JUST IN: California’s Third Woman Executed by Nitrogen Gas | She Cried “I’M INNOCENT”

[music] June the 3rd, 1955. San Quinton State Prison, California. [music] The gas chamber has been prepared for three people, three chairs, three death sentences, but only one of them belongs to a woman. Her name was Barbara Ela Graham. And on that morning, the state of California were about to make her the third woman in its entire history to die in that chamber.

 And the press, hungry, merciless, and absolutely certain of her guilt, had already given her a different name. They called her Bloody Babs. But here is the question nobody in that courtroom bothered to ask. Was that nickname earned or was it built? That morning, the governor issued not one but two last minute stays of execution, pushing her death back from 10:00 to 10:45, then to 11:30.

 Each delay felt less like mercy and more like slow torture. Barbara said it herself. Why do they torture me? [music] I was ready to go at 10:00. When a guard told her that taking a deep breath after the cyanide dropped would make dying easier. She looked at him and said, “How the hell would you know?” And then she said her last words.

 She walked into that chamber insisting she was innocent. [music] And what the jury never got to hear, evidence hidden by the very people sworn to deliver justice, [music] is absolutely impossible to believe. a former prosecutor on the OJ Simpson trial later reviewed the full transcripts. Her conclusion, the trial was fatally flawed.

 We are going to show you exactly how. Welcome. If you are [music] new here, this is where we go beyond the headlines and into the full documented truth. Hit subscribe and stay with us. Let’s get into it. Before we talk about the crime, we need to talk about the woman it was committed against. Mabel Monohan was 64 years old, a widow, a quiet woman living a quiet life in Burbank, California in the early 1950s.

 She was not famous, she was not wealthy. She was simply a woman who had worked hard, lived honestly, and by the time this story begins, had settled into the kind of peaceful retirement most people only dream about. Earlier in her life, Mabel had performed as a vaudeville entertainer on the prestigious Keith Albi Circuit, [music] one of the most respected performance networks in the country.

 But those days were long behind her. Now she lived alone in a comfortable corner house in Burbank’s Rancho Equestrian Neighborhood, a quiet residential area not far from the Warner Brothers and Disney studio lots. Her connection to the criminal world, she had none. Not directly, but she had a daughter. Her daughter Iris had once been married to a man named Luther Tutor Sharer, a multi-millionaire casino investor with ownership stakes in gambling clubs in Palm Springs and casinos in Las Vegas and rumored ties to organized crime.

[music] When Iris and Sharer divorced, Iris received the Burbank house as part of the settlement. She then remarried and moved to New York, leaving her mother, Mabel, to live in the property alone. Sharer and Mabel remained close friends after the divorce. He visited regularly. To the outside world, that friendship looked suspicious.

 And in the wrong circles, the bars, the back rooms, the criminal underworld, it fed a dangerous rumor. The rumor said Sharer had left $100,000 in cash, locked inside a safe, hidden somewhere inside Mabel’s home. There was no safe. There was no cash. The rumor was completely false, but it was enough to get Mabel Monahan killed. She had done nothing wrong.

 She had simply stayed kind to a man she once called family. And that kindness cost her everything. Now, let’s talk about the woman the press turned into a monster. Barbara Elaine Ford was born on June the 26th, 1923 in a boarding house in Oakland, California. She came into the world with almost nothing, no father, no stability, and a mother, Hortense Ford, who was only 17 years old and surviving through prostitution.

 When Barbara was roughly 2 years old, Hortense was arrested for what? authorities called encourageability and sent to reform school. Barbara was placed in foster care. She would later say she was beaten there, mistreated, unwanted. What followed was a childhood built entirely on institutions, foster homes, an orphanage, a convent, no single adult who stayed, no place that felt like home.

 At 14, Barbara was sent to the California School for Girls in Ventura, the exact same reform school her mother had been locked in years before. The conditions were brutal. Barbara joined a riot protesting the physical abuse of girls inside the facility. She escaped three times, hitchhiking home each time and begging to be allowed to stay.

