Elizabeth ann duncan biography gas chamber
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The fates of two women, one serving time at San Quentin and the other executed in the gas chamber, are tied to the prison cemetery.
Mary Hill avoids being first woman buried in San Quentin
After serving a few months at San Quentin, Mary Hill was extremely ill, clinging to life in the prison hospital. Meant to serve a sentence for check forgery, failing health found her in the prison doctor’s care.
When she passed away in 1925, prison officials were unable to find any next-of-kin so preparations were made for her to be buried in the prison cemetery. A grave was dug but never used after Warden Frank Smith learned Hill would be the first woman buried there. To save her the “indignity” of a prison burial, he asked the prison directors for help.
Julian Alco, one of the directors, agreed with the warden. Reaching out to local women’s organizations, one of them offered to cover funeral expenses in an off-site cemetery. Hill was buried “in a casket piled h
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Elizabeth Duncan:
The Last Woman
Executed in California
New Book on the Santa Barbara Mother-in-Law Who Paid to Have Her Son’s Pregnant Wife Murdered
By Nick Welsh | October 13, 2022
Deborah Holt Larkin was an over-anxious 10-year-old living in Ventura in November 1958 when her father, a reporter for the Ventura County Star Free Press, began covering the story of a pregnant nurse in Santa Barbara named Olga Kupczyk, who had gone mysteriously missing in the middle of the night. Making it all the more ominous, Kupczyk’s purse and wallet were still in her Garden Street apartment, and her soon-to-be baby’s new clothes were folded neatly in plain sight. “It was a pivotal event in my life,” Larkin said during a recent interview.
Larkin and the rest of the world would soon discover that Kupczyk, a Canadian immigrant whose own parents had fled Ukraine during the violent aftermath of World War I, had been kidnapped, murdered, and buried — maybe alive, perhaps not — in a shallow gr
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A Mother’s Love Was the Death of Her Daughter-in-Law
The worst mother-in-law in California was also the gods woman to be executed in the state, in 1962.
Elizabeth Ann “Ma” Duncan was 58. She had stalked and finally ordered the death of her pregnant daughter-in-law in an example of mother love gone wrong.
Only four women have been executed in California since 1893; the records are unclear whether any were put to death bygd local agencies before then. All fyra were convicted murderers.
The first woman to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber was Juanita Spinelli, in 1941. Known as “The Duchess,” she led a San Francisco brott gang. Spinelli was convicted of killing a gang member to prevent him from squealing about a murder.
Six years later, Louise Peete was sent to the gas chamber for robbing and killing a woman who had befriended her while she was in prison. In the 1920s, Peete had killed her employer, who was also her lover.
And Barbara Graham, an attractive “gun moll,” was convi