Ruth Snyder
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ruth Brown Snyder (March 27, 1895 – January 12, 1928) was an American murderer. Her execution in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison for the murder of her husband, Albert, was recorded in a well-publicized photograph.
Execution
On January 12, 1928, Snyder became the first woman to be executed in Sing Sing since 1899. She went to the electric chair only moments before her former lover. Her execution (by New York State Electrician Robert G. Elliott) was caught on film, by a photograph of her as the electricity was running through her body, with the aid of a miniature plate camera custom-strapped to the ankle of Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer working in cooperation with the Tribune-owned New York Daily News. Howard's camera was owned for a while by inventor Miller Reese Hutchison, and later became part of the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Snyder was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. Her gravestone simply reads "Brown".
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