The Diplomat's Widow: The Urdanivia Tragedy

It's not every day that the widow of a Peruvian diplomat makes headlines for being a mass murderer, and it's even rarer when the widow of a Peruvian diplomat commits a mass murder in Pennsylvania-- but that's exactly what happened in Allentown in the fall of 1959. This is the shocking story of Ruth Mae Urdanivia.

On a cool November night in 1957, a diplomat and his family stood inside a San Francisco airport checking their baggage when the diplomat, 42-year-old Jose Urdanivia, felt a twinge of pain in his chest. His companion, Gustavo Silva, the Peruvian vice consul in San Francisco, promptly drove the Urdanivias to Park Emergency Hospital, but Jose suffered a massive heart attack along the way. By the time the car reached the hospital Jose Urdanivia was dead, leaving his wife and their five children in a state of grief and confusion.

The Urdanivias were supposed to be going to Yokohama, Japan, where Jose had recently been appointed as the Peruvian consul. The son of a Peruvian army colonel, Jose was educated in Germany and Switzerland and had served in the Ministry of Foreign Relations before going to San Francisco, where he first met Ruth Mae Strawbridge.

Being the wife of a diplomat had provided Ruth, who was born in raised in Allentown, with rare opportunities to travel the world and rub elbows with the upper crust of society; in fact, she and her husband had even been invited to the White House on several occasions. But now that their 12-year-long marriage had come to an abrupt and tragic ending, the family faced an uncertain economic future. After Jose's death, Ruth was startled to discover that her husband, despite his respectable job, had very little in the way of savings. With what little money she had saved, Ruth took her five children and moved back to Allentown. The family of six huddled into a small third-floor apartment on North Seventh Street in the Westbrook Park section of the city.

Jose Urdanivia (center) at a Pan American league luncheon in 1947.

 A Brief Family History

Born to Edwin and Mabel Strawbridge in 1927, Ruth Mae Strawbridge graduated from Allentown High School in 1935. As a young woman she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a clerk in the FBI office, and she met and fell in love with a young man who held a minor diplomatic post. Ruth and Jose were married after the war came to an end, and Ruth gave birth to two daughters-- Ruthie Lucia and Christina-- while the Urdanivias lived in San Francisco. They moved to Peru after Jose was promoted to a higher position, and their next two children-- Luis and Anna Marie-- were born in Lima. Jose was later reassigned to Washington, D.C, where their fifth child, Carol, was born.

Unfortunately, the move to Allentown after Jose's death did little to improve the family's circumstances. Ruth found work in a factory but was forced to quit because she didn't want to work on Saturdays, so worked three days a week at Sacred Heart Hospital. The salary just wasn't enough, and so Ruth turned to the government for financial assistance-- only to be denied. She was unable to collect Social Security because her husband was being paid by a foreign government, and so, with nowhere else to turn, she contacted George K. Boyle of the Lehigh County Americanization Office, but Boyle was unable to help since both Ruth and her children were American citizens.

Ruth Strawbridge Urdanivia at age 4 in 1922.

 

A Bewildering Tragedy

In the middle of October, 1959, Ruth Urdanivia dropped out of sight, and her father and employers were unable to get in touch with her. On Monday, October 19, Robert Schaffer, caretaker of the three-story apartment building at 217 North Seventh Street, was sent to the Urdanivia home by property owner Arthur Peters to check on the family. Schaffer climbed the stairs and found the front door to the Urdanivia apartment open, but the interior was dark. He flicked on his flashlight and stepped inside. What he discovered would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Schaffer entered the front bedroom, where flashlight beam illuminated splotches of blood on the floor next to a bed. He raised the beam to the bed and saw two dead children in it, Their skin had turned black, and it was evident that they had been dead for several days. Horrified, Schaffer ran downstairs and telephoned the police from an electronics store which occupied the first floor of the building. Rudolph Rizzetto, the owner of the shop, ran up to the apartment to render whatever aid he could, and immediately detected the smell of gas. He raced into the kitchen and stumbled over Ruth's body, which was sprawled across the floor. She was conscious, but delirious.

When police arrived, the found the bodies of the three other Urdanivia children in their beds in a rear bedroom. It appeared as if their mother had drugged them sometime the previous week. The victims were Carol Miriam, age 4; Anna Marie, age 7; Luis, age 9; Ruth Lucia, age 10; and Christina, age 12. Patrolman George Kurtz turned off the gas jets on the kitchen range and then attempted to revive Ruth with an inhalator. While the coroner's office collected the bodies of her children, Ruth was transported in handcuffs to Sacred Heart Hospital.

The murder house as it appears today. The Urdanivias occupied the third floor.

