Infamous Crimes: The True Story of Winnie Ruth Judd, Phoenix’s “Trunk Murderess”

In October 1931, a young medical secretary in Phoenix, Arizona shot two of her former roommates, packed their dismembered bodies into luggage, and boarded a train to Los Angeles. What followed was one of the most sensational murder trials in American history — a case involving a supposed affair with a powerful married man, three competing confessions, and a woman who spent 40 years escaping an institution before walking free.

This is the story of Winnie Ruth Judd — and the questions that have never been answered.

A Fractured Friendship

Winnie Ruth Judd, a slight woman with a history of tuberculosis, worked as a secretary at the Grunow Medical Clinic in Phoenix. She had previously shared a cottage at the corner of 2nd Street and Catalina Drive with two friends and coworkers — Agnes "Anne" LeRoi and Sarah Hedvig "Sammy" Samuelson. Just one week before the murders, Winnie had moved out following growing tension between the three women.

At the center of that tension was Jack Halloran, a wealthy and well-liked Phoenix businessman who was financially and emotionally entangled with all three women. "He was their meal ticket," says Scott Coblio, a filmmaker, author, and Winnie Ruth Judd historian who has spent years researching the case.

On the evening of Friday, Oct. 16, 1931, Anne called Winnie at work and invited her over. Winnie initially declined, having made plans to see Halloran. When Halloran failed to show up, Winnie made her way to the cottage around 10 o'clock that night.

Cards, Rice Pudding, and a Gun

What happened next depends entirely on which version of events you believe — Winnie eventually made three separate confessions, each contradicting the others.

According to Winnie's own account, the evening began calmly enough. The three women sat in the back bedroom, eating rice pudding and catching up. The conversation took a sharp turn when Anne brought up a woman named Lucille Moore, who had been seen spending time with Halloran and Winnie. Anne and Sammy suspected Moore had syphilis and threatened to tell Halloran. Winnie shot back that if they did, she would expose rumors about Anne and Sammy's relationship — that the two women were romantically involved, a scandal that could have cost them both their jobs and reputations.

Winnie took her dishes to the kitchen. According to her account, Sammy followed her with a gun — Winnie's own gun, left behind from when she'd lived at the cottage — and threatened her. Anne appeared from the bedroom wielding an ironing board and began beating Winnie with it, shouting at Sammy to shoot. In the struggle, Winnie was shot in the hand. Sammy was soon shot in the chest. Winnie, now in possession of the gun, shot Anne. When Winnie turned herself in a week later, she had more than 100 bruises on her body, consistent with an ironing board beating.

Whether it was self-defense or premeditated murder, two women were dead on the floor of a Phoenix cottage before sunrise.

"Leave Everything to Me"

Winnie fled back to her apartment, where a drunk Halloran soon appeared. She told him what had happened. He returned with her to the cottage and, according to Winnie, took immediate control.

"For God sake, don't call your husband! Don't call the police!" he allegedly told her. He instructed her to retrieve the steamer trunk from the garage and suggested they put the bodies inside and dump them in the desert. Then he changed plans entirely. He told Winnie to go to work the next day, act normally, and wait for his call.

When Halloran finally called the next day, the plan had shifted again. He could not dispose of the bodies himself, he said. Winnie would need to take them by train to Los Angeles, where a man named Mr. Wilson would meet her. "Jack Halloran has to know this is a terrible plan," Coblio notes. If Winnie's account is accurate, Halloran may well have been setting her up.

The Luggage Problem

Winnie returned to the cottage after work to prepare for the journey. A delivery man arrived to collect the trunk and found it was over the weight limit. With no cash to cover the surcharge, Winnie had it sent to her apartment instead.

Alone on a Saturday night with two bodies and a train to catch, Winnie improvised. She divided the contents of the single large trunk across multiple pieces of luggage: a smaller trunk, a suitcase, and a hatbox. Anne remained in the large trunk. Sammy's body was distributed among the others.

The medical consensus at trial was that Sammy had been dismembered — at least partially — either at the house before the trunk was collected, or later as Winnie reorganized the luggage. Whether Halloran was present for this, or whether Winnie acted entirely alone, was never definitively resolved.

