You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Geesy Bundy Dahmer The Nightstalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good Evening.
In this dramatic true account about the power of sensationalized crime, one woman's case is exposed for its sexism, flagrant disregard for the truth, and ultimately the dangers posed by an unbridled prosecution. Unwanted and thected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse, offering her too many
options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she reached double digits. Her record of petty crime spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in nineteen fifty three, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult out of obscurity and into the headlines. When a robbery spiraled out of control and escalated into a brutal murder,
Barbara became the centerpiece of a media circus. Her beauty enraptured the press, and they were quick to portray her as a villainous femme fete, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, a fiction. The prosecution eagerly promoted the frenzy of public interest and wilful distortion paved a treacherous path for Barbara Graham.
In Trial by Ambush, author and criminal lawyer Marcia Clark investigates the case, exposing the fallacies in the demonizing picture they painted and the critical evidence that was never revealed. The book that we're featuring this evening is Trial by Ambush, Murder Injustice and the Truth about the Case of Barbara Graham, with my special guest, criminal lawyer O. J. Simpson, prosecutor
and New York Times bestselling author Marcia Clark. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Marcia Clark, Thank.
You so much. Dan. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
It's a pleasure to be able to speak to you and congratulations on this new book, Trial by Ambush.
Delighted to be able to talk to you about it.
You are a New York Times bestselling novelist, among being a former prosecutor and defense attorney. But tell us about your decision to write about Barbara Graham. You write that you have a vivid memory of the minute you knew that you were going to write about Barbara Graham. Tell us what it was that finally convinced you.
You know, it was a slow rolling process, Dan, It was not one of those Eureka moments. You know that I saw the case and I said, oh, this is it. I did not know that I had been researching another case all entirely. And it was a footnote at the bottom of the page that mentioned Barbara Graham's case. And I looked at that, and then I saw that it had been a very famous case. It was its own trial of the century back in nineteen fifty three. Nationwide coverage.
They were covering it NonStop, feverishly, especially in California and Los Angeles, like morning, afternoon and evening newspapers. And I thought, oh boy, I don't know. I don't want to tread on ground that's already well trodden. And then I saw that it had been the subject of an Oscar winning film called I Want to Live, featuring Barbara Graham, who was one of the defendants and won an Oscar actually
for Best Actress for Susan Hayward. And then I was really convinced this was never going to work, but I was intrigued nonetheless, and so I decided to look into it and see what had been written. And it turned out that actually, other than newspaper clippings, it had been very little written about. One book, a very slim volume published by one of the reporters who covered the case for the Herald examer which was not your most reliable outlet at the time, and he covered it. He wrote
the book in collaboration with the prosecution. So I thought, okay, And then I read the book, very short book, and it was it was filled with things that made me go, what that can't be right. This can't be right. That can't be right. I thought, okay, so this is not going to be the definitive work on this, And then I saw that it had also been written about, in some measure by Kathleen Karen, who wrote a fantastic book called Proof of Guilt, which focuses on the death penalty,
and she mentioned Barbara's case among others. Excellent book. I recommend it, but it did not go into the trial, which is what I wanted to do, because what you have here was a really heinous, brutal murder of a totally innocent victim. Mabel Monahan, who was in her sixties and infirm, lived a quiet life in a suburban little house in Burbank. There was no reason for her to
be bludgeoned and strangled to death by these defendants. But the defendants that were involved in this case along with Barbara, looked nothing like her. They looked like the thugs they were. You can imagine them doing just a anything. Barbara, on the other hand, she had a misdemeanor rap sheet that was nothing, that was marijuana possession, check kiding, maybe prostitution here and there, really way out of her lead to
be involved in something like this. So I knew that I had to find out what really happened, How did she get convicted and how did she get put to death? And so that required, of course that I look into not only the investigation of the case, but the testimony at trial that put her in the gas chamber. And so that was I think. And then it was the final final grace note and coupdi gras in terms of my decision to do it was the photograph I saw. It was her sitting with her lawyer in her prison dress.
