November 21st, 1941. San Quentin State Prison, California. Outside the steel doors of the gas chamber, 65 newspaper reporters and law enforcement officers wait in tense silence. 23 prison guards stand ready. Inside that sealed room, something is about to happen that has never happened before in California’s history.
A 52-year-old woman is about to become the first female ever legally executed by the state of California. Her name is Eva Lita Juanita Spinelli, but on the streets of San Francisco, everyone knew her as the Duchess. She was a scrawny ex-wrestler who ran a strange kind of family business. She took in young, homeless, delinquent men off the streets. She cooked for them.
She cleaned for them. She gave them a place to sleep. But this wasn’t charity. The Duchess was training these lost boys to become professional criminals. Now she’s strapped to a chair in the gas chamber, waiting to die for a murder that shocked even hardened criminals. She didn’t kill a rival gang member or a police officer.
She killed one of her own boys, 19-year-old Robert Sherrod, because she feared he might talk to the police. So how does a woman who plays mother to homeless boys end up drugging, beating, and dumping one of them into the Sacramento River? What kind of person earns the loyalty of death row inmates while being called evil as a witch by the prison warden? Before [clears throat] we dive into the twisted story of the Duchess, hit that like button right now.
Share this video with anyone who loves true crime and subscribe to this channel. Your support keeps us bringing you these incredible stories. Eva Lita Juanita Spinelli was born on October 17th, 1889. By the time she died in 1941, she was 52 years old. She had been an ex-wrestler, a gang leader, and would become the first woman legally executed by the state of California.
FBI profiler Candace DeLong studied Spinelli’s case years later and described her perfectly. A stone-cold psychopath who had no use for anybody other than what she could get out of them. That description tells you everything you need to know about the Duchess. Before arriving in San Francisco, Spinelli had been running with the Purple Gang in Detroit.
The Purple Gang was a notorious criminal organization and Spinelli earned her nickname the Duchess during those years. But eventually, she had to flee Detroit. She headed west and settled in San Francisco, where she started a new operation. Her business model was simple but effective. Spinelli regularly took in young men, delinquents, homeless kids with nowhere else to go.
She offered them something they desperately needed, a home. She cooked their meals. She cleaned for them. She gave them structure and discipline. But there was a price. The Duchess was training these boys to become professional criminals. She taught them how to rob people, how to avoid getting caught, and how to bring the money back to her.
The young men received a $10 weekly allowance for their work. The rest, the lion’s share of everything they stole, went straight into Spinelli’s pocket. Her daughter Lorraine, who went by the nickname Gypsy, played her own role in the operation. Gypsy used what’s called a honey trap. She would flirt with drunk men at bars and on the streets, luring them into dark alleys or quiet spots.
Once the men were isolated and distracted, Spinelli’s boys would move in and rob them. It was a family business in the darkest sense of the word. From the outside, it might have looked like Spinelli was helping these young men. She fed them, housed them, and treated them like sons. But behind the hot meals and the motherly act, the Duchess was running a cold, calculated criminal enterprise.
And that business was about to turn deadly. With Eva Juanita Spinelli, it’s hard to know where the truth ends and the legend begins. Some sources claim she was a professional wrestler. Others say she worked as a madam or even a trained nurse. There are rumors that her husband was killed during a smuggling job in Mexico, but here’s the problem.
None of these claims can be confirmed. The real story of who Spinelli was before she became the Duchess is buried under layers of rumor and speculation. What we do know is that she picked up the nickname the Duchess at some point during her time in Detroit. Was it a sign of respect from fellow criminals who admired her toughness? Or was it sarcasm? A joke about a scrawny, hard-faced woman who acted like royalty? Nobody knows for sure, but either way the name stuck, and she carried it all the way to California. By the time
Spinelli arrived in San Francisco, she was a middle-aged woman with a clear plan. She ran what looked like a flop house, a cheap place where homeless young men could stay. But in reality, it was a crime school. She was a mother and a grandmother, yet she was also arming young men and sending them out to mug drunk people and rob small businesses.
Clinton Duffy, the warden at San Quentin State Prison, met Spinelli during her time on death row. His description of her was brutal and unforgettable. He called her the coldest, hardest character, male or female, I have ever known. A homely, scrawny, nearsighted, sharp-featured scarecrow. The Duchess was a hag, evil as a witch, horrible to look at, impossible to like.
