In January 1928, Tom Howard of the "Daily News" smuggled a camera into Sing Sing, where he took a picture of Ruth Snyder's final moments.
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The main gate of the prison Sing Sing, about 30 miles north of New York City, could hardly be considered a gathering place. But at 11 p.m. on the night of January 12, 1928, hundreds of viewers they were huddled roughly under the guard towers. There was little for them to see; the grim proceedings of the night would take place deep within the grounds of the penitentiary. But the world he came anyway, some from Chicago. Cars blocked the roads. Women arrived with their children. The men—the avengers and the grieving—cursed.
In four minutes, the "Ruthless Ruth» Snyder, a woman who she had murdered her husband for the insurance money, he would die in the electric chair.
Soon after, the engine of a Ford sedan roared to life as the car turned south toward Manhattan. Crouching in the back seat was a photographer named Tom Howard. And in his camera – who sneaked into Sing Sing in defiance of the prison's ban on photographs in the execution chamber – was one of more creepy photos ever presented to the public.
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It was 94 years ago this week that the New York Daily News published the photo in question – a gruesome image of appropriate title: “DEAD!” As New Yorkers shuffled around the booths on the morning of January 13, hundreds of thousands stood still in incredible horror. The front page of the tabloid showed Snyder strapped into the electric chair, a black hood over her head as 2,000 volts were passing through her body.
Howard's snapshot was the first photo execution by the electric chair. Never before had a newspaper published such a graphic picture of the killing machine in action. At the time, prisons banned cameras during executions as a matter of decency.
"The photo of Snyder being electrocuted remains one of the most gruesome pieces of photojournalism – an image that leaves the viewer feeling they shouldn't have seen this," says Marco Conelli, a retired NYPD detective and recognized expert in the Snyder Case. "The lasting shock factor comes from that moment when, visible to the eye, life leaves her body."
It is not surprising, then, that the image sparked discussions both during its publication and during decades since then. As critics and supporters alike have questioned, the public's right to know includes the his right to see; Where should news organizations draw the line between journalism and opportunism;
One point is indisputable. The elaborate planning required to capture the photo remains one of the greatest newspaper coups. It was, in her own characteristically exaggerated words Daily News, "the most talked about feat [in] the history of journalism".
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Howard's shocking photo would not exist without the shocking crime that preceded it. Snyder was his wife Albert Snyder, of an art director whose love of alcohol had long since superseded his affection for her. In the summer of 1925, Snyder met corset salesman Gray at a Fifth Avenue lunch counter; the couple soon fog up the windows of a room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Two years later, the couple decided to call it quits together. Financing the escape fell to Snyder, who has taken out life insurance policies on Albert worth $45,000 (approx. 770.000 dollars today). Snyder added a clause double compensation which doubled the payment in case of "death by accident', a legal term originating in the United Kingdom that denotes some form of death other than natural causes, such as suicide, accident or homicide.
The unfortunate event followed. After smashing Albert's head with a window-pane weight on the morning of March 20, 1927, Gray covered his opponent's face with a cloth soaked in chloroform and then strangled him with frame wire.
Snyder tried to present the homicide as a robbery, but the authorities were not impressed. It didn't help that she was discovered with her feet bound but not her hands. Additionally, the alleged burglar failed to steal Albert's gold pocket watch and platinum chain.
In accordance with The “Double Indemnity” Murder: Ruth Snyder, Judd Gray, and New York's Crime of the Century by Landis MacKellar, Deputy Inspector Arthur Carey told Snyder that the scene did not look like a robbery. "What do you mean? How could you tell?' asked. In response, he said: “We're seeing a lot of break-ins. They're not made that way." Although Snyder and Gray initially maintained their innocence, they eventually confessed, each placing much of the blame on the other. The state charged the lovers with first-degree murder, ensuring conviction in a highly publicized trial that ended in May 1927 with death sentences for both.
The coverage of the trial itself was not the height of journalism. Journalists thronged the courtroom in surprising numbers celebrities (no wonder the murder would later become the template for Billy Wilder's 1944 film Double Indemnity). And while the papers—which devoted more ink to the Snyder affair than Charles Lindbergh's solo transatlantic flight—promised impartiality, the reporters fell for Snyder from the start.
In addition to criticizing her clothes, voice, and face ("She's not ugly," He wrote journalist Damon Runyon. "I've seen much worse"), the press set Snyder up as an archetype of the overly liberated woman of the 1920s. Her life, Ossining said Citizen Sentinel, was "full of mystery, booze, illicit love [and] jazz." The Daily Mirror referred to Snyder as "a pleasure-seeking shallow mind, accustomed to unlimited self-indulgence, which ultimately culminates in an orgy of murderous passion and lust".
