Before becoming the last woman ever executed in California in 1962, the convicted murderer Elizabeth Duncan was far from repentant. The night before she was sent to San Quentin’s gas chamber, Duncan told a jail matron she had no qualms about hiring two ex-cons to murder the pregnant daughter-in-law who’d recently married her lawyer son Frank.
As Deborah Holt Larkin writes in “A Lovely Girl” (Pegasus), when the prison guard asked Elizabeth if she’d commit the crime again knowing its consequences, Duncan didn’t bat an eye.
“You bet I would,” Duncan said. “Nobody is going to have my son.”
Elizabeth Duncan’s obsession with “Frankie” was clear. Dressed nattily in stylish dresses and cat’s-eye glasses, Mrs. Duncan was known in 1950s Santa Barbara for attending all of her defense attorney son’s trials. She could frequently be heard exclaiming “brilliant!” as her boy made his case. Except for a very brief interlude when Frank lived in a college fraternity, mother and son lived together throughout the 30 years of the young man’s life. Most of their apartments had only a single bed, convincing at least one neighbor was convinced they cohabitated as “husband and wife.” When a friend once dropped in for an early-morning visit, Elizabeth pointed adoringly to a sleeping Frank.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” she cooed.
While an incestuous relationship between the two was never confirmed, it wouldn’t have been a stretch for the family; she had six children total, including four daughters and two sons. On one occasion, a friend staying in a hotel suite with Mrs. Duncan and another son was awakened one night to hear a “ruckus” coming from the second bedroom. She was aghast when she realized she was listening to loud lovemaking between Mrs. Duncan and her offspring.
Her sons were apparently the only men in her life who stuck around; at her trial, it was revealed she was a ‘bunco artist’ who’d previously been arrested for solicitation in San Francisco and was known as a con woman who was married at least 12 times, mostly just to shake men down for money.
Elizabeth Duncan didn’t want Frank — her admitted “favorite” son — to date. But Frankie had a normal interest in the opposite sex, pursuing his fair share of young women in the Santa Barbara area. Due to a slight lisp, he was known by the females around the courthouse as the “Wicked Wascal Wabbit.”
When Frank began seriously dating a young Canadian nurse named Olga Kupczyk in 1957, Mrs. Duncan wouldn’t have it. She told a friend that Olga was “unfit” to date her son, not to mention a “foreigner.”
At her trial, an acquaintance of Mrs. Duncan summarized the situation: “She spoke many times about how she would like to have Frank stay with her and not marry anyone. She said she would make it rather disagreeable if he went out with young ladies.”
When Frank began spending nights at Olga’s apartment and the relationship turned serious, Mrs. Duncan immediately began a reign of terror toward her son’s paramour. Elizabeth asked an ex-boyfriend to “beat up” Olga, and when he refused she began to harass her by phone. She called so frequently to convince Olga to leave Frank that the young nurse changed her home phone number. Then Mrs. Duncan began telephoning the hospital where she worked, heaping on so much abuse that Olga often fled the operating room where she worked in tears.
A marriage between her son and Olga was something Elizabeth Duncan wouldn’t abide.
“Over my dead body” is what one neighbor testified Mrs. Duncan often said.
“I’ll kill her first.”
When Olga ended up pregnant, the lovers tied the knot in secret. Frank spent the wedding night not in his new wife’s bed, but at his mother’s apartment.
When Mrs. Duncan found out about the nuptials, she immediately took steps to try to dissolve it. First she sweet-talked her way into Olga’s apartment and tried to get the landlady to evict her. Then, without Frank’s knowledge, she posted an ad in the local newspaper announcing her son would not be responsible for his new wife’s debts.
’Over my dead body, [and] I’ll kill her first.’
Elizabeth Duncan’s stance on a nurse set to marry her son, according to a neighbor’s testimony
Finally, she hired a drifter to accompany her to a courthouse in the neighboring county to get the marriage revoked. Mrs. Duncan and her hired man swore they were Frank and Olga and signed some paperwork, officially annulling the marital union as if it never existed. (Incredibly, they were not asked to show identification; the fact that they verbally claimed to be Frank and Olga was sufficient.)
That didn’t stop Frank from continuing to see his pregnant wife – at least occasionally, as he continued to live at home with his mother – as well as support her. But when Frankie bought Olga a new TV and an insurance policy, Mrs. Duncan had enough.
“I’m not taking any more from that bitch,” Elizabeth said.
Initially, she asked the same drifter who’d helped her annul the marriage to “take care of” Olga. When the man refused, Mrs. Duncan got more specific, and extended the request to several others. Elizabeth asked her best friend, a delicate octogenarian named Mrs. Short, to hide in Olga’s apartment to throw a rope around her neck, hang her in the closet, and then toss her off the wharf. She asked Barbara Jean Reed, a friend of her late daughter, to splash acid in Olga’s face, chloroform her with a blanket and fling her off a cliff. She offered $1,500 to the 19-year-old wife of one of Frank’s criminal clients to smash Olga’s skull, put her in the bathtub and cover her with lye. Mrs. Duncan even gave the woman $5 to buy the first two cans of lye.
When all those offers were politely rejected, Mrs. Duncan kept trying. Her persistence paid off when the wife of another of Frank’s convicted clients introduced Elizabeth to two ex-cons willing to kill Olga for a promised $6000. The men would only ever get $335 from Mrs. Duncan for the murder, but they did finish the job.
Around midnight on Nov. 17, 1958, as her husband Frank sat watching TV at his mother’s home, Luis Moya and Gus Baldonado lured Olga Kupczyk from her apartment with a story about finding Frank passed out at a local bar. The ever-loyal Olga followed the men outside to help her hubby and was immediately abducted, hit over the head with a pistol and forced into a car. Olga struggled mightily, desperate to keep herself and her child alive, but was eventually struck so many times that the handgun broke over her head.
“Bitch didn’t want to die,” Baldonado later told police.
When Olga didn’t show up to the hospital the next day, her friends and co-workers immediately pointed the finger at the mother-in-law. Given the many public threats Mrs. Duncan had made towards Olga, it didn’t take police long to ascertain the guilty parties.
Moya and Baldonado were no criminal masterminds, being seen the night of Olga’s disappearance covered in blood. Plus, when they returned the car they’d borrowed on the night of the murder, its backseat was ripped and burned. Dried blood blotted the vehicle as well.
She had been beaten and strangled to death, and eventually buried in a shallow, hand-dug grave. She was found weeks later, the ill-fated wedding ring still on her finger.
When the two murderers were hauled in by police and realized their fates, the men immediately confessed in the (fruitless) hope of avoiding the death penalty. They’d done it, Moya and Baldonado said, but at the behest of one Mrs. Elizabeth Duncan. A California court confirmed the culpability of all three, and given the gruesome nature of the crime, each received the death penalty.
Perhaps the only person not certain of Mrs. Duncan’s guilt was her loyal son, Frank, who offered only the understated take that “They never hit it off, my mother and Olga.”
And while Elizabeth Duncan steadfastly maintained her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity until the end, she did allow that whatever might’ve happened occurred only because she was “so lonesome for Frank.”