BOOK REVIEW : A Story of Murder--and Desperate Times : THE TRUNK MURDERESS: Winnie Ruth Judd, <i> by Jana Bommersbach,</i> Simon & Shuster, $22; 284 pages

The precipitating incidence for this book (and reams of other journalistic efforts down through the years) is this: In October, 1931, in Phoenix, a young woman named Winnie Ruth Judd did or did not kill two other women, Anne Le Roi and “Sammy” Samuelson. The killings were nothing much in the larger scheme of things, but a day or two later, a very nervous Winnie Ruth took the train to Los Angeles with two large trunks which gave off a ghastly, suggestive smell. Convinced that someone was trying to bring contraband venison into the state, officials opened the trunks to find one dead human body and about three-quarters of another.

Journalists from all over the country went ape crazy. Well, who wouldn’t? The idea of a young and pretty woman exterminating two other ladies and then taking a train ride with their dead bodies was distracting and wacko and did wonders in taking the public’s mind off the Great Depression.

Days went by before the rest of the dismembered body was found--in a suitcase at the train station behind a door. Winnie Ruth Judd was returned to Arizona. Her plea? Insanity, although she might have done better with self-defense.

From the beginning, there were doubts about how the investigation and subsequent trial proceeded. Mainly, questions of height and weight and poundage didn’t add up. One of the victims weighed more than Winnie Ruth. How had she managed to jam those bodies into those pieces of luggage? How had she managed to dismember one woman? (For although, in the public imagination, that body had been “hacked,” in reality, it had been sliced by professional hands--either a butcher’s or a doctor’s.)

This account takes us through the trial again and trudges rather heavily through the second two-thirds of Winnie Ruth’s life: After being committed to a state hospital for the insane, she managed to escape seven times--once for more than six years-- then went to prison and wasn’t pardoned until almost 40 years after the crime.

The author here takes the position that Winnie Ruth was railroaded--that corrupt officials, inept bureaucrats and a self-serving business community rallied to protect one of their own--a hard-drinking entrepreneur named “Happy” Jack Halloran.

All that is interesting, but the first hundred pages here are the splendid part, re-creating an America that scrimped and saved and drank hard liquor during Prohibition and sweltered during unforgiving summer months because there was no air conditioning. The life in this desert town divides down into the respectable and the demimonde. If you were a woman living on your own, you pretty much had to fit in the latter category, because you simply couldn’t make enough to live on.

Jana Bommersbach has here beautifully re-created the society of desperate, jaunty poverty, where working girls worked in both senses of the word. Winnie Ruth was married, but her husband had been left a drug addict by World War I.

Sammy and Anne lived together in a modest bungalow. Alaska , of all places, was in their background. One worked as an X-ray technician; the other was dying of TB. But they entertained Phoenix businessmen, whose wives went to cooler climes in the summer. Sammy, Anne and Winnie Ruth lived lives of terrible marginality, scrounging food and liquor, giving parties and going to them.

The death part of this story (even including those trunks) is not very scary. It’s the life part of this narration where the real shivers reside. All this happened just 60 years ago, in America. The TB bacteria is back again with a vengeance. The recession once again puts the middle class and underclass at economic risk. And single women still sometimes make pitiful bargains with rich and prosperous men. The Old Days aren’t really gone. Trailer parks are filled with elderly ladies who still remember.

This is a cautionary tale, not about the past, but about the present. The dismembered limbs, now as then, are only a macabre diversion.