JUST IN: California Executes Last Woman in State History in the Gas Chamber | Crime + Final Meal 

It was on August 8th, 1962, San Quentin State Prison, California. A 58-year-old woman is being walked toward the gas chamber. Her steps are slow. Her face is set. She is not crying. She is not begging. She is going to her death the same way she lived her life completely on her own terms.

 Her name is Elizabeth Anne Duncan. The world knew her as Ma Duncan. On this single morning, three people were executed in that same chamber. One after another. It was the last triple execution in California history. And Elizabeth Anne Duncan was the last woman the state of California would ever put to death. She went in still claiming she was innocent.

 Even as two men who carried out the killing with their own hands confirmed under oath that she hired them and paid them to do it. This was not a sudden act of rage, there was no single breaking point. This was weeks in the making. And here is what makes it truly disturbing. Multiple people knew it was coming.

 Not one of them warned the victim. But what drove a mother to such extremes? The answer will leave you questioning everything you think you know about obsession. Welcome back to Redmark Files. If you are new here, hit that subscribe button right now because this story goes places most true crime does not.

 Today’s case involves a mother, a nurse, an unborn baby, and a $6,000 contract on a life. Stay with us through the very end because the final twist involving her son is unlike anything in California legal history. To understand why this case shook California to its core, you first need to know who Olga Cupchek was. Olga was born in Canada to Ukrainian immigrant parents who had fled Eastern Europe in the violent years following World War I.

 Her family came to North America with nothing but the will to survive. And that same strength ran straight through Olga. She trained as a registered nurse. Her colleagues described her as warm, dedicated, and deeply professional. She was the kind of person who showed up for her patients, for her work, for the people around her. She chose a caregiving profession and she lived it genuinely every single day.

She eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, building a quiet and dignified life far from the hardships her parents had known. Then came the night that changed everything. Frank Duncan’s mother, Elizabeth, had taken a severe overdose of pills. She was admitted to cottage hospital. Olga was assigned to care for her.

 Frank was there constantly sitting by his mother’s bedside. That is where he and Olga met. both of them approaching 30, both steady and serious. A connection formed in the middle of a crisis, they began dating. When Olga discovered she was pregnant, Frank married her on June 20th, 1958. But the marriage never got the chance to grow.

 By the time Olga disappeared in November of that same year, she was 7 months pregnant. Her apartment on Garden Street told the story of a woman who had no idea what was coming. Her purse was still on the table. Her wallet was inside it. Her baby’s new clothes were folded neatly, waiting for a child that would never come home. When Olga’s father, Elias Koopsik, traveled all the way from Bonito, Manitoba to claim his daughter’s remains, he was told he could not.

 Frank, her husband and legal next of kin had gone into hiding. Elias was left waiting with nothing. Elizabeth Anne Duncan, real name, was Hazel Lucille Sinclair Nye. She was born on April 16th, 194 in Kansas City, Missouri. By the time the world came to know her, she had buried that name completely. She went by Elizabeth Anne Duncan.

 And to her son, she was simply mom. To the outside world, she looked like a devoted, protective mother, Frank’s biggest supporter, his greatest champion. That was the image she built carefully and guarded closely. But court records told a very different story. Elizabeth admitted under oath to being married at least 10 times. Later testimony suggested the number may have been 11.

 She had multiple aliases, multiple ex-husbands, and a long trail of legal trouble behind her. She had been arrested for operating a brothel in San Francisco, and charged with passing bad checks on more than one occasion. Her pattern with men was deliberate. She would tell them she stood to inherit a large sum of money.

 They would marry her based on that promise. When they discovered the inheritance did not exist, she would attempt to squeeze alimony from them on the way out. One former husband testified that a private detective warned him Elizabeth had hired someone to throw acid in his face. She had four children in total. Her daughter Patricia died at just 15 years old.

Elizabeth admitted in court that she loved Frank the most and that love had no limits, no boundaries, and no room for anyone else. When Frank began moving toward independence, she swallowed a bottle of pills rather than face life without him. And when his marriage to Olga became real, when a baby made it permanent, Elizabeth did not look for a lawyer or a counselor.

 She started looking for someone willing to make Olga disappear. Frank and Olga were married on June 20th, 1958. Within 2 weeks, the marriage was already falling apart. Not because of anything Olga did, but because Frank never truly left his mother. Court records show that Frank continued living primarily with Elizabeth after the wedding.

 He visited his wife occasionally. That was the marriage. A man who went home to his mother most nights while his pregnant wife waited alone on Garden Street. Elizabeth took that as permission to escalate. She began showing up at Olga’s workplace. She banged on Olga’s apartment door. Witnesses described her behavior as explosive.