 Each time her mother sent her back, she was released on parole just before her 16th birthday. Still a teenager, still completely alone. She worked as a housekeeper, a waitress, and a telegram delivery girl in Long Beach, doing whatever she could to survive. But survival for Barbara had limits.

 Still in her mid- teens, she entered prostitution, working near Oakland Army Base and Alama Naval Air Station during the war years alongside other women doing the same. The arrests began stacking up. Vagrancy, prostitution, bad checks, and then in 1948, a perjury conviction. 5 years served at California Women’s State Prison in Tahachchip for providing a false alibi for two men accused of assaulting women.

 By her early 30s, she had been married four times and had three sons she was not raising. Her fourth husband, Henry Graham, introduced her to amphetamines, heroin, and opium. Barbara Graham had a troubled past, a criminal record, a broken life. But here is what that record did not include. Not once, not ever, a single conviction for violence.

 What the prosecution claimed she did on the night of March the 9th, 1953, and what was actually proven in that courtroom are two very different things. By the early 1950s, Barbara Graham’s life had settled into a dangerous routine. She was working at an underground gambling parlor in Elmonte, California. Owned and operated by a man named EMTT the Weasel Perkins.

 The parlor ran poker and dice games. For Barbara, it was as close to steady work as her world allowed. Perkins was an ex-convict, wiry, restless, and connected to Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen’s criminal operation. He was also Barbara’s employer, and eventually her lover. Through Perkins, Barbara met another career criminal named Jack Santo.

 The two men ran in the same circles, shared the same history, and were both looking for the same thing, a big score. Barbara’s husband, Henry Graham, was barely holding his life together. He worked as a bartender and arranged escorts for his bar’s male clients, quietly funneling those same men toward Perkins Gambling Parlor. But Henry’s addiction to opiates had consumed him completely.

 By late 1952, he had essentially moved out of their apartment. Barbara was left carrying everything. A newborn son, Tommy, born around 1953, no reliable income, no support. She was forging checks and shoplifting just to keep the lights on. It was in this moment of desperation that the plan began to take shape. According to court records, the robbery was not a spontaneous decision.

 The rumor about Tutor Sharer’s hidden cash had been circulating through criminal bars and backrooms for months. Perkins brought the idea to Santo. Santo brought in a safe cracker named Baxter Sharter and a man named John TR, a deep sea diver with absolutely no prior criminal record. But there was one problem.

 The target was an elderly widow living alone. She would never open her front door for a group of men she did not know. They needed a woman. They chose Barbara. Her role, as they described it, was simple. Go to the door, get it open, step aside. That was all. The plan sounded straightforward. Get in. Find the safe. Get out.

 But what none of them knew, what would only surface in court testimony 2 years later, is what actually happened once that door swung open. Let’s be clear about who was in that room. There were five people involved in the plan to rob Mabel Monohan. Each one played a role. Each one made a choice. EMTT the Weasel Perkins, the organizer, Barbara’s lover, a violent ex-convict with deep ties to the Los Angeles underworld.

 Jack Santo, Perkins partner, another career criminal with a long record and no hesitation. Baxter Sharter, a safe cracker connected to Mickey Cohen’s operation. Shorter initially objected to including a woman in the plan. He was overruled. John TR, a deep sea diver, no prior criminal record, no history of violence.

 He was the outsider in this group. He was also the one who would later walk free in exchange for his testimony against the others. And finally, Willie Upshaw, a bookie, also connected to Cohen’s network. Upshaw conducted early surveillance on Mabel’s property. But when he remembered that police had previously questioned him about a break-in at Tutor Sharer’s Los Angeles home, he got nervous and pulled out.

 He would later resurface, this time as a witness for the prosecution. According to court records, the group came together on the evening of March the 8th, 1953, the night before the robbery at a drive-in restaurant in Studio City, California. They ate fried chicken and shrimp. They finalized the plan. Then all five, plus Upshaw in a separate vehicle, drove slowly past Mabel Monohan’s corner house on Parkside Avenue in Burbank.

