It didn’t help her case that she was discovered with her feet tied up but not her hands. Snyder attempted to stage the homicide as a robbery, but authorities were unimpressed. After smashing Albert’s head with a window sash weight on the morning of March 20, 1927, Gray covered his rival’s face with a chloroform-soaked rag, then strangled him with picture frame wire. Snyder added a double indemnity clause that doubled the payout in the event of “ death by misadventure,” a legal term that originated in the United Kingdom and signifies some form of death outside of natural causes, including suicide, accident or homicide. Funding the escape fell to Snyder, who took out life insurance policies on Albert worth $45,000 (about $770,000 today). Two years later, the couple decided to run away together. In the summer of 1925, Snyder met corset salesman Gray at a Fifth Avenue lunch counter the pair was soon fogging up the windows of a room at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Snyder was the wife of Albert Snyder, an art director whose love of alcohol had long since supplanted his affection for her. Howard’s shocking photo wouldn’t have existed without the shocking crime that preceded it. It was, in the typically hyperbolic words of the Daily News itself, “the most talked-of feat in history of journalism.” The elaborate scheme required to take the picture remains one of newspaper reporting’s biggest coups. As critics and proponents alike asked, does the public’s right to know include a right to view? Where should news organizations draw the line between journalism and opportunism? Little wonder, then, that the image sparked debate both upon its publication and in the decades since. “Its enduring shock factor comes from that moment where, visible to the eye, life is leaving her body.” “Snyder’s electrocution photo remains one of the most horrific pieces of photojournalism-an image that leaves the viewer feeling that they shouldn’t be seeing this,” says Marco Conelli, a retired detective with the New York Police Department and a recognized expert in the Snyder case. At the time, prisons banned cameras during executions as a matter of propriety. Never before had a newspaper published such a graphic image of the killing machine in action. Howard’s snapshot was the first photograph of an execution by the electric chair. The tabloid’s front page showed Snyder strapped to the electric chair, a black hood over her head as 2,000 volts coursed through her body. It was 94 years ago this week that the New York Daily News published the photograph in question-a ghastly image with a headline to match: “DEAD!” As New Yorkers shuffled past newsstands on the morning of January 13, hundreds of thousands stopped in incredulous horror. And inside his camera-snuck into Sing Sing in defiance of the prison’s ban on photographs in the execution chamber-was the one of the most disturbing pictures ever shown to the public. Crouched down in the back was a photographer named Tom Howard. Soon after, the engine of a Ford sedan coughed to life as the car swung south toward Manhattan. By 11:14, both prisoners had been pronounced dead. “ Old Sparky,” in use since 1891, didn’t take long to do its work. Henry Judd Gray, Snyder’s lover and accomplice, met his end that night, too. Photo by NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images Tom Howard (seated) shows how he strapped a camera to his ankle to secretly photograph Snyder's execution. Photo by Tom Howard / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images The January 13, 1928, front page of the New York Daily News' extra edition In four minutes, “ Ruthless Ruth” Snyder, a woman who’d murdered her husband for insurance money, would die in the electric chair. Men-the vengeful and the aggrieved-hurled curses. But people came anyway, some from as far as Chicago. There was little for them to see the night’s grim proceedings would take place deep inside the correctional facility’s grounds. on the night of January 12, 1928, hundreds of onlookers milled about below the guard towers. The main gate of Sing Sing prison, some 30 miles north of New York City, was hardly a place for congregating.

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