Las Vegas casino pioneer a footnote in Southern California slaying

A high-profile murder in 1950s Southern California at the former home of a Las Vegas casino operator led to the death row execution of one woman and two men — and was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Susan Hayward.

The brutal killing and its aftermath, including the courtroom drama, is the subject of a new true crime book, Trial By Ambush, by Marcia Clark, former lead prosecutor in the ill-fated O.J. Simpson murder trial during the mid-1990s.

Recently, Clark appeared with Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard in a “Crimes of the Times” podcast on the newspaper’s website, discussing the 1953 bludgeoning and strangulation in Burbank of Mabel Monahan, a 64-year-old widow with a slight limp from an old car accident. 

A vaudevillian and palm reader sometimes known as Madam Martinez during earlier years, Monahan was a former mother-in-law of Luther B. “Tutor” Scherer, a Los Angeles underworld figure who became a casino executive in Las Vegas. Monahan lived alone in the one-floor, ranch-style house in Burbank, north of downtown Los Angeles, after her daughter divorced Scherer and moved out of state.

In an email to The Mob Museum, Clark said Scherer had given his ex-wife, Iris, Mabel Monahan’s daughter, the Burbank house at Parkside Avenue and South Orchard Drive.

“Mabel had always loved the house,” Clark said. “She’d never owned or lived in one, having spent her life on the vaudeville circuit, which meant staying in hotels around the country, and Iris didn’t want it, so she gave it to Mabel.”

After moving to Southern Nevada, Tutor Scherer remained good friends with Mabel Monahan, often visiting her when he was in Los Angeles, Clark said. This led to word on the street that Scherer was hiding skimmed Las Vegas casino money at the Burbank house.

“No one seems to know how the rumor got started,” Clark said. “Here’s my guess: Tutor had tried to get a foothold in the gambling game in L.A. for a while, but the notorious gangster Mickey Cohen owned the gambling business in L.A. and Tutor decided it might be best to give Cohen a wide berth, so he moved to Las Vegas. Some of the crooks who’d worked for Tutor before he decamped to Las Vegas probably noticed he was visiting Mabel when he was in town and surmised he was hiding cash in her house, skimming the proceeds of his casino in Las Vegas.”

‘She swore she never murdered’

The home-invasion crew that entered Monahan’s Burbank house on March 9, 1953, included two habitual criminals in their 40s, Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo. Also present were safecracker Baxter Shorter and John True, a deep-sea diver who claimed to know Tutor Scherer. The crew supposedly believed casino “black money” was in a safe in the house.

There was a fifth person involved in the incident, Barbara Graham, a 29-year-old heroin user and prostitute with a felony perjury conviction, sometimes called Bonnie, also known as Barbara Radcliff and Barbara Kielhamer. At a gambling den in El Monte, about 14 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, Graham was a shill, or “dice girl.” This illegal dice-and-poker operation was run by her friend Perkins, a 44-year-old hoodlum who went by the alias Jack Bradley and carried his false teeth in his pocket.

In a story on the Los Angeles Times website, Goffard wrote that Graham had been abandoned at a young age by her mother and sent to the Ventura School for Girls, “a brutal reform school from which she emerged with an education in crime.”

“She never made it to high school,” Goffard wrote. “She hustled for a living. She wrote bad checks. She shoplifted. She was busted for drug possession, prostitution and perjury. She married four times. She had three kids. She loved jazz.”

During the trial, and later in coverage of the June 1955 cyanide-gas executions at San Quentin State Prison, the press focused on Graham, dubbing her “Bloody Babs.” It was uncommon for women to face death in the gas chamber.

“From her arrest to her execution, something about Barbara Graham inspired frenzied verbiage from the journalists of the era,” Goffard wrote. “Newspapers portrayed her as a chilly, oversexed murderess from the pages of pulp fiction. Sometimes she was ‘the redhead,’ sometimes ‘the icy blond.’  She was ‘the gun moll.’ She was ‘sultry.’ She was ‘shapely Barbara Graham, the blond iceberg.’”

Though Graham insisted she wasn’t at Monahan’s house the night of the murder, Clark stressed in Trial By Ambush that the deck was stacked against her during court proceedings. To save his own neck, True claimed Graham pistol-whipped Mabel Monahan. The prosecutor, J. Miller Leavy, relentlessly attacked Graham, reading aloud from her love notes to another inmate, Donna Prow.

In jail, Prow double-crossed Barbara Graham, arranging for an undercover officer to meet with a desperate Graham to concoct a phony alibi. During the trial, Prow, conveniently nowhere to be found, was unavailable for Graham’s lawyer to question. This is one example, Clark wrote, of the prosecutorial misconduct that occurred throughout the trial. Clark’s research in writing the book led her to question Leavy’s tactics and ethics.

Going into the book project, Clark, who had handled big cases at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, knew about Leavy’s legendary record in winning criminal convictions. During a 41-year career as a prosecutor, he sent 13 men and one woman, Barbara Graham, to the gas chamber. Writing about the Graham case in the nonfiction book LAPD ’53, crime novelist James Ellroy, known for his word play, unusual spellings and alliteration, refers to the prosecutor as “Gas Chamber” Leavy, the Kapital Kase Kahuna.

