Mid-20th Century – Empowering women through fiction and history.

Trunk Murderess or Victim? The Case of Winnie Ruth Judd

Book 3 of my Grave Sisters Mysteries is coming out in July. As part of my newsletter, I like to do an email sequence that expands upon a topic related to the book I’m releasing. Sometimes that means a specific event in history (such as post-WWI attitudes and struggles for soldiers coming back to civilian life, as I did with Book 2 of this series). Sometimes it means a true crime case that somehow relates to the book itself, though not necessarily inspired it.

For Book 3, I wanted to focus on a true crime case that featured murder and friendship, since this is a heavy theme in Book 3. At first, I had the idea of highlighting a famous case that took place in 1920s Hollywood: the death of director William Desmond Taylor. The murder happened in 1922, the same year as the events in Book 3, and in California, the setting of Book 3. Friendship may or may not have played a role in the murder (as it still remains unsolved today).

But when I started to dig deeper into classic cases related to friendship, I came across the case of Winnie Ruth Judd. Although the murders associated with it occurred almost ten years after the Taylor case and happened in Arizona rather than California, it was far more interesting and complex than the Taylor case (which I will save for another time).

Photo Credit: Winnie Ruth Judd (smiling) leaving the courthouse to return to prison during the trial. The man is her husband, Dr. William Judd, and the woman behind her is the sheriff’s daughter who served as her maid during the trial. Acme Newspicture, 1933: Gzen92bot/Wikimedia Commons/PD France

Judd’s life wasn’t an easy one from the start. She grew up in what seems like a loving, supportive, but poor family. At the age of seventeen, she married a man in his late 30s named Dr. William Judd. The doctor was, sadly, something of a bum and a morphine addict. They bumped around Mexico while he tried to hold down a job (and didn’t succeed). In 1930, Winnie contracted tuberculosis and moved to Phoenix to recover from her illness while her husband went down to Los Angeles to find work. In spite of her illness, Judd was able to get a job as a secretary for a clinic. There, it seemed, her troubles began.

She befriended two coworkers, Anne LeRoi and Sammy Samuelson. The three women were, at first, great friends and inseparable, even sharing an apartment for a time. But squabbles over house rules and men (all three girls were party girls, inviting men to their apartment for dinner and cards) forced them apart, and Winnie moved into her own place a few blocks away but still maintained close ties with the two other women. There was nothing deadly about this — just like a lot of women friends, they were simply not compatible as roommates.

The details of the crime are still rather fuzzy and uncertain, which is one of the bizarre aspects of this case. What is known is Winnie killed Anne and Sammy and was herself injured in the process. The reason for the murder is also hazy. Some say she killed them out of jealousy, as all three women were crazy about a prominent and influential businessman named John “Happy Jack” Halloran. Judd maintained all her life that the two women attacked her and she killed them out of self-defense. However, the narrative Judd told about this in the 1960s was odd and confusing and not very believable.

What happened next, though, was even more bizarre than the seeming lack of motive. Winnie headed for the train station, presumably to take the train to Los Angeles to be with her husband. She took several large trunks with her. In L.A., those trunks were discovered to be reeking of a bad odor and leaking blood. What was inside would feed the imagination of the press and its readers for months: the dismembered bodies of the two women she killed.

Judd was eventually caught and brought back to Phoenix for trial. The verdict was guilty, and Judd was sentenced to the death penalty. However, in 1933, that sentence was overturned, and Judd was confined to a mental institution instead. She ran away six times in thirty years, the last time managing to evade the police and work for a family as a live-in maid for six years before she was caught and brought back to the institution. However, by that time, she was able to lobby for parole and was granted it in 1971. Twelve years later, she was released from parole and completely free. She moved back to Arizona and lived there until her death in 1998.

There are a lot of twists and turns to this case, including a possible cover-up. To find out the complete dossier on the case, you’ll want to sign up for my newsletter here. If this is your first time signing up, you’ll get some goodies as a gift, including an Adele Gossling Mysteries novella.

