Convicting 'gun moll' Barbara Graham was a famous win for L.A. prosecutors. Did they cheat?
Leavy won many high-profile cases during his storied career at the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, but few drew more attention than the case against the woman nicknamed 'Bloody Babs.'
She was streetwise and brassy and physically striking, a small-time hustler and 'dice girl' who lingered in casinos to induce men to drink and gamble. She had a heroin habit and a baby to feed. In March 1953, in the company of four men, she participated in the home-invasion robbery of a disabled Burbank widow who was found bludgeoned and strangled.
Relentless and skilled, with a flair for theater, Leavy told jurors that Graham had not just participated in the robbery but was central to the violence. 'Barbara Graham tied Mabel Monahan's hands behind her back, pistol whipped her and left her to die,' Leavy, then 85, told a Times columnist in 1990. 'Sending her to the gas chamber didn't bother me at all.'
"For the People," an authorized history of the district attorney's office, burnishes Leavy's legend and repeats the claim that Graham pistol-whipped the victim. For generations of prosecutors, Leavy loomed so large that when they lost a case, they'd quip, 'Leavy could have won it.'
Marcia Clark, who would become one of the best-known prosecutors of her generation during the ill-fated O.J. Simpson case in the mid-1990s, heard all the stories about Leavy during her 14 years at the D.A.'s office. She began researching the Graham case for her book "Trial By Ambush," which published in November. She went into the project with admiration for Leavy — and emerged with the certainty that he had cheated.
He hid a key witness, she concluded. He constructed the prosecution narrative based on the word of a co-defendant who had good reason to lie. He did things that would be illegal today, Clark said, like planting the jailhouse informant who won Graham's love and helped doom her.
'He was a very good lawyer, don't get me wrong,' Clark told The Times in a recent interview. 'But what I didn't expect to see was that he was a sleazy player.'
From her arrest to her execution, something about Barbara Graham inspired frenzied verbiage from the journalists of the era. Newspapers portrayed her as a chilly, oversexed murderess from the pages of pulp fiction. Sometimes she was 'the redhead,' sometimes 'the icy blond.' She was 'the gun moll.' She was 'sultry.' She was "shapely Barbara Graham, the blond iceberg."
In the Los Angeles Daily Mirror, she was "that monster disguised as a woman.' In the Herald-Express, she was "the most beautiful victim that the gas chamber will ever have claimed."
Abandoned by her mother, she was sent, in her teens, to the Ventura School for Girls, a brutal reform school from which she emerged with an education in crime. She never made it to high school. She hustled for a living. She wrote bad checks. She shoplifted. She was busted for drug possession, prostitution and perjury. She married four times. She had three kids. She loved jazz.
She was broke, and trying to raise a baby, while working as a shill at a dice-and-poker house in El Monte. A rough-looking outlaw named Jack Santo showed up. He was a criminal confederate of the man who ran the gambling house, Emmett Perkins. They had heard that a retired vaudeville performer, Mabel Monahan, stashed money in her home safe.
'These guys were very bad news,' Clark said. 'I think much more bad news than Barbara knew.'
The safety-conscious Monahan would not open her door to just anybody, especially not to hard-looking thugs. But the petite, pretty Graham might get them inside. And so, on March 9, 1953, Graham appeared at Monahan's door with the story that her car had broken down.
Monahan let Graham in, and the hooligans followed. In came Santo, Perkins, safecracker Baxter Shorter and John True, whose self-serving account of what happened would be adopted as fact by the authorities. The robbers sacked the house, found no safe and left Monahan bludgeoned with a pillowcase over her head. 'Wealthy widow beaten to death in California,' read one headline.
Detectives caught up to Shorter within weeks, and his account led them to the others. As Clark documents in her book, he described Perkins "slugging [Monahan] in the temple" with a gun.
Shorter might have been the state's star witness had he not vanished soon after. (He was kidnapped by Perkins at gunpoint, according to a witness, and presumed dead.) Jurors would not get his version of the murder.
That left True as the prosecution's key witness. He was granted immunity for his testimony, minimized his own culpability — he had actually tried to save Monahan, he said — and pointed a finger at Graham. He said she held the victim by the neck with one hand and pistol whipped her with the other.
Hoping to clinch Graham's conviction, authorities planted an informant beside her at the L.A. County jail. The plant was Donna Prow, who was in her early 20s and serving time for manslaughter. She approached Graham. She poured on the charm. She brought her candy. Jail was lonely, and Graham fell for her.