That’s how the people who actually knew her saw her. Not as some glamorous gangster, but as a cold, unpleasant woman who used people without a second thought. So yes, there’s a legend around the Duchess. Stories of wrestling rings, smuggling operations, and dangerous husbands. But strip all that away and what’s left is simpler and darker.
A middle-aged woman running a low-rent gang out of a San Francisco flop house, exploiting desperate young men for profit. And that small-time operation was about to spiral completely out of her control. April 8th, 1940, San Francisco, California. Two of Spinelli’s proteges, Albert Ives and Raymond Sherrod, walked into a barbecue stand armed and ready to rob the place.
It was supposed to be a simple job. Get in, get the money, get out. Just another routine theft to bring cash back to the Duchess. But nothing about that night went according to plan. The owner of the barbecue stand was a man named Leland Cash. He was deaf, or at the very least severely hard of hearing. That detail, something Cash couldn’t control, would cost him his life.
Ives and Sherrod burst in with their guns drawn. They shouted at Cash to put his hands up, but Cash didn’t respond. He didn’t raise his hands. He didn’t freeze. He just stood there, seemingly ignoring their commands. The two young men didn’t understand what was happening. They thought Cash was being defiant, maybe even brave.
In reality, he simply couldn’t hear them. Then, according to reports, Cash reached for something. It might have been his hearing aid, but in that split second, Ives and Sherrod thought he was reaching for a weapon. Panic took over. One of them fired. The bullet hit Leland Cash in the stomach. He collapsed. Cash would later die from that gunshot wound.
This wasn’t a calculated mob hit. This wasn’t a professional execution. This was a messy, nervous stickup gone horribly wrong. A deaf man reached for his hearing aid, and two scared young criminals mistook it for a gun. That single A of confusion turned a petty robbery into a murder. And here’s the thing about small-time gangs.
It’s often the messy jobs that bring them down. The big-time mobsters might have lawyers, connections, and ways to cover their tracks. But Spinelli’s operation, it was low-rent, sloppy. And now, it had left a body behind. The police immediately started looking for the killers. Witnesses had seen two young men fleeing the scene.
Word started spreading through San Francisco’s criminal underworld. The heat was on. For Spinelli, everything changed in that moment. Up until then, she had been running a small-time operation, mugging drunks, robbing stores. Nothing that would bring serious attention from law enforcement. But now, now her boys had killed someone.
A murder investigation was underway, and the police were closing in. The Duchess was no longer just a mentor to petty thieves. She was now the mastermind behind a gang of killers. And she knew that if the police caught Ives and Sherrod, there was a very real chance they would talk. That fear, that one of her boys might confess and bring the whole operation crashing down, would lead Spinelli to make a decision that would seal her fate forever.
She was about to kill one of her own. After Leland Cash was killed, Spinelli had a problem. The police were investigating, asking questions, and putting pressure on anyone connected to the barbecue stand robbery. She knew it was only a matter of time before they found Ives and Sherrod.
But Spinelli wasn’t worried about Albert Ives. He was older, tougher, more experienced. She trusted him to keep his mouth shut. Raymond Sherrod was different. He was younger, only 19 years old. He was nervous, fragile. Spinelli looked at him and saw weak link. Someone who might crack under police interrogation. She feared that if the cops picked him up, Sherrod would confess everything.
He would tell them about the robbery, about Cash’s death, and worst of all about her. So, Spinelli made a cold, calculated decision. She would eliminate the problem before it could destroy her. She invited Sherrod to have a drink with her. It seemed normal enough. The Duchess often shared meals and drinks with her boys.
Sherrod had no reason to suspect anything. He trusted her. After all, she had taken him in, fed him, and given him a place to belong. Spinelli handed him a glass of whiskey. What Sherrod didn’t know was that the whiskey had been laced with chloral hydrate, a powerful sedative. He drank it down. Within minutes, Sherrod began to feel drowsy.
His body grew heavy. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. Eventually, he lost consciousness completely. That’s when the gang moved in. While Sherrod lay unconscious and defenseless, they beat him. They struck him over and over, making sure he wouldn’t wake up. This wasn’t a quick death. It was brutal. But, Spinelli wasn’t done.
She needed to cover her tracks. If Sherrod’s body was found with signs of a beating, the police would know it was murder. So, she came up with a plan to make his death look like an accident. The gang stripped Sherrod down to nothing but swimming trunks. Then they drove him to the Clarksburg Bridge, which crosses the Sacramento River just south of Sacramento.
They carried his limp, beaten body to the edge of the bridge and threw him over into the water below. The plan was simple. Make it look like Sherrod had gone swimming and drowned. Just a tragic accident. Nothing suspicious. But Spinelli made a critical mistake. When the authorities recovered Sherrod’s body and performed an autopsy, they discovered something that shattered her cover story.
There was no water in his lungs, none. That meant Sherrod was already dead before he hit the river. He hadn’t drowned. He had been murdered. Think about what this means. This wasn’t some rival gang member. This wasn’t an enemy or a snitch from the outside. This was one of her boys, a teenager she had taken into her home.
Someone she had cooked for, trained, and claimed to care about. And she killed him to save herself. Some reports list his age as 18, others as 19. Newspapers later referred to him as Robert Sherrard. But the core truth remains the same. A young man who trusted Spinelli, who saw her as a mother figure, was drugged, beaten, and dumped into a river like garbage.
The murder of Leland Cash had created the pressure. The murder of Raymond Sherrod was Spinelli’s solution. But that second murder, the cold-blooded killing of one of her own, would become the crime that sealed her fate and sent her to the gas chamber. When investigators pulled Raymond Sherrod’s body from the Sacramento River, they immediately knew something was wrong.
The autopsy results confirmed their suspicions. There was no water in his lungs. Sherrod hadn’t drowned. He had been dead before he ever hit the water. On top of that, his body showed clear signs of a severe beating. This was no accident. This was murder. The police were already investigating the killing of Leland Cash at the barbecue stand.
Now they had a second body, a young man connected to the same criminal circle. The cases were linked and the stories people had been telling started to fall apart. Then came the break investigators needed. Albert Ives, one of Spinelli’s proteges and one of the men involved in Cash’s killing, realized he was in serious danger.
He had seen what happened to Sherrid. He knew that if Spinelli thought he might talk, he could be next. Fear for his own survival pushed him to make a choice. Ives went to the police and confessed. He told them everything. The robbery, the shooting of Leland Cash, and the murder of Raymond Sherrid. He gave investigators the inside picture of Spinelli’s operation, naming names and explaining how the gang worked.
Because of his cooperation and mental state, Ives was eventually committed to Mendocino State Hospital instead of facing the gas chamber. Meanwhile, forensic experts were doing their own work. Ballistics tests matched the bullet that killed Leland Cash to a gun that belonged to Spinelli herself. That evidence was huge.
It moved her from being just the gang’s leader to someone directly and physically connected to the murder. As the investigation continued, more gang members started talking. Mike Simon, who was Spinelli’s first lieutenant and common law husband, and Gordon Hawkins, another key member, were also arrested. Their motives for cooperating varied.
Some were scared, some cut deals, and others were simply trying to survive. But one by one they turned on the Duchess. Spinelli knew the walls were closing in. She and some of her crew tried to run. They fled to Sacramento and hid near the river. Then they headed toward Reno hoping to disappear. But they didn’t get far.
Acting on a tip from frightened associates who wanted nothing more to do with her, police arrested Spinelli and her gang near Truckee. The woman who had trained young men to be criminals, who had fed them and housed them and controlled them, now faced the ultimate betrayal. The boys she had molded became the witnesses who would help send her to the gas chamber.
Evangelista Juanita Spinelli was charged with murder for her role in the killing of Raymond Sherrard. The prosecution made it clear, this wasn’t just about one crime. The murder of Leland Cash during the barbecue stand robbery provided the context. It showed why Sherrard had to die. Spinelli feared he would confess to the police about Cash’s killing, so she ordered his death.
On May 30th, the verdicts came in. Spinelli, Albert Ives, Mike Simeone, and Gordon Hawkins were all found guilty. The prosecution’s narrative was simple and devastating. Spinelli wasn’t just some bystander who happened to be around when bad things occurred. She was the leader. She was the one who made the decisions. She gave Sherrard the drugged whiskey.
