State’s Executions of Women Carried the Aura of a Circus

San Quentin Prison guard Joe Feretti strapped Barbara Graham into the gas chamber chair, patted her shoulder and whispered to her: “Take a deep breath and it won’t be so bad.”

Graham, a brassy former prostitute, lifted her head up toward the guard and uttered her final words: “How the hell would you know?”

Of the four women executed in California, the Graham case attracted the most attention. Because she was young--32--and attractive, her sensational trial drew nationwide publicity, and her case became a cause celebre. Before she died in 1955, thousands of people from throughout the country sent letters to Gov. Goodwin Knight, imploring him to commute her sentence.

Feretti, 86, now retired and living in Petaluma, strapped 126 people into the gas chamber, but Graham was the only one he felt sorry for. He was used to dealing with hardened, stoic killers; he was not prepared when a frail young woman padded out to the gas chamber in house slippers and a blindfold.

Graham, referred to at the time as the “gun moll” of the Mountain Murder Mob, was convicted, along with two other members of the gang, of robbing and murdering a wealthy Burbank woman named Mabel Monahan. Graham could have avoided the gas chamber if she had told authorities where the gang had buried a man they had murdered, recalled Thomas Keffer, a former guard at San Quentin.

“I won’t snitch on the guys,” is all Graham would say.

The last woman executed in the state--in 1962--was Elizabeth Duncan, known at the time as the worst mother-in-law in California. She was consumed with an intense hatred for her daughter-in-law, and hired two men to kill the woman. Before the killing, she had tried to break up the marriage by impersonating her daughter-in-law at an annulment hearing, after paying a stranger to pose as her son.

The trial was just as bizarre as the crime. Duncan’s son, a Santa Barbara attorney, didn’t appear to hold a grudge against his mother and even defended her during trial as her co-counsel.

The first woman to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber was Juanita Spinelli, known as The Dutchess, the leader of a San Francisco crime gang. Spinelli, who was executed in 1941, was convicted of killing a gang member to prevent him from “squealing” about a recent killing, according to newspaper reports. She drugged him by slipping a “Mickey Finn” in his drink and then, along with other gang members, drowned him in the Sacramento River.

Spinelli was described by prosecutors as a “scheming, cold, cruel woman . . . head of an underworld gang . . . an ex-wrestler and a knife thrower who could pin a poker chip at 15 paces.”

Six years after Spinelli was executed, Louise Peete was sent to the gas chamber. Peete, a housekeeper in Los Angeles who robbed and killed her employer, had held out hope for a pardon from Gov. Earl Warren.

“The governor is a gentleman,” she said at the time, “and no gentleman could send a lady to her death.”

She was wrong.

While Peete’s trial did not attract the attention of the other condemned women, her final press conference the day before her death was legendary. Joking and smiling frequently, she “kept a roomful of newsmen guffawing as she sprinkled her final remarks liberally with wit and sarcasm,” according to a newspaper report.

At the end of the press conference, Peete, a plump, matronly woman, opened a gold-wrapped box of chocolates, extended them to reporters and said: “Now I want you to have some candy--all of you.”