JUST IN: First Woman Hanged in Arizona For Killing Her Boss – The Rope That Took Her Head Too –

[music] Five witnesses faint. Not one, not two. Five grown adults collapse to the floor. One moment they are standing, the next they are unconscious. No one moves. No one speaks. Every pair of eyes is fixed on the same point above the gallows, trying to understand what they are seeing. This is not a battlefield.

 It is not a disaster scene. It is an execution. Arizona State Prison, Florence, Arizona. February 21st, 1930. And something has gone horribly wrong. Within hours, newspapers across the country will report what happened inside this room. And within the next few years, Arizona will abandon this method of execution.

 But none of that is known yet. Because minutes earlier, the woman standing beneath those gallows appeared completely calm. She was 52 years old. She did not tremble. She did not cry. And when the guards gripped her arms too tightly as they led her toward the platform, she didn’t panic. She simply looked at them and told them to loosen their grip as if she were more concerned about appearing afraid than about dying.

Who does that? Who walks toward a gallows knowing exactly what is waiting at the top and remains that calm. To understand that, we have to go back because the woman who stood on that platform that morning had a history filled with disappearances. unanswered questions and a murder that would eventually bring her face to face with the gallows.

 And what happened when the trap door opened was only the beginning. Welcome to Redmark Files. If this is your first time here, hit subscribe and stay with me because this case does not end where you think it does. To understand what brought her to that room, you first need to know the story behind it. Andrew J. Matthysse was a chicken rancher.

 He lived and worked in Puma County, Arizona, just outside the city of Tucson. [music] He was not a man who inherited his wealth. He built it year by year on dry Arizona land. He ran a chicken operation that made him one of the more comfortable men in his area. What he had, he earned. But Andrew Matthysse was not an easy man to be around.

 Court records and press accounts from the time describe him as demanding, blunt, and difficult. He had high expectations for everything and everyone around him. He did not soften his words. He did not apologize for his standards. If something was not done to his liking, he said so loudly and without patience. He lived alone on the ranch.

 No wife, no children nearby, just the land, the chickens, [music] and the daily work that kept everything running. Because the operation required more hands than one man could provide, Matthysse hired help when he needed it. That is how Eva Dugan came into his life. He brought her on as a live-in housekeeper. It was a practical decision.

 She would cook, clean, and manage the household. In return, she had a roof over her head and a wage, simple enough on paper. But Andrew Matthysse hated her cooking from almost the very beginning. He criticized her work constantly. The arguments between them became a regular occurrence. Two strong willed people trapped together on an isolated ranch with no one else around to break the tension.

 He made his final decision in late January of 1927. He fired her. He told her to be off his property by morning. By the next dawn, Andrew Matthysse was gone. His car was gone. His cash box was gone. And the woman he had just fired had disappeared with all of it. Now, let’s talk about the woman at the center of this story. Court records list her full name as Eva Dugan.

She was born in 1878 in Salsbury, Missouri. Her father’s name was WM McDaniel. Her mother’s name does not appear anywhere in the official records. That absence alone tells you something about the kind of start Eva had in life. She married young. The two of them had two children together, a son and a daughter. Then her husband walked away.

He left Eva alone with two young children and no money, no support, no plan, just poverty and the pressure of keeping two kids alive. Most people in that situation fold. Eva did not. When the Klondai gold rush pulled thousands of people north between 1896 and 1899, Eva went with them. She packed up and traveled to Juno in the territory of Alaska.

 There she found work as a cabaret singer. But singing alone was not enough to feed her children. So she also sold sex. It was not glamorous. It was survival. And Eva Dugan was above everything else a survivor. That quality, the ability to keep going no matter what, would stay with her for the rest of her life, all the way to the gallows. But survival has a shadow side.

And Eva’s shadow was long. Court records show that Eva Dugan was married five times in total. The first marriage ended when that husband left her for another woman. That much is straightforward. But the other four husbands, they disappeared. Each one of them gone under circumstances that were never fully explained.

 never investigated deeply enough to produce charges and never resolved. No arrests, no trials, no bodies ever officially connected to her. Then there were her children. Police eventually traced a father living in California and a daughter living in White Plains, New York. But Eva refused to name either one voluntarily. She gave investigators nothing.

 And her son, the little boy she had raised in poverty and carried north toward the gold fields. His identity has never been confirmed to this day. On the surface, Eva Dugan appeared capable, tough, and completely unafraid. But the record behind that image tells a different story. Four husbands, four disappearances, no charges, no bodies, and then she walked onto a chicken ranch in Arizona and history finally caught up with her.

