Proof of Guilt: Barbara Graham and the Politics of Executing Women in America

3. A Femme Fatale on Trial

33 3 A Femme Fatale On Trial Buxom Barbara Graham is a woman of many sides, most of them lurid. Name it and Barbara seems to have done it. . . . The record runs from charges of escape from reform school through prostitution, perjury, narcotics, and bad checks. Barbara Wood Kielhammer Puchelle [sic] Newman Graham may become the third woman legally executed in California. Though she got by “the hard way”since she was 13, Barbara is far from unattractive at 30. Her tinted titian blonde hair is drawn up in a school teacher’s bun. Her complexion is good. . . . But her green eyes are cold. “Monahan Case Femme Fatale, Story of a Girl Who May Die for Killing,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 20, 1955 by the time San Francisco Chronicle readers scanned these words on September 20, 1953, jurors four hundred miles away in Los Angeles were only days from determining the fates of Barbara Graham, Emmett Perkins, and John Santo. Readers might have been excused if they failed to immediately recall Perkins and Santo. Virtually the entire trial had centered on Graham,who captivated a large audience reaching to the Bay Area and beyond. 34 A FEMME FATALE ON TRIAL The public,in California and elsewhere,may have been fascinated by Graham, but not in a way that encouraged empathy. Throughout the month-long trial she had refused to adhere to the unwritten code covering female defendants in murder cases, namely, to forge an emotional bond with jurors and nudge them toward at least one “there but for the grace of God” moment. This was a difficult proposition for any murder defendant in the early 1950s, but women were held to different standards. With the exception of female jurors, virtually all the major players in criminal trials were men who generally subscribed to a gender ideology that envisioned women as more nurturing and less prone to violence than men. Since men controlled trial narratives, it behooved defense attorneys to cloak their female clients in traditional garb, or as close to traditional as they could get. Success in this endeavor not only encouraged juror identification, but also fueled empathetic coverage from journalists. Sympathetic stories created public sentiment in favor of defendants, which in turn could shape the way prosecutors and judges treated them.¹ As a decidedly unconventional woman charged with bludgeoning a stranger, especially one always described as elderly and thus exceptionally sympathetic,Graham had a particularly strong incentive to heed these rules. She needed to project herself as submissive, as deferential to authority, and as an admittedly flawed individual who agonized over her many mistakes in judgment.She had to emphasize her role as a mother and suggest that she could never physically harm another human being. And she needed to dress the part of a modest supplicant, since female criminal defendants historically have faced journalistic and public scrutiny of their appearances to a degree not shared by their male counterparts.² The success of this approach can be seen in cases of female murder defendants who did manage to prevail in death-penalty trials.In 1949, A FEMME FATALE ON TRIAL 35 for example,a Los Angeles jury acquitted Elizabeth“Betty”Ferreri of murder, even though she had acknowledged hacking her husband Jerome to death via twenty-three blows with a meat cleaver. For her courtroom appearances, Ferreri was deathly pale, wore no makeup, dressed in black widow’s weeds, wrung her hands, sobbed inconsolably , and claimed, through copious tears, that she had murdered Jerome to stop his abuse.³ Graham took the opposite tack. She was carefully made up with face powder,mascara,and dark lipstick.She dressed in tight clothing and strode into court on high-heeled pumps that showed off her trim ankles and shapely legs. She radiated anger and resentment as she sat, casually smoking, at the counsel table. Perkins and Santo, on the other hand, expressed little emotion throughout the trial. And they dressed conservatively in slacks, dress shirts, and jackets. As a result of her appearance and demeanor, defense lawyer Jack Hardy had difficulty constructing her as anything other than a femme fatale. Graham might have faced condemnation no matter what her behavior.She had a criminal record.Her codefendants were hardened felons and suspects in other murders, and Graham’s trial took place in Southern California, the setting for hard-boiled detective novels and noir films. These books and movies virtually...