As for A Weekend Getaway Murder, the book is on preorder now at a special price. You can read all about it here.

Lending a Helping Hand: The Early FBI

I’m a big classic movie fan. I prefer the earlier classics from between the 1920s and the 1950s rather than the later ones from the 1960s onward. But one film from the 1970s that has always fascinated me is the film Paper Moon. It’s a black comedy set during the Great Depression in the Midwest, where Americans were having the toughest time and would do anything to get by. The film follows a charming and handsome con man named Moze (played by Ryan O’Neal) who gets stuck with an eight-year-old orphan, Addie (played by his real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal), who becomes a better con artist than he is. Clearly, this is not the kind of film that would go over well today, but in the 1970s, when standards were different and the concept of “political correctness” wasn’t as prevalent, this kind of film embedded a lot of social and political views that many Americans, especially younger ones, shared.

There’s a scene in the film where Moze and Addie succeed in beating a bootlegger at his own game when they find his stash of illegal whiskey, steal some of it, and sell it back to the man. They get caught by the local police but manage to escape. The escape scene is pretty standard 1970s action stuff (you can watch it here). Their goal is to get out of Kansas (their current location) and drive across the state line to Missouri, where the police can’t touch them.

Why was this so crucial? Because up until just after the Great Depression ended, state police had no authority to apprehend criminals who had not committed crimes in their state. So Kansas police couldn’t track Moze and Addie down if they crossed over to Missouri.

Criminals weren’t, however, completely free. In 1908, Theodor Roosevelt approved a new national law enforcement agency that could function in any state and help apprehend criminals who had crossed the state line. At that time, it was named the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, but in 1935, it was renamed to what we know now as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the F.B.I.

Photo Credit: Newspaper story of the ambush (initiated by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation) that killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, 23 May 1934: Bradford Timeline/Flickr/CC BY NC 2.0

This agency helped crack some of the most notorious cases, including:

– The Lindbergh baby case (1932): The infamous case of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son prompted Hoover (head of the Bureau at the time) to send out agents to look for marked bills of the ransom money to try and track down the perpetrator.

– Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (1934): Bureau agents in nine states collaborated to eventually track the killing couple down in Louisiana and create an ambush that led to their deaths.

– Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1950s): This is sort of a forgotten case, but it was huge at the time (and if you’ve read poet Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, you’ll know it). At the height of the Cold War scare, a spy ring was discovered to be transferring secrets from the atomic development center in New Mexico to the Russians. The FBI traced these messages to a scientist named Julius Rosenberg, and he and his wife, along with several others, were arrested in 1951. Both refused to confess and were executed in 1953.

Book 3 of my Grave Sisters Mysteries doesn’t involve Oliver Clarke, the Gyver district attorney, because the sisters focus on helping Daniel Frazer, the Moody County D.A., with his case. But Oliver has his own case, which is helping the Bureau capture criminals who kidnapped a child and left her for dead (yes, the case in the book is inspired by the Lindbergh baby kidnapping).

A Weekend Getaway Murder is available now for preorder, as it comes out this summer, so grab your copy here.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

More than I Love Lucy: Desi Arnaz

This month is Hispanic Heritage Month where we celebrate, among other things, the history and contributions of the Hispanic community. Probably one of the most well-recognized names (and faces) of the Golden Age of Hollywood is that of Lucy’s husband, Desi Arnaz. Only, he was much more than just Lucy’s sidekick in the I Love Lucy show.

Now, I really do love Lucy. Not only did she open doors for women comediennes at a time when men were dominating the comedy genre in film and television, but her I Love Lucy character offered a different glimpse of who women were in the Occupation: Housewife era of the 1950s. It also gave us another image to look up to other than the happy and contented housewife that characters like June Cleaver (though I defend June in this blog post) that many women of the mid-20th century found so oppressive.

But the success of I Love Lucy wasn’t due to Lucille Ball alone. I was recently watching a documentary about Lucy and while it went into details about her life and career, the mention of Desi Arnaz seemed almost like an afterthought. That annoyed me and made me curious about the life and work of this Cuban-American icon. What I found was a man who displayed a technical brilliance and talent of his own, not to mention a resilience that many people immigrating to America (including me) could identify with.

Photo Credit: Desi Arnaz, publicity photo, 1950, General Artists Corporation: Wikimedia Commons/PD US no notice

Desi came from Cuban nobility, which did not sit well with the revolutionaries active in Cuba in the 1930s. In fact, his family had to flee to America when the revolutionaries destroyed their home and possessions in 1933. They came to Miami with nothing and, like many immigrants, had to struggle to survive. They lived in a garage and Desi mentions in several interviews that he had to clean out birdcages among other odd jobs to help the family income.

However, his musical talent led him to form his own orchestra and tour around the country which got him into films. This, of course, is where he met and married Lucille Ball in 1940.

As Lucy’s husband on the show, he was charming and tolerant of her crazy schemes. But Desi’s real talent lay behind the scenes. He was a very savvy businessman and as passionate as Lucy about developing the technical side of television (which, in the early 1950s, was still very new). Desi is always credited for coming up with what is now considered the gold standard of the TV sitcom world: the multiple-camera set up. Up until 1951, most sitcoms were produced in New York and were recorded and broadcast to the rest of the country in a less-than-attractive way in terms of quality. Desi and his cameraman developed a system of multiple cameras filming at the same time on a sound stage with a live audience in the background which allowed for higher-quality images and a realtime feel to the show. Another thing Lucy and Desi are credited for is the invention of the rerun. They insisted on retaining the rights to the I Love Lucy show which allowed them to negotiate contracts with TV stations to broadcast the reruns we still see today.

After Lucy and Desi divorced in 1960, Desi continued to be active in film and television, though not to the degree that Lucille Ball was (who went on to create two more shows in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as star in a multitude of films). He largely retired from the limelight.

Still, his contribution to television is one of the endearing legacies of the medium, not to mention his marriage to Lucille Ball. In the 1950s, multi-racial marriages were much less common than they are today (something that plays a role in my upcoming Adele Gossling Mysteries book Murder Among the Rubble).

If you want to know more about what women enduring in the 1950s, you might enjoy my post-World War II short story collection, Lessons From My Mother’s Life. You can read all about it and find out where to get it here.

Rerelease Day: Lessons 4-Year Publiversary!

Today marks the 4-year anniversary of the publication of my historical women’s fiction short story collection Lessons From My Mother’s Life (hence the “publiversary”).

This book was a huge departure for me when I first published it in 2020. I was writing my Waxwood Series at the time, which was set in the 1890s, and I was also working on my Adele Gossling Mysteries, which is set at the turn of the 20th century. So to write stories set in the post-World War II era was a big change. It was also a book that was more personal to me than anything I had written up until that time.

A word about the title of this collection: I had some arguments with my mentor about changing it. Why? Because she felt the title was misleading. The implication of Lessons From My Mother’s Life is that the book is non-fiction stories about my mother’s life. Or that the book is true stories of other women’s mother’s lives. From a marketing perspective, she thought this would create some problems with the book reaching the right audience.

And truthfully, I did consider changing the title for this rerelease (which I had planned on doing since last year). But I decided to keep the title as it was for several reasons. First, it felt right (and authors can be very stubborn about their titles!) But second, the title originally came from the idea that the lessons the stories convey are lessons that come from my mother’s generation, though they are not lessons she overtly taught me. They are more lessons inferred from her own life, that is, her regrets and what she did that I don’t want to do. These are universal lessons mid-20th century women have to teach us, whether they are our mothers or grandmothers, or even great-grandmothers. In the stories, an older woman teaches a younger one something about life not overtly but covertly, by encouraging her to do what she couldn’t or sending the message “Don’t do what I did.”

