Notaro’s historical crime novel The Murderess (Little A: Amazon) fictionalizes the notorious case of Winnie Ruth Judd, who in 1931 murdered her two best friends and placed their bodies in trunks. The grisly crime was discovered when Judd attempted to ship the trunks via train from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Notaro tells LJ about Phoenix’s “boogeyman,” her research work, and how it feels to get inside a murderess’s head. Check out the accompanying podcast, also called The Murderess, at laurienotaro.com.

Describe the origin story of this novel. Did you hear scary stories about Winnie Ruth Judd while growing up in Phoenix? You mention that this has been a “passion idea” since 1996, and then a passion project since 2015.

She was the boogeyman for the Boomer generation; they were often threatened with “You’d better be good, or Winnie Ruth Judd is going to get you and cut you up!” She escaped so many times from the state hospital, and the whole city would be on alert.

A book had already been written about her in the early ’90s. It gave me the information I needed to go and scope out the murder house and look at the clinic where Judd and one of her friends, Anne, worked; seeing those places makes the story become very real.

In 2014, the confession letter surfaced and put [the case in] a whole new light…. The real story was far more tragic, if that’s even possible, and truly compelling…. I started to poke around, finding documents, going through trial transcripts, going to the archives, libraries, reading everything that I could possibly get my hands on. What I found was not what I wanted to find, to be honest. It was a whole different set of facts, and it was haunting. As much as the original story is terrible, the backstory is even more awful.

Did the absurdity of the recorded accounts of Ruth compel you to write this story, or was it the opportunity to comment on “hysterical” women and how they have been treated throughout history?

That’s what makes this story so terrible. It’s not about one woman who goes a little off her nut, and then people are dead. There’s so much depth to the time and place and the role of women in the 1930s and the Depression [who] had absolutely no choices. You could get married and struggle, or you could be single and struggle. Ruth Judd is married, but she’s on her own. Her husband is hapless, not by his own design but because of circumstance. Anne and Sammy, the victims, were single, in love, and one of them was terribly ill. Anne worked to support them both and to pay for Sammy’s tuberculosis treatments. All three of these women had tuberculosis, which was part of being in the 1930s in Phoenix and America. All three are doing what they have to do to survive.

Tell us about Ruth. Do you like her? How did it feel to be inside her head, and how did you get there?

Ruth had an illness that no one understood in 1931; there was no treatment, no therapy, and when you layer anxiety, stress, cocaine, luminol, and whiskey on top of that, things are going to spin out in a bad way. But Ruth was gentle, kind, very devoted to helping people. She just also killed people. I believe I would have liked her. I don’t think I forgive her. There is a responsibility that comes with taking two lives….

I spent 10 years working on the book—researching, writing, then researching again, outlining, reshuffling—and then I wrote the remainder in one shot, like a firehose. I couldn’t be in Ruth’s head for too long; it was a bad place to be. Usually, I am sad when I finish a book. But I felt like the world got off my shoulders when I sent this one off. And then I had nightmares that Sammy and Anne would yell at me because “I didn’t do enough.”

Other than Ruth, who were your favorite characters to write? Who was the most difficult to create?

Absolutely the love story between Anne and Sammy. In most coverage of this case, they are victims, rarely portrayed as people with active lives and preferences and laughter and hobbies. If you are going to tell this story right, you have to know who they were. They were people, not just bodies in trunks. The section [written] from Jack’s perspective was very challenging; he is despicable. As a person, I loathe him—he doesn’t have one redeeming quality. But readers need to understand what kind of man they are dealing with, and why Ruth doesn’t see it. This murder cannot have happened without Jack Halloran. He was the catalyst—and the power—of it all.

Which books or media were helpful? Did you work with any particular library or historical organization?

I was gifted the largest archive about the Judd case that exists, the work of Sunny Worel, the great-niece of Sammy Samuelson, one of Ruth’s victims. Her research was impeccable. She was a research librarian for the National Institute of Health by day and a Judd archivist by night, weekends, and vacations. Sunny not only researched the case but went to spots that she knew Ruth, Anne, and Sammy had been…. She took trips to do more research…every entry is footnoted. Sadly, Sunny passed in 2014 and left the collection to a mutual friend and colleague, Robrt Pela, who had also written about Judd and broke the story about the confession letter. He gave the archive to me…. Of course, the Arizona State Archives, Arizona Historical Society, and Arizona Memory Project were also invaluable.

Discuss your choice to use several different narrative modes.

I approached the narrative from several viewpoints as an experiment; all first person, all third person, omniscient, and none of them worked with this story exclusively. What I wanted was to understand Ruth and why she killed her two best friends. People needed to identify with her, know her backstory, experience her thought process, so it all forms the big picture. To do that successfully, I realized I had to take several different perspectives and techniques to make the flow of the book work. It is unconventional, but otherwise, this book would have been 1,200 pages long. In the later half, I do take a more sterile approach to the escapes from the state hospital and her later life, because I had to cover 80 years.