 Multiple fits, multiple confrontations. This had started on the very night Frank and Olga got married and never stopped. When the harassment alone was not enough, Elizabeth moved to something more deliberate. She hired a man named Ralph Winterstein to pose as Frank while she posed as Olga and attempted to file an illegal anolment of the marriage.

 Court records confirmed this scheme was carried out before any murder plot was ever arranged. But the anulment failed, so Elizabeth kept going. She approached a car hop named Barbara Jean Reed at the Blue Onion Drive-In with a specific request. Throw acid in Olga’s face, wrap her body in a chloroform soaked blanket, and dump her in the mountains.

 The price she offered was $500. In August of 1958, she went back to Ralph Winterstein, the same man she had used for the anulment, and asked if he would also kill Olga. In September of 1958, she approached a woman named Diane Romero with an offer of $1,500. Barbara Jean Reed did eventually speak to Frank.

 She told him directly, “Your mother’s crazy, but she never told him what his mother had actually said. At least five people heard Elizabeth Duncan talk openly about killing her daughter-in-law. Not one of them warned Olga, and what came next is impossible to believe. Every failed attempt had brought Elizabeth closer to one conclusion.

 If she wanted Olga gone, she was going to have to pay someone to make it happen. The connection came through her son’s own work. Frank’s Duncan was representing a man named Marciano Esavl on a stolen property charge. Marciano’s wife, Espironza Esl, owned a bar and restaurant on the 400 block of State Street in Santa Barbara.

 As a favor, because Frank was defending her husband, Espironza agreed to make an introduction. Elizabeth did not go alone. She brought Emma Short with her. Emma was 84 years old, a former thrift store owner with her own history of grifting. The two women walked into that bar together and began the process of arranging a murder.

 The men Espironza introduced them to were Augustine Baldonado, 25 years old, and Luis Moya, 20 years old. Both had criminal records. Neither had ever killed anyone before. On November 13th, 1958, the deal was made. Baldonado and Moya agreed to kill Olga Duncan for $6,000. The plan was straightforward. Lure Olga out of her apartment, drive her to Mexico, and make her disappear there.

 But the plan had problems before it even started. The car they arranged to use was borrowed and had mechanical issues. Mexico was never a realistic destination given those conditions. The weapon was a pistol, not sourced through any professional channel, not prepared with any real care. Court records confirm that Esparansza Esavl later acknowledged the group met inside her establishment 4 days before the murder took place.

 At least one additional witness was also placed at that meeting. Before we go any further, if you have not already subscribed, do it now and turn on notifications. These stories take months of research and your support is what keeps them coming. Drop your reaction in the comments before you see how this ends.

 What Moya and Baldonado did not know, and what Elizabeth never counted on, was that absolutely nothing about this plan would go the way anyone expected. And the moment it fell apart, is where this case gets truly dark. The night of November 17th, 1958, started like any other night on Garden Street. Olga was in her second floor apartment in Santa Barbara.

 Her purse was on the table. Her wallet was inside it. Her baby’s clothes were folded neatly, small, and waiting. She had no reason to think anything was wrong. Then came the knock. Augustine Baldonado and Luis Moya arrived at her building late that evening with a story ready. They told Olga that Frank was drunk and needed her help.

 It was a lie built specifically to work on her because they knew she still cared about her husband. They knew she would come. She came downstairs. She trusted them. She walked out of her home and toward the car. The moment she got close to the vehicle, Moya raised the pistol and struck her. He beat her until she lost consciousness.

 Then both men loaded her into the borrowed car and drove. They headed away from Santa Barbara, moving toward a secluded stretch of road near Cassidas Pass Road, a rural area outside Carperia, adjacent to land being developed into the Casus Reservoir. It was dark. It was remote. Nobody was around. When they arrived, Baldonado got out and began digging a shallow grave with his bare hands.

 But Olga was not done. She regained consciousness. Court records along with the confessions both men later gave described what happened next. She fought back hard. A seven-month pregnant woman alone in the dark fought two men with everything she had. Moya raised the pistol again and struck her a second time.

 He hit her so many times and with such force that the gun broke apart in his hands. The weapon was destroyed. Shooting her was no longer possible. So they strangled her instead. In the pre-dawn hours of November 18th, Baldonado and Moya took turns strangling Olga Duncan. When they were certain she was no longer moving, they placed her body into the shallow grave Baldonado had dug and covered her with a few inches of dirt.

 The coroner’s findings, combined with both men’s confessions, would later raise a deeply disturbing possibility that Olga may not have been fully dead when they buried her. Her unborn child did not survive. Moya and Baldonado then got back into the borrowed car and drove back to Santa Barbara as if nothing had happened. Elizabeth Duncan had paid them $360 out of the $6,000 she promised.

