Juanita Spinelli

Ethel Leta Juanita Spinelli was born in Kentucky on the 17th October 1889 and made history by becoming the first woman legally executed in California and the first woman in the USA to die in the gas chamber.

The leader of a criminal gang who nicknamed her “the Duchess,” by 1940 she and her husband Michael Simeone were living in San Francisco with their three children. Together they committed armed robberies on stores, gas stations and motorists. On the 8th April 1940, whilst robbing a barbecue stand in San Francisco they shot its owner, Leland S. Cash, dead. On the 14th April 1940 while on a picnic with the gang on the banks of the Sacramento River, Ethel added chloral hydrate to a glass of whisky which she persuaded gang member Robert Sherrard to drink. He fell unconscious and they threw him into the river, leaving him to drown. After Sherrard’s body was found Ethel was arrested and the revolver used to kill Leland S. Cash was discovered, with her fingerprints still on it.

Juanita Spinelli was executed on the 21st November 1941.