 They were watching, counting, mapping every detail. The following evening, March the 9th, 1953, the group regrouped in the parking lot of the Smokehouse restaurant in Burbank, directly across from the Warner Brothers studio lot. From there, they drove to the house together. Court records confirmed that only two firearms were present among the group that night, one held by True, one held by Perkins.

Whether Barbara Graham carried a weapon at all was never conclusively proven. That question alone would become one of the most fiercely argued points in the entire trial. If this story has already shocked you, wait until you hear what happened inside that house. And wait until you hear what the prosecution deliberately kept from the jury.

 Make sure you are subscribed so you do not miss what comes next. Now, let’s keep going. It is the evening of March the 9th, 1953. The group has left the smokehouse restaurant parking lot. Two cars, five people, one destination. 1718 Parkside Avenue, Burbank, California. At approximately 8:00 in the evening, Barbara Graham walks up to the front door alone. The porch light comes on.

She speaks through the closed door. She tells the woman inside that her car has broken down and she needs to use a telephone. A woman alone asking for [music] help. Nothing about it sounds dangerous. Mabel Mon opens the door. What happened next inside that house depends entirely on who you ask. And that is exactly where this case begins to fall apart.

 According to Baxter Shorter, he remained outside for the first several minutes. When he was eventually called inside, Mabel was already on the floor. She was bleeding. She was moaning. Her mouth had been gagged. Shorter said he watched Perkins strike her with a gun. When he noticed Mabel was struggling to breathe, he tried to have the gag removed.

 He later stated clearly he had not agreed to be part of a murder. According to John TR’s testimony at trial, he entered the house directly behind Barbara, carrying a firearm. He claimed he watched Barbara bludgeon Mabel in the face with her own weapon, striking her repeatedly. He said he physically pulled Barbara away.

 He then claimed Barbara pulled a pillowcase over Mabel’s head while Perkins bound her hands and Santos cinched fabric tightly around her neck. That was the story TR told in court, but it was not the story he told first. In TR’s original statement to police, a statement that was never shown to Barbara’s defense attorneys, he said he saw Barbara strike Mabel only once.

 He made no mention of a gun in her hand. And in that same first statement, it was Perkins, not Barbara, who placed the pillowcase over Mabel’s head. By the time TR took the witness stand, that account had changed completely. Marshia Clark, the former prosecutor who later reviewed the full case transcripts, put it plainly. Barbara was at the scene.

She was the one who got the door open. But the specific act that made her eligible for the death penalty, the pistol whipping of Mabel Manohan, rested entirely on the testimony of a man whose story had quietly and significantly changed between his first police interview and the day he faced a jury. While all of this was happening, the rest of the group was tearing the house apart.

 Every drawer, every cabinet, every closet, they found a trap door cut into the den floor, and underneath it, nothing but a furnace. No safe, no cash, no $100,000. The rumor that had cost Mabel Monahan her life was completely false. What made it worse? $15,000 worth of jewelry and valuables was sitting in a purse inside a closet. They walked right past it.

 The group fled. Someone stopped at a pay phone and called for an ambulance, but gave the wrong city. No help came. Mabel Manohan was left on the floor of her own home, bound, hooded with a pillowcase, a ligature pulled tight around her neck, alone. 2 days later, her gardener arrived and found her body.

 She had died of asphyxiation. She was 64 years old. They found no money, no safe, nothing. The robbery had failed completely. But that was not even the most disturbing part of this story. What the police and prosecutors did next, the moves they made before that courtroom ever came to order, is what truly defined this case.

And what it cost Barbara Graham was her life. When the two cars pulled away from Parkside Avenue that night, there was no celebration, no cash to split, no safe cracked open, no victory of any kind, just five people scattering across Los Angeles County, each one carrying the weight of what they had left behind on that floor.

