A Mother’s Love Was the Death of Her Daughter-in-Law "This is Terrible"

A March 17, 1959 file photo of Elizabeth Ann Duncan accompanied by Dep. Jeff Boyd, wearing a faint smile as she goes back to her cell to await the verdict to the jury.

The worst mother-in-law in California was also the last woman to be executed in the state, in 1962.

Elizabeth Ann “Ma” Duncan was 58. She had stalked and finally ordered the death of her pregnant daughter-in-law in an example of mother love gone wrong.

Only four women have been executed in California since 1893; the records are unclear whether any were put to death by local agencies before then. All four were convicted murderers.

The first woman to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber was Juanita Spinelli, in 1941. Known as “The Duchess,” she led a San Francisco crime gang. Spinelli was convicted of killing a gang member to prevent him from squealing about a murder.

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Six years later, Louise Peete was sent to the gas chamber for robbing and killing a woman who had befriended her while she was in prison. In the 1920s, Peete had killed her employer, who was also her lover.

And Barbara Graham, an attractive “gun moll,” was convicted, along with two accomplices, of strangling and beating to death a wealthy disabled Burbank widow. Her execution--seven years before Ma Duncan’s--was graphically and sympathetically depicted in the 1958 Oscar-winning Susan Hayward film “I Want to Live.”

Ma Duncan’s 1959 trial focused a harsh spotlight on Ventura County, where the prosecution painted a grim portrait of an overbearing, obsessed and terrifying mother, consumed with an intense hatred for her pregnant daughter-in-law and a perverse love for her son--so much that she resorted to murder to separate him from his wife.

Before she hired two thugs to murder the wife, Ma Duncan had tried to break up their marriage by impersonating her daughter-in-law at an annulment hearing and paying a stranger to pose as her son.

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The trial was just as bizarre as the crime. Ma Duncan’s son, Frank Patrick Duncan, a Santa Barbara attorney whom she always called “mama’s little boy,” didn’t appear to hold a grudge; he even helped to defend his mother at trial.

It was also the first time Ventura County Dist. Atty. Roy Gustafson prosecuted a capital murder case under a state law he wrote that created a separate penalty phase of the trial.

In 1948, Ma Duncan was living in Long Beach with the youngest of her six children, Patsy Ann, 15. When Patsy Ann died of a “spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage,” Ma Duncan’s life changed dramatically.

Over the next decade, she drifted in and out of 10 or 20 marriages, in some cases not bothering to divorce one man before marrying another. She wrote bad checks, used false names and once served 30 days in jail in San Francisco for running a brothel. She lured several husbands on the false promise of money coming her way, and she once lied about her age to another husband--one of her son’s law school classmates--even promising that she would give him a baby.

In November 1957, Ma Duncan moved in with her favorite child, Frank, who lived in Santa Barbara. He tried to sort out her marital tangles, but when she refused to cooperate, he ordered her to move out.

Instead, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. While she was recuperating, Frank got to know her nurse, 30-year-old Canadian-born Olga Kupczyk.

As the two dated and fell in love, Ma Duncan’s health returned and her wrath grew. She was possessive and didn’t want anyone interfering in Frank’s life or career, or coming between her and “mama’s little boy.”

In June 1958, Frank and Olga were married. When Frank told his mother, she became hysterical. “There was uncontrollable weeping and she begged me to return home,” Frank later testified. “I felt like a yo-yo, bouncing back and forth between both women.”

To keep the peace, Frank visited his wife in her own apartment every night, but went home to sleep at the apartment he shared with his mother. Still, Olga soon was pregnant.

After Frank left for work each morning, his mother telephoned Olga or went to her apartment to threaten the woman, hoping to scare her out of town. When that failed, she bought a gun and threatened to kill herself in front of her son. He took the gun away.

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