Barbara Graham Executed in America’s Gas Chamber — Before She Died: “They’re So Sure They’re Right”

In 1958, Hollywood turned her story into a film. Susan Hayward won the Academy Award for best actress playing her. The movie suggested she was innocent. In 2024, a former prosecutor named Marcia Clark published a book concluding that this woman never received a fair trial and likely never physically harmed anyone the night she was convicted of murder.

 The woman they were talking about had been dead for nearly 70 years. Buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in San Rafael, California. Executed by the state before anyone asked the questions that needed asking. Her name was Barbara Graham. She walked into San Quentin State Prison on the morning of June 3rd, 1955. Wearing a beige suit. Her hair was neat.

Her face was calm. She was 31 years old. The room she was led into smelled of antiseptic. The walls were painted green. At the center sat a single steel chair bolted to the floor. She asked for a blindfold. She refused to look at the people watching her die. That same morning, she had been scheduled to die three separate times. Three delays.

Three times she prepared herself. A reporter who covered the execution said he had never seen anything like it in his career. Her last words spoken clearly before the chamber door sealed shut. Welk. Welcome to our channel. If you are new here, hit that subscribe button and join a community that believes every story deserves to be told the right way.

 Tell me in the comments what moment in this case hit you the hardest. We will see you in the next one. Before we talk about the crime, we need to talk about the woman it was committed against. Her name was Mabel Monahan. Some court records spell it Monahan. She was 64 years old and she had lived a life worth remembering long before the night strangers came to her door.

 Mabel had once been a vaudeville performer. She toured the Keith Albby Circuit, one of the most prestigious entertainment networks in America at the time. Night after night, city after city, she performed on stage for crowds who gave her a standing ovation. She was a woman of talent, energy, and grace. But by 1953, those days were long behind her.

 Mabel had traded the spotlight for something quieter. She lived alone in a modest home in Burbank, California. No more crowds, no more curtain calls, just a peaceful life in a neighborhood where nothing dramatic was supposed to happen. The house she lived in had belonged to her daughter, Iris. Iris had received it in a divorce settlement from her ex-husband, Luther Sharer, a multi-millionaire who owned gambling clubs in Palm Springs and had casino investments in Las Vegas.

 Iris later remarried and moved to New York, leaving her mother behind in the Burbank home. Sharer and Mabel remained close friends after the divorce. That friendship, innocent as it was, sparked dangerous rumors in criminal circles. Word spread through bars and underground networks that Sharer, trusting no one more than Mabel, had hidden $100,000 in cash inside a safe in her home.

 There was no safe. There was no $100,000. The only valuables in that house were $15,000 worth of jewelry sitting quietly in a purse inside a closet. Her killers never even found it. Mabel Monahan did not die because of anything she did. She died because of a rumor because she opened her front door to a stranger. Now to understand Barbara Graham, you cannot start with the crime.

 You have to start much earlier because long before she became a headline, she was a child. The system had already failed. She was born Barbara Elaine Ford on June 26th, 1923 in Oakland, California. Her mother, Hortense Ford, was a teenage unwed woman of Portuguese Azorian descent who supported herself through prostitution. Barbara’s father was never in the picture.

 When Barbara was just 2 years old, Hortense was arrested and sent to Ventura State School for Girls, a reform school. Barbara was placed in foster care. She later alleged that she was beaten and treated poorly in the homes where she was placed. When Hortense was eventually released at 21, she refused to allow Barbara to live with her. Barbara was raised by strangers and extended family members who came and went. She was intelligent.

 Court records and later prison testing would confirm an IQ of 114, but her education was broken and limited. By the time she was 14, Barbara had been arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to Ventura State School for Girls, the same reform school her mother had been sent to years before. Released in 1939, Barbara tried to build a normal life.

 She married a United States Coast Guardsman named Harry Keelhammer in 1940. Enrolled in business college and had two sons. By 1942, the marriage was over. Harry was awarded custody of both boys. Barbara lost her children. She married twice more. After that, both marriages failed. During World War II, she entered sex work, becoming what was known in some circles as a seagull.

 women who followed naval fleets between bases in cities like Long Beach, San Diego, and San Pedro. She was arrested on vice charges in several of those cities. At 22, she worked in San Francisco for a well-known brothel madam named Sally Stanford. From there, Barbara became embedded in gambling and drug circles, surrounding herself with ex-convicts and career criminals.

