100 Murder Cases

No chivalry for 'The Duchess' in death

In February 1941, warden Clinton T. Duffy witnessed an act of unexpected chivalry at San Quentin prison.

It came from a committee of inmates who presented Duffy with a petition in which they made a plea to save the life of a condemned prisoner.

She was Juanita Spinelli, 53, the third woman ever sentenced to death by the state of California. The earlier death sentences were never carried out and the women got life in prison. That left Spinelli facing the possibility of being the first woman to be executed in California.

Even for San Quentin's hardened criminals, the idea of gassing a gal was too much. At least 300 convicts, the committee said, were ready to take her place in the death chamber.

They insisted that the state should not ruin its 100-year record of never executing a woman. "If that is done the world at large would declare, in sad disillusionment, that deterioration and retrogression had entered the world's most golden State."

Spinelli, known throughout the underworld as the Duchess, wasn't the kind of woman likely to inspire the white knight in many men. She was no doomed beauty, like Barbara Graham, who would die at San Quentin 14 years later. And while she had three children, Spinelli wasn't a sweet motherly type who could spark memories of their own mamas in the hearts of lonely prisoners.

By most accounts, Spinelli was repugnant, inside and out. "An enormous mouse wearing glasses," was how one lawman described her. Duffy would later recall in a memoir that she was the "coldest, hardest character, male or female, I have ever known ...The Duchess is a hag, evil as a witch, horrible to look at, impossible to like."

Still, he said he "dreaded the thought of ordering her execution."

Little is known about her youth and the years before she came to California in the 1930s. The story was that she was born in a hobo camp in Kentucky, the daughter of a drifter and a Native American teenager who died in childbirth. Living off men and odd jobs — from laundress to lady wrestler — sustained her for years.

In San Francisco, she became the mastermind of a small crime syndicate. Lady Fagin, as some papers called her, tutored wayward youths in the art of petty crime — rolling drunks, small burglaries, and car theft.

The holdup of a little oceanfront barbeque stand run by Leland Cash, 55, and his wife, Beatrice, on April 8, 1940, started out as one of these simple jobs.

The team consisted of Spinelli, car thief Gordon Hawkins, 21, and Detroit hoodlum Mike Simeone, 32. the Duchess's current flame. Two students, Albert Ives, 23, and Robert Sherrard, 18, referred to by the press as the "baby members of the hoodlum ring," came along.

Leland was outside, getting ready to close, when Beatrice heard gunfire and her husband's cry for help. "Bea, come quick. I've been shot." He died shortly after he reached the hospital. Police speculated that because the victim was partially deaf, he could not hear the crooks' demands. So they shot him.

No leads emerged for a week. Then, investigators got a surprising break.

Ives came forth and confessed to shooting Cash and fingered the other gang members — including Spinelli — in a related killing.

The victim was one of their own, Sherrard, a dim-witted youth Spinelli took in after he escaped from a mental institution. Sherrard could not stop talking about what happened the night they killed Cash.

Spinelli feared Sherrard's blabbing would implicate the gang. So she ordered her minions to do away with him, but gently.

"I liked the boy and wanted it to be a mercy killing," Spinelli would explain later. She threw a picnic for her gang, during which someone drugged Sherrard's whiskey and knocked him out. Then, they dressed him in swim trunks and tossed the unconscious man into a river, hoping to make it look like a drowning.

Ives squealed because he feared he was next on the gang's hit list.

State troopers nabbed Spinelli, Simeone, and Hawkins as they headed for Detroit in a stolen car. Spinelli's three children were along for the ride.

Hawkins and Simeone tried to place the blame on the others, but in the end both men and Spinelli were sentenced to death. Ives was declared insane and sent to a mental institution. He died in 1951.

The San Quentin committee to save Mrs. Spinelli threatened food strikes and riots. Clergymen from the Men's League of Mercy of the United States raised their voices to support her.

Spinelli's final appeal to the governor requested life imprisonment, based on the grounds that no other woman had been executed in the state.

The governor denied her request. She responded by putting a curse on everyone responsible for her situation. "My blood will burn holes in their bodies and before six months have gone by, my executioners will be punished."

Her only request on her execution date — Nov. 21, 1941 — was that she be allowed to have photos of her three kids and her first grandchild, who was born while grandma was on death row, pinned over her heart.

It took 10 ½ minutes for the fumes to kill her, making her the first woman to die in the gas chamber in the United States. Hawkins and Simeone would follow her a week later.