of true-crime fiction is a collision of jealousy, drug addiction, insanity, rage, and inescapable choices. At its heart, a condemned and tragic mystery woman whose trial—and its shocking twists—will make history.
CHAPTER ONE
October 19, 1931
The first drop of the rust-colored liquid that splashed on the wooden railway platform in the Union Station was not noticed.
Neither was the second, fourth, fifth, or twentieth. But ten minutes after the porter placed the black packer trunk on its side after the train from Phoenix had come to a stop, the stain began to spread. It leached out beyond the corner of the trunk, seeped in between the planks of wood, and settled in a dark, growing puddle, underneath the smaller gray steamer that accompanied it.
The first porter who saw it ignored it; he had a full compartment of baggage to unload and this was not his car. Another porter stopped for a moment, assumed it was water, and moved on. The messenger from the Golden State Limited train stopped, bent down, swiped his index finger through the small pool, and examined the dark, murky liquid. He took a sniff. It smelled of rot.
He checked the tag attached; the name scribbled on it read “Judd.”
“Sir?” he called out to the chief porter. It took several attempts to get his attention.
“I think we have something odd here, sir,” he said, holding out his fingertip. “I think we have some smuggling. A deer, probably.”
Arthur Anderson sighed and studied the accumulating stain. “We’ll need to bring the trunks into the baggage room. Don’t let anyone claim them until they see me first,” he said, and then wrote the same instructions on the baggage tags.
Together, they shifted the larger trunk, exposing an expansive area of liquid that had gathered underneath.
Anderson wrinkled his nose. “God, that’s bad,” he said to the messenger, who nodded.
They dragged the trunks to the small office on the platform not far from where they had been unloaded, a telling trail of darkness smeared behind.
They placed them as far away from their desk as they could. The pool was growing with speed, the stench gathering potency as well.
It took twenty minutes for a petite blond woman to appear at the baggage room door. She waved to get Anderson’s attention, then handed him her claim tickets. She had a young man with red, bushy hair as her companion.
Anderson studied the woman for a moment. She was slight, a smooth complexion and wide, deep-set eyes. A pretty thing. She was clothed nicely, in a clean, fashionable dress and a matching hat, tilted and poised on her head of light curls, which stopped just below her chin. She carried a brown leather satchel in one gloved hand, and had the other in the pocket of her jacket. Her shoes were bright and unscuffed; her lips had a slight tint to them, pinkish. Not gaudy. She didn’t look like a smuggler. A little girl like this? But things were different now; several years into the Depression, even prominent, upstanding people were employing all sorts of means to keep their families fed and stop the banks from coming for their houses. You couldn’t go by looks anymore, he knew, didn’t matter who had nice shoes and who didn’t. None of it mattered, even if a lady was wearing gloves. If there was a deer in that trunk, and he suspected there was, he would have no choice but to call authorities.
“Are these the ones you’re looking for?” he asked, pointing toward the black and gray trunks in the corner.
She suddenly smiled, brightly. “Oh yes, thank you.”
Anderson looked at her again, noted her cheerfulness, then moved his eyes to her claim tickets.
“What was the name on that tag, ma’am?” he asked.
“Judd,” she said quickly. “Mrs. Judd.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Judd, can you tell me what the contents are?” he asked. “Medical books,” she replied without hesitation. “For my husband. He is a physician.”
“Did you pack those trunks yourself, Mrs. Judd?” he asked.
She did not look alarmed, but was clearly taken aback.
“I don’t understand,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Is there a problem? May I just have my trunk, please?”
“Come with me,” Anderson said, and led the woman and her com panion into the office to where the trunks stood, the spot beneath the larger trunk dark and wet. “Mrs. Judd, do you notice that disagreeable odor?”
She sniffed briefly, delicately, and shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”
The chief porter looked at her. The smell was not only palpable—it was overbearing. He couldn’t help but notice it, even from several feet away. Flies had begun to gather, buzzing above it, several of them landing on the top.
“You don’t detect any smell coming from your trunk?” he asked again.
“I do,” her companion said. “That is awful! What could be causing that smell?”
“I don’t,” she replied, shaking her head, her eyes fixed on the chief porter. “May I take my trunks now, please?”
Anderson shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Mrs. Judd, this trunk is leaking,” he informed her, pointing to the collection of liquid below. “Are you sure there are only medical books in there?”
“Of course I am,” she said, a bit irritated. “I’m just bringing them to my husband. I told you, he’s a physician.”
Anderson didn’t want to get involved with this: calling the police, having her taken away, all for some pieces of meat. He was sure of it; there was a deer in that trunk. Parts of a deer, anyway.
“Mrs. Judd, I am going to have to ask you to open this trunk, please,” he said with a deep breath.
She shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said sharply. “I don’t have the key.”