 The group went their separate ways. No meetings, no plans, no next move. Barbara Graham went back to her life. She did not flee the state. She did not contact police. She made no effort to separate herself from Perkins or Santo in the days and weeks that followed. According to court records and later testimony, she continued doing exactly what she had been doing before, working, [music] caring for her newborn son, Tommy, and surviving one day at a time.

 Across the country in New York, Mabel’s daughter, Iris, received the news of her mother’s death. She responded by offering a reward of $5,000, worth more than $52,000 by today’s value for any information that would lead to an arrest and conviction. Tutor Sharer, the man whose name and false rumored cash had made Mabel a target, was left with something no amount of money could fix.

His continued friendship with his former mother-in-law had, without his knowledge, painted a target on her door. Of all five conspirators, the one showing the most visible distress was Baxter Shartter. According to court records, he was shaken in the weeks following the murder. He had walked into that house expecting a robbery.

 What he witnessed was something far beyond what he had agreed to. He knew the men he was dealing with, and he knew exactly what they were capable of. There were no insurance payouts waiting, no financial gain of any kind. The entire plan had produced nothing except a dead woman and five people whose time was running out.

The press for now was quiet. But the moment arrests were made, the moment Barbara Graham’s photograph landed on a newspaper editor’s desk, everything was about to change. The police had a dead woman and almost nothing else. On March the 26th, 1953, more than 2 weeks after Mabel Manohan’s body was found, Laped arrested and questioned five men believed to have possible connections to the murder.

 Three were known associates of Mickey Cohen. The other two had minor connections to the same criminal network. Every single one of them was released. There was not enough evidence to hold any of them. The forensic picture was nearly empty. No fingerprints recovered from the crime scene, no weapons found, no physical evidence connecting any specific individual to the beating that killed Mabel.

 The entire case from the very beginning rested on one thing, witness testimony. The least reliable form of evidence in any courtroom. Among those questioned was Baxter Shartter. And unlike the others, Shartter could not hold himself together. The thought of the gas chamber broke him completely. He voluntarily approached investigators and gave a full confession, naming every member of the crew and walking police through the events of that night in detail.

 According to court records, he believed that cooperating fully would spare his life. It did not save him. It got him killed. Shorter’s statement was leaked. Within weeks, he was kidnapped from his apartment in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles. His wife witnessed the abduction and managed to capture the license plate of the vehicle.

 That plate led police to a car registered to Jack Santos’s girlfriend, found abandoned near the airport. Inside the vehicle, investigators found a fragment of a rare yellow desert flower, suggesting the car had been driven toward the mountains east of Palm Springs. Baxter Sharter was never found. He is presumed to have been murdered and buried somewhere in those mountains.

With their only willing witness gone, police turned their attention to John Tru, who denied knowing anything about the murder. The investigation stalled completely. [music] Meanwhile, the tabloids had Barbara Graham’s mugsh shot. Her red hair, her looks, her criminal record. It was everything they needed.

 The nickname Bloody Babs was printed across newspaper front pages before she had ever been formally charged with a single crime. The investigation had stalled. The key witness was gone. The forensic evidence was almost non-existent. But then two separate cracks appeared and together they broke the case wide open. The first came from Willie Upshaw.

 Upshaw, the bookie who had pulled out of the robbery plan before it happened, walked into a grand jury room and told everything he knew. He confirmed he had been present during the surveillance drive past Mabel Monahan’s house on Parkside Avenue on the night of March the 8th, 1953. He confirmed the group had discussed the robbery in full detail.

 He confirmed Barbara Graham was among them. His reason for dropping out, he explained, was simple. He was afraid of Tutor Sharer’s retaliation. The second crack came from John TR. Faced with the full weight of a first-degree murder charge and offered complete immunity from prosecution, TR changed his story entirely.

 He agreed to testify against Barbara, Perkins, [music] and Santo. He was the only person still alive who could place himself inside that house on the night Mabel died. But the most damaging blow to Barbara’s case came from inside the jail. and it came from someone she trusted completely. Her name was Donna Prow, 21 years old, a car hop from Burbank who was serving time for vehicular manslaughter.

