April 6, 1959–August 9, 1962
Roy Gustafson had made no promises to Luis Moya and Augustine Baldonado before they confessed to Olga’s murder, but he did agree to try the men separately if they testified against Elizabeth Duncan at her trial. Therefore, after she was sentenced to death, separate penalty trials began for the admitted killers to determine their fates: life in prison or the death penalty.
Gustafson prosecuted each penalty trial before a new jury. The defendants were represented by local attorneys Burt Henson and John Dench, both experienced defense attorneys appointed by Judge Blackstock.
Baldonado’s trial began two weeks after Elizabeth Duncan’s trial ended and lasted four days. The verdict was death.
Moya’s trial started ten days later and lasted eight days. His attorney, Burt Henson, made an impassioned and compelling plea for his client to be granted a new trial or to be sentenced to life in prison. He argued that Moya had not received a fair trial because of pretrial publicity. Gustafson worried about a hung jury, but after five hours of deliberations, the verdict for Moya was also death.
Under the law, Judge Blackstock had the authority to reduce the punishments to life imprisonment at the final sentencing hearings. He did not. The eighty-three-year-old judge, who had never before pronounced a death verdict, said, “If anyone imagines I have not thought about this case night and day and at midnight and at all times, they are mistaken. But if you are going to be a judge, you have to be a judge.”
California law provides an automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court for all death penalty sentences. The attorneys representing the appellants all cited the same reasons for the court to overturn the guilty verdicts: inflammatory pretrial newspaper coverage and numerous procedural errors during the trials themselves.
Roy Gustafson personally prepared the prosecution’s briefs and appeared before the court to argue the case for the People. Despite Sullivan’s confidence during the trial, in January of 1960 the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the guilty verdicts and death penalties. The court stated that there was “abundant evidence of guilt,” and the justices were satisfied from examination of the entire record that there was “no miscarriage of justice.” An execution date for all three was set for April 14, 1960.
The attorneys for Mrs. Duncan, Moya, and Baldonado all filed additional briefs in federal court requesting new trials. The appeals progressed through the system all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the trial judgments were unanimously affirmed on March 11, 1960. A new execution date was set for June, but the executions were stayed again when the American Civil Liberties Union injected itself into the case on behalf of all three defendants.
The ACLU’s principal contention accused Roy Gustafson of misconduct for deliberately attempting to inflame the community and poison the jury pool. They contended that the Ventura County district attorney’s “vitriolic” pretrial public statements to the press had “prejudicially violated” the defendants’ right to a fair trial.
Gustafson called the claims “hogwash” and complained that he was being subjected to a “bitter personal attack” by the ACLU. He admitted to bone tiredness, telling colleagues that he couldn’t stand to go through the case again during the new appeals.
On July 2, 1960, as the federal appeals court considered this new argument, Moya, Baldonado, and four other prisoners tried to break out of San Quentin State Prison. Someone had smuggled a hacksaw onto Death Row, and the inmates used it to saw through their bars. Once out of their cells, they jammed several toilets. When a guard went to investigate the running water, he was hit over the head with an iron pipe. His guns—a pistol and a twelve-gauge shotgun—were taken by the prisoners. Another guard was held hostage when he arrived to check on his partner. Moya used the telephone and tried to disguise his voice as the injured man to lure more guards to the cell block, but the injured guard yelled into the phone, “There’s trouble here!”
The warden ordered tear gas lobbed into the cells, which quickly ended the endeavor. He later told the press, “The escape try was hopeless. They never had a ghost of a chance of gaining freedom.” All the prisoners involved in the plot were placed in solitary confinement.
Roy Gustafson resigned as Ventura County district attorney effective January 1, 1961, and went into private practice. Assistant DA Woodruff J. Deem was appointed to serve out his term. Many more execution dates were set and then revised as the ACLU appeal wound through state and federal courts. After two years, the case was finally heard by the United States Supreme Court for a second time. The court issued an unusually short one-sentence opinion stating that “the facts failed to support the accusation made by the defendants.”
A judge in Ventura Superior Court set a new execution date: August 8, 1962.
The only remaining hope of halting these executions was to convince California governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown to commute the death sentences.
Governor Brown held a clemency hearing in Sacramento on August 1, 1962. Frank, his new wife, Elinor Chandler Duncan, and Ward Sullivan took turns describing Mrs. Duncan as a kindly person.
“My mother lives in a dream world and has never done anything seriously wrong,” Frank told the governor. “She is the best mother a man could ever have. She gave me life. I’m asking you to give her the rest of hers.”
Frank’s second wife, herself an attorney, said that during her visits with Mrs. Duncan at Corona women’s prison, she had found her mother-in-law to be a very warm and good-natured person. “Mrs. Duncan would have been the first to come to Olga’s rescue if she’d known Olga was being attacked,” the new Mrs. Frank Duncan insisted.
