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

5. An Execution in California

67 5 An Execution in California edward s. montgomery “covered everything from doll shows to executions” in his forty-year career as a newspaper reporter. He reveled in his job and in the power it gave him to shape public opinion and to hold public officials’feet to the fire. Originally from Colorado, he began his career in Reno, Nevada, before World War II, but spent most of his working life at the San Francisco Examiner. Part of the nationwide Hearst chain, the Examiner competed fiercely with other San Francisco dailies, but its most important rival was the San Francisco Chronicle.¹ By the early 1950s, Montgomery was his newspaper’s ace reporter and could be counted on to garner major scoops and prizes.One competitor described him as“a serious,bespectacled journalist—a loner. ”² Montgomery liked working alone and loved digging to find stories.In 1950 he spent weeks wading through records and interviewing dozens of people—including mobsters and a San Francisco abortionist—for a series detailing how Internal Revenue Service personnel extorted money from individuals facing scrutiny for income tax evasion. The series resulted in prison time for the conspirators and forced the irs to acknowledge lax enforcement of professional standards. It won Montgomery the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. 68 AN EXECUTION IN CALIFORNIA Several years later the Examiner assigned Montgomery to cover the disappearance of Stephanie Bryan, a Berkeley teenager. After Bryan’s purse turned up in the home of University of California accounting student Burton Abbott, Montgomery went the extra mile—literally—chartering a plane to remote Alpine County, where Abbott and his family had a cabin.Accompanied by a photographer, Montgomery rented the services of a dog handler and, with two canines, combed the rugged mountain terrain. About four hundred yards from the cabin,in a heavily forested area,one of the dogs began to paw at the ground. Montgomery moved in closer and spied a saddle shoe protruding through the earth.He called local police,who unearthed Bryan’s body. His diligence and enterprise earned Montgomery approximately twelve thousand dollars per year. This represented more than twice the average male salary in the 1950s, and in a field that was notoriously low paying.³ Montgomery was forty-two and had been at the Examiner for eight years when the trial of Barbara Graham, Emmett Perkins, and John Santo began in August 1953. Though Los Angeles was four hundred miles south of San Francisco, Examiner editors assigned him to the story because Graham was from the Bay Area, John True was originally questioned by San Francisco police, and Perkins and Santo were suspects in Northern California murders. Montgomery attended the trial only sporadically. Nonetheless, he believed his journalistic experience enabled him to quickly and accurately size up the players and the narrative thread of the courtroom drama.4 Like many high-profile journalists of his era, Montgomery saw himself as a participant in the stories he covered, an advocate for the forces of good. He did not posit himself as an impartial observer, a status to which the next generation of reporters would aspire. As Graham’s trial unfolded, he stood squarely on the side of prosecutors , believing that they possessed “a perfect case. . . . The evidence AN EXECUTION IN CALIFORNIA 69 of murder was there. Conclusive evidence gilted [sic] by the confession of one of the participants—a third man who elected to‘sing’as State’s witness to escape the gas chamber. ”Public outrage over Mable Monahan’s murder made death sentences for the three defendants a foregone conclusion to newshounds, including Montgomery, who hungrily lapped up each crumb of information tossed by police and prosecutors.5 Montgomery believed Graham to be guilty of murder, but she also intrigued him. As he sat through the trial’s closing arguments, he attempted “to evaluate the personalities of the three defendants seated before me.” Knowing that Santo and Perkins already had been linked to other killings,“I found myself observing them with a jaundiced eye.” He recalled later that Graham seemed different, less tough and hard than he had expected. After her death verdict, Montgomery stood in the hallway outside the courtroom with dozens of other reporters clamoring for a comment from Graham. He asked her, cavalierly: “How about it Babs: Just a short statement?” She offered a terse response: “You’re all invited to the execution. It’s only fair.” Turning...