Background
Winnie Ruth Judd was born Winnie Ruth McKinnell on January 29, 1905, in Oxford, Indiana, the daughter of a Methodist minister. In 1924 she married Dr. William C. Judd, a physician considerably older than she was. The couple's life was marked by frequent relocations and financial difficulty, in part connected to her husband's struggles with morphine addiction.
By 1930 Winnie Ruth Judd had settled in Phoenix, Arizona, while her husband worked elsewhere. She found employment as a medical secretary at the Grunow Clinic in Phoenix. There she became friends with two other young women, Agnes Anne LeRoi, a medical technician, and Hedvig Marie Samuelson, known as Sammy, with whom she socialized closely in Phoenix's small professional community.
The Killings
On the night of October 16, 1931, a confrontation occurred at the apartment LeRoi and Samuelson shared on North Second Street in Phoenix. Both women were shot to death. Agnes Anne LeRoi was 32 and Hedvig Samuelson was about 24 at the time of their deaths. Judd herself was wounded in the hand during the events.
Judd always maintained that the shootings followed a violent quarrel and that she had acted in self-defense after Samuelson drew a gun. Prosecutors instead argued the killings were premeditated, possibly rooted in jealousy. The exact sequence of events that night, and whether Judd acted alone, remained matters of dispute for the rest of her life.
The Trunks and Arrest
Following the deaths, the bodies were placed into luggage, including a large trunk and a smaller valise or trunk. On October 18, 1931, Judd traveled by train from Phoenix to Los Angeles, taking the baggage with her. When she arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, a baggage agent noticed fluid leaking from the trunk and a foul odor, and asked her to open it.
Judd left the station rather than open the luggage, and the trunks were opened by authorities, revealing the remains. The discovery triggered a widely publicized manhunt. Judd surrendered several days later, on October 23, 1931, after going to a Los Angeles funeral parlor. The grisly nature of the case and the use of trunks to transport the bodies led the press to dub her the Trunk Murderess and the Tiger Woman, names that fixed her in tabloid history.
Trial and Conviction
Judd was extradited to Arizona and tried in Phoenix in early 1932 for the murder of Agnes Anne LeRoi. The trial drew enormous national attention. The defense argued self-defense and raised questions about her mental state, while the prosecution presented the case as a calculated double murder. In February 1932 a jury convicted her of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to death by hanging.
As her execution approached, her mental condition became the central legal issue. A sanity hearing in April 1933 concluded that she was insane, and the death sentence was set aside. Instead of being executed, Judd was committed to the Arizona State Hospital for the mentally ill, where she would spend much of the following decades.
Confinement and Escapes
Winnie Ruth Judd became notorious not only for the crime but for repeatedly leaving the Arizona State Hospital. Over the years she escaped from the institution multiple times, sometimes for short periods and on at least one occasion for an extended stretch. Her most famous absence lasted roughly six and a half years in the 1960s, during which she lived in California under an assumed name and worked as a housekeeper before being located and returned.
Public and legal attitudes toward her gradually softened. In 1971 she was released from custody, and she was later granted a full parole. She lived out her remaining years quietly in California, largely out of the public eye, and died in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 23, 1998, at the age of 93.
Legacy and Disputes
The Winnie Ruth Judd case remains one of the most heavily mythologized American crime stories of the 1930s. It inspired books, magazine features, and later documentary treatments, and the phrase Trunk Murderess endured in popular culture. Jana Bommersbach's investigative book The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd, published in 1992, re-examined the evidence and questioned aspects of the original prosecution.
Significant elements of the case continue to be debated. Whether Judd acted alone or had help moving and disposing of the bodies, the precise circumstances of the shootings, and the fairness of her trial have all been the subject of competing accounts. What is firmly established is that two women were killed in Phoenix in October 1931, that their bodies were transported to Los Angeles in luggage, and that Judd was convicted of murder and ultimately spent decades confined before her release and death.
