Back of Beyond

Winnie Ruth Judd, 46, the "blonde tigress" trunk slayer of 20 years ago (she shot two women friends, dismembered the bodies, shipped them from Phoenix to Los Angeles), made her fourth escape from the

Arizona State Hospital for the Insane. Less than 24 hours later she was picked up on the street in Phoenix.

Old Athlete Jim Thorpe decided it was time to settle one point about the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm (after which he was disqualified as an amateur because he had played professional baseball) and threatened to sue the A.A.U. It was bad enough, he said, for the Olympic Committee to take back the medals he had won, "but I do hold that the officials had no right to take back the bronze bust of himself that King Gustav V of Sweden gave me or the jewel-studded silver Viking ship the Czar of Russia asked me to accept. They belong to me and must be returned or I will bring a suit for damages."

The latest list of collectors' items from the rare book department of Charles Scribner's Sons in Manhattan included a copy of the declaration which launched the Franco-Prussian War, signed by Kaiser Wilhelm, and priced at $2,750. It was a gift from Rudolph Hess to his good friend Adolf Hitler and inscribed in gold: "To the Fuehrer, Christmas, 1938, in which year he twice overran borders in order to bring back German territory into the Reich." Among half a dozen other books from the Fuehrer's personal library: autographed first editions by Authors Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Roehm; a German translation of Henry Ford's My Life and Work, inscribed by piano-thumping Ernst ("Putzi") Hanf-staengl, "Mit alien besten Wunschen fur 1924." Price for the lot: $4,500.

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