The Dream Book Blog – Empowering women through fiction and history.

A Safe and Sane 4th of July

Today is Independence Day in America, also known as the Fourth of July. Americans have always been enthusiastic about their freedom, especially when you consider it’s an integral part of the American philosophy of life.

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era were no exceptions. America was coming into its own during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Spanish-American War of 1898 brought America to the world stage for the first time. The nation was prosperous, and social reforms were making it even better. Things were pretty good.

But sometimes Americans carried their enthusiasm a little too far. Today the Fourth of July is largely a social holiday with parades, family BBQs, and fireworks. I’ll never forget my first San Francisco Fourth celebration in 1995. I went to Crissy Field to see them shoot fireworks over the bay. It was an amazing spectacle of national spirit and dedication.

Photo Credit: Drawing of a skeleton dressed up for the 4th of July celebrations, 1899, lithograph, created by L. Crusius, Welcome Collection: Look and Learn/CC BY 4.0

Ironically, during the Progressive Era, however, many politicians and reformers were pushing for a “quiet” Fourth of July celebration, encouraging Americans to stay home instead of going out into the street. They had good reason. The enthusiasm for the Fourth had, by that time, gotten out of hand. Children were going around shooting off toy guns, and sometimes their aim wasn’t so careful. Fireworks, as you might imagine, weren’t exactly sophisticated in those days, so safety wasn’t a priority. Added to that were cannons, firecrackers, and other explosives that caused many injuries and even death. And we’re talking serious numbers here. In 1903, more than 400 people died, and 4,000 were injured during the nation’s Fourth of July celebrations. Many of these fatalities came from shrapnel wounds acquired by dangerous explosives or careless toy guns that resulted in tetanus.

The reformers of what was dubbed the Safe and Sane movement weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms. Many Americans made fun of the reform movements taking place in the early 20th century, and they resented these reformers who wanted to take away their holiday fun. But they could do little about it when cities began to implement ordinances to curtail these dangerous practices. In San Francisco (where part of my Adele Gossling Mysteries series takes place), women’s clubs worked hard to get toy guns banned from kids under seventeen. Sadly, they did not succeed, but they did succeed in restricting dangerous explosives, cannons, and firecrackers from these celebrations.

By the 1920s (when my Grave Sisters Mysteries series takes place), Fourth of July celebrations were an entirely different animal. The transformation from chaos and danger to community was complete. You were more likely to see people running in a three-legged race or participating in a pie tasting contest than shooting off cannons or toy guns. Other events besides fireworks included sports and picnics. These practices gave Americans a chance to celebrate the holiday in a social environment that was, well, safe and sane!

Feel free to check out my Adele Gossling Mysteries and my Grave Sisters Mysteries to learn a lot more history from the early 20th century (and engage in some fun mysteries too!)

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!

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!

International Women’s Day: Quotes that Inspire

Happy International Women’s Day!

This day has become pretty special to me in the last few years because I went back to work as an English language teacher for business professionals all over the world. I work with a lot of women from different countries. I hear about their struggles and their triumphs and their views about women’s place in their country and in the world, and I see what they are trying to do for their daughters.

So, if anything, this blog post is a tribute to their wisdom, strength, and insights.

If you want to get to know some wise, strong, and insightful American women living through tougher times than ours, don’t forget to check out my Adele Gossling Mysteries series and my new Grave Sisters Mysteries series!

School of Hard Knocks: What School Was Like in the Early 20th Century

I’m a teacher as well as a writer. I got into teaching pretty much by surprise. I was always very shy and introverted, the kid who slouched down in her seat in the back so the teacher wouldn’t call on her. When my parents suggested I do a teaching certificate when I was in college, mostly because they couldn’t see any practical profession for me as an English major, I shuddered. I didn’t end up getting that teaching certificate, as I had no interest in teaching children. But when I got into a master’s program and was offered a part-time instructorship teaching freshmen English composition courses as a way to pay part of my tuition, I grabbed it. Shockingly, I found I loved teaching adults (if you can consider college-aged students adults). In 2004, I transitioned from teaching college English classes to teaching ESL to business professionals. I still do that today, and I still love it.

Maybe that’s why teachers figure prominently in several of my books. But my teachers are victims not only of murder but of the rather unpolished and sometimes brutal school system in America in the early 20th century.

A typical schoolhouse in a small town or rural area in the early 20th century. Note the one-room structure and the mix of students (younger and older) posing in front of it.

Photo Credit: A one-room schoolhouse with the teacher and students, north of Kearny, Nebraska, 1910, Solomon D. Butcher (photographer), Library of Congress: LOC’s Public Domain Archive/Public Domain

Compared to schools today, the American school system, especially in small towns and rural areas (where many of my books take place) was pretty harsh. Parents complain today of crowded classrooms, but in the early 20th century, school was a one-room affair that packed in kids from the first to the eighth grade. The younger kids learned the basics while the older ones did more self-study. Older children were expected to help younger ones with their lessons. As you might expect, the separate spheres dictated some differences in what boys and girls were taught. Although both were taught the basics (reading, writing, and math), girls were taught subjects considered more appropriate for their future station in life (like sewing and mending) while boys were allowed to tackle subjects like science and biology.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about American schools at the turn of the 20th century is that corporal punishment was legal and widely used in many schools. It wasn’t unheard of for a child to get a sharp rap on the knuckles or on the palm of his or her hand with the teacher’s ruler if they misbehaved. For example, the murder of a schoolteacher in 1915 by one of her former students was partly provoked by her and the school principal’s liberal use of this kind of punishment (you can read more about that case here).

Teachers didn’t have it easy in the early 20th century. Surprisingly, most teachers were men up until that time. Things changed during the Progressive Era when more women went to work. Teaching was one of the few respectable professions for a young woman (some as young as seventeen), and school districts could get away with paying women much less than they paid the men.

But, as those who have read the first book of my Grave Sisters Mysteries know, the teaching profession bound these young ladies to rigid and restrictive rules. They had to dress a certain way and were forbidden to do certain things, like take in some of the outside leisure activities that were becoming popular at the time (think: vaudeville, moving pictures, and even drug store soda fountains). They were forbidden to go out with men and couldn’t even be seen with any man who wasn’t family. They were expected to save most of their paltry earnings for retirement so they wouldn’t be a burden on the community in their old age. That left them with barely enough to support themselves.

Another one of my books that features the death of a teacher is A Wordless Death. That book is on sale now for a great price, and you can find out more about it here.