The Second Woman Executed in California’s Gas Chamber — Louise Peete: “I Am Ready to Die”

The Second Woman Executed in California’s Gas Chamber — Louise Peete: “I Am Ready to Die”

April 11th, 1947. San Quentin State Prison. 10:13 in the morning. A gray-haired woman sits inside the gas chamber. She wears a simple brown dress. She asked for no blindfold. Her last words were calm. I am ready to die. 10 minutes later, she was gone. Her name was Louise Peete, and this was not her first murder conviction.

 25 years earlier, she killed a wealthy man in Los Angeles. She only served 18 years. She walked out of prison a free woman. A parole board believed she had changed. One journalist did not. She warned that letting Louise Peete go would be tragic for someone. She was right. Before we get into how this all unfolded, hit that subscribe button and join us here at Tilly Tone.

 Because what happened after her release is something you need to see for yourself. Margaret Logan was a retired social worker living in Pacific Palisades, California. Neighbors described her as trusting, generous, the kind of woman who believed people could change. That belief would cost her everything. Margaret first met Louise Peete while Louise was still behind bars.

 Louise was serving time for the murder of Jacob Denton, a wealthy mining engineer she had killed back in 1920. Denton was a widower. He had a teenage daughter. He had made his fortune in mining before he was strangled and shot, then buried under his own house. Margaret did not see a killer in Louise. She saw a woman worth saving.

 So, Margaret lobbied the parole board. She wrote letters. She spoke on Louise’s behalf. She told anyone who would listen that Louise Peete was innocent. In 1939, her efforts paid off. Louise was released. Margaret welcomed her into her own home. She lived there with her husband, Arthur Logan, an elderly man suffering from dementia.

Margaret needed help caring for him. Louise offered to be that help. She moved in as housekeeper, as nurse, as a trusted friend, but Margaret controlled the household finances, and that control became a problem. Court records show Louise forged a $200 check in Margaret’s name.

 When Margaret discovered it, she was furious. She demanded a meeting to go through their finances together. That meeting never happened the way Margaret expected. Days later, Margaret Logan vanished. Her name at birth was Loafie Louise Preslar. She was born September 20th, 1880 in Bienville, Louisiana. Louise liked to say she came from cultured, educated people.

 She claimed her parents were respectable. She claimed she was raised properly. Her actions told a different story. At 15 years old, she was sent to a private school in New Orleans. She was expelled. The reason, she was caught stealing from her classmates. That was only the beginning. She married a traveling salesman named Henry Bosley in 1903.

Four years later, he died by apparent suicide after finding Louise with another man. She married again. Her second husband was Harry Furote, a hotel night clerk. He too died by apparent suicide not long after money went missing from the hotel safe. Two husbands, two deaths, both ruled suicide. Along the way, Louise built a habit of hiding behind fake names.

 In Boston, she called herself Louise M. Gould. She posed as a Dallas heiress named R. H. Rosley. Later in life, she went by Anna Lee. Each new name gave her a fresh start. Each fresh start ended in theft or worse. By 1920, she had graduated to murder. She was convicted of killing Jacob Denton and sentenced to life in prison.

18 years later, in 1939, a parole board set her free. Not everyone agreed with that decision. Journalist Caroline Walker wrote directly to the board. She warned them that Louise had survived her whole life by stealing, by lying, and by violence. She said letting her out would be tragic for someone.

 The board released her anyway. Once Louise moved into the Logan home, things began to change. She was there to help, to care for Arthur, to support Margaret. But Louise had other plans. She kept pushing Margaret to send Arthur away. She said his condition was getting worse. She said he needed to be committed to an institution. Margaret resisted.

 She loved her husband. She was not ready to give up on him. At the same time, Louise told Margaret a story. She said she owned a property back in Denver, left to her after her husband’s death. She said that once it sold, she would help Margaret invest the money. Margaret believed her. She used the promise to move forward with a real estate purchase of her own.

 It came with tight payment deadlines. But no money from Denver ever came. Because there was no property. Margaret was now short on funds. She was stressed. She was caring for a sick husband and losing money on a deal she could not complete. Then came the $200 check, forged in Margaret’s name.

 Margaret confronted Louise about it. She wanted answers. She wanted the truth about the money. Around this same time, in May of 1944, Louise secretly married a bank manager named Lee Judson. This marriage broke the terms of her parole, so she kept it hidden from everyone, including her parole officer. Margaret did not know about the marriage.