She was by the way, I should not say by the way, because the newspapers made a big deal. She was beautiful. She did not look like a murderer in any way, shape or form. In fact, some of the newspapers said that she looked more like a showgirl than a defender. She was beautiful, and she was sitting at this little table with a horde of reporters, all men like, hovering over her. The degree to which she was just kind of at the center of this intense energy, all
focused deeply on her was really very compelling. And she's looking over her shoulder in a way that looks a little frightened, a little intimidated. There is no sign of the ultimate of the murderous, the stone cold, bloody Babs as they called her that the press had been touting throughout the trial. And I thought, Okay, this is really something's wrong here. I have to look into this and that was the final moment.
You say that at first it was a circuitous route to get this reporter's transcript, because at first you got the clerk's transcript. So this author, Kathleen Cairn's actually helped you locate that reporter's transcript, which was, you say, essential to be able to write this book. Right.
She recommended that I check out the state archives. Now, even so, I wasn't sure that reporters would be keeping the court reporters would keep the transcript for as long as this This is over seventy years ago, and so I had reached out to this court reporter's website with an email saying, do you guys still how long do you keep these notes and how long do you keep
transcripts for? Because in the average case, I know handling appeals as I do in California that in the typical felony they don't keep their notes longer than ten years. So I got no answer to the email, and I thought, well, these guys are too busy to deal with me. So I called the number and got extremely lucky that a court reporter actually picked up the phone, and I said, is there any chance that you would keep the transcripts
and the notes from a case this old. And she said said, well or nearly no, Well what was the sentence And I said it was the death sentence. Oh, she goes, Oh, we keep those forever, There'll be somewhere.
Wow.
So I had hope. And then I went to the archives, and the archives took a while to say, we don't know what we have. We might have it, we might not. And I had my researcher, John Valeri, who was amazing, keep after them and keep in communication, and they kept saying they were having their legal team review it and vet it. And I thought, wait, if they have transcripts of the trial that's public record, anyone can get that. There's nothing to vet. So I was worried that what
they might actually have would not be the transcripts. So when they finally said they're on their way. What we've got, you've got now, I wasn't sure I was going to get what I needed. So it was like a moment of heart pounding when I saw when the boxes were dropped on my doorstep and I opened up the first one and I almost didn't want to look. I opened it up and then I saw the front page. It said volume one reporters transcript, and I was like, yes, this is but then I saw it was over four
thousand pages. So this was the heaven and the hell of it all. Here you go. And so that's why it took the better part of two years to write this book.
Wow, now you tell the story of Barbara Graham on the evening of March eighth, nineteen fifty three in Burbank, California. But where you take us to the home of Mabel Monahan, the widow who lived alone, and she was ready to go to her regular Sunday night poker game where her close friend Merle Leslie tell us a little bit about Mabel and that night before March ninth, nineteen fifty three.
So Mabel was a really cool person. She was trippy, She was a member of a vaudeville troop. She was a renowned roller skater, and say she toured the country, spent all of her adult life doing that and performing. And at one point she was even she palmed herself off as a palm reader and called herself Madame Martinez, which was at that time considered an exotic name. And she met her husband, who was a world class ice skater and roller skating performer. They became a duo and
they performed together and ultimately married. And there's this picture of them skating where he's holding her by a rope in his mouth that she's holding in her mouth and she's spinning around in the air with him spinning in circles, an amazing feat. So she was really quite something. So how does she wind up in Burbank? That was purely happenstance. Her daughter, Iris, who was also a performer, wound up marrying a casino owner and real estate entrepreneur named Tutor Scherer.