Why am I calling this a “rerelease”? Because a few things have changed. The biggest change is the cover. When I first published the book, I created the cover because I was a struggling author whose finances were extremely limited. But over the years, thanks to all my amazing readers (those existing and those to come), I’ve been able to afford to have a professional designer do my covers. So I knew it was time for Lessons to get a makeover.

I also took the opportunity to give the book a new cover to give the stories another proofread. I’ve done this multiple times (don’t ask how many) as a way to refresh the stories and make sure they still read well. So there are some minor tweaks to most of the stories. Even if you’ve already read the book, I encourage you to pick it up again because the stories will read a bit differently than they did in the original version.

I hope you enjoy the book and have a discussion with your mother or grandmother about what her life was like so you can learn the valuable lessons her life has to teach you.

Title: Lessons From My Mother’s Life

Author: Tam May

Genres: Historical Women’s Fiction/Short Fiction

Original release date: March 29, 2020

Rerelease Date: March 29, 2024

How happy was the 1950s happy housewife?

Women in post-war America were supposed to have it all: generous husbands with great jobs, comfortable suburban homes with nice yards and two-car garages, and all the latest gadgets to make their housework easier.

The pain and horror of World War II were over. The economy was booming and America was becoming a world leader. American women were to play a role in America’s prosperity, the role they were always meant to play: supporting mothers, wives, and daughters. Theirs was a life of ease. They were the fairytale princesses with the happy ending.

The women’s magazines told them so. The advertisements for laundry detergent and TV dinners told them so. The doctors who treated their children’s colds told them so.

Women in 1950s America were sold a bill of goods about their purpose in life and their futures. Some bought it and some didn’t.

This book is about the women who didn’t.

These are not nostalgic stories about my mother’s life or your mother’s life. They dig deep into the lives of five fictional characters who knew in the back of their minds that their lives weren’t happy and they wanted something more.

Five stories. Five women. Five roads that will lead to self-identity and fulfillment.

About the Author

Writing has been Tam May’s voice since the age of fourteen. She writes stories set in the past that feature sassy and sensitive women characters. Tam is the author of the Adele Gossling Mysteries which takes place in the early 20th century and features suffragist and epistolary expert Adele Gossling whose talent for solving crimes doesn’t sit well with her town’s conventional ideas about women’s place. Tam is also working on a new series, the Grave Sisters Mysteries about three sisters who own a funeral home and help the county D.A. solve crimes in a 1920s small California town, set to release in 2025. She has also written historical fiction about women breaking loose from the social and psychological expectations of their era. Although Tam left her heart in San Francisco, she lives in the Midwest because it’s cheaper. When she’s not writing, she’s devouring everything classic (books, films, art, music), concocting yummy plant-based dishes, and exploring her new riverside town.

Social Media Links

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tammayauthor/

Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/tammayauthor/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/tammayauthor/

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Tam-May/e/B01N7BQZ9Y/

BookBub Author Page: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/tam-may

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16111197.Tam_May

Are you into fun and engaging mysteries set in the past? Love sassy but sensitive women characters defying the social conventions of their time? Then you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, enlightening anecdotes about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

The Feminine Mystique: Our Mothers’ and Our Grandmothers’ Lessons

In 2020, I released what is probably to date the most personal book I’ve ever written. It’s not an autobiographical novel or even a partially autobiographical novel. It’s a collection of short stories set in the post-WWII era of America. The book, Lessons From My Mother’s Life became much more of a personal project than I anticipated (or even intended) it to be for several reasons.

First, it was intended to be a historical rewrite of the first book I ever published back in 2017. Those stories were set in contemporary times and were quite literary in tone and style. Reviewers liked the book overall but many complained the stories were too short and the endings seemed chopped off. I agreed with this (and did a lot of journaling as to why that was because I knew there were deeper reasons than the fact that it was my first book and I was still learning the writing craft). I firmly believe in giving readers the best I have as a writer and revising books when I know my writing has become stronger and my writing purpose clearer (I’ve done this with several books). So I had no qualms about releasing a second edition of that first book.

