Tigress Loose

Last time Winnie Ruth Judd went to Los Angeles she traveled with two trunks and a valise--in them the dismembered bodies of two women friends. Last week she traveled light.

On Oct. 16, 1931, Winnie Ruth Judd was blonde, slim, shapely, 26. That was the day she killed her friends. Many times in the next 15 months, passionate Mrs. Judd earned in full her newspaper nickname "The Blonde Tigress." She dropped her hysteria, her fits of blank staring, only when an impressionable jury had saved her from a scaffold-drop by judging her insane.

One night last week a little brown-haired woman, shy and mild of manner, went quietly to her bed in a small private room inside the locked doors and barred windows of the Arizona State Hospital for the insane. Not till 11 o'clock next morning did attendants jerk down the covers to see why 34-year-old Winnie Ruth Judd wasn't up & about. They found rags, shoes, bottles, soap neatly arranged as a Mrs. Judd-size dummy, but no Mrs. Judd.

Winnie Ruth Judd stuffed cans of soup, spaghetti, bread and a jar of jelly in a pillow case, stole two pairs of shoes, left a maundering letter to Governor Robert T. Jones, and slipped out. For 15 minutes she appeared at the nearby bedside of her invalid, 80-year-old father, then vanished in the night. Police watched her invalid 56-year-old husband, Dr. William C. Judd, in Sawtelle, Calif., Hospital Superintendent Louis Saxe broadcast a promise: she could run the prison beauty parlor if she'd return. One night this week a burglar fled from a Phoenix home, was caught. It was the onetime tigress, near starvation. For six days she had been hiding in a cornfield.

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