She only knew her friend owed her answers. She called for one final meeting to settle the finances. The next conversation between the two women would be the last anyone ever heard from Margaret Logan. Here is what makes this case different. There was no partner, no hired hand, no one else pulling the strings.

 Louise Peete acted alone. She did not need help. She had done this before, and she knew exactly what to do. Court records show she began forging signatures almost right away. She wrote checks in Margaret’s name. She signed documents Margaret never saw. She also built a story, a cover. She told neighbors and friends that Margaret had gone into hiding.

 She said it was because of an injury. She said Margaret was too embarrassed to be seen. The weapon she used was a .32 caliber revolver. Investigators later traced it back to Emily Latham, a former parole officer of Louise’s who had died years earlier. Somehow that gun had ended up in Louise’s hands.

 Slowly, people began to notice things were not right. Neighbors realized they had not seen Margaret in weeks, then months. Bank employees noticed something odd about the signatures on Margaret’s checks. The handwriting did not look right. Nobody had proof yet, but the questions were growing. If you’re following this timeline so far, drop a comment below and let us know.

And if you have not already, hit subscribe, because the verdict in this case is coming, and it is not what most people expect. May 29th, 1944, Louise Peete told her husband, Lee Judson, to stay at the Glendale Hotel. She said she needed to meet with Margaret Logan, just the two of them, to talk about money.

 That was the last time anyone confirmed seeing Margaret Logan alive. No neighbor spoke to her after that day. No friend received a phone call. No family member heard her voice again. Two days later, on June 1st, 1944, Louise and her husband moved into the Logan house. Margaret was gone. There was no scream anyone heard.

 No struggle anyone witnessed. No phone call to police. No call for help of any kind. Just silence. And Louise Peete standing in her friend’s home acting as if nothing had happened. Court records show she moved fast after that. Within days, she convinced doctors that Arthur Logan needed to be committed. On June 5th, 1944, Arthur was taken to Patton State Hospital. He was elderly.

 He was struggling with dementia. He had no way to defend himself or explain what he knew. With Arthur locked away and Margaret missing, Louise controlled the entire house, and she controlled the story. When neighbors asked about Margaret, Louise had an answer ready. She said Arthur had attacked his wife in a violent episode.

 She said he bit her nose so badly that her face was disfigured. She said Margaret was too ashamed to be seen and had gone into hiding to recover or to have surgery. It was a strange story, but grief and illness make people believe strange things. So, the questions slowed down. Fewer people asked about Margaret as the weeks turned into months.

 There was no body found. No crime scene sealed off. No blood discovered. Nothing that pointed to a murder. At least not yet. Louise kept living in the house. She kept spending Margaret’s money. She kept signing Margaret’s name on documents Margaret would never see again. For 6 months, not one person outside that house knew Margaret Logan was already dead.

 6 months of forged checks, 6 months of fake explanations, 6 months where a woman’s disappearance was treated as an inconvenience, not a crime. But somewhere in that quiet house in Pacific Palisades, the truth was buried, literally. And it was only a matter of time before someone started digging. With Margaret gone and Arthur committed, Louise Peete and her husband settled into the Logan home like it belonged to them.

 It did not, but that stopped no one. Court records show Louise began spending the Logan’s money freely. She wrote checks in Margaret’s name. She forged Margaret’s handwriting on her own parole reports, sending them off to her parole officer, as if nothing was wrong. She was, on paper, a reformed woman living a quiet life with a new husband.

In reality, she was living inside a lie built on a friend’s disappearance. Months passed. On December 6th, 1944, Arthur Logan died at Patton State Hospital. He never left. He never got the chance to explain what he might have known. Louise gave the order to donate his body to science. No funeral, no burial for family to visit.

 Back in Pacific Palisades, neighbors were growing uneasy. Margaret had not been seen in half a year. Arthur was dead. Louise was the only one left who could explain any of it, but she kept explaining, kept telling her story, kept insisting that Margaret was still alive somewhere, healing, hiding, embarrassed. Slowly, fewer people bothered to ask.

 It seemed for a while that Louise Peete had gotten away with it again. She was wrong. The first crack in Louise Peete’s story came from a bank. An employee reviewing the Logan accounts noticed something wrong. A check did not look right. The signature seemed off. Around the same time, Louise’s parole officer noticed something, too.