 Here is something important to establish before we move forward. No confirmed accomplice was ever charged in the death of Andrew Matthysse. No second person was ever arrested. As far as law enforcement and the courts were concerned, Eva Dugan acted alone. But Eva herself told a very different story. At trial, she introduced a figure known only as Jack.

 According to Eva, Jack was a teenage boy who showed up at the Matthysse ranch looking for work. At some point, Matthysse ordered Jack to milk a cow. Jack refused. Matthysse responded by beating him. Jack hit back one punch and that single blow, Eva claimed, killed Andrew Matthysse on the spot. She did not stop there. Eva testified that she and Jack then tried to bring Matthysse back.

 They removed his false teeth and attempted to revive him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When that failed, they made a decision. They loaded Matthysse’s body into his own Dodge Coupe. Jack drove the car out alone to dispose of the body. He returned to the ranch at 5:00 in the morning. That was Eva’s version of events.

 The problem is that Jack was never found. He was never identified. Not a single witness confirmed his presence on that ranch. Court records show no physical evidence, none, that supported the existence of this teenage boy. The prosecution was direct about it. There was no Jack. The weapon was an axe, and the act was not accidental. What Eva did control was very clear.

 She took the Dodge Coupe. She took the cash box. She took select possessions from the ranch and attempted to sell some of them to neighbors before vanishing from Arizona entirely. If you’ve stayed with me this far, go ahead and give this video a like. It genuinely helps the channel because what comes next, the night of January 27th, 1927, is where this case takes its darkest turn.

January 27th, 1927. a chicken ranch outside Tucson, Arizona. The sun has not yet risen. This is where the story breaks open. The events of that night begin with what we already know. Andrew Matthysse had fired Eva Dugan the evening before. He told her to be gone by morning. That was the last instruction he ever gave her.

 Court records show that what followed in the hours before dawn would end with one person dead and another one running. Neighbors would later tell investigators what they observed in the time leading up to Eva’s disappearance. They saw her moving items around the property. She had already begun trying to sell some of Matthysse’s possessions before she had any right to touch them.

 The Dodge Coupe was still on the property that evening. Matthysse’s cash box was still inside the house. Nobody reported hearing a gunshot that night. Nobody reported a struggle loud enough to draw attention. The prosecution’s theory explains that silence, the weapon, they argued, was an axe, not a firearm.

 close, quiet, and final. Eva’s version of events, which she delivered from the witness stand, told a completely different story. She said a teenage boy named Jack came to the ranch looking for work. Matthysse ordered Jack to milk a cow. Jack refused. Matthysse beat him for it. Jack struck back with one punch, and that punch killed Matthysse where he stood.

Eva said she tried everything to save him. She and Jack removed his false teeth and attempted to bring him back with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It did not work, so they lifted the body into the Dodge Coupe. Jack drove away alone to dispose of it. He came back at 5:00 in the morning. The prosecution did not accept a single word of that account.

 Their reconstruction was straightforward. Eva Dugan killed Andrew Matthysse deliberately using an axe. She then took his car, his cash box, and whatever possessions she could carry or sell. And before the sun came up over that ranch, she was gone. No alarm was raised that morning. [music] In 1927, in rural Arizona, there was no emergency line to call, no system that triggered automatically when a man did not appear for breakfast.

 The disappearance spread slowly, neighbor to neighbor, question to question, as people began to notice that Matthysse had simply stopped being visible. By the time anyone thought to look seriously, Eva was long gone. The ranch stood empty. The coupe was gone. The cash box was gone. Nobody found Andrew Matthysse that morning.

 Nobody found him the next day or the next month. For almost 9 months, the rancher was simply gone. And the woman who left before dawn was already hundreds of miles away. Court records could not fill in every detail of what happened inside that ranch house before sunrise. But on one point, the record was never in doubt.

 Andrew Matthysse did not walk off that property alive. Eva Dugan did not stop moving after she left the ranch. She headed east. Her first major stop was Kansas City, Missouri. There, she sold Andrew Matthysse’s Dodge Coupe for $600. It was a clean transaction, no hesitation, no delay. She took the money and kept moving.

 That sale would later become one of the most damaging pieces of evidence the prosecution placed before the jury. From Kansas City, she continued northeast, eventually settling in White Plains, New York, the city where her daughter lived. She kept a low profile. She did not draw attention to herself, but she stayed in contact with her father who was living in California through the postal mail.

 That decision, staying connected, leaving a paper trail would ultimately be her undoing. Back in Arizona, the questions were starting. Neighbors who knew Andrew Matthysse began talking among themselves. The man had not been seen. His ranch was sitting empty. His housekeeper had vanished and so had his car and his cash box.

