Subjects: Alumni

Description: LeMoyne Snyder was born June 16, 1898, on the Michigan State University campus to Clara Maud Mifflin and MSU President Jonathan LeMoyne Snyder. He had two brothers - Robert (born 1893, MAC class of 1912), and Plummer (born 1900). LeMoyne and his wife, Louise, had four children: Catherine, Maile, John, and Susan. Snyder received his B.S. from M.A.C. in 1919, and his M.D. from the Harvard Medical School in 1923. After a three year internship at the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York, he worked for one year as resident surgeon. He spent the following year as a ship's surgeon in the U.S. Army. Snyder returned to Lansing in 1928 or 1930, working as an attending physician at Edward W. Sparrow and St. Lawrence Hospitals. From 1930 to 1934, Snyder studied law with Judge L. W. Carr, and passed the Bar Exam in 1934. In 1933, he became the Medicolegal Director for the State of Michigan Police, a position which he held for fifteen years. When Michigan State University established the Department of Police Administration (now the School of Criminal Justice), and the State of Michigan organized the Michigan Crime Laboratory, Snyder's interest in forensic medicine led him to play a significant role. In 1944 Snyder’s book Homicide Investigation was published, which served as an important text in police academies and university criminology programs for over thirty years. It has been reprinted and revised many times over the years. Snyder's fame in the 1950s and 1960s was built on his participation in the Court of Last Resort, sponsored by Argosy Magazine, under the editorial direction of Henry Steeger. The central members of the Court were Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of the Perry Mason character), Marshall Houts, Alexander Gregory, and Snyder. The Court of Last Resort (CLR) undertook private investigations of cases where an inmate convicted of murder and sentenced either to life in prison or execution continued to claim innocence, but had exhausted all available financial resources to hire legal counsel. The stated purpose of the CLR was not to serve as counsel for the accused, but publicity. Cases investigated by the CLR would be written up in Argosy Magazine, and through varying circumstances, many of those who turned to the CLR were paroled or pardoned. At the height of its popularity, the Court of Last Resort was the subject of an NBC half-hour program which premiered on Friday, October 4, 1957 at 8 p.m. In September of 1959 it moved to ABC, where it ran until February 1960. The Court of Last Resort's activities waned in the late 1950s and it is unclear from these papers how Snyder spent most of the following 25 years. He kept in touch with several correspondents, and the third edition of his book was published in 1977. At the December 10, 1977 commencement exercises, Michigan State University, Snyder's alma mater, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws. Dr. LeMoyne Snyder died June 4, 1989, twelve days short of his 91st birthday, in California.

His collection at the MSU Archives contains both personal and professional materials.

Note: only a small portion of Ishino's collection has been digitized. The finding aid for the collection is available online: https://findingaids.lib.msu.edu/repositories/2/resources/112.

Format: Text/pdf

Collection Number: UA 10.3.97

Language: English

Relation: LeMoyne Snyder papers

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections