Winnie Ruth Judd

Winnie Ruth Judd (born Winnie Ruth McKinnell, Oxford, Indiana, January 29, 1905 – October 23, 1998) was a Phoenix, Arizona medical secretary accused of murdering her friends Agnes Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson in October 1931, allegedly over the affections of Jack Halloran, a prominent Phoenix businessman. The murders were discovered when Judd transported the victims' bodies, one of which had been dismembered, from Phoenix to Los Angeles by train in trunks and other luggage, causing the press to name the case the "Trunk Murders". She was tried for LeRoi's murder, found guilty, and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later repealed after she was found mentally incompetent, and she was committed to the Arizona State Asylum for the Insane (later renamed the Arizona State Hospital). Over the next three decades, she escaped from the asylum six times, the final time during the 1960s when she remained at large for over six years and worked under an assumed name for a wealthy family. She was ultimately paroled in 1971 and discharged from parole in 1983.