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

1. A Murder in Burbank

1 1 A Murder in Burbank mable monahan lived in a residential neighborhood of immaculately landscaped yards and spacious homes in Burbank, California, about a dozen miles north of Los Angeles. Her tidy white stucco house straddled the corner of West Parkside Avenue and Orchard Street. A sturdy row of decorative hedges hugged the house on three sides. A concrete walkway led from the street to the front door, which was partially obscured by a latticed trellis covered by climbing vines. Despite the area’s low crime rate, Monahan took extraordinary precautions to ensure her safety. A six-foot tall concrete wall separated her front and back yard,and the two areas connected via a gate that opened onto the driveway. Monahan always kept it locked. Every Wednesday morning her landscape gardener,Mitchell Truesdale,performed the same ritual at Monahan’s home: he mowed the front lawn, knocked on the front door,retrieved the gate key,unlocked the gate, immediately relocked it from the inside, mowed, edged and clipped the backyard, locked up again, and returned the key. Monahan also installed large floodlights under the eaves on the part of her home that could be seen from the street. She turned them on each night at sunset and turned them off when she rose in 2 A MURDER IN BURBANK the morning. She kept her living room drapes tightly shut at night so that no one could see inside the house, and she installed safety latches on all the windows and double bolts on the doors. The front door held a small, unobtrusive peephole located at eye level. Monahan never discussed the basis for her fears with friends or family members. But several factors may have enhanced her sense of vulnerability. Her daughter Iris had been married to Las Vegas gambler Luther “Tutor” Scherer, well-known for his high-rolling lifestyle and reputed mob connections; the Scherers had lived in the Burbank house before divorcing in the late 1940s. Monahan was a widow in late middle age who lived alone, and she suffered from a slight disability as the result of a decades-earlier automobile crash. The accident had ended her somewhat colorful career as a professional roller skater and palm reader who toured with her late husband George on the national vaudeville circuit. At sixty-five she was still attractive,with a slender figure and short,curly, grayish hair, but she walked slowly and with a slight limp. Often she used a cane.¹ As it turned out, Monahan’s fears were justified. It seems, in retrospect , that she possessed a sixth sense about the disaster that would befall her. Inexplicably, her premonitions and many precautions did not prevent her from opening her front door to a stranger just after dark one cool evening in March 1953. That split-second decision cost Monahan her life and catapulted her into public view as part of a sensational murder case, the significance of which far outlasted its time and place in history. Six months after Monahan’s death, jurors in Los Angeles County convicted Barbara Graham, Jack Santo, and Emmett Perkins of her murder. Twenty months after that, Graham, Santo, and Perkins went to their own deaths in the gas chamber at San Quentin. All because friends of Santo’s heard rumors that Tutor Scherer had stashed one hundred thousand dollars in a safe in his former home.² A MURDER IN BURBANK 3 On Monday, March 9, 1953, the last day of Mable Monahan’s life, she awoke just after 11:00 a.m. She had spent the previous night playing her weekly poker game with a group of women friends. One of them, Merle Leslie, had driven her home after midnight. Leslie was tired and decided to stay over at Monahan’s. Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on Monday, Leslie left for home, promising to check in with Monahan later. When she phoned shortly before 7:00 that night, Monahan said she had eaten dinner and was sitting in her den, reading The Purple Pony Murder, a mystery novel. She was tired and planned to turn in early, she said. It was the last time Leslie spoke to, or saw, her friend.³ About 11:15 a.m. on Wednesday March 11, the gardener, Truesdale, arrived for his weekly appointment. He noticed the curtains still closed and the floodlights still on. As he approached the house to...