And he was a trip in himself. He had been heavily invested in his speakeasy in this restaurant that was basically a refurbished ship off the pier of Santa Monica called Ships, and I had audition to perform his in a stage show there, and in hiring her, they got to be close and then they wound up getting married. But he was somebody who didn't necessarily believe in monogamy. They had thirteen years of a rocky marriage and ultimately
Iris divorced him. He was a very wealthy man and he was very generous with Iris when he divorced her. When she divorced him, that is, she didn't. He gave her the house in Burbank, as well as jewels and money. She didn't want the house. She wanted to remarry and move to New York, which she did, so she gave the house to her mother, Mabel Monahan. Now Mabel had never lived in a house before, so she was very
security conscious because she'd always lived in hotels. Hotels had front desks, they had men between you and whoever was going to come to see you. So she was not accustomed to living on her own and that made her nervous, so she would keep her doors and windows locked and gates locked. This was not somebody who was likely to open the door for anyone. So although Irish divorced Tutor Sharer, Mabel Monahan was very close with him. They were very tight.
She loved him, he loved her, and he would come to visit her whenever he came to Los Angeles. He had since although he had been heavy into his speakeasy and even tried to get into the gambling scene in Los Angeles, it soon became apparent he couldn't stay here because Mickey Cohen owned all the gambling business, and Mickey
Cohen didn't like competition. So Tudor Scherer, who liked to keep his who liked to stay breathing, decided he would move to Las Vegas and there he invested in casinos et cetera, made a lot of money, did extremely well. He would come out to visit occasionally for various interest real estate interests here, and he would come and stay
with Mabel Monahan. This led the community of bad guys, safecrackers and burglars to start a rumor that Tutor Sharer came out to visit Mabel Monahan because he was stashing money in her house. And this big rumor started to flingvoing around that there was a safe in her house with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and two years before the murder, there was an effort to actually case the house to see whether it was possible to get in and steal the money and break into the safe. Nothing
came of it. It never happened. So flashed forward to March eighth. The evening of March eighth, Mabel Monahan went with her friends to her regular poker game. It was a poker party actually in Studio City, after which they went to what they called dinner, which was at four in the morning, and then they went home, and it was on that day she went to sleep. Mabel her friend ultimately left that afternoon, and by the evening, Mabel was sitting and reading a murder mystery called The Purple Pony,
when there was a knock on the door. Now, unbeknownst to Mabel, the plot had been hatched to burglarize the house. But knowing that she would never open the door to someone, to a man or someone she didn't know, they had to find someone who would act as the lure, whom Mabel would be more likely to trust, and that was Barbara Graham Petit very sweet looking, certainly didn't look like a criminal. Barbara went to the door and knocked on the door and said, could you please help me? My
car broke down in the middle of the street. I don't know what to do. I have to get to a phone. Can I please use your phone to call for help. Mabel made her one fatal mistake and let Barbara in, and then the men came in behind her.
You say that.
Two days later, March eleventh, nineteen fifty three, her gardener at about eleven thirty came by Mitchell Shreuesdale and he thought it was unusual because the floodlights were still on and then the front door was ajar, So tell us what he discovers, then what happens following.
Yeah, so this was completely out of character for Mabel. I mean, not only did she never leave her front door unopened, she never left it unlocked. Not only that, but the gate to the backyard was also I think unlocked as well. But just the front door being open was really shocked him. He pushed it a little further open and looked inside and immediately saw blood on the walls.
Could see right through It's not a big house. You could see right through to the living room and all the furniture had been upended, the carpeting and the rugs had been torn up. The house had been turned upside down, and there was more blood toward the going toward the living room. He backed out, freaked out, called his friend, who was a police officer in Burbank Police Department, and he happened to be off duty at the time. He
showed up. He walked through the house and saw Mabel Monahan lying in a hallway with a garage around her neck and her head bloodied, and then he called in the regy, Lieutenant Robert Coveney.
You're right right away that of course suspect some form of robbery. But then they go into this closet and what did they discover that was crazy.
So it looks like it's for all intents and purposes, the way the house has been ransacked looks like it must have been an intended burglary, robbery, et cetera. But they they don't find a safe, they don't find anything wrong, and then they go to mal Mabel's mon Han's. They go to Mabel Monahan's closet and they see all these purses that she had, and they go through all and it's clear that they went through all the purses. They
dumped them out, throw them on the floor. But there's a purse left hanging on a hook in the closet that they didn't touch, and that was the purse that Mabel Monahanue had used the night before, which happened to contain all kinds of expensive jewelry as well as hundreds of dollars in cash. Because Mabel liked to flashed her jewelry to all her buddies whenever she went out, and she carried it with her frequently. That purse happened to be left untouched there. Plus, okay, so that's a mystery.
