Here is where a photo of Mrs. Mabel Monahan (also spelled Monohan) ought to be. She was the victim. I was unable to find any photos of Mrs. Monahan. Some perverse individuals have sought to cast Barbara Graham as the victim of the piece.
Re-posted by N.S.
A few days ago, I sat up all night reading Clark Howard's online biography of Barbara Graham. It moved me for days, like a movie masterpiece. Howard (1932-2016) was an extraordinary crime writer. He had a black sense of humor, like many an old-school copper, but at the same time great compassion for certain bad guys like Graham. And yet, he was no Alibi Ike, embracing cut-throats.
PART I
Execution Day -- 6:00 am
Barbara Graham paced back and forth in the execution chamber holding cell at San Quentin Prison, just north of San Francisco. It was not much of a pace: four steps up to the cell door, four steps back to the wall. But it was better than just sitting.
It was six o'clock in the morning. Her execution was scheduled for ten.
Barbara wore flame-red silk pajamas in the holding cell. She had brought them with her the previous day when they had driven her up to San Quentin from the women's correctional facility in Corona, nearly five hundred miles to the south. The trip had taken ten miserable hours. Stifling heat, in the back seat of a state car, hands cuffed together, back aching, legs cramping, wrists chafing. Agony. On top of everything else, she had a goddamned toothache.
They got to San Quentin just before five o'clock and she had been taken, nervous and trembling, directly to the holding cell next to the gas chamber. So that she would not actually have to see the gas chamber on her way to the cell, Warden Harley O. Teets had ordered a large tarpaulin draped along the route to cover it. Teets, a somewhat bland, neat gentleman, had come up through the ranks as a guard in federal penitentiaries, reached the level of lieutenant, then was hired as a captain at Folsom, the toughest joint in California in the 1940s. Later he became associate warden under the legendary Clinton Duffy at San Quentin, and succeeded Duffy late in 1951 as warden. During his six-year tenure, he endured an investigation of alleged brutality within the prison which was generated by a series of San Francisco Chronicle articles written by a young reporter named Pierre Salinger.
When Barbara Graham had arrived at his prison the previous day for her scheduled execution, Teets had personally come down to the death house to see her. In his calm manner, he had sat in the cell with her, asked her for a cigarette, and helped her to begin unwinding as much as she could. Before he left her to settle in, he ordered that she be served as many double-chocolate milkshakes as she wanted. That was all she consumed for the rest of the night.
Now it was early morning, June 3, 1955, and Barbara, in her red silks, was waiting for her breakfast -- a hot fudge sundae. While she waited, she chain-smoked Camels in a black plastic cigarette holder. Every once in a while, she said to the death watch matron, "I can't believe I only have four hours to live. I can't believe it."
"Maybe something will happen," the matron reassured. "Maybe you'll get a stay of execution."
"Oh, sure," Barbara replied wryly. "I never got a break in my whole goddamned life and you think I'm going to get one now' Not a chance, lady. Not a chance in hell."
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Hortense Wood was adolescent and unwed in 1923 when she gave birth to a baby girl in a shabby boarding house district of Oakland. It was lucky for the baby, who was named Barbara Elaine, that Hortense was part of a loosely extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins, and close neighbors, because just two years later the young mother was deemed by a juvenile court to be recalcitrant and wayward, and was committed to the Ventura State School for Girls.
Although left without a parent, little Barbara, who was called "Bonnie," somehow did not fall into the hands of any state welfare agency, but was kept in Hortense's extended family and cared for as a kind of afterthought by first one, then another, for several years until her mother was released and returned home.
Hortense's habits apparently had not been modified to any degree by her incarceration, because it wasn't long after her return that she was pregnant again. She had a boy this time. And a couple of years later had another daughter. Bonnie got little attention after that and continued to live a kind of unfettered existence, not really being raised, but simply growing up, getting older, surviving. From the age of about nine, she rarely stayed with Hortense, more often than not living elsewhere in the extended family with whomever would take her in. Her elementary school education was casual, at best, but she was a naturally bright child, and that, together with a pretty face and outgoing personality, usually got her by. Hortense, however, never allowed her to forget that she was illegitimate and would probably turn out "bad" because of it. In retrospect, looking back years later from a prison cell, Barbara told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Bernice Freeman, "My mother never cared whether I lived or died, as long as I didn't bother her."
Barbara almost got the best break of her life when she was twelve. A welfare worker who had been familiar with Barbara's situation for several years decided that she would like to adopt her and give her a better life. Ed Montgomery, another reporter, tracked down the woman to interview for a series of articles he was writing for the San Francisco Examiner. Remembering Bonnie, the woman said, "The poor little kid never had anyone who really loved her. And she was the most beautiful thing in the world. She was a little doll, always so lively and full of fun. I managed to take her to live with me for a couple of months, but Hortense would not even consider letting me adopt her. She was a spiteful, vindictive woman. I believe she truly hated Barbara."
Maybe she did, because the next year, when Barbara was thirteen, Hortense turned her over to the juvenile authorities, claiming she was unmanageable. Barbara was sent to the same reformatory Hortense had gone to, the Ventura State School for Girls.
Mother's prediction had come true; she had personally seen to it. Barbara had gone "bad."
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