 Her first serious conviction came when she provided a false alibi for two petty criminals. She was convicted of perjury and served 5 years at California Women’s State Prison into Hatchip. After her release, she drifted through Reno and Tonapa in Nevada, working briefly as a hospital worker and a waitress. Then she boarded a bus to Los Angeles, rented a room on Hollywood Boulevard, and returned to the only life she had known.

 In 1953, she married Henry Graham, a bartender and low-level criminal with a drug addiction. Together, they had a son named Tommy. Barbara’s third child and the only one she raised with a partner at her side. It was Henry Graham who introduced her to the men who would bring her world to an end. [music] Henry Graham’s drug addiction did not stay the same.

 Through 1952 and into 1953, it got worse. And as it did, the people around him got more dangerous. Through Henry, Barbara was introduced to two men whose names would follow her for the rest of her life. The first was Jack Santo. The second was Emmett Perkins, known in criminal circles as the Weasel.

 Both men carried serious criminal records. Court records would later link Santo and Perkins to six murder cases between them. These were not small-time street criminals. They were hardened, calculating, and violent. Barbara began an affair with Perkins. That relationship pulled her deeper into his world than Henry Graham ever had.

 It was Perkins who first mentioned Mabel Monahan. He told Barbara about an elderly widow living alone in Burbank, California, and the rumor that had been circulating through bars and criminal networks across Los Angeles. That $100,000 in cash was sitting in a safe inside that woman’s home. Barbara’s own criminal record up to that point was nonviolent.

 Prostitution, bad checks, perjury. She had never been connected to anything that ended in bloodshed. What Perkins was proposing was a different category of crime entirely. Also moving in and out of this circle around the same time were two other men, Baxter Shartter and John TR. Their roles in what was coming would prove to be decisive.

 The Los Angeles criminal underworld of 1953 was connected to casino money, mob linked figures, and the network surrounding notorious gangster Mickey Cohen. This was the world Barbara Graham now lived inside. On the evening of March 8th, 1953, the group sat down together for dinner in the San Fernando Valley. That dinner was not a social occasion.

 It was the night the plan became real. Barbara Graham was about to walk into something she may not have fully understood. And the man who recruited her would later make sure she paid for all of it while he walked free. By the time that dinner ended on March 8th, 1953, every person at that table had a role to play.

 EMTT Perkins was the one who brought the group together. He was the source of the Monahan tip and the driving force behind the plan. He was Barbara’s lover and the most dangerous man in the room. Jack Santo was Perkins partner, equally hardened, equally willing. He asked few questions and raised no objections. John TR was a more peripheral figure brought in to participate but not to lead.

 He was there. That was enough to seal his fate. and eventually Barbara’s. Baxter Sharter was recruited as the safe cracker. His presence confirmed what everyone in the group believed that there was an actual safe inside Mabel Monahan’s home waiting to be opened. And then there was Barbara Graham.

 According to Shorter’s confession and the testimony John TR would later give in court, Barbara’s role was singular. She was the lure. The plan required someone who could knock on an elderly woman’s door late at night and not raise alarm. Barbara’s appearance, a young, non-threatening woman, was the key that would open Mabel Monahan’s front door.

 Court records indicate that Shorter initially objected to including Barbara. He reportedly referred to her as a dame and did not want her involved. Perkins overruled him without hesitation. Without Barbara at that door, he argued Monahan would never open it. A witness named William Upshaw would later testify before a grand jury that he had been in the car with the group the night before the murder, watching Monahan’s home and going over the plan.

 He said he chose not to participate out of fear of retaliation from Luther Sheerer. The plan itself was straightforward. Barbara knocks. She tells Monahan her car has broken down and asks to use the phone. Monahan opens the door. The rest of the group enters behind her. No money changed hands that night. The robbery would pay for itself.

Or so they believed. It was built entirely on a rumor that was never true. The dinner in the San Fernando Valley was over. The plan was set. Now all that was left was to carry it out. Mabel Monahan spent that evening the way she spent most evenings, alone, quietly inside her Burbank home in a neighborhood where nothing alarming was supposed to happen.

 She had no reason to expect trouble. She had no reason to fear the night. The group moved toward Burbank. According to Baxter Shorter’s later confession, they made their final approach in the early evening hours. They were not in a hurry. They believed what was waiting inside that house was worth $100,000. At approximately 9:00 that evening, Barbara Graham walked up to Mabel Monahan’s front door alone. She knocked.