What happened here? And why did they leave that? Why were they there? Plus they had no physical evidence. They never found fingerprints, They never found really any shoeprints that went to anything. All they knew that there was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, and Mabel Monahan lying dead, bludgeoned and garroted.
Now police don't have any leads, They don't have any physical evidence, as you're right, So who do they go to initially to see if they can find any information?
So the police fan out all over the place. They asked neighbors if they saw or heard anything. No one did. Remember this is nineteen fifty three. There's no close circuit cameras, there's no citywide cameras, there's no ring cameras, and there's no necessarily of course, there's not DNA. There's a lot they didn't have. No one heard anything, no one saw anything. So they had to fan out to their known informants
and bad guys who lived or worked the area. It took a while, and for a couple of weeks there were no leeds whatsoever. Because this was such an innocent victim and in such a quiet, very peaceful neighborhood that never had any crime in it. There was a real public outcry about what had happened and a lot of pressure on the police to solve this one. So they reached out to the typical suspects who might know something about the criminal community, the typical burglars and boxmen as
they called men. The boxman is their slang for a safe cracker. And they eventually came up with someone who was called Indian George, and he told, you know, I remember people talking about wanting to ransack this house because we believed that it had a safe with lots of money in it. He gave up some names, and all of the names he gave up were former employees of Mickey Cohen the Gangster. A couple of them panned out. One of them first was William Upshaw. He was known
to have worked for Mickey Cohen. He began to talk and he gave them the name of Baxter Shorter, another former cohort of Mickey Cohen and Baxter Shorter was known to be a boxman too. Baxter Shorter was indeed turned out to be was indeed involved in the burglary and murder. Though he was peripheral, he was the one who actually knew where Mabel Monahan lived. He was the one hired to be the lookout, but also to show them where to go, and he would remain The plan was he'd
remain outside as the lookout. He'd get ten percent of the take.
That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you talk about right away, Shorter gets a lawyer, and what does the lawyer want for his client.
So the lawyer of Baxter Shorter, before he talked, reach out to a lawyer whom his buddy, William Upshaw happened to have used for his situation because he wanted immunity as well. He got that lawyer. The lawyer immediately saw the value of his testimony, of his statement, because the police had nothing, no leads, they had no case, and
they said, I want complete immunity for Baxter Shorter. If he's going to give you this statement, he will give you all the information he has and he will absolutely be able to identify the other perpetrators involved, but he wants to be able to walk. The cops, having no choice, said yes, you know, done, done deal, come in and talk to us. So he gave a statement, an official statement under oath in the DA's office, in which which
was memorialized by a stenographer. So you had a court reporter there taking down his statement word for word, which is in the book word for word. And he tells the story of these three let me see Jack Santo's Emmett Perkins, John True as I call him, the ironically named John True, and Barbara Graham. He did not know Barbara Graham's name. He just knew it was a woman
was involved. He thought her name was Mary. And he told of how they said to him, we hear there's all this money in a safe at the Nabel Wanahan house. You're a box man, you know where she lives. You can tell us, you can help us with this plan and you'll get a part of the take. Baxter didn't really want to be part of the burglary itself. He
was very gun shy about it. He had in fact been one of the people who cased the house before, and he was nervous that if this burglary went through, the cops would go straight to him, because he believed that the cops had arrested him previously for chasing the house.
Right.
He was wrong. He had never been arrested for that, but that's what he thought. So he decided, he said, you know, I'll help you out, but I won't ask for as much as the take. I'll just be a look out ten percent. So he named them, and he said, he told exactly what happened. He said, you know, they went to the house. Barbara got her to open the door, true John True went in right after her, like right afterwards. And then it took a long time. Something was going wrong.
