174. Looks Like Murder Made For Hollywood - Mabel Monohan And Barbara Graham

Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

This week Melissa jumps into the Tip-Ster Wayback machine and journeys to the rough-and tumble era of 1950s Los Angeles, where corruption ran rampant, the mob still held sway, mean jamokes with ill intent lurked in the shadows –and where Hollywood influenced everything from clothing to language to the very news being home-delivered every day. And right near the outset of that turbulent era – on March 9, 1953 – one of the decade’s most sensationalized murders took place on a quiet street in a tidy bungalow in suburban Burbank. There, in the shadow of the recently relocated Warner Bros and Walt Disney film studios, a former Vaudeville and Tent Show diva – 69 year-old widow Mabel Monohan – was brutally beaten and left for dead by a gang of five robbers who believed she was hiding a large stash of money in a safe, neither of which existed. Beaten and bloody, bound with a pillow case over her head, Mrs. Monohan died of her injuries – her body not found until two days after the botched robbery. After a couple of confessions (and after the burglars killed one of their own who squealed to the cops) – three of the five were eventually put to death in California’s gas chamber. Simple enough, right? Well no, not at all. That’s because one of the three capital murder defendants was a woman – a beautiful 29 year-old, thrice-married sex worker and heroin addict named Barbara Graham, who, with four male co-conspirators, plotted to steal $100,000 they believed Mrs. Monohan kept in a safe, as a favor to her gambler ex-son-in-law. So Graham and her four cohorts made a plan to invade the home, tie up Mrs. Monohan, crack the safe, take the money and run. It was Graham, posing as a young woman asking for help, who convinced Mrs. Monohan to open the door to the house. The plan – obviously – went awry very quickly. Mrs. Monohan was pistol-whipped and, when the would-be thieves fled after they realized no money was to be found, she was left on the floor, still bound, suffering from mortal wounds. By the time arrests were made, the local press had successfully turned the allegations against Barbara Graham into an international cause celebre, making the beautiful young woman’s story into a plea for leniency and an end to the death penalty. After Graham and the two other conspirators were executed, Hollywood picked up Graham’s story and turned it into a motion picture that won its star, Susan Hayward, an Oscar for Best Actress. Join Melissa as she covers the full gamut of this timeless case of murder, sex, sexism and the relevance of the death penalty – especially against women – and how those issues from 67 years ago haven’t really changed all that much.