Many have doubted Winnie acted alone. She was small, physically weakened by tuberculosis, and dealing with a gunshot wound. The logistics of dismembering and moving a body in the early stages of rigor mortis pointed, to many observers, toward a second set of hands — most likely Halloran's.

A Train Ride and a Leaking Trunk

Winnie boarded the train to Los Angeles a day behind schedule. Mr. Wilson was not at the station. Her brother, who had come to pick her up, was met instead by station officials who had noticed Winnie's luggage was leaking a foul-smelling liquid.

Asked for the key to her trunks, Winnie said she didn't have one and simply walked away. She vanished into Los Angeles for a full week.

During that week, Winnie walked across the city with a bullet still lodged in her hand, which had begun to turn gangrenous. She slept in a vacant cottage at La Viña Sanitarium in Altadena, where she had previously been treated for tuberculosis. She moved through the city while her name dominated every newspaper headline.

Eventually she heard someone read aloud from a newspaper article urging her to turn herself in — and listing a phone number to call. She called it. Her husband sent a man to collect her. Winnie surrendered at the Alvarez and Moore Funeral Chapel in Los Angeles, wearing a fur coat she had taken from the sanitarium.

Photographers mobbed her on the steps. She was, by every account, composed, beautiful, and utterly cinematic despite her week on the run without much access to food or water.

The Trial

Winnie's trial opened on January 19, 1932, at the Maricopa Courthouse in Phoenix. Prosecutors charged her with premeditated murder, arguing her wounds were self-inflicted. Her defense chose to try her only for Anne's death, believing the circumstances of Sammy's dismemberment would be too damaging to overcome.

Jack Halloran attended the trial every day. He was never called as a witness and never spoke on the record. Jurors were asked whether they knew him, but the reason was never explained in open court.

Media baron William Randolph Hearst contributed $20,000 to Winnie's defense fund — reportedly in exchange for the exclusive rights to her life story. The deal backfired strategically. Winnie's new high-profile lawyer kept her from testifying, resulting in what Coblio describes as "a very unconvincing insanity trial."

On Feb. 8, 1932, Winnie was found guilty and sentenced to hang on Good Friday, February 17, 1933.

Halloran, the Hanging, and the Loophole

Facing execution, Winnie finally spoke openly. She stated in court: "I am going to be hanged for something Jack Halloran is responsible for. I was convicted of murder, but I shot in self-defense. Jack Halloran removed every bit of evidence. He is responsible for me going through all this."

A separate hearing determined the deaths were the result of self-defense, not homicide. Halloran walked free. Winnie's death sentence stood.

Then, in the eleventh hour, the sheriff of the jail where Winnie was held discovered an obscure legal provision allowing him to request an insanity hearing if he personally believed a prisoner was mentally unfit. He invoked it. Winnie submitted a new confession — frantic, raving, and widely believed to have been strategically crafted — describing drug dependency and sole culpability. Hours before her scheduled execution, she was declared insane and committed to the Arizona State Hospital.

The condition attached to her commitment was strict: if she were ever found sane, she would be hanged immediately.

Forty Years Under the Shadow of the Noose

Winnie spent more than 40 years at the Arizona State Hospital and escaped at least six times. The hospital's nurses were so fond of her that they gave her a key to the front door and never changed the locks after her departures.

Winnie became a sought-after hairdresser within the institution, eventually attracting paying clients from Phoenix society who would visit specifically to have their hair done by the "Trunk Murderess."

Her longest escape lasted six years. She worked as a caretaker for a wealthy California woman who grew so attached to her that she left Winnie a house and a substantial sum of money in her will. Winnie's nephew, who had been blackmailing her, eventually turned her in. She was returned to the hospital.

In 1971, attorneys Larry DeBus and Melvin Belli secured her parole. Winnie Ruth Judd walked out of the Arizona State Hospital a free woman, more than four decades after the night at the cottage on Catalina Drive.

The full truth of what happened on the night of October 16, 1931 died with her.

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