'Hi Baby,' Graham wrote to her in one of many letters police obtained. 'Your note was so sweet, honey, but I want you to be sure of your feelings, or I wouldn't want to start something we couldn't finish. You are a very lovely and desirable woman, honey, and I want you very much."
As Graham's trial approached, she had a desperate problem — no alibi — but Prow offered a solution. She arranged for Graham to meet a man who would lie for her. He'd claim to have been with her miles away at an Encino hotel during the killing.
All of it was a police set-up. Prow's "friend" was an undercover police officer named Sam Sirianni, and when Leavy introduced secret recordings of Graham cobbling together the fake alibi — and admitting she'd been with her co-defendants on the fatal night — her credibility was destroyed.
But Graham's defense attorney never got a chance to cross-examine Prow. The D.A.'s office had arranged for her to be released from jail, and to leave California — safely beyond the reach of the defense.
'No one could find her, and the prosecution made sure of it, and that was illegal. They hid a key witness,' Clark told The Times. 'They would have pried out of her how much effort she went to get Barbara to go along with the false alibi scheme. And that would have made, I think, things look a lot different to the jury.'
The prosecutor dwelled at excruciating length on Graham's love letters to Prow.
'And it was very clear why he did it,' Clark said. 'He's tarnishing her character in front of the jury. Back then, there was not much grace given to homosexual relationships of any kind.'
In his closing argument, Leavy told jurors that Graham had testified with the aim of seducing the male jurors, deterring them from their duty to convict her with the hope that she could 'just get up there and look pretty.' It was a tactic Clark finds 'morally repugnant.'
'The law was different back then, and [they did] a lot of things that would be absolutely grounds for disbarment today,' she said.
Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her sympathetic but campy portrayal of Graham in the 1958 film 'I Want to Live!' In it, Graham is punished for defying the conventions of the time. She is sexually adventurous. She smokes cigarettes with men in darkened rooms. She sneers clever quips at the tormenting cops. She is a wildcat with a tender heart.
"She was the wildest of the jazzed-up generation,' proclaimed the ad copy. 'She had lots of friends, most of them bad. She was driven by a thousand desires, a few of them decent. She sinned. She stole. But she swore she never murdered."
Though Graham denied she was at the victim's house, Clark believes she was there — but as a decoy. It struck her as unlikely that the 5-foot-3 Graham, in the company of four stronger male accomplices, some with records of violence, had been the bludgeoner.
Under the felony murder rule, Graham would have been guilty for any participation in the crime, but in a differently handled case, she might have avoided a death sentence.
Jurors convicted Graham, Santo and Perkins of murder, and a judge sentenced them all to death. At San Quentin, one of Graham's last requests was to wear a mask as she went to the gas chamber. "I don't want to see the people," she said.
Leavy was one of the witnesses to her execution, his legend about to acquire another notch.
Also present was journalist Al Martinez, who would become a Times columnist and, decades later, write about being haunted by what he saw as the cyanide pellets dropped and the gas rose.
The cop next to him said, "Mabel Monahan died hard too."
