Samuels May Join a Select Club on Death Row

Mary Ellen Samuels is about to join an exclusive club.

If a Van Nuys jury’s recommendation Thursday is upheld, the woman dubbed the “Green Widow” for masterminding the murders of her husband and a hit man will become just the fifth woman on California’s Death Row.

Only four women have been legally put to death in California since 1893, although the records are unclear whether any were executed by local authorities before that time.

All the women were convicted murderers like Samuels. And all died in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

Although they are sentenced to die at San Quentin--which also houses the 377 men awaiting execution--condemned women are imprisoned about 200 miles away at the Central California Women’s Facility in the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla.

If their sentences are carried out, the women are driven to San Quentin for the actual execution, after choosing whether to die strapped to a chair in the gas chamber or strapped to a gurney and be injected with a combination of lethal drugs.

Since executions were authorized by California in 1851, 503 state prisoners have been put to death. Most were hanged--215 at San Quentin and 92 at Folsom. The rest--196--died in the gas chamber.

The last to die was David Edwin Mason in August, 1993.

But it has been 32 years since a woman was last put to death by the state. All of the women now awaiting execution were sentenced in the last five years. One was sentenced in Van Nuys, just like Samuels.

Lawyers who have defended Death Row inmates said it is unlikely that the numbers will swell much further. Encino attorney James Gregory said most juries are unwilling to sentence women to death--even in heinous crimes.

“I think it is harder for a jury to sentence a maternal person--therefore a woman--to death,” Gregory said. “We are taught from childhood to be chivalrous to women. We don’t view violence by women as premeditated.”

Other attorneys said the number of women on Death Row will likely remain low because women overall are less violent than men. Even among women who are convicted of murder, most have no history of criminal activity that would justify the death penalty, said Los Angeles lawyer Rowan Klein.

Although the circumstances of their crimes differ widely, all of the women on Death Row--both past and present--shared a certain celebrity. Their cases were widely covered and their stories widely told.

The first to be strapped into the gas chamber was San Francisco crime leader Juanita Spinelli in 1941. Known as The Dutchess, Spinelli was convicted of killing a gang member to prevent him from “squealing” about a recent killing.

She did the deed by slipping a “Mickey Finn” into his drink and then with the help of other gang members drowning him in the Sacramento River. She was described by a prosecutor as a “scheming, cold, cruel woman,” and as an “ex-wrestler and a knife thrower who could pin a poker chip at 15 paces.”

The last to die was Elizabeth Ann Duncan, a 59-year-old Ventura County woman convicted of hiring two men to kill her daughter-in-law, Olga. The two accomplices got $6,000 for their crime--and the gas chamber. Duncan’s son helped represent her at her trial.

A respected nurse, Maureen McDermott, was convicted in Van Nuys in 1990 of hiring a co-worker to kill her roommate to collect a $100,000 mortgage insurance policy.

McDermott, who sits in Chowchilla awaiting execution, once told an interviewer that death holds little fear for her. “What kind of life is this?” she asked. “Waking up every morning to a cement wall is an unbearable future. I sometimes think the gas chamber is better than staring at these walls for the rest of my life.”

Probably the most famous woman ever to end her days on Death Row was Barbara Graham, an attractive “gun moll” convicted of robbing and murdering a wealthy Burbank woman, whose execution in 1955 was graphically depicted in the Susan Hayward film “I Want to Live.”

Graham could have avoided death by telling authorities about other crimes committed by her Mountain Murder Mob.

“I won’t snitch on the guys,” Graham is reported to have said.

When Graham was strapped into the gas chamber chair, prison guard Joe Feretti patted her on the shoulder and whispered: “Take a deep breath and it won’t be so bad.”

Her final words were: “How the hell would you know?”