In response, newly elected Ventura DA Woodruff Deem detailed for the governor Elizabeth Duncan’s part in the horrific crime. He described some of her more shocking activities, such as getting the fake annulment of her son’s marriage. Several times, the governor turned to Frank and said, “Is this true?” Each time, Frank admitted that it was.
The attorneys for Moya and Baldonado, along with friends and relatives of the two men, also pleaded their case for clemency, citing examples of good works and claiming that “they never had a chance” because of their early troubled lives.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Deem left behind color pictures of the murdered Olga and her unborn child for the governor to review. “The photos reveal the extent of the atrocity and torture inflicted by the murderers,” he said. “These particular pictures were never shown to the jury because anyone who sees them either becomes enraged or is made violently ill.” He asked that the governor not release the pictures to the press.
Governor Brown, well known for his anti-death-penalty views, rendered his decision the following morning: “I have reviewed in great detail the evidence and the arguments presented for clemency for Elizabeth Duncan, Luis Moya, and Augustine Baldonado. I am unable to find circumstances to warrant commutation. I will not intervene in these cases.”
On the morning of August 7, 1962, at the California women’s prison in Corona, Elizabeth Duncan stepped into an unmarked car, accompanied by two guards and a nurse, for the four-hundred-mile drive north to the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison. The superintendent said Mrs. Duncan had appeared to be “at ease” that morning after being comforted by the prison’s Catholic chaplain. A small group of correctional personnel said their goodbyes at the door of the prison’s release room. As she left the prison, Mrs. Duncan covered her head with an olive-colored jacket to prevent photographers from taking her picture. One of the matrons who had guarded her during her three-year incarceration at Corona teared up as the car pulled away for the long drive north.
That night, Frank visited with his mother in her small cell near the gas chamber. He had filed one last, long-shot writ of habeas corpus in federal court on August 1, 1962, claiming that his mother had been so drugged by medication administered at the Ventura County jail that she had been unable to fully cooperate with her defense during her trial.
During this last meeting with her son, Mrs. Duncan said that she had confidence that “her very good boy” would get another reprieve for her at the hearing, which was scheduled for the following morning. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told Frank before returning to her cell to take a sedative and go to sleep.
The next morning, August 8, Mrs. Duncan received communion and then repeatedly asked her guards, “Where’s Frank? Where’s Frank?”
Frank was in San Francisco making the last-ditch plea to get her execution delayed. In case the court granted another stay, Governor Brown was waiting near an open phone line connecting the prison to his summer house in Los Angeles.
Fifty-seven witnesses gathered in the observation room to see Mrs. Duncan die, including members of law enforcement, the press, and politicians from throughout the state. Three of the men—sheriff’s deputy Ray Higgins, who had persuaded Augustine Baldonado to confess and lead police to Olga’s body; the Reverend Floyd Gressett, Moya’s spiritual advisor; and Bob Holt, the only reporter who had attended all sessions of the trials for all three defendants—waited next to the heavy glass windows of the gas chamber. They stood so close to the death chamber that if one had extended his hand toward Mrs. Duncan and she had extended hers, they could have easily touched if not for the glass and steel between them. The chamber itself was so small that there was room inside for little more than its two metal chairs.
Supporters and family of the condemned were also allowed to witness the executions, but Mrs. Duncan had no friends or family present. Frank was still at the appeals court ten miles south in San Francisco.
Bob Holt’s firsthand account of the execution appeared in the Ventura County Star-Free Press in the afternoon edition on the same day. More articles would follow over the next six days of August 1962.
At 10:02 A.M., after telling the warden one last time, “I am innocent,” Mrs. Duncan walked quietly into the gas chamber, wearing a pink-and-white striped prison smock, her graying hair pulled into a tight bun. Her glasses and false teeth had been removed. She appeared to have gained considerable weight during her three-year prison stay.
Three guards accompanied Mrs. Duncan into the small green octagonal room, its thick walls studded with bolts. They strapped her into the chair. One of them patted her on the shoulder as they left the chamber.
Mrs. Duncan kept her eyes closed and her lips pressed together. At 10:04, the warden gave the signal to pull the lever that dropped the cyanide pellets into a vat of acid under Mrs. Duncan’s chair. No gas fumes were visible to the spectators crowded into the observation room, but soon Mrs. Duncan began struggling to breathe and strained against the straps. Slowly her head dropped backwards onto the green-metal chair’s backrest; her sightless eyes stared at the ceiling. Her lips moved one last time. If she said anything, no one heard.
The prison doctor, clipboard in hand, was visible through slatted windows beyond the death chamber. Through a stethoscope taped to Mrs. Duncan’s chest, he listened until her heartbeat ceased at 10:12 A.M., eight minutes after the pellets dropped.
