Near the end of his life, the prosecutor who sent 32-year-old Barbara Graham to death row proclaimed his conscience clear. Her execution by cyanide gas in June 1955 was merciful compared to her crime, as J. Miller Leavy saw it.
Leavy won many high-profile cases during his storied career at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, but few drew more attention than the case against the woman nicknamed “Bloody Babs.”
She was streetwise and brassy and physically striking, a small-time hustler and “dice girl” who lingered in casinos to induce men to drink and gamble. She had a heroin habit and a baby to feed. In March 1953, in the company of four men, she participated in the home-invasion robbery of a disabled Burbank widow who was found bludgeoned and strangled.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
Relentless and skilled, with a flair for theater, Leavy told jurors that Graham had not just participated in the robbery but was central to the violence. “Barbara Graham tied Mabel Monahan’s hands behind her back, pistol whipped her and left her to die,” Leavy, then 85, told a Times columnist in 1990. “Sending her to the gas chamber didn’t bother me at all.”
“For the People,” an authorized history of the district attorney’s office, burnishes Leavy’s legend and repeats the claim that Graham pistol-whipped the victim. For generations of prosecutors, Leavy loomed so large that when they lost a case, they’d quip, “Leavy could have won it.”
Marcia Clark, who would become one of the best-known prosecutors of her generation during the ill-fated O.J. Simpson case in the mid-1990s, heard all the stories about Leavy during her 14 years at the D.A.’s office. She began researching the Graham case for her book “Trial By Ambush,” which published in November. She went into the project with admiration for Leavy — and emerged with the certainty that he had cheated.
Deputy Dist. Atty. J. Miller Leavy, left, questions Sam Sirianni, an undercover police officer, during Barbara Graham’s trial.
(Associated Press)
He hid a key witness, she concluded. He constructed the prosecution narrative based on the word of a co-defendant who had good reason to lie. He did things that would be illegal today, Clark said, like planting the jailhouse informant who won Graham’s love and helped doom her.
“He was a very good lawyer, don’t get me wrong,” Clark told The Times in a recent interview. “But what I didn’t expect to see was that he was a sleazy player.”
From her arrest to her execution, something about Barbara Graham inspired frenzied verbiage from the journalists of the era. Newspapers portrayed her as a chilly, oversexed murderess from the pages of pulp fiction. Sometimes she was “the redhead,” sometimes “the icy blond.” She was “the gun moll.” She was “sultry.” She was “shapely Barbara Graham, the blond iceberg.”
In the Los Angeles Daily Mirror, she was “that monster disguised as a woman.” In the Herald-Express, she was “the most beautiful victim that the gas chamber will ever have claimed.”
Abandoned by her mother, she was sent, in her teens, to the Ventura School for Girls, a brutal reform school from which she emerged with an education in crime. She never made it to high school. She hustled for a living. She wrote bad checks. She shoplifted. She was busted for drug possession, prostitution and perjury. She married four times. She had three kids. She loved jazz.
She was broke, and trying to raise a baby, while working as a shill at a dice-and-poker house in El Monte. A rough-looking outlaw named Jack Santo showed up. He was a criminal confederate of the man who ran the gambling house, Emmett Perkins. They had heard that a retired vaudeville performer, Mabel Monahan, stashed money in her home safe.
A Los Angeles County sheriff’s van passes through the gates of San Quentin State Prison, bearing convicted killers Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins.
(Bettmann Archive)
“These guys were very bad news,” Clark said. “I think much more bad news than Barbara knew.”
The safety-conscious Monahan would not open her door to just anybody, especially not to hard-looking thugs. But the petite, pretty Graham might get them inside. And so, on March 9, 1953, Graham appeared at Monahan’s door with the story that her car had broken down.
Monahan let Graham in, and the hooligans followed. In came Santo, Perkins, safecracker Baxter Shorter and John True, whose self-serving account of what happened would be adopted as fact by the authorities. The robbers sacked the house, found no safe and left Monahan bludgeoned with a pillowcase over her head. “Wealthy widow beaten to death in California,” read one headline.
Detectives caught up to Shorter within weeks, and his account led them to the others. As Clark documents in her book, he described Perkins “slugging [Monahan] in the temple” with a gun.
Shorter might have been the state’s star witness had he not vanished soon after. (He was kidnapped by Perkins at gunpoint, according to a witness, and presumed dead.) Jurors would not get his version of the murder.
That left True as the prosecution’s key witness. He was granted immunity for his testimony, minimized his own culpability — he had actually tried to save Monahan, he said — and pointed a finger at Graham. He said she held the victim by the neck with one hand and pistol whipped her with the other.
From left: Emmet Perkins, Jack Santo and Barbara Graham after their capture in May 1953.
(Los Angeles Times)
Hoping to clinch Graham’s conviction, authorities planted an informant beside her at the L.A. County jail. The plant was Donna Prow, who was in her early 20s and serving time for manslaughter. She approached Graham. She poured on the charm. She brought her candy. Jail was lonely, and Graham fell for her.
“Hi Baby,” Graham wrote to her in one of many letters police obtained. “Your note was so sweet, honey, but I want you to be sure of your feelings, or I wouldn’t want to start something we couldn’t finish. You are a very lovely and desirable woman, honey, and I want you very much.”
As Graham’s trial approached, she had a desperate problem — no alibi — but Prow offered a solution. She arranged for Graham to meet a man who would lie for her. He’d claim to have been with her miles away at an Encino hotel during the killing.
All of it was a police set-up. Prow’s “friend” was an undercover police officer named Sam Sirianni, and when Leavy introduced secret recordings of Graham cobbling together the fake alibi — and admitting she’d been with her co-defendants on the fatal night — her credibility was destroyed.
But Graham’s defense attorney never got a chance to cross-examine Prow. The D.A.’s office had arranged for her to be released from jail, and to leave California — safely beyond the reach of the defense.
“No one could find her, and the prosecution made sure of it, and that was illegal. They hid a key witness,” Clark told The Times. “They would have pried out of her how much effort she went to get Barbara to go along with the false alibi scheme. And that would have made, I think, things look a lot different to the jury.”
The prosecutor dwelled at excruciating length on Graham’s love letters to Prow.
Barbara Graham looks back at a camera during her trial.
(Herald-Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)
“And it was very clear why he did it,” Clark said. “He’s tarnishing her character in front of the jury. Back then, there was not much grace given to homosexual relationships of any kind.”
In his closing argument, Leavy told jurors that Graham had testified with the aim of seducing the male jurors, deterring them from their duty to convict her with the hope that she could “just get up there and look pretty.” It was a tactic Clark finds “morally repugnant.”
“The law was different back then, and [they did] a lot of things that would be absolutely grounds for disbarment today,” she said.
Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her sympathetic but campy portrayal of Graham in the 1958 film “I Want to Live!” In it, Graham is punished for defying the conventions of the time. She is sexually adventurous. She smokes cigarettes with men in darkened rooms. She sneers clever quips at the tormenting cops. She is a wildcat with a tender heart.
“She was the wildest of the jazzed-up generation,” proclaimed the ad copy. “She had lots of friends, most of them bad. She was driven by a thousand desires, a few of them decent. She sinned. She stole. But she swore she never murdered.”
John True, second from right, served as a state witness, testifying against Barbara Graham and her co-defendants on trial for Mabel Monahan’s murder.
(Los Angeles Times)
Though Graham denied she was at the victim’s house, Clark believes she was there — but as a decoy. It struck her as unlikely that the 5-foot-3 Graham, in the company of four stronger male accomplices, some with records of violence, had been the bludgeoner.
Under the felony murder rule, Graham would have been guilty for any participation in the crime, but in a differently handled case, she might have avoided a death sentence.
Jurors convicted Graham, Santo and Perkins of murder, and a judge sentenced them all to death. At San Quentin, one of Graham’s last requests was to wear a mask as she went to the gas chamber. “I don’t want to see the people,” she said.
Leavy was one of the witnesses to her execution, his legend about to acquire another notch.
Also present was journalist Al Martinez, who would become a Times columnist and, decades later, write about being haunted by what he saw as the cyanide pellets dropped and the gas rose.
The cop next to him said, “Mabel Monahan died hard too.”