 The parole reports coming in did not match Louise’s handwriting. Someone else seemed to be writing them, or Louise was writing them differently, and either way, it raised a flag. The case was handed to Walter Lenz, chief investigator for the District Attorney’s Office. He compared the handwriting samples side by side.

His conclusion was clear. Every report since June had been written by a different hand. That was enough to open a deeper investigation. Homicide Chief Thad Brown took over from there. He worked quietly. He did not want to alert Louise Peete that she was being watched. He spoke to neighbors near the Logan home.

 None of them had seen Margaret Logan in months. He spoke to nurses at Patton State Hospital, where Arthur Logan had spent his final 6 months. Their answer was just as troubling. Arthur had not received a single visitor the entire time he was there. Not one. No wife, no friend, no one checking on a dying man. Two people connected to Louise Peete were now unaccounted for in every meaningful way.

 One was dead, the other had not been seen in 6 months. Investigators still had no body. That was about to change. Louise Peete was told she would only speak to one person, Sheriff Gene Biscailuz. He came personally. He escorted her to the Hall of Justice for questioning. While she was being interviewed, police searched the Logan property.

 They moved through the backyard, past the flower beds, toward an avocado tree near the back of the lot. They started digging. It did not take long. On December 20th, 1944, police uncovered a decomposed body buried in a shallow grave. It was Margaret Logan. An autopsy revealed she had been shot in the back of the neck. Her skull was fractured.

She had been dead for almost 6 months. Buried in the garden of her own home, while Louise Peete lived inside that same house. Confronted with the evidence, Louise gave a statement. She admitted to burying Margaret’s body, but she denied killing her. She claimed Arthur Logan had beaten Margaret in a fit of rage, then shot her. She said she panicked.

She said she buried the body because she feared no one would believe her, given her past conviction. Her husband, Lee Judson, was arrested alongside her. He was released days later. There was not enough evidence to charge him. The next day, humiliated and devastated, Lee Judson jumped to his death from the ninth floor of an office building in Los Angeles.

Louise Peete was now facing her second murder charge. Louise Peete’s trial for the murder of Margaret Logan opened in Los Angeles on April 23rd, 1945. Prosecutors did not just focus on Margaret. They brought in the transcript from Louise’s first murder trial, the one involving Jacob Denton back in 1921. The comparison was hard to ignore.

 A trusted person, a missing victim, a body buried on the property. Court records showed the two cases followed an almost identical pattern. Louise took the stand in her own defense. She was calm. She was well-spoken. Witnesses later described her as articulate, even charming. She was trying to win over the jury, 11 men and one woman, the same way she had won over people her entire life.

 It did not work this time. On May 31st, 1945, the jury returned its verdict, guilty, first-degree murder. As the judge prepared to hand down her sentence, Louise sat in the courtroom reading a book. Witnesses said she barely looked up. She was sentenced to death. For the next 2 years, her lawyers filed appeal after appeal.

 Each one argued she deserved a new trial or a lighter sentence. Each one was denied. Louise Peete had escaped serious consequences before. She had talked her way out of one murder charge as self-defense years earlier. She had served only 18 years for killing Jacob Denton. This time, there would be no reduced sentence, no parole board to convince, just a death sentence and a clock now counting down.

For 2 years, Louise Peete sat on death row. She never confessed. She never admitted to killing Margaret Logan. She maintained her innocence until the very end, just as she had done with Jacob Denton 25 years earlier. Then came April 11th, 1947. That morning, she slept in fits, but she asked for no sedatives.

 She wrote a few final letters. For breakfast, she drank only a cup of coffee. She dressed in a simple brown print dress with a floral design. When the time came, she walked to the gas chamber without a blindfold. She sat down. She looked straight ahead. At 10:13 in the morning, she was declared dead, 10 minutes after cyanide gas filled the chamber.

 Louise Peete became only the second woman ever executed by the state of California. She had escaped consequences once before. This time, there would be no parole board to plead to. Margaret Logan spent years fighting to set Louise Peete free. She believed in her. She trusted her. She welcomed her into her home. That trust cost Margaret her life.

 Two husbands died by apparent suicide. One innocent man’s name was dragged through headlines for a murder he did not commit. And one loyal friend ended up buried in her own backyard. So, we want to know, what moment in this story hit hardest for you? Drop a comment below and let us know. And if you haven’t already, subscribe because the next case is one you will not want to miss.