She ordered the beating. She planned the cover-up. The gang members might have carried out the violence, but it was the Duchess who pulled the strings. In court and in the press, Spinelli’s image worked against her. Warden Clinton Duffy’s description of her as the coldest, hardest character, and a homely, scrawny, nearsighted, sharp-featured scarecrow painted a picture of a woman who didn’t fit society’s expectations.
In the 1940s, people expected women to be soft, nurturing, and gentle. Spinelli was none of those things. She was cold, calculating, and ruthless. That made it easier for the public to accept what was coming next. In 1941, Spinelli, along with co-defendants Simeone and Hawkins, appealed their convictions.
They tried every legal avenue available. But every single appeal failed. The courts reviewed the evidence, the confessions, the ballistics, the autopsy results, and found no reason to overturn the verdicts. For many people in California at the time, the idea of executing a woman was still shocking. The state had never done it before.
There was discomfort, even among some who supported the death penalty, about sending a woman to the gas chamber. But, then people remembered what Spinelli had done. She had drugged a 19-year-old boy who trusted her. She had him beaten while he was unconscious. She dumped his body in a river, and tried to make it look like an accident.
That level of brutality, especially against one of her own gang members, someone she had taken in and claimed to care for, pushed public sympathy away. Yes, she was a woman, but she was also a cold-blooded killer. As her lawyers continued working the courts, Spinelli’s case became a media sensation. Newspapers ran headlines about the duchess on trial, the mother gangster who had turned on her own.
Reporters filled courtrooms. The public followed every twist and turn. But, in the end, none of it mattered. The legal result was final. The death sentence stood. The state of California now had a date with history. For the first time ever, they would execute a woman in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison. And that woman would be Eva Lee Ta Waneta Spinelli, the Duchess.
Eva Lee Ta Waneta Spinelli arrived at San Quentin State Prison as a 52-year-old mother and grandmother, now waiting on death row for her execution. But, something unusual happened. Governor Culbert Olson granted Spinelli three separate stays of execution. Her original execution date was set for June 1941. The governor delayed it by 30 days, then he delayed it again and again, three reprieves in total.
A public debate erupted across California. Some people were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of executing a woman. A San Francisco celebrity even publicly pleaded for mercy, arguing that the state shouldn’t cross that line. On the other side, law enforcement and the families of the victims saw things differently.
To them, Spinelli was just as responsible, just as dangerous as any male gang boss. Gender shouldn’t protect her from justice. Then something strange happened inside San Quentin itself. Other condemned inmates, men already waiting for their own turn in the gas chamber, reportedly offered to die in Spinelli’s place. It was a bizarre mix of old-fashioned chivalry, superstition, and prison legend.
Some believed it was wrong to execute a woman. Others thought her death would bring bad luck. But all the delays, all the public debate, all the offers from death row inmates, none of it changed the outcome. Each reprieve only stretched out the suspense. The clock kept ticking. By November 1941, the final date was set. There would be no more delays, no more reprieves. November 21st, 1941.
That was the day Evalita Juanita Spinelli would make history. Evalita Juanita Spinelli’s last meal was simple, a hamburger and turkey meat, nothing fancy, nothing dramatic, just plain food, almost boring compared to the chaos and attention swirling around her case. Warden Clinton Duffy later recalled that Spinelli ate a hamburger at midnight.
After that, she stayed awake all night. She didn’t sleep. Instead, she spent her final hours writing letters and talking with Mrs. Alice Gwyn, a matron from Tehachapi women’s prison, who had been brought in to stay with her. As morning arrived on November 21st, 1941, the scene outside the gas chamber at San Quentin was tense.
About 65 newspaper reporters and law enforcement officers crowded the area, along with 23 prison guards. They all waited behind the steel doors of the death chamber, wondering what would happen next. Inside the legal system, Spinelli’s attorneys were making one last desperate attempt to save her life.
They rushed emergency habeas corpus petitions to the state court of appeal and the California Supreme Court, hoping for a miracle. One more delay, one more chance, but both courts moved quickly. They reviewed the petitions and denied them. The legal scramble delayed Spinelli’s execution by only about 14 minutes. 14 minutes.
