The Trunk Murderess: Phoenix's Most Infamous Crime

The baggage handler knew something was wrong before the train even reached Los Angeles. Two large trunks, checked by a young blonde woman in Phoenix, were leaking. The smell was unmistakable. When he confronted the woman at Union Station, she fled. When police opened the trunks, they found two bodies — one intact, one dismembered.

It was October 1931. The woman was Winnie Ruth Judd, a 26-year-old medical secretary. The victims were her friends, Agnes LeRoi and Hedvig "Sammy" Samuelson. And what followed — the trial, the sentence, the escapes, the cover-ups — would become Phoenix's most notorious crime story, a mystery that still hasn't been fully solved.

The Girls

Winnie Ruth Judd arrived in Phoenix in 1930, following her husband, a doctor who'd come west hoping the desert air would cure his morphine addiction. She was young, pretty, and alone — her husband was often away, and she found herself adrift in a strange city.

She met Agnes LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson through work. The three women became inseparable — partying together, sharing secrets, navigating Depression-era Phoenix as single women in a man's world. They had another thing in common: all three were involved with the same man.

The Trunks

Judd stuffed LeRoi's body intact into a large black trunk. But Samuelson was taller — she wouldn't fit. So Judd, using surgical skills she'd learned as a medical secretary, dismembered the body. The torso and head went into a second trunk. The legs went into a valise and hatbox.

Two days later, on Sunday evening, Judd — her hand still bandaged from the gunshot wound — boarded the Golden State Limited train from Phoenix to Los Angeles. She checked the trunks as baggage.

The Asylum

Days before her scheduled execution, Judd was declared insane and transferred from death row to the Arizona State Mental Hospital. She would spend the next thirty-eight years there — but not continuously.

Winnie Ruth Judd escaped from the asylum seven times.

The first escapes were brief — a few days of freedom before recapture. But the seventh escape, in 1962, was different. Judd vanished completely. She assumed the name Marian Lane, moved to Northern California, and found work as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family. She was good at her job. Her employers adored her. For six and a half years, she lived a completely normal life.

She was returned to the asylum. But by then, attitudes had shifted. In December 1971, Governor Jack Williams signed her pardon. Winnie Ruth Judd walked out of the Arizona State Mental Hospital a free woman, forty years after the murders.

The Mystery

What actually happened in that bungalow on October 16, 1931? The full truth has never emerged. Judd maintained until her death that she acted in self-defense, that the other women attacked her first, that powerful people had covered up their role in the crime.

Investigative journalist Jana Bommersbach spent years reexamining the case for a series of articles in the Phoenix New Times. She interviewed Judd herself, reviewed trial transcripts and police records, and concluded that the prosecution's case was deeply flawed. Key evidence was suppressed. Witnesses were intimidated. Jack Halloran's involvement was deliberately obscured.

Was Judd guilty? Almost certainly — she killed two women and dismembered one of them. Was she the cold-blooded predator the newspapers made her out to be? Probably not. The truth, as Bommersbach's reporting suggests, is more complicated: a woman caught in an impossible situation, treated brutally by a system that had already decided she was a monster.

The End

Winnie Ruth Judd lived quietly after her release, working at a bakery and avoiding publicity. She died in her sleep on October 23, 1998, at the age of ninety-three. Her obituary ran in newspapers across the country — sixty-seven years after the murders, she was still famous.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt pardoned her and other wartime sedition convicts — a symbolic gesture, since she'd already been transferred to the asylum. The pardon acknowledged what many had long suspected: that her trial had been unfair, her sentence excessive, her story more complicated than the headlines allowed.

Phoenix has changed beyond recognition since 1931. The bungalow where the murders happened is long gone. The train station where Judd began her doomed journey is now a museum. The asylum where she spent forty years has been demolished. But the story endures — Phoenix's most notorious crime, still debated, still mysterious, still unsettling.

Winnie Ruth Judd killed two women. That much is certain. Everything else — why, how, who else was involved — remains in shadow. She took her secrets to the grave. Phoenix has never quite figured out what to do with her memory.