They should have subdued Mabel much quicker than they did. And for a long time there was no sound, no sight of anybody giving them the go ahead as they were waiting outside. And ultimately EMMITTT. Perkins decides to go inside and finds that Mabel Monahan is on the floor, beaten and struggling for breath. And then Jack Santos went inside and after a few minutes, I think during those
few minutes they were ransacking the house. Baxter Shorter, Jack Santos goes outside, waves to Baxter Shorter to say, there's nothing here. We just want you to see come inside and see there's nothing here to justify the fact that he wasn't going to get any proceeds from the burglary, and Baxter Shorter then saw the whole bloody scene and the way in which the house had been torn up, and describes the behavior of everyone in the house, including John True.
God True, it was the person that said that Tudor Scherer had this money, and he had traveled with him with this big box of money. So he is the guy that incentivizes these other people with this story, doesn't he? Yes?
In part? I think also, I think actually this was such common knowledge among the burglars in the area that others knew about it, and they knew it earlier, as
I said back in like fifty one, I think. But it's but John True insisted that he was the one who knew and told everybody that he had ridden from Las Vegas to Los Angeles with Tutor Share and that he saw him holding a cardboard box that was filled with money, and Tutor Sharer told him that he did, and so he could assure everyone I know there's money in that house because I saw him coming to Los Angeles with that box. So he was the one who
actually provided the motive for it, according to him. I really do think Upshob probably co that, and so did Baxter Shorter. But for sure, John True insisted that he knew and he was involved, and he actually represented that he was very tight with Tutor Sharer. They were good friends,
and he went to his wedding. That turned out to be just one of many lies told by John True, who actually was the one who turned state's evidence and helped the prosecution make the case that they could never have made without him.
Well, let's talk about Baxter Shorter was a prosecution dream in terms of this previously, with no leads and no physical evidence, So what do they do? What do they advise? And how does the press handle this information?
So Baxter Shorter was the dream come true. Finally he kicked open the door they could identify suspects. One thing led to another and they figured out who the woman was. That because she had been a girlfriend so to speak, of Emmett Perkins and a known associate of his. She had been his dice girl for his gambling house. In El Monte. So ultimately what Baxter Shorter gave them was
literally everything in terms of information. Now, Baxter Shorter did not witness the initial confrontation with Mabel Monahan because he EMMITTT. Perkins and Jack Santo's were outside right, But what he could say was that when he did get in, he saw Mabel Monahan's condition, and he saw that John True was sitting with Mabel Monahan's head in his lap. He also attributes certain statements to John True, gives the police reason to believe that John True is neck deep in
this whole thing. And then Baxter Shorter, they being their key witness, they advise him to get police protection, to leave town, to be very careful because you know, he's talking to the police. And at some point it's going to become obvious that someone is talking to the police,
because the press was covering this exhaustively. And at one point someone and I never could determine exactly which one did, it was a police officer who made a statement that seemed to point the finger directly at Baxter Shorter as the one who was singing as the canary if you will, and it got very dangerous for him. So the police went to the DA, who was Ernie Roll at the time, and said, look, we've got to arrest pant Santos, Perkins
and Graham. We've got to and John True. We have to arrest those guys right away, because what they're going to if they find out, once they see this story, they're going to find out it's Baxter Shorter. He could be the only one it could be who's talking to us, and they're going to kill him. They went to Backs and the DA said, no, you don't have it. You don't have enough information, you don't have enough evidence, and
you can't justify the arrest. And it's true that all they had was the word of someone who was in self an accomplice, no particular corroboration at that point, and he also had not really seen a lot of what went down in the house until he got inside. They so he refused to allow them to file the case, and the police went to him and so did the DA and told Baxter you need to get out of town. You need to accept police protection. Baxter Shorter said, no, if I do that, then they'll really know that it
was me singing, and he refused. Well, that turned out to be that was not a bad idea on his part, But it turned out to be not a good idea either, because he ultimately was kidnapped and according to his wife, was kidnapped out of the house, out of their house by Emmett Perkins, and was never seen again. It was widely believed they killed him, but his body was never found.
