Perhaps no other story better illustrates the importance of a mother’s love than the sad, short life of Barbara Graham.
A touch of maternal affection might have saved her from her awful fate, but that was not in the cards for the girl who one day would become known to the world as “Bloody Babs.”
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She careened from a miserable childhood to reformatories, then whorehouses, heroin addiction, and murder. Her wild ride ended in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Born in 1923 in an Oakland, Calif., slum, she was the unwanted baby of an unwed teenage hooker – Hortense Wood.
At best, Hortense was an indifferent mother, and often a hostile one. Years later, Barbara would tell a reporter that she was certain her mother didn’t care whether she lived or died “as long as I didn’t bother her.”
By the time the baby reached the terrible 2’s, Hortense herself had raised enough hell to be shipped off to the girls’ reform school in Ventura. Barbara was left in the care of a loose network of family and friends, shuttled from place to place until her mother was deemed ready to mingle in polite society and set free. Hortense soon had two more babies, and even less interest in her firstborn.
Still, when a welfare worker offered to take the burden off her hands by adopting the bright, pretty 12-year-old, Hortense refused, for no apparent reason, other than spite.
Old enough to start raising her own hell, Barbara soon entered her Mom’s alma mater, the Ventura reformatory. By 16, she was out on the street, earning her keep as a “sea gull,” a young lady who circled the navy yards seeking handouts from lonely sailors.
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By the time she was 27, she had three ex-husbands and a long record of arrests for petty crimes, prostitution, perjury and vagrancy. She also had two baby boys, which she left with the father, her first husband, when that marriage dissolved.
In 1950, Barbara met husband No. 4 – bartender Henry Graham – in a Los Angeles gin mill. Their union produced another baby, Tommy, and, for her, a raging heroin addiction.
The marriage lasted until he decided that her dope was communal property. She took the drugs and cash, left him with the baby, and moved in with the unsavory Emmett Perkins, a friend and business associate of her husband. Perkins’ business was illegal gambling, and soon Barbara was playing the role of “come-on girl,” luring men from bars to Perkins’ crooked gaming tables.
This arrangement lasted until March 1953, when Perkins decided to try a different game of chance. Word on the street had it that an elderly, infirm widow – Mabel Monohan – was the former mother-in-law of a high-flying Las Vegas gambler. Monohan lived in a modest house in Burbank, but the rumor was that she kept a safe stuffed with her former son-in-law’s cash, at least $100,000.
Perkins pulled together a crew of five for the burglary. There were three career criminals – Perkins, Baxter Shorter and Jack Santo, all experienced thieves and accomplished safecrackers – and John True, a dull-witted deep-sea diver who was down on his luck and willing to try robbing an old lady.
Barbara Graham was asked to come along to get Monohan to open the door. The gang thought their victim would be more likely to trust another woman.
On the night of March 9, 1953, Graham rang Monohan’s doorbell, said she had car trouble, and asked if she could to use the phone. The men followed, and started tearing up the house.
The terrified widow shrieked and wouldn’t stop. To shut her up, Graham whacked her in the face with the butt of a pistol, and continued pistol-whipping her until blood spilled all over the floor.
They never found the safe, and fled empty-handed, somehow overlooking their victim’s expensive jewelry.
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Police got Shorter first – on an unrelated crime – and he squealed about the Burbank murder. A few days later, Shorter was abducted at gunpoint from his home, and was never seen again.
Within a month, the remaining suspects were in custody.
Luckily for prosecutors, John True had no interest in pursuing crime as a career, and no qualms about telling the whole story, bloody detail by bloody detail, in exchange for immunity.
Graham denied having any role in the Monohan caper or killing, and might have convinced a jury had she not made one serious mistake. She began a love affair with a fellow inmate, Donna Prow. When she lamented that she did not have an alibi, Prow offered to have a friend say that he was with Graham the night of the murder. Little did she know that Prow’s friend was an uncover cop, and that her jailhouse sweetheart had betrayed her for a reduced sentence.
In court, it all added up to convictions, and death sentences for Graham and her partners.
Appeals dragged on for 18 months, continuing all the way to the execution day, June 3, 1955, when Calif. Gov. Goodwin Jess Knight called twice to delay the execution. Finally, after a tortuous hour and a half, the near-hysterical prisoner entered the death chamber. “Count to 10 after you hear the cyanide tablets drop, and then take a deep breath,” one officer whispered to her. “It’s easier that way.”
His advice provoked a sneering, “How the hell would you know?”
Santo and Perkins followed the same day.
Graham’s story might have ended there, but her name has not been forgotten, thanks to Hollywood. In the 1958 movie, “I Want to Live!” Susan Hayward gave the performance of her life, earning her only Oscar and a slew of other awards for her sympathetic portrayal of the hardened criminal. The movie was said to have given Graham something she never had – a little understanding – and fueled public sentiment opposing the death penalty.
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