Except it didn’t turn out to be a second edition. It turned out to be an entirely new book. I set the stories in a historical timeframe rather than a contemporary timeframe. Most of the stories in Lessons differ from those in the original first book (which is still available in online bookstores). I took some stories out that didn’t fit with the historical background and themes I was aiming for and replaced them with other stories.

Second, the historical era I chose turned out to be a big surprise even to me. As many of my readers know, I am a huge fan of the 19th and early 20th centuries. My preferred timeframe for my books is the Gilded Age (roughly, the last quarter of the 19th century) and the Progressive Era (roughly, the first few decades of the 20th century, up until the end of WWI), though I’m experimenting now with a new upcoming series that is set in the 1920s.

Photo Credit: Betty Friedan as photographed in her home, 1978, photo taken by Lynn Gilbert and uploaded 6 August 2009: LynnGilbert5/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

So why did I choose to set the stories in Lessons in the 1950s and early 1960s? Because, at the time, I had rediscovered a book I read in grad school: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan’s book introduced the paradox of women’s lives during the post-WWII era to the American public. The book came out of Friedan’s experiences talking with women in the 1950s, especially housewives, while working as a journalist for women’s magazines. She takes a very comprehensive look at what she calls “the feminine mystique” and the institutions that allowed this image to emerge.

The “feminine mystique” has been defined in many ways over the years, but for me, it’s the idea that a woman’s biological, psychological, social, and spiritual destiny boils down to one thing: her identity in relation to others. In post-WWII America, this was pretty much all that was expected of women. As Friedan puts it, “[For] the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife” (p. 59).In other words, her identity and her role in life are defined as wife, mother, daughter, granddaughter, caretaker, lover, etc.

For Friedan, the problem wasn’t with these roles but with the isolation and restriction the outside world forced upon them. It wasn’t that it was bad to be a mother or a daughter or a wife or that women who wanted these things were wrong. It was that the expectation that this is all a woman was capable of being and should want to be was limiting and unfulfilling to many women.

Now, this idea of restricted identities for women is not new. It’s an inherent part of the separate spheres, which began in the 18th century but really saw its heyday in the 19th century. But what was different about the post-WWII era was that women were starting to feel the damaging effects of it on their psyches. They were getting subtle messages from their mothers and grandmothers who had grown up with the separate spheres that this was not enough and shouldn’t be enough for many women. The epigraph for Lessons states:

“A mother might tell her daughter, spell it out, “Don’t be just a housewife like me.” But that daughter, sensing that her mother was too frustrated to savor the love of her husband and children, might feel: ‘I will succeed where my mother failed, I will fulfill myself as a woman,’ and never read the lesson of her mother’s life.” (p. 71)

Lessons From My Mother’s Life is exactly about the lessons mothers and grandmothers have to teach the younger generation. The stories are set in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the second-wave feminist movement. In each story, the main character sees the writing on the wall in terms of where her life has been or where it’s going and someone outside of her is trying to teach her the lessons of the feminine mystique. For example, in my story “Fumbling Toward Freedom,” Susan is a nineteen-year-old college student about to marry an upright young man still in medical school. When she attends an exhibition of Circe sculptures by an older woman artist, the artist’s work demonstrates the consequences of letting a marital relationship define who a woman is. The story ends with Susan taking a step back to examine what it is she really wants in life.

Is Friedan’s book and the idea of the feminine mystique still relevant to the younger “I don’t need feminism” generation today? I explore that in this blog post.

Lessons is getting a makeover with a new cover and a few revisions and will be out in its new form on March 29th.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy my novella The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers and you can get it here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Works Cited

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition). W. W. Norton & Company, 2013 (original publication date: 196). Kindle digital file.