 People began approaching local authorities with what they knew. Law enforcement opened an inquiry. But here is the critical detail. There was no body. There was no confirmed crime scene. Without those two things, investigators could not pursue a murder case. What they had was a missing man, a stolen car, and a woman who had disappeared.

 So, the investigation began as a car theft and property theft case. Nothing more. Matthysse had no wife at the ranch, no children nearby, nobody whose grief would push investigators harder or faster. His disappearance was taken seriously, but not urgently. That gap gave Eva Dugan weeks of freedom, and she used every one of them. Investigators did not stay still for long.

 They traced the Dodge Coupe and found the sale in Kansas City, Missouri. $600 transaction confirmed. The paper trail had begun. From there, law enforcement worked to build a picture of who Eva Dugan was and where she might have gone. They discovered she had a father living in California and a daughter living in White Plains, New York.

 Both contacts were placed under watch. Investigators understood that a woman on the run would eventually reach out to the people she trusted most. They just had to wait. The break came through the postal mail. A postal clerk in White Plains, alerted by police, intercepted a postcard that had been sent to Eva from her father in California.

 That single piece of mail told investigators exactly where she was. The search was over. Eva Dugan was arrested in White Plains, New York. But the charge at that point was not murder. It was automobile theft. She was extradited back to Arizona, tried on that charge, found guilty, and sentenced to 9 months in prison.

 She began serving her sentence, and while she sat in that cell, she offered investigators almost nothing. She refused to identify her children by name. She gave no formal alibi for the night Matthysse disappeared. When questioned, her response was silence and deflection. Court records note that she showed no grief over Matthysse, no concern, no distress. She did not ask about him.

 She did not react the way someone would react if they had simply left an employer behind. Prosecutors would later point to that composure as something deliberate. The behavior of a woman who already knew exactly what had happened to Andrew Matthysse. But without a body, there could be no murder charge. The case sat. Eva served her 9 months.

 And somewhere out on that ranch in Arizona, the truth was still waiting to be found. October 1927. 9 months had passed since Andrew Matthysse vanished from his ranch outside Tucson. Then someone found him. A camper moving through the Matthysse property came across decomposed human remains.

 The body was identified as Andrew J. Matthysse. He had been there the entire time on his own land, not far from the life he had built and the ranch he had run for years. That discovery changed everything. What had been a property theft and automobile theft case was now a murder investigation. A man was dead. A body had been recovered.

 And the woman who had left that ranch before dawn on January 27th was still sitting in an Arizona state prison cell, finishing the last of her 9-month autotheft sentence. Investigators moved immediately. Eva Dugan was held as the primary suspect in the murder of Andrew J. Matthysse. The prosecution began assembling its case.

 The evidence pointed in one direction. Eva had motive. Matthysse had fired her. Their relationship had been bitter and hostile, and she had been ordered off his property the night he died. She had opportunity. She was the last known person on that ranch before he disappeared. She had shown clear flight behavior, selling his car in Kansas City, cutting contact, [music] and actively concealing the identities of her own children to avoid being tracked.

and the neighbors had already told investigators that Eva had been trying to sell Matthysse’s possessions before he was even reported missing. Each piece connected to the next. Court records show that by the time investigators had assembled the full picture, there was only one name at the center of all of it.

 The woman already sitting in an Arizona prison cell. Eva Dugan was formally charged with first-degree murder. The case was moving to trial, and this time there would be no 9-month sentence at the end of it. The trial of Eva Dugan was held at the second Panol County courthouse in Florence, Arizona. The prosecution came in knowing their case had a weakness.

 There was no eyewitness to the killing. No one had seen what happened inside that ranch house before dawn on January 27th. Court records confirm the case rested largely on circumstantial evidence. A web of behavior, timing, and physical facts that pointed to Eva without capturing the moment itself. Eva made a bold decision. She took the stand.

 She told the jury that Matthysse had accused her of poisoning his breakfast food. She denied it. She said his illness came from eating rotten rabbit meat, a rabbit that had boils on it. She wanted the jury to see Matthysse as a suspicious, difficult man who was already unwell before she left. Then she went further. She openly admitted to the weekly sexual arrangement she had with Matthysse.

 She described the prostitution operation on the ranch, the men Matthysse recruited from Tucson, the $3 per encounter, the 50 cents she handed back to him. She laid out the full reality of what life on that ranch had actually been. And then she told them about Jack. The prosecution dismantled the Jack account without difficulty.