 Barbara grew close to her, deeply close. She confided in Prow that she had no solid alibi for the night of March the 9th. She thought she might have been with a man named Logan or possibly at home arguing with Henry. She was not sure. Prow told her not to worry. She knew someone who could help for a price.

 that someone was officer Samsriani working undercover. Sirriani met with Barbara three times inside the jail, presenting himself as a man who could make problems disappear. He produced a fabricated hotel registration card and receipt from the Enino Ritz Motor Hotel, suggesting the two of them had spent the night of the murder together.

 Barbara agreed to pay him $25,000 and her exact words were, “The day we walk out of court.” every single conversation was being recorded. On tape, Barbara admitted she had been at Mabel Monahan’s house that night. She also confirmed she knew that Baxter Sharter had been, in her own words, done away with and would not be testifying.

Donna Prow, the woman Barbara had trusted with her fears, her secrets, and her freedom, had been a police informant from the very first day they met. Barbara Graham, Emmett Perkins, and Jack Santo were formally arrested and charged with first-degree murder. On August the 18th, 1953, the trial of Barbara Graham, Jack Santo, and Emtt Perkins opened at Los Angeles Superior Court.

 The judge was Charles Fricky, a man who had sent dozens of defendants to their deaths over the course of his career. His courtroom was known for one thing above all else, rulings that consistently favored the prosecution. Barbara’s attorney was Jack W. Hardy. He had never once represented a defendant in a capital murder case.

 He had no investigators working alongside him. No funds to commission independent forensic analysis. And when the defense requested help locating Donna Prow, the jailhouse informant whose manipulation of Barbara was central to the entire alibi tape, Prow had completely disappeared. No one in the prosecution’s office claimed to know where she was.

 Marcia Clark, reviewing the case decades later, was direct. She said hiding a witness of that importance was one of the worst things a prosecutor can do. The problems did not stop there. The jury was permitted to hear that Barbara had invoked her fifth amendment right against self-inccrimination when she appeared before the grand jury.

 That ruling has since been classified as unconstitutional. But in that courtroom in 1953, it planted a single idea in every juror’s mind that she had something to hide. John TR took the stand and delivered his expanded account, placing Barbara as the primary aggressor inside Mabel’s home. It was a version of events that differed sharply from the statement he had originally given to police.

 That original statement, the one that contradicted his trial testimony in critical ways, was never handed over to the defense. Barbara was the only one of the three defendants who chose to testify. She told the jury that Donna Prow had pressured and manipulated her into the fake alibi arrangement. Without Prow on the stand to confirm or deny it, her explanation had no support.

 The recorded tape was played in open court. Her admission that she had been at Mabel Monahan’s house that night was enough for the jury. [music] In September of 1953, all three defendants were found. Not a single dollar. The rumor was

fiction. And that fiction cost Mabel Monahan her life and eventually cost Barbara Graham hers. In 2024, former prosecutor Marcia Clark published her book Trial by Ambush, formerly documenting the misconduct that shaped this case. The Withheld Witness Statement, The Hidden Informant, The Disappeared Donna Prow, All of It Now on record.

 Susan Hayward won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1959 for playing Barbara in I Want to Live. Barbara never saw a single frame of it. Iris, Mabel’s daughter, spent years fighting for justice for a mother she had left alone in that house. She got three convictions, three executions. Whether she ever got the full truth is a question nobody can answer cleanly.

Barbara Graham was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in San Rafael, California. Her three sons grew up without her. Barbara Graham may have been guilty under the law of 1953, but was that law just? And if the jury had seen everything the prosecution deliberately kept from them, would she still have died in that chair? Tell me in the comments what moment in this story hit you hardest.

 Was it the hidden evidence? Was it Donna Prow? Was it the two days that passed before anyone found Mabel? Drop it below. And if this is your first time here, subscribe. New cases, full stories every week. I will see you in the next