 
Searching for Answers

Though the family had been in Allentown for just a few years, the senseless tragedy stunned the city, especially those who knew the Urdanivias personally. Three of the girls attended Sacred Heart School, and were described as bright, above-average students. According to teachers, they dressed impeccably, did their assignments diligently, and got along well with their classmates. They were always smiling, and no one could ever have predicted their sad fate, and no one knew of their mother's secret demons. "If she needed help, if she couldn't afford to care for the children, we would have done it for her," said Monsignor Leo G. Fink of the Sacred Heart parish.

Ruth's brother, William Strawbridge, refused to believe that his sister committed the murders because of money troubles, however. If anything, he said, her future looked bright. Ruth was negotiating for a larger home in Westbrook Park and was in the closing process. Two of the children, nine-year-old Luis and four-year-old Carol, had been living with William and his wife since the previous Christmas. Ruth had come back for them just hours before taking their lives, under the pretense of taking them to a doctor's appointment, as the Urdanivia children had been suffering from colds.

At the hospital, Ruth was questioned by authorities and admitted to hoarding Nidar-- a commonly prescribed barbiturate-- for two years, figuring if things didn't get better she would poison her children and herself. She said that she had picked up Luis and Carol from her brother's home on Wednesday, October 14, because her intention was to give her children the pills that same night. 

That evening, at around 9:30, she took one hundred of the pills, crushed them into a powder with a drinking glass, and mixed them with sugar and water and instructed her children to drink it for their coughs. When the children complained that the concoction was too bitter, Ruth added orange juice. After everyone had consumed the juice, they went to bed. Ruth Urdanivia slept for three days. When she finally woke up on Monday morning, the apartment was deathly quiet. Knowing that all her children were dead, she broke a drinking glass and tried cutting her wrists. When that failed, she turned on the gas jets.

Ruth Makes Statement

When questioned at Sacred Heart Hospital, Ruth insisted that financial troubles were indeed the cause of her mental strain. "I went everywhere to get help, but couldn't get any," she told District Attorney Paul A. McGinley.

"I did it," she confessed from her hospital bed to Captain Aldo Candia of the Allentown Police Department. "I know it's a sin. If only I could have gone with them. The only regret I have is that I didn't die. They're better off with their father. They won't have to live in a pig sty or eat inferior food. I'm tired, tired of begging. No one helps a widow."

But others insisted that Ruth did have options that might've prevented the deaths of her five children. Miguel Grau, minister's counsellor of the Peruvian embassy in Washington, told reporters that friends attached to the embassy had sent her money from time to time, totaling around $2,000, up until a few days before she carried out the murders. Embassy officials had even lined up a job for her with a cosmetics firm, but Ruth had refused to accept it. And while Ruth was an American citizen, because her husband and two of her children had been born in Peru, she had the right to become a Peruvian citizen if she so desired. 

It was also revealed that Ruth received a widow's pension from the Peruvian government, but had admitted to Allentown police that she "never bothered to collect it because of language difficulties". However, Peruvian officials stated that Ruth and all of her children spoke Spanish fluently.
"She said she felt it was not worth the worry," said one source to the Allentown Morning Call. In other words, help had been offered to the diplomat's widow-- she just refused to accept it.

 

Even the police department pointed out the inconsistency in her stories. They said that her $80-a-month apartment was not at all a "pig sty" as she had described, but a clean and well-maintained home with modern conveniences, and that her earnings were more than enough to maintain a fair standard of living.

As a result, many began to wonder if Ruth had simply become unable to cope with the change to her lifestyle; there would be no more diplomatic receptions, no more ballrooms and evening gowns, no more state dinners at the White House with President Eisenhower and President Truman. She had fought to so hard to get out of Allentown as a young woman and was rewarded with a cushy seat on luxury's lap, only to have it all taken away in a horrible instant. And now she was right back where she started, only decades older, with five children and an unglamorous life of drudgery juggling a nine-to-five job and the menial domestic tasks of a working-class mother. yet, she always managed to carry herself with the utmost dignity. "You could tell that she was a lady," remarked Mary Schellenberg, who worked with Ruth in the Sacred Heart Hospital admissions office.

 
Facing the Music

Ruth Urdanivia was charged with five counts of murder and arraigned the following day. She appeared emotionless as she sat before Alderman Bennie Rizzotto. Afterwards she was committed to Lehigh County Prison, where she threatened to commit suicide, thereby forcing Warden George Albright to petition the court to have the 41-year-old widow examined by psychiatrists.