Goffard, the Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote that Clark approached the Barbara Graham book project “with admiration for Leavy—and emerged with the certainty that he had cheated.”

In the 1958 movie I Want To Live!, Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her sympathetic portrayal of Graham. On the Los Angeles Times website, Goffard points out that the ad copy for the movie calls Graham “the wildest of the jazzed-up generation.”

“She had lots of friends, most of them bad,” the ad copy states. “She was driven by a thousand desires, a few of them decent. She sinned. She stole. But she swore she never murdered.”

The movie is based on articles by San Francisco Examiner reporter Ed Montgomery, a journalism graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno, and Pulitzer Prize winner for his stories about an IRS tax scam. At Montgomery’s death in 1992 at age 82, the Los Angeles Times referred to him as the crime reporter who led an unsuccessful “crusade to prevent Barbara Graham from dying in California’s gas chamber.”

In an email, Clark said Barbara Graham didn’t take part in the murder, “but she was present during the home invasion burglary.” That alone is grounds for a murder conviction but not necessarily the death penalty.

“She was the decoy the four men used to get Mabel Monahan to open the door,” Clark said. “Mabel was well known to be very security conscious, and she would never have opened her door to a strange man at night. Barbara, on the other hand, who was petite — 5 foot 3, 120 pounds and pretty — was a different story.”

Graham knocked on the door, telling Monahan her car had broken down and that she was alone and stranded. Graham asked if she could use Monahan’s phone to call a cab.

“Mabel let her in, and one of the men, John True, who would later become the prosecution’s star witness in exchange for total immunity, pushed in behind Barbara,” Clark said. “After that point, although John True testified that Barbara took part in the bludgeoning of Mabel, the evidence disproves that. It seems Barbara was basically a bystander and the men actually killed Mabel, pistol whipping her and then strangling her with a piece of a sheet or pillowcase. She died of asphyxiation.”

In Trial By Ambush, Clark wrote that it was likely Perkins who put the pillowcase over Monahan’s head, with Santo then tying the gag around her neck. The crew did not find a safe. Not long afterward, Shorter, the “box man,” as safecrackers were called, was kidnapped at gunpoint, by Perkins, according to a witness, and was never seen again. Shorter had been an informant but went missing before he could testify in court.

The scene inside Monahan’s house was bloody and disturbing. According to the Burbank Police Department website, a gardener had gone to the front door “and looked in to find a ransacked home and grisly trail of blood.” Mabel Monahan’s badly beaten body was partially inside a hall closet.

Ellroy, who has written fiction and nonfiction books and journalism about the criminal underworld, much of it centered on Los Angeles, called the Monahan killing “the ugliest crime story I know.”

As for Perkins and Santo, they also were sentenced to death in the case, and, in 1955, were executed later the same day as Graham in the San Quentin gas chamber. 

Scherer: No Las Vegas connection to Burbank murder

Scherer became a footnote in the Monahan tragedy. He was questioned about it and denied knowing John True.

In early coverage of the killing, however, the press “ate up the sensational [Scherer] hook and jumped in with both feet, announcing that gambling interests might lie at the bottom of the slaying,” Clark wrote in Trial By Ambush. One newspaper headline read, “Gambling Link Is Sought in Widow Strangulation.”

Scherer said he didn’t know why anyone would kill Mabel Monahan. “I’m sorry as hell Mabel got knocked off,” he said at the time. “We always got along swell, even after the divorce.”

He denied there was any casino money at the home. “I never had a safe of any kind in that house,” Scherer said. “I think a guy who keeps large sums of cash or jewelry where he lives is just begging to be knocked over.”

According to Clark, he “waved off the press hype” about a link between the murder and Las Vegas gambling, saying, “There just isn’t any connection.” Scherer said the divorce settlement resulted in Monahan only receiving cash, some jewels “and the Burbank house, which I knew the old gal liked so much.”

It is not surprising Scherer was headline material in those days. Years earlier, he was one of the operators of floating casinos off the Southern California coast and had owned a syndicate club with another bookmaker in downtown Los Angeles on Spring Street, an area swarming with grifters.

Under pressure from public officials, and, as Clark noted, squeezed out by local gangsters, Scherer and other Southern California racketeers moved to Nevada and operated Las Vegas casinos in an era when the town was beginning to take off.

Among other properties, Scherer co-owned the Pioneer Club, which opened in April 1942. At that casino on Fremont Street, the Vegas Vic neon cowboy was installed in 1951. Vegas Vic is still on display at that location, having been shortened a bit to make room during the mid-1990s for the electronic canopy covering the Fremont Street Experience. The property where Vegas Vic stands is no longer a casino.

In 1950, Scherer was named Nevada poet laureate as the author of easy-to-read verse, some of it written poolside at the El Rancho Vegas, a hotel-casino that burned down in 1960 on Highway 91, now known as the Las Vegas Strip. Scherer had been the resort’s president.

Scherer died in 1957 at age 78, but his legacy as a gaming pioneer lives on in Southern Nevada. West of downtown Las Vegas is Scherer Street, near Ansan Sister City Park.

The street is named for the man who rose to prominence in Las Vegas after moving away from Southern California, leaving behind the house where his former mother-in-law would be slain in an incident the Burbank Police Department to this day calls “one of the most infamous crimes in the city.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.