Monahan answered. Barbara told her the same story they had rehearsed the night before. Her car had broken down. She needed to use the phone. It was a simple, believable request. the kind a neighbor might make. Mabel Monahan opened the door. That was the last moment of safety she would ever have. Perkins, Santo, and Tru pushed in immediately behind Barbara.

 Shorter followed shortly after. Five people now stood inside a 64year-old woman’s home. And what happened next is where the accounts begin to split. John TR testified in court that Barbara handed a pistol to Perkins and said, “Knock her out.” He further testified that Barbara then began to beat Monahan herself viciously and without hesitation.

 Baxter Shorter’s confession told a different story. When he entered the house, Monahan was already bleeding. Her mouth was already gagged. Sharter said he did not see Barbara deliver any blows. In his account, Perkins was the aggressor. In 2024, former prosecutor Marshia Clark reviewed the original court transcripts and discovered something critical.

 The statement John TR gave to police before the trial, conflicted with the testimony he delivered on the stand, specifically on the question of who physically attacked Mabel Monahan first. That original statement was never given to the defense. The jury never saw it. While Monahan lay bleeding, the group tore through her home, every room, every drawer, every wall, they were looking for a safe that did not exist.

 They found nothing. No safe, no $100,000. $15,000 worth of jewelry sat untouched in a purse inside a closet. They never found it. Court records established that Mabel Monahan was beaten with a pistol and strangled with a liature placed around her neck. She was gagged. With the gag in place, she could barely breathe.

 Shorter’s confession states that he noticed Monahan struggling and urged TR to remove the gag. TR’s testimony did not confirm this. The group left the house believing she was already dead or would be shortly. Santo reportedly told the others she was gone. What happened after they left is one of the most haunting details of this entire case.

 Shorter, according to his confession, felt something, guilt, fear, or both, and stopped at a pay phone to call for help. He gave the operator an address, the wrong address. Mabel Monahan lay bound and dying on the floor of her destroyed home. No one came. Her gardener found her two days later on March 11th, 1953.

 The official cause of death was asphyxiation. Mabel Monahan may have survived if that address had been correct. Someone in that group tried to call for help, but the wrong digits meant the difference between life and death. Her daughter, Iris, calling from New York after being notified, offered a $5,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of her mother’s killer.

 The investigation was now open and the clock was running for every person who had been inside that house. When the group left Mabel Monahan’s home that night, they left with nothing. No cash, no jewelry, no safe. The robbery they had planned for weeks had produced nothing at all.

 They dispersed quietly into the night and went back to their separate lives as though nothing had happened. Barbara returned to her room in Hollywood. Henry Graham, her husband, had no full knowledge of what had taken place that evening. Meanwhile, in a quiet house on a quiet street in Burbank, Mabel Monahan lay bound and bleeding on the floor.

 [music] No one knocked on the door. No one came to check on her. She was completely alone. For two full days, she remained undiscovered. On March 11th, 1953, her gardener arrived and found her. Police were called immediately. The Burbank residence was sealed off and became a crime scene. Iris, Mabel’s daughter, was reached in New York.

 She issued a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever was responsible. She also cooperated fully with investigators. Luther Sharer, the wealthy ex-son whose continued friendship with Mabel had fueled the deadly rumor, also cooperated with police. Court records show he had no prior knowledge of the robbery plot.

 The rumor about his money had spread entirely without his involvement. Local newspapers ran the story, but with no immediate suspects and no clear motive that investigators could publicly confirm, it was initially treated as a random home invasion killing. In the criminal underworld, however, people were already talking.

 Baxter Shorter in particular was not handling what he had witnessed well. He was shaken, troubled, and he would not stay quiet for long. Mabel Monahan had left the stage decades earlier looking for peace. She had found it until strangers decided her home held a fortune it never held. She paid for that rumor with her life.

 Detectives had a crime scene. They had a dead woman. What they did not have was a clear path to who did it. On March 26th, 1953, 17 days after the murder, police moved. They arrested and questioned five men with known connections to Mabel Monahan through Luther Sharer. Three of the five were known associates of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen.