You also say that they're now urgently looking for Jack Santo and there's another reason other than his link to this crime. Tell us what else they suspect him of being involved in.
So Jack Santa's actually had been a suspect in a number of murders in the northern California area, in the gold mining area and in rural areas up there. He himself was into He himself was suspected of killing a miner, and perhaps with the help of EMMITTT. Perkins, a gold miner up in the I'm trying to remember it was the Gold Country, I think it was. And also the very heinous murder of a man and his three children, his three children plus a neighbor child. And when I
say children, I mean between ages two and six. They had all been murdered and stucked in the trunk of the car, so he was suspected in all of that, and that became revealed as well when he got arrested ultimately for the Mabel Monahan murder. They looked into it further and found enough evidence ultimately to file that case against him and Emmett Perkins.
Now they have to find Barbara on these two men, so they're they were under surveillance, but apparently they lost track of them. So a policewoman had spotted them earlier, or spotted her earlier at a shopping mall, and they decided just to wait and see if she'd return, and she did.
As a matter of fact, they had said that they were keeping Barbara on their radar and they were watching her, but when it came time to go and arrest everybody, they couldn't find anyone. So the only thing they knew to do, the policewoman went back to the area at the shopping mall where she had last been seen two
weeks earlier, and hoped that she would come back. And it took a few days, and she didn't for quite some time, but then ultimately she did, and they followed her as she got on one bus and then another and then another and followed her back to this flophouse in Lynnwood where she was staying with Jack Santos and Emmitt Perkins, and all three got arrested.
Now, how does the prosecution deal with the disappearance of Baxter Shorter? What did they do? And we haven't mentioned the incredible pressure on the prosecution by the press itself. You talk quite a bit about the press s and its behavior, right, the press.
Was all over this case from day one, creating its own pressure on the police, primarily the police, because until the case is file, the prosecutor has no role to play, really, and they were after anything they could find. So when they had Baxter Shorter, oh relief, We've got a case we can handle. We can file this. We're going to get enough evidence ultimately we're going to be able to prove who did it. But then Baxter Shorter disappears. Now
they suddenly don't have a case again. Now they have to look for someone who will put it all together. But in the meantime, with Baxter Shorter having been disappeared and every reason to believe it was one of those defendants or more than one of those defendants who were involved in his disappearance, they had to arrest them, but they still had no case. They still really had no eyewitness who could testify to exactly what happened now that
Baxter Shorter was gone. They really didn't because Baxter Shorter's friend, William Upshaw, had heard from Baxter what had happened, but they couldn't get That's not enough to present a case. So all Upshaw had was really hearsay. So they were desperate then to get those three defendants or four defendants into custody. They went after Barbara, they went after Santos, they went after Perkins, and they they got him into custody.
Then they had to go after John True. Now at that point, the only one that they really could legitimately turn state's evidence and expect to get any traction from the jury was John True. He had been a deep sea diver, and unlike the others, he had no record whatsoever. If they could turn him, they stood a chance of even of putting a case together. And he was easy to find because he was working up in a shipyard
in the Bay Area, actually you know, provably employed. The Francisco Police Chief went there with Lieutenant Coveney from Burbank PD and They picked him up and put him in and took him into custody as one of the conspirators in the case. At first he refused to talk, but they sweated him, and they sweated him, and they sweated him for days. They kept him there and he wasn't cracking. Finally, they brought in the friends that he knew were closest to him and got them to try and break him
and break him down and make him talk. They finally got through to him, but he no fool. He said, I want the word of the actual district attorney himself that I get complete immunity for anything that is in connection with this case before I tell you one word. He got on They said done, consider it done. Now this statement that he ultimately gives. So da Ernie Roll got on the phone with John True and promised him and said, you will not be prosecuted for any involvement
in this case whatsoever. No charges will be remaining against you. And he said, okay, fine, then I'll talk. At that point, the prosecutor, one of the prosecutors who would handle the case, Adolph Alexander, flew up to San Francisco and took an official statement from John true forty two page statement with
an official stenographer taking down every word. That statement never got revealed to the defense, and it did have significant differences between not only his ultimate trial testimony, but the statement given by backs are shorter.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now. In the research of this you talked about that you looked at the legendary career an icon j Miller Levy, and you said he was a legendary prosecutor. As you worked on this book and you looked at these transcripts, you got a different picture of this icon, didn't you.