While his mother was inhaling the cyanide gas, Frank Duncan stood defeated outside the federal court building in San Francisco, his last-chance plea to the court rejected.
“They won’t listen,” he told reporters. “It’s a most barbaric thing. The son of a bitches are going to kill her.”
Following Elizabeth Duncan’s gassing, pumps and a tall chimney cleared the deadly cyanide from the double-seated chamber to make it ready for the simultaneous executions of Olga’s other two killers. At one P.M., Augustine Baldonado, wearing a jaunty smile, entered the small green eight-sided room. His last words to the warden were, “Be sure to shut that door tight.”
Following on his heels was a pale and resigned-looking Luis Moya. During the murder of Olga Duncan and its aftermath, Moya had been the leader, with Baldonado relying upon him for guidance. But on this day, it was Moya who seemed to look to the older man for courage as they faced death.
Among the witnesses outside the heavy glass windows were Baldonado’s brother and brother-in-law. When Baldonado saw them, he smiled and waved. Meanwhile, Moya was being strapped into the chair where Elizabeth Duncan had died three hours earlier.
Although the gas chamber was assumed to be soundproof, some of Baldonado’s remarks were semi-audible. When his brother began to weep, Baldonado winked and said, “It’s okay.” As a guard tightened the straps on his ankles, Baldonado called out, “Visit my kids!” Then the guards left, and the hatch-like door closed with a thud.
The start of the one o’clock execution had been slightly delayed because of an appeal filed by a San Francisco attorney on the grounds that the two condemned men were too simple-minded to know what they had done. Both Moya and Baldonado had asked the attorney not to make this final appeal, but the prison warden waited by the phone. When the appeal was rejected, at 1:05 P.M., the pellets dropped.
As the cyanide fumes began to rise, Baldonado shouted, “It’s down! I can smell it, and it doesn’t smell good!”
Moya looked out at his longtime spiritual advisor, Floyd Gressett, and mouthed the words, “Goodbye, Reverend.”
Baldonado laughed and joked. The two men smiled at each other and for a while engaged in animated conversation. Both wore white shirts, open at the throat, and dark trousers for their death uniforms, with stethoscopes attached under the shirts.
Soon the banter ended. Both men fell unconscious, their heads sinking onto their chests. The only sounds in the observation room were the sobs of Baldonado’s brother.
Moya was pronounced dead at 1:14, Baldonado at 1:15. Moya’s body was immediately taken to Stanford Medical Center so that his eyes could be donated to the eye bank there.
Following the executions, the San Quentin warden held a press conference. He was asked, “Do you think the murder rate in California will fall off as a result of this triple execution?”
“No,” he said. “I think the death penalty has very little deterrent effect. However, I think that there are some people who must be put to death for the protection of society.”
When asked if the Duncan murderers were in this category, the warden said, “I’d rather not comment. But remember, we’re carrying out these executions for you, the people of California. Nobody here wants to do it.”
After I finished reading my dad’s front-page story, I sat silently at our modern glass-topped dining room table, still wearing my new two-piece bathing suit after a day of body surfing with my teenage girlfriends. Marilyn had driven us to the “cool kids’ ” beach by the pier and to Fosters Freeze afterward for deep-fried corn burritos.
I read the headline again—TRIO DIES IN GAS CHAMBER. MA GOES QUIETLY, ACCOMPLICES JOKE—and waited to feel something. Relief?… Satisfaction?… Safer?
They removed Mrs. Duncan’s false teeth…. Good.
Resting my chin in my hands, I stared at the crystal vase filled with wilting pink, yellow, and white roses that had been cut from my mother’s prized bushes in the backyard. I picked up a brown-edged petal, closed my eyes, and inhaled its sweet fragrance.
The deadly fumes began to rise…. Slowly her head dropped backward…. Her sightless eyes stared at the ceiling.
I hadn’t thought about Olga and Mrs. Duncan very often in the three years since the trials had ended. The killers were all awaiting execution, and the sensational newspaper stories had disappeared from the headlines. Gradually my attention had turned to the complexities of junior high social life.
The little bird in the clock on the wall above me shot from its door, calling out, “Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.” I slammed my hand to my heart. Oooh. Time to get ready for swim practice. Big open ocean water swim in three weeks. Don’t think about the sharks.
I folded the newspaper to take to my bedroom and reread what the warden had said. The death penalty has very little deterrent effect. Then a small headline below the fold caught my attention:
KIDNAP MURDER SUSPECT SOUGHT
The kidnapping and murder of an 18-year-old student shot after being abducted with his 16-year-old girlfriend while on a swim outing at a lake touched off an intense man hunt…. The boy’s body was found in a plum orchard last night. The girl…