 That was all she had given them. That was what Olga Coupoop checked Duncan’s life was worth to her. Olga did not show up for work the next morning. Her colleagues noticed immediately. Her landlady grew concerned. When people went to check on her, they found her apartment exactly as she had left it the night before.

 Purse on the table, wallet inside, baby clothes still folded. Nothing had been taken. Nothing had been disturbed. Olga was simply gone. As the story began spreading through newspapers and television across Ventura County, Elizabeth Duncan positioned herself as a worried family member. She claimed she knew nothing.

 She expressed no knowledge of what could have happened to her daughter-in-law. But investigators, working through the routine steps of a missing person’s case, quickly pulled on a thread that unraveled everything. They discovered the fraudulent anulment, the scheme in which Elizabeth had posed as Olga, and hired Ralph Winterstein to pose as Frank in order to dissolve the marriage illegally.

 That discovery shifted suspicion directly onto Elizabeth. She was arrested. Frank, using his standing as a licensed attorney, moved to have her bail reduced from $50,000 to $5,000. Once that reduction was granted, he disappeared. He went into hiding and became unreachable, leaving investigators unable to locate him and leaving Olga’s father stranded.

 Elias Cupchick had traveled all the way from Bonito, Manitoba, hoping to bring his daughter home. But American law required Frank’s consent as next of kin before the remains could be released. Frank was gone. Elias had no choice but to wait. Meanwhile, Emma Short, Elizabeth’s 84year-old companion, was watching the news coverage grow louder every day.

 The pressure was building around her, and Moya and Baldonado were back in Santa Barbara, living quietly, waiting for money that was never going to come. The man leading the investigation was Santa Barbara detective Charlie Thompson. Those who covered the case described him as exceptionally confident, the kind of detective who did his crossword puzzles in pen, not pencil.

 He did not second guessess himself, and he was not going to let this case go cold. But without a body, there was only so much he could do. Officially, this was still a missing person’s case. There was no crime scene, no confirmed cause of death, and no physical evidence of a homicide. The investigation had to move carefully.

 The fraudulent anulment gave Thompson his first real opening. It was a documented, provable act, and it gave police the grounds they needed to bring Elizabeth in for direct questioning. She sat across from investigators and did not flinch. She was calm. She was dismissive. She insisted that Moya and Baldonado were attempting to blackmail her and denied any involvement in Olga’s disappearance, but the witnesses were talking.

 Nurses who had worked alongside Olga at St. Francis Hospital described Elizabeth’s repeated harassment at the workplace. Olga’s landlady told investigators about Elizabeth showing up at the apartment door, causing scenes, including on the very night of the wedding. Thompson made a critical decision. He pulled Emma Short away from Elizabeth’s presence and questioned her separately.

 Away from Elizabeth’s watchful eye, Short opened up. She told investigators that Elizabeth had spoken frequently and openly about wanting Olga dead. Then, in December of 1958, Ventura authorities arrested Luis Moya on a parole violation and Augustine Baldonado for non-payment of child support. Neither was charged with murder yet.

 But they were in custody and that changed everything. With two men behind bars, one of them furious about money he was never paid and a detective who refused to walk away. What happened next? Broke the entire case wide open. December 21st, 1958. Augustine Baldonado broke. Under questioning, he told investigators everything.

 He was not doing it out of guilt or remorse. He was angry. He told police that Elizabeth Duncan had promised $6,000 for the job and had only ever handed over $360. He had committed murder and had not been paid. That fury is what cracked the case open. Baldonado did not just confess. He led authorities directly to the body to the shallow grave near Casita’s Pass Road outside Carpia, the same stretch of rural road where he and Moya had buried Olga in the pre-dawn hours of November 18th.

 Then on Christmas night of 1958, Luis Moya confessed the full account of the murder to a street preacher. That confession reached investigators shortly after. The coroner’s examination of Olga’s remains confirmed the cause of death as strangulation. The findings also documented severe blunt force trauma consistent with everything both men had described.

 and the condition of the shallow grave combined with both confessions raised once again the grim possibility that Olga had still been alive when she was buried. The broken pistol destroyed during the attack was recovered and became a key piece of physical evidence. Court records confirm it was connected to the events of that night through direct testimony from both men.

 Elizabeth had already been arrested on the fraudulent anulment charge. Once both confessions were in hand and both men named her directly as the person who hired them and arranged the payment, she was formally charged in connection with the murder. Then the other witnesses came forward. Espironza Esql confirmed the meeting at her establishment.

 The months of documented solicitations, acid, chloroform, cash offers, all of it now formed a prosecutorial case that was almost impossible to argue against. The trial of Elizabeth Anne Duncan began on February 24th, 1959 in Ventura County, where the killing had taken place. Though Elizabeth, Moya, Baldonado, and Olga herself had all been Santa Barbara residents.

 By the standards of any era, the case moved fast. From the night Olga was taken to the day of final execution, less than four years would pass. District Attorney Roy Gustiffson led the prosecution with an aggressive hand. But before a single juror was selected, Gustoson made public statements declaring that the crime demanded the death penalty.

 Those statements made openly before jury selection even began almost certainly reached the people who would later sit in judgment of Elizabeth Duncan. At trial, Elizabeth took the stand and held her position. She testified that Moya and Baldonado were attempting to blackmail her. She refuted the accounts of every prosecution witness, including the two men who had confessed in detail to carrying out the killing on her instruction.

 Her defense team, which included her own son, Frank Duncan, and attorney S. Ward Sullivan, presented the theory that Olga had been targeted in a ransom plot. The jury rejected it without hesitation. What complicated the case legally was what Gustiffson put before the jury beyond the murder itself. He introduced evidence of Elizabeth’s 11 marriages, her history of passing bad checks, her alleged brothel work, and her pattern of defrauding men with false inheritance claims.

 One former husband testified that she had hired someone to throw acid in his face. None of that was directly connected to Olga’s murder. The judge’s response was to instruct the jury to disregard everything they had just heard, a directive that legal observers later called deeply inadequate. The defense did not object in the moment. They raised it later in appeals.

 The jury deliberated for 4 hours and 51 minutes. On March 16th, 1959, they returned a guilty verdict. 4 days later, Elizabeth Anne Duncan was sentenced to death. Frank Duncan, attorney Bert M. Henen, and two additional attorneys filed appeals. Everyone was denied. The case reached Governor Pat Brown, a man personally opposed to capital punishment.

 His office acknowledged openly that there had been serious irregularities in the trial, but they also concluded that the weight of evidence against Elizabeth was so overwhelming that no different verdict was ever possible. Governor Brown allowed the executions to proceed. From the day she was sentenced to death in March of 1959, Elizabeth Anne Duncan spent 3 years and 5 months on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

 She used every one of those months to insist she was innocent. Every appeal was filed and denied. Every clemency request was rejected. The legal doors closed one by one. And still she maintained that she had done nothing wrong. That Moya and Baldonado had fabricated the entire story against her. Frank did not stop fighting either.

 Court records show that he pursued every remaining legal avenue on her behalf, continuing to file and argue right up to the final minutes before her execution. When the last option was exhausted, there was nothing left to do. On the morning of August 8th, 1962, Elizabeth Anne Duncan sat down for her last meal. She ate steak and salad.

 Then she was walked to the gas chamber. Witnesses described her entrance as composed and dignified. She did not tremble. She did not break down. She walked in as though she still believed somehow that she had done nothing deserving of what was about to happen to her. Her last words were seven. I am innocent. And as she looked around for her son, she asked, “Where is Frank?” Frank was not there.

 Elizabeth Anne Duncan was 58 years old when the chamber sealed behind her. She was the first of three people executed at San Quentin that day. Augustine Baldonado followed. Luis Moya followed after him. Three people, same chamber, same day. The last triple execution in the history of California. Among the witnesses present that morning was Bob Holt, a reporter for the Ventura County Starf free press.

 He watched all three executions. His daughter, Deborah Holt Larkin, would later spend 9 years writing about the case in her book, A Lovely Girl. Afterward, the warden spoke quietly. We do this on behalf of the people of California. We don’t do it for us. The people of California should do what I just did.

 Valdonado was buried at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura. Moya donated his body to Stanford University Medical School. Elizabeth’s final resting place has never been confirmed. Her son claimed the body and sent it to a San Francisco funeral home. She does not appear in San Quentin prison cemetery records. Where she was buried remains unknown to this day.

 Elias Koopchick never got to bury his daughter on his own terms. Frank’s disappearance during the investigation made sure of that. Olga’s baby never received a name in any public record. That child came and went without a trace, erased before the world ever knew them. Frank Duncan continued practicing law for decades after his mother’s execution.

 He outlived her by more than 60 years. Then in September of 2023, the state of California disbarred him after three prior disciplinary actions. He was in his 90s. Elizabeth Anne Duncan destroyed three lives trying to hold on to her son. She died in a gas chamber. Her son lost his career in the end.

 Anyway, Olga Koopchick came to California to build something good. She folded her baby’s clothes neatly and left them on the shelf. Nobody warned her. Which moment in this story hit you the hardest. Drop it in the comments below. I read every single one. If you are not subscribed yet, hit that button now and turn on the notification bell.

 The next case is already in production and it is one you will not want to miss.