Locals drawn into 1930s’ most notorious murder (Part 1 of 2)

Good morning, Oregon. I'm Finn J.D. John, FJ at OffbeatOrgan.com, and this is the daily

Offbeat Oregon History Podcast. Thanks for downloading, and I sure hope you enjoy the

show today. This story was first published on March 1st of 2021 under the headline

Locals Drawn into 1930's most notorious murder. This is part one of a two-part

presentation of this story, part two will be coming tomorrow. Here we go. Oregon

divorcee Agnes Anne Annie LaRoy arrived in Phoenix in the first few months of

1931, with her best friend and roommate, schoolteacher, head-vig, Sammy Samuelson. They

were climate refugees. Sammy had tuberculosis, and at the time, the only cure for consumption

was a dry climate and rest. Back then, many patients with TB waited until they were so

far gone that the climate couldn't save them. Essentially, they moved to Arizona to

die. Sammy wasn't one of them. Her case was mild. But although she didn't know

it, she too was moving to Arizona to die. She had less than nine months to live. So did

Annie. Neither one of them would die of tuberculosis, though.

When the First World War broke out, Dr. William Craig Judd was in his early 30s, a fresh-faced

young physician, the sion of a prominent Salem family, and a recent graduate of the

Willamette University College of Medicine. When the U.S. joined the fighting a few years

later, naturally, he wasted little time rallying to the colors. Commissioned a first lieutenant,

he was soon in France, patching up doughboys on the front lines.

Doctors in the Great War didn't face off with the enemy over No Man's land, or swarm

over the top and bayonet charges, but nobody in the trenches was safe from the number

one killer of the war, artillery shells. And in 1918, a German shell flew through the

air with young Lieutenant Judd's name on it. The wounds of the shell inflicted were

very painful, so Lieutenant Judd found relief from his suffering the way many Great War

soldiers did from morphine. But unlike the other soldiers, nobody forced him to stop taking

this stuff after his wounds healed. Like Hugh Laurie's character in the 2010s Fox Network

TV show House MD, as licensed physician Dr. Judd was fully empowered to prescribe

himself anything he pleased, and so it was that Dr. William Judd mustered out of the

army with the monkey of morphine addiction clinging tightly to his back. Unlike Dr. House's

though, Dr. William's career did not prosper. He drifted from position to position, dropping

lower on the physician's pecking order with each move. But on his way down the medical

hierarchy, he took a position at the Indiana State Hospital where he met a vivacious 17-year-old

blonde hospital orderly named Winnie Ruth McKinnell, the daughter of a local Methodist

minister. Despite being more than twice her age, she fell hard for her and she for him. Soon

they were married, and when Dr. William found it necessary to move on from Indiana, she

accompanied him. The couple ended up in Mexico, where Dr. William found a job as a company

doctor at a copper mine. It was a hard life, and not at all what the new Mrs. Judd had been

expecting. Winnie, who went by her middle name Ruth, was vivacious and outgoing, but she

was very slender, less than 120 pounds soaking wet, and not very robust. She suffered two

miscarriages in Mexico, which devastated her. She very much wanted a baby. Then Ruth caught

tuberculosis. Dr. William sent her to Convalesca to a facility in California, and she seemed

to get better, but when she rejoined him in Mexico, it flared up again. She tried several

more times, but by this time Dr. William had lost his copper mine job, and was basically

blowing around Mexico from village to village. She couldn't survive the lifestyle, so she

returned to the States in 1930 and settled down in Phoenix, taking a job as a governess

in wealthy, plutocrat Lee Ford's family home. A wealthy lumberman named Happy Jack Halloram

lived next door to the Fords with his wife and several children. Happy Jack and notorious

Philanderer soon noticed the pretty blonde governess and moved in on her. The legendary

Happy Jack charm worked as advertised a few weeks or months later that two of them were

embroiled in a secret affair. A few more months went by, and Ruth left the Ford's employee.

Possibly they found out about her nocturnal rendezvous with their neighbor, and took

a job as a medical secretary at the Grunau clinic. The job paid fairly well, well enough

to pay for a small place of her own with a little leftover to send off to help out Dr.

William, who had checked himself into a drug rehab facility in California.

At the clinic, Ruth quickly made friends. Soon she was spending a lot of time with two

of her clinic co-workers, a 32-year-old X-ray technician and a 24-year-old orderly who

had just moved to town earlier that year and taken jobs at the clinic. Other names, as

you've probably guessed, were Annie LaRoy and Sammy Samuelson. Ruth's friendship with

Annie and Sammy started out strong, but there was a problem in their relationship right

from the start, and that problem's name was Happy Jack Halloran. Ruth Judd's playboy

side piece, whether Ruth introduced the girls to him or whether they met him in some other

way, he was far too much of a hound not to make a move on them, and none of the girls

was overmuch pleased at the prospect of sharing him. The tensions came to a head on October

16th of 1931. That night Ruth had been invited to come play bridge with Annie and Sammy,

but she'd turned them down because she had a date with Happy Jack. But by 9pm it was

clear that Happy Jack was standing her up, so Ruth hopped on the trolley and headed for

Annie and Sammy's place to see if there is still up for some bridge. When she arrived,

she found her two friends, loaded for bear. According to Ruth's later recollections,

they were angry because she'd widened Happy Jack's extramarital dating pool by introducing

him to a dishy co-worker earlier in the day, a pretty single co-worker who they happened

to know or believed had syphilis. Annie and Sammy called Ruth a slot and threatened

to tell Dr. William that his wife was sleeping around with the town wolf hound. She hit back

by calling her hosts perverts. They were extremely close and lived together like sisters which

had been more than enough to start whispers of lesbianism making the rounds on the local

rumor mill. Furious, Ruth stood up to go. She took her drink cup to drop it off in the

kitchen sink, and when she got there well, something happened. Something involving a kitchen

knife, a coat 25 automatic, and possibly another larger caliber pistol. Whatever it was,

it resulted in Sammy getting stabbed once and shot three times in the shoulder chest

and head. Annie shot at least once in the head and Ruth shot in the left hand. Ruth found

herself alone, wounded in the kitchen with her two ex-friends dead on the floor. We'll

talk about what Ruth did in the aftermath of this disaster tomorrow in part two of this

story.

Well, that's our show for today. Thanks again for listening. This podcast is part of

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