On Wednesday morning, October 21, she was examined at the jail by Drs. George S. Boyer and Thomas J. Weaber, who decided to have her transferred to Allentown State Hospital. Judge James F. Henninger issued the hospital commitment order and she was transferred later that afternoon.
Meanwhile, funeral arrangements were being made for the five poisoned children by the Strawbridge family. After a requiem mass on Thursday morning, the victims were laid to rest at Sacred Heart Cemetery. According to newspaper reports, more than 1,100 mourners attended the services, though Ruth never sought permission to attend her children's funeral. Because the Strawbridge family didn't have enough money for a headstone, the Urdanivia grave remained unmarked until the following February, when a gravemarker was donated by Mr. and Mrs. John Ziegenfuss.

On March 29, 1960, Ruth Mae Urdanivia appeared in court for a preliminary hearing before Alderman Rizzotto. She wept continuously as the facts were laid bare by the newly-elected district attorney, George J. Joseph, who charged that the defendant murdered her children "feloniously, willfully, deliberately and with malice aforethought." In April, she was indicted on five counts of general murder and voluntary manslaughter by the Lehigh County Grand Jury.

 On April 6, 1960, Ruth Mae Urdanivia went on trial. She entered a plea of guilty before Judge Henninger against the advice of her attorney, Theodore R. Gardner, and was found guilty of murder in the second degree on each of the five murder charges against her. This proved to be a wise move by the widow; under the law, by entering a guilty plea to a general charge of murder, the plea constitutes a legal confession to second-degree murder. It then becomes the duty of the three-judge court to determine whether the crime should remain at the second degree or be raised to the first degree. After a closed door conference between Judge Henninger and Judges Kenneth H. Koch and Henry V. Scheirer, it was ruled that the second-degree murder charges would stand. Had she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity as her attorney had recommended, it would have been an "all or nothing" strategy resulting in either a first-degree conviction or an outright acquittal.

Ruth had taken the safest route, much to the displeasure of District Attorney Joseph, who believed he could prove the murders had been premeditated-- after all, Ruth had hoarded the pills for over a year, and she had retrieved two of her children from her brother's house under the pretense of taking them to a doctor's appointment. Even Judge Henninger, after the trial's conclusion, remarked that an insanity plea never would've worked. Ultimately, Ruth's decision to plead guilty saved her from spending the rest of her life in prison. 

The following day, Ruth Urdanivia was sentenced by Judge Henninger to five "concurrent indefinite terms" at the Industrial Home for Women in Muncy, meaning that it would be up to the institution's officials to determine the length of her incarceration. From the time of her arraignment, jury selection, testimony and sentencing, Ruth never spoke a word except to enter her plea. 

Ruth Urdanivia leaving the courthouse after her conviction

 

The Fate of Ruth Urdanivia

Ruth was transported to Muncy on April 12, 1960, by Sheriff Ernest Kistler, Deputy Sheriff Pat Waelchli and Deputy Matron Eva Crum. She appeared in good spirits during the 120-mile trip, in stark contrast to her sullen demeanor during her trial. She was paroled from the Industrial Home for Women on January 18, 1967. Ultimately, Ruth spent less than seven years at the Industrial Home-- in essence, a punishment of just 16 months for every innocent life that she took.

To satisfy the conditions of her parole, Ruth was forced to take a job and, remarkably, she found employment in the admissions office of a hospital in Lycoming County. When this fact was leaked to the public several months after her parole, State Parole Board Chairman Paul J. Gernert assured the public that they were in no danger. "While at Muncy, she became proficient in the use of IBM equipment," explained Gernert. "She learned to do office work. She is very efficient in office work and that's what she's doing now.

"She had a number of psychiatric contacts while in the institution," he continued. "She got to know herself. She got psychological advice and therapy from the institution officials." When asked by the Allentown Morning Call how the judges and district attorney responded to the parole board's decision to release the five-time child murderer and place her in a hospital job, Gerdert declined to comment. Ruth Urdanivia was finally released from parole in 1970, and she continued to work at the hospital until her death in December of 1982 at the age of 64.

 

Sources:

San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 16, 1957.
Allentown Morning Call, Oct. 20, 1959.
Hanover Evening Sun, Oct. 20, 1959.
Allentown Morning Call, Oct. 21, 1959.
Somerset Daily American, Oct. 22, 1959.
Allentown Morning Call, Oct. 22, 1959.
Allentown Morning Call, Oct. 23, 1959.
Allentown Morning Call, Feb. 7, 1960.
Allentown Morning Call, March 29, 1960.
Allentown Morning Call, April 6, 1960.
Allentown Morning Call, April 7, 1960.
Allentown Morning Call, April 8, 1960.
Allentown Morning Call, April 12, 1960.
Allentown Morning Call, July 25, 1967.