Winnie Ruth Judd; Trunk Murderess

Winnie Ruth Judd, the quiet preacher’s daughter and doctor’s wife who became known around the world in the 1930s as the Trunk Murderess, died in her sleep Friday in Phoenix. She was 93.

Judd was convicted of murder in the 1931 shooting deaths of two young female friends in their Phoenix duplex. She accompanied the two bodies by train to Los Angeles, after chopping one up so most of it would fit in a trunk. The parts that didn’t fit she carried in her suitcase.

A railroad attendant in Los Angeles noticed blood seeping from one of the trunks. Judd fled, but after a huge dragnet, was found several days later at a mortuary.

The case was front-page news around the nation. Judd said she acted in self-defense. Children sold magazines door to door to raise money for her defense. She was nonetheless found guilty and sentenced to death. Less than 72 hours before her scheduled hanging, she was declared insane and spent most of the next 40 years in a mental hospital. She was described as a model inmate, except for four escapes.

After one, she walked from the Yuma-area hospital to Phoenix, about 150 miles. After another, she managed to get to San Francisco, where she worked for more than six years as a maid.

She was paroled in 1971. She spent the rest of her life in Northern California and Arizona.

Larry Cain, 76, was one of those who as a boy raised money for Judd’s defense. He became a friend of Judd after he retired and moved to Sun City, Ariz.

Judd was an accomplished storyteller who could talk for hours, Cain said, but she refused to talk about the murders.

“ ‘Every time I think about it, I cry,’ ” Cain recalled her saying. “I told her to go ahead and cry one time and be done with it, but she wouldn’t do it.”

At the time of the slayings, Judd was the 26-year-old wife of a 56-year-old physician, William Judd, who had left her in Arizona while he came to Santa Monica to work. She was said to have become involved with a playboy lumberman. He was believed to be involved with either or both of the victims, Anne LeRoi, 32, and Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson, 24.

The murders occurred in the victims’ duplex. Both were shot to death. Judd was shot in the hand. Cain said photographs taken of Judd after her arrest showed that she had also been beaten.

“She was fighting for her life,” he said.