I did. It was so weird. I mean, one of the things that drew me to the case was the excitement in getting able in being able to see this icon of all of us. Back in the day when I was in the DA's office, Jamiller Levy was famous and just a renowned prosecutor who had handled all the biggest cases. He prosecuted Carol Chessman, he prosecuted Eluing Scott. I think it was the first nobody homicide in California.
Big deal. I mean, no, It's very, very hard to prosecute a case when you have no body of the victim, and I did it. I had two cases like that, and there's a lot of evidence you cannot get when you don't have the victim's body. So it was a big deal that he did that. He didn't have DNA, so I was very excited to see him in action. And as I read this transcript, I discovered I rediscovered the saying don't meet your heroes. It was pretty shocking to see the It was just ugly, snow ip, very
ad hominem personalized attacks he launched against Barbara. In particular, he went after her in a way that even a federal district judge later said was unseemly. I've never seen a prosecutor go after a defendant the way he went after Barbara, and he did it in a personal way and in a way that really pushed the legal envelope
as well. Although the laws have changed, and some of the things he did back then were lawful, were permitted, they soon were not, and within a few years after that trial, in fact, many of the things he did were deemed to be improper and would have required a mistrial. But back when he did it, for example, the Griffin rule. Right now we have called the comment rule back in California.
Back in the fifties, in California, you were allowed to comment on a defendants invocation of his right to remain silent. You could say, if he was innocent, he would have spoken to the police. If he was innocent, he wouldn't have been voked his right to remain silent. That was held in federal court back in eighteen ninety three to be improper. There are many reasons why I defended is afraid to talk, and not all of them mean he's guilty.
It's not fair to say that you're protected by the Fifth Amendment and then use your reliance on the Fifth Amendment as proof of guilt. So the FEZ never allowed it, or hadn't for quite some time, but as of nineteen fifty three, it was allowed, and J. Miller Levy flogged all of them, but especially Barbara, with the fact that she had invoked her right to remain silent when she was hauled in front of the grand jury in this case. So that was allowed, and yet the degree was remarkable.
But there was much more that he did, including putting stool pigeons in her cell at a point in time when it was not legal to do that back then you could. Back then you could, I want to be clear about that, but hiding discovery was not legal even then. Hiding John True's initial statement to Adolph Alexander was illegal.
And when it was discovered long after the conviction that he had done so, that they had not revealed that statement, which would have made a difference, I think, and the way the jury saw what he said and then saw the difference between his testimony and that first statement, it might well have made a big difference for Barbara. In particular, that caused actually a Senate subcommittee hearing to discuss changing the actual written laws as opposed to case law about
governing a prosecutor's duty to a provide discovery. So there was a lot that went wrong there, but it was the unseemly manner that he did it, in the way he cross examined her and the way he argued the case that was so shocking. There were points that I really had to stand up and walk away because it was this is a horrible No defendant deserves his treatment. This is not a fair trial.
You write about the dramatic testimony of Barbara, she you don't think that it was anything, but she had no
choice but to take the stand. And then you describe j Miller and Adolf Alexander line by line, going through these notes between this police plant that you mentioned, Donna Prow and her luring Barbara into looking for an alibi, because that's what she needed to do to stay off death row, was to have some alibi, and her attorney, Jack Hardy, pleaded with her while she was in custody, saying, you are going to go to death row if you do not have an alibi.
