On this day...

... in 1927, Albert Snyder, mild-mannered art editor of Motor Boating magazine, was beaten, strangled, and chloroformed to death by Judd Gray, lover of Snyder's apparently scheming wife, Ruth. The ensuing trial became one of the most sensational of the 1920s, despite protests by writers such as Damon Runyon that neither perpetrator was worth the attention. The widow Snyder gained immortality of a sort when her final, blurry moments in the electric chair were recorded by a hidden camera strapped around a photographer's ankle. The case later inspired, very loosely, the much better novel and film "Double Indemnity."