“All right, then, who has the key?” Anderson asked, looking at her male companion.
“I told you, these are my husband’s trunks, they are his books,” she said, becoming more agitated, her eyes widening. “This is not my husband. This is my brother. My husband has the key. I was only to bring them to him.”
Her companion looked puzzled. Anderson knew she realized she had been caught. Was it worth calling the police? Getting this woman in trouble? He doubted she had money for bail, not if she was shipping this kind of cargo from Phoenix to Los Angeles. He felt sorry for her. He had as soon as he saw her wave to him at the door.
“Mrs. Judd, I would appreciate it if you would get the key and open up this trunk for me,” he said. “I cannot let you have either of them until you do. I’m sorry.”
The woman took in a deep breath through her nostrils and bit the inside of her lip.
“That is all right,” she told him. “I will get the key from my husband and then we can get this all sorted out.”
“I’m sorry,” Anderson said, knowing that he was forcing her to walk away from money that she probably needed badly.
She shook her head sharply, once; this was clearly a bother. She turned and walked down the platform, her companion following her, and was quickly absorbed by the crowd of other passengers making their way into the station.
Anderson shook his head. He felt a bit responsible for what he had forced her to lose. A nice lady like that.
The smell was there, he told himself. The smell was there.
When the next shift of porters arrived, the trunks remained exactly where Anderson and the other porter had dragged them. Though October, the day was still warm, and the odor from the first trunk had grown with the increasing temperature.
“I’ve got these trunks,” he said to the incoming porter. “Belong to a woman—she said she’d come back with the key hours ago, never did. I think she’s smuggling some deer or something. Got blood or something leaking out from all underneath.”
“It stinks,” the porter agreed. “Whatever’s in there has gone off. I don’t want that thing stinking all night. Call the cops.”
“Sure,” Anderson replied, and stepped inside the office. He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.
The porter grimaced at the smell.
Anderson waited until two lieutenants arrived, Detectives Ryan and Torres, both men in their thirties but who looked like they had seen far more in their lives for their age.
Ryan asked if Anderson had a master key ring, but Torres stopped him.
“I’m not going to smell this while you go through fifty keys till you find the right one,” he insisted. “You have a crowbar?”
Anderson nodded, and the night porter came back with it. Together, they kicked the larger trunk over. With one lift of the crow bar, the stench ballooned, rising from the trunk, affronting those not even directly in front of it.
“Oh my God,” Anderson said, using the hem of his porter’s jacket to cover his mouth. The night porter began to gag, stood up, and ran down the platform until he reached clear air, then stood with his hands on his bent knees, trying to inhale.
“What is it?” he called in between breaths. “What the hell is in there?”
“Deer, I think,” Ryan said, his words muffled by his hand as he turned away.
Several porters came out of the office almost immediately and, once confronted with the smell, turned away or sought some sort of protection.
In the trunk was a mass of objects: linens, photos, newspaper, clothes. Whatever smelled lay under them, the fabric and household items simply filler for the other contents.
“Give me that,” Ryan said to the night porter, who handed him the crowbar.
It took a while. With equal parts revulsion and trepidation, Ryan lifted out as many of the items as he could with the crowbar—the clothing and linens—and then tossed the books, letters, and newspaper out by hand. He had just moved what appeared to be a dirty brown tablecloth up and out of the trunk when a porter who was looking on sprinted over to the platform to vomit.
Anderson stood back for a moment, not wanting to see what foul thing had been uncovered, but he stepped forward, one foot, then another, and looked in.
At first, he didn’t know what it was. Was that fur? Hair? What was it? It looked black. Was it curled up? A hand? What? Was it pushed up, curled into a ball? And then, after a few moments of adjusting to the horror he saw, he was rather sure that he was looking at a girl.
The second trunk was opened next. Only a layer of towels was placed on top; the stench was awful, but not as bad as the first trunk. Torres removed the towels and the porters stood back in a group far enough away from the trunk that they couldn’t immediately see what was inside—with that smell, they knew it wasn’t something they wanted to see.
In the first trunk had been a woman, a Black woman, dead for days, the detectives surmised by the stench. She’d been shoved into it until she was curled up like a shrimp, her head bent so far forward that it was unnatural. It looked like her neck might have been broken.
Torres called to his fellow officers, who had just stepped up on the platform, and shook his head.
“Jesus,” one of the newly arrived officers said after he looked into the second trunk, jerking back simultaneously. Another one shook his head and looked upward. A third walked quickly away, muttering in disbelief as he passed the porters, “Legs. Only legs.”
A few minutes later, another officer came out of the station and onto the platform, calling, “Ryan, Torres. We’ve got something in the bathroom, behind a door. A brown leather satchel—there’s an arm in it.”
Excerpted from The Murderess: A Novel by Laurie Notaro. © 2024 Published by Little A Books, October 8, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
