Murder Victim. One of two who died in the infamous "Trunk Murder Case". A Minnesota native, Samuelson moved to Juneau, Alaska in 1928 to teach elementary school. She was well-liked for her bubbly personality and known to everyone as "Sammy". In February 1930 she met Agnes Anne LeRoi, a registered nurse, and the two immediately became close friends. "It seems that I knew her always", she wrote in her diary. When Samuelson was diagnosed with tuberculosis the following September, LeRoi moved with her to Phoenix, Arizona to oversee her care. Samuelson was housebound with her illness during the last year of her life, while LeRoi was employed as an x-ray technician at a local clinic - where her co-workers included Winnie Ruth Judd. The stage was now set for one of the most notorious murder cases of the 1930s. Judd visited Samuelson and LeRoi every evening and for a time they shared a duplex near downtown Phoenix, but Judd's hectic lifestyle - she was married to a doctor and also seeing someone on the side - prompted her to move out in early October 1931. On October 16, the three women disappeared; neighbors would report hearing a loud argument coming from the duplex that evening. Three days later Judd arrived at the Santa Fe train station in Los Angeles with a bandaged hand and several trunks, one of which was emitting a strong odor. When railroad officials asked Judd to open her luggage she claimed she didn't have the key and fled the scene. Police subsequently discovered that the trunks contained the bodies of Samuelson and LeRoi. Both had been shot at close range and Samuelson had been dismembered. At her trial in Phoenix for LeRoi's murder in January 1932, Judd claimed that Samuelson had threatened her with a gun and that she shot both women in self-defense; the jury found her guilty and sentenced her to death. She was never tried for the more heinous death of Samuelson. Two days before her scheduled execution Judd was declared insane and committed to an Arizona state hospital. She would escape from the facility several times before being paroled in 1971. Very little is known about Samuelson today. Her family, horrified by her murder and by the fact that her diaries were leaked to the press, refused to speak of her in public. And there are many unanswered questions about the full extent of Judd's involvement in the crimes.