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Miami Herald
15 hours ago
- Miami Herald
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Los Angeles Times
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Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
How an LAPD internal affairs detective became known as ‘The Grim Reaper'
In a police department with a long tradition of colorful nicknames — from 'Jigsaw John' to 'Captain Hollywood' — LAPD Sgt. Joseph Lloyd stands out. 'The Grim Reaper.' At least that's what some on the force have taken to calling the veteran Internal Affairs detective, usually out of earshot. According to officers who have found themselves under investigation by Lloyd, he seems to relish the moniker and takes pleasure in ending careers, even if it means twisting facts and ignoring evidence. But Lloyd's backers maintain his dogged pursuit of the truth is why he has been entrusted with some of the department's most politically sensitive and potentially embarrassing cases. Lloyd, 52, declined to comment. But The Times spoke to more than half a dozen current or former police officials who either worked alongside him or fell under his scrutiny. During the near decade that he's been in Internal Affairs, Lloyd has investigated cops of all ranks. 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On more than one occasion, the supervisor added, Internal Affairs received complaints from senior department officials who thought that Lloyd didn't show them enough deference during interrogations. Other supporters point to his willingness to take on controversial cases to hold officers accountable, even while facing character attacks from his colleagues, their attorneys and the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League. Officers have sniped about his burly build, tendency to smile during interviews and other eccentricities. He wears two watches — one on each wrist, a habit he has been heard saying he picked up moonlighting as a high school lacrosse referee. But he has also been criticized as rigid and uncompromising, seeming to fixate only on details that point to an officer's guilt. People he has grilled say that when he doesn't get the answer he's looking for, he has a Columbo-esque tendency to ask the same question in different ways in an attempt to elicit something incriminating. And instead of asking officers to clarify any discrepancies in their statements, Lloyd automatically assumes they are lying, some critics said. Mario Munoz, a former LAPD Internal Affairs lieutenant who opened a boutique firm that assists officers fighting employment and disciplinary cases, recently released a scathing 60-page report questioning what he called a series of troubling lapses in the LAPD's 2023 investigation of the Mission gang unit. The report name-drops Lloyd several times. The department accused several Mission officers of stealing brass knuckles and other items from motorists in the San Fernando Valley, and attempting to hide their actions from their supervisors by switching off their body-worn cameras. Munoz said he received calls from officers who said Lloyd had violated their due process rights, which potentially opens the city up to liability. Several have since lodged complaints against Lloyd with the department. He alleged Lloyd ultimately singled out several 'scapegoats to shield higher-level leadership from scrutiny.' Until he retired from the LAPD in 2014, Munoz worked as both an investigator and an auditor who reviewed landmark internal investigations into the beating of Black motorist Rodney King and the Rampart gang scandal in which officers were accused of robbing people and planting evidence, among other crimes. Munoz now echoes a complaint from current officers that Internal Affairs in general, and Lloyd in particular, operate to protect the department's image at all costs. 'He's the guy that they choose because he doesn't question management,' Munoz said of Lloyd. In the Mission case, Munoz pointed to inconsistent outcomes for two captains who oversaw the police division accused of wrongdoing: One was transferred and later promoted, while another is fighting for his job amid accusations that he failed to rein in his officers. Two other supervisors — Lt. Mark Garza and Sgt. Jorge 'George' Gonzalez — were accused by the department of creating a 'working environment that resulted in the creation of a police gang,' according to an internal LAPD report. Both Garza and Gonzalez have sued the city, alleging that even though they reported the wrongdoing as soon as they became aware of it, they were instead punished by the LAPD after the scandal became public. According to Munoz's report and interviews with department sources, Lloyd was almost single-handedly responsible for breaking the Mission case open. It began with a complaint in late December 2022 made by a motorist who said he was pulled over and searched without reason in a neighboring patrol area. Lloyd learned that the officers involved had a pattern of not documenting traffic stops — exploiting loopholes in the department's auditing system for dashboard and body cameras. The more Lloyd dug, the more instances he uncovered of these so-called 'ghost stops.' A few months later, undercover Internal Affairs detectives began tailing the two involved officers — something that Garza and Gonzalez both claimed they were kept in the dark about. As of last month, four officers involved had been fired and another four had pending disciplinary hearings where their jobs hung in the balance. Three others resigned before the department could take action. The alleged ringleader, Officer Alan Carrillo, faces charges of theft and 'altering, planting or concealing evidence.' Court records show he was recently offered pretrial diversion by L.A. County prosecutors, which could spare him jail but require him to stop working in law enforcement. Carrillo has pleaded not guilty to the charges. In an interview with The Times, Gonzalez — the sergeant who is facing termination — recalled a moment during a recorded interrogation that he found so troubling he contacted the police union director Jamie McBride, to express concern. McBride, he said, went to Lloyd's boss, then-deputy chief Michael Rimkunas, seeking Lloyd's removal from Internal Affairs. The move failed. Lloyd kept his job. Rimkunas confirmed the exchange with the police union leader in an interview with The Times. He said that while he couldn't discuss Lloyd specifically due to state personnel privacy laws, in general the department assigns higher-profile Internal Affairs cases to detectives with a proven track record. Gonzalez, though, can't shake the feeling that Lloyd crossed the line in trying to crack him during an interrogation. He said that at one point while Lloyd was asking questions, the detective casually flipped over his phone, which had been sitting on the table. On the back of the protective case, Gonzalez said, was a grim reaper sticker. 'And then as he turned it he looked at me as if to get a reaction from me,' Gonzalez said. 'It was definitely a way of trying to intimidate me for sure.'
