Marcia Clark didn’t need to write this book, and she says as much in the introduction. Three decades removed from the trial that catapulted her to enduring fame—Clark was the lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case—she has written nine novels and now works on appellate cases.
And the story of Barbara Graham—her arrest, trial, conviction, and execution for the 1953 robbery and murder of retired vaudeville star Mabel Monohan, later movie fodder through Susan Hayward’s Oscar-winning performance in I Want to Live! (1958)—was a known quantity, thanks to two books and numerous podcasts. What was left to say about Graham, alternately judged a cold-blooded murderess and a wrongfully executed naïf?
A lot, as it turns out. This welcome surprise of a narrative focuses chiefly on what Clark feels got short shrift in past coverage: the trial itself, and the many errors that compounded it, leading to a verdict that failed to meet modern standards and probably failed the ones of its time, too.
Before Clark turns to the trial, she sets out the case facts: Graham, 29 and twice divorced, had met veteran criminals Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins through her drug-addicted husband at the time, Harry Graham. Perkins, later Graham’s lover, talked up Monahan and her apparent penchant for keeping large sums of money (and jewels) in her home. The trio met up with two others, John True and Baxter Shorter, in the San Fernando Valley and, over dinner, hatched the robbery plan: Graham would knock on the door, claiming car trouble, and the others would muscle their way in.
Shorter, who disappeared before the trial and was presumed murdered, said he arrived last, and that he found Monahan gagged and bleeding. True, in a statement to the cops, pinned the blame on Graham, giving rise to the nickname “Bloody Babs.” But as Clark points out, True’s statement emerged from an illegal arrest across county lines that was kidnapping in all but name. Anything he said shouldn’t have made it to court. Instead, he was the prosecution’s star witness.
Clark has some choice words for the prosecution too. Though she once regarded the D.A., J. Miller Leavy, as someone to idolize, he and his team’s conduct before and during the trial outrages her. She can’t believe that Leavy badgered Graham on the witness stand so relentlessly that he would repeat back her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself, a tactic that was legal then but has been disallowed since the 1960s.
And she can’t get over how they had enlisted another jailed woman, Donna Prow, to entrap Graham, through overtly romantic correspondence, into confessing to Monohan’s murder, only to allow Prow to split town and never testify as a witness. Clark agrees wholeheartedly with Graham’s lawyer: “I never saw a case in my life where such utterly ruthless means with a person trapped up there in the County Jail—were taken to try to trap them and get them to convict themselves.”
Clark’s greatest ire is for the media. She castigates, rightly, local Los Angeles papers, such as the Times, the Daily News, and the Mirror, for trial coverage “straight out of a romance novel,” be it depicting Graham, who would spend days on the stand under cross-examination, as having “a mask of fleeting hatred” or being “a monster disguised as a woman,” in the acid-tongued words of Daily News gossip columnist Florabel Muir.
I do wish Clark had interrogated some of her own biases as rigorously as she did the biases emerging from the Graham trial. She describes the abuse and neglect Graham suffered from her mother, Hortense, in withering, almost cartoon-villainous terms—but it’s plausible that Hortense, an unwed teen sex worker when Barbara was born, conceived the child through sexual assault, a potentially mitigating circumstance that should have been more thoroughly investigated.
Such speculative quibbles do not take away from the power of Trial by Ambush, one rooted in Clark’s investigative experience that justice failed Barbara Graham, that her conviction was nowhere near the ballpark of fair—Clark believes Graham was present at Monohan’s house, but did not kill the woman—and that her execution will forever remain a stain upon the state of California. Clark may not have needed to write this book, but I’m awfully glad she did.
Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita and the editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession
