Winnie Ruth Judd: the trunk murders,

by Robert J. Hendricks and J. Dwight Dobkins

Book Overview

Winnie Ruth Judd: the trunk murders, [Hardcover] J. Dwight Dobkins J. Dwight Dobkins (Author) This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0448021870
• ISBN13: 9780448021874
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great history

Very interesting story. The presentation is tedious at times and a little hard to follow at others, but a concise history.

The Stuff of Legend

Rarely in the annals of crime history has a case been closed with so many questions left unanswered. This is arguably the better of two books on the subject of the infamous Trunk Murderess Winnie Ruth Judd. It is shorter than Jana Bomersbach's exposé of 1992, but much better written. Tempering the sensational aspects of the case with poetic eloquence and restraint, Dobkins' prose in recounting the story of the lady killer is at once poignant and chilling, packing the wallop of a classic mystery story. As with most legendary mysteries, there are loose ends and riddles to this case perhaps never to be solved. If Winnie shot her two best friends in self defense as she claimed, why did she attempt to hide their bodies by putting them in trunks and taking them on a train from Phoenix to Los Angeles, with the dizzy idea to sink them at sea? Was the prominent, married business tycoon with whom she claimed to be having an affair behind the cover up as she later alleged? If not, who helped the frail, tubercular woman move and pack the bodies, one of them dismembered to fit into three different pieces of luggage? How could a woman who was remembered by her associates as being of a gentle & sympathetic disposition, and with no history of violence, suddenly turn into a cold-blooded killer? And if she did not, who was influencing her to hide a crime for which she might have been forgiven? And why? Winnie's case only got stranger as it progressed, with betrayal, conspiracies, conflicting confessions and disappearing evidence muddying the waters of the crime. And always at the center, the pretty 26 year old girl with the ice blue eyes who spoke so little about her case but about whom volumes have been written. Who was Winnie Ruth Judd and what really happened on October 16, 1931? Dobkins, in the spirit of great storytelling, wisely avoids concluding these mysteries about the enigmatic "Velvet Tigress", leaving us to ponder whether our protagonist was a persecuted victim, a villianous who paid--but not the whole price of her deed, or something perched unsettlingly between.