Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

The trial of Barbara Graham and her two co-defendants was as bizarre and sensational as was the crime for which they were to pay the extreme penalty. The news media covered it extensively from start to finish, from the moment Mrs. Monohan’s brutally battered body was found until Emmett Perkins was pronounced dead.

Who, really, was Barbara Graham? What made her what she had become, and what events led her to her desperately tragic and ignominious end?

Barbara was born in a slum neighborhood in Oakland, California, in 1923. Her mother was seventeen years old at the time. Her father was as unknown to Barbara as he was to her mother.

Hortense, Barbara’s mother, a harried teen-ager, hated the infant she had brought into the world from the first moment she laid eyes on her, according to Barbara’s own statement. Hortense felt a shame and disgrace for having brought a bastard into being and the more she regarded the result of her sex experience, now regretted, the more she hated what she saw.

Why she didn’t give the infant up for adoption remains an untold puzzle to this day. A short time after Barbara was born, Hortense met and married a man named Joe Wood.

“He was good to me,” Barbara said, “and I didn’t know he was not my real father until I applied for a birth certificate when I was seventeen.

“When I was two years old my mother dumped me with relatives and disappeared with her husband. She and her husband visited me infrequently over the next several years. He treated me kindly, brought me small gifts, and held me on his lap. My mother couldn’t look at me and her whole attitude toward me was one of antagonism. I cried a lot when she came to see me and her relatives because she wouldn’t pay any attention to me. I would run to her and hold out my arms to be taken into hers but she pushed me away.”

“For crissakes, get the hell away from me, you damned little brat!” Hortense screamed. “Get away! You stink!”

Barbara said she recalled Joe Wood saying, “Why don’t you pick her up and hold her? She’s your daughter. Pick her up!”

“I hate the little bitch!” Hortense yelled. “If she wants to be held then you hold her!”

Little bitch!

That phrase may have been a forecasting of what Barbara was to become. Perhaps the phrase stuck in the child’s mind, an anchor in her subconscious, a drag that stayed her ship of life to the pier of degradation, misery, violence, and murder. For a bitch is what she became.

A murderess? That doubt remains and what happened during the trial for the murder of Mrs. Mabel Monohan gives that doubt a great deal of credence.

The relatives with whom Hortense placed Barbara no longer wanted her around and showed it in many ways. When Hortense next came to visit them they told her to take Barbara wherever she wanted to, but out of their home.

“She’s your child, your responsibility. You take care of her!” she was told.

“I’ll take care of her all right,” Hortense retorted.

She grabbed Barbara by an arm, dragged her into the little room where the child slept and packed her meager belongings in a shopping bag. She placed Barbara with a woman named Mrs. Lottie Kennedy, a fat harridan with a cruel streak in her makeup.

Mrs. Kennedy owned a parrot that kept up a steady stream of parrot sounds in its attempt to utter the words Mrs. Kennedy tried to teach the bird to say. Barbara believed the bird wanted to get out of its cage or it wouldn’t protest so loudly and incessantly. She opened the cage and the parrot flew out, landed on a sideboard and knocked over a slim crystal vase which smashed into bits.

Mrs. Kennedy came running into the dining room, stared at the wreckage and the yawking bird and screamed hotly at Barbara.

“You damned little brat! I’ll fix you! I’ll fix you good!”

Mrs. Kennedy yanked her into a corner and told her to stay there, facing the wall. She then went into the kitchen, peeled a large onion, cut it in half and returned to the child, who now was whimpering with fear. Mrs. Kennedy forced the onion halves into Barbara’s hands.

“Hold these to your eyes until I tell you to take them away. If you take them away before that I’ll whip you silly. You got that?” As a sample of the whipping she threatened she whacked the child several times across the shoulders with her fist.

Each day turned into a new kind of horror for Barbara as Mrs. Kennedy sought novel kinds of punishment for house infractions, real and imagined. Finally, after almost a year, Joe Wood came to see Barbara, took one look at her and wanted to know what Mrs. Kennedy had done to her.

“She looks terrible,” Joe Wood said. “What in hell have you been doing to her?”

“I’ve been trying to teach her some manners, that’s what I’ve been doing to her!”

“How? By beating her and starving her?”

“Who says I beat her? She eats what I do. I can’t help it if it don’t show.”

“I know what does show. Brutality, that’s what shows. I’m taking her out of here before you kill her with your kindness!”