In Pursuit of Truth: Researching Trial by Ambush with Marcia Clark

“As both a prosecutor and a defense attorney, the one principle I’d held most dear was the right to a fair trial. There can be no justice without it.”

—Marcia Clark, Trial by Ambush

Justice isn’t always served in a court of law, nor does truth always prevail over rhetoric.

It’s a harsh reality that Marcia Clark knows all too well. As a practicing criminal attorney since 1979, she has sat at both ends of the counsel table, a firsthand witness to the system’s routine triumphs and occasional travesties—the latter perhaps no more evident than in the ill-fated prosecution of O.J. Simpson in 1995. 

Since then, Marcia—who now handles court-appointed appeals on behalf of the indigent—has explored the many gray areas of the law through fact and fiction as a bestselling author (the Rachel Knight and Samantha Brinkman series), podcaster (Informants: Lawyer X), and television personality (Marcia Clark Investigates the First 48, The Fix).

Her new non-fiction book, Trial by Ambush: Murder, Injustice, and the Truth About the Case of Barbara Graham, exposes shocking malfeasance in the state’s prosecution of Graham. In 1953, Graham, John (“Jack”) Santo, and Emmett Perkins were convicted of the brutal slaying of Burbank widow Mabel Monahan, whose home they invaded under the erroneous belief that it housed a safe stuffed with cash. All three were later put to death for the crime, though Graham’s role in its commission remained murky.

Intrigued by the case—which hadn’t been written about much in recent years (and never exhaustively) despite its infamy—Marcia began to suspect that Graham hadn’t gotten a fair shake but rather found herself the unwitting fall girl, first in the crime itself and then in the state’s prosecution of it. But would the records, if they even still existed, support her theory? She was determined to find out.

Already saddled with a full caseload of appellate work, the development of a podcast, and her initial investigation into Graham’s case (which turned up the clerk’s trial transcript of the day-to-day minutes and motions but not the court reporter’s containing the actual witness testimony), Marcia invited me to collaborate on the research. For the next year, we went deep down the proverbial rabbit hole, unearthing some critical documents that had gone largely unseen for decades, and which provided incontrovertible evidence of a miscarriage of justice. 

Our first order of business was to review the full-length works that were already available to see what they might have to offer. 

We began by having reporter Bill Walker’s long out of print The Case of Barbara Graham digitized for easy reading and reference. Published as a mass market paperback in 1961, the book was written with the cooperation of prosecutor J. Miller Leavy. A damming portrait of Graham, the book offered a chronology of events and a play-by-play of the prosecution’s case, which had come under fire in the wake of Graham’s execution. Unsurprisingly, it was far from impartial. (To be fair, you wouldn’t pick up Marcia’s own trial memoir, Without a Doubt, and expect it to be favorable to Simpson.)

On the opposite end of the bias spectrum was 1958’s I Want to Live! The Analysis of a Murder—a companion to the film of the same name that won Susan Hayward an Oscar for her portrayal of Graham. Authored by “Tabor Rawson”—the pen name of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward S. Montgomery—the book offered a sympathetic look at its subject, chronicling both her tragically unstable childhood and subsequent life of (mostly) petty crimes as well as her fateful meeting with hardened criminals Santo and Perkins. Its depiction of Graham’s trial and treatment went a long way toward evoking public sympathy (not to mention suspicion of Leavy’s tactics) following her death. Alas, it did not contain a bibliography.

In stark contrast to the aforementioned books, there was the far more recent and refreshingly objective Proof of Guilt by Kathleen A Cairns, who used Graham’s story as a lens through which to view the history and politics of women put to death by capital punishment. While the criminal investigation and trial encompassed but a few chapters of the narrative, Cairns’s impeccable research and sourcing provided abundant avenues for follow-up—including contradictory evidence and lingering questions that the trial (and subsequent hearings) failed to resolve.

Cairns led us to San Quentin and the California State Archives as sources of both the original trial transcripts and Graham’s execution file. Inquiries to the former revealed that the prison no longer had either in their possession, though the California State Archives was ultimately able to locate the transcripts and various other documentation (including records from the California State Assembly’s criminal procedures subcommittee on alleged prosecutorial misconduct). Clearing and copying them, however, would take many months and much prompting.

In the meantime, the Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, connected us with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which now houses the Walter F. Wanger Papers. Wanger was a producer on I Want to Live! and kept an extensive collection of background material. Included among his files were copies of correspondence between Graham and her attorney, Jack Hardy, as well as Wanger’s own communications with the aforementioned Edward S. Montgomery, who became a passionate if unlikely advocate of Graham’s following her conviction.

Far more important, however, was the discovery of two documents that explicitly illustrated the lengths to which the police and prosecution went in their dogged, and arguably unlawful, pursuit of Graham: John True’s original statement to police and an investigative report on (former) inmate Donna Prow prepared by the defense’s investigator, Carl G.G, Palmberg, following Graham’s conviction.

The ironically named True was initially charged along with Graham, Santo, and Perkins in Mabel Monahan’s death. Those charges were later dropped and True agreed to testify for the prosecution. What the defense didn’t know—because the prosecution failed to turn it over—was that True had made an earlier statement to police that contradicted his testimony at trial in some significant ways. To say more would be a spoiler. (Read the book!) 

And the report on Donna Prow—a jailhouse friend (and flirtation) of Graham’s, herself incarcerated for vehicular manslaughter—uncovered a plot between the police and Prow, the police to lure Graham into soliciting a false alibi for the night of the murder. (Graham’s own attorney unwittingly encouraged her participation by telling Graham that she would most likely be convicted and put to death if she couldn’t account for her whereabouts.) The mechanics of this scheme, though technically legal at the time, were ethically questionable and had profound consequences. (Again: read the book!)

Newspapers.com also proved a fruitful, if occasionally frustrating, avenue for exploration. (Good luck trying to find the same article twice!) Newspapers were the source of record at the time, and Graham’s case was covered extensively, both in California and nationally. The truly shocking thing was to see just how much attention was thrust on Graham (nicknamed “Bloody Babs”) to the exclusion of her male co-defendants despite their established history of violent crimes. Indeed, Graham’s appearance and demeanor often dominated the headlines, overshadowing the facts of the case—which is something Marcia herself would experience some forty years later in the prosecution of Simpson. 

After having exhausted our resources (which also included magazine articles, scholarly papers, and various reports pertaining to Graham’s personal and criminal background), the Archives came through with the reporter’s transcripts, which totaled more than four-thousand pages delivered in three boxes to Marcia’s doorstep. Finally, she had the official record of the People of the State of California vs. Emmett R. Perkins, John A. Santo, and Barbara Graham, which, taken in conjunction with all the other documentation we’d amassed, would allow her to tell the story of Barbara Graham’s case in its entirety for the very first time.

And while the full truth may never be known, Trial by Ambush is as close to it as we’re likely to come.