 No witness placed Jack on that ranch. No physical evidence supported his presence. No one in the surrounding area had seen or spoken to a teenage boy matching any description Eva provided. Jack existed in her testimony and nowhere else. The prosecution’s argument was clean and direct. The weapon was an axe. The act was deliberate.

 And Eva’s decision to take the car, the cash box, and flee across state lines proved she knew exactly what she had done. The jury agreed. The verdict was guilty of first-degree murder. Eva Dugan did not cry. She did not flinch. She turned to face the jurors and said, “Well, I’ll die with my boots on and in full health, and that’s more than most of you old coots will be able to boast on.

” Her appeal for clemency, filed later on the grounds of mental illness, was reviewed and denied. execution was confirmed. Sitting in that courtroom was also the shadow of four missing husbands. Never charged, never tried, never explained. The jury never heard those cases formally, but the press had reported them. And that background darkened the room around Eva Dugan in ways no defense attorney could undo.

 Eva Dugan arrived on death row and did not fall apart. Most people in her position withdraw. They wait. They grieve. Eva did none of that. She made plans. She refused to be buried in the coffin the state provided. She wanted her own. To pay for it, she sold interviews to members of the press for $1 each. She embroidered handkerchiefs by hand and sold those, too.

 She collected 50 cents from every visitor who came to see her, penny by penny, dollar by dollar. She funded her own burial on her own terms. She also made a dress for her execution. A silk beaded jazz dress sewn specifically for the occasion. Then she changed her mind. She set it aside and chose a cheaper dress instead.

 Her reason, in her own words, was that the silk rapper might get must. Even in her final days, Eva Dugan was practical above everything else. Time magazine took notice. In a story dated March 3rd, 1930, the publication described her upbeat manner and gave her a name that followed her into history, cheerful Eva. The night before her execution, she cooked her own last meal inside her cell.

 Then she sat down and played cards with other inmates until nearly midnight. But the day before that, the mood had shifted. Rumors spread through the prison that Eva intended to end her own life before the state could. Officers searched her cell and found a bottle of raw ammonia and three razor blades hidden inside a dress. Both were confiscated.

 Her clemency appeal had already been denied. The execution date held firm, February 21st, 1930 at 5:00 in the morning. Eva Dugan was the first woman ever executed by the state of Arizona. Her execution was also the first in Arizona history where women were permitted to serve as witnesses.

 She walked to the gallows composed. When guards gripped her arms too tightly on the way up, she told them, “Don’t hold my arms so tight. The people will think I’m afraid.” When the noose was placed around her neck, she swayed slightly. When asked if she had final words, she shook her head. “No.” At 5:11 in the morning, the trap was sprung.

 The drop distance had been miscalculated. The force of the fall severed her head completely from her body. It rolled across the floor and came to rest at the feet of the witnesses. Her heart continued to pump blood from the severed neck for several minutes. Five witnesses collapsed. Two women and three men. [music] The noose used that morning is preserved to this day at the Panal County Historical Society and Museum in Florence, Arizona.

Jack was never found. No co-conspirator was ever charged. The newspapers the next morning did not hold back. Reporters described what happened in that prison room in graphic detail. The public reaction was immediate and loud. People were horrified, not just by the death, but by the way it happened. The outcry spread across the country.

Arizona’s legislature responded. In 1934, 4 years after Eva Dugan’s execution, the state abolished hanging entirely and replaced it with the gas chamber, a direct response to what the world had witnessed on February 21st, 1930. But the gas chamber brought its own nightmare. In April 1992, an inmate named Donald Eugene Harding was executed by gas in Arizona.

 Witnesses described the death as violent and ugly. They said he appeared to be in serious pain before the end came. The chamber was shut down after that execution. In November of that same year, Arizona voters approved lethal injection as the new method, giving inmates already on death row a choice between the two.

 One botched hanging in 1930 set off a chain of reforms that reshaped Arizona’s execution policy for over 60 years. Andrew Matthysse’s ranch passed into history without an heir to claim it. His death, slow to be discovered, difficult to prove, remains one of Arizona’s most debated criminal cases. Eva’s daughter was traced to White Plains, New York.

Her son’s identity has never been confirmed. Eva said she would die with her boots on in full health in front of everyone. She was right on every count. She just didn’t expect to take the entire room down with her. Andrew Matthysse deserved better than an unmarked disappearance on his own land. And whatever Eva Dugan’s full story was, she carried most of it to the grave.

 Or rather, she left it rolling across the floor of that prison room. What moment in this case hit you hardest? Drop it in the comments below. I read every single one. If you are new here, subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a case. The next one is just as dark.