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

6. Executing Women in America

87 6 Executing Women in America when barbara graham died in San Quentin’s gas chamber, she became the thirty-seventh woman executed in the United States in the twentieth century. Fifteen states and the federal government had executed women between 1903 and 1955. New York held the distinction of having sent the largest number of women to die: seven. California had executed three women, including Graham. By comparison, more than six thousand men had been hanged, gassed, and electrocuted in America during that same period.¹ With such small numbers, it seems natural to wonder how these particular women earned the ultimate penalty while others were convicted but not condemned,or tried but acquitted.As death-penalty scholar Victor Streib noted,“Probably several times this many women were sentenced to death but never executed ...presumably hundreds, perhaps thousands of women committed capital crimes but were never sentenced to death.”Thus it might be tempting to view all of the executed women through the same lens, to envision them as sharing a unique set of characteristics and similar circumstances.² In fact, Graham and her female counterparts did share many common life threads.One was the crimes required for execution.Men could be executed for a variety of felonies, including murder, rape, 88 EXECUTING WOMEN IN AMERICA kidnapping, robbery, even burglary, particularly if they were African American.³ All but one executed woman had been condemned for first-degree murder. Only Ethel Rosenberg, electrocuted in 1953 by the federal government along with her husband, Julius, had been executed for another crime: conspiring to commit espionage.4 Graham, like many other executed women, had been condemned for committing murder in partnership with men. Other prominent cases included those of Ruth Snyder, electrocuted by New York in 1928 for murdering her husband, Albert. Judd Gray, Snyder’s lover and partner in crime, also was executed. In 1929 Louisiana hanged Ada LeBoeuf and Thomas Dreher for killing LeBoeuf’s husband. After shooting him, they hired a trapper to slit open the dead man’s body, fill it with lead, and drop it into a swamp. The trapper earned a life sentence.5 New York electrocuted Anna Antonio in 1934 for hiring two men to kill her husband. Then in 1951 New York executed Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez for duping and killing women involved in lonely hearts clubs—a post–World War II phenomenon wherein individuals looking for love paid money to meet up with potential mates. Beck also killed a child of one of the adult victims.6 One of the most coldly calculating and brutal partner murders occurred in Missouri when Bonnie Heady and Carl Hall kidnapped six-year-old Bobby Greenlease from his private school, took him across state lines into Kansas, and then demanded a six-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom from his distraught family. The family paid, but Bobby was already dead, having been shot and killed by Hall and buried in a backyard. The federal government executed both Heady and Hall in 1953.7 Virtually all of the murders attributed to executed women—at least if they were white—can be considered predatory.They involved sex, money, or revenge. None of the executed white killers seem to have committed their crimes out of fear, jealousy, or passion, motives ordinarily ascribed to females who murder. Perhaps that EXECUTING WOMEN IN AMERICA 89 offers a partial explanation for the disparity between the percentage of women initially charged with murder—about 10 percent of all such charges—and those eventually executed for the crime. Ruth Snyder’s decision to murder her husband can be deemed a sexual slaying with financial overtones. So can Martha Beck’s, since she seems to have been in thrall to Raymond Fernandez and fearful of losing him.Other slayings with sex as a component included those of Mary Rogers, who helped a man murder her husband to cover up an illegitimate pregnancy and who was executed by Vermont in 1905; Frances Creighton, electrocuted by New York in 1936 for poisoning her lover’s wife; and Toni Jo Henry,electrocuted by Louisiana in 1942 for killing a man who offered her a ride while she was en route to Texas. She hoped to spring her husband from the prison where he had been incarcerated for murder.8 Graham had been executed for murder involving financial gain.So had Mary Farmer, electrocuted by New York in 1909 for hacking...