 Baxter Sharter was among them. All five men knew Sharer through his casino networks. But knowing someone is not the same as proving something. There was not enough physical evidence to hold any of them. All five were released. The investigation hit a wall. In 1953, detectives had none of the tools that exist today.

 No DNA testing, no digital footprint, no surveillance footage. Every camera on every corner that modern investigators rely on simply did not exist. This case was going to stand or fall entirely on what people were willing to say out loud under oath in a courtroom. Barbara Graham had no alibi for the night of March 9th.

 No witness who could place her somewhere else. No receipt, no phone record, nothing. Just the absence of any proof she was anywhere other than that house in Burbank. Then Baxter Sharter made a decision. Shorter was terrified. The gas chamber was a real possibility and he knew it. He approached police and offered to turn states evidence.

 He gave detectives a detailed account of the robbery and murder, naming Barbara Graham, Emmett Perkins, Jack Santo, and John TR. It should have been the break that cracked the case open. Instead, his statement was leaked. Word reached Perkins and Santo almost immediately. Shortly after Shartter was released from police custody, he was kidnapped.

 He was never seen alive again. His body was never recovered. Court records indicate he was murdered by Perkins and Santo, a witness eliminated before he could take the stand. The one man who knew exactly what happened inside that house and was willing to tell the truth about it was gone.

 Now the prosecution had to build its case with someone else entirely. Someone with a very different set of incentives. With Baxter Shorter dead, investigators had to find another way in. A convicted felon named William Upshaw came forward voluntarily. He testified before a grand jury that on the night before the murder, he had been in the car with Barbara Graham, EMTT Perkins, Jack Santo, John TR, and Baxter Sharter as they watched Mabel Monahan’s home and went over the details of the robbery plan.

 He said he chose not to take part because he feared retaliation from Luther Sheerer. His testimony placed Barbara at the planning stage of the crime. It was damaging, but it was not enough on its own to charge her with murder. The prosecution needed someone who had been inside the house. John TR was facing serious criminal exposure.

 He had been present the night of the murder. He had been inside Mabel Monahan’s home. Prosecutors offered him a way out. In exchange for his full cooperation and testimony against Barbara Graham, Perkins, and Santo, TR was granted complete immunity from prosecution. He would never spend a single day in prison for what happened to Mabel Monahan.

 In court, TR testified that Barbara handed a pistol to Perkins and instructed him to knock Monahan out. He further testified that Barbara then beat Monahan herself. His account placed Barbara as the most physically aggressive person in that house. What the jury did not know was that TR’s original statement to police told a different story.

 That statement was later found in the archived files of film producer Walter Wonger and reviewed by former prosecutor Marshia Clark in 2024. Clark concluded that the original statement conflicted with TR’s trial testimony on key points and that it was never provided to the defense. Under legal standards that existed even in 1953, that statement should have been disclosed.

 While all of this was developing, Barbara Graham was sitting in jail with no alibi and no way to prove where she had been on the night of March 9th. Then a fellow inmate named Donna Prow befriended her. Prow cultivated a close relationship with Barbara. Sources describe it as a jailhouse romance and eventually made her an offer.

 For $25,000, Prow and a friend would provide Barbara with a fabricated alibi for the night of the murder. Barbara accepted. The friend was not who Barbara thought he was. His name was Samriani. He was an undercover police officer. Sirriani met with Barbara, guided the conversation, and pushed her to confirm she had been at the scene of the crime that night.

 Every word of that meeting was secretly recorded. When Barbara asked at trial why she had gone along with the scheme, she said, “Oh, have you ever been desperate? Do you know what it means not to know what to do?” Donna Prow disappeared before the defense could find her and bring her to the stand. Marshia Clark’s research suggests she was deliberately kept out of reach with assistance from authorities.

 At trial, Sirriani testified about the meeting and the recording was played for the jury. Combined with Barbara’s prior perjury conviction, it destroyed whatever credibility she had left. She had not confessed to murder, but she had confirmed she was there. And in that courtroom, that was enough. The trial of Barbara Graham, Jack Santo, and EMTT Perkins opened on August 18th, 1953.

 The prosecution was led by District Attorney J. Miller Levy, an aggressive, ambitious man who had tried some of the highest profile cases in California. Across the aisle sat court-appointed defense attorneys with no investigators, no independent funding, and no real ability to locate or challenge witnesses.

