Death of a Sea Gull

Hortense Ford arrived at a Ventura (Calif.) reform school when she was 19; her illegitimate daughter Barbara made it when she was 14. After two years in the reformatory, Barbara married, became a "sea gull," i.e., a fleet follower in San Diego. She was convicted of perjury, prostitution, lewd conduct, vagrancy; she had four husbands, three sons. In 1953 she was arrested in a room with Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo, who were suspects in six murder cases. Barbara had a narcotic user's scars on her arms and a new charge on her record: murder. A witness testified he saw her pistol-whip a crippled widow to death. Barbara, Santo and Perkins were convicted, and Barbara became the third woman in California to be sentenced to death.

In prison Barbara showed an above-average I.Q. of 114, began listening' to classical music, read Socrates and was quoted: "I've always been a pushover for poetry--Oscar Wilde. Walt Whitman and some of Robert Bridges. Verse seems to say something to me that nothing else can." When the "sea gull" was arrested, she had a mask of caked make-up and a bottle-blond hairdo, but as she was moved to the death house at San Quentin 26 months later, she had neat brown hair, a scrubbed face, wore a tasteful beige suit and looked like a respectable suburban housewife.

One morning last week she toyed with the hot fudge sundae she had ordered for breakfast. The gas chamber execution was scheduled for 10 a.m. At 9:05 the governor's office called and postponed the execution because the State Supreme Court had been asked by Barbara's lawyer to hear a new argument. At 10:26 a.m. Governor Goodwin Knight himself called, said the court had rejected the request. A remote-reading stethoscope was being taped over Barbara Graham's heart when a third call came at 10:43, delaying the execution. A new petition had been filed. Cried Barbara: "Why do they torture me? I was ready at 10 o'clock." At 11:12 the phone rang once more; the court had rejected the last plea. At 11:31 Barbara entered the chamber; at 11:34 the cyanide pellets were dropped in the acid. Barbara held her breath, tilted her head back as if praying; at 11:37 1/2 she breathed and died, aged 32.

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