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Barbara Graham was 32 years old when she was escorted into the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in June 195.

She was the third woman to be executed in California and one of the last.

By then, two years after the

crime that sent her to prison, the Los Angeles newspapers were calling her bloody babs. The coverage

dwelled endlessly on her appearance and her supposed coldness. Some articles called her the redhead,

others the icy blonde, or sultry Barbara Graham, or shapely Barbara Graham,

the blonde iceberg.

A Los Angeles Daily Mirror gossip columnist

covering her trial had called her

that monster disguised as a woman, adding,

Barbara Graham, 29-year-old blonde gun mall, must be a pleasant little trick to meet in a dark alley.

She had a voice that was as metallic as her character, according to the Herald Express, which called her

potentially the most beautiful victim that the gas chamber will ever have claimed.

In these descriptions and in many others,

you could sense a kind of giddiness as journalists vied to portray her

as a seductive murderess out of a James M. Kane, a Raymond Chandler novel.

What was her crime? In the company of four men,

she had participated in the home invasion robbery of an elderly disabled widow, Mabel Monaghan, who kept cash and jewelry at her Burbank home and was found there bludgeoned and strangled.

In a career full of notable cases, it was one of Los Angeles prosecutor Jay Miller Levy's big wins. In his 80s, near the end of his life, Levy was firm in the belief that Barbara

Graham and the 12 other people he'd sent to death row had deserved it. Their deaths were a lot more

merciful than the deaths they caused, he said.

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