 The structural disadvantage was built in from the first day. Before the jury heard a single word of testimony, the press had already decided what Barbara Graham was. She was 30 years old, red-haired, attractive. She had a past in prostitution and a prior conviction for perjury. That was enough for the headlines.

 Reporters called her bloody babs. They described her as a gun mall, a fem fatal, a woman who killed not out of desperation, but out of cold-blooded pleasure. The coverage was relentless, and it was almost entirely focused on her, not Santo, not Perkins. Barbara. At trial, John TR took the stand and described in specific detail watching Barbara hand a pistol to Perkins and then beat Mabel Monahan herself.

 The jury had no way of knowing his original police statement told a different story on the critical question of who attacked Monahan first. Samsirriani testified about the alibi meeting. The recording was played in court. When Barbara was questioned about why she had agreed to buy a false alibi, she said, “Oh, have you ever been desperate? Do you know what it means not to know what to do?” Her detractors heard an admission.

 Her supporters heard a frightened woman with no other options. The jury deliberated for only a few hours. guilty first-degree murder all three defendants. Because the jury did not recommend life imprisonment, the judge was required by law to impose death sentences on all three. John TR collected his immunity and walked out of court a free man.

 He was never charged with any crime related to the death of Mabel Monahan. Barbara’s appeals were filed from the California Institution for Women in Chino. Every court that reviewed the case affirmed the conviction. Every appeal failed. The execution was set for June 3rd, 1955. Barbara Graham spent 26 months on death row.

 What happened to her during that time surprised nearly everyone who paid attention to it. Prison records and journalism from the period document a woman who read Socrates and philosophical texts. She listened to classical music. She wrote letters to a journalist. Letters that described her life, her regret, and her insistence that she had not beaten Mabel Monahan.

She wrote about poetry saying in one letter, “I have always been a pushover for poetry.” Oscar Wild, Walt Wittmann, some Robert Bridges verse seems to say something to me that nothing else can. The woman who had arrived at her arrest with caked makeup and hardened street edges had been replaced by someone with neat brown hair, a clean face, and quiet composure.

 One reporter who saw her in the final weeks described her as looking like a respectable suburban housewife. She maintained her innocence until the end, not as a legal strategy, but with what the people around her described as genuine conviction. On June 2nd, 1955, Barbara was transferred from Chino to San Quentin State Prison, the facility that housed California’s gas chamber.

She spent her final night in the death house. On the morning of June 3rd, she ordered a hot fudge Sunday for breakfast. Then she prayed, then she waited. At 10:00 in the morning, the execution was scheduled to begin. Governor Goodwin Knight issued a stay. A new legal appeal had been filed with the state supreme court.

 The execution was pushed to 10:45 in the morning. At 10:43, another petition arrived. Another stay pushed again to 11:30. A remote reading stethoscope was already being taped over Barbara’s heart. When the second stay was announced, she broke down. She said, “Why do they torture me?” I was ready at 10:00. At 11:12, a final call came from the governor’s office. All appeals had been rejected.

There were no more delays. At 11:28, Barbara Graham was led to the gas chamber. She asked for a blindfold. She would not look at the witnesses watching her die. Barbara Graham’s last words were, “Good people are always so sure they’re right.” As she was being strapped into the steel chair, she was told that taking a deep breath immediately after the cyanide pellets dropped would make her death faster and easier.

 She looked at the officer and said, “How the hell would you know?” At 11:34 in the morning, the cyanide pellets dropped into the acid below her chair. She held her breath. One witness later said she tilted her head back as though she was praying. At 11:37, she involuntarily breathed. She was pronounced dead within minutes. She was 31 years old.

 Later that same day, Jack Santo and EMTT Perkins were executed in the same chamber. John TR, the man whose testimony placed Barbara Graham’s hands on Mabel Monahan, was never charged with any crime. He walked away free. Barbara Graham was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in San Rafael, California. In 1958, Hollywood released I Want to Live based on her letters.

 Susan Hayward won the Academy Award for best actress playing her. The film reignited the national debate on capital punishment. In 2024, Marshia Clark published Trial by Ambush, concluding that Barbara Graham never received a fair trial. John TR was never charged. He died a free man. Tell me in the comments what moment in this case hit you the hardest.

 Was this justice or was it a setup? Drop your thoughts below. And if you want more stories like this, subscribe because the truth is always stranger than the headline.