The Daily News was not above this battle. With traffic on it one million, the newspaper fed the readers her with a steady diet of love triangles, tragic accidents and homicides. But the Daily News didn't just write about these events – he showed them. The publisher Joseph Medill Patterson placed his tabloid as "New York's Picture Newspaper". Realizing that Snyder's execution was sure to be the story of the year, Patterson knew he had to put a photographer in Sing Sing.
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Two obstacles stood in Patterson's way. Since adopted the electric shock as a method of capital punishment in 1888, New York State had banned cameras in the execution chamber. To complicate matters, the guards recognized every newspaper photographer in town. The only way around this problem was to recruit someone from out of town willing to sneak a camera inside.
The Daily News found both in Howard, a seasoned photographer for the Chicago Tribune, a newspaper run by Patterson's cousin. Robert R. McCormick. Howard literally only had one take. Since low-light film had not yet been invented and flash was out of the question, Howard's only option was to expose a single frame of film long enough to capture the image. The resourceful photographer threaded a connecting cable down his leg that allowed him to activate the camera's shutter by pressing a bulb into his pocket. Howard—comfortable in a Manhattan hotel room—practiced rolling up his pants cuff, opening his diaphragm for a few seconds, then quietly closing it.
Warden Lewis Lawes received more than 1,500 applications for the 20 reporter positions at Snyder's execution. Securing one of those coveted spots, Howard secured his seat in the front row, his camera hidden under his clothes.
Shortly after 11 p.m. on January 12, 1928, the executioner Robert G. Elliott he hit a switch that sent electricity into Snyder's body. The convict writhed under the straps as the current ran for two full minutes—long enough for her hair to start smoldering. The witnesses turned pale. Even Elliot felt a wave of revulsion. "I'm not heartless," he later told Collier's magazine. "This was a horrible operation."
In the first row, Howard pulled up the cuff of his pants, squeezed the shutter bulb for six seconds, and relaxed his grip. Minutes later, he was racing toward Manhattan in the back seat of the Ford.
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Tabloids have published photos of corpses before, but few as gruesome as this one. The Daily News defended her feat for journalistic reasons. Snyder's photo, they wrote the paper's editors, "sheds light on the liveliness of reporting when done with a camera instead of a pencil and typewriter."
But others shuddered at the sight of the photo—even Elliott. "It was, indeed, a horrible sight," wrote the executioner at memoirs of. For their part, prison officials were furious that Howard had thumbed his nose at state law. Corrections Commissioner Raymond FC Kieb asked the attorney general to prosecute both Howard and the Daily News, but the lawsuit failed. "The man who took this picture", he said Kimb, "… he not only violated the trust placed in him by the prison officials, but he violated the trust of the people."
Such as he would remember later longtime Daily News reporter John Chapman on the aftermath of the photo, “For many it was a great journalistic feat. for many others ... it was a reprehensible violation of civilized taste.'
And indeed, the bigger issue was moral correctness. This was no snapshot of a dead gangster's day. It depicted death at the hands of the state — the death of a woman, no less. The tabloid's editors "knew that visualizing this would be voyeuristic and culturally exciting, because killing women has a different cultural significance than killing men," says Shannon Thomas Perrich, curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Despite its sensationalism, the photograph unwittingly served an urban purpose by confronting the public with the reality of the electric chair: "what it means, what it looks like, and the kind of cruelty and pain it causes," adds Perrich.
The photo also raised uncomfortable questions about the role the public played in its creation. Be that as it may, New Yorkers also bought half a million copies of the extra edition that carried the picture – on top of the paper's usual daily circulation.
THE Susie Linfield, a social and cultural theorist at New York University, points out that Snyder's photograph confronted New Yorkers in 1928 with moral complications similar to those created by graphic images posted online today. "There's a kind of morality in seeing," Linfield says. "Each person should really think about what they're looking at and why."
Snyder's image is just a Google search away, as is the Howard's camera. The Daily News donated it to the Smithsonian in 1963. Now, it resides in the collections of the American History Museum—a fitting home, says the Daily News writer and former crime reporter, David J. Krajicek.
“Photography defined her jazz journalism, which is why the ankle camera and its story deserve a place in the Smithsonian,” says Krajicek. “Patterson might have argued that the public deserved to see the moment of death by electrocution to understand the brutality of the death penalty. But on another level, he knew the hidden [photo] would shock. Mission accomplished, even a century later.”
*Cover Photo: On January 12, 1928, Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing Prison for the murder of her husband, Albert. Bettman via Getty Images
Source: smithsonianmag