Correct. So back then we had I think, actually every state has a felony murder rule. What that means is if you commit one of a list of violent felonies, and robbery and burglary are two of them, and a murder occurs in the course of it, homicide occurs in the course of it. Even if the homicide is accidental, even if you don't mean to kill the victim, it
doesn't matter. You're on the hook for murder. Now, back then, even if you did not personally commit the murder, you were still on the hook for murder as well as a special circumstance of murder committed in the course of that felony and that's what leads to the death penalty. So the only defense left was alibi, and if she could not come up with an alibi, she would face the death penalty. The very least she would get is life without the possibility of parole.
You write about the press and its influence in this trial, if it were to compare to today.
Yeah, what was interesting to me. That was another thing was the manner in which the press behaved. There were many outlets that reported on this trial, but all of them took the same tack. All of them went after Barbara as the villainous, the mastermind of all things, and the stone cold, cold hearted, vicious murder. They spared no they spared no adjective in describing her as this bloodthirsty monster. It was remarkable to me that they couldn't. They were
so credulous when it came to John True. John True's story to me was full of holes right from the start. Even if I didn't know about his earlier statement to Adolph Alexander, I would still have thought, this makes no sense. This testimony, this story, the whole description of what happened when he entered the house behind Barbara made no sense to me. Just physically, logically made no sense. No one
questioned it, not one person. They all hung laurels on him, calling him virtually the savior, the rescuer of mont Mabel Monahan, because they're buying his story that he was the one trying to save Mabel from the vicious pistol whipping administered
by Barbara Graham. It was absurd. The whole story was absurd, but no one questioned it until the very end of the trial, when one reporter from up north, Ed Montgomery, who worked for the San Francisco Examiner, came down to the courtroom and actually watched the trial for a period of time and said, this doesn't fit, this doesn't make sense. He became Barbara's champion ultimately and decided to help her to try and get the case, the conviction reversed, or at least get a grant of clemency.
You write, going back just to the trial that Jack Hardy, in his closing statements said that the prosecution in this case went to the links that he'd never seen to pin this atrocity on someone, and there wasn't much difference who they pinned it on. Utterly reckless means with a person trapped in jail, were taken to try and trap them, to get them to convict themselves. And you write in explanation marks that neither have you seen anything like this in your career?
No, I have not. I have not seen a prosecutor go after a defendant this way, hiding discovery, pulling every trick in the book they could possibly think of, particularly focused on the one that you know is the least culpable of the three. Well, whether the jury could see that or not, the jury didn't know all that they knew.
Jamiller Levy and Adolph Alexander knew very well what John True initially said, knew very well what Baxter Shorter said, which conflicted with John True's account in many significant ways. They had every reason to doubt the veracity of his testimony, and nevertheless targeted Barbara with a zeal that was just unbelievable. And I think in part it's because she became the get. She became the one they had to go after and the one they had to convict, and the one they
had to get into the gas chamber. Because she was the hardest of them all to believe that she would be involved in something like this. The two men, Jack Santos and Emmitt Perkins. You just look at them, you know they did it. There was no challenge there, but Barbara that was the big challenge, and they went after her in that manner, I think because that was the big notch in the belt and that's what was so sickening about what happened.
I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book, Trial by Ambush, The Truth About the Case of Barbara Graham. For those people that might want to find out more about this book. Do you have a website and do you do any social media?
I do both, so I have an author's website Marcia clarkbooks dot com. You can see all kinds of information about Trial by Ambush and the other books I've written, and then social media, my handle is that Marsha Clark.
Yes, thank you so much. There is so much more for people to discover. We just touched on the appeal, but also the horrible upbringing and the abandonment by her mother that certainly had something to do with shaping her character. And so it's a fascinating book that you go so in depth into this trial and all the prosecutorial misconduct by the prosecution and also just the tale of the young girl that was abandoned and then beset upon by the press and the prosecution just to get a conviction
and a death penalty sentence. Thank you so much for this interview, Miss Marcia Clark, Trial by Ambush. Thank you so much for this interview, and have a great night, good night.
Thank you so much for having me Dan, it was a pleasure.
Thank you.