That’s all the extra time she got. While the lawyers fought their final battle upstairs, the gas chamber sat ready below. The witnesses were in place. The guards were prepared. The cyanide pellets were loaded. And Evangelista Juanita Spinelli, the woman who had once run a gang of young criminals, who had cooked for them and trained them and ultimately killed one of them, was about to make history in the worst possible way.
She was about to become the first woman ever executed by the state of California. The steel doors would soon open. The witnesses would take their positions, and the Duchess would walk into that chamber, knowing there was no way out. At 10:14 a.m. on November 21st, 1941, Evangelista Juanita Spinelli was strapped into the metal chair inside the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison.
She sat with her back to the witnesses, facing the cyanide pellets waiting below her. She was a middle-aged woman, scrawny, nearsighted, exactly as Warden Clinton Duffy had described her. But now, instead of her old street clothes, she wore a green prison smock. Her appearance was plain, unremarkable. She looked like what she was, a 52-year-old woman about to die.
Just before entering the chamber, Spinelli had received Holy Communion. As she sat strapped to the chair, witnesses watching through the glass windows reported that her lips moved in silent prayer. She was praying right up until the very end. Under her green prison smock, Spinelli carried something deeply personal, photographs, pictures of the people who mattered most to her, her daughter Gypsy, her two young sons, and her infant grandson.
It’s a heartbreaking detail. Spinelli had once blamed Gypsy for dragging her into this mess, for being part of the operation that led to her downfall. But even now, facing death, she carried her daughter’s picture close to her heart. The mechanics of the gas chamber are simple, but brutal. At the signal, the cyanide pellets drop into a container of acid below the chair.
The chemical reaction produces deadly gas. The gas rises. The prisoner breathes it in, and then they die. The witnesses watched through the glass as the process began. Spinelli’s lips continued moving in prayer. The gas filled the chamber. Her body reacted, and then, slowly, she stopped mo
ving. At 10:25 a.m., about 11 minutes after the gas was released, Eva Juanita Spinelli was pronounced dead. She had officially become the first woman executed by lethal gas in California. More than that, she was the first woman legally executed by the state of California in its history. Two floors above the gas chamber, in their cells on condemned row, two men waited.
Mike Simoan, 32 years old, Spinelli’s first lieutenant and common-law husband, and Gordon Hawkins, 21, both knew their turn was coming. Their executions were scheduled for exactly 1 week later. And Albert Ives, the man who had confessed, who had given the police everything they needed to bring down the Duchess, he wasn’t in the gas chamber.
He was in Mendocino State Hospital, committed for mental health reasons, far away from San Quentin’s death row. The Duchess was gone, but her story was far from over. 1 week after Spinelli’s execution, Mike Simoan and Gordon Hawkins were led into the same gas chamber at San Quentin. They were executed on November 28th, 1941, effectively wiping out the core of the Duchess’s gang.
Spinelli’s execution marked a dark milestone in California history. The only other woman put to death in California before her was a woman named Juanita, lynched by a mob in Downieville in 1851. No last name was recorded. There was no legal process. Spinelli’s case was the first time the state itself legally executed a woman.
Her story didn’t end with her death. She became a subject for true crime writers and legal historians. Her case was dramatized on radio and television in the Gang Busters episode titled The Duchess Spinelli Case. Even today, modern writers argue over how much of her biography is fact and how much is myth.
Spinelli was buried at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in San Rafael. She remains one of only four women ever executed in California’s history. For some, she’s a symbol of how far the state will go when someone is deemed beyond redemption. For others, she’s a reminder that even maternal criminals can be just as ruthless as the men they lead.
This is what happens when a life of crime reaches its final sentence. Eva Lita Waneta Spinelli blurred the line between caretaker and predator in the most disturbing way. She offered young men a home, hot meals, and a sense of belonging, but it was all a pipeline into crime. Her family was never about love or protection. It was about control and profit.
In the end, paranoia and self-preservation drove her to turn on one of her own. A 19-year-old boy who trusted her was drugged, beaten, and thrown into a river like trash. The contrast is haunting. In her final moments, Spinelli prayed after taking communion and carried photographs of her children and grandson close to her heart, but those same hands had once held the